"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." - Henry David Thoreau
***
Tribal Workers
Financial Times
Today's generation of high-earning professionals maintain that their personal fulfilment comes from their jobs and the hours they work. They should grow up, says Thomas Barlow.
A friend of mine recently met a young American woman who was studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. She already had two degrees from top US universities, had worked as a lawyer and as a social worker in the US, and somewhere along the way had acquired a black belt in kung fu. Now, however, her course at Oxford was coming to an end and she was thoroughly angst-ridden about what to do next.
Her problem was no ordinary one.
She couldn't decide whether she should make a lot of money as a corporate lawyer/management consultant, devote herself to charity work helping battered wives in disadvantaged Communities, or go to Hollywood to work as a stunt double in kung fu films. What most struck my friend was not the disparity of this woman's choices, but the earnestness and bad grace with which she ruminated on them. It was almost as though she begrudged her own talents, Opportunities and freedom - as though the world had treated her unkindly by forcing her to make such a hard choice.
Her case is symptomatic of our times. In recent years, there has grown up a culture of discontent among the highly educated young something that seems to flare up, especially, when people reach their late 20s and early 30s. It arises not from frustration caused by lack of opportunity, as may have been true in the past, but from an excess of possibilities.
Most theories of adult developmental psychology have a special category for those in their late 20s and early 30s.
Whereas the early to mid-20s are seen as a time to establish one's mode of living, the late 20s to early 30s are often considered a period of reappraisal. In a society where people marry and have children young, where financial burdens accumulate early, and where job markets are inflexible, such appraisals may not last long. But when people manage to remain free of financial or family burdens, and where the perceived opportunities for alternative careers are many, the reappraisal is likely to be strong.
Among no social group is this more true than the modern, International, professional elite: that tribe of young bankers, lawyers, consultants and managers for whom financial, familial, personal, corporate and (increasingly) national ties have become irrelevant. Often they grew up in one country, were educated in another, and are now working in a third.
They are independent, well paid, and enriched by experiences that many of their parents could only dream of. Yet, by their late 20s, many carry a sense of disappointment: that for all their opportunities, freedoms and achievements, life has not delivered quite what they had hoped. At the heart of this disillusionment lies a new attitude towards work.
The idea has grown up, in recent years, that work should not be just a means to an end a way to make money, support a family, or gain social prestige but should provide a rich and fulfilling experience in and of itself. Jobs are no longer just jobs; they are lifestyle options. Recruiters at financial companies, consultancies and law firms have promoted this conception of work. Job advertisements promise challenge, wide experiences, opportunities for travel and relentless personal development.
Michael is a 33-year-old management consultant who has bought into this vision of late-20th century work. Intelligent and well-educated - with three degrees, including a doctorate - he works in Munich, and has a "stable, long-distance relationship" with a woman living in California. He takes 140 flights a year and works an average of 80 hours a week. Some weeks he works more than 100 hours.
When asked if he likes his job, he will say: "I enjoy what I'm doing in terms of the intellectual challenges." Although he earns a lot, he doesn't spend much. He rents a small apartment, though he is rarely there, and has accumulated very few possessions. He justifies the long hours not in terms of wealth-acquisition, but solely as part of a "learning experience".
This attitude to work has several interesting implications, mostly to do with the shifting balance between work and non-work, employment and leisure. Because fulfilling and engrossing work - the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience - often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.
Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don't contain enough hours.
Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: "Isn't this great? This is when I really love my job." What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. "It's as though he was validated, or making his life important by this," she says.
Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself - and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked - people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
Michael, the management consultant, is a good example of this phenomenon. He is prepared to trade (his word) not just goods and time for the experience afforded by his work, but also a substantial measure of commitment in his personal relationships. In a few months, he is being transferred to San Francisco, where he will move in with his girlfriend. But he's not sure that living the same house is actually going to change the amount of time he spends on his relationship. "Once I move over, my time involvement on my relationship will not change significantly. My job takes up most of my time and pretty much dominates what I do, when, where and how I do it," he says. Moreover, the reluctance to commit time to a relationship because they are learning so much, and having such an intense and fulfilling time at work is compounded, for some young professionals, by a reluctance to have a long-term relationship at all.
Today, by the time someone reaches 30, they could easily have had three or four jobs in as many different cities - which is not, as it is often portrayed, a function of an insecure global job-market, but of choice. Robert is 30 years old. He has three degrees and has worked on three continents. He is currently working for the United Nations in Geneva. For him, the most significant deterrent when deciding whether to enter into a relationship is the likely transient nature of the rest of his life. "What is the point in investing all this emotional energy and exposing myself in a relationship, if I am leaving in two months, or if I do not know what I am doing next year?" he says.
Such is the character of the modern, international professional, at least throughout his or her 20s. Spare time, goods and relationships, these are all willingly traded for the exigencies of work. Nothing is valued so highly as accumulated experience. Nothing is neglected so much as commitment. With this work ethic - or perhaps one should call it a "professional development ethic" - becoming so powerful, the globally mobile generation now in its late 20s and early 30s has garnered considerable professional success. At what point, though, does the experience-seeking end?
Kathryn is a successful American academic, 29, who bucked the trend of her generation: she recently turned her life round for someone else. She moved to the UK, specifically, to be with a man, a decision that she says few of her contemporaries understood. "We're not meant to say: 'I made this decision for this person. Today, you're meant to do things for yourself. If you're willing to make sacrifices for others - especially if you're a woman - that's seen as a kind of weakness. I wonder, though, is doing things for yourself really empowerment, or is liberty a kind of trap?" she says.
For many, it is a trap that is difficult to break out of, not least because they are so caught up in a culture of professional development. And spoilt for choice, some like the American Rhodes Scholar no doubt become paralysed by their opportunities, unable to do much else in their lives, because they are so determined not to let a single one of their chances slip. If that means minimal personal commitments well into their 30s, so be it. "Loneliness is better than boredom" is Jane's philosophy.
And, although she knows "a lot of professional single women who would give it all up if they met a rich man to marry", she remains far more concerned herself about finding fulfillment at work. "I am constantly questioning whether I am doing the right thing here," she says. "There's an eternal search for a more challenging and satisfying option, a better lifestyle. You always feel you're not doing the right thing always feel as if you should be striving for another goal," she says.
Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could "do anything", "be anything". It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.
The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.
Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Malaysia/Singapore as Immigrant Societies
"What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?" - Logan Pearsall Smith
***
Malaysia/Singapore as Immigrant Societies
... In Malaysia of course official ideology requires that 62% of the population be regarded as ‘sons of the soil’, defined in racial terms rather than place of birth. But there is also an older pre-nationalist tradition there of understanding Malaya as an immigrant society, and a tendency as in other immigrant societies for the relatively recent migrants in all communities to provide much of the innovative energy and leadership – witness Hussein Onn, Tun Razak and Dr Mahathir in Malay politics...
The populations of Malaysia, Singapore and Australia all grew at exceptionally high rates over the past two centuries, so far above the Asian average up to 1950 as to mark them as standouts. Overall, however, it is Malaysia/Singapore that had the more exceptional rates of growth, among the highest in the world for most periods before 1950...
The immigration rate (immigrants per 1,000 population) of Malaya (Peninsula Malaysia and Singapore) was the highest in the world throughout the period 1881-1939, more than ten times as high a rate as the United States or other so-called ‘immigrant societies’... In each decade until the 1930s, the number of immigrants arriving in Malaya represented between 84% and 100% of its total population...
The Malayan Peninsula... then unrelated northern Borneo, and Australia, were all relatively sparsely populated before the arrival of the British in these places in the 1780s. Although figures are highly controversial, the Peninsula and Australia appear each to have then had sparse populations below a half-million in total... The question of indigeneity, or indigeny as Geoffrey Benjamin insists on calling it, is extremely politicized in Malaysia... Wheatley (1961: 232) concludes from the silence of Arab navigators in the previous period that they found no ‘civilised human settlement and opportunity for trade’ to the south of the place they called Kalah...
[In Malaysia] Pockets of rice-cultivators may already have settled the river-mouth areas of Kedah, Kelantan and Pahang before 1400, presumably through interactions of Indian traders, aboriginal populations, and other mobile Southeast Asians from Sumatra and elsewhere. We cannot label them ethnically before the category ‘Malay’ began to be created by the hybridizing genius of fifteenth century Melaka. In such a crossroads of trade routes, the migrants were also more diverse than Australia’s. The major waves of migrants before 1870 were:
[Malay kings, Minangkabau pioneers, Bugis, the European/Chinese/Indian/SEAsians in what became the Straits Settlements, Chinese mining & agricultural pioneers, Organised contract labourers {mostly Cantonese and Tamil}, others]...
There developed a more artificial racial construct of ‘whiteness’ (in Australia) or ‘Malayness’ (in Malaysia), which could be all the more shrill because it had no basis in a shared past...
A fierce competition between generations and types of migrants, about the identity of the state and the types of new migrants. Racism has been a marked feature of migrant societies, because of the way the dominant migrant community seeks to cohere against both the aboriginal population and other more recent and hungry migrant groups who threaten their control. The unnaturalness of these exclusions was part of the reason why racism reached such shrill heights at times in the 20th Century...
We might hope that migrants would be highly tolerant of other migrants, sympathetic to their needs and to their legitimacy. In this regard the Malay rulers and gate-keepers get the highest marks for tolerance and absorption of a diversity of migrants. Malay identity proved wonderfully absorptive in the 15th Century as a creative creole, turning Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Javanese and Filipinos into loyal subjects of the sultan, bilingual in their own language and Malay. Although the line between Muslim insiders and non-Muslim outsiders became gradually more firm from the 16th century, right up to the 20th migrants constantly joined the main game through accepting Islam (masuk Melayu). In this the Malay record long-term is far more generous and accommodating than that of the British in places such as Australia...
[Mahathir] argued that every country has a ‘definitive people’ who were the first immigrants to set up states in the territory in question. Since the aborigines in both Malaysia and Australia were stateless peoples who did not do this, it was the Malays in Malaya, like the English-speaking Christians in Australia, who defined the core culture and set the conditions by which subsequent migrants were admitted. [He interpreted] Australia somewhat idiosyncratically to suit his argument for permanent Malay supremacy in Malaysia"
***
Malaysia/Singapore as Immigrant Societies
I’d like to ask everyone, especially those characterized as ‘Malays’, to list their family histories. And see how many of us can really go back further than three generations born in this land. I know I can’t (Marina Mahathir)
... In Malaysia of course official ideology requires that 62% of the population be regarded as ‘sons of the soil’, defined in racial terms rather than place of birth. But there is also an older pre-nationalist tradition there of understanding Malaya as an immigrant society, and a tendency as in other immigrant societies for the relatively recent migrants in all communities to provide much of the innovative energy and leadership – witness Hussein Onn, Tun Razak and Dr Mahathir in Malay politics...
The populations of Malaysia, Singapore and Australia all grew at exceptionally high rates over the past two centuries, so far above the Asian average up to 1950 as to mark them as standouts. Overall, however, it is Malaysia/Singapore that had the more exceptional rates of growth, among the highest in the world for most periods before 1950...
The immigration rate (immigrants per 1,000 population) of Malaya (Peninsula Malaysia and Singapore) was the highest in the world throughout the period 1881-1939, more than ten times as high a rate as the United States or other so-called ‘immigrant societies’... In each decade until the 1930s, the number of immigrants arriving in Malaya represented between 84% and 100% of its total population...
The Malayan Peninsula... then unrelated northern Borneo, and Australia, were all relatively sparsely populated before the arrival of the British in these places in the 1780s. Although figures are highly controversial, the Peninsula and Australia appear each to have then had sparse populations below a half-million in total... The question of indigeneity, or indigeny as Geoffrey Benjamin insists on calling it, is extremely politicized in Malaysia... Wheatley (1961: 232) concludes from the silence of Arab navigators in the previous period that they found no ‘civilised human settlement and opportunity for trade’ to the south of the place they called Kalah...
[In Malaysia] Pockets of rice-cultivators may already have settled the river-mouth areas of Kedah, Kelantan and Pahang before 1400, presumably through interactions of Indian traders, aboriginal populations, and other mobile Southeast Asians from Sumatra and elsewhere. We cannot label them ethnically before the category ‘Malay’ began to be created by the hybridizing genius of fifteenth century Melaka. In such a crossroads of trade routes, the migrants were also more diverse than Australia’s. The major waves of migrants before 1870 were:
[Malay kings, Minangkabau pioneers, Bugis, the European/Chinese/Indian/SEAsians in what became the Straits Settlements, Chinese mining & agricultural pioneers, Organised contract labourers {mostly Cantonese and Tamil}, others]...
There developed a more artificial racial construct of ‘whiteness’ (in Australia) or ‘Malayness’ (in Malaysia), which could be all the more shrill because it had no basis in a shared past...
A fierce competition between generations and types of migrants, about the identity of the state and the types of new migrants. Racism has been a marked feature of migrant societies, because of the way the dominant migrant community seeks to cohere against both the aboriginal population and other more recent and hungry migrant groups who threaten their control. The unnaturalness of these exclusions was part of the reason why racism reached such shrill heights at times in the 20th Century...
We might hope that migrants would be highly tolerant of other migrants, sympathetic to their needs and to their legitimacy. In this regard the Malay rulers and gate-keepers get the highest marks for tolerance and absorption of a diversity of migrants. Malay identity proved wonderfully absorptive in the 15th Century as a creative creole, turning Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Javanese and Filipinos into loyal subjects of the sultan, bilingual in their own language and Malay. Although the line between Muslim insiders and non-Muslim outsiders became gradually more firm from the 16th century, right up to the 20th migrants constantly joined the main game through accepting Islam (masuk Melayu). In this the Malay record long-term is far more generous and accommodating than that of the British in places such as Australia...
[Mahathir] argued that every country has a ‘definitive people’ who were the first immigrants to set up states in the territory in question. Since the aborigines in both Malaysia and Australia were stateless peoples who did not do this, it was the Malays in Malaya, like the English-speaking Christians in Australia, who defined the core culture and set the conditions by which subsequent migrants were admitted. [He interpreted] Australia somewhat idiosyncratically to suit his argument for permanent Malay supremacy in Malaysia"
Post ID: 4672194072409042511
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Links - 10th August 2010
"We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez: small, sweet, and coming out of a funny, plastic head." - Dennis Miller
***
iPad(lock) – Why you should think twice about buying an iPad - "First I jailbroke my iPhone. Then I installed a firewall application on it from an unofficial "app store" called Cydia. Only then did I notice that many applications I had purchased through Apple's App Store were trying to contact PinchMedia. Now I have the freedom to block these outbound connections. But do you? Because I jailbroke my iPhone I can make Skype calls through 3G. Can you? I can now also change, not only the background image of the home screen, but completely theme the operating system. Can you? It' 2010. Why do I have to jump over hurdles and obstacles and break the law. Just in order to be able to use a gadget I bought in the manner I choose to? By buying an iPad you are sending out powerful messages. Not only are you declaring to the world how cool and stylish you are, you are also stating that you don't care about your privacy and that you are prepared to give up certain freedoms."
iPad's lack of Flash/USB/Bluetooth is all about lock-in (updated) - "That’s why Apple uses an expensive proprietary 30-pin “dock connector” instead of USB. They get to sell expensive cables (there’s no OTA syncing of content, natch) and they get to license the connectors to legions of third parties clamoring to make peripherals for the device. More importantly though, Apple wants to sell millions of $69 keyboard docks and maintain control over what is passed across the dock connector port. The same goes for expandable memory…"
One comment: "I have been using Apple products almost since the beginning and one of the biggest complaints that us Mac users would was that PC makers (MS) wanted to rule the world. It seemed everything was for the PC. Nothing seemed to work with the Mac line. So Apple became more proprietary, more expensive and highly arrogant"
The pettiness of the race - "With the pathetic and banal predictability that is fast becoming the hallmark of Indian politics, history has repeated itself. Our next President will probably be Mrs Pratibha Patil, the archetypal last-minute candidate whose name was accepted because nobody could find anything objectionable about her... I find this whole “Look, we’ve found a woman President! Hooray!” routine obscene and offensive... Why is Mrs Patil a better candidate than Mr Patil? Both are steady, mainstream Maharashtra politicians who will toe the Congress line. But she’s a woman and, therefore, difficult for a politically correct commissar to oppose. So, the conclusion of this leg of the presidential race was not a victory for woman’s empowerment at all. Rather, gender was used as a weapon to win a petty political fight that was about something entirely different. I’m a little tired also of seeing women politicians on TV telling us smugly (the ones from the Congress) or hysterically (the ones from the Left) how the election of Mrs Patil will actually help Indian women. If history has taught us anything it is that the caste, gender and religion of the occupant of Rashtrapati Bhavan make no difference to those whose aspirations they are supposed to symbolise. It is hard to think how Muslims have benefited from having Kalam in the top job. Nor did Dalits gain from Naryanan’s stature. And Sikhs actually suffered because of Zail Singh’s machinations. And when it comes to gender in particular, there is no evidence that women benefit significantly when other women are in power"
Swift Kick Central: Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
This is why NUS vets valedictorian speeches; the only thing worse than standardised testing is having no standardised testing
Official – Vatican does compare child abuse with ordaining women - "Apologists for the Vatican have recently claimed that the Catholic Church does not compare sexually abusing a child with attempting to ordain a woman, but that it merely included both crimes in the same document as a procedural matter... the direction of the comparison is not that they consider these theological crimes to be as serious as sexually abusing a child, but that they consider sexually abusing a child to be as serious as these theological crimes... sexually abusing a child is listed not as a crime against the child, but as a crime against the Biblical commandment forbidding adultery. And attempting to ordain a woman attracts a more serious punishment than sexually abusing a child. This is the type of morality that results when people put theology ahead of reality"
Smashing The Clock - "No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace"
Language Log » The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese Script - "My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong... Today, I made the students close their computers, electronic dictionaries, and all their books and papers, then asked them to write down on a piece of paper the simplified and traditional characters for Taiwan...
* only 2 students could write both forms correctly
* only 4 students could write both forms partially correctly
* only 10 students could write one form correctly
* about 10 students could write one form partially correctly
* the remainder of the students could not write either form correctly, including a couple of the native speakers
* most students who had taken up to 6 years of Chinese couldn't write either form correctly"
Addendum: More evidence that Chinese is freaking difficult, even for "native speakers"; "汉字不灭，中国必亡".
DNA Boosts Herodotus’ Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy - "“Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom,” wrote the Greek historian Theopompos of Chios in the fourth century B.C. “Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they dine not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be present.” He added that Etruscan women “are also expert drinkers and are very good looking”... Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire and the Etruscan state that preceded it, asserting a foreign origin for the Etruscans has long been politically controversial in Italy. Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan studies in Italy who died in 1995, held that because no one questioned that the French, say, developed in France, the same assumption should be made about the Etruscans. “Someone who had a different position didn’t get a job in archaeology,” said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia."
Ovulation hormones make women 'choose clingy clothes' - "These hormonal shopping habits were triggered by the proximity of attractive women... "Our findings suggest marketers for many types of female products are well served to strategically time their mailings, coupons, electronic solicitations, and direct requests to the specific window when women are ovulating"... "Women do the choosing [of mates] but in order to enable them to choose, they need a good number of suitors to select from""
Templeton prayer study meets expectations - "Subjects were recruited from a self-selected population of rural Africans who were attending a charismatic/evangelical revival…that is, people who knew they would be rewarded with acclaim if they publicly demonstrated dramatic improvements in their health under the influence of a priest. This experiment did not use single-blind trials — in fact, the subjects were hammered repeatedly with the protocol until they reported that it worked for them, subjectively... Most damning of all, there were no controls. I repeat, no controls anywhere in the experiment... I'm also not surprised that this garbage was funded by the Templeton Foundation. It could only have been supported by an organization that places scientific rigor a distant second to making excuses for faith"
Apple Hater Seeks Roommate in the Big Apple via Craigslist
"I refuse to live with anyone that has sold their immortal soul to Steve Jobs. I don't care about your app that tells you when you need to water your plants. I don't care that your phone can function as a Speak N Spell. I don't care that your phone has a million "exciting" features that exist elsewhere... Upon meeting, you must show me your phone (no scammers! I will be calling it in person to confirm that it is indeed your phone)"
Young men affected by romance drama more than women - "A possible explanation for the findings could be that for young men, their romantic partners are often their primary source of intimacy, whereas young women are more likely to have close relationships with family and friends... while young men are more affected emotionally by the quality of their current relationships, young women are more emotionally affected by whether they are in a relationship or not"
Why Evolution May Favor Irrationality - "We fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways... these lapses have a purpose: they help us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” says psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania. Failures of logic, he and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris propose, are in fact effective ploys to win arguments. That puts poor reasoning in a completely different light. Arguing, after all, is less about seeking truth than about overcoming opposing views"
Untidy beds may keep us healthy - "Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies. A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed"
Eva Mendes Sex Tape
SFW
Funniest Commercial
Thai ads are good
Lufthansa Searches for Savor in the Sky - "Seasonings like cardamom, lemon grass and curry survived better than salt and sugar"... Lufthansa's sommelier, is using the analysis to help select wines like Italian Amarone, with a strong 15% alcohol content. "On the ground, it's a very opulent and powerful wine, but in the air, it tastes light—it's the ideal airline wine""
Making the case for the Death penalty - "Obviously there are some people who still think differently. That is their mindset and I have no business trying to change theirs as long as they don’t change mine."
Great Singaporean logic (as with the rest of the article), which is self-defeating to boot.
The Rise of the Caring Industry - "By focusing on a person’s problem, short-term therapy mimics the experience of real friendship... Today’s caring professionals offer the same service to lonely, unhappy people that friends and relatives once did. They do so because so many Americans are lonely and unhappy... An estimated 95 percent of Americans have low self-esteem. Consistent with these trends, at least 15 percent of Americans are now on a psychoactive drug at any given moment... In the 1940s, the top three discipline problems in schools were talking, chewing gum, and making noise; in the 1980s, they were drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and suicide... the caring industry continues the trend toward speech codes that curtail speech on the grounds that some of it is “hurtful” and can injure another person’s self-esteem"
I suspect most of the rhetoric is unjustified
***
iPad(lock) – Why you should think twice about buying an iPad - "First I jailbroke my iPhone. Then I installed a firewall application on it from an unofficial "app store" called Cydia. Only then did I notice that many applications I had purchased through Apple's App Store were trying to contact PinchMedia. Now I have the freedom to block these outbound connections. But do you? Because I jailbroke my iPhone I can make Skype calls through 3G. Can you? I can now also change, not only the background image of the home screen, but completely theme the operating system. Can you? It' 2010. Why do I have to jump over hurdles and obstacles and break the law. Just in order to be able to use a gadget I bought in the manner I choose to? By buying an iPad you are sending out powerful messages. Not only are you declaring to the world how cool and stylish you are, you are also stating that you don't care about your privacy and that you are prepared to give up certain freedoms."
iPad's lack of Flash/USB/Bluetooth is all about lock-in (updated) - "That’s why Apple uses an expensive proprietary 30-pin “dock connector” instead of USB. They get to sell expensive cables (there’s no OTA syncing of content, natch) and they get to license the connectors to legions of third parties clamoring to make peripherals for the device. More importantly though, Apple wants to sell millions of $69 keyboard docks and maintain control over what is passed across the dock connector port. The same goes for expandable memory…"
One comment: "I have been using Apple products almost since the beginning and one of the biggest complaints that us Mac users would was that PC makers (MS) wanted to rule the world. It seemed everything was for the PC. Nothing seemed to work with the Mac line. So Apple became more proprietary, more expensive and highly arrogant"
The pettiness of the race - "With the pathetic and banal predictability that is fast becoming the hallmark of Indian politics, history has repeated itself. Our next President will probably be Mrs Pratibha Patil, the archetypal last-minute candidate whose name was accepted because nobody could find anything objectionable about her... I find this whole “Look, we’ve found a woman President! Hooray!” routine obscene and offensive... Why is Mrs Patil a better candidate than Mr Patil? Both are steady, mainstream Maharashtra politicians who will toe the Congress line. But she’s a woman and, therefore, difficult for a politically correct commissar to oppose. So, the conclusion of this leg of the presidential race was not a victory for woman’s empowerment at all. Rather, gender was used as a weapon to win a petty political fight that was about something entirely different. I’m a little tired also of seeing women politicians on TV telling us smugly (the ones from the Congress) or hysterically (the ones from the Left) how the election of Mrs Patil will actually help Indian women. If history has taught us anything it is that the caste, gender and religion of the occupant of Rashtrapati Bhavan make no difference to those whose aspirations they are supposed to symbolise. It is hard to think how Muslims have benefited from having Kalam in the top job. Nor did Dalits gain from Naryanan’s stature. And Sikhs actually suffered because of Zail Singh’s machinations. And when it comes to gender in particular, there is no evidence that women benefit significantly when other women are in power"
Swift Kick Central: Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech
This is why NUS vets valedictorian speeches; the only thing worse than standardised testing is having no standardised testing
Official – Vatican does compare child abuse with ordaining women - "Apologists for the Vatican have recently claimed that the Catholic Church does not compare sexually abusing a child with attempting to ordain a woman, but that it merely included both crimes in the same document as a procedural matter... the direction of the comparison is not that they consider these theological crimes to be as serious as sexually abusing a child, but that they consider sexually abusing a child to be as serious as these theological crimes... sexually abusing a child is listed not as a crime against the child, but as a crime against the Biblical commandment forbidding adultery. And attempting to ordain a woman attracts a more serious punishment than sexually abusing a child. This is the type of morality that results when people put theology ahead of reality"
Smashing The Clock - "No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace"
Language Log » The Opacity and Difficulty of the Chinese Script - "My class on the Chinese script has around 36 students in it. About half of them are native speakers from Taiwan, the Mainland, Singapore, and Hong Kong... Today, I made the students close their computers, electronic dictionaries, and all their books and papers, then asked them to write down on a piece of paper the simplified and traditional characters for Taiwan...
* only 2 students could write both forms correctly
* only 4 students could write both forms partially correctly
* only 10 students could write one form correctly
* about 10 students could write one form partially correctly
* the remainder of the students could not write either form correctly, including a couple of the native speakers
* most students who had taken up to 6 years of Chinese couldn't write either form correctly"
Addendum: More evidence that Chinese is freaking difficult, even for "native speakers"; "汉字不灭，中国必亡".
DNA Boosts Herodotus’ Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy - "“Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom,” wrote the Greek historian Theopompos of Chios in the fourth century B.C. “Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they dine not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be present.” He added that Etruscan women “are also expert drinkers and are very good looking”... Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire and the Etruscan state that preceded it, asserting a foreign origin for the Etruscans has long been politically controversial in Italy. Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan studies in Italy who died in 1995, held that because no one questioned that the French, say, developed in France, the same assumption should be made about the Etruscans. “Someone who had a different position didn’t get a job in archaeology,” said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia."
Ovulation hormones make women 'choose clingy clothes' - "These hormonal shopping habits were triggered by the proximity of attractive women... "Our findings suggest marketers for many types of female products are well served to strategically time their mailings, coupons, electronic solicitations, and direct requests to the specific window when women are ovulating"... "Women do the choosing [of mates] but in order to enable them to choose, they need a good number of suitors to select from""
Templeton prayer study meets expectations - "Subjects were recruited from a self-selected population of rural Africans who were attending a charismatic/evangelical revival…that is, people who knew they would be rewarded with acclaim if they publicly demonstrated dramatic improvements in their health under the influence of a priest. This experiment did not use single-blind trials — in fact, the subjects were hammered repeatedly with the protocol until they reported that it worked for them, subjectively... Most damning of all, there were no controls. I repeat, no controls anywhere in the experiment... I'm also not surprised that this garbage was funded by the Templeton Foundation. It could only have been supported by an organization that places scientific rigor a distant second to making excuses for faith"
Apple Hater Seeks Roommate in the Big Apple via Craigslist
"I refuse to live with anyone that has sold their immortal soul to Steve Jobs. I don't care about your app that tells you when you need to water your plants. I don't care that your phone can function as a Speak N Spell. I don't care that your phone has a million "exciting" features that exist elsewhere... Upon meeting, you must show me your phone (no scammers! I will be calling it in person to confirm that it is indeed your phone)"
Young men affected by romance drama more than women - "A possible explanation for the findings could be that for young men, their romantic partners are often their primary source of intimacy, whereas young women are more likely to have close relationships with family and friends... while young men are more affected emotionally by the quality of their current relationships, young women are more emotionally affected by whether they are in a relationship or not"
Why Evolution May Favor Irrationality - "We fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways... these lapses have a purpose: they help us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” says psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania. Failures of logic, he and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris propose, are in fact effective ploys to win arguments. That puts poor reasoning in a completely different light. Arguing, after all, is less about seeking truth than about overcoming opposing views"
Untidy beds may keep us healthy - "Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies. A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed"
Eva Mendes Sex Tape
SFW
Funniest Commercial
Thai ads are good
Lufthansa Searches for Savor in the Sky - "Seasonings like cardamom, lemon grass and curry survived better than salt and sugar"... Lufthansa's sommelier, is using the analysis to help select wines like Italian Amarone, with a strong 15% alcohol content. "On the ground, it's a very opulent and powerful wine, but in the air, it tastes light—it's the ideal airline wine""
Making the case for the Death penalty - "Obviously there are some people who still think differently. That is their mindset and I have no business trying to change theirs as long as they don’t change mine."
Great Singaporean logic (as with the rest of the article), which is self-defeating to boot.
The Rise of the Caring Industry - "By focusing on a person’s problem, short-term therapy mimics the experience of real friendship... Today’s caring professionals offer the same service to lonely, unhappy people that friends and relatives once did. They do so because so many Americans are lonely and unhappy... An estimated 95 percent of Americans have low self-esteem. Consistent with these trends, at least 15 percent of Americans are now on a psychoactive drug at any given moment... In the 1940s, the top three discipline problems in schools were talking, chewing gum, and making noise; in the 1980s, they were drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and suicide... the caring industry continues the trend toward speech codes that curtail speech on the grounds that some of it is “hurtful” and can injure another person’s self-esteem"
I suspect most of the rhetoric is unjustified
Post ID: 8444945502454554380
Why I don't watch French films
"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble." - Samuel Johnson
***
"Aural jouissance has been associated with the feminine in Christian cultures since the Annunciation, when the angel’s words penetrated the Virgin Mary’s ear. (This sexualization of the recessed and largely invisible organ of hearing was supposedly the reason why in the Middle Ages it was customary for respectable women at least to wear wimples)...
Thai drive is most clearly expressed when the narrator says: ‘J’étais très excite quand je faisais ça, mais je ne suis pas sûr que je bandais par exemple. Je devrais plutôt dire, comme une femme, que je mouillais’. He does, of course, ‘get wet’ in a literal and uncomplicatedly abject way, kneeling down on a urine-soaked floor in pursuit of his goal, which may even stimulate fantasies of wetness of another kind, unattainable to the male. But the intransitive use of ‘mouiller’ suggests an envious usurpation of female sexual arousal, and thus a refusal of male sexual possession analogous to that diagnosed by Amengual. The abjection here is multiple: in the activity described, in the manner and context of its description and most strikingly in its dephallicized quality. The public toilet or rest-room has traditionally, as a result of legal repression, been regarded as a sexual space almost exclusively by male homosexuals (the French ‘tasse,’ corresponding to the English ‘cottage’), so to find it sexualized in what turns out to be a doubly female manner, via the feminization of the voyeur, suggests a disconcerting rejection of the penis/phallus and all its works...
When they rush into a service station in order to use the (non-segregated) toilets, Carmen pisses in the urinal, not standing up (which would have been as close as she could come to a performative denial of difference and/or to an admission of penis envy) but squatting, as though to suggest that while sexual difference undoubtedly exists she is capable of transcending it — of becoming, in other words, the ‘real male’ in their inexorably doomed couple. The scene is watched by a bystander, played by the chubby Jacques Villeret who is best known for his comic roles for more popular directors such as Claude Lelouch and Jean Becker. Villeret shows no sign of sexual arousal, but continues, in childlike pre-sexual fashion, to wolf down jam from a jar with his fingers...
Here Joseph, still in agony after Carmen has rejected him, masturbates in the shower — clearly what Boujut is referring to when he writes ‘on s’y branle.’ However, perhaps like the Roland Amstutz character in Sauve qui petit, Joseph does not get an erection. His at once frenzied and distracted tugging at his own unresponsive flesh, worthy of a Houellebecquian hero, signais the calamitous collapse of the desire that a few minutes before had him all but crucified across the television...
Bataille's well-deserved reputation for debauchery and excess might make him appear an unlikely candidate for such an approach, but we have seen that in his work vomiting and erotic exhaustion are commonplace and that penetrative sex tends to be the exception rather than the rule. It is in Bataille too that we come across the most explicit eroticization of the mother’ s body, more shocking perhaps in Tropmann’ s masturbation beside her dead body in Le Bleu du ciel than in the more ‘conventionally’ incestuous denouement of Ma mère"
--- The abject object: avatars of the phallus in contemporary French theory, literature and film / Keith Reader
On the upside, I now know that mouiller is the equivalent of bander!
***
"Aural jouissance has been associated with the feminine in Christian cultures since the Annunciation, when the angel’s words penetrated the Virgin Mary’s ear. (This sexualization of the recessed and largely invisible organ of hearing was supposedly the reason why in the Middle Ages it was customary for respectable women at least to wear wimples)...
Thai drive is most clearly expressed when the narrator says: ‘J’étais très excite quand je faisais ça, mais je ne suis pas sûr que je bandais par exemple. Je devrais plutôt dire, comme une femme, que je mouillais’. He does, of course, ‘get wet’ in a literal and uncomplicatedly abject way, kneeling down on a urine-soaked floor in pursuit of his goal, which may even stimulate fantasies of wetness of another kind, unattainable to the male. But the intransitive use of ‘mouiller’ suggests an envious usurpation of female sexual arousal, and thus a refusal of male sexual possession analogous to that diagnosed by Amengual. The abjection here is multiple: in the activity described, in the manner and context of its description and most strikingly in its dephallicized quality. The public toilet or rest-room has traditionally, as a result of legal repression, been regarded as a sexual space almost exclusively by male homosexuals (the French ‘tasse,’ corresponding to the English ‘cottage’), so to find it sexualized in what turns out to be a doubly female manner, via the feminization of the voyeur, suggests a disconcerting rejection of the penis/phallus and all its works...
When they rush into a service station in order to use the (non-segregated) toilets, Carmen pisses in the urinal, not standing up (which would have been as close as she could come to a performative denial of difference and/or to an admission of penis envy) but squatting, as though to suggest that while sexual difference undoubtedly exists she is capable of transcending it — of becoming, in other words, the ‘real male’ in their inexorably doomed couple. The scene is watched by a bystander, played by the chubby Jacques Villeret who is best known for his comic roles for more popular directors such as Claude Lelouch and Jean Becker. Villeret shows no sign of sexual arousal, but continues, in childlike pre-sexual fashion, to wolf down jam from a jar with his fingers...
Here Joseph, still in agony after Carmen has rejected him, masturbates in the shower — clearly what Boujut is referring to when he writes ‘on s’y branle.’ However, perhaps like the Roland Amstutz character in Sauve qui petit, Joseph does not get an erection. His at once frenzied and distracted tugging at his own unresponsive flesh, worthy of a Houellebecquian hero, signais the calamitous collapse of the desire that a few minutes before had him all but crucified across the television...
Bataille's well-deserved reputation for debauchery and excess might make him appear an unlikely candidate for such an approach, but we have seen that in his work vomiting and erotic exhaustion are commonplace and that penetrative sex tends to be the exception rather than the rule. It is in Bataille too that we come across the most explicit eroticization of the mother’ s body, more shocking perhaps in Tropmann’ s masturbation beside her dead body in Le Bleu du ciel than in the more ‘conventionally’ incestuous denouement of Ma mère"
--- The abject object: avatars of the phallus in contemporary French theory, literature and film / Keith Reader
On the upside, I now know that mouiller is the equivalent of bander!
Post ID: 4371782596798903220
Monday, August 09, 2010
Winston Churchill on Democracy, Constitutional Safeguards and the Separation of Powers
"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience." - John Updike
***
"The spirit of the Parliament Act, and the purpose of that Act, were to secure the intimate, effective and continuous influence of the will of the people upon the conduct and progress of their affairs. That was the purpose—not the will of the governors or the governesses of the people, but the will of the people...
Democracy, I must explain to the Lord President, does not mean, "We have got our majority, never mind how, and we have our lease of office for five years, so what are you going to do about it?" That is not democracy, that is only small party patter, which will not go down with the mass of the people of this country...
The right hon. Gentleman has an obvious, unconcealable, well-known relish for petty dictatorship. He has many good qualities, but he should always be on guard against his propensity and love to "cat and mouse" people from morning until night. Look at all the power he is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution...
It is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament... We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters...
Both progress and stability are needed to make a happy country. But the right hon. Gentleman complains that the present Second Chamber has, from its composition, an undue bias in favour of stability...
No free country of which I have heard up to the present... which is enjoying democratic institutions has adopted single-Chamber Government. The United States, the Swiss, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French even in their latest constitution have a Second Chamber. Eire has created its own Senate... All feel that between the chance vote of an election on universal sufferage and the permanent alteration of the whole slowly built structure of the State and nation there ought to be some modifying process...
Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature"
PARLIAMENT BILL (Hansard, 11 November 1947): HC Deb 11 November 1947 vol 444 cc203-321)
***
"The spirit of the Parliament Act, and the purpose of that Act, were to secure the intimate, effective and continuous influence of the will of the people upon the conduct and progress of their affairs. That was the purpose—not the will of the governors or the governesses of the people, but the will of the people...
Democracy, I must explain to the Lord President, does not mean, "We have got our majority, never mind how, and we have our lease of office for five years, so what are you going to do about it?" That is not democracy, that is only small party patter, which will not go down with the mass of the people of this country...
The right hon. Gentleman has an obvious, unconcealable, well-known relish for petty dictatorship. He has many good qualities, but he should always be on guard against his propensity and love to "cat and mouse" people from morning until night. Look at all the power he is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution...
It is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament... We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters...
Both progress and stability are needed to make a happy country. But the right hon. Gentleman complains that the present Second Chamber has, from its composition, an undue bias in favour of stability...
No free country of which I have heard up to the present... which is enjoying democratic institutions has adopted single-Chamber Government. The United States, the Swiss, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French even in their latest constitution have a Second Chamber. Eire has created its own Senate... All feel that between the chance vote of an election on universal sufferage and the permanent alteration of the whole slowly built structure of the State and nation there ought to be some modifying process...
Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature"
PARLIAMENT BILL (Hansard, 11 November 1947): HC Deb 11 November 1947 vol 444 cc203-321)
Post ID: 2982319287744952991
NDP Pledge Time
The bells of St Teresa's Church started ringing, which they are not wont to often do.
Perhaps this was to remind people that no Man may serve two Masters.
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."
(presumably they do not quote this very often in City Harvest and other Propserity Gospel churches)
Perhaps this was to remind people that no Man may serve two Masters.
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."
(presumably they do not quote this very often in City Harvest and other Propserity Gospel churches)
Post ID: 3088005899824747209
Differential outrage
"Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin." - Stanislaw J. Lec
***
The reaction to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is to label it a "thinly veiled excercises in xenophobia and racism", and to claim that:
Since this issue is framed not as being about blasphemy or free speech, but "about privilege, racism and xenophobia", it is no wonder there is a reaction totally blown out of proportion to the imaginary harm caused.
Meanwhile, real examples of real harm (where lives are ruined, or threatened to be ruined) get bland "I'm sorry"-s and "we [should] agree to disagree". Reactions that, if applied to cases where "privilege, racism and xenophobia" are seen to apply (in lieu of the usual frothy tirades), would get a reaction equally (if not more) scathing as the original article cited.
It is indeed appropriate to see this coming from the Barnyard Chorus. Truly, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
(Going back to the original issue, the irony, as one commenter pointed out?
***
The reaction to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is to label it a "thinly veiled excercises in xenophobia and racism", and to claim that:
By violating objects and ideas that are held sacred by marginalized populations with an eye to upholding your own privileged hegemony you are doing harm. You are doing harm by normalizing and celebrating violence (for the violation of the sacred is a form of violence) against an entire population of people. You are doing harm by courting a negative reaction from this population that will then add to the fire that caricatures Muslims as reactive and unreasonable. You are doing harm by using your position of privilege to publicly deride an already marginalized population.
Since this issue is framed not as being about blasphemy or free speech, but "about privilege, racism and xenophobia", it is no wonder there is a reaction totally blown out of proportion to the imaginary harm caused.
Meanwhile, real examples of real harm (where lives are ruined, or threatened to be ruined) get bland "I'm sorry"-s and "we [should] agree to disagree". Reactions that, if applied to cases where "privilege, racism and xenophobia" are seen to apply (in lieu of the usual frothy tirades), would get a reaction equally (if not more) scathing as the original article cited.
It is indeed appropriate to see this coming from the Barnyard Chorus. Truly, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
(Going back to the original issue, the irony, as one commenter pointed out?
for an article which disparages the act of perpetuating sterotypes, it is itself also guilty of characterizing Muslims as disenfranchised minorities, and not only that, miniorities who will necessarily react violently in response... criticising the act as a form of western imperialism meant to incite violence from minorities is like saying that women who wear skimpy clothing and are sexually molested are in the wrong for being "incendiary")
Post ID: 4646498812865865246
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Divine Ecstasy
Sex is a religious experience for some. And some religious rituals involve sex:
"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying."
--- Of Visions. The Graces Our Lord Bestowed on the Saint. The Answers Our Lord Gave Her for Those Who Tried Her: Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of The Order of Our Lady of Carmel
"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying."
--- Of Visions. The Graces Our Lord Bestowed on the Saint. The Answers Our Lord Gave Her for Those Who Tried Her: Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of The Order of Our Lady of Carmel
Post ID: 9055775712407483787
Obscurantism in Philosophy
philosophy bites: Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism
"[On Sartre being on Speed when writing his later works] It was appalling. It was absolutely ghastly. I mean, I didn't like the style of Being and Nothingness, though I enjoyed the anecdotal part of it. And I enjoyed the sort of huge metaphysical structure that it was all built around.
But it appalled me when I first read it. But it was nothing... the incomprehensible and really shoddy way that the critique was written
But when that book came out, we hadn't yet had the benefit of yet more incomprehensible and deliberately incomprehensible French philosophers like Derrida... who really are unreadable, and meant to be so...
They wanted to be profound. And I think they were unduly influenced by Heidegger, who thought that philosophy had to have a whole special vocabulary and way of going about things, that nobody could possibly understand.
I think really, from Hegel onwards, one branch of philosophy did delight in obscurity. And I think that is a totally mistaken view of what philosophy should be about."
"[On Sartre being on Speed when writing his later works] It was appalling. It was absolutely ghastly. I mean, I didn't like the style of Being and Nothingness, though I enjoyed the anecdotal part of it. And I enjoyed the sort of huge metaphysical structure that it was all built around.
But it appalled me when I first read it. But it was nothing... the incomprehensible and really shoddy way that the critique was written
But when that book came out, we hadn't yet had the benefit of yet more incomprehensible and deliberately incomprehensible French philosophers like Derrida... who really are unreadable, and meant to be so...
They wanted to be profound. And I think they were unduly influenced by Heidegger, who thought that philosophy had to have a whole special vocabulary and way of going about things, that nobody could possibly understand.
I think really, from Hegel onwards, one branch of philosophy did delight in obscurity. And I think that is a totally mistaken view of what philosophy should be about."
Post ID: 9039352152312932737
iPhone4 vs HTC Evo
"Fools rush in where fools have been before." - Unknown
***
""Is it an iPhone?"...
"It's similar to an iPhone, but has a bigger screen"
"I don't care"
"The internet speeds are around 3 times faster"
"I don't care"
"It has a higher resolution camera on both the front and the back"
"I don't care"
"And it doesn't require you to be on Wi-Fi to use video chat"
"I don't care"
"Its battery is replaceable, as is the memory card"
"I don't care"
"It is highly customisable. Everything from the widgets to the icons, the fonts and even has video wallpaper"
"I don't care"
"The monthly bill is cheaper"
"I don't care"
"It fucking prints money"
"It can grant up to 3 wishes, even if one of those wishes is for an iPhone"
"I don't care"...
"Not only are you so batshit stupid that you still want this device, you are also so retarded that you think you can just fucking waltz into any store and purchase one on launch day without a pre-order?
I think I need to go chop off my own dick now. Yes. I think I will. I don't need my children growing up in a world populated by dipshits like you""
***
""Is it an iPhone?"...
"It's similar to an iPhone, but has a bigger screen"
"I don't care"
"The internet speeds are around 3 times faster"
"I don't care"
"It has a higher resolution camera on both the front and the back"
"I don't care"
"And it doesn't require you to be on Wi-Fi to use video chat"
"I don't care"
"Its battery is replaceable, as is the memory card"
"I don't care"
"It is highly customisable. Everything from the widgets to the icons, the fonts and even has video wallpaper"
"I don't care"
"The monthly bill is cheaper"
"I don't care"
"It fucking prints money"
"It can grant up to 3 wishes, even if one of those wishes is for an iPhone"
"I don't care"...
"Not only are you so batshit stupid that you still want this device, you are also so retarded that you think you can just fucking waltz into any store and purchase one on launch day without a pre-order?
I think I need to go chop off my own dick now. Yes. I think I will. I don't need my children growing up in a world populated by dipshits like you""
Post ID: 6453665189774238596
A suggestion on reducing the wastage of cookhouse food
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'" - Theodore Roosevelt
***
"To Whom It May Concern,
1. Recently, I have read about wastages in public funds amounting to $22,000 due to excess meal orders being covered up. I would like to propose a USMS suggestion to deal with this issue.
2. I believe this has been happening at many camps, and not just a few out of many. In fact, this has happened during the time I served my NS, and I wrote a small USMS suggestion regarding what to do with excess food, but it was rejected. I have modified what I have written, and added in new improvements.
3. The system I believe, is this. Every week, the CQMS or RQ or QM, or a specialist arrowed by either of them, compiles a list of people who will be in camp. This list is then submitted to the cookhouse personnel so they can prepare the exact amount of food. From what I recall, there is no opt-out system. This will not be so bad, except there are a numerous amount of canteens in camp, serving food at far cheaper prices. Here, I use the estimate from what I recall in my NSF days - lunch and dinner cost about $5.00 each. If I am not mistaken, canteen food is cheaper.
4. What I propose is this:
a. The allowance for NSFs per month will increase by the amount of current breakfast/lunch/dinner prices. This should pose no financial burden on MINDEF, since that sum is already deducted, albeit invisibly.
b. i) Any NSF (or regular) of rank CPL and above can choose to indent food for the upcoming month, and submit the time period where he will be in camp (to consume food) to the respective personnel. This is subject to unit constraints, or
ii) Any NSF (or regular) who is primarily in Service, and not in Combat, can also choose to indent food for the upcoming month regardless of rank, and submit the time period where he will be in camp (to consume food) to the respective personnel.
with the understanding that the cost of the food consumed at the cookhouse will be deducted from his allowance. If this NSF (or regular) wants to consume food solely from the cookhouse for the entire month, then after deduction from his allowance, his allowance should be what an NSF (or regular) of similar rank gets currently.
5. If an NSF (or regular) prefers to eat at the canteen everyday in this case, let him. He is saving the SAF money, because he is not indenting food which will be wasted.
6. There may be worries that this may spike a trend of all NSFs (or regulars) going to eat at the canteen instead. But then that means canteen food is preferable to cookhouse food, and SFI should either lower the cost (now visible) of its food, or make the food more palatable. This is what I have learnt from Economics studied in JC.
7. There may also be fewer cases of over-indenting occuring. Seeing the true cost reflected in one's allowance will give one pause to think. To give an example, the cost of water in India in different provinces is either free to farmers, or supplied at below its true price. This leads to many farmers overabusing this supply of water, and not using it efficiently. Of course, India also suffers from a water crisis now. Similarly, if an NSF (or regular) does not know the true price of SFI food, and thinks it comes free, you cannot expect them to eat at the cookhouse each day. It is interesting to note that the cost of food is not reflected to servicemen (at least not during my time) - I only found out by asking people. I do not believe many NSFs will be like me and actively try to find out more while serving the nation. Ignorance, after all, is bliss, and it is easier to pretend the cost of food is negligible and continue to waste it, instead of actively doing something.
8. 4b i) will also encourage combat personnel to pass their IPPT (to get CPL promotion), so they can decide whether they want to eat at the cookhouse.
9. Since there will still be excess food, though perhaps not as much, I also suggest giving these foods to the following groups of people: a) Hungry NSFs who want to eat more, b) Construction workers, Maintenance personnel, or Domestic Cleaners working on any projects within the unit or camp. There can be a centralized area with the understanding: If there is any excess food, come to this area at a set time to eat. There can also be a form to sign, similar to those given by the civil service / other private organizations which disclaims all liability like food poisoning, etc from the food. This can help spread goodwill about the SAF as well.
10. Lastly, if this solution seems too complicated, a variant would be to increase the NSF (or regular)'s allowance to include the food cost, but then it will be deducted anyway. While this seems like a waste of time - it is what is happening now, just that it is not explicitly shown in the allowance, knowing the true cost of food may let some servicemen reconsider their actions of not eating. Point 7 comes to play.
11. I hope this suggestion is of help.
Best Regards,
CFC(NS) XXX"
This is a good suggestion (not from me, of course).
Which is why the SAF will never adopt it.
As we all know, the SAF's Core Values are Stupidity, Sadism and Senselessness.
***
"To Whom It May Concern,
1. Recently, I have read about wastages in public funds amounting to $22,000 due to excess meal orders being covered up. I would like to propose a USMS suggestion to deal with this issue.
2. I believe this has been happening at many camps, and not just a few out of many. In fact, this has happened during the time I served my NS, and I wrote a small USMS suggestion regarding what to do with excess food, but it was rejected. I have modified what I have written, and added in new improvements.
3. The system I believe, is this. Every week, the CQMS or RQ or QM, or a specialist arrowed by either of them, compiles a list of people who will be in camp. This list is then submitted to the cookhouse personnel so they can prepare the exact amount of food. From what I recall, there is no opt-out system. This will not be so bad, except there are a numerous amount of canteens in camp, serving food at far cheaper prices. Here, I use the estimate from what I recall in my NSF days - lunch and dinner cost about $5.00 each. If I am not mistaken, canteen food is cheaper.
4. What I propose is this:
a. The allowance for NSFs per month will increase by the amount of current breakfast/lunch/dinner prices. This should pose no financial burden on MINDEF, since that sum is already deducted, albeit invisibly.
b. i) Any NSF (or regular) of rank CPL and above can choose to indent food for the upcoming month, and submit the time period where he will be in camp (to consume food) to the respective personnel. This is subject to unit constraints, or
ii) Any NSF (or regular) who is primarily in Service, and not in Combat, can also choose to indent food for the upcoming month regardless of rank, and submit the time period where he will be in camp (to consume food) to the respective personnel.
with the understanding that the cost of the food consumed at the cookhouse will be deducted from his allowance. If this NSF (or regular) wants to consume food solely from the cookhouse for the entire month, then after deduction from his allowance, his allowance should be what an NSF (or regular) of similar rank gets currently.
5. If an NSF (or regular) prefers to eat at the canteen everyday in this case, let him. He is saving the SAF money, because he is not indenting food which will be wasted.
6. There may be worries that this may spike a trend of all NSFs (or regulars) going to eat at the canteen instead. But then that means canteen food is preferable to cookhouse food, and SFI should either lower the cost (now visible) of its food, or make the food more palatable. This is what I have learnt from Economics studied in JC.
7. There may also be fewer cases of over-indenting occuring. Seeing the true cost reflected in one's allowance will give one pause to think. To give an example, the cost of water in India in different provinces is either free to farmers, or supplied at below its true price. This leads to many farmers overabusing this supply of water, and not using it efficiently. Of course, India also suffers from a water crisis now. Similarly, if an NSF (or regular) does not know the true price of SFI food, and thinks it comes free, you cannot expect them to eat at the cookhouse each day. It is interesting to note that the cost of food is not reflected to servicemen (at least not during my time) - I only found out by asking people. I do not believe many NSFs will be like me and actively try to find out more while serving the nation. Ignorance, after all, is bliss, and it is easier to pretend the cost of food is negligible and continue to waste it, instead of actively doing something.
8. 4b i) will also encourage combat personnel to pass their IPPT (to get CPL promotion), so they can decide whether they want to eat at the cookhouse.
9. Since there will still be excess food, though perhaps not as much, I also suggest giving these foods to the following groups of people: a) Hungry NSFs who want to eat more, b) Construction workers, Maintenance personnel, or Domestic Cleaners working on any projects within the unit or camp. There can be a centralized area with the understanding: If there is any excess food, come to this area at a set time to eat. There can also be a form to sign, similar to those given by the civil service / other private organizations which disclaims all liability like food poisoning, etc from the food. This can help spread goodwill about the SAF as well.
10. Lastly, if this solution seems too complicated, a variant would be to increase the NSF (or regular)'s allowance to include the food cost, but then it will be deducted anyway. While this seems like a waste of time - it is what is happening now, just that it is not explicitly shown in the allowance, knowing the true cost of food may let some servicemen reconsider their actions of not eating. Point 7 comes to play.
11. I hope this suggestion is of help.
Best Regards,
CFC(NS) XXX"
This is a good suggestion (not from me, of course).
Which is why the SAF will never adopt it.
As we all know, the SAF's Core Values are Stupidity, Sadism and Senselessness.
Post ID: 6082603437643770039
Saturday, August 07, 2010
NUS: Flavours of Asia
"MA4257: Financial Mathematics II
Dr. Xia Jianming
matxj@nus.edu.cn"
Post ID: 5386630125824815510
The Median Isn't the Message: Interpreting Statistics
"I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it." - Mae West
***
The Median Isn't the Message
Stephen Jay Gould
"Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, abetted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shrift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death"...
Trying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all...
I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. "A sanguine personality," he replied...
Hence the dilemma for humane doctors: since attitude matters so critically, should such a sombre conclusion be advertised, especially since few people have sufficient understanding of statistics to evaluate what the statements really mean?... Knowledge is indeed power, in Bacon's proverb...
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities"...
Variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency"
***
The Median Isn't the Message
Stephen Jay Gould
"Many people make an unfortunate and invalid separation between heart and mind, or feeling and intellect. In some contemporary traditions, abetted by attitudes stereotypically centered on Southern California, feelings are exalted as more "real" and the only proper basis for action - if it feels good, do it - while intellect gets short shrift as a hang-up of outmoded elitism. Statistics, in this absurd dichotomy, often become the symbol of the enemy. As Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death"...
Trying to keep an intellectual away from literature works about as well as recommending chastity to Homo sapiens, the sexiest primate of all...
I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. "A sanguine personality," he replied...
Hence the dilemma for humane doctors: since attitude matters so critically, should such a sombre conclusion be advertised, especially since few people have sufficient understanding of statistics to evaluate what the statements really mean?... Knowledge is indeed power, in Bacon's proverb...
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities"...
Variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency"
Post ID: 954256930607871479
Creationism and Religion
"The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion."
--- Our Place in the Cosmos / Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
--- Our Place in the Cosmos / Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
Post ID: 2670489609660209163
Friday, August 06, 2010
Footprints
"Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts.
Others come into our lives and make us wanna leave footprints on their face."
(@kingsleyyy)
Others come into our lives and make us wanna leave footprints on their face."
(@kingsleyyy)
Post ID: 4082609649341515236
Thursday, August 05, 2010
They needs a good copywriter
"Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat." - Sir Julian Huxley
***
WE NEEDS A GOOD COPYWRITER
"Sparkfury Creative Consultants Pte Ltd is a wart-winning creative agency. We handle humerous regional blue-cheap accounts including Sony Asia Pacific, BiC and UOB. We have been a full member of the 4As (Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Singapore) since 2003. Despite our fast going list of awards and accolades, our gold remains the same. We want to ignite our clients' brains and build a fun-filled working environment. We seek light-minded individuals to be a part of us.
***
WE NEEDS A GOOD COPYWRITER
"Sparkfury Creative Consultants Pte Ltd is a wart-winning creative agency. We handle humerous regional blue-cheap accounts including Sony Asia Pacific, BiC and UOB. We have been a full member of the 4As (Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Singapore) since 2003. Despite our fast going list of awards and accolades, our gold remains the same. We want to ignite our clients' brains and build a fun-filled working environment. We seek light-minded individuals to be a part of us.
WE NEEDS A GOOD COPYWRITER
Requirements:
- Minimum 3 years experience in capywriting
- Maticulous with versatile writing skills skills
- Responsible with a strong scent of timeline
- Abler to perform under pleasure in a fast place
- Able to think s tragically and perform as a team
- Persuasive comunicator of well-conceived ideas
If you've zero tolerance for bad copywriting and think you've what it takes to elevate our creative standards, we want to hear from you. Email detailed resume to recruit@sparkfury.com"
Post ID: 1983430387519795890
Cai Png 101
"You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature." - George W. Bush
***
The Art of Ordering Mixed Vege Rice
"Visit the stall near the end of lunch/dinner time.
Sure, some of the dishes may be sold out, but there will also be plenty of other dishes still available. Since the stall owner can't keep the dishes until the next lunch/dinner time, it is in his interest to give away larger portions so that he won't need to deal with leftovers later.
Get your guy colleague to order for you.
This only applies to girls. Stall owners tend to give a smaller portion to girls compared to guys. However, they charge the same price for both. So it is more value for money for a guy to place the order on behalf of the girl so as to receive a larger portion.
Ask for 'more rice' instead of 'add rice'.
Most stall owners will interpret 'more rice' as a larger scoop of rice which will result in more rice. This is generally free. However, 'add rice' entails adding a second scoop of rice to the first, and this generally cost additional money.
Make sure the stall owner has space to serve.
In many mixed vege stalls, there are usually two or more people serving dishes as the same time. When you are ordering, make sure to order dishes that are near the person serving you so that he won't have to stretch over his co-worker to reach your dish. If he is stretching to reach your dish, he probably won't give you more than usual serving since it is that much of a hassle.
Order the meat first.
This is to create a good impression with the stall owner. By ordering the meat first, your are signaling to the stall owner that you will not be ordering the cheapest items on the menu. This puts the owner in a better mood, so he may give you a larger serving.
Order 1 dish at a time and wait until he finished serving.
Point to your first dish, then wait until the stall owner finish serving it before pointing to the next dish. Do not rush him. Often, the stall owner needs time to gauge the portion of food to serve. If you give him sufficient time, it is likely that he will give you a larger than standard portion. Hurrying him results in less than standard portions.
Pause in between ordering dishes.
Pretend to ponder in between dishes. This gives more time for the stall owner to serve your previous dish which likely will result in a larger portion. When he is finished and noticed that you are still pondering overyour next order, he may feel bored and add a few more slices of your previous dish while waiting for you to make your next choice.
Order the same dish twice.
Use this technique very sparingly. After order a dish, pretend to look distracted and point to the same dish again. The stall owner will likely tell you that he has already served that dish. However, occasionally, he may instinctively go through the motion of serving the dish again and make your portion slightly larger, all for the same price.
Order dishes that are about to run out.
It takes practice to estimate, but it is worth picking dishes that are left with about 1.5 to 2 portions. Chances are, that if there is only about 1.5 to 2 portions of the dish left, the stall owner will think 'what-the-heck' and just give you everything. The good is that you get extra servings, the bad is that sauces right at the bottom of the tray are very salty.
Order vege dishes that contain meat sauces.
Some vege dishes have some meat in it to bring out the additional flavour. But it is sold at the price of vege becos the meat is usually in small amounts and only present in the sauce. Tofu dishes are an example of such. By ordering such dishes, you are getting some serving of meat for the price of vege. Nice.
Do not order meat dishes that contain vegetables.
These dishes count as meat but is usual half served with vegetables. It is very not worthwhile, do not order it. An example is the stir fried venison with leek. Go for fully meat dishes instead.
Ask for curry sauce.
Many a time, when you ask for curry sauce, some other ingredients in the curry sauce will find its way onto your rice, such as small pieces of chicken or potato. Cabbage curry sauce will probably bring you some cabbages and longbeans. And it's free.
Ask for meat sauces.
As mentioned earlier, some sauces are cooked with minced meat. It is near impossible to separate the mince meat from the sauce. So if you ask for meat sauces, you will definitely receive some serving of meat with it. And it's free.
Become a regular customer.
Talk to the stall owner on occasions. With good rapport, the stall owner will recognize you as a regular customer and will naturally give you extra servings the next time you visit."
***
The Art of Ordering Mixed Vege Rice
"Visit the stall near the end of lunch/dinner time.
Sure, some of the dishes may be sold out, but there will also be plenty of other dishes still available. Since the stall owner can't keep the dishes until the next lunch/dinner time, it is in his interest to give away larger portions so that he won't need to deal with leftovers later.
Get your guy colleague to order for you.
This only applies to girls. Stall owners tend to give a smaller portion to girls compared to guys. However, they charge the same price for both. So it is more value for money for a guy to place the order on behalf of the girl so as to receive a larger portion.
Ask for 'more rice' instead of 'add rice'.
Most stall owners will interpret 'more rice' as a larger scoop of rice which will result in more rice. This is generally free. However, 'add rice' entails adding a second scoop of rice to the first, and this generally cost additional money.
Make sure the stall owner has space to serve.
In many mixed vege stalls, there are usually two or more people serving dishes as the same time. When you are ordering, make sure to order dishes that are near the person serving you so that he won't have to stretch over his co-worker to reach your dish. If he is stretching to reach your dish, he probably won't give you more than usual serving since it is that much of a hassle.
Order the meat first.
This is to create a good impression with the stall owner. By ordering the meat first, your are signaling to the stall owner that you will not be ordering the cheapest items on the menu. This puts the owner in a better mood, so he may give you a larger serving.
Order 1 dish at a time and wait until he finished serving.
Point to your first dish, then wait until the stall owner finish serving it before pointing to the next dish. Do not rush him. Often, the stall owner needs time to gauge the portion of food to serve. If you give him sufficient time, it is likely that he will give you a larger than standard portion. Hurrying him results in less than standard portions.
Pause in between ordering dishes.
Pretend to ponder in between dishes. This gives more time for the stall owner to serve your previous dish which likely will result in a larger portion. When he is finished and noticed that you are still pondering overyour next order, he may feel bored and add a few more slices of your previous dish while waiting for you to make your next choice.
Order the same dish twice.
Use this technique very sparingly. After order a dish, pretend to look distracted and point to the same dish again. The stall owner will likely tell you that he has already served that dish. However, occasionally, he may instinctively go through the motion of serving the dish again and make your portion slightly larger, all for the same price.
Order dishes that are about to run out.
It takes practice to estimate, but it is worth picking dishes that are left with about 1.5 to 2 portions. Chances are, that if there is only about 1.5 to 2 portions of the dish left, the stall owner will think 'what-the-heck' and just give you everything. The good is that you get extra servings, the bad is that sauces right at the bottom of the tray are very salty.
Order vege dishes that contain meat sauces.
Some vege dishes have some meat in it to bring out the additional flavour. But it is sold at the price of vege becos the meat is usually in small amounts and only present in the sauce. Tofu dishes are an example of such. By ordering such dishes, you are getting some serving of meat for the price of vege. Nice.
Do not order meat dishes that contain vegetables.
These dishes count as meat but is usual half served with vegetables. It is very not worthwhile, do not order it. An example is the stir fried venison with leek. Go for fully meat dishes instead.
Ask for curry sauce.
Many a time, when you ask for curry sauce, some other ingredients in the curry sauce will find its way onto your rice, such as small pieces of chicken or potato. Cabbage curry sauce will probably bring you some cabbages and longbeans. And it's free.
Ask for meat sauces.
As mentioned earlier, some sauces are cooked with minced meat. It is near impossible to separate the mince meat from the sauce. So if you ask for meat sauces, you will definitely receive some serving of meat with it. And it's free.
Become a regular customer.
Talk to the stall owner on occasions. With good rapport, the stall owner will recognize you as a regular customer and will naturally give you extra servings the next time you visit."
Post ID: 177512228460403617
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Links - 4th August 2010
"The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name." - Aldous Huxley
***
Schneier on Security: Pork-Filled Counter-Islamic Bomb Device
The ups and downs of being a freelancer - "No set routine... Creative and intellectual fulfillment... Being able to work wherever you like... Crowd avoidance...
Idleness... Social isolation... The need to sell yourself... No employee benefits... The financial rollercoaster... Taxes"
Why travel solo when you can trip pool? - "Mr Liow and his male friend, for example, waited four hours to take a shower during their Taiwan trip, as they did not realise that the five women travelling with them would take that long to bathe."
Does Language Influence Culture? - "Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet."
Male road accidents soar in summer due to women's short skirts
Legal actions against international media - The File Cabinet - "A list of cases of the international media being punished by the Singapore government and/or judicial system... The list is still in progress, so do not take it as a comprehensive listing. If you have more cases to contribute, feel free to email me with the details."
Car Thieves Picky About Color - "The least popular colors in North America are yellow/gold at 2% and beige/brown at 5%. These and other bright colors deter car thieves. Not only do these vehicles have a lower resale value, but they are also like a flashing neon sign"
Britain has no need to make an apology to India for Empire... - "Indians require no apology for Empire and seek none, and nor do Britons need to feel especially guilty for it... All that is best about India - its tolerance, freedom and engagement with the world - has flourished due to the structures and ideas it inherited from British rule"
Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers
delanceyplace: the oil curse - "If you're an oil state, it's far more efficient to ask oil buyers for more money than to collect taxes from your population... When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting as much money as possible and encouraging the growth of a private economy to collect taxes from. A strong private economy, so the thinking goes, creates a strong civil society... Taxes aren't democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing effects... oil, and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for nondependent countries"
Second Passport and Second Citizenship for any kind of purpose - "EU Passport $9,900, Guyana $18,700, Suriname $17,400, Nicaragua $16,000"
Interestingly, one field is "Military Duty?"
Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
8 Websites You Need to Stop Building - The Oatmeal - "Digg and Reddit Clones: 'I've got it! I'll create a social news website by picking a word, dropping a word from it, and then letting users vote on what's popular! It's genius, I tell you!'"
Work experience at the FO? Not if you¿re a middle class white male - "Under the tightly-drawn rules, only women, people from ethnic minorities and the disabled are entitled to apply for a chance to work at one of the great offices of state"
"Jewish Privilege" was why they introduced the Aryan Paragraphs [Addendum: or the Nuremberg Laws, and was a contributor factor to the Holocaust]
YouTube - Un perro muy jugueton - "An old lady getting humped by a horney dog, dont know if thats the funniest or most disgusting thing I have ever seen LOL"
Justin Bieber's Failed Segway Getaway - "Justin Bieber's physical well-being was endangered this week when his Segway failed to outrun a gawping throng of twelve year old girls. I've never been more thankful for the existence of video cameras."
Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright - "This is a complete reversal of earlier rulings across the country (and completely opposite to the approach that the US Trade Representative has demanded from America's trading partners)"
The Longest Photographic Exposures in History
The power of speech - "The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture. Thirty years living with the Pirah? destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework... he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language... "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often. So then I find myself with the Pirah?. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell"... "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives""
Are Too Many Students Going to College? - "All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at "four year" colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won't graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets."
Aussie horse butcher 'faces death threats'
Now for whale, dog and cat meat
Woman 'wakes up' with foreign accent - " Fewer than 100 people in the world have been officially documented as suffering from the syndrome, which leaves them speaking with an alien accent. In the case of Mrs Fox, it is a mixture of Welsh, Scottish and North London accents"
Terror arrest threat for rail passenger who took photos on train to prove overcrowding
Of course, he got an apology
A liturgical occurrence - "The priest was at the altar with the doors open when suddenly a small boy, not more than four or five years old, broke loose from his parents and ran up towards the altar and… charged right through the doors and started tugging on the priests vestments"
Nasi KangKang - "Nasi KangKang, literally means Squatting Rice. It's some sort of love potion made for men. It was believed that after eating the rice, the man was bound to abide entirely by the woman's wishes. His mind will be reset and zombified. Any of the woman's wishes such as, "buy me a diamond" would be fulfilled immediately"
YouTube - Dai Mahou Touge - Vegetable Suicide
Damn Japs
Je suis mariée et je me masturbe - "Arrêtez de nier la réalité et de dire que la taille n'a aucune importance, c'est pire que de l'hypocrisie de dire cela, Au risque d'être vulgaire : enfoncez vous un cure-dent ou un coton-tige dans le vagin et si vous jouissez prévenez moi ? Car un penis petit et fin fait à peu de choses le même effet...."
Beware the office feeder: They tempt with sweets and treats, but never tuck in themselves - what are they up to? - "They like to see others eating, because it reinforces their own sense of mastery and self-will, and they feel good about avoiding calories when someone else is consuming them in front of their eyes"
Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy - "The premise was to go an entire month wearing only six items already found in your closet (not counting shoes, underwear or accessories)... women, on average, own seven pairs of jeans but wear only four regularly"
***
Schneier on Security: Pork-Filled Counter-Islamic Bomb Device
The ups and downs of being a freelancer - "No set routine... Creative and intellectual fulfillment... Being able to work wherever you like... Crowd avoidance...
Idleness... Social isolation... The need to sell yourself... No employee benefits... The financial rollercoaster... Taxes"
Why travel solo when you can trip pool? - "Mr Liow and his male friend, for example, waited four hours to take a shower during their Taiwan trip, as they did not realise that the five women travelling with them would take that long to bathe."
Does Language Influence Culture? - "Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet."
Male road accidents soar in summer due to women's short skirts
Legal actions against international media - The File Cabinet - "A list of cases of the international media being punished by the Singapore government and/or judicial system... The list is still in progress, so do not take it as a comprehensive listing. If you have more cases to contribute, feel free to email me with the details."
Car Thieves Picky About Color - "The least popular colors in North America are yellow/gold at 2% and beige/brown at 5%. These and other bright colors deter car thieves. Not only do these vehicles have a lower resale value, but they are also like a flashing neon sign"
Britain has no need to make an apology to India for Empire... - "Indians require no apology for Empire and seek none, and nor do Britons need to feel especially guilty for it... All that is best about India - its tolerance, freedom and engagement with the world - has flourished due to the structures and ideas it inherited from British rule"
Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers
delanceyplace: the oil curse - "If you're an oil state, it's far more efficient to ask oil buyers for more money than to collect taxes from your population... When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting as much money as possible and encouraging the growth of a private economy to collect taxes from. A strong private economy, so the thinking goes, creates a strong civil society... Taxes aren't democracy, but they seem to connect taxpayers and government in a way that has democratizing effects... oil, and mineral-exporting countries have a 23 percent likelihood of civil war within five years, compared to less than 1 percent for nondependent countries"
Second Passport and Second Citizenship for any kind of purpose - "EU Passport $9,900, Guyana $18,700, Suriname $17,400, Nicaragua $16,000"
Interestingly, one field is "Military Duty?"
Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
8 Websites You Need to Stop Building - The Oatmeal - "Digg and Reddit Clones: 'I've got it! I'll create a social news website by picking a word, dropping a word from it, and then letting users vote on what's popular! It's genius, I tell you!'"
Work experience at the FO? Not if you¿re a middle class white male - "Under the tightly-drawn rules, only women, people from ethnic minorities and the disabled are entitled to apply for a chance to work at one of the great offices of state"
"Jewish Privilege" was why they introduced the Aryan Paragraphs [Addendum: or the Nuremberg Laws, and was a contributor factor to the Holocaust]
YouTube - Un perro muy jugueton - "An old lady getting humped by a horney dog, dont know if thats the funniest or most disgusting thing I have ever seen LOL"
Justin Bieber's Failed Segway Getaway - "Justin Bieber's physical well-being was endangered this week when his Segway failed to outrun a gawping throng of twelve year old girls. I've never been more thankful for the existence of video cameras."
Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright - "This is a complete reversal of earlier rulings across the country (and completely opposite to the approach that the US Trade Representative has demanded from America's trading partners)"
The Longest Photographic Exposures in History
The power of speech - "The idea that we can be enlightened or destroyed by living with exotic people has transfixed western societies since before Joseph Conrad's rogue trader Kurtz was corrupted in the Congo. Yet Everett's life could be a more dramatic example of enlightenment and destruction than any fictional encounter with a drastically different culture. Thirty years living with the Pirah? destroyed his evangelical faith in God, wrecked his marriage and estranged him from two of his three children. It also dismantled his intellectual framework... he is continuing his fight with Noam Chomsky in a debate that could transform our understanding of human language... "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often. So then I find myself with the Pirah?. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell"... "One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives""
Are Too Many Students Going to College? - "All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at "four year" colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won't graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets."
Aussie horse butcher 'faces death threats'
Now for whale, dog and cat meat
Woman 'wakes up' with foreign accent - " Fewer than 100 people in the world have been officially documented as suffering from the syndrome, which leaves them speaking with an alien accent. In the case of Mrs Fox, it is a mixture of Welsh, Scottish and North London accents"
Terror arrest threat for rail passenger who took photos on train to prove overcrowding
Of course, he got an apology
A liturgical occurrence - "The priest was at the altar with the doors open when suddenly a small boy, not more than four or five years old, broke loose from his parents and ran up towards the altar and… charged right through the doors and started tugging on the priests vestments"
Nasi KangKang - "Nasi KangKang, literally means Squatting Rice. It's some sort of love potion made for men. It was believed that after eating the rice, the man was bound to abide entirely by the woman's wishes. His mind will be reset and zombified. Any of the woman's wishes such as, "buy me a diamond" would be fulfilled immediately"
YouTube - Dai Mahou Touge - Vegetable Suicide
Damn Japs
Je suis mariée et je me masturbe - "Arrêtez de nier la réalité et de dire que la taille n'a aucune importance, c'est pire que de l'hypocrisie de dire cela, Au risque d'être vulgaire : enfoncez vous un cure-dent ou un coton-tige dans le vagin et si vous jouissez prévenez moi ? Car un penis petit et fin fait à peu de choses le même effet...."
Beware the office feeder: They tempt with sweets and treats, but never tuck in themselves - what are they up to? - "They like to see others eating, because it reinforces their own sense of mastery and self-will, and they feel good about avoiding calories when someone else is consuming them in front of their eyes"
Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy - "The premise was to go an entire month wearing only six items already found in your closet (not counting shoes, underwear or accessories)... women, on average, own seven pairs of jeans but wear only four regularly"
Post ID: 3942294420867313615
On genocide, and why George W Bush is not culpable of it
"And remember, no matter where you go, there you are." - Earl Mac Rauch
***
The worst genocides of the 20th Century:
"The crimes committed by right-wing dictators have always been easier to track down than the crimes against humanity committed by communist leaders...
The most frequently asked questions are always about current unpopular USA presidents: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II... The moment the USA elects a new president, i start receiving emails asking to add him to the list of "genociders". The moment the president leaves office the same people forget about him and jump on the next one. Can we consider President Bush a genocider due to all of the civilians killed in Iraq under his watch? I don't think so, because the vast majority of civilians killed in Iraq were NOT killed by USA troops. It is genocide, but the "genociders" are others, and the situation is still too murky to decide who exactly killed those 100,000 civilians. (If Bush is indirectly guilty of it, then certainly Islam is too). The USA bears some clear responsibilities for the chaos, but ineptitude, miscalculation, ignorance, etc do not qualify as genocide. Otheriwse the United Nations and France would be responsible for the genocide in Rwanda (900,000 people). Putin would be a better candidate for "genocider", since the vast majority of Chechen civilians killed under his watch were killed by Russian troops. However, i have never received a single email nominating Putin...
I often get asked if Hiroshima/Nagasaki qualify as a genocide. I disagree... Winston Churchill and Harry Truman did not start that war: they ended it. It is even debatable if these bombings killed or saved lives... more Japanese died in two weeks of battles with the Soviet Union in Manchuria than in the two nuclear bombings...
I've been asked why i blame the USA only for part of the civilian deaths in Vietnam while i blame the Soviet Union for all of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The USA "invasion" of Vietnam is not as clearcut as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
1. Even today many in Vietnam think that the aggressor was North Vietnam, not the USA, at least at the beginning"
***
The worst genocides of the 20th Century:
"The crimes committed by right-wing dictators have always been easier to track down than the crimes against humanity committed by communist leaders...
The most frequently asked questions are always about current unpopular USA presidents: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II... The moment the USA elects a new president, i start receiving emails asking to add him to the list of "genociders". The moment the president leaves office the same people forget about him and jump on the next one. Can we consider President Bush a genocider due to all of the civilians killed in Iraq under his watch? I don't think so, because the vast majority of civilians killed in Iraq were NOT killed by USA troops. It is genocide, but the "genociders" are others, and the situation is still too murky to decide who exactly killed those 100,000 civilians. (If Bush is indirectly guilty of it, then certainly Islam is too). The USA bears some clear responsibilities for the chaos, but ineptitude, miscalculation, ignorance, etc do not qualify as genocide. Otheriwse the United Nations and France would be responsible for the genocide in Rwanda (900,000 people). Putin would be a better candidate for "genocider", since the vast majority of Chechen civilians killed under his watch were killed by Russian troops. However, i have never received a single email nominating Putin...
I often get asked if Hiroshima/Nagasaki qualify as a genocide. I disagree... Winston Churchill and Harry Truman did not start that war: they ended it. It is even debatable if these bombings killed or saved lives... more Japanese died in two weeks of battles with the Soviet Union in Manchuria than in the two nuclear bombings...
I've been asked why i blame the USA only for part of the civilian deaths in Vietnam while i blame the Soviet Union for all of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The USA "invasion" of Vietnam is not as clearcut as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
1. Even today many in Vietnam think that the aggressor was North Vietnam, not the USA, at least at the beginning"
Post ID: 7266354364485768167
Women's self-objectification
"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." - George Bernard Shaw
***
Whose Slut? - The F-Word
"Despite attempts to sell pornographic images of men to women as a great equalizer, women still prefer their magazines populated with sexy women. This makes sense to me; since the beginning of time, the female body has been associated with sex...
The traditional feminist response to the fact that straight women clearly demand and enjoy images of sexy women has been that we have internalised the patriarchal values which oppress us and lost sight of our own sexuality along the way...
Self-objectification is an integral part of female heterosexuality. Whether it be shopping for underwear or dancing at a club, most of us get a thrill at the thought of being desired by men. Taking it a step further, how many of us have fantasised about being strippers or whores?...
The notion that a sexualised woman is degrading to women derives from the assumption that she is being sexualised by men, for men...
In recent years, women have begun to reclaim their sexualisation. From women making their own porn films to the growing number of feminist strippers who freely admit they get a kick out of displaying their bodies, we are slowly beginning to show that sexualisation can be just as fun and empowering for the ones being watched as for the ones watching. We are even beginning to reclaim sexist insults... Anti-porn advocates'... cries of ‘degrading to women’ are merely adding to the common assumption that any woman who enjoys the male gaze must be either a victim or a slut...
Some feminists believe we can go back and change our history so women will no longer have to bear this association [with being male sex objects]. I believe that any attempt to do so will further alienate the majority of women from the cause and ultimately be met with overwhelming resistence, if not from the powers that be then from our own sexuality."
I was reading this after the outcry about Hugh Hefner saying that 'Women Are Sex Objects'.
While this is a refreshing change from much of feminism (for example, questioning that objectification is always a bad thing), the logic here seems to be that it is okay for women to objectify other women, or for women to objectify themselves, but not for men to do so (or to act on the implications of such objectification).
Besides the problem with restricting objectification of women to other women, if a department store has an attractive and novel display, you surely cannot fault people for ogling at it, telling their friends or even taking pictures of it. What you CAN fault them for is vandalising it or stealing parts of it (touching it falls into a grey category - probably the most you can do is expel someone who keeps touching your exhibit from your store). And to insist that only some people can ogle at it, tell their friends or take pictures of it seems capricious (perhaps even discriminatory).
To look at it another way, if "most [women] get a thrill at the thought of being desired by men", men are doing them a favour by desiring (and objectifying them).
***
Whose Slut? - The F-Word
"Despite attempts to sell pornographic images of men to women as a great equalizer, women still prefer their magazines populated with sexy women. This makes sense to me; since the beginning of time, the female body has been associated with sex...
The traditional feminist response to the fact that straight women clearly demand and enjoy images of sexy women has been that we have internalised the patriarchal values which oppress us and lost sight of our own sexuality along the way...
Self-objectification is an integral part of female heterosexuality. Whether it be shopping for underwear or dancing at a club, most of us get a thrill at the thought of being desired by men. Taking it a step further, how many of us have fantasised about being strippers or whores?...
The notion that a sexualised woman is degrading to women derives from the assumption that she is being sexualised by men, for men...
In recent years, women have begun to reclaim their sexualisation. From women making their own porn films to the growing number of feminist strippers who freely admit they get a kick out of displaying their bodies, we are slowly beginning to show that sexualisation can be just as fun and empowering for the ones being watched as for the ones watching. We are even beginning to reclaim sexist insults... Anti-porn advocates'... cries of ‘degrading to women’ are merely adding to the common assumption that any woman who enjoys the male gaze must be either a victim or a slut...
Some feminists believe we can go back and change our history so women will no longer have to bear this association [with being male sex objects]. I believe that any attempt to do so will further alienate the majority of women from the cause and ultimately be met with overwhelming resistence, if not from the powers that be then from our own sexuality."
I was reading this after the outcry about Hugh Hefner saying that 'Women Are Sex Objects'.
While this is a refreshing change from much of feminism (for example, questioning that objectification is always a bad thing), the logic here seems to be that it is okay for women to objectify other women, or for women to objectify themselves, but not for men to do so (or to act on the implications of such objectification).
Besides the problem with restricting objectification of women to other women, if a department store has an attractive and novel display, you surely cannot fault people for ogling at it, telling their friends or even taking pictures of it. What you CAN fault them for is vandalising it or stealing parts of it (touching it falls into a grey category - probably the most you can do is expel someone who keeps touching your exhibit from your store). And to insist that only some people can ogle at it, tell their friends or take pictures of it seems capricious (perhaps even discriminatory).
To look at it another way, if "most [women] get a thrill at the thought of being desired by men", men are doing them a favour by desiring (and objectifying them).
Post ID: 8861578509669352623
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Come to think of it, I've never read a feminist bashing Disney for giving girls unrealistic expectations of men
"Porn movies and Disney are responsible for the most frustrated human beings I know"
"where the hell is my prince charming ?"
"where the hell is my insatiable whore ?"
Post ID: 203111392741610323
Why Men should not take pictures of Women in Singapore
"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate." - Elbert Hubbard
***
After my oppression by the heavy arm of the State last year, I finally got around to going to a police station (with REAL police) to enquire about the legality of taking pictures of people in public. Despite the platitudes of "it depends", I did get some answers.
(Summary of linked post: I took a picture of 6 female teenagers sitting in a playground explicitly marked out as being for preschool children, and was threatened with having the police brought down on me. Despite my photo being as far from possible from an upskirt or a downblouse [while still having females in it], the airport police sided with the girls, and I was forced to delete the pictures in the end.)
The officer I spoke to said that if you took pictures of a woman, there were 2 offences they could charge you under: insulting the modesty of a woman, and intruding into the modesty of a woman. Unfortunately I could not find the latter offence in the Singapore Statutes OnLine.
So the relevant law is my 2nd-favourite section of the Penal Code (my favourite is even better):
"Section 509: Word or gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman
Whoever, intending to insult the modesty of any woman, utters any word, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both."
Given that the modesty of a woman is an extremely broad term (and the privacy of a woman only, perhaps, slightly less so), you can see how it is very easy to use this law against men (while the law is gender-neutral in wording, in reality we know that it is very unlikely to be used against women, due to Female Privilege).
On the other hand, the officer continued, if you took pictures of a man, only intentional harassment would get you in trouble, and furthermore it would be a civil case, not a police case.
I brought up the example of STOMP, which had lots of pictures of people, and he said it was better to ask the subjects of photographs for permission. I said street photography was about spontaneity, but he didn't respond to that
So, as far as I can tell, essentially you can't take pictures of women in Singapore without being at risk of being harassed by the police but men are fair game (as long as you don't "harass" them, so one-off shots should be fine).
This sort of case would seem to be ridiculous and not worth the time of those who ensure that Singapore has Low Crime. However, from other sources I know that the police tend to take the side of whoever calls them first - of whoever makes the complaint. And they also tend to investigate all cases - even ridiculous-sounding ones. And of course there's the bias against the man whenever a woman accuses him of having done something sexual to her.
So in this case, if girls are upset that you have taken pictures of them and call the police, you may get your camera (or phone) confiscated as 'evidence', and you may not get it back for weeks or months while you are being 'investigated'.
In the end, you will probably get a 'stern warning' instead of the case being dropped. While this is not as bad as being prosecuted in court (a possibility that cannot be totally discounted), this will count against you in future cases of a similar nature, which is great news if another female tries to use the law against you with an allegation of a sexual crime, since "If you commit any offence in future, the same leniency may not be shown towards you", and your camera/phone may not even be returned to you in the end (since a 'stern warning' is taken to mean that you did something wrong, they just chose not to prosecute you - in comparison note the phrasing when they drop the case entirely) and then be ordered destroyed by the Courts.
What might await you if you, as a man, take a picture of women in Singapore in public
I note that even in the unlikely case of the case being dropped, at the very least a few hours of your time will have been wasted, your camera (or phone) might be confiscated as "evidence" and you will be traumatised at being oppressed by the heavy arm of the State.
All in all, this is entirely consistent with what we know about the law and sex crimes committed by men against women in Singapore, and with other police advice that I have heard (that it is better for the man to settle, because the cards are stacked against him). Essentially, the man is screwed.
***
After my oppression by the heavy arm of the State last year, I finally got around to going to a police station (with REAL police) to enquire about the legality of taking pictures of people in public. Despite the platitudes of "it depends", I did get some answers.
(Summary of linked post: I took a picture of 6 female teenagers sitting in a playground explicitly marked out as being for preschool children, and was threatened with having the police brought down on me. Despite my photo being as far from possible from an upskirt or a downblouse [while still having females in it], the airport police sided with the girls, and I was forced to delete the pictures in the end.)
The officer I spoke to said that if you took pictures of a woman, there were 2 offences they could charge you under: insulting the modesty of a woman, and intruding into the modesty of a woman. Unfortunately I could not find the latter offence in the Singapore Statutes OnLine.
So the relevant law is my 2nd-favourite section of the Penal Code (my favourite is even better):
"Section 509: Word or gesture intended to insult the modesty of a woman
Whoever, intending to insult the modesty of any woman, utters any word, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both."
Given that the modesty of a woman is an extremely broad term (and the privacy of a woman only, perhaps, slightly less so), you can see how it is very easy to use this law against men (while the law is gender-neutral in wording, in reality we know that it is very unlikely to be used against women, due to Female Privilege).
On the other hand, the officer continued, if you took pictures of a man, only intentional harassment would get you in trouble, and furthermore it would be a civil case, not a police case.
I brought up the example of STOMP, which had lots of pictures of people, and he said it was better to ask the subjects of photographs for permission. I said street photography was about spontaneity, but he didn't respond to that
So, as far as I can tell, essentially you can't take pictures of women in Singapore without being at risk of being harassed by the police but men are fair game (as long as you don't "harass" them, so one-off shots should be fine).
This sort of case would seem to be ridiculous and not worth the time of those who ensure that Singapore has Low Crime. However, from other sources I know that the police tend to take the side of whoever calls them first - of whoever makes the complaint. And they also tend to investigate all cases - even ridiculous-sounding ones. And of course there's the bias against the man whenever a woman accuses him of having done something sexual to her.
So in this case, if girls are upset that you have taken pictures of them and call the police, you may get your camera (or phone) confiscated as 'evidence', and you may not get it back for weeks or months while you are being 'investigated'.
In the end, you will probably get a 'stern warning' instead of the case being dropped. While this is not as bad as being prosecuted in court (a possibility that cannot be totally discounted), this will count against you in future cases of a similar nature, which is great news if another female tries to use the law against you with an allegation of a sexual crime, since "If you commit any offence in future, the same leniency may not be shown towards you", and your camera/phone may not even be returned to you in the end (since a 'stern warning' is taken to mean that you did something wrong, they just chose not to prosecute you - in comparison note the phrasing when they drop the case entirely) and then be ordered destroyed by the Courts.
What might await you if you, as a man, take a picture of women in Singapore in public
I note that even in the unlikely case of the case being dropped, at the very least a few hours of your time will have been wasted, your camera (or phone) might be confiscated as "evidence" and you will be traumatised at being oppressed by the heavy arm of the State.
All in all, this is entirely consistent with what we know about the law and sex crimes committed by men against women in Singapore, and with other police advice that I have heard (that it is better for the man to settle, because the cards are stacked against him). Essentially, the man is screwed.
Post ID: 6865485523960674355
Monday, August 02, 2010
New blog picture - 2nd August 2010
"I vowed never to shoot another film using a dog."
Post ID: 6025067096965552298
Conversations - 2nd August 2010
"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." - Howard Scott
***
Someone: *** related a story about why you can't kayak near the merlion
a bunch of trainers organised a trip to marina bay
they were playing at the merlion sprout
then this security guard comes over and tells them to "go away! go away! merlion only for tourists!"
Me: wonderful
2nd class citizens
Someone else: i HATE how guys turn so much colder when they find out im attached
maybe i should purport to be single just to make use of them
maybe it is a type of feminism too
Me: yeah you've said that before
how do you want to make use of them
Someone else: for whatever lah
carry my bags
give me tips
things that men do just to get pussy
Me: ...
dont you feel that is exploiting them
and that you are equally reprehensible
Someone else: they do that for me anyway, BEFORE they find out im attached
all im doing is taking my time to let them know i am
Me: ...
Someone else: it's like going for free drinks on ladies night lah
lol
Someone: from an old post: "I talked to someone who'd studied in Japan for 9 months, and he said when you first meet Jap girls they talk in a high voice, but later when you know them better and you're at the bar they will talk in their natural voice." this is so true!
actually, it's high and sort of breathless
someone i know does this.. totally irritates me
esp when she suddenly switches to her natural voice
Someone else: studying in an all-girls' school taught me a few things
1) when girls talk among themselves they talk dirtier than guys do
2) some girls are not shy about teaching one another how to use tampons
Me: was it CHIJ
if so it's a biased sample
Someone else: no no no
no i came from ***
i believe such observations can be made in any girls' school lah
Someone: wah i din noe u r into law as well
Me: I'm a man of many talents and interests
Someone else on sending me a file on YouSendIt: i'm gg to encrypt it with a password
Me: ... why're you so paranoid
at the most they will delete it tomorrow
Someone else: sorry i'm in the bizness
heh
Me: this is called paranoia
since you're in the business are you scared of DNS poisoning
I can destroy your modem for you
do you check keyboards for hardware keyloggers
do you know that people can detect your password by the sound of your typing?
or there're keyloggers that can detect onscreen keyboards also
rootkits that you will never detect
so you should never use an unsecured computer
do you use bitlocker on your laptop
Someone else: i noe all of this
duhz
Me: yes
so do you do all those things
Someone else: i'm pretty lax already
u shld see my friend
Me: they have better things to do than trace the IPs of people who upload vaguely naughty videos
and report them to their ISPs for copyright infringement
when the copyright holder is someone chinese company they have never even heard of
Someone else: he runs all his programs in a vm
and resets e image everyday
Me: this reminds me of audiophiles
Someone else: sorry lar
u cant blame us
we've in this line
so we noe
Me: you know all the possible things that can go wrong
you don't know a reasonable way to calibrate what you do
remember to physically destroy hard disks after you use them
otherwise people can read the data
even if you write the bits 255 times
or cut up the platters
Someone else: yes physical destruction is e only way to be absolutely safe
Me: doesn't mean everyone should do that
Someone else: most pple dun
Me: most people shouldn't
it's not worth the bother
so what do you think will happen if you don't encrypt the file with a password
the only reason people normally do that is so the file isn't detected as illegal and deleted
e.g. when you're sharing warez
however in this case it's a one-time send to me
and I won't download it again
Someone else: its a public server
after all
i dun want the admins to probe it
Me: so what if they probe it
Someone else: nah i'm just not comfortable with it
anyway it isnt very troublesome
to just encrypt it with a password
no computer is totally secure
but trying to minimize e potential areas of attack
my browser is encapsulated inside a sandbox
so there's no way web exploits can jump out of e sandbox
Me: using google chrome?
Someone else: firefox
Me: what if no browser has that function
would you set up a VM just to browse?
Someone else: YES
Me: can you cut and paste to/from VMs?
the clipboard should be secured to prevent clipboard exploits right
Someone else: not saying using a VM is 100% safe
but if e attacker is able to jump out of e VM, he's probably so highly skilled
tt its a targeted attack
and dun bother to defend it in tt case then
Me: see
this is where you are using some form of discretion
I bet there're ways to make it even more secure than a VM
Someone else: but it shld keep 99% of e attacks out
Me: do you bother to use other terminals
since you can't be sure if there're keyloggers on them
when you go overseas do you check your email
Someone else: we always change our passwords
when we go overseas
for msn, emails
and then change back
when we get back
and no, we dun use public terminals to check mail
Me: yes you can change your password
but they can hack in before you return home
and your account will be gone
Someone else: NEVER
if i have to check mail
Me: so you always bring your laptop overseas
Someone else: yes
Me: right
so if you have no laptop
or it spoils
will you check your mail
Someone else: u will nv find me logging in a public terminal to check my email
i wun
Me: ok
Someone else: ok lar i noe this sounds a bit extreme to u
trust me
u haven seen e really extreme ones in my office
Me: no
not checking email on public pcs is not that extreme
err
if people cut off their arms it doesn't mean cutting off your hand is ok
Someone else: another way
is to relay forward all ur email
received
to a temporary email account
while overseas
and check from tt account
and delete e mails after viewing
if u for some reason decides to join IT security one day
perhaps u'll understand better why IT security r so paranoid
Me: it's because they are not able to calibrate the cost-benefit matrix
Someone else: not true
*** configures some hot keys
to disable his network adapter
whenever he's not at his pc physically
THAT extreme
Me: so do you think companies are justified in blocking MSN, gchat, gmail, twitter, facebook etc
Someone else: tt's from a biz perspective
its rather to restrain colleagues from wasting time on these
rather than for security
Me: it's also called paranoia
the official justification is to prevent the leaking of business secrets also
Someone else: rubbish lar
do u see me being blocked from ms, etc
Me: that's because they're not being dumb about it
how about the SAF
are they justified in banning CD-Rs for 'security'?
Someone else: e company is just lazy to do a proper audit
if it blocks all e msn etc
RW YES
justfiied
R...no
Me: I said CD-R
Someone else: i think they no longer ban cd-r
Me: they do
Someone else: but yah its SAF
they r well known for being a f**ked up org
Me: so if someone from the SAF talked to you about "security"
and justified all those measures
what would you say
Someone else: we as the solution providers provide recommendations
the clients , whether they want to follow
is their own business
***
Someone: *** related a story about why you can't kayak near the merlion
a bunch of trainers organised a trip to marina bay
they were playing at the merlion sprout
then this security guard comes over and tells them to "go away! go away! merlion only for tourists!"
Me: wonderful
2nd class citizens
Someone else: i HATE how guys turn so much colder when they find out im attached
maybe i should purport to be single just to make use of them
maybe it is a type of feminism too
Me: yeah you've said that before
how do you want to make use of them
Someone else: for whatever lah
carry my bags
give me tips
things that men do just to get pussy
Me: ...
dont you feel that is exploiting them
and that you are equally reprehensible
Someone else: they do that for me anyway, BEFORE they find out im attached
all im doing is taking my time to let them know i am
Me: ...
Someone else: it's like going for free drinks on ladies night lah
lol
Someone: from an old post: "I talked to someone who'd studied in Japan for 9 months, and he said when you first meet Jap girls they talk in a high voice, but later when you know them better and you're at the bar they will talk in their natural voice." this is so true!
actually, it's high and sort of breathless
someone i know does this.. totally irritates me
esp when she suddenly switches to her natural voice
Someone else: studying in an all-girls' school taught me a few things
1) when girls talk among themselves they talk dirtier than guys do
2) some girls are not shy about teaching one another how to use tampons
Me: was it CHIJ
if so it's a biased sample
Someone else: no no no
no i came from ***
i believe such observations can be made in any girls' school lah
Someone: wah i din noe u r into law as well
Me: I'm a man of many talents and interests
Someone else on sending me a file on YouSendIt: i'm gg to encrypt it with a password
Me: ... why're you so paranoid
at the most they will delete it tomorrow
Someone else: sorry i'm in the bizness
heh
Me: this is called paranoia
since you're in the business are you scared of DNS poisoning
I can destroy your modem for you
do you check keyboards for hardware keyloggers
do you know that people can detect your password by the sound of your typing?
or there're keyloggers that can detect onscreen keyboards also
rootkits that you will never detect
so you should never use an unsecured computer
do you use bitlocker on your laptop
Someone else: i noe all of this
duhz
Me: yes
so do you do all those things
Someone else: i'm pretty lax already
u shld see my friend
Me: they have better things to do than trace the IPs of people who upload vaguely naughty videos
and report them to their ISPs for copyright infringement
when the copyright holder is someone chinese company they have never even heard of
Someone else: he runs all his programs in a vm
and resets e image everyday
Me: this reminds me of audiophiles
Someone else: sorry lar
u cant blame us
we've in this line
so we noe
Me: you know all the possible things that can go wrong
you don't know a reasonable way to calibrate what you do
remember to physically destroy hard disks after you use them
otherwise people can read the data
even if you write the bits 255 times
or cut up the platters
Someone else: yes physical destruction is e only way to be absolutely safe
Me: doesn't mean everyone should do that
Someone else: most pple dun
Me: most people shouldn't
it's not worth the bother
so what do you think will happen if you don't encrypt the file with a password
the only reason people normally do that is so the file isn't detected as illegal and deleted
e.g. when you're sharing warez
however in this case it's a one-time send to me
and I won't download it again
Someone else: its a public server
after all
i dun want the admins to probe it
Me: so what if they probe it
Someone else: nah i'm just not comfortable with it
anyway it isnt very troublesome
to just encrypt it with a password
no computer is totally secure
but trying to minimize e potential areas of attack
my browser is encapsulated inside a sandbox
so there's no way web exploits can jump out of e sandbox
Me: using google chrome?
Someone else: firefox
Me: what if no browser has that function
would you set up a VM just to browse?
Someone else: YES
Me: can you cut and paste to/from VMs?
the clipboard should be secured to prevent clipboard exploits right
Someone else: not saying using a VM is 100% safe
but if e attacker is able to jump out of e VM, he's probably so highly skilled
tt its a targeted attack
and dun bother to defend it in tt case then
Me: see
this is where you are using some form of discretion
I bet there're ways to make it even more secure than a VM
Someone else: but it shld keep 99% of e attacks out
Me: do you bother to use other terminals
since you can't be sure if there're keyloggers on them
when you go overseas do you check your email
Someone else: we always change our passwords
when we go overseas
for msn, emails
and then change back
when we get back
and no, we dun use public terminals to check mail
Me: yes you can change your password
but they can hack in before you return home
and your account will be gone
Someone else: NEVER
if i have to check mail
Me: so you always bring your laptop overseas
Someone else: yes
Me: right
so if you have no laptop
or it spoils
will you check your mail
Someone else: u will nv find me logging in a public terminal to check my email
i wun
Me: ok
Someone else: ok lar i noe this sounds a bit extreme to u
trust me
u haven seen e really extreme ones in my office
Me: no
not checking email on public pcs is not that extreme
err
if people cut off their arms it doesn't mean cutting off your hand is ok
Someone else: another way
is to relay forward all ur email
received
to a temporary email account
while overseas
and check from tt account
and delete e mails after viewing
if u for some reason decides to join IT security one day
perhaps u'll understand better why IT security r so paranoid
Me: it's because they are not able to calibrate the cost-benefit matrix
Someone else: not true
*** configures some hot keys
to disable his network adapter
whenever he's not at his pc physically
THAT extreme
Me: so do you think companies are justified in blocking MSN, gchat, gmail, twitter, facebook etc
Someone else: tt's from a biz perspective
its rather to restrain colleagues from wasting time on these
rather than for security
Me: it's also called paranoia
the official justification is to prevent the leaking of business secrets also
Someone else: rubbish lar
do u see me being blocked from ms, etc
Me: that's because they're not being dumb about it
how about the SAF
are they justified in banning CD-Rs for 'security'?
Someone else: e company is just lazy to do a proper audit
if it blocks all e msn etc
RW YES
justfiied
R...no
Me: I said CD-R
Someone else: i think they no longer ban cd-r
Me: they do
Someone else: but yah its SAF
they r well known for being a f**ked up org
Me: so if someone from the SAF talked to you about "security"
and justified all those measures
what would you say
Someone else: we as the solution providers provide recommendations
the clients , whether they want to follow
is their own business
Post ID: 7347459851216769349
Lim Swee Say's Stormtroopers
"Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there." - Scott Adams
***
Among the many, many problems: Zorro does NOT wear a business shirt and business trousers, the stormtroopers are carrying miniature AR-15s, the helmets are inconsistent and ill-fitting and the guy on the left has a Phase I Clone Trooper helmet.
From what little we can see from the ST's photos, the Flash and Batman look more credible (what should be Jack Sparrow is another joke).
What Zorro is SUPPOSED to look like
REAL Stormtroopers
ascelineleong: "This is only the prequel, LKY should really dress up and assume the character of the emperor in star wars and the best part is no makeup is required.
Lee hsien loong should be darth vadar and mah boh tan or wo ng k an s eng might want to be luke skywalker with darth vadar telling them 'wa si nin nao peh'.
The rest of the ministers should all become the other characters like the bounty hunters and stormtroopers perhaps."
***
Among the many, many problems: Zorro does NOT wear a business shirt and business trousers, the stormtroopers are carrying miniature AR-15s, the helmets are inconsistent and ill-fitting and the guy on the left has a Phase I Clone Trooper helmet.
From what little we can see from the ST's photos, the Flash and Batman look more credible (what should be Jack Sparrow is another joke).
What Zorro is SUPPOSED to look like
REAL Stormtroopers
ascelineleong: "This is only the prequel, LKY should really dress up and assume the character of the emperor in star wars and the best part is no makeup is required.
Lee hsien loong should be darth vadar and mah boh tan or wo ng k an s eng might want to be luke skywalker with darth vadar telling them 'wa si nin nao peh'.
The rest of the ministers should all become the other characters like the bounty hunters and stormtroopers perhaps."
Post ID: 2711324282930423730
Sunday, August 01, 2010
To boldly go where no Opposition Party has gone before
"Singapore: The final frontier
These are the travails of the Party, Singapore Democratic
Its 30 year mission
To induce the passage of strange new laws
To seek out new jail terms and fines
To boldly go where no Opposition Party has gone before"
Post ID: 877347142206481066
Le COD de "on"
"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit." - W. Somerset Maugham
***
Moi: Je sais qu'il n'y a pas de COD pour "on". Malheureusement, certaines phrases deviennent moins élégant.
Par exemple :
"On aime ceux qui nous abîment"
Le sujet "on" est devenu le COD "nous".
On peut dire, aussi :
"Nous aimons ceux qui nous abîment"
C'est plus consistent, mais j'aime bien le mot "on".
Savez-vous comment on peut construire une phrase plus élégante en utilisant le sujet "on" ?
A: Je n'y avais jamais pense. On pour "one" est elegant, mais on pour "nous" est familier. Je ne pense pas que l'on puisse construire une phrase plus "elegante" avec on, a moins d'utiliser le l' comme je viens de le faire. Un autre pronom que vous pouvez utiliser avec on est soi ; on n'aime que soi (même) au lieu de nous...
B: C'est interessant; certains auteurs ont utilisé "vous" avec "on".
Des jets d'eau vous inondaient, quand on se posait sur le sopha. (Flaubert)
On ne refuse pas le bonheur quand il frappe à votre porte. (Chamson)
(Cités dans Le Bon Usage.)
***
Moi: Je sais qu'il n'y a pas de COD pour "on". Malheureusement, certaines phrases deviennent moins élégant.
Par exemple :
"On aime ceux qui nous abîment"
Le sujet "on" est devenu le COD "nous".
On peut dire, aussi :
"Nous aimons ceux qui nous abîment"
C'est plus consistent, mais j'aime bien le mot "on".
Savez-vous comment on peut construire une phrase plus élégante en utilisant le sujet "on" ?
A: Je n'y avais jamais pense. On pour "one" est elegant, mais on pour "nous" est familier. Je ne pense pas que l'on puisse construire une phrase plus "elegante" avec on, a moins d'utiliser le l' comme je viens de le faire. Un autre pronom que vous pouvez utiliser avec on est soi ; on n'aime que soi (même) au lieu de nous...
B: C'est interessant; certains auteurs ont utilisé "vous" avec "on".
Des jets d'eau vous inondaient, quand on se posait sur le sopha. (Flaubert)
On ne refuse pas le bonheur quand il frappe à votre porte. (Chamson)
(Cités dans Le Bon Usage.)
Post ID: 2158049685720321432
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