There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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Stripping ratio (mining term) definition




Not as risqué as it might sound, the stripping ratio does NOT refer to the propensity of Jakarta’s nightclub dancers to throw off their clothes but instead to the relative amount of overburden (waste) required to be moved to access coal seams.

 The definition is:

 Total overburden (waste) removed / coal mined

 Hence if a coalminer has a stripping ratio of 8x, this means that eight times more overburden (waste) is removed in relation to the amount of coal mined.

 When coal prices are low, coalminers will typically seek to achieve a low stripping ratio – as removing waste is a costly business. If the stripping ratio is very high, above say 12x, it may mean that the coal is uneconomic to mine.

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