coworking space licensing

Johor seems to have shut down Network School's business license for further investigation, as of 22 July 2026.

I built Asia's first 24-hour cafe with free workspace for digital nomads, in 2015, in Malaysia, before coworking spaces were trendy here. Even then, and till now, coworking spaces have never been tightly regulated. Nearly all city councils follow the convention of issuing a business license for "management offices" which has zero regard for the P&L model of subletting space, value-added services, sundry goods, and F&B.

This has been lazy governance by Malaysian regulators, so it's not the fault of space operators. And it effectively leaves regulators with a bouquet of non-compliance opportunities to hurl at any operator.

It'll be interesting to see how all this moves forward.

Why I still rarely vote in Malaysia

This note is shortly in advance of the 16th Malaysian general election. I'm 43 this year, and I've only bothered to vote once. Malaysia has not changed much in my lifetime ... its past 20 years have been poor, foolish, economic bumblings, for the most part. As usual, one is hard-pressed to find a citizen who isn't mainly concerned with food, family, friends, gods, cars, or travelling : travelling is more of a zeitgeist in these two decades, as prosperity has picked up somewhat : unfortunately education and STEM have not, so much.

I have written variously over the years ( here's as link to a blog post I made in 2013 ). Without saying much more ( I don't actually remember all the things I've written, and I haven't found time to review them in detail, though they are always public ) Generally, Malaysia does not present itself to me as an interesting machine, so I'm happy to let other people operate it, while accepting the consequences, and committing to keep up a steady volume of complaints.

 https://sextechandmergers.blogspot.com/2013/05/some-things-just-have-to-be-said.html

tests of the frail

In my anthropology, I find that the main ineloquence of (many but.not all) polite people, is that they are polite. So it becomes a categorical imperative for those of us who are rude, to lead the polite person to tests of their ambition. Will they be proven coherent, or stripped of facades?