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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SPG Indonesia @ the 20th Jakarta motor show

Another year, another motor show. The 20th to be precise. Lots of cars, predominately Japanese, and mostly very, very boring. Many of them (theoretically at least) can go extremely fast - but that’s all rather academic when the traffic in Jakarta is now so bad that our return trip from the motor show was done at a crawl. Hell, I could have walked faster, ironically enough. Who needs a car anyway?

But shiny new cars don’t just sell themselves of course and an army of attractive SPG was out in force to arouse (sorry!) a bit of interest. Strangely, I discovered, there seemed to be a rather notable inverse relationship between the quality of the SPG and the car maker.

The SPG for the interesting cars like Mini, Jeep, Audi etc were rather dull and average, whereas the SPG for the boring cars like Toyota and Ford were far more attractive. I got a few numbers. And a few snaps with the old d70 and the new 35mm 1.8" lens. All in all, a pleasant enough way to wile away a few hours…

SPG Indonesia

SPG Indonesia

SPG Indonesia

SPG Indonesia

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