Look for the limau nipis.

You know the type. Yellow noodles, slightly wetter, usually redder, a bit more sauce, cili, taugeh, sawi, egg, sometimes tofu or tomato or chopped kobis. Then somewhere at the side, one little piece of lime.

Melayu punya mesti ada limau nipis potong. 😂 Once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.

Malay mee goreng at Chong Choon Cafe, Kuching and Aik Seng, Sarikei. The only two places worth mentioning.

Chinese-style mee goreng usually looks and tastes a bit different. Drier, darker, fried harder, less garnish, and if the uncle knows what he is doing, a bit of that smoky wok hei. Oh, usually they will give you soy sauce with chopped chillis.

Chinese-style mee goreng from Sarikei, Lachau and Kuching.

Of course I am generalising. Before somebody starts a Malaysian food civil war in the comments, this is not some academic classification of mee goreng.

It is just one of those things you grow up eating often enough that you can look at a plate and immediately go, “Ah. Melayu punya.” Or, “Ah. Chinese shop punya.”

Both are mee goreng. Both can be bloody good. Both can also be terrible. There are really a lot of bad mee goreng. I always kena because I love trying the same menu at different places, especially new places. Most of the time, disappointment. 😔 It looks easy and simple, but not everyone can do a good mee goreng, in my book.

Bad mee goreng is remarkably democratic.

Apparently I have been thinking about fried noodles for quite a long time too. Back in 2006, I posted a photo of mee goreng I fried myself for dinner, wrote “Fried mee!! Yummy yummy….”, then spent the rest of the same post complaining about MSN Messenger.

Twenty years later I am still writing about mee goreng and complaining about technology.

Growth, yo!

Anyway, my very scientific conclusion remains the same: if the mee goreng comes with a piece of limau nipis, confidence level that it is Melayu punya immediately goes up to 87%.

Peer reviewed by nobody.

The internet has become stupid.

Everything is shorter. Louder. Angrier. More confidently wrong. Somebody posts one sentence, somebody else reads half of it, a third person replies to something nobody actually said, and by lunchtime everybody is fighting. You guys should try Threads.

Then I remember something.

Maybe the internet did not become stupid.

Maybe everybody simply arrived.

When I started wasting my life online properly in the early 2000s, being on the internet still required a little bit of effort.

You needed a computer. A connection. Some patience. A lot of it if you were on dial-up. 🤣 You sat at a desk. You searched for things. You found forums. Blogs. Message boards. IRC. Weird little websites made by weird little people for another twenty weird little people.

Even finding those places required some intent.

Nobody accidentally opened a browser, fell into an infinite vertical feed and emerged forty-five minutes later having watched seventeen videos of strangers arguing about whether a restaurant served the correct amount of sambal.

We had to work for our stupidity.

And because internet access itself filtered who was there, I think many of us developed a slightly romantic (probably misguided) idea that the old internet was somehow populated by smarter people.

University students. Office workers stealing company bandwidth. Geeks. Forum regulars. Bloggers willing to spend two hours formatting one post nobody asked for.

Very intellectual, konon. But let’s not bullshit ourselves.

The old internet had plenty of idiots too.

Chain emails. Fake virus warnings. Urban legends. Forum flame wars. Terrible forwarded jokes. People typing in ALL CAPS. Blog posts about what somebody ate for lunch accompanied by seven badly exposed photographs.

I know because I contributed generously to several of those categories.

But there was one important difference.

There was friction.

Writing something long took effort. Reading something long took effort. Finding a community took effort. Uploading a photograph could take long enough for you to reconsider whether the photograph was worth uploading in the first place.

Then the smartphone happened.

And suddenly the internet stopped being somewhere you went. It became something permanently attached to your hand.

That is an enormous improvement, by the way. I don’t mean this as some “kids these days” complaint. More people being able to communicate, learn, publish, create, sell things, find communities and access information is obviously a good thing.

But when you remove almost all the friction, you also remove the little pauses that used to sit between thought and publication.

Think.

Type.

Edit.

Maybe delete.

Now it can be:

See thing.

Feel thing.

POST!!!

And because everybody is carrying a camera, keyboard, television station and publishing platform in their pocket, there is simply much more of everything.

More brilliant people.

More funny people.

More experts.

More complete idiots.

More cats. Especially cats.

So perhaps the internet did not deteriorate into a worse version of humanity.

Perhaps it finally became a fairly accurate sample of humanity.

Which is slightly terrifying.

There is another part to it though.

The platforms themselves learned what keeps us staring at the screen. Not necessarily what is most useful. Not what is most thoughtful. What keeps us there. All those algorithms.

Shorter things are easier to consume. Bite-sized outbursts and “thoughts”. Outrage is easy to understand. Certainty travels better than nuance. A thirty-second video is easier to start than a 2,000-word article. Before you know it, you have trained yourself to expect every idea to arrive already chopped into bite-sized pieces.

I complained about this recently in So… what now? — that I think some of the degradation in the way we express ourselves comes from consuming too much shortened, quick-fix material. Bite-sized stuff is only good for Chipsmore. LOL.

But the annoying thing is that I am part of the problem too.

Of course I am.

I use Twitter. X. Whatever. I’m also on… Threads. 💀

I scroll. I post stupid observations. I share screenshots. I watch short videos. I open something interesting, tell myself I will read it later, then never see it again because the feed has already moved on to twelve other things. Just scrolling back up to find those old photos or videos would take forever and quite some effort.

Convenience wins.

I actually figured out part of this years ago.

In 2018, when I briefly tried blogging again in I iz bek!, I realised that Twitter and Facebook had slowly replaced blogging for me simply because they were easier. I could do everything from the phone. A thought didn’t need to become an article. It only needed to become a post.

Then that became the habit.

And habits change the way you think. Eventually, how you do things too.

If every thought must fit inside a tiny box, eventually you start thinking in tiny boxes.

That is probably the part I came to dislike most.

Not that social media is stupid.

It can be hilarious, useful and occasionally brilliant.

But it encourages you to hit publish before the thought is properly developed.

You publish the thought while it is still half cooked.

Sometimes that is fine. Some thoughts deserve exactly seven seconds of attention.

Some of mine deserve less.

But other things need room.

Room to explain.

Room to contradict yourself.

Room to change your mind halfway through.

Room to write three paragraphs before finally discovering what the hell you were actually trying to say.

That is one reason I am enjoying having this stupid blog back.

There is no character limit here.

No algorithm deciding that the first sentence must provoke somebody immediately or the post dies.

No obligation to turn every point into a thread, carousel, reel, short, story, whatever.

I can ramble.

Which, historically, I think I am quite good at. And twenty years later the rambling is still here. That might actually be the biggest advantage a blog has over the modern feed.

It stays put.

A social-media post has the lifespan of a mosquito. It appears, gets some replies, disappears down the timeline and becomes archaeology within a week.

A blog post can sit quietly for fifteen years until some idiot rebuilds his dead website, finds it again and wonders why he used to write like that.

There is value in that, at least for me.

I don’t want the old internet back exactly as it was. I like fast connections. I like smartphones. I like being able to access almost anything from almost anywhere. I definitely do not miss waiting for a photograph to load line by bloody line.

But I do miss the idea that the internet was a collection of places rather than one enormous feed.

Places you visited deliberately.

Places with strange personalities.

Places somebody actually owned and cared about.

Maybe that is why resurrecting bongkersz.com felt unexpectedly satisfying. I “force” myself to write again. Longer posts. And re-read my old posts. I do not even care that much if anyone is reading or commenting.

It is my little place again.

Not because the old internet was smarter.

It probably wasn’t.

There were simply fewer of us, more friction, and more reasons to slow down. Maybe that is why so many people keep saying “it was better back in the day.” Perhaps they could feel the connection, the sincerity and the effort given. Heck, we had LAN parties, blogger meetups and forum meetups back then.

Now everybody is here.

Which is wonderful.

And terrible.

Basically, humanity lah.

The crease.

There it is. The crease is visible. The crease is less visible. The crease is deeper. The crease is shallower. The crease catches light at 37.5 degrees while somebody holds the phone under studio lighting like they are inspecting a fucking diamond.

Yes lah. There is a crease.

After actually using a Fold every day, I can tell you something very exciting about it.

I mostly don’t give a shit. 

And I don’t think people who actually use folding phones give much of a shit at this point. I have used Fold 4. Fold 5. Oppo Find N5. Honor Magic V5. Now I am using Fold 8. Oppo’s Find N5 was the best in terms of being almost crease-free. Fold 4 had the most visible crease among those I have used. But really, it makes very little difference in real-life use.

Fold 5 I think this one.

Not because it is invisible. It isn’t. If I purposely tilt the screen, look from the side and hunt for it, of course I can see it. But when I am actually reading, typing, looking at photos, checking drawings, scrolling rubbish on social media or doing whatever else I bought the bloody phone for, my brain simply stops noticing it. And who looks at stuff on their phones from weird angles anyway.

Which is why I sometimes find Fold reviews quite funny.

Reviewers have to review something measurable. Thickness. Weight. Benchmark. Camera. Hinge. Crease. Battery. All fair. All useful.

But owning one for months is a completely different thing.

You stop reviewing the phone and start developing habits around it.

And that is the part I think many Fold reviews miss.

The outer screen and inner screen are not just the same phone in two sizes.

I use them differently.

The outside screen is the normal quick phone. Messages. Notifications. Music. Quick search. Check something. Reply something. Take a photo. Done.

Then I open it and the whole behaviour changes. Longer reading. Browsing. Maps. Photos. Documents. Spreadsheets. Comparing things side by side. Anything where a normal phone screen suddenly feels a bit too cramped.

And because it is Android, I can arrange the two experiences differently instead of being forced to pretend one layout must work everywhere.

That is the fun part.

I fiddle with the home screens. Different layouts for outer and inner display.  Landscape. Portrait. Widgets. App placement. Status bars. Animations. How things open when I unfold the phone. Then I change something again because apparently I have nothing better to do. Like having 4 different wallpapers. Outer lock screen. Outer main screen. Inner lock screen. Inner main screen.

How do you like my wallpapers? 

Some people buy a phone, move all their apps over and never touch the setup again for three years.

I cannot live like that. 😂

And suddenly this reminded me of something I wrote sixteen years ago.

In 2010 I reviewed the Nokia N900. Reading that old post now is quite funny because half the specifications sound prehistoric. 600 MHz processor. 256MB RAM. A 3.5-inch screen. I was apparently VERY EXCITED about all this.

But the interesting part is that the things I loved most were not really the specifications.

It was multitasking. Customisable home screens. Plugins. Extensions. Applications. Messing around with repositories. Changing how the device behaved. Making the phone mine.

Basically, I liked the N900 because it invited me to poke around.

Sixteen years later, that is still one of the reasons I like Android.

Android is polished enough now that you don’t need to mess around with anything. You can take the phone out of the box, sign in and use it like a normal human being.

But if you are the sort of idiot who looks at a perfectly working interface and thinks, Hmmmm. Can I move this? Change that? Make this screen behave differently? What happens if I do this? — Android still lets you play.

And a Fold multiplies that.

Now you have two screen states to play with. Two layouts. Different app behaviour when folded and unfolded. Different ways of multitasking. Different little annoyances you can spend an unnecessary amount of time fixing.

Wonderful.

This is also why judging a Fold purely as a normal phone that happens to bend misses the point.

If you use it exactly like a slab phone and only open it occasionally to watch YouTube, then yes, you may reasonably ask why the hell you paid so much money for it.

But once the larger screen starts becoming part of your normal workflow, going back feels strange.

I notice this especially when I need to read something while referring to something else. Or look at a drawing. Or browse a proper desktop-ish webpage. Or compare information without jumping back and forth between apps like a madman. Of course it helps to have a bigger screen when you are growing older. *cough* eyesight HAHAHAHA!

Just about the same screen size as an iPad Mini (5, I think).

None of these things sounds revolutionary.

That is the problem with reviewing mature technology. The biggest improvements are often not the dramatic things you can show in a thumbnail with a red arrow saying GAME CHANGER!!!

They are small conveniences that quietly become habits.

And once they become habits, you miss them when they are gone.

Is the Fold perfect? Of course not.

I have complaints. Every device has irritating shit. There are things Samsung can improve, things Android can improve and things developers still handle badly on a big folding screen.

But if you ask me what I want fixed first, I am not going to stand under a fluorescent lamp, tilt the display sideways and scream:

THE CREASE!!!

That is not how I actually use the phone.

Maybe that is the biggest difference between a review and ownership. A reviewer has to notice everything. There is this long checklist to tick. More things to add. More things to talk about.

An owner eventually notices only the things that matter.

And after all these years — from Maemo and the N900 to Android and a Fold — apparently what still matters to me is quite simple.

Give me a device that works. Good battery life. Good camera. Multitasking.

Then give me enough freedom to fuck around with it.

Good enough already lah liddat.

And of course somebody did.

Basically:

Infernal Affairs: Malaysian Politics Edition.

So I asked Grok to translate the video into English. Some friends were asking for the translation. I was lazy to do it myself so I asked Grok lah. 

Simple enough.

Except it translated the Chinese political subtitles instead of the actual spoken audio.

Fair enough. Easy mistake.

Then I asked it to translate the voice.

That was when things became hilarious.

The audio is the original Cantonese from Infernal Affairs.

One small problem.

The audio in this particular video is Mandarin.

So I told it.

And Grok doubled down.

Then doubled down again.

Apparently the audio was definitely Cantonese because the lip movements matched the original movie dialogue.

🤣🤣🤣

At this point I was no longer asking AI for a translation.

I was arguing with an uncle at a kopitiam who had already decided he was correct and would rather die than admit otherwise.

So I gave the same video to ChatGPT and specifically said:

Use the audio for translation.

This time it picked up the actual political parody dialogue.

The funny part is not even which AI got it right or wrong.

It is the confidence.

Not:

“I think this might be Cantonese.”

But:

THE AUDIO IS CANTONESE.

Case closed.

Everybody go home.

🤣🤣🤣

Maybe AI really has achieved human-level intelligence after all.

Not because it can code.

Not because it can pass exams.

But because it has finally mastered one of humanity’s greatest skills:

Being completely wrong and refusing to admit it. 

Welcome to civilisation, machine.

You’ll fit right in.

P/S: Somewhere inside Grok’s silicon brain it is probably still insisting the audio is Cantonese.

P/P/S: Before anybody starts another argument — yes, I KNOW the original Infernal Affairs scene is in Cantonese. That was exactly the bloody point.

P/P/P/S: Original scene here if anyone is interested. It is the rooftop meeting between Chan Wing-yan (Tony Leung) and SP Wong (Anthony Wong), where Wong asks whether Yan has forgotten he is a cop, and Yan complains that the “three-year” undercover assignment kept being extended until it was nearly ten years. The key Cantonese line is the famous: “三年之後又三年……十年都嚟緊頭啦，老細！” roughly: “Three years, then another three years… it’s almost ten years already, boss!”

Watch the original Infernal Affairs rooftop scene on YouTube

So, last night, the same AI was checking concrete volumes, reinforcement, wall areas, floor finishes and electrical fittings for 17 buildings, against their actual drawings. How the hell did we go from “Eh, rate my blog” to “Check whether this RAB actually matches the drawing” in slightly more than one week?

Cautiously lah of course. I did not trust it right away.

At first I deliberately gave it jobs where screwing up didn’t matter. Like harmless stupid things – describe my Twitter account, then my friends’ accounts. The usual personality read thing from your tweets. Rate my blog. Fix this photo. Colour that old photo. Small things. If it hallucinated something stupid, nobody dies and no contractor gets paid for concrete that doesn’t exist HAHAHAHA!

Then I gave it something more important: my master spreadsheet. Monitoring sheets. For contracts, CAPEX, projects, progress, quantities and all the usual reporting rubbish that accumulates over the years. That session ran the whole day. Build this tracker. Reconcile these files. Change this. No, not like that. Apply the same correction everywhere else.

What started winning me over was not the speed. It was the fact that when it could not verify something, it said so instead of inventing a number. Ah. That I can work with. And then things escalated. Damn!

Once all this plumbing exists, naturally you start throwing more things at it. It now checks my inbox and tells me what actually needs attention. It reads my FCPO charts and gives me the levels I am monitoring without trying to be some guru shouting BUY BUY BUY!!!. I also gave it some of my old tender evaluation reports and asked it to draft new ones using the same structure.

The funny part is the AI assistant is on my WhatsApp, so for most of the past week I have basically been walking around staring at my phone and furiously WhatsApping it instructions. To everybody else it probably looks like I have spent one whole week chatting nonsense on WhatsApp. In reality, quite a lot of the work above was happening there.

Still needs checking. Still needs judgement. But a half-finished report is much nicer than a blank Microsoft Word page.

Then came this stupid idea. Or brilliant idea. Still deciding. What if…. I see if this thing can do this instead.

You see, I am currently preparing tenders involving 17 buildings, and every RAB has to match the construction drawings. Oh RAB – Rencana Anggaran Biaya. Bill of Quantities for those who are not familiar.

Every year end or start of the year I need to prepare for new tenders. Anyone who has done the quantity take-off knows how boring and tedious this becomes: measure, calculate, check drawing, check specification, wonder where this quantity came from, why this mistake or that detail and specification I thought I already rectified before is still there?? And then you start questioning your life choices.

So it is a perfect job for an AI guinea pig. Mana tau if it can help to cut down the time and repetitive work, kan? No harm trying.

I started with one small fertilizer store and taught it how I wanted the quantities measured. Show the calculation. Reference the drawing. Don’t assume blank means zero. Flag anything that doesn’t make sense. Basically, remember mathematics in school? Show your working! How you get that? No no your assumptions are wrong. Ah you can just calculate it this way. Then it started finding things for me! Silly typos. Lazy detailing. All kinds of shit. Embarrassed man to be corrected by an…… AI.

One drawing showed 5 mm of sand underneath a floor slab. Five millimetres. Obviously something wasn’t right. Most likely it should have been 50 mm, but the interesting part was that it stopped and flagged it instead of happily calculating whatever the drawing said.

Then another one. The RAB allowed for 2 wall fans. The drawing showed 8. Hmmmm. Somebody is going to have either a very windy room or a very hot one. HAHA!

Of course it gets things wrong too. On the first pass it called those fans ceiling fans. I checked the drawing. No lah. Wall fans. Corrected it, it corrected the workbook and continued. That is basically how I’m using it now. AI calculates, AI checks, AI highlights discrepancies, AI shows me the evidence. I decide. No. The 17 buildings RAB work is not done. I need to go through one by one with many lists and comments from my new assistant. 😭😭

So what is it actually? Can replace my job or not? It is many things and yet not everything. (Does that even make sense LOL). Not a Quantity Surveyor. Not an engineer. Not the person signing anything. The closest description is probably a very enthusiastic junior who doesn’t get tired of measuring things, shows his calculation, occasionally talks cock and waits for me to tell him whether he is right. Does not get tired.

That is genuinely useful. It does the repetitive work, compares files, recalculates quantities and brings strange things back to me. The boring 80%. I deal with the irritating 20%.

And no, it isn’t always fast either.

One of my print/report runs took around one hour and forty minutes. I was busy working on other things, then when I came back, eh, still working? At one point I actually asked, “Done?” Then later, I quipped “That is quite long.” HAHAHAHA!

Nothing. No hurt feelings. No black face from the employee because the boss complained. It just continued doing its bloody work. Beautiful.

A little over one week ago I was asking it to rate my blog. Then spreadsheets. Reports. Emails. FCPO charts. And eventually: here are the drawings and RAB for seventeen buildings. Check the quantities.

WTF.

I think the order matters. I gave it stupid jobs first, checked the answers, found mistakes, corrected them, and slowly increased the consequences of getting things wrong. I still check everything. The difference now is I know much better where it is useful, where it is stupid, and where I still need to keep my own hands on the steering wheel.

No magic. Just another tool. A surprisingly useful one. Can use lah!

That sentence feels weird to write after spending so much time digging through old backups, broken images, Wayback captures and all the other crap that came with bringing this place back. For the past two weeks or so, I have been tweaking and polishing this site. Adding a few buttons here and there, cleaning up the image links, touching up the Archives.

Anyway, I already wrote most of that story in “I killed my blog. Then 10 years later, I brought it back.” No point repeating it again. But do read it if you have free time since you are already here.

So the more interesting question now is: what the hell do I do with this place?

I don’t want bongkersz.com to become a museum where I spend the next few years polishing 2008 forever.

The old posts are useful because they show where I was, what I thought, what I cared about and how much rubbish I was capable of writing before breakfast.

But they should be the foundation, not the ending.

I still have things to write about. And writing is therapeutic.

I think the degradation of our minds, or the way we express ourselves nowadays, has a lot to do with us consuming too much bite-sized, shortened, quick-fix stuff. Everything is made for social media shares and sanitised for our less-than-one-minute attention spans.

Anyway, I digress.

Yes, I still want to write whenever I can. On any topic I feel like writing about.

Sarawak. Malaysia. Indonesia. Politics. Work. Engineering. Plantations. Technology. Getting older. The internet. And probably plenty of completely meaningless shit in between. The longer version will be here. For bite sized shit you can always look me up on Twitter. Oh it is X for you young flers ah?

Some old posts also deserve revisiting. Not rewriting. Just looking at them again with another 15 or 20 years behind me.

Some opinions aged well.

Some definitely did not.

That could be fun.

So I guess this is the point where the restoration project stops being the main story.

The blog is back.

Now I actually have to use it lah!

It’s that time of the year again, when the noonday sun dims, mountains and buildings disappear behind a curtain of grey, and that familiar smell of smoke follows you around wherever you go.

The haze is back!

For those of us living in this part of Southeast Asia, especially in Borneo, this has become an almost seasonal affair. During prolonged dry periods, fires appear across Sumatra and Kalimantan and, depending on where the wind decides to blow, the smoke eventually finds its way across borders.

We have been dealing with this for decades. The 1997 haze remains probably the most memorable, when the Air Pollutant Index (API) in Kuching went beyond an astounding 800.  I was in Form 3 back then taking my PMR. Sarawak declared a 10-day state of emergency on September 19, 1997 because the API reading was over 500. I think in Miri it was close to over 900, visibility was really poor. I was staying at the hostel back then and I remember walking to the dining hall and could not see like 5m-10m distance ahead.

Then we had few more notable periods of serious haze like in 2013, 2015 and 2019 when I wrote the article because it got so bad as well I remember. 2015 and 2019 was bad, I think it was El Niño season as well in 2015.

API reading in Palangkaraya in 2019

Anyway, since then we have had several serious episodes, schools closed, flights disrupted, visibility reduced and millions of people breathing air that they really should not be breathing and of course this year with the what El Niño “Godzilla”, by far this year is among the worst, on par or even worse than 1997 episode. In Pontianak, last Sunday and Monday I think the reading was 1,500 – 1,900 from the AirVisual app.

Pontianak API on 13 September 2026

And every time the haze comes back, so does the same explanation.

It must be the oil palm plantations.

Those big plantation companies are burning thousands of hectares to clear the land again.

Why doesn’t the Indonesian government do something about them?

I work in the plantation industry, so perhaps I look at this differently from someone looking at a hotspot map from outside. I have seen what actually happens inside plantations during the dry season, how fires are dealt with on the ground, how complicated the ownership of land within and around plantation areas can be, and just how much manpower and equipment can be involved when somebody reports smoke somewhere.

That does not mean plantation companies are innocent. Some have undoubtedly been involved in illegal burning and where that is proven, they should be dealt with accordingly.

But the idea that the transboundary haze can simply be explained as “big oil palm companies burning forests” has always bothered me because the reality on the ground is far more complicated than that.

First, finding a hotspot is not the same as finding who started the fire

Satellite technology today is remarkably good. We can detect hotspots across Sumatra and Kalimantan almost in real time, plot them on a map and overlay them against plantation boundaries.

This is extremely useful.

The problem starts when we make the next jump.

Hotspot inside plantation concession = plantation company started the fire.

That is not necessarily true.

Anyone who has actually worked around large plantation areas in Indonesia will know that the neat boundaries we see on a map do not necessarily describe what exists on the ground.

Inside and around plantation landscapes you can have villages, community land, independent farmers, conservation areas and land with competing or unresolved claims. You can have people cultivating land independently even though, when you look at a concession map from a few hundred kilometres away, everything appears to sit inside one giant polygon belonging to Company A.

Then there is the obvious fact that fire does not understand cadastral boundaries. A fire that starts on somebody’s farm does not stop at the boundary marker, check the map and decide that the next piece of land belongs to somebody else.

So satellite hotspots are very good at telling us where something is burning. They are not necessarily capable of telling us who lit it.

That second question requires investigation on the ground.

There is, however, another side to this argument which plantation companies themselves cannot conveniently ignore. Even if somebody else started the fire, that does not necessarily end the company’s responsibility.

Who started the fire and who was responsible for detecting, preventing and controlling the fire are two different questions. This distinction is important, and under Indonesia’s latest regulations it has become even more important.

Why would a plantation burn its own trees anyway?

Slash-and-burn agriculture has existed for centuries for one very obvious reason: it is cheap. Cut the vegetation, let it dry and burn it.

Compare that with bringing in excavators, bulldozers, tractors, trucks and workers to mechanically clear the same piece of land and you can understand why a farmer with very little capital might choose fire. Commercial plantations historically used burning as well. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But the economics and practicalities of managing a modern commercial oil palm plantation are quite different.

Oil palm is a long-term crop. You plant it, wait roughly three years before meaningful commercial production begins and then manage the same palms for around two decades before replanting becomes necessary. You are not clearing and replanting the entire estate every few years.

When replanting does come, simply burning everything is not particularly useful.

You still have to establish planting rows and planting points. Roads need to remain accessible. Drains need to function. Old palm biomass needs to be dealt with. Soil and water conditions need to be managed. All of this is much easier to control, measure and supervise mechanically. More importantly, fire is unpredictable. And evidently it is HARD to control or else we would not have the problem we face today.

An uncontrolled fire does not politely burn the old palms you want removed and then extinguish itself when it reaches the next block. It can jump roads and drains, damage palms you intended to keep and, during very dry weather, get completely out of control. From a plantation manager’s point of view, this is not merely an environmental problem. It can become an operational and financial disaster.

And today there is another very important consideration: plantation land opening and cultivation without burning is no longer merely a matter of good agricultural practice. It is regulated.

The HGU problem

Another thing that is frequently misunderstood outside Indonesia is Hak Guna Usaha, or HGU.

HGU is a legal right to cultivate land under Indonesia’s agrarian framework, originating from Law No. 5 of 1960 concerning Basic Agrarian Principles (UUPA). On paper, an HGU or plantation licence can cover an enormous area. On the ground, things are rarely so tidy.

There may be villages, community land, independent farmers, conservation areas and unresolved land claims within and around the wider plantation landscape. Plantation companies normally try to consolidate economically viable areas through land acquisition or cooperation arrangements such as plasma schemes (sort of like co-operative, farmer-owned by local organisation that partners with a large plantation company to manage a portion of community agricultural land, most commonly in the Indonesian palm oil sector), but not everybody wants to participate.

Some farmers prefer to manage their own land. Some distrust plantation companies. Some claims existed long before the plantation arrived. Others remain disputed for years.

It can be messy.

This is why looking at a hotspot and saying “that is inside Company X’s area, therefore Company X started the fire” is not enough to establish what actually happened. But again, this does not mean Company X can wash its hands of the matter. And this is where things have changed considerably since I first wrote about this issue.

Indonesia has tightened the rules considerably

Indonesia introduced Minister of Agriculture Regulation No. 06 of 2025 (Permentan No. 06 Tahun 2025), amending the earlier 2018 regulation governing plantation land opening and cultivation without burning. If you go through the regulation, some of the requirements are surprisingly specific.

This is not merely a document telling plantation companies that they should have some pumps lying around somewhere in case something catches fire. Plantation companies are required to establish a proper fire-control organisation with manpower, equipment, detection systems and operational procedures. The number of dedicated core firefighters is tied directly to plantation size.

For an operation of 1,001 to 5,000 hectares, there must be two core teams totalling 30 personnel. From 5,001 to 10,000 hectares, it becomes three teams totalling 45 personnel. A plantation between 10,001 and 20,000 hectares must maintain four core teams with 60 personnel.

Yes. It is a law and mandated for the plantation companies to set it in such a way. A 15,000-hectare plantation is expected to have 60 core firefighting personnel. Firefighting is no longer something the manager can delegate to five security guards and a water tanker when somebody sees smoke.

The requirements go further.

For oil palm, there must be one fire observation tower for every 250 to 600 hectares, subject to adjustments for the topography of the estate. The observation floor has to be at least three metres above the highest crop canopy. Usually they just put up a 15m and above observation tower, made from steel structure  at a minimum 1 unit every 600 hectares. The local authorities would come and inspect and count how many observation towers already been built against the requirement. Modern technology is specifically recognised as well. Monitoring can involve CCTV, real-time remote sensing and hotspot information, while drones or binoculars form part of the monitoring equipment.

Then you have the actual firefighting equipment.

Protective clothing, helmets, masks, gloves and firefighting boots. Axes, fire beaters, rakes, shovels, backpack pumps and chainsaws. High-pressure pumps, portable pumps, hoses, nozzles and water tanks. GPS units, handheld radios and vehicles or boats depending on the terrain.

There is even specific equipment for injecting water into burning peat — suntikan gambut — because anyone who has dealt with peat fires knows that putting out the flames you can see is sometimes the easy part.

The fire underneath your feet is another matter altogether.

Water availability is regulated too. Plantation companies are required to provide one or more water-storage facilities for every 500 hectares, with a combined minimum capacity of 800 cubic metres. Estates have to allocate machinery to dig up ponds with storage capacity more than 800 cubic metres, every 500 hectares. Well during the long period of extreme dry season like the current El Niño “Godzilla”, most of the ponds dried up anyway.

These are measurable requirements. We can therefore judge a plantation not merely by whether it claims somebody else started the fire, but by whether it was actually prepared to deal with one.

Was the fire detected quickly?

Were the towers operational?

Were the firefighting teams properly staffed?

Were the pumps working?

Was sufficient water available?

How quickly did the team reach the site?

If its own resources could not control the fire, did it call for assistance?

This is a much more useful way of determining corporate responsibility.

Then we have the smallholders

Now imagine a farmer with two hectares of land.

He wants to plant paddy, vegetables, fruit trees or perhaps oil palm. He has a parang, some basic tools and his own labour.

He does not have an excavator.

Mechanical clearing costs money. Fire costs almost nothing.

The economics are obvious.

One farmer burning one hectare is not going to cover half of Southeast Asia in smoke. But if many people are preparing land during the same dry period, many individually small fires become a much larger problem. And there is a specific regulation allowing local farmers to clear their land by burning – 2 hectares per household. Look it up, Google it yourself which province allows that.

Then add peat into the equation.

And this is where things can go very wrong, very quickly.

Peat changes everything

Healthy peat is naturally wet. In that condition it is relatively difficult to burn.

Drain it, lower the water table and then subject it to a prolonged dry period, and you have something completely different. You have fuel. A vegetation fire at the surface can ignite the dry peat underneath. The visible flames may eventually disappear and everyone thinks the fire is under control. Except that the ground is still burning. And during this extreme dry season, without proper water management in the peat area, the area will be dried out and prone to fire. Just a passerby, motorist or hunter in the jungle discarding or flicking a cigarette butt, still hot or not fully extinguished would spark a fire.

Peat can smoulder below the surface for days or longer, moving through the organic material and appearing somewhere else. Fighting it is extremely difficult because you are no longer merely trying to extinguish burning vegetation. You are effectively trying to extinguish burning soil. This is also where assigning responsibility becomes uncomfortable.

Imagine that a farmer starts a fire outside a plantation and the fire eventually reaches drained peat within a developed area.

Who caused the resulting haze? The farmer who struck the match? The company whose drainage system contributed to drying the peat? The authority that approved the development? The people responsible for enforcing the regulations? The landholder who failed to respond quickly enough?

Potentially, several of them contributed to the outcome in different ways. Which is why I think we spend too much time asking who started the fire, when another equally important question is:

Why was the landscape capable of burning like this in the first place?

“We didn’t start it” is not enough either

This is one aspect of the 2025 regulation that is particularly important. If a fire occurs within the plantation area covered by the company’s business licence, the plantation company is required to undertake firefighting. If the company cannot control it with its own resources, it has to coordinate with government brigades, community fire groups, Manggala Agni, local fire departments or firefighting units belonging to other plantation companies.

In other words, saying “not our fire” is not sufficient.

You may not have lit it, but if it is burning inside your operational area you are still expected to do something about it.

That is fair.

Large companies have resources. They have people, equipment, vehicles, roads, pumps, management structures and increasingly sophisticated monitoring systems. If a company deliberately burns land illegally, prosecute it. If it is required to maintain 60 firefighters and does not, deal with it. If its fire towers exist only in inspection reports but not in the field, deal with it. If the pumps do not work, the water ponds are dry and nobody responds to a hotspot until hundreds of hectares are burning, then “somebody else started it” is not much of a defence.

Corporate responsibility should be enforced properly. In Malaysia, we even tried to come up with a transboundary haze law in 2019. The new Pakatan Harapan government at that time considered introducing a Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (similar to Singapore’s 2014 law) to penalise Malaysian companies contributing to smoke-causing fires abroad, or specifically in Indonesia. However idiots from the tebuk-atap government took over and the Enviromnent Minister at that time, that PAS fler Tuan Ibrahim put it on hold cancelled it. You can read more about the haze act chronology here.

And actually, the more difficult problem is what to do with everybody else.

You cannot give every farmer an excavator

This is where environmental policy runs into economic reality. Tell a plantation company managing 15,000 hectares that it cannot use fire and must purchase equipment, build water ponds, maintain observation towers and employ firefighting teams. Fine. It has the financial and organisational capacity to do that.

Now tell a farmer working two hectares that he cannot burn the vegetation on his land. His immediate question will probably be: Okay, so who is paying for the excavator? But this does not mean smallholders should be allowed to burn indiscriminately. Smoke does not become less harmful because the person who produced it is poor.

But simply banning something without providing an economically viable alternative does not make the underlying incentive disappear. Interestingly, Indonesia’s new regulatory framework appears to recognise this problem as well. The regulation provides for Kelompok Tani Peduli Api (KTPA), or Farmer Fire Awareness Groups, consisting of a trained farmer as leader together with 15 to 30 trained farmers. These groups are supposed to help educate farmers about land preparation without burning, monitor hotspots, conduct early firefighting and coordinate with government and other firefighting organisations.

In theory, you begin to get several layers of defence: plantation firefighting teams, community KTPA groups, government brigades, Manggala Agni and other emergency services.

Whether all of this works equally well everywhere on the ground is another question altogether, like usual lah.

A regulation is only as useful as its implementation.

And then there is politics

This is probably the most difficult part of the problem.

Smallholders are not corporations. Many have limited financial resources. Some communities have used controlled burning as part of their agricultural practices for generations. Land ownership itself may be disputed. Alternatives can be expensive.

And, of course, these communities vote.They protest. If you are stopping their way of life, their culture of doing things you need to provide the alternatives and solutions. Actually I think they need more incentives – the carrot, to not to burn rather than giving them the stick.

Governments cannot ignore illegal burning simply because the people doing it are poor. At the same time, marching into rural communities every dry season and treating a subsistence farmer in exactly the same way as a company illegally clearing hundreds of hectares is hardly a sensible solution either.

There has to be something in between.

Shared machinery. Especially during the dry season when nearby farmers or communities are clearing lands to plant their crops, the large companies – plantations, mining, pulp, instead of asking them to spend money and allocate resources for the fire fighting and monitoring which usually already “after the effect”, maybe should look into offering their resources and machinery during this period. The government and authorities can incentivise them to do so, for sure. Community land-clearing programmes. Financial assistance. Training. Properly equipped village firefighting teams. Better land records. Peat restoration. Practical alternatives that make not burning economically possible and attractive to all.

Otherwise we will continue dealing with the symptom while leaving the incentive untouched.

So who is responsible for the haze?

I think this is where the whole argument normally goes wrong.

We want one answer.

The plantation companies did it.

The smallholders did it.

Indonesia did it.

El Niño did it.

Pick your villain.

The reality is considerably less satisfying. There are really several questions that need to be answered separately.

Who started the fire?

Who benefited from the burning?

Why was the land so combustible?

Why did the fire spread?

And who was responsible for controlling it once it did?

The answers may not point to the same person.

A farmer can start a fire. A commercial interest can start a fire. A badly managed drainage system can make peat dangerously dry. Drought can magnify everything. Poor enforcement can allow illegal practices to continue. Inadequate firefighting can allow a manageable fire to become an uncontrollable one.

Then the wind blows. Suddenly something that started on a few hectares of land in Kalimantan or Sumatra becomes everybody’s problem. That, I think, is the more useful way of understanding transboundary haze. It is not simply an oil palm problem. Neither is it simply a smallholder problem. It is a land management, peatland, agricultural economics, enforcement and governance problem, all interacting with each other during the worst possible time of the year.

Large plantation companies are actually the easier part of this equation. We know who they are. We know where they operate. Indonesia now has measurable requirements for the number of firefighters, observation towers, equipment and water they are supposed to maintain.

Enforce those requirements properly. The much harder task is building the same level of fire resilience across thousands of independent farmers and communities who do not have corporate resources behind them. And that cannot be solved by fines and jail sentences alone.

So the next time the mountains disappear and that familiar smell of smoke starts creeping into the house, by all means ask:

Who started the fire?

We should find out.

But perhaps after decades of going through the same thing, we should also be asking a bigger question.

Why do we still have landscapes where one fire can become an international environmental disaster?

Because whoever held the match is only the beginning of the story. Everything that allowed that small flame to become thousands of hectares of fire and millions of people breathing the smoke is the real problem. And until we fix that, we will probably continue doing what we have been doing for decades.

Wait for the rain, lah!