Thursday 24 March 2011

Rant 751 / Coffee With Sweetened Condensed Milk

Lurking in EDMW too long will make you want to vote for anyone but the PAP, just to piss them off. This was probably the last straw for me.

Some dude wrote to the Straits Times a rather negative letter. What ST did was rephrase it with less negative data and made it sound very positive.

Original letter:


I read with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (“School system still ‘best way to move up’”; Monday).
It is indeed heartwarming to learn that only 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university.
I firmly agree with our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, who declared that “education remains the great social leveller in Singaporean society”. His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination.
In recent years, there has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.
I would like to commend Ms Rachel Chang on her outstanding article. On behalf of the financially disadvantaged students of Singapore, I thank the fine journalists of the Straits Times for their tireless work in bringing to Singaporeans accurate and objective reporting.

Published letter:


A reassuring experience of meritocratic system
I READ with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (‘School system still ‘best way to move up”; March 8).
It is indeed heartwarming to learn that almost 50 per cent of children from one- to three-room flats make it to university and polytechnics.
I firmly agree with Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who said that education remains the great social leveller in Singapore society.
His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort.
There has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship.
The system also ensures that good, able students from the middle- and high-income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.

For all I know, both letters are accurate. What matters is how great the change of perspective is between them.

This is rather overboard. If this is what they've been doing all along, I'm very disappointed.

Another thing is how the other day, some PAP candidate said he knew what it was like to be poor because he grew up in a 4-room flat. A 4-room flat in Singapore is an apartment with 2 rooms, a living room, a kitchen and 1 or 2 bathroom(s).

Yea, that's totally poor... for someone aspiring to be a minister.

Not that I'll definitely vote for anyone not in the PAP but this just makes me more inclined to vote at all.







One thing I've found out today is the huge different between adding real milk and condensed milk into my coffee. Had to taste it to find the difference. The logic is simple, the effect was greater than expected.

Another thing I realized is that each filter bag is costing me more than the tablespoon of coffee and the water combined. I've barely used a quarter of the half-kg bag and it costs S$6. That packet of filter bags contained about 20-30, so even if it was priced at $1, which is the lowest I can imagine for such a product, it's still more expensive than the coffee. In fact, in order to match the tablespoon of coffee each bag would probably have to cost me a single cent.

I should probably get a reusable filter if possible.








Watching Criminal Minds. Pretty interesting. Somehow I could kind of relate to one of the psychos in the first season, except I stopped that kind of thought more than a decade ago while he kept on harbouring that kind of mentality till he went mad and started killing people.

Better still, it lacked the gruesome scenes that the CSI series loved to use. Makes it easier for me to eat while watching.

And I really like how I have another 4 seasons of this show to watch. I don't think I'll be needing to find more for quite some time.







Heroes of Might and Magic 6 is coming out in June. Isn't that roughly the same time Witcher 2 is being released? Oh wait, that's May.

Holy crap! I won't be bored during the holidays then! Yay!








So I got the Black Emporium DLC for Dragon Age 2 in order to buy the potion to re-allocate my ability and attribute points, and lowered the difficulty to Normal. Still, I get this sense of dislike whenever I see the game icon. I should never have played on Hard. I'm not that good and/or it's not that fun.

Now I know where I'm going with my Rogue's abilities. Shadow Assassin - lots of crits with 2 disappearing abilities to get out when I get too much attention from the enemies.







I've been getting some comments that are ending up in the Spam bin. Some were automatically filtered, not that I mind since they're mostly in Russian or very broken English. Others were sent there because they mentioned their blogs, either in their names (signed in) or in the comment itself.

I don't know if this is going to sound offensive, and I'm sorry if it does, but all comments posted here that contain links to other blogs or websites will be treated as spam.

There are simply too many people trying to boost their own blogs' viewcounts (and hence income via AdSense) by posting inane flattery on other blogs.

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