photo by Musthafa, Anton

Under the agreement, Detroit Electric will use Proton’s underutilized assembly line. Detroit Electric’s motor, lithium polymer battery, the drive train and other components will be fitted in the bodies of two Proton models, Persona and Gen 2. They will be sold as Detroit Electric, without a specific brand name.

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Keep up the trend. Sorry Saudi Arabia..

• Sicko’s Arabia and Dubai is no better
• ZeroTruck

photo by shamshahrin

Articles like this scare the hell out of me. Malaysia has a growing issue on it’s hands in part because the government is still saying, “No problemo“. Unless there are genius’ at work the likes of no where else in the World, Malaysia has some painful realizations to come to grips with over the next few months.

Where the discussion isn’t going, at least in public, (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won’t have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.

A close friend of mine organizing funding for a mobile device startup recently had dinner with banker here and told him that many manufacturers in the country have cut back to 2 days of operation. The next shoe to drop locally is massive defaulting on credit and car loans according to this banker.

Malaysia and other countries facing a financial crisis need to rewrite home and auto loans based on current valuation rather than going into the same default and foreclosure spiral as the US and Europe. A link house in Bandar Sri Damansara was 285k RM in 2002. Earlier this year the same property was asking 520K RM. I anticipate correction in the area of 30 to 40% over the next year. Basically if your property doubled in value over the last few years, get ready for a big correction.

Malaysia has been lucky to have experienced good times for a long while. I’m scared what the reaction would be here if people are holding property loans at twice the amount of the homes current value. Then consider a collapse in the job market along with b.a.d. inflation. Then add government with weak leadership that continues to deny there is a problem.

Scary times folks.

• Malaysia is in recession
• Peter Schiff predicts US economic collapse 2 years back

Head on over to http://store.apple.com/my

Prices are a bit higher than the US store. 1023 USD for a MacBook vs. the US Apple store price of 999. No mention of educational discounts. Free shipping on orders above RM 250.

• Apple is now 3rd largest PC vendor in the USA
• Does the iPhone suck?

I work with video and all of the services I am reviewing / testing are outside Malaysia. At times my connection to US servers was as fast as my advertised connection speed and other times, most of the time in fact, my connection was 10 times slower. I’ve become accustomed to reconnecting until I get a “good” IP address.

I usually spend about 5 to 10 minutes playing the reconnect game. Today I decided to document the ritual and provide proof that TMnet is cheating customers by giving them throttled (bad!) IPs 8 times out of 10.

This is not about p2p throttling or slowing down rapidshare downloads.

Here is proof that Streamyx is limiting speed for ALL overseas connections.

Symptom: Internet is slow..

Log into router and disconnect, reconnect.

Perform bandwidth test… Slow ! Bad IP !!

Repeat while cursing TMnet for cheating you out of your time and money.

Eventually the Streamyx gods will decide to bless your router with the much coveted “Good IP”.

Good IPs will be in different ranges depending on your location. I’d love to hear Telekom Malaysia’s explanation.

Call 1-300-88-9515 to see what they say.

Repeat bandwidth test.

10 times faster – funny how that works isn’t it? I’ve been doing this routine for years now.

These tests were done on the same US based server in SF, CA.

Smells like fraud to me. What say you?

• P1 W1MAX pricing
• Celcom broadband slow and unstable

I’m tired of buying food from Tesco Malaysia that’s rotten. Last night we bought some Fuji apples and tonight after dinner I cut some open to find out the whole bag was spoiled even though they look OK on the outside. They’ve got that spunky carbonated taste. I would not write about this if it were the first time. We’ve had problems before with food quality there and I’ve written to Tesco Sdn Bhd Malaysia to ask them if they think it is acceptable to sell spoiled food to people.

I’m curious, is Tesco known for selling bad produce and spoiled goods in other countries? I’ll be sure to bring my camera next time to document how bad it is – some of the produce is disgusting.. I don’t have a problem with their dry goods but they need to do something about the produce – yuck!

• Surprise, China blocks blog coverage of milk scandal
• Social unrest possible in Malaysia due to economic collapse

• Langkawi, nice for a few days
• Proof TMNet is cheating you

It was an honor to talk about President Obama (sounds nice) on TV. Nice meeting Han and Naz and Dr. Azmi – cool guys. Also thanks to KevinC, Jessica and Sariah for having me on. I managed to get in a quick plug for Democrats Abroad Malaysia and votefromabroad.org.
Slept well last night =)

Part one above. I come on around 7 minutes into the segment.

Part two

• Americans in Malaysia – Americans Abroad for Obama
• Social Media Optimization project: Democrats Abroad

• Rubber recycling gone wrong, China used condoms for hairbands
• Malaysia set put the smack down on social media

After spending a few years in Malaysia, whenever you hear top level ministers and the Prime Minister repeatedly declare that things are not that bad, things are actually bad. I’ve talked to shop keepers, hand phone dealers, car salesmen & real estate agents. They already know what the government is afraid to say, Malaysia is indeed in recession.

KUALA LUMPUR: The global economic slowdown is beginning to take a toll on the lifestyle of Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur and people are bracing themselves for difficult times. A member of the public said: “What I heard around in the market… even they are saying things are more expensive. They are buying less, going to supermarket less and business is slowing down a bit.” Another said: “I have cut down a lot on lifestyle expenses.”

I’ve noticed over the past several years the increasing trend of banks handing out packs of 3 and 4 credit cards to just about anyone. Retailers here have schemes whereby people can purchase appliances, computers and such for zero interest for the first 12 months, quite popular with consumers. The real economic danger here will be when people begin to mass default on credit debt.

via Channel News Asia

• Malaysians are horny buggers
• New Zealand in recession

Get your request for absentee ballots mailed in by September 15th if you are in Southeast Asia.

The wizard at votefromabroad.org should only take 5 minutes of your time. Here is a postage paid envelope template to send your forms in.

Great post over at DailyKos with a ton of information for Democrats Abroad and Americans Abroad for Obama.

Obama/Biden ‘08 !

• Social Media Optimization project: Democrats Abroad
• Obama / Webb ‘08