Population and Housing Census of Malaysia 2010

The 5th nationwide population and housing census (banci penduduk dan perumahan) since the formation of Malaysia in 1963 will be held from 6 July until 22 August 2010. This census is carried out at the interval of every 10 years, and the last census was in 2000.

During the census period, officers appointmented by the Department of Statistics will visit each and every household to collect information of all family member, including the racial origin, language spoken, religion, number of people in each household, their ages, educational qualifications, occupation, type of school attended by children and other information deemed fit. These information are used for national planning.

All census officers must wear their identity tag which looks like this:

and also must carry the official census bag which looks like this:

This year, instead of answering the census questions through interview with the officers, we can also do it online.

For more information, visit to the official Population and Housing Census of Malaysia 2010 website.

POS Malaysia has risen domestic postage rate

POS Malaysia has, by today 1 July 2010, risen the domestic postage rate.

The new rate is as below:

If you want to send anything using the snail mail method by POS Malaysia, you have to be aware of this new tariff and paste your stamp accordingly.

Hope that this has minimal impact to the e-Commerce market, as I think most parcel in e-Commerce deals are sent using more reliable service providers rather than POS Malaysia.

Malaysia national debt increased to 50.6% of GDP

According to the reply from Prime Minister Nazib Razak to Taiping MP Nga Kor Ming (倪可敏) in the parliament, the latest national debt of Malaysia now stood at RM378.3 billion, or 50.6% of the GDP.

This means that for every citizen in Malaysia, we are bearing a national debt of RM14,000 per person on average.

The national debt has surged by 19.1 billion during the 1st quarter of 2010! Compared with the national debt at RM230 billion when RMK-9 was just began, it has increased by RM148.3 billion within just 5 year! During 1997, our national debt was just 96 billion.

If the national debt continues to grow at a CAGR of 12%, by 2019, it will eventually reach RM1 trillion!

The alarm has already triggered, and the government as well as the citizen must wake up now, if we don't want to repeat the history of what is happening in Greece now!