Meme - "Hey Siri, why don't my relationships work out?"
"This is Alexa."
Facebook - "the setting off of flares from ships at the stroke of midnight is supposedly a maritime tradition observed in many parts of the world including the Eastern Anchorage off East Coast Park for as long as I can remember. Not anymore. I arrived at my vantage point on 31st December 2022 two nights ago, set up my cameras, counted down to midnight and... nothing happened. I was completely shocked and different trains of thought started to go thru my head - did the hundreds of ships moored off the ECP decided to follow the Indonesian timezone this year? Did they all exchange for new flares just before 31 December? You see, one of the reasons the mariners used to give for flare firing on New Year's Day was so that flares with a typical three year shelf life could be expended. Also the tooting of horns and red pyrotechnics lighting the sky was something to behold. After ten minutes, there was one flare. Then a second. Then that was it. Did all the mariners receive a memo I obviously would not have gotten? For years, I could depend on the ships to do this one thing at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day but my faith was suddenly shaken. Immediately after packing up, I did some quick research and realised that the firing of flares off the coast of Singapore was now... you guessed it... illegal... So, flares from ships having been fired during a ten minute window at the first few moments of every new year for the last forty years have not caused any issues to air navigation for an Aerodrome that has essentially the same incoming flight path for same amount of time but in 2021, it was decided that they are now dangerous and will be declared illegal? And so, a longtime tradition witnessed by many but yet still unknown to some is killed. And we will never be able to make a photograph like this again in Singapore. Happy New Year Singapore, please treasure what you have and make as many photos as you can, because you never know when it will be taken from you."
Bad taste? McDonald’s vows to remove McCrispy ad next to crematorium sign - "The McCrispy advertisement was placed at a bus stop in Cornwall, England, that is next to a road sign pointing motorists toward the Penmount crematorium... Some online users found the ad’s placement to be darkly comical. One wrote on Facebook saying: “My parents are in this crematorium. My old man had a brilliant sense of humour, so I’m sure he would have chuckled at this!” Someone else wrote, “Well it got them plenty of more notice didn’t it! Bad placement without thinking humm I don’t think so! I only recently lost 2 loved ones & to be honest if I’d seen that sign near the crematorium I would have smiled. I don’t find it offensive at all.” Meanwhile, another user said: “Thank God [it] wasn’t advertising Burger King and being ‘flame grilled.’... In 2017, McDonald’s apologized after an ad showed a boy asking his mother about his dead father. As the mother in the ad described to the child what his father was like, the boy appeared visibly sad over the apparent lack of similarities between him and his dad. However, the day is saved when the mother and son stopped at a McDonald’s restaurant where he orders a Filet-O-Fish sandwich and she says: “That was your dad’s favourite, too.” Psychotherapists and parents condemned the ad, arguing that it “exploited child bereavement”."
This McDonald's sign outside Yass, Australia. : CrappyDesign - "MYASS. Open 6 AM"
Google is officially a 'dog company' - "Google has enshrined its status as a "dog company" in its code of conduct on its investor relations web site"
Meme - "SGAG. Your turn @mgagmy
How to find good government in Malaysia *go to Singapore*
How to find smart Malaysians in Malaysia *go to Singapore*
How to be a badminton world champion in Malaysia *go to Singapore*
How to triple your income in Malaysia *go to Singapore*
This was in response to (and in the same format as) MGAG posting the same "joke" that they always post, and which got old years ago, but which Malaysians still get very excited about because they know their country sucks, about how Singaporean food is trash
Meme - "RADKID in... NO PAIN, No GAIN
I WANT TO GET FIT, BUT THIS GYM IS TOO EXPENSIVE
I CAN'T AFFORD THIS HEALTHY FOOD EITHER
TIME FOR A RADICAL SOLUTION! *robs bank*
*bulking up in prison*"
Report: Google and Facebook Made a 'Secret Deal' to Dominate Online Advertising
SMRT Feedback page disappears as S'porean Muslim woman says she won't retract police report - "Social media marketing Facebook page SMRT Feedback by The Vigilanteh has disappeared and then re-emerged with a different vanity URL. This was after the page publicly apologised for a May 21 Facebook post that questioned the loyalties of Singaporean Muslims in times of conflict. The apology was made after a Singaporean Muslim woman, Syazana Yahya, filed a police report against the post, calling its content "seditious"... It later changed its URL to "ahmadandlupcheong"... "I am happy an apology and clarification was put up by SMRT Feedback by the Vigilanteh. I think it’s a smart move and if I was their lawyer, I would have advised them to delete the post and put up a sincere apology as well." "However, historically, apologies have never absolved individuals of liability and this case should not be an exception""
Police not taking action over post about Singaporean Muslims on 'SMRT Feedback by The Vigilanteh' Facebook page - "a post was put up on the Facebook page of SMRT Feedback by The Vigilanteh, stating that it is understandable that former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew did not allow Muslims to serve in sensitive military positions, except for a few... The post stated that Muslims always prioritise their religion over everything else. Given Singapore’s relationship with Israel in matters of defence, the Facebook page claimed that Muslims in sensitive military positions dealing with military technology from Israel would have a hard time fulfilling their responsibilities. The post read: “Would his responsibilities as a Singaporean be overridden by his duties as a Muslim?” Israel has had a longstanding conflict with Palestinians, who are predominantly Muslim. Ms Syazana said in her Facebook that she filed a police report against the post on May 22. She said that Muslims’ primary obligations are towards their family and country, and such a post would cause non-Muslims in Singapore to believe that Muslims are predisposed to be traitors."
From 2021
This is why Singapore will never progress on matters of race and religion, since these matters can never be discussed
Given that the SMRT Feedback team seem to be majority Malay, this is especially ironic
What does authorities' decision to close the case on SMRT Feedback by The Vigilanteh's seditious post signal to the public? - "In what appears to be a departure from the common outcome in cases concerning racial or religious sensitivities, the authorities have decided to take no further action against Facebook page SMRT Feedback by The Vigilanteh over a now-deleted Facebook post in May, almost two months since police reports were made against it... Ms Syazana told TOC that she was “quite surprised by the outcome”, as she had anticipated “at the very least, a stern warning to be issued given how similar (and less serious) cases were treated in the past. “I had also expected the people responsible for the post to be held accountable. Yet, they remain anonymous and continue to live their lives as if they had not enraged the feelings of an entire community. “The overall response by the authorities was also surprisingly very muted, even though this was an incident which clearly angered the community. I am quite puzzled by this. Overall, it just feels like an incident swept under the rug with no steps taken to address the wrongdoing.” What AGC and the police have done in SMRT Feedback by the Vigilanteh’s case here appears to be awfully strange, especially given their decisions in past cases involving or relating to sedition... one has to wonder: Why are the AGC and police making what appears to be efforts to obscure the identity of SMRT Feedback by the Vigilanteh’s administrator(s)? Many have hypothesised that the page is run by the PAP-sponsored internet brigade, or even agents provocateurs allegedly linked to ministries. Could the authorities’ recent action indicate that there is some truth to such speculation? What is clear now, however, is that the decision to not even issue a warning or name the person who made the post—in contrast to the various other cases the authorities had took action on—has created distrust in the authorities on the public’s end."
A tale of two provinces - "The idea of an Alberta election turning on the future of the Calgary ring road, for instance, is beyond funny—it’s unthinkable. But the listless campaign seemed right for a province that has lost its mojo. The sort of place where the government can fence off cherry blossom trees during Covid and the people don’t just laugh and tear them down. A place where the pedal pubs aren’t allowed to serve beer, which may or may not be related to the fact that there is still a Prohibition-era outfit called “The Beer Store.” Ontario used to bill itself as “a place to stand, a place to grow,” but it feels like it’s been all downhill since the province’s last burst of creative energy in 1976, when it built a really tall tower. Today the province appears to think of growth in terms of ever-expanding sprawl across farmland to keep a mortgage-based economy afloat. It’s certainly no place to grow a family, not in a million-dollar tear-down in the outer suburbs with a 60-minute commute to a grey forest of steel and glass office towers. Viewed from the West, it is not surprising that almost half of the people who left Canada in the first quarter of the year left Ontario. Alberta could not be more different. It is Canada’s youngest province, demographically speaking, and its best-educated—and its politics reflect that. The electorate bristles with the uncompromising vigour of youth and the entrepreneurial impatience of the newcomers who are drawn to it... Alberta isn’t just younger than Ontario, it feels newer and fresher. It feels, dare I say, hopeful... The economy is also booming, thanks to global commodity prices but also thanks to the economic policies Kenney introduced before Covid. And it is, once again, the most attractive province for other Canadians, who are voting with their feet. Alberta overspills with confidence, which is often misinterpreted by self-deprecating (read: self-doubting) central Canadians as arrogance or entitlement. On a recent podcast (it was one of these, I don’t recall which), journalist Matt Gurney suggested that Alberta’s identity is “anti-Laurentian.” This is funny, because Gurney lives in Toronto, a city that has no identity. Toronto prides itself on being a cultural mosaic, you see, which is a worthy ideal—except the point of a mosaic is that when you step back all the individual tesserae meld into a harmonious picture. It has been so long since anyone thought about a united and unifying culture in Ontario that when you step back and look at the bigger picture, the impression is of slapdash patchwork. Sorry, a world-class slapdash patchwork... Where there is energy in a province, there is interest in its politics. Compared to Ontario, Alberta’s politics look like fireworks on acid. On the Left, the Alberta NDP under Rachel Notley is the most radical mainstream party in the country—far more so than the BC NDP under John Horgan or a traditional prairie NDP party. On the other side, the UCP has aggressively pursued conservative policies. It has expanded education options in the only province that already has real school choice, cut corporate taxes and red tape, pushed private health care innovation, and switched its drug addiction policy from addiction maintenance and a culture of death to funding recovery options and a culture of dignity and hope."
Meme - Andrew Looby: "Preparations underway today for burial of IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad *coffin assembly*"
Why Is America So Bad at Keeping People Alive? - The Atlantic - "Before the 1990s, average life expectancy in the U.S. was not much different than it was in Germany, the United Kingdom, or France. But since the 1990s, American life spans started falling significantly behind those in similarly wealthy European countries... “Europe has better life outcomes than the United States across the board, for white and Black people, in high-poverty areas and low-poverty areas”... Finding a straightforward explanation is hard, because there are so many differences between life in the U.S. and Europe. Americans are more likely to kill one another with guns, in large part because Americans have more guns than residents of other countries do. Americans die more from car accidents, not because our fatality rate per mile driven is unusually high but because we simply drive so much more than people in other countries. Americans also have higher rates of death from infectious disease and pregnancy complications. But what has that got to do with guns, or commuting?... Europe’s mortality rates are shockingly similar between rich and poor communities. Residents of the poorest parts of France live about as long as people in the rich areas around Paris do... But in the U.S., which has the highest poverty and inequality of just about any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where you live is much more likely to determine when you’ll die... even rich Europeans are outliving rich Americans. “There is an American view that egalitarian societies have more equality, but it’s all one big mediocre middle, whereas the best outcomes in the U.S. are the best outcomes in the world,” Schwandt said. But this just doesn’t seem to be the case for longevity... Europeans in extremely impoverished areas seem to live longer than Black or white Americans in the richest 10 percent of counties... In the three decades before COVID-19, average life spans for Black Americans surged, in rich and poor areas and across all ages. As a result, the Black-white life-expectancy gap decreased by almost half, from seven years to 3.6 years. “This is a really important story that we ought to move to the forefront of public debate,” Schwandt said. “What happened here? And how do we continue this improvement and learn from it?”"
The cope will be that it's due to the poor people in the US, even though this is already contradicted by the data
Facebook banned me for life because I created the tool Unfollow Everything. - "If someone built a tool that made Facebook less addictive—a tool that allowed users to benefit from Facebook’s positive features while limiting their exposure to its negative ones—how would Facebook respond? I know the answer, because I built the tool, and Facebook squashed it. This summer, Facebook sent me a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action. It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services. The tool I created, a browser extension called Unfollow Everything, allowed users to delete their News Feed by unfollowing their friends, groups, and pages. The News Feed, as users of Facebook know, is that never-ending page that greets you when you log in. It’s the central hub of Facebook. It’s also a major source of revenue... you don’t actually need to have a News Feed. If you unfollow everything—all of your friends, groups, and pages—your News Feed ends up empty. This isn’t the same as unfriending. If you unfollow your friends and groups, you’re still connected to them, and you can look up their profiles if you want. But by unfollowing everything, you eliminate your News Feed. This leaves you free to use Facebook without the feed, or to more actively curate it by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts you really want to see. I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable... Unfollow Everything started taking off. People loved it. Thousands of people got rid of their News Feed using it. Reviews included comments like “I am officially not addicted to Facebook thanks to you!” I received emails from people telling me that using the tool had changed their lives. A few months after I published Unfollow Everything, academics at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, expressed interest in using it to study the News Feed’s impact on the amount of time spent on Facebook and the happiness of the platform’s users... Pointing to a provision in its terms of service that purports to bind even former users of Facebook, Facebook also demanded that I never again create a tool that interacts with Facebook or its many other services in any way... I am far from the only one to face this kind of scenario. Facebook is increasingly using its terms of service to crush not only research, but also tools that give users more control over their data and platform experience. Just last summer, Facebook went after Friendly, a web browser that allows users to switch between their social media accounts, more easily download or repost photos and videos, and filter their feeds by keyword. Facebook’s behavior isn’t just anti-competitive; it’s anti-consumer. We are being locked into platforms by virtue of their undeniable usefulness, and then prevented from making legitimate choices over how we use them—not just through the squashing of tools like Unfollow Everything, but through the highly manipulative designs and features platforms adopt in the first place. The loser here is the user, and the cost is counted in billions of wasted hours spent on Facebook. If lawmakers and regulators are serious about empowering users to stand up to big tech, they need to address the ways in which platforms stymie user choice, including through terms of service. Platforms shouldn’t be able to wield the threat of lawsuits and account suspensions against researchers and developers who create tools that merely empower users"
Irish man killed by chicken that also attacked granddaughter - "An Irish man was found dead lying in a pool of blood after he was mauled by a vicious chicken, according to reports. Jasper Kraus, of Killahornia, was killed by a brutal Brahma chicken in April 28, 2022, according to a recent inquest in Ballaghaderreen... A trail led to the chicken house, where she saw one of the birds with blood on its claws and suspected it was the same one that had been sent to live on the farm after it had earlier attacked Kraus granddaughter. Corey O’Keeffe, a tenant at the home, said he heard Kraus screaming during the attack and saw blood spurting from the man’s leg, as well as a large wound on his calf... he also appeared to have a heart attack at the time of the vicious chicken mauling"
'Singaporean signs are very smart': American linguists so tickled by toilet etiquette posters, they wrote a research paper on it - "When American linguists Keri Matwick and Kelsi Matwick came to Singapore in 2018, one thing that caught their eye was toilet etiquette posters featuring the use of comics. Dr Keri Matwick, a lecturer at the Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) School of Humanities, says she and her twin sister found these posters "humorous but complex" as they were not common in other countries... Their research led to a paper titled "Comics and humour as a mode of government communication on public hygiene posters in Singapore", which was published in the Discourse, Context & Media journal"
PSLE in the sky: Singaporeans take Pri 6 math test on plane to kill time
Squeegee men, scourge of the '90s, are back in NYC - "Overly aggressive window washers were a mainstay of city intersections in the 1980s and 1990s, squirting car windows at stoplights without permission — and at times terrorizing motorists by threatening to break windows or windshield wipers if they didn’t receive a tip. Giuliani used the windshield cleaners as a symbol of the general disregard for law and order when he took office in 1994 — and made them a focus of his bid to improve the quality of life in the city. Then-NYPD Commissioner William Bratton deployed New York’s Finest to get the pesky beggars back on the sidewalk... One of the window washers told The Post the part-time gig actually brings in more than the minimum-wage job he once had. “I make enough. More than minimum wage,” said the man, who declined to give his name. “That’s a fact. I’m a vet, so I get money every month. I had a construction job.” His partner in grime, who also declined to give his name, said they are generally left alone by cops — and when they are shooed along, as they were by Port Authority police Sunday, they just wait and come back when the gumshoes are gone... A police source blamed 2017 criminal justice reforms for emboldening the rogue rag men. “We don’t even arrest people for pissing in the street anymore, why would we arrest a squeegee guy?” a police source griped. “They know they won’t get arrested, so why wouldn’t they come back?”"
Meme - "Final Destination 2 came out in January 2003. It is now 2019, I am 30 years old and EVERV SINGLE TIME i see a logging truck or any truck carrying anything long and round i have a mini panic attack and change lanes. ITS BEEN 16 YEARS, FUCK YOU FINAL DESTINATION"
IsItBullshit: burying a dead body vertically with a dead animal on too : IsItBullshit - "Seems everybody on Reddit thinks they could totally be a super cool murderer if they wanted to, so of course everyone feels the need to share their totally unique advice about burying a dead human vertically and placing an animal on top for false-positives for police dogs. Is it really that simple?" "Bullshit. Too difficult. Once I helped dig a grave. It was in an awkward spot in the graveyard and had to be done by hand, and it had to be six feet deep, and it had to be done that day. We were strong landscapers but had never done this before, getting only some cursory tips and rules from the curator. It completely exhausted three or four of us including one of the biggest and strongest dudes I've ever worked with. He got the worst of it because after a certain point only he was tall enough to properly toss the dirt up to the loader bucket. We had to dig stairs on the way down, then dig out the stairs and lift the dirt out with hand buckets. Then the last guy in the hole needed help getting out. We needed or tried shovels, spades, pry bars, post-hole diggers, buckets, rope, tarps, and a front-end loader stretching over the wall. Someone unaccustomed to digging would likely win huge blisters even with work gloves. I know I couldn't do it myself, given all day. The important point is that the hole was coffin length and still only one person could work in it. You just can't easily dig a narrow hole that's six feet deep. Maybe if you dig a fox hole and buried the body in a fetal position. Maybe if you had a giant auger to drill a hole. Another point: we were digging among other, much older graves, close enough that the edge of one side of our hole was much easier to dig, I guess because it had already been dug out 50 years before, and you could see it in the stratification of our hole. The other coffin must have been only a foot or so away. The easy digging was still a tell that it was a grave, fifty years later. If I dug up a pet there's a chance that I might notice that it's still easy digging below. People who dig holes have a high appreciation for easy digging."
Commentary: Late-night eating may cause greater weight gain — new research points to why - "eating four hours later than normal actually changed many of the physiological and molecular mechanisms that favour weight gain. This work adds to other recently published work which has found that eating earlier in the day is more beneficial for both appetite and body weight control."
Meme - "Lady Obama trying to say she's oppressed
You've taken everything from me.
Giga Chad Candace roasting her on TV
No one even cares who you are anymore"
Meme - "So I need about 3 open minded friends down to chill Friday or Saturday. Just hit my DMs - NO WEIRDOS PLS *4 sided dildo*"
Meme - "LOW LEVEL WIZARDS AFTER ONE COMBAT
I WANNA TAKE A NAP. I WANNA TAKE A NAP. I TAKE A NAP RIGHT HERE. GOOD NIGHT"