Posted by: joelfirenze on: January 16, 2012
There has been a bit of a debate in Singapore about whether ministers and political appointees are paid high enough or not. The reason for this debate goes all the way back to the last time revisions were made to the salary structure over many years, the last one being made in 2007 (before the [...]
Posted by: joelfirenze on: December 30, 2011
I had recently come across Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies. As the title suggests, the book explores how past civilizations (and ours?) were unable to cope with certain pressures of their environment and collapsed. The book qualifies the term “collapse” – in Tainter’s view, collapse is a justifiable choice when a society is unable [...]
Posted by: joelfirenze on: June 26, 2011
Setting the context: I saw old people boarding a bus after visiting the wet market. Presumably it was a trip organised by some RC. I also know that RCs organise trips for usually the elderly to the veg farms in Lim Chu Kang, so all of these isn’t new. What’s new however, is the intensification [...]
Posted by: joelfirenze on: June 7, 2009
I am unabashedly a fan of NYTime, not because its about New York, but rather in the way it delivers an ecology of information to readers. Going through the website and the blogs, the information within an article is always connected to the information of another article or blog, and within that, there is a tremendous [...]
Posted by: joelfirenze on: May 18, 2009
I was sitting at a nice chinese restaurant at kitchener road, which was at Little India area, on a Sunday… Eating at a chinese place, I felt a sense of dislocation as I saw busloads of india/bangladeshi workers coming in for their weekend jaunt, I guess. And on and on, it happened… Watching this scene [...]
Posted by: joelfirenze on: May 18, 2009
I would first say that I need to read more about local writing, since my current sampling has simply been Catherine Lim. Based on that, and from other isolated examples, I’m getting the feeling that the better stories are the ones that revolve around the change in values through the generations. I know, because I [...]
