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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Indonesia image of the day (6): The Ministry of Energy and logical faux pax

“We're all mad here.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 Things are getting curiouser and curiouser in the big Durian and just over there, on a banner outside the Ministry of Energy, is a logical faux pax so bad it would have the English writer Lewis Carroll spinning in his grave if he knew about it:

A MAXIMUM temperature setting of 25° Celsius?!!!! Wtf!

Meaning that it would be acceptable to set your air conditioning thermostat at 16° but not, say, 28°? Isn’t this the very opposite of what they are trying to say? Or are they actually encouraging people to waste energy? But, hey, that could be it. Because there is nothing logical about energy policy in Jakarta, of course. The city’s soul-crushing traffic jams are testament to that: the millions of liters of fuel needlessly burnt every day by the mostly stationary cars and, even more incongruously, this madness funded by the government through its fuel subsidies!

And this is what they have in Bangkok…

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