Sunday, December 10, 2023

China’s Difficult Challenge to Reach the Middle (Or why China won't surpass US GDP)

Growth dreams deferred. 

China’s per capita income of $21,400 places it just above the 60th percentile of the global income distribution.


By Enda Curran

October 23, 2023

An unlikely geopolitical subplot of 2023 is the emerging view that China’s economy isn’t going to overtake the US after all.

Friday, November 10, 2023

Worker praised for im-peck-able gesture towards chicken crossing the road

 


10 Nov 2023

SINGAPORE – An act of kindness by a worker who helped a lost, panicking mother hen and her chicks to safety has catapulted him into the limelight.

Swift Justice in Singapore (A.K.A. "History is written by winners"... in exile... on Douyin...)

China "Karen"

'History is written by winners': Woman, 29, who verbally abused SGH nurse & deported to China

She was deported after spending 29 days behind bars.

Winnie Li

November 09, 2023

The woman who verbally abused a Singapore General Hospital staff and was jailed and deported for it, has taken to social media to write: "History is written by winners." 

Her latest update online came in the form of a Douyin video posted at around 1:20am on Nov. 9, 2023.

[Right! Losers tiktok & Douyin... Or blog. Like me. :-( ]

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Man offered S$2 to sex worker instead of agreed fee in repeat offence, gets jail

The Australian woman, who was in Singapore for a holiday, charged S$700 per hour.

[Note that she is described as an "Australian Woman". Not "Australian Prostitute", or "illegal foreign sex worker." No judgement here.]



Lydia Lam

31 Oct 2023


SINGAPORE: A repeat offender on remission for refusing to pay sex workers after obtaining their services struck again, this time targeting an Australian woman who was in Singapore for a holiday.

Monday, August 28, 2023

Musk undue influence over US policy and the Russo-Ukraine war.

 Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.

By Ronan Farrow


Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Full of beans: scientists use processed coffee grounds to make stronger concrete

Australian engineers say they can make concrete nearly 30% stronger by incorporating processed grounds into the material

Donna Lu

Tue 22 Aug 2023


In an idea that fittingly arose over a cup of coffee, researchers have devised a technique to recycle used coffee grounds to make stronger concrete.

Engineers at RMIT University say they have developed a way to make concrete nearly 30% stronger by incorporating processed coffee grounds into the material.

Samples of unroasted coffee beans, roasted coffee beans, spent ground coffee and the team’s coffee biochar.
Photograph: Carelle Mulawa-Richards, RMIT University