3 minute car wash birds pigeons on rooftop ready to shit on clean cars
Commentary: Why do so many Singapore diners dislike vegetables? - "From what I recall of my time living in Singapore, meat and seafood were on the table at every meal, sometimes even in every dish. While vegetables were ordered (usually just one dish to make the meal feel more virtuous), the star was always the coffee ribs, pepper crab or braised duck... In 2010, nine in 10 Singapore residents did not eat enough fruit and vegetables, according to the National Nutrition Survey conducted that year. That figure improved in the 2018 survey, with average vegetable consumption hitting the recommended two daily servings... According to Shen Tan, founder of the now defunct nasi lemak stall OG Lemak, the price ceiling on hawker food might also have a part to play in the disproportionate lack of vegetables on our plates. “Because people want to pay only S$5 and still feel like there is a lot to eat, hawkers tend to give a lot of carbohydrates to give the illusion of fullness and abundance. This has thrown the balance off a hawker dish,” she said. Apart from some dishes such as thunder tea rice or yong tau foo, greens are glaringly absent from most hawker dishes, which comprise predominantly of carbohydrates... I have noticed that it is not just hawker meals that are imbalanced. When my husband and I ate at restaurants with the older generation, we observed that vegetables were at times not ordered. The reasoning provided is often that the markup on vegetable dishes is the highest on a menu; it is "not worth it" to order greens at a restaurant and ordering meat or seafood dishes gives you more bang for your buck. But, the decision to omit vegetables from a restaurant order is often far more complex. In a food-obsessed country like Singapore, food transcends nourishment; it is loaded with symbolism. Offering others meat or seafood - often the more expensive items on a menu - is a sign of generosity, hospitality and love. Meat has also become a social marker in Singapore - a symbol of progress. Tan explained, "Not so long ago, my parents could not even afford chicken rice, so they only ate it on their payday. Or they only ate eggs on their birthday. So, for a lot of older people, big prawns or wagyu is a big deal." That said, vegetables are not popular among some of my younger friends either. When pressed, they say that the produce one gets in Singapore simply doesn't taste good. I get where they are coming from. My first taste of pumpkin in Australia was a revelation; its dense, sweet flesh was a far cry from the water-logged specimens I had encountered in Singapore. Yet, while produce imported from afar is undoubtedly inferior to farm-direct produce, I believe that if our attention is turned to vegetables from our region, we might find unexpected treasures... Khee Shihui, founder of Tabaogirl, shared, "Many traditional foods have vegetables as their foundational elements. Abacus seeds are primarily made from yam, for example, with just a little minced meat added to flavour the entire dish. Celebrating vegetables is not just about grain bowls or raw salads.""
Yam (taro) is mostly carbohydrates, so...
US has regressed to developing nation status, MIT economist warns - "America is regressing to have the economic and political structure of a developing nation, an MIT economist has warned. Peter Temin says the world's’ largest economy has roads and bridges that look more like those in Thailand and Venezuela than those in parts of Europe. In his new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class", reviewed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Mr Temin says the fracture of US society is leading the middle class to disappear. The economist describes a two-track economy with on the one hand 20 per cent of the population that is educated and enjoys good jobs and supportive social networks. On the other hand, the remaining 80 per cent, he said, are part of the US’ low-wage sector, where the world of possibility has shrunk and people are burdened with debts and anxious about job security. Mr Temin used a model, which was created by Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis and designed to understand developing nations, to describe how far inequalities have progressed in the US. When applied to the US, Mr Temin said that “the Lewis model actually works”.
From 2017
Meme - "Wow, I'm not a Christian, but I'm pretty sure Jesus taught that you should be loving It doesn't seem very loving of you to disagree with my views Oh. you think disagreement can be a form of love? I was looking more for the kind of love where you remain quiet and bend passively to my will"
Meme - "Hey man, Jesus just gave us like, one commandment bro. Which is to be vaguely nice to each other man. As long as you're being vaguely nice by the cultural standards of the current time period we live in and completely ignoring the Bible you're doing a heckin wholesome Christianity"
Dear F&B restaurant owners, would it be wrong to return a dish that is only 95% eaten because the dish isn't up to my satisfaction? : askSingapore - "Swensen’s food quality went downhill after they went halal"
Dear F&B restaurant owners, would it be wrong to return a dish that is only 95% eaten because the dish isn't up to my satisfaction? : askSingapore - "Agree with this. You know which other place? Poulet. When I first ate it is was amazing. Now it tastes like Malay food. As a Malay I gotta say if I wanted Malay chicken I would go to a coffeeshop"
Dafrosty🏳️🌈🇵🇸🇲🇾 on Twitter - "The only time you can exercise your freedom of public assembly in Singapore is during funerals and weddings. Basically just to celebrate the end of your life"
Meme - "Private Sign. Do Not Read"
For reasons no one can fathom, McDonald’s has released a new Game Boy Color game - "Fast food giant McDonald's has released a new retro-style game featuring Grimace, the purple milkshake blob. While it's clearly meant to be played in a browser on a phone or computer, it's also a fully working Game Boy Color game that you can download and play on the original hardware. Grimace's Birthday was developed by Krool Toys, a Brooklyn-based independent game studio and "creative engineering team" with a history of creating playable Game Boy games as unique PR for musicians and brands... The game is so period-authentic that there's even a screen telling original monochrome Game Boy owners that the game "requires a color device to play." Even on Game Boy hardware, it still makes references to people playing on "mobile devices""
Asleep on the Job: Banker’s Nap Costs Millions - "A German bank employee accidentally transferred 222,222,222.222 euros ($295 million) from a customer's account when he fell asleep at his computer. The bank clerk had been attempting to transfer just 62.40 euros ($82.80) for the customer, a pensioner, when he dozed off with a finger on his keyboard's "2" key. The clerk's boss was fired for failing to notice the mistake, made in April last year, but a labor court in Germany ruled on Tuesday that the dismissal was unfair... the mistake occurred because she had less than three seconds to check each transaction, and was overseeing hundreds every day... Fortunately for the bank and the customer, the error was caught by an internal system and corrected."
Emil O W Kirkegaard on Twitter - "People from bad neighbors are more crime prone, why? Does living a bad place cause you to commit crime? Or are bad places bad because of those who live there? One can find out by studying the same person who moves around. It's mostly the people."
Associations of neighborhood disadvantage and offender concentration with criminal behavior: Between-within analysis in Finnish registry data - "The association between neighborhood disadvantage and crime has been extensively studied, but most studies have relied on cross-sectional data and have been unable to separate potential effects of the neighborhood from selection effects. We examined how neighborhood disadvantage and offender concentration are associated with criminal behavior while accounting for selection effects due to unobserved time-invariant characteristics of the individuals. We used a registry-based longitudinal dataset that included all children aged 0–14 living in Finland at the end of year 2000 with follow-up until the end of 2017 for criminal offences committed at ages 18–31 years (n = 510,189). Using multilevel logistic regression with a between-within approach we examined whether neighborhoods differed in criminal behavior and whether within-individual changes in neighborhood disadvantage and offender concentration were associated with within-individual changes in criminal behavior. Our results indicated strong associations of most measures of neighborhood disadvantage and offender concentration with criminal behavior between individuals. The within-individual estimates accounting for selection related to unobserved individual characteristics were mostly non-significant with the exception of higher neighborhood disadvantage being associated with increased risk for violent crimes. Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is better explained by individual characteristics than by causal effects of neighborhoods."
Damn socialisation!
Cambodia Closes State Department-Funded Propaganda Outlet, Corporate Media Cries About 'Democracy' - "the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) runs VOD. Who runs CCHR? Via its “donors” page, financial sponsors include:
U.S. Department of State
British Embassy
US AID
Open Society Institute (George Soros’ NGO)
United Nations"
The author's reflexive anti-Westernism aside, it seems funding and conflict of interest are only issues when they're from unapproved sources
My students can't write essays – I blame Ireland's declining academic standards - "As a postgraduate student in an Irish university, every teaching year brings its headaches. The biggest of all? Bad essays. The Irish school system isn’t equipping my students with the basic skills they need to research and write their papers. The university isn’t supporting them, and I’m left to pick up the pieces. Although I ought to be used to this by now, I’m especially dreading my return to teaching this year – because changes to Ireland’s final exam system are about to make things even worse. In Ireland, we’ve been seeing a steady decline in academic standards among incoming undergraduate students for a while. A lecturer in my department set a diagnostic assignment in a class four years ago and 50% of them failed. Returning to that module for the first time since then this year, they set the same assignment and got a 100% fail rate. It’s at least partly down to a disconnect between Irish secondary education, which puts little to no emphasis on continuous assessment beyond a small amount of project work in certain subjects, and what’s expected of students at university.I have had undergraduates stare at me in disbelief when I outline the mandatory attendance aspects of their grading, or I demand that they submit their essays on time. In one case, a student simply refused to believe me, skipped all the classes, and failed the module. The universities themselves perpetuate a cycle: obsessed with minimising failure and drop-out rates, they tweak numbers and force lecturers to grade on a bell curve to ensure impressive statistics. I have seen students take advantage of the weighting of certain modules towards the final exam: they do nothing all term, and then turn up to the exam and scrape a pass overall. Take this example, which epitomises how schools and universities fail to help each other. On a course that trained secondary school teachers for a particular practical subject, one final-year assignment was to produce the same portfolio as students of the Leaving Cert (Ireland’s A-levels). So many students failed that the higher-ups freaked out and instructed the lecturers to lower the passing threshold. So teachers unable to prepare their students to pass a Leaving Cert assignment are now teaching in secondary schools.The problem is further exacerbated by the Central Applications Office university entry points system (Ireland’s Ucas equivalent). The system assigns points to final exam results on the basis of one’s grades, but the points requirements for university courses are calculated based on demand for that course. This means that a large number of low-demand liberal arts courses have very low points. People barely scraping through their examinations (which are largely essay-based) can only get on to courses that require them to write essays."
Lowering standards is just fooling yourself
Florida man steals $33,000 in rare coins, uses them in change machines - "A Florida man stole more than $30,000 in rare coins and cashed them in for a fraction of their value at change machines at area grocery stores, investigators said. Palm Beach Sheriff's Office investigators said Shane Anthony Mele, 40, stole the rare presidential coins, valued at $1,000 each, and other items worth a total of $350,000... Mele sold some of the coins to a pawn shop for $4,000, then exchanged the majority of them through CoinStar change machines at grocery stores, which would only give face value for them, a fraction of their worth."
Meme - "Graphics from a 2008 PS3 Game"
"Graphics on a 2023 PSS Game"
Meme - "*Chicago can't be that bad*
Google map street view: *black guy holding gun on sidewalk*"
Gigi | Positive + Gentle Parenting on Instagram: “When I am with my youngest one, I am always looking for ways to help her with whatever she’s doing. This came very naturally to me because…” - "When I am with my youngest one, I am always looking for ways to help her with whatever she’s doing. This came very naturally to me because it was my primary role to help her in everything when she was an infant. But over time, I realized that I was creating a situation where my daughter would always depend on me and I wasn’t giving her the space to learn on her own. As difficult as it was, I became very intentional in staying quiet [but always keeping a distance so I can help in the case of an emergency.] My goal was to provide her space to experience failures and extract valuable learnings from those instances. It always gave her the opportunity to succeed and build her own confidence knowing full well that she did it on her own. With my little one learning to speak, one of the sweetest phrases she has been using recently after achieving something is “I did it!”. (🥹❤️She is proud of herself)"
no. 61: ratcheting skyward - by TW Lim - let them eat cake - "A potted history of the last 50 years of French gastronomy might go something like this:
In the beginning, there was the cuisine of Escoffier, characterized by formality, richness, and above all elaboration. There was a culinary canon, and it was as thoroughly native as the guillotine. Sauces were complicated focal points, with an intensity and richness that often surpassed the flavor of the ingredients on the plate. Service happened table-side and required at least three tuxedos, a silver mine, and a flambé burner. The pinnacles of haute cuisine were tessellated centerpieces of game and shellfish and as many vegetables as you could round up, seasoned with the sweat of the many commis doing the knifework.
Around 50 years ago, a generation of chefs emerged who decided that they actually rather liked the pure taste of their ingredients. They’d traveled, and realized that some cooks outside France actually had interesting ideas. They’d trained under people who made the classic sauces and elaborate centerpieces, but felt that these presentations, this centering of the sauce, could be replaced by a cleaner, clearer sort of cooking. This, more or less, was nouvelle cuisine. It utterly changed the aesthetic on the plate, but kept the brigade in the kitchen and the tuxedos in the dining room.
30 years ago, Yves Camdeborde opened La Regalade. He was the first of a generation. Folks who’d been sous chefs and chefs de cuisine under the grandmasters of nouvelle cuisine got tired of toques and tuxedos and salles à manger scaled for maneuvering a hoop skirt. Instead, when they struck out on their own, they opened what looked and felt like bistros, small restaurants with simple dining rooms and casual service (which were also, conveniently, much cheaper to finance and run). They served bistro dishes refined with techniques from haute cuisine... Bistronomie was a disjuncture, a new way of being a restaurant, and its appeal was due at least in part to how accessible the prices were. There were half as many things on the plate, a quarter as many staff, and so these restaurateurs charged a fifth of what their old bosses did... the original restaurants in their original incarnations were never truly sustainable. The prices were friendly because everyone running them was undercharging. The staff were in their 20s and slept in the restaurant (terrific public healthcare and social security help too). The food was great because the chefs were working 16 hour days. Few people can work 16 hour days for 20 years. Fewer still want to. Chefs grow up, too: at some point, families and mortgages seem more exciting than tattoos and new drugs, and they’re more expensive. Society doesn’t offer many other ways to pursue these goals other than to start making more money, and the restaurant world doesn’t offer many options for doing so other than to raise your prices, start a restaurant group, or, ideally, both... a stupendous lunch costing 80€ will never be as exciting as a stupendous lunch costing 23€. The first is a meal, the second is a statement... This audaciousness was surely as much a part of bistronomie's appeal."
Opinion: Make French safer by making Quebec richer - "Reducing taxes and regulatory burdens in education would make it more attractive for immigrants to learn French... If the members of a large linguistic group are highly educated and very productive, the economic returns from the mastery of their language will be greater than if the group is smaller and its members less educated."
Economic freedom and human capital investment - "Using data from 1972 to 2011 on 109 countries, this paper empirically studies the impact of economic freedom on human capital investment. Enrollment in secondary education is used as a proxy for such investments. Controlling for a large number of other determinants of education, it finds that, over the sample period, economic freedom had a substantial positive effect. This is probably because more economic freedom increases the return on investing in human capital, enables people to keep a larger share of the return, and, by facilitating the operation of credit markets, makes it easier for them to undertake such investments in the first place."
Hawking was right: All large objects will eventually evaporate
Empires strike back against false 250-year claim - "A social media video claims no empire in history has existed for longer than 250 years. The claim is false. The Egyptian, Roman and Ottoman empires – to name a few – all lasted longer than 250 years, with the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) existing for at least 1000 years. Motivational speaker Espen Hjalmby makes the claim in a Facebook video posted to his 24,000 followers promoting his upcoming “Quantum Wealth Mastermind” event – a “one-day money mastery event” in which he plans to tell his audience when the next recession is likely to begin. In the video, he predicts that “we’re in for a huge financial recession” based on his belief the “US empire” is in decline. “It’s the end of a 250-year cycle, and … no empire in history, as far as I’ve studied, has ever lasted any longer than that 250-year cycle, from its initiation or its first rise of power, to the decline,” Hjalmby says (video mark 6min 10sec). However, history experts say many empires lasted far longer than 250 years, with one describing the claim as “pure fantasy”. Stuart Tyson Smith, a professor of archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told AAP FactCheck that he could “unequivocally say that Egypt contradicts the idea empires only last 250 years and cycle, especially the New Kingdom empire in Nubia.” Professor Smith said the Egyptians conquered Nubia between 1550 and 1502 BCE, with parts of the empire lasting almost 500 years, and others lasting about 400 years... The longevity of the Western Roman and Eastern Roman empires also disprove the “250 years” claim. Peter Sarris, professor of Late Antique, Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge, described the 250-year empire claim as “pure fantasy”. Professor Sarris told AAP FactCheck the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) continued for “a thousand years after the demise of the Roman Empire in the West”. “The only debate is whether we should think of it as an empire that lasted for fifteen hundred years (as the Roman Empire) or a thousand years (after the demise of the Roman Empire in the West),” he said via email. The Sasanian Empire is considered to have existed for more than 400 years, from 224 AD to the mid-600s AD, and the Ottoman Empire is considered to have existed for approximately 600 years, from 1300 AD to 1922 AD. The British Empire is thought to have existed for at least 400 years. Dr Stephen Tuffnell, associate professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford, said Hjalmby’s assumption that empires are cyclical is also questionable. “Most empires conceive themselves as the empire rising while another falls and hopes to avoid the ‘decadence’ of past empires by learning from them, so that type of imperial comparison itself has a long imperial pedigree”... While Hjalmby does not say how he arrived at the “250 years” claim, the time frame has been used by some commentators to ask whether the United States – approaching 250 years of independence – is at “death’s door“. An article in the American Conservative magazine credits a former British army officer named Sir John Glubb and his essay The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, for the idea that the average lifespan of an empire is 250 years. In the essay, Sir John argued it was the “average length of national greatness” and that the average had not varied for 3000 years."
Meme - Fast Food worker to fat man: "I‘M SORRY SIR. BUT GLUTTONY lS A SIN AND IT WOULD COMPROMISE MY RELIGIOUS BELIEFS TO ENABLE YOUR SINFUL LIFESTYLE."
Sign: "We don't serve: the angry, lazy greedy, proud lustful, envirous or gluttons or the divorced or liars, or sabbath breakers, or graven image makers..."
This image is from 2015. No wonder. In the last 8 years things have changed so much. Now you're forced to fly the Pride flag so this sanctimony about the religious seems quaint
Annoyed janitor turns off super-cold freezer and destroys decades of scientific work, causes at least $1M in damages - "A janitor working in a laboratory who was annoyed by an incessant beep reportedly flipped a switch that killed the noise — but also shut off a storage freezer, destroying decades of scientific work, according to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute lab in Troy. The cleaner’s alleged carelessness cost the lab at least $1 million in damages, a lawsuit the university filed against its third-party cleaning service charges. “People’s behavior and negligence caused all this,” Michael Ginsberg, RPI’s attorney, told the Times Union in Albany. “Unfortunately, they wiped out 25 years of research.” The super-cold freezer the custodial worker allegedly shut down held cell cultures, samples, and other elements stored at minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit... when the worker from Daigle Cleaning Services shut off the circuit breaker on Sept. 17, 2020, to silence a beeping alarm, the temperature leapt to minus-25.6 degrees, which damaged or destroyed the material, the lawsuit claimed. The freezer alarm had been triggered by a mechanical malfunction that stopped the unit from maintaining a constant temperature, as it was supposed to. Repairs had been scheduled for Sept. 21, 2020... A sign on the lab freezer door explained the source of the alarm, and also bore instructions on how to silence it... The cleaner thought they were flipping the breaker on when they actually turned it off, according to a report filed by the RPI public safety staff afterward... The cleaning company had a $1.4 million contract to clean the RPI facilities during the 2020 fall semester."
Lonely people share too much on Facebook - "nearly 98% of the lonely users shared their relationship status publicly on Facebook instead of restricting it to just friends, and they even publicly shared their home address online... People who don’t explicitly state that they’re lonely on Facebook (though some might be) tend to share more about subjects like religion and politics, the study found. “It makes sense that the people who felt lonely would disclose this type of information,” Al-Saggaf says. “They want to make it easier for others to initiate contact with them, which may help them overcome their feelings of loneliness.” But over-dependence on social networks as a social outlet can also lead to what some doctors call “ Facebook Depression ,” according to a 2010 report, “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Family,” by the American Academy of Pediatrics"... Al-Saggaf and Neilson’s study isn’t the first to link over-sharing on Facebook and emotional distress. In 2012, Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University and author of “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us,” analyzed 800 Facebook members and tested them for a range of psychological disorders, and found those who most often “like” other people’s activities on Facebook are more likely to show symptoms of “mania” and “compulsivity.” On a happier note, having more Facebook friends may also be a predictor of fewer symptoms of mild and major depression, indicating that people who are popular online are well-adjusted in real life too, research by Rosen found last year . But it cuts both ways: Social media can be a way of gaining virtual empathy — “but also make you feel that everyone else’s life is better than yours as though you have to show your best self and gain admiration through ‘likes’ and postings,” Rosen says."
Absent Minded - "The Simpson were supposed to be a weird, dysfunctional family in the ‘90s but by today’s standards they’re kinda aspirational. Both parents stayed together, they own a home on one income, Marge gets to be a full time mom, Bart’s not on 17 different behavior-modifying drugs, and Lisa’s “liberal” politics seem mostly pretty middle-of-the-road and reasonable in 2023. Homer’s not even THAT overweight. Gen Z kids WISH they could have a life like that."
Animal Matters - "Human population growth is the underlying cause of virtually all wildlife habitat destruction."
More environmentalist misanthropy, with comments like "I,ve said before, I'll say it again: "Humans are the plague upon this planet.""
Meme - Carson Palm Her: "Ladies if you fuck one guy a day for $100 that's $365,000 you made in one year. Bitches with degrees not making that. Be your own boss."
"Bitches with degrees know that will only add up to $36,500"
Alaric The Barbarian on Twitter - "HERNAN CORTES: A MAN OUT OF TIME Most of us know the conqueror of the Aztec Empire, at least in passing. But Cortes' story is criminally undersold in pop culture and education. He's one of the most fascinating figures to ever live; a man straight from some ancient epic."
