Expats baulk at rising rents, as some think twice about staying in Singapore amid intensifying global talent war - "“Most of us are here on local contracts, paying our own rents, healthcare, schooling for kids, flights and so on,” he said. This is worsened by the fact that foreigners do not enjoy subsidies like Singapore residents, while at the same time, some expat families have become single-income as a recent legislation change disallowed dependent pass holders from working, he added."
Singapore tenant slapped with 75% rent increase but landlord said he is giving her a ‘discount’ for being a ‘good tenant’ (Video) - "Horror stories surrounding surging rental prices in Singapore are becoming the talk of the town this year and this tenant’s experience just proved them right. TikTok user Sal (@salshoult) on Tuesday posted her frustration with her landlord who increased her rent by 75% and told her that it was actually a discount since he would rent it on the open market at a 100% increased rate if she did not renew... In the comments, Sal explained that the landlord told her she was getting the discount for being a “good tenant”, noting that she had lived in the house for four years, never missed a single rent payment, kept the house in “good condition” and was a low maintenance tenant... According to reports, the surge in rental prices recently has forced some working in Singapore to move back home. Channel News Asia reported at least a 21% increase in all neighborhoods for 4-room flats throughout 2022. The Urban Renewal Authority also recorded a 29.7% increase in Singapore’s average monthly rent in the central region last December."
Medieval Divorce by Combat: Guaranteeing ‘til Death do us Part’ - "Divorce by combat appears to have been a form of trial by combat. Trial by combat was part of Germanic law that dealt with accusations between two parties where there were no witnesses or a confession. Whoever won the duel was deemed to be right. It was essentially a legally-sanctioned duel. These rules for a divorce by combat come from Hans Talhoffer’s Fechtbuch, which was written in 1467. The book serves as an instruction manual for how duels should be fought. The book deals with many different types of duels fought with various weapons. However, the section that caught Professor Hodges and the internet's eye was the section on duels between men and women. The man was placed in a waist-height 3-foot (1 meter) deep hole, with one hand tied behind his back while the woman was allowed to move freely. Both parties wore practical clothes, a one-piece bodysuit with stirrup legs... At the end of the day, it seems unlikely that divorce by combat was all that common. Trial by combat was not a frivolous duel used to settle a disagreement. It was a serious judicial matter with complicated rules and regulations. It is unlikely the church or the state would readily sanction many of these trials, for fear they would get out of hand."
A Store Selling Heroin, Meth, and Cocaine Just Opened in Canada - "A Vancouver man has opened the only known brick-and-mortar store in Canada and the U.S. that sells heroin, cocaine, meth, MDMA, and other drugs. Jerry Martin, 51, opened the Drugs Store Wednesday in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood that’s long been considered ground zero for Canada’s overdose epidemic. While British Columbia has very progressive drug laws, the mobile shop is operating completely illegally. The province recently began a three-year drug decriminalization pilot project for possession of small amounts of opioids, cocaine, meth, and MDMA, but selling remains prohibited. However, Martin told VICE News he opened the store because he wants to give people drugs that have been tested and are free from adulterants, including fentanyl. Although fentanyl, which is driving record overdoses in Canada and the U.S., is the primary street opioid that Vancouverites now use, Martin is instead selling heroin... Martin said all the drugs he’s selling have been tested at Get Your Drugs Tested, a Vancouver facility that uses a fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy machine to detect what’s in people’s drugs. His hope is to open franchises of The Drugs Store around the country, similar to what happened with grey market cannabis dispensaries."
Manipulating the mind? DID is a social construction - "Many people are aware of the famous and controversial case of Shirley Ardell Mason, better known under the alias “Sybil” from the feature film “Sybil” and the book by the same name. Mason supposedly had 16 different personalities as a result of severe child abuse. Her situation was ultimately determined to be fraudulent after evidence was found that her psychiatrist deliberately attempted to draw out multiple personalities. The mentally unstable Mason was looking for attention and an answer to her psychiatric questions and therefore found it easy to believe that she had “multiple personalities” living inside of her, controlling her life. Before her case received public attention with the movie and book, only 75 cases of dissociative identity disorder had been reported. Afterwards, upwards of 40,000 diagnoses have been made. This case, among several others, dramatically shaped public opinion of the disease and can arguably be called a primary cause of it... We as a society have created this disorder. This is not to say that DID doesn’t exist, or that the patients are faking their personalities, but rather that this disorder is primarily a result of societal ideas of self. I encourage those suffering to seek help, and I believe that we should all be empathetic to their plight. However, I fundamentally believe that we are responsible for causing identity crises to become a serious mental disorder because we’ve defined them as such."
Of course, this means that social contagion is absolutely not a thing and we must respect lived experience
Higher Rent, Fewer Babies? Housing Costs and Fertility Decline - "Faster-rising rents are associated with lower fertility for all age groups... But for home prices, the story is different. Rising home prices reduce birth rates for younger women, but for women in their upper 30s, there is actually a very slightly positive association between home prices and fertility! Higher prices reduce fertility for younger women but might increase fertility for older women. This, again, makes sense: younger women are less likely to own homes, so higher prices lock them out of getting a newer, bigger, better house. But for older women who are more likely to already own homes, higher housing prices can be a good thing, as it gives them more wealth... Bigger houses are associated with higher birth rates... More crowded housing is associated with lower birth rates... it’s possible that causation could flow either way! Maybe bad housing reduces fertility or maybe low fertility creates changes in the housing market! If nobody is having kids, maybe builders make tinier houses; if population growth is low, maybe fewer houses are built at all... There are several ways to try and untangle cause and effect. The first is to look at it from a high level: if lower fertility causes smaller, worse, or pricier housing, then low-fertility, bad-housing places should not have big gaps between desired fertility and actual fertility. That is to say, if people just didn’t want as big a family, and so builders responded with smaller homes, then low-fertility, bad-housing places should probably have about the same, or probably an even lower, gap between ideal and actual fertility as other places. But it turns out that, for the sample of 27 European countries for which I have actual and ideal fertility data, as well as housing overcrowding data, the fertility gap is actually slightly larger in more overcrowded places! Citizens of countries with overcrowded housing still want bigger families... Two studies have actually attempted to assess whether deteriorating housing availability causes lower fertility. One study used data from England about how often localities refuse to allow new housing to be built. This creates a kind of natural experiment when two nearby, similar localities allow very different amounts of housing to be constructed. This study found, as one might expect, that when localities refuse to build houses, it causes home prices to rise, and birth rates to fall by a large amount. A second study focuses on the United States. It used data culled from court records to identify states where “zoning” and “land use” court cases come up the most. This provides an annual time series for each state of how much each state restricts new construction. And it turns out, when states restrict construction, it reduces birth rates, especially for women in their 20s... at every stage, the housing situation for young people disfavors childbearing more than in the past, which is almost certainly a major driver of low fertility today. This is both encouraging and disheartening. It’s encouraging because the solution to high housing prices is very simple: relax zoning regulations and build more houses. But it’s also disheartening because local land use policies are often deeply entrenched and hard to change and can usually only be altered through local action"
The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "The United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $649 BILLION a year"
"If you’re thinking there’s something fishy about claiming that *annual* US fossil fuel subsidies exceed the *entire* market cap for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Marathon, Phillips 66 & ConocoPhillips, you are correct. Here’s the background on this whopper of a meme.
The US Energy Information Administration put the amount of federal fossil fuel subsidies at just $489M in FY2016 (the latest report available), down from $3.9B in 2013. This doesn’t include state and local subsidies, but it’s less than 1/1000th of the meme’s claim. In contrast, wind power had $1.3B in subsidies in 2016 (down from $6.2B in 2013) while solar had $2.2B (down from $5.8B). The entire federal subsidies for the energy industry totaled $15B, more than half of that being tax breaks/credits. Direct payments were $4.7B. Ironically, the the single largest amount of direct subsidies come from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) which assists the poor with heating and cooling. It’s doubtful those who oppose these subsidies would want that program cut. Oil Change International, not exactly a pro-fossil fuel lobby, puts the annual federal subsidy at $20.5B. They note “other credible estimates…range from $10B to $52B annually”. However, many of these include dubious subsidies like tax deductions, which exist in every industry and apply to every worker. The government taking less of your money is not a subsidy, unless one also considers mortgage, student loan and healthcare deductions as subsidies. ️So where does this meme get the outlandish $649B number from? A paper published by the IMF in 2019, which claims the world subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of $5.2T/year. But their definition of subsidy is far removed from popular understanding. Their paper claims that fossil fuels are subsidized because they are too cheap! Yes, seriously. Almost all of their subsidy calculations are based not on government grants to the industry, but on too few taxes and surcharges levied on it."
After using the term “fudge-packers”, Kingston High principal is reassigned - "Two months after he was placed on paid administrative leave after it was revealed that he’d used the term “fudge-packers” in a post on social media site Facebook, Vince DeCicco has officially resigned as principal of Kingston High School... The School Board also unanimously approved the creation of a new contracted position for DeCicco in the Teaching and Learning Department. The new position, the district said relates to testing, assessments and data. DeCicco’s new role will pay him $115,000 a year, down from his salary of $160,000 as principal... “Fudge-packers” is often colloquially used as a homophobic slur, but in mid-September, DeCicco said he used the term as a slight on the Green Bay Packers football team, longtime rival of the Chicago Bears, and denied intending to offend anyone in the LGBTQ community. Also in September, he said teachers and administrators should strive to be inclusive with the district’s diverse student population, and should consider whether something they say or post online could be misconstrued."
Japanese adult video actress hugs over 3,000 fans in 24-hour event in Shibuya - "Japanese adult video actress Eimi Fukada, known for her erotic films, held a 24-hour-long event where she hugged each of her fans who queued up to see her. All 3,163 of them. Fukada, 24, held the event in Shibuya, Tokyo, at 6pm on Aug. 27. When she made the announcement, she said she wanted to be "the most hugged woman in the world". She ended a day later at 6pm on Aug. 28. According to Daily Japan, Fukada only took one three-hour break and a few 10-minute breaks throughout the entire event. She didn't have time to sleep, even at night, and by the end of the event she was "completely exhausted"... Fukada had some costume changes during the event -- she wore a traditional yukata, a bunny outfit, an "office lady" outfit and a "China dress" (cheongsam). Participants did not have to pay for the hug, but a smartphone photo cost 1,000 yen (S$10.10). Fans could also purchase merchandise. During the event, fans had to keep their arms by their sides or back, and refrain from returning Fukada's hug"
Terry Dinerman's answer to Is marijuana less harmful than other drugs? - Quora - "After 40 years as a Paramedic, I can say two things about marijuana users…"
I never “worked” a marijuana overdose.
With the advent of “Edibles” they may have eaten enough to put them into a DEEP sleep, but they never stopped breathing like the opiate/barbiturate/benzodiazapine/alcohol users would.
A quiet, uneventful ride to the hospital for a long nap under observation was generally enough.
Now matter how stoned they were, I was never attacked or even mildly abused by a marijuana user."
Malls in Orchard Road remain empty - "Lam Chern Woon, head of research and consulting at Edmund Tie, said possible factors causing high vacancy rates in any mall could include high rental rates and associated operating costs, making it challenging for retailers to sustain their businesses. “The location and positioning of the mall can have a strong bearing on the footfall and profile of shoppers. “In addition, malls with a stronger concentration of trades that face competition from eCommerce (such as fashion, home furnishing and electronics) could also come under greater pressure,” said Lam. Hsu said both Cineleisure Orchard and The Cathay would benefit from “a redesign of their mall positioning and trade-mix strategy to appeal and relate to a new generation of shoppers post-pandemic, with a palette of engaging shopper experiences”."
Reddit: Husband puts lock on bedroom door for daily for two hours of 'quiet time' - "disaster struck when their three-year-old son spilt hot oil on his arm while their 14-year-old daughter was cooking dinner - and the wife couldn't wake up her husband in the emergency"
Mark Zuckerberg says the 'Eye of Sauron' is a loving nickname from his employees | Fortune - "From offering 17-year-old interns $6,000-a-month salaries to organizing and attending annual “Faceversaries” to celebrate employee work anniversaries, Zuckerberg has earned a reputation as an eclectic and passionate boss. And it seems that Zuckerberg’s employees—his Metamates, as he likes to call them—have come up with a nickname that reflects their boss’s occasional intensity. “Some of the folks who I work with at the company—they say this lovingly, but I think they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron”... Zuckerberg explained that when at work, he tends to direct his energy toward one area and nothing else, which may explain the intensity some of his employees feel when they fall under his attention—and the consequential sobriquet. Although Zuckerberg assured Ferriss that the moniker is used as a term of endearment, rather than as a reference to Sauron’s role as a permanent malignant presence keeping a watchful eye over Middle-earth, the CEO did acknowledge that focusing fully on one thing or idea does not always lead to the best results."
Woman ‘killed lookalike’ to fake own death - "A woman in Germany has been accused of killing a lookalike she found on Instagram to fake her own death. The suspect, identified as Shahraban K, is alleged to have stabbed beauty blogger Khadidja O more than 50 times, completely disfiguring her face, after luring her into a meeting in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt... Shahraban K, a 24-year-old German-Iraqi woman who is herself a beauty blogger, then allegedly tried to make it look as if she was the one who had been murdered by leaving Khadidja’s body in her Mercedes car and parking it near the flat of friend Sheqir K, who is alleged to have been an accomplice. Local reports said even Shahraban K’s parents were fooled and identified the body as hers before an autopsy a day later threw the assumption into doubt... Prosecutors believe Shahraban K wanted to run away from trouble at home... Shahraban K, who was living in Munich, allegedly set up fake Instagram accounts and tried to arrange meetings with women who looked similar to her. She eventually found Khadidja O, a 23-year-old Albanian citizen, who lived about 100 miles away... After a post-mortem and DNA tests, it was discovered that the body was really Khadidja O, police said. Shahraban K and Sheqir K were then arrested."
Why vegetable recipes are not very spicy - "Spices are aromatic plant materials that are used in cooking. Recently it was hypothesized that spice use yields a health benefit: cleansing food of parasites and pathogens before it is eaten, thereby reducing food poisoning and foodborne illnesses. In support, most spices have antimicrobial properties and use of spices in meat-based recipes is greatest in hot climates, where the diversity and growth rates of microorganisms are highest. A critical prediction of the antimicrobial hypothesis is that spices should be used less in preparing vegetables than meat dishes. This is because cells of dead plants are better protected physically and chemically against bacteria and fungi than cells of dead animals (whose immune system ceased functioning at death), so fewer spices would be necessary to make vegetables safe for consumption. We tested this corollary by compiling information on 2129 vegetable-only recipes from 107 traditional cookbooks of 36 countries. Analyses revealed that spice use increased with increasing ambient temperature, but less dramatically than in meat-based recipes. In all 36 countries, vegetable dishes called for fewer spices per recipe than meat dishes; 27 of these differences were significant. Of 41 individual spices, 38 were used less frequently in vegetable recipes; 30 of these differences were significant. Proportions of recipes that called for >1 spice and >1 extremely potent antimicrobial spice also were significantly lower for vegetable dishes. By every measure, vegetable-based recipes were significantly less spicy than meat-based recipes. Within-country analyses control for possible differences in spice plant availability and degrees of cultural independence. Results thus strongly support the antimicrobial hypothesis."
Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? - The Atlantic - "Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition... “There are few plausible biological explanations for these results,” Ardisson Korat wrote in the brief discussion of his “unexpected” finding in his thesis. Something else grabbed my attention, though: The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect... Pretty much across the board—low-fat, high-fat, milk, cheese—dairy foods appeared to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes... tucking into a “dairy-based dessert”—a category that included foods such as pudding but consisted, according to Pereira, mainly of ice cream—was associated for overweight people with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin-resistance syndrome. It was by far the biggest effect seen in the study, 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk... The Harvard researchers didn’t like the ice-cream finding: It seemed wrong. But the same paper had given them another result that they liked much better. The team was going all in on yogurt. With a growing reputation as a boon for microbiomes, yogurt was the anti-ice-cream—the healthy person’s dairy treat. “Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk” of type 2 diabetes, “whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not,” the 2014 paper said. “The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.” But yogurt made so much more sense. In a way, it was confirmation of something that everyone already knew... Even after being spiked with sugar in the ’70s and ’80s to better suit the U.S. market, yogurt still retained its image as an elixir. Furthermore, a growing body of literature suggested that yogurt’s health benefits might be real... Dagfinn Aune, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a peer reviewer of the Chen and Hu paper, said that the ice-cream effect was “similar” in magnitude to, or “slightly stronger” than, the one for yogurt... “reverse causation.” To test this idea, Hu and his co-authors set aside dietary data collected after people received these sorts of diagnoses, and then redid their calculations. The ice-cream effect shrank by half, though it was still statistically significant, and still bigger than the low-fat-dairy effect that Harvard had publicized in 2005. In any event, if people who received adverse diagnoses cut back on their ice cream, you might expect that they’d also cut back on, say, cake and doughnuts. So shouldn’t there be mysterious protective “effects” for cake and doughnuts too? “There should be,” Mozaffarian said. “That’s why the finding for ice cream is intriguing.”... it didn’t take long for the Harvard group’s good news about yogurt to take hold as a dominant scientific narrative... Tobias, the journal editor and member of the 2025 U.S. dietary-guidelines advisory committee, called it “totally fair criticism” to ask why yogurt was played up while ice cream was played down... ice cream’s glycemic index, a measure of how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. “There’s this perception that ice cream is unhealthy, but it’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” Mozaffarian said. “Given how horrible the American diet is, it’s very possible that if somebody eats ice cream and eats less starch … it could actually protect against diabetes.” The “Got Milk?” crowd also loves to talk about the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” a triple-layered biological envelope that encases the fat in mammalian milk. Some evidence suggests that dairy products in which the membrane is intact, such as ice cream, are more metabolically neutral than foods like butter, where it’s lost during the churn. (That said, regular cream has an intact membrane, and it hasn’t been consistently associated with a reduced diabetes risk.) Then there is what might charitably be termed the “real-world evidence.” In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes... If this had been a patented drug, he continued, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”... once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into the science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts"
Trust the Science!
Love - "Today, my girlfriend's mother called me to tell me she didn't appreciate our "public amorous behaviour" at the local food court. I didn't go out all day. FML "
Intimacy: Hmmm, twins - FML - "Today, I found out my boyfriend only dates me because I look a bit like his favourite porn star. FML"
My ex, Parents and Love: Parents vs. Parents - FML - "Today, my parents met my girlfriend's parents for the first time. They not only brought along embarrassing childhood photos of myself, they'd 'accidentally' placed an intimate photo of me and my ex-girlfriend with them. That was their subtle way of telling everyone they prefered my ex. FML"
Meme - BIG MULA @1jiare: "So my girl almost died 3 facking times in my apocalypse dream cause she don't FUCKING listen. Now I'm irritated."
Phillepe Miller @philmillerz: "The male version of "you cheated in my dream""
Meme - "This is why it's called pizza
Thickness = a Radius =z
Volume = pi z^2 a
Volume = pi (zz) a"
The Washington Post on Twitter - "Exclusive: Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work nearly a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter - "This is corruption. Plain and simple. And each day that passes, the Supreme Court is looking less like a bench and more like an auction house. Thomas should resign immediately and Roberts should see to it that he does."
Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "AOC broke federal campaign finance laws by concealing thousands in campaign spending and accepting impermissible gifts. She also illegally funneled campaign funds to China and her boyfriend. AOC is corrupt. Plain and simple. She should resign."
I remember when Biden defenders were claiming what Hunter did was irrelevant, since people weren't electing Hunter Biden
Why do so many Chinese international students in Canada end up back home? - The Globe and Mail - "For them, China is not just home, but a place whose embrace of modernity has created comforts not available in North America – bullet trains, lively cities with a cornucopia of eating choices – while its capital and consumer markets offer opportunity that Canada cannot match. Chinese students like to joke about Canada as haoshan, haoshui, hao wuliao: nice mountains, nice water, very boring. China is not boring and its air and water are quickly improving, along with its salaries. In other words, even if China grows less appealing to those outside its borders, it is becoming more desirable to many of its own... In the U.S., the National Science Foundation tracks the percentage of doctorate recipients who intend to stay. Things have changed there, too. In 2001, 91.4 per cent of PhDs from China intended to remain in the U.S. By 2019, the number had fallen to 79.3 per cent. The remainder expected to return to China... “In Canada, your soft skills can’t really compete with native speakers. You have to know their culture, you have to know their entertainment, and you have to chat to make connections. It’s hard for us if we don’t grow up in that environment.”"
Man Running from Cops Stops to Pet Cats, Goes to Jail - "a Boca Raton man last week who, in the middle of fleeing police, stopped by a home, asked for water and the proceeded to lay down and play with the homeowner’s cats... Daniel Pinedo-Velapatino, 21, now faces a long list of charges, including burglary of an occupied dwelling, three counts of drug possession, three counts of assault, hit and run, and grand theft auto, among others."
Priorities
Florida man climbs atop playground equipment at Clearwater park, tells kids where babies come from - "Police took Otis Dawayne Ryan, 30, into custody on a charge of disorderly conduct... Ryan at first was approaching tourists and making inappropriate comments to women in an effort to get their male partners to confront him"
Florida man bitten by shark, punched by monkey (twice), struck by lightning, bitten by snake - "Erik Norrie, a man who, in his 40 years on Earth, has had run ins with monkeys, sharks, rattlesnakes and the hammer of Thor himself... he was attacked by monkeys twice, once because he wandered too close to a simian while in the Amazon. The second time was the result of a joke, of sorts, played by his wife. She locked Norrie in a cage with a small monkey, which then proceeded to bite, hit and pelt him with his own keys. His wife, Spryng, wasn't worried, though. "She took photos and giggled""
Guy In Florida Loads Car With Frozen Iguanas, They Warm Up, Come Back To Life, Cause Car Accident
