Fixed the display glitch in
the Chinese RPG by switching my System Locale in the Control Panel's Regional and Language Settings to Simplified Chinese. Now the game is perfectly fine without using fixes and cracks. Wow. I'm seriously impressed. Just yesterday I was spending an entire morning trying to install Fahrenheit and getting it to work. Had to download fixes that didn't work, followed by Orca which I used to delete a few lines. The guide I followed wasn't enough but eventually I removed an additional line in the Fahrenheit.msi that solved the problem.
Fahrenheit was a 2005 game. The Chinese game was released in 1995.
So I thought I'll just type some PAP-bashing stuff to balance my yin yang. The appearance of the following linked article also helped.
The rich-poor gap is one undeniable problem. LKY recently brought this up with his book and now even the AFP is discussing this issue. How does one close this gap without welfare?
That's a tough one that few, if any, countries have managed to solve. I think the government is going to have to go with this more or less standard approach. Housing and taxes, IMO are the major factors. Raise housing grants and the zero income tax bracket. Free money and shares are useless to the poor in the long term. A couple hundred bucks can only last so long, but no taxes for people with income below S$40k a year would help them for a longer time.
If the no-mercy stance that LKY has encouraged since independence has been working at all, it sure isn't showing right now. For all I know it could have worked and we're having fewer poor people than we could have had, but their voices seem to be getting louder as the Singapore population grows.
And I really have to agree with the following statements:
"Some feel that we're creating this place to be a playground for the rich," said Eugene Tan, assistant professor at Singapore Management University. "There are people who genuinely feel that Singaporeans don't come first."
I find it hard to come up with a reason with which to deny the first statement. Even if it isn't true yet, that's exactly the direction we're heading towards. You know what this reminds me of?
Monaco.
As for the second, I suppose it can be true. After all, we're supposed to be a meritocratic society, right? I guess most of us Singaporeans never thought about what they meant when the government first said that, until now. Meritocracy and xenophobia don't mix, so someday, the PAP's going to have to get their priorities straight, or give citizenship to more wealthy foreigners. They have to get their votes from somewhere.
That would essentially be a trade of national identity for cash. You give citizenships often to successful (ie wealthy) foreigners while the middle class natives, feeling the increasing squeeze, leaves the country while they still can afford to. As this goes on, there is a gradual increase of the proportion of citizens who are first or second generation immigrants. GDP goes up, percentage of millionaires/billionaires goes up, proportion of the poor goes down, meaning of the adjective "Singaporean"
gone.
I know, I know. Change. Progress. Who's going to build your homes. Etc etc. But the direction we're heading, is that the sort of progress we want? Exchanging what it means to be Singaporean for money? Or is being Singaporean all about money?
Hmm.. I think I've just hit on something. Singaporeans have always loved money. From what I've seen, Singapore itself really isn't too important to Singaporeans. I mean, most people who's been through NS would have said at one point or another during their lives that if Singapore is invaded, they would not be staying to defend the island, describing the desire to stay as stupid. I'm paraphrasing of course.
Therefore, there's a general lack of patriotism among the population. Ergo, selling the national identity for cash is not too absurd a goal in the long term.
Voila! The PAP has been right all along in creating a playground for the rich! Someday, being Singaporean would not mean being born here, speak English with a Southeast Asian accent or being kiasu. Someday, being Singaporean will just mean loving money and having lots of it.
To be fair, we do depend a lot on money. Money is the reason the country is stable. Money, spread properly, makes people content. Content people don't cause unrest. If not for the wealth of the country, it's actually quite amazing the number of angles the rest of the world can bash us from. Absence of democracy and the death penalty are just two of the very obvious ones.
Money is necessary as bribes. I'm pretty sure the government has made a lot of potential trouble go away using some form of
monetary instrument. It's not a bad thing. Bad news often fan sparks into flames. What used to be a small matter no one gives a damn about can easily turn into huge national issue just because some journalist wrote an article about it.
Money also gives our country political clout. It is partly why nobody has tried to mess with us too much so far. I think the last time someone did was during the Konfrontasi, but that was really the British fighting Indonesia while Singapore was just a British pawn.
I met a taxi driver who used to serve in the British army and had friends who were involved in Konfrontasi. He was saying how the British officers back then really had balls, especially with the way they dared to charge ahead with nothing but a handgun. Anyway, according to his friends, it was quite lucrative to be in wars.
First, they got to rob/loot any enemy soldiers they capture or kill. Their officers would identify the enemies, prevent them from killing any high-ranking officers and instruct them to keep them alive as POWs instead. The looting usually netted a lot of money because the enemy soldiers preferred to hide among the civilians, ie carry their own money.
Second, promotions. Every one of his friends who survived the Konfrontasi had multiple promotions. Lots of sergeants rose to commissioned officers after the war, and a few even got "crabs" (aka Crests), ie
Major, Lieutenant-Colonel or full Colonel. Also, there's a new rank of Senior LTC on the linked Wiki page that they didn't use to have in those days.
Watson won an American TV game show against 2 of its best contestants. We're talking about an AI designed by IBM and its hardware alone is pretty incredible.
2880 POWER7 3.55GHz processor cores, 17TB RAM. It contains no hard drive because hard drive is slow. Come to think of it, I once heard a lecturer in NTU mention that computers use hard drives only because RAM is too expensive. Hard disks, according to him, are more of a compromise between memory access speed and costs than a necessary part of a computer. In other words, if you can afford it you can build a computer with only RAM and without a hard disk drive. I guess this has just been confirmed by this AI.
I have to admit it brings to mind certain science fiction stories.
A train trip from Vancouver to Ontario costs more than a plane ticket if you want a bed. I've been looking at
VIA Rail Canada and the prices are pretty surprising to me. I've rarely taken long distance train trips so yea, C$1400 per person for a "Cabin for 2" with discounted fare was nowhere close to what I expected.
Furthermore, those need to be booked like a year in advance because I've just checked the fares on a random date in June and the 2-person cabins have been sold out. Another date was a random day in November and the 3-person cabins were sold out while the 2-person ones weren't.
The length of the trip is about 4 days long. Basically, it's like staying in a moving hotel if you take a cabin because only these have private bathrooms. Meals are also included in all sleeper fares, so if you take all these into account, it's pretty reasonable. It seems that it's best to get the meals-included fare because there are only 8 stops along the way.
C$1451.52 (taxes included), or S$1881.28, per pax for a 3D4N/ stay from 8.30pm on 15th Nov 2011 to 9.30am on the 19th of Nov in a 2-person cabin (costs even more if only 1 person is staying in a 2-person room) makes roughly $470 per night per person with food and accommodation. Surprisingly, it's also more expensive per person for a group of 3 staying in a 3-person cabin.
Most of their trains offer complimentary wifi internet access and, according to the website, they're currently upgrading it to broadband access.
Too bad a round trip between Singapore and Vancouver would cost me over S$2k. If I were to try that train trip, it would take over S$4k. I could buy 2 more PCs that are better than my current one and still have a few hundred to spare, or I could get some insurance and pay the premiums for a number of years. Both of them would benefit me for years while the trip would be over in less than a week. Both the computers and the trip would give me happy memories.
Which means I'll go on that trip only after I have more than enough to pay for at least a year of premiums for all my insurance and buy at least 2 more desktops.
Recently noticed the ad on Care2 for this chocolate brand called "
Endangered Species Chocolate". I was interested, so I tried to find it on Wikipedia. Instead of this brand, I found the page for "
Rescue Chocolate".
While Endangered donates 10% of its net profits to charities for saving wild plants and animals, Rescue claims to donate 100% of its net profits to
charities that protect abandoned pets.
Shipping is too expensive for me due to the nature of chocolate. Cheaper shipping (minimum US$20 for both) means it will definitely melt by the time it reaches Asia. Expedited shipping may guarantee the quality since they're supposedly packed with ice and insulation that will last a few days but cost at least US$80.
Out of question.
If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, what about birth control? We've always assumed that all prostitutes use various means to prevent conception when they're working, but is the history of contraceptives that long? I mean, people haven't always known that sperms + eggs = babies. The idea of sperms and eggs came
after the idea that microscopic cells exist. Microscopes didn't exist till, what, the 16th century when someone looked through a drop of water resting on on a tiny hole?
So all the way before that, had people known that the stuff that the guys ejaculate will lead to pregnancies?
They probably noticed that. Or did they?
Actually,
they didn't.
Ancient Mesopotamia had a form of birth control involving spermicidal herbs, though they definitely didn't know that was the way it worked. Ancient Egypt also used birth control methods that involve sticking stuff in the vagina and... lactation. I don't understand how lactation works either but I'll leave that for later.
Similarly, the ancient Greeks utilised plants for birth control.
Later, the Hebrew Bible described coitus interruptus as a means of contraception. Coitus interruptus basically means ejaculating outside the vagina.
The Chinese in the 7th century BC also found coitus reservatus and coitus obstructus, both of which I find very uncomfortable to imagine. Coitus reservatus means the guy prevents ejaculation while maintaining his erection through sheer will alone, and this also means
not ejaculating even outside the vagina. On the other hand, coitus obstructus means pressing the base of the penis or the area between the scrotum and anus to prevent ejaculation, forcing semen to enter the bladder instead.
Anyway all these mean that being a prostitute really sucked in ancient times. First, herbs aren't very effective, I believe. Second, spreading a paste in a vagina deep enough to cover the semen and that it probably gets pushed in deeper means it must have been very hard to clean up after work, not to mention that herbs rot. Third, if only the Jewish Bible mentioned one effective (relatively speaking) method of birth control, I don't think the entire civilized world could have known about it.
What about the other side of the world? The American natives? All I can find out is that they had herbal contraceptive methods. Nothing on Google seems to say that they had any physical means of birth control like coitus interruptus.
Putting all these together, it can be deduced that whores must have gotten pregnant and needed abortions fairly frequently in ancient times.
Okay, now to the strange side-story of lactation. Apparently, lactation prevents ovulation. So if a mother breastfeeds for an indefinite amount of time, she could have safe sex without doing a thing. Wait... do couples do that? Use lactation as a form of contraception? That would mean either the dad does the daily sucking or she uses a breast pump till menopause.
Speaking of which, what happens to the remaining eggs when she reaches menopause? All females are born with lots of eggs, more than enough to last multiple lifetimes, so what happens to the ones not used or expelled?
According to
this page, the death of eggs is a very common phenomenon. So whatever eggs are left after menopause will just die.
