The Prisoner Exchange

Kasiem is a genius.

Imagine being able to pay someone else to do your prison time. Think of the business opportunity. You could even set up an exchanges whereby short term credits in maximum security prisons could be exchanged for longer terms in nicer prisons. Otherwise unemployed people could now find meaningful employment as exchange brokers.The govenment could even generate revenues from licensing aforementioned brokers as well as a service fee levied on each transaction.

Its a win-win as far as I can see.

tilting at windmills

I can't think of a better metaphor to describe the current Minister Of Communication's fetish with cleansing the Indonesian web sphere of porn just in time for Ramadan this August. He certainly has his windmills lined up. But who is he kidding really? By his own lieutenant's admission his ministry is incapable of blocking more than 3000 porn sites per day. The Internet porn business creates some 4 million sites per day - created by some of the most Internet-savy people on the web. So, according to  my math. the government may at best be able to block some 40,000 sites before Ramadan. That leaves only a mere 39, 960,000 porn sites for the porn crazed, sex staved, uberhorny, morally challenged rakyat to nibble on before their annual month long abstinence.  This solution will be as much use as issuing spoons to Jakarta residents to prevent flooding during rainy season. I'm not even going to bother with the sms text porn,sms picture porn and cell phone porn movies flying around the country for years now. You don't even need the Internet for that shit.

Here is some free advice for the good minister. You wanna limit the effects of porn? Start with your kids. Watch a porn video with them or at least sit them down for a nice chat. Trust me, they will probably be so creeped out from watching/discussing porn with their parents that any possible mystique will be totally  and irretrievably lost. Failing that you could foist off your kids sex education on the public school system or leave it to the dvd merchants in glodok. Implementing blanket bans may garner the morality vote but really its a fig leaf covering your own inability to deal  sensibly with the problem.