Monday, June 13, 2011
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Inception as I see it – Thoughts, theories, and spoilers.
Writer’s note:
It’s been a long time since I have been actually inspired to write anything of a substantial length, which just goes to show just how awesome and mind-blowing Inception is as a movie. (It may also be because I have too much time on my hands, but you’re never going to catch me admitting to that.) If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend that you watch it, not least because this discussion contains spoilers, and reading this discussion alone will not do justice to the movie. This discussion assumes you’ve watched the movie, and understood at least half of what was going on. I’m not going to bother much with literary devices, bombastic vocabulary or what-have-you to make this a well-written essay, instead, I’m just going to hash out all my points and describe them as best as I can in the shortest time so that you can go and watch the movie a second (or third) time straight after reading this.
The most resilient and contagious virus is an idea. That is the basic premise upon which inception works – the insinuation of an idea deep into an individual’s mind. Once rooted, it would be nigh impossible to remove. Such ideas have potentially far-reaching effects, because as quoted in the move: ideas can create a person, or destroy him. An idea may eventually come to redefine a person’s entire life.
Such planting (or extracting) of ideas into people’s minds is made possible in the movie with a special technology that allows people to share each other’s dreams, literal expressions of the subconscious where secrets can be kept in security vaults and broken into just like in reality.
In the dream world, the dreamer’s mental defenses are lowered, allowing others greater access to the secrets that his subconscious unwittingly expresses, be it in the form of confidential documents hidden in a safe, or a projection of a dead wife as a result of guilt and grief. At the same time, the subconscious is also vulnerable to external influence, and becomes increasingly so the deeper one goes into dreams. That is the reason why Cobb and his team chose to enter the 3rd level of Fischer’s (the mark) dream, risking stability issues in order to plant an idea so deep within Fischer’s consciousness that he would be fundamentally influenced by that idea, and be unable to distinguish it as a planted idea (rather, he would believe it as his own idea). Similarly, Cobb was only able to permanently resolve the guilt and grief issues concerning his wife, Mal, in the deepest level of his subconscious, his own personal ‘limbo’. In the third level, experiences there will make the most impact on the subconscious, and leave the deepest imprint upon the mind.
In the movie, it seems that the main conflict is between Fischer and the team, as the team struggles against Fischer’s subconscious projections in order to plant an idea within his subconscious mind. Yet, as the movie progresses, it is apparent that there is another conflict present, and it is this conflict that is actually the main highlight of the movie, and distinguishes Inception from most other movies. This conflict revolves mainly about the concept of the conscious vs subconscious, to be specific, Cobb’s struggle against his own subconscious as he tries to come to terms with his wife’s death. In this conflict, the conscious mind is incapable of knowing, or controlling what the subconscious does, whereas the subconscious knows everything the conscious mind knows, building up to perhaps one of the greatest internal conflicts in protagonists throughout movie history.
Throughout all of Cobb’s dreams, subconscious projections of his wife and his kids continue to recur, representations of his two greatest subconscious desires, so great that they continually intrude upon his (and that of others) dreams beyond his control. The very fact other characters are not faced with such problems suggests that it’s a serious problem (duh). The continual reappearance of his kids signifies his overwhelming desire to return to his children, while the former is slightly more complicated.
Unlike most other faceless / anonymous subconscious projections, Cobb’s subconscious projection of Mal is unusually vivid and personable, such that in most cases, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the projection from the real Mal. This is possibly because of Cobb’s degree of closeness with his wife, such that even a subconscious projection of her appears to take on a life of its own. Furthermore, Cobb’s projection of Mal is almost always involved in sabotaging his missions, and continually tries to persuade him to follow “her” by killing himself. It cannot be stressed enough that it is not the actual Mal doing all this, but Cobb’s own subconscious trying to persuade him to give up on his current pursuits / missions and just kill himself.
This strongly suggests that no matter how strongly Cobb insists upon his grip on reality, his subconscious betrays him by showing that at a fundamental level, he continually doubts his reality, and tests it by spinning his top frequently, almost obsessively. On one incident, before his children called him (after the first failed mission), he tests his reality with his totem, and from the way he picks up his gun, it is evident that he is already fully prepared to shoot himself should the totem keep spinning. It is further confirmed that Cobb’s grip on reality is not as strong as the audience is led to believe initially, when in the ski fortress, he hesitates in killing his own projection of Mal, because, as he tells Ariadne, he can’t be sure it isn’t the real Mal.
Apparently, Cobb’s inability to truly believe in his reality is not common. Throughout the entire movie, we only see Cobb continually testing his totem, and no one else. This problem may have arisen due to the long time he spent in limbo with Mal, as well as his own penchant to live in his own dreams constructed out of memory (as Ariadne discovers the night before the mission), such that he cannot truly distinguish between reality and dream. In that aspect, he has become no different from the dozen dreamers slumbering in Yusuf’s basement.
This brings us to the concept of totems: small, heavy objects that serve to help dreamers distinguish dream from reality. As much as I understand, the underlying principle behind these totems is that personal totems are meant to be kept a secret. That way, when the dreamer finds himself in another (possibly hostile) individual’s carefully crafted dream, and tests his totem, it will betray the truth of the dream, as that other individual who creates the dream is ignorant of specific details of the target’s personal totem. As such, a spinning top may continue spinning, or a loaded die may fall on the wrong side, because it is an overlooked detail on the dream creator’s part.
Understanding how a totem works has a very important implication: a totem truly works if you are in another person’s dream, or if you are in your own dream and know that it is a dream. It will fail to function correctly if you are in your own dream but fail to realize it, as your subconscious will be aware of your totem’s secret and, believing in the reality of the dream, change the dream to allow for the correct outcome of the totem test, tricking you into believing the dream as reality.
Upon this hinges an important outcome of the entire movie (the main topic of discussion in this movie): whether Cobb’s entire believed reality is a dream. At the end of the movie, it is irrelevant whether the top continues spinning or falls: if Cobb is living within his own dream, and believes it to be his reality, it will fall.
Certainly, there are many hints which seem to support the theory that right from the beginning, Cobb has been living a dream, and that the entire team are all simply projections of his own mind. Yet I shall proceed to refute them and show why this is not so.
Arguments for why it is all a dream:
1) In the helicopter, when Saito makes his initial proposal to Cobb, he asks Cobb whether he wants to see his family again, or if he wants to become ‘an old man, living in regret, and dying alone’. This phrase is strangely reminiscent of the exchange between Cobb and Saito much later, when discussing the effects of being stranded in limbo for years, and may hint that Cobb is already stuck in limbo.
-It is a hint, nothing more. It is not concrete, and I believe it is simply meant to tantalize the audience and give them doubts about whether the entire reality is a dream. Much later, when Cobb and Saito converse in Saito’s limbo, they use the exact same words because these words are familiar to them, and represent something they hold very close to their hearts, and are used to fully convince Saito that he is still dreaming.
2) When Cobb meets Miles (Mal’s father and Ariadne’s professor) in the movie in his search for an architect, Miles asks him to come back to reality.
-Taken alone, it may seem like a hint that actually, Cobb isn’t already in reality, but still dreaming. However, if one looks at the context of the conversation, it is clear that is not what Miles means. Instead, he wishes for Cobb to stop participating in dream crime and lead an honest life, and the ‘reality’ he mentions is simply a metaphor.
3) When Cobb and Ariadne enter limbo to confront Cobb’s projection of Mal, the projection whispers Cobb’s own unspoken fears to him: that his own believed reality is but a dream, where he is persecuted by countless nameless, anonymous projections (from the corporation).
-As mentioned earlier, a personal totem only serves to distinguish reality from dream only if the dream is someone else’s creation and not if it is Cobb’s own dream. From Cobb’s tests in the movie, it is readily apparent that if it is a dream, it is definitely not someone else’s but his own (I shall not go into the possibility that someone who is aware of Cobb’s secret totem is recreating his reality as a dream). If Cobb’s reality is a dream, it is no one’s but his own. As such, it will not make logical sense for the ‘faceless projections’ (his projections) to hunt him down.
Arguments for why it is reality:
1) Cobb and Mal took years to build their own city in limbo. The cities and surroundings displayed in reality in the movie are all far too detailed, and on too large a scale for it all to have been created by Cobb’s subconscious alone (unless there is someone else participating in Cobb’s dream / limbo who is consciously supplementing it by constructing every single detail). For me, there was no discernable lack of detail of that I could spot. Notice that in Saito’s limbo, all the detail that is shown is just a sea fortress.
2) If the rest of the team is all projections, then they are very convincing projections. Their personalities are highly detailed and complex, even Fischer’s relationship with his father, perhaps too complex to be simply projections. They exhibit no odd behaviour, such as coordinated staring when the dreamer (Cobb) is stressed or doubts his reality. Cobb’s projection of Mal is the only one rivaling the characters in terms of personality (only because Cobb knows Mal in such intimate detail), and even then, she is almost too single-minded in wanting Cobb to kill himself, and the circumstances of her appearance are always abrupt and illogical, such that it becomes clear she is a projection.
3) As clearly illustrated previously, Cobb maintains little control over his subconscious where his wife and his children are concerned. In his dreams, whenever he feels a desire to return home to his children, they will appear randomly almost anywhere, in the oddest of places: a hotel, on the beach of his own limbo, and even on the beach of Saito’s limbo. In reality, they don’t do this…at most, they give him a call.
There are two possibilities:
Cobb is living his dream, and several very skillful people are participating in the dream with him, supplementing every single detail carefully. Since his subconscious believes this dream is real, it makes the top wobble and fall every time. Or he is living the dream of someone who knows the secret to his totem.
Second possibility is that his reality is real. I choose to go with the latter, the former being unlikely (but not totally ruled out).
So what really happened?
As mentioned in the movie, Cobb planted an idea within Mal’s subconscious while in limbo: a spinning top, the idea that your reality is a dream. Unfortunately, it is folly to believe one can brainwash a person that casually without disastrous consequences. That act eventually wrecked havoc within her mind, changed her forever, and resulted in a lot of unhappiness for everyone (never mess around with people’s heads – a possible moral of the movie?). Cobb failed to understand the full gravity of inception when he carried out that particular act, but went ahead anyway.
(In my opinion, since Mal locked away the top and promptly forgot about it, what he should have done was to take out the top and spin it in front of her instead of playing around with her mind [the safe]. True, he’d get hell from his wife for breaking and entering into her mind, but in the end, it’d have been better for the both of them. But if that happened, there’ll be no good movie.)
Cobb successfully brainwashed Mal for his own ends, but subsequently, his plan began to spiral out of control. When the couple returned to the real world, Cobb failed to realize that within Mal’s “safe”, her deepest subconscious, the top was still spinning…and he’d forgotten to take it out. As long as the top remained spinning within her head, she was doomed. Regardless of whether she was in a dream or reality, she would keep killing herself, over and over again, an endless cycle, until she truly died. So she jumped to her death. And that was supposed to have been the end of it all…
But as Cobb says at the beginning of the movie, and repeats later on before he faces his own projection of Mal in his limbo, an idea is the most resilient and contagious virus. That is the true reason why his own subconscious construct of Mal kept trying to persuade him to kill himself (not so much his guilt). Because at a subconscious level, Cobb himself has been infected by the very same creeping doubts he planted in Mal, an idea impossible to totally eradicate. Coming from a person that he trusted and loved for more than fifty years (in limbo, at least) with such conviction, it is inevitable that Cobb would also be affected by the idea, especially when Mal gave her life for it.
This explains his continual doubt of reality throughout the entire movie, his almost obsessive habit in testing reality with his totem. This explains the recurrent projections of his doubts about reality in the form of Mal, the avatar of his disbelief at a subconscious level. He claims that he believes he is in reality, but fundamentally, his own subconscious projection betrays his true doubts (as mentioned earlier).
Finally, Cobb is able to weed out that particular idea from within his own head within his limbo (where his subconscious is most vulnerable to influence), when he confronts his own subconscious projection together with Ariadne. There, he admits to having performed inception on Mal, and Mal’s delusion was the direct result of his interference. He is the true source of her idea, and Mal was not acting rationally when she jumped to her death, as there was no evidence that they were living a dream. These facts (as well as resolving the guilt he felt towards her) enabled him to free himself of the idea which had ensnared him as well, and permanently set his own doubts to rest. He tells her ‘but we’ve had our time together, don’t you remember?’, and in doing so, shows that he is willing to forsake any possibility of him joining her by killing himself.
My interpretation of what happens next may be slightly different from conventional interpretation. Several concepts were not described very well in the movie (either that or I’m just stupid), but from what I could discern about limbo, I highly doubt that there is a ‘universal limbo’, the whole point of limbo being a personal limbo.
As far as I can deduce, when Cobb and Ariadne followed Fischer into limbo, they probably connected themselves with Fischer before they went to sleep, thus explaining how Fischer came to end up in Cobb’s limbo (the abandoned city). Yet, following that, I do not see Saito being linked up with Cobb at any point in time (in the ski fortress, when Saito died in one corner), and I fail to see how Cobb managed to end up in Saito’s limbo almost magically.
(You can argue that in reality, in the van, and in the hotel, both of them are still linked, but judging from the movie creators’ treatment of ‘dream within a dream’, the ski fortress has to be treated as reality before Cobb can go further into limbo. Thus, he has to be connected to Saito in the ski fortress if he is to find Saito…unless there is a ridiculously complicated explanation about limbo being parallel to all the dream states.)
My interpretation is this: when ‘Mal’ stabbed Cobb in limbo and Cobb ‘died’, he did not magically transport himself to Saito’s limbo, but fell deeper into his own limbo. The rest of what happened in the movie is all a dream. There is an abrupt transition from when the old Saito picks up Cobb’s gun in limbo, to Cobb waking up, that leaves a hanging question in the audience’s minds…what happened after he picked up the gun? And the universal question that should be asked in dreams: How did Cobb get there (back to the plane seat)? (And it is impossible to escape from limbo by killing yourself, due to the nature of the special sedative used on that mission. Cobb and Mal were previously only able to escape their own limbo because they used a different sedative, I presume.)
When Cobb wakes up, there is an announcement on the plane saying that the plane will land in 20 minutes. That means that the sedative wore off. According to the movie, the rest of the team were able to end up safely back in the ‘raining LA dream’. As I see no practical way of giving the team freefall jumps in the plane (or for that matter, for the air hostess to know that the mission is complete, and wake them up), the only way for the team was to remain 1 week in the raining dream until the sedative wore off. The movie literally skims over this entire part about Cobb and Saito waking up in the raining dream and hooking up with the rest of the team, which leads me to doubt the reality of the scene of Cobb actually waking up when the sedative wore off.
Notice that after Cobb wakes up, everything seems strangely dreamlike. There is minimal conversation; instead, all that is shown is the team members smiling at Cobb in approval as he floats through immigration in an almost dreamlike manner (with inspiring music playing, to fill up the silence). The sequence passed almost too smoothly and quickly, and the team members displayed a noticeable lack of personality in my opinion.
Since Cobb has also laid down the doubts about his reality and come to terms with his wife’s death, projections of his wife no longer appear. He reaches home, and out of habit, spins his totem. Yet it becomes clear that he does not need his totem anymore, and ignored the outcome, as he becomes distracted by his own children. His mind distracted, his subconscious overlooks the minor detail of the spinning top, which will keep spinning, and spinning, until he remembers the top, upon which the top will wobble and fall, as he believes it will. Ultimately, it is the faces of his own children which will tie him down permanently in this dream, for Cobb has come home at last.
Inconsistencies and flaws in the movie
1) When Arthur (or Cobb, I can’t remember) explains the concept of dreaming to Ariadne, he cites the popular myth that we only use 10% (or thereabouts) of our brain’s true capacity when we’re dreaming. It is scientifically proven untrue.
2) In the first layer of the dream (the raining dream), when the van goes into freefall, the physics of the second dream are changed, and everyone becomes weightless in the hotel. Technically, this should further apply into the third dream in the ski fortress, but then the movie would turn into a comedy. It is possible (but unlikely) that Ariadne, being the architect, was consciously maintaining gravity in Fischer’s dream in the third level. It should be noted that only the dreamer could alter the physics in his particular dream. Otherwise, Arthur could have reinstated gravity in the hotel and made life a lot easier and a lot less exciting.
3) I am under the impression that there are only two ways to wake up from a dream. First is to have someone wake your sleeping body up (ie subjecting it to freefall, or the ‘jump’ and the ‘kick’). Second is for your dream self to kill yourself, or get killed. In the mission, with the use of the special sedative, the latter option becomes void. The problem comes when Ariadne tries to wake both herself and Fischer up from limbo. She subjects both of their dreaming selves to freefall, and it is this freefall which wakes Fischer first and Ariadne later. On the other hand, Cobb seems to believe that by killing themselves, him and Saito can wake from limbo. Furthermore, the charges set to blow up the ski fortress (to give the team freefall) seem rather redundant, given that the ‘kick’ is already being provided to their sleeping selves in the hotel elevator, to wake them up from the ski fortress dream. I’m confused.
4) Cobb and Saito were not connected before Cobb entered Saito’s personal limbo. But then again, my earlier theory gives a possible explanation.
5) The film does a rather mathematical treatment of dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream. I find it rather hard to visualize such a possibility occurring. Granted, the movie made allowances for such a possibility by introducing a special sedative that stabilized such dreams. Still, the idea that in the third level of the dream, your mind works 8000 times as fast as normal stretches the limits of neural science (as far as I know) and gives a convincing argument for sleeping in the examination hall.
Interesting points to note
1) It is noted that whenever an individual enters a dream (doesn’t have to be his own), his mind automatically populates it with people, projections of his subconscious. This is demonstrated in the training dreams between Ariadne and Cobb / Arthur. In Cobb’s and Mal’s shared limbo, no projections were shown, not even their children, for that matter. In the mission, only Cobb’s and Fischer’s projections appear, in the form of Mal and military / security dudes respectively. None of the other team members had any projections appear.
2) Apparently limbos (Saito’s, Cobb’s, and Mal’s) seem to be characterized by one thing: it is a land surrounded on all sides by an ‘infinite sea of the subconscious’. On this land is the only refuge for the dreamer, where he encloses and isolates himself in the middle of this infinite sea.
3) It seems that within dreams, the team members possess a certain capacity to manipulate the dream even if it is not their dream. Ariadne, as an architect, designs the mazes within Fischer’s dreams. Arthur, one on occasion in the hotel, manages to twist a set of staircases into a paradox, allowing him to come up behind a projection and defeat him. On the other hand, on the tundra in the third dream, team members are unable to create paradoxical shortcuts to reach the fortress faster; instead, they have to rely on Ariadne’s knowledge of the maze she designed.
4) At the beginning of the movie, when Cobb meets his projection of Mal while trying to steal from Saito, she asks him, “If I jump, will I still live?” Cobb replies, “A clean dive, perhaps.” He tries to evade the true meaning behind the question, and in doing so, shows that at that point in the movie, he is still unwilling to face his doubts, and tries to deny them, up till the point where it gets progressively worse.
5) On their wedding anniversary, Mal discarded her totem (the top) and left it on the floor of the hotel room. In her eyes, her totem was no longer useful in determining her reality, as it did not correspond with what she firmly believed in. It was then that Cobb picked it up and started using it thereafter as his own totem. It appears he had no problem dealing with reality before that, and therefore had no use for a totem.
On the whole, Inception is a beautifully crafted movie, with layers upon layers, much like dreams (not to mention the tantalizing hints and clues in both directions, leaving much room for speculation). As some people say, it can indeed be called a dream: a shared dream where Nolan is the dreamer and we are the targets, a dream where the actors, producers, and the rest of the set all have a part to play in filming a movie so real, and with such incredible detail, that it just blew most of us off our feet.
A train is coming. You know where it might bring you, but you don’t know for sure. You get on anyway, because you’d be together.
Feel free to criticize (I read too much into things), feedback (disagreements with certain arguments?), or suggest your own theories.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
screwed by perth airport again
i was supposed to reach perth at 1330 to catch a 1600 flight to sydney. i got deleyed for 30min at changi and 2hr at perth. apparently it takes 90min to get to the guy who stamps your passport and another 30min to the guy who x-rays your luggage, yea asians always kenna 'random sampling of passengers for security check'. then there's the 30min wait for the domestic terminal transfer bus and 20min drive. in the end qantas rebooked me on a midnight flight to arrive in sydney 25hr after i left home in sg. at least they gave me a $25 meal voucher to spend at the dismal domestic cookhouse.
on a lighter note, i met this swedish guy who also missed his connection and he taught me how to pronounce ikea properly.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
BEST.MONTH.EVER
Probably the best period of my life.
So far at least.
A big Thank you to all who have made it possible.
And now back to my hectic lifestyle in my little corner.
lalala
ys
When i get older, i will be stronger.
They'll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Update
Why did Perth Airport not win Airport of the Year?
And the bus runs once an hour.
Alternatively you can take a taxi there for AUD30.
Brilliant.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Reservice
Sunday, June 06, 2010
so happening...
Starting from the 23rd of may, I've been reaching home late at night for almost every day. Tiring, but enjoyable. Not quite sure how they fit, but they just did. Half of me tells me this cannot continue, else my backlog will pile up once again(it's already very large). But the other half of me hope it does =) lol. Regardless, my coming week is filled already, with the exception of friday.
In the meantime, I'm very very happy! For being able to do the following activities which i haven't done in years: Rock climbing, cycling, pool, telescope star-gazing. And also to the following people for spending time(and in some cases, money), to meet-up since 23rd may!
Yiting, Eugene, Gerard, Gen, Chinny, Shun Cheng, Kelvin, Jasper, Wing Chung, Zann, Tricia, Ms Low, Mr Joseph Chong, Mr Pang, Shi Xiong, Joshua, Jing Xun, Teddy, Willy, Aaron, Sherman, Matthew, Margaret, Shawn, Guangyan, Yee Sian, Thomas, Xin Ying, Charlotte, Timothy.
Thanks alot ppl! Long list already(30!), but can get longer! Still got a few people who would be nice to meet up with but are absent from this list. Come back from overseas soon!
Saturday, May 01, 2010
how did all these happen?
The month started on a relaxing tone, so much that i was free to play games sometimes even on weekday nights. As the month passed by, it started getting hectic. the weekday games disappeared, and the weekend ones followed suit. It wasn't long before the common test preparation came into full swing, and all my time went to the students and tuition kids.
Time constraints aside, other things were happening. "How to train your dragon" came out, exciting me to no end. Stupid rumours of me and someone died down, much to my relief. And gerard and chinny celebrated their 21st birthdays. (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! once again!!!) And i learned something so shocking it made me re-look at the amount of trust i place in friends.
then came yesterday. I stayed back in school to an crazy time of 8.30pm because of a whole wide array of factors. When i finally stepped out of school, i received a call from an insanely weird and long phone number. Against my better judgement, i picked it up.
Turned out it was a call from my bro(who's overseas in australia now, hence the weird number). That is of course, fine. Except that prior information i have attained informs me that my bro should be with his gf now, and hence, a certain classmate and friend with the initials 'lz' as well.
And all of us know lz well enough to know that when he calls you out of the blue, it has got to be either one of these two things:
1. he's calling you to go online and play dota.
2. he's calling to ji siao you and screw you up.
This call had nothing to do with dota.
And so after spreading unbased rumours of me to my bro, asking me random stupid questions with regards to those rumours(i have to admit they were quite funny though), and wasting about 5 mins of my phone bill on an international call, they(my bro, lz and cheryl) cut the phone call abruptly. which i, of course, didn't mind.
Then came the bomb when i reached home. I'm not gonna talk about it here. All i'm gonna say is that it sums up the point on this month being one of revelation. and that my feelings thereafter could be best described, i think, as one of 'confusion with a pinch of happiness'.
ok that's all folks.
lalala
ys
P.S lz why don't you entertain my bro and his gf with ACCURATE FACTS like your infatuation with a certain person whose initials happen to be 'pp', instead of entertaining them with baseless rumours of me? hahaha
Saturday, April 24, 2010
europe
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
follow up
Through a careful consultative process, the hospitals will be able to finalize the specific terms and conditions in such a manner as to attract as many good doctors home as possible. On the whole, responses from overseas trained doctors and students have however been favorable. We will share more updates when ready.
Monday, April 19, 2010
A joke and an insult
I refer to this article: http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20100416-210789.html
In summary, the government is going to tempt people like Jameson and I (overseas Singapore med students) to return to Singapore to work in the public healthcare system. The health minister announced a month or two ago that MOH is mulling some kind of pre-employment grant (note they do not use the term scholarship) to entice us back. Hastily, they came up with something that seems great to the layman but fails to impress anyone in the profession, just like they did with the new residency program.
The article starts with:
To woo them back, the Government is looking to offer them up to $50,000 a year while they are still in university, to cover about 60 per cent of their fees in the last two years of their course.
I interpret that to mean: $50k or 60%, whichever is lower, and only for the last two years. Take my case for example at today's school fees and exchange rate, that equates to $31k a year or $62k total. For that, they want me to serve a minimum of 4 years, it is unclear if the intern year (or postgraduate year 1) is included.
Now lets consider what the government is doing with the local med students, namely YLLSOM and Duke-NUS.
YLLSOM:
According to NUS, tuition fee this year is $107k, of which $88k is paid by the government so Chinny pays $19k and change. Discounting annual inflation, the government pays each YLLSOM student $440k over the course of his/her studies. For that, Chinny has to serve 5 years in addition to a year of housemanship (i.e. internship). Source: https://share.nus.edu.sg/registrar/info/ug/UGTuitionCurrent.pdf
I could not find the full tuition fee for Duke-NUS so I shall use Duke University Medical School's fees for argument's sake, hopefully it is comparable. Duke's fees this year is USD46k or SGD64k (which begs the question, why is NUS so darn expensive?! Harvard is SGD57k, Hopkins is SGD42k, Edingburgh is SGD57k). Duke-NUS charges $35k so the government is topping up $29k per student per year or $116k for the whole program, again discounting inflation. For that, the student serves 4 years in addition to a year of internship. Sources: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/items/04081 http://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/web/admission_fees.htm
To quantify our government's love for medical students/noob doctors with pink ICs, I shall use the Money Invested to Length of Service Demanded ratio. A higher ratio implies that the candidate is able fulfill his/her worth (to the government) in a shorter period of time, hence he/she is more competent and efficient.
University of New South Wales (me): $15.5k/yr
YLLSOM: $73.3k/yr
Duke-NUS: $23.2k/yr
Wow, so I am 20% as competent as Chinny and 65% as efficient as a Duke-NUS guy. Granted I did not get into the former (DOH!) and do not qualify for the latter but UNSW can't be that bad; after all, MOE has all the primary school kids doing our math/sci/english tests.
It gets better:
Writing in his blog, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said that the 'pre-employment grant' (PEG) would be based on merit and offered to students of top schools overseas.
bla bla bla
the grant target Singaporeans in top medical schools recognised by the Singapore Medical Council, such as Harvard Medical School, Imperial College and the University of Melbourne
Firstly, I seriously doubt any Singaporean went to Harvard. For the few that went to Imperial, I doubt they'll want to return to Singapore for $92k (which is how much this PEG will pay them) unless they are fanatics who want to build a democratic society, based on justice and equality, so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation. After Melbourne changed its medicine program from undergrad MBBS to postgrad MD, Singaporeans stopped going. The earning potential in UK or AU or anywhere else in the developed world totally owns Singapore. A Singapore Houseman (intern) makes ~SGD2.7k while an Australian intern makes ~AUD5.5k, specialist wages vary too much even within the same country so it would not be a fair indication of median pay. Anyway I doubt the foreign talents MOH dug from India and Philippine graduated from Harvard, Imperial or Melbourne.
As an interesting contrast, the 3 year officer contract with the Army (essentially 2yr on top of NS) pays $10k sign-on bonus, $6k combatant bonus, $6k end-of-contract bonus and ~$10k total difference between NSF 2LT and REG 2LT during the second year of service (discounting pay difference as a REG OCT). Their worth turns out to be ~$16k/yr, and they only need to pass A level/diploma as opposed to graduate from a 'top medical school(s) recognized by the Singapore Medical Council'. Source: http://www.mindef.gov.sg/arc/officers.asp
I'm not done yet.
As we ramp up local training and reduce the shortage, the scheme may hopefully become redundant
This is why they call it a pre-employment grant instead of scholarship, it is just a stopgap measure to get all the people they rejected to go back, there is no bright future ahead like there is for any typical scholar. Call me a sour grape but the government did not help me get my licence to practice so I have no legal or moral obligations to return and serve. If you say MOE provided me a good primary/secondary/jc education to study medicine in uni, I refer you to this blog post: http://angrydr.blogspot.com/2010/04/elite-bashing.html Hopefully, as they ramp up local training, less Singaporeans will need to go overseas. The statement goes to show that the government couldn't care less about our welfare, the whole point of the scheme is to plug the doctor shortage. When NTU medical school starts churning out doctors to fulfill Singapore's needs, there will still be Singaporeans who can't make it to local medical schools and head abroad, by then they will be considered 'redundant'.
Statement of the century:
We are still working out details to develop a package that will be both cost-effective and attractive to top talent.
Wow, what I want pales in comparison:
I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce
Don't be frontin' son no seeds on the bun
We be up in this drive thru
Order for two
I gots a craving for a number nine like my shoe
We need some chicken up in here
In this hizzle
For rizzle my mizzle
Extra salt on the frizzle
Dr. Pepper my brother
Another for your mother
Double double super size
And don't forget the fries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhlUVyDBusg
All that and a figure like Keira Knightley's.
And for the cherry on top:
Singaporean medical students who qualify for the PEG also have the new residency programme to look forward to, as it presents an additional opportunity for specialty training
Yea, I don't really look forward to the unaccredited and overcrowded residency program, Chinny do you?
Monday, April 12, 2010
Question: Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of CF arrangement
Condittional Fea Arraangementt (CF.A) (spelling mistake is meant so that this article is unsearchable) was introduced by the Access to Justice Act (AJA) 1999 as an attempt to transfer legal funding from the treasury to the private sector. This occurred as a result of an increasing and ridiculous growth in the cost of legal aid, namely from a few hundred million to well over 2.1 billion pounds from the 1980s to 2000. Moreover, it was not because demand was growing. Rather, number of cases relying on legal aid had decreased. Due to the need to control budget, CF.As are used to fund many civil cases which legal aid now excludes, and the issues brought about by CF.As have been debated over the last decade.
Admittedly, based on my research, the only groups of individuals who have really benefitted from this scheme are the lawyers, the claims management companies (CMCs), the banks and the insurance companies, which, is typically the supplier base for this system. In contrast, the consumers themselves have little but complaints, even though the CF.As were targeted to helping them in the first place. The introduction of Lord Justice Jackson’s report this year 2010 is new and the effects have not been visible in the current market, though we may look at the theoretical and legal implications that such an upheaval in the CF.A this would bring.
Firstly, we look at the advantages.
In terms of access to justice, CF.As have provided for many who could not qualify for legal aid. From 2000-2005 alone, personal injury cases saw a jump in a million[1] consumers seeking redress through CF.As. This is likely because of a few reasons. For one, the strict means test introduced by the AJA 1999 has led to the middle income group not qualifying for legal aid, but they are not able to afford legal services either. Secondly, the AJA 1999 has taken away certain civil cases from its funding, personal injury as an example. Thirdly, CMCs have been actively educating the masses as to seeking redress for personal injury cases especially, thus promoting a culture that citizens fight for their rights, and the CF.A is one avenue that they can do it for free. The statistics[2] speak for themselves. Especially in road traffic accidents, sometimes it is not proportional the damage to apply for legal advice but now it is made possible without the burden of bearing those legal costs. CF.As have increased accessibility to justice in a way that legal aid with a budget can never provide.
In terms of cost, in particular the success fee, it has been said to be an incentive, the only incentive for lawyers to ever enter into a CF.A. A huge risk of not being paid a cent should equally mean that there should be a larger chance to earn more[3]. Lawyers themselves are taking this risk and in order to maintain a supplier base, a success fee is a must. Currently, the success fee stands at any bonus amounting to up to 100% of the normal legal fees. However, it does not mean that it is up to the lawyer’s whims and fancies to set the percentage. This sum is decided in an agreement between the lawyer and the insurance company, based on the chance of success in a case. Opposition to this has argued that the success fee leads to perverse profits, but statistics show otherwise. Since implementation of CF.As, two large firms of CMCs have gone bankrupt within a short span of 4 years[4] and this makes us wonder whether doing CF.As are way more profitable than regular legal work.
Next, we look at the disadvantages.
The quality of justice has been described by the CAB (Citizens Advice Bureau) as appalling ever since the CMCs have started to act as middlemen for lawyers and clients in setting up a CF.A in personal injury cases. CMCs use hard-selling marketing tactics which pressures victims into entering into a contract with them. Often, they start by saying that they do not need to come out with a cent in seeking compensation but later on in some tiny footnotes they would write that the client may be subject to some payment. Essentially, not paying a cent is true, where legal costs is concerned, but damages are not always enough to pay back the interest rates of applying for a bank loan, which was meant to supply the insurance premiums. Because of the straightforwardness of some cases, some lawyers also take advantage of the situation to drag the case so that they may be paid more legal fees. Many consumers have complained that CF.A cases are so inefficient that they find it hard to resume their daily lives. Some straightforward cases were said to take up to months[5].
The one-way cost shifting is also a disadvantage for the defendant. If the defendant has failed to take up BTE (Before the event insurance), then he might find himself burdened with high legal costs from the other party when he loses[6]. What is worse is that he also has to pay the other party’s success fee, which means he could be paying up to 2 times the price of a normal fee. This is not fair to the defendant[7]. Another issue is that the defendant cannot control the legal costs of the other party and explained earlier this could be abused. Statistics have shown that the market for BTE is still very premature and hence defendants ending up bankrupt as a result of CF.As are a reality[8].
Next, we look at the former aims of CF.As. CF.As were meant to help those who were too poor for legal advice but failed the means test for legal aid. Recent cases such as Campbell v Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd[9] have seemed to imply that CF.As are available to just about anyone. This issue was brought up in the London Seminar as they said that for “
Looking at the efficacy of the CF.A also brings shivers down one’s spine. While it is meant to provide claimants an avenue to seek compensation so that they can use the damages awarded to resume their daily lives or seek medical treatments, most of them end up having to pay for medical fees by themselves. Statistics showed that after the interest rates deduction, claimants were left with a meagre 10-15%[12] of the total damages awarded. Some even had to pay more. This does not seem to be a system to help the poor!
Lastly, on the point of abuse, it seems that lawyers doing CF.As are paid better hourly rates than a normal lawyer. Based on statistics, a CF.A lawyer easily earns 103-115%[13] of the normal lawyer fee based in
The Jackson Report this year has led to many changes to the CF.A scheme and though the effects have not been felt there has been much feedback.
For one, the Condittional Fea Ammendment Act 2010[15] aims to reduce the success fee from 100% to 10% maximum. This is something targeted to help the defendant as there has been much feedback that success fees are perverse to a point of landing people into bankruptcy. However, many such as the Law Society and the Manchester Law Society have spoken up for the lawyers saying that the 100% success fee should maintain. Many lawyers also seem to object to this move[16]. This goes on the grounds that it is important that there are incentives for lawyers to do CF.A work. After all, if they lose the case, they are not paid, and these lawyers are really gambling out there. Based on my opinion, what this amendment does will cause severe repercussions. This will not stop the problem of cherry-picking. Rather, it will result in more cherry-picking because there is a tendency to do almost no-risk work. Also, this would mean that many people would lose the option to enter into a CF.A as supplier base would probably decrease due to less sure-win cases. Next, to look at the problem of dragging cases to increase profits, this might actually persist and get worse in order to earn more. Hence I would feel that this is an effort, despite its good intentions, that would be difficult to bear fruit.
Secondly, there is a proposal to shift costs from the defendant to the claimant. Rather than bearing the full cost, it is suggested that the success fee be paid by the claimant. Courts have shown an apprehensive attitude towards this as the adversarial system has always been one that has a principle that the losers should pay the winner’s cost. This again is a move aimed to help the defendants. However, having this in play would mean that the claimants have less damages to recover. Yet, to look at it from another perspective, this would mean that lawyers can now no longer abuse success fee setting. It would shift the demand of this market to the hands of the claimants. In a way, this provides competition, keeping success fees low and efficient. It would also solve the problem of case dragging, since lawyers would be pressured by claimants not to take so much time. Although this means more lawyers would exit the market because of low profits, I would feel that it is still an advantage as it increases efficiency and cost.
In conclusion, there are many disadvantages and little advantages of the old CF.A system as I have researched and analysed but the new reforms by the Jackson Report might actually be able to solve some of those disadvantages so that CF.As become a good substitute for legal aid.
[1] No Win No Fee No Chance - James Sandbach, Dec 2004
[2] As from FN 1
[3] Win first, Pay later - Bob Maynard 2009
[4]
[5] Opinions expressed and reported by CAB based on 385 evidence reports between Jan 2002 to Sept 2004
[6] see Callery v Gray - [2002] All ER (D) 233 (Jun) Lexis case search
[7] Cardiff Seminar 2009, speech by Sir Anthony May
[8] The Trade Union Congress submission in the Lord Justice Jackson's Final Report
[9]
[10] The
[11] Conditional Fee Arrangement & Freedom of Expression – Thomas Gibbons, 2005
[12] Civil Costs Newsletter 2010
[13] Segmental Analysis Report by Ministry of Justice, data for 2008-2009
[14] The Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in
Review’), Sir David Clementi, March 2004
[15] Lexis Legislation search
[16] Access to justice:
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
NS Call Up?
Usually, such events are associated with shock, cursing and sadness on the part of the receiver. Mine was more than that.
Part of me thought it was a very very bad joke.
Reason? The date of the ICT was 12/10/2010 to 29/10/2010.
For those of you who are wondering what's wrong with that date, take a second look at the month of the call up.
Like hello? It has been repeatedly clarified to us that those who are headed off to institutes of higher learning(IHL), which is practically the entire RJC cohort, will either be deferred(overseas cases) or be called up during a common black-out window(local cases). That above date hardly complied with that.
It can only mean 1 thing. Someone somewhere screwed something up. And the administration failed to pick it up.
Now half of me feels like posting my NS call up email on failblog and then write in to the straits times demanding an explanation. Usually, i can take things pretty calmly. But with the burden on an unlimited workload, seeing such a mess up is pushing me to the verge of explosion. And if i require a deferment, i actually have to send a copy of my uni acceptance letter, a copy of my course time table, as well as a copy of my exam time table. Of which i have none cause i've missed all my uni briefings so far due to work commitments.
How much trouble is it going to cause me to procure all that? Surely much less than a simple write-up to the straits times. Well, SAF better pray they clear this mess up soon, not just for me, but for 10 of my platoon mates as well, or risk a serious blow-up.
noobify†™
ys
