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

How long will an apartment last?

Ah, that old question again! Reflecting the fear that an apartment building may not last very long and your investment will turn into nothing. So do you need to worry? Well, not really. Just look at New York City and you can still see many old apartment buildings from the 1930s still going strong and with selling prices for individual apartments at very high levels indeed. Old is not necessarily bad.

So how long will an apartment building last? Well, you could ask how long is a piece of string? It depends. Apartment buildings are basically just constructed from cement and steel and provided that there are no structural design flaws the basic structure should stand firm for many, many years.

What may not last so long, though, is the plumbing and the electrical wiring. These will almost certainly have to be maintained and possibly even completely replaced after 20 or 30 years. The public areas of the apartment building will also need to be regularly maintained by the building management. After 30 years, the swimming pool may have lost a lot of the shine it once had, for example!

It is, of course, very difficult to know what an apartment building will look like in another 30 years time and whether it will still be "livable" or in such a bad state of repair that it needs to be torn down. Obviously, though, the better quality buildings stand a higher chance of lasting longer.

But people shouldn't worry too much.

Because for most of them, they probably won’t live long enough to have to worry about this problem!

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