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Wednesday, Dec 12, 2012 - 00:40 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Note From Nowhere


Cute, but I'd say that can get old quickly. If the girl's not actually cute enough, that is.

I was toying with reviving EPL Tales using Benitez's improbable return to management and subsequent misadventures, but figured that would be picking on far too easy a target. If the funny builds, though...

Was wanting to mention that Magic: The Gathering has hit upon the "can't sacrifice" design space, touched on long, long ago in Conflagration (with Sanctity of Life, a triple-white enchantment). Guess they couldn't have avoided this slice of design space for long, or perhaps I am mistaken, and they had already used it in some much earlier card.

[N.B. (23rd December 2012): Already mentioned. Oops.]

As to the aftermath of the refusal-to-work-turned-bus-strike, somehow it morphed into the conclusion that commuters must pay more (as usual). This might have gone down better had it not become popular knowledge that SMRT is plainly socializing costs while privatizing profits, and in fact their business plan can probably be described as follows:

  1. Decide on how much annual net profit P to make (inconveniences such as slap-on-wrist fines imputed). Must be more than the previous year, to show growth and the management qualities of the top ranks, who therefore deserve a fatter bonus
  2. Estimate costs C. Also reward those who cut costs, largely regardless of how they achieved it and whether there will be long-term implications (they will have moved on by then)
  3. Add P and C to get R, the revenue required
  4. Try to make R by raising fares "for drivers' welfare"
  5. If the required quantum of raise looks unconscionable even by local standards, no worries. Simply ask the government for the money outright
  6. Rejoice in another successful year of record profits, wrested from the unforgiving maw of competitive capitalism

Note the factors that, as a result, have completely no effect on company performance:
  • Long-term planning (operational, financial or otherwise)
  • Consumer welfare
  • Efficiency


You believe?


On staff welfare, I was taken aback when the nurse who merely put through a prank call, which she thought was from the Queen herself, committed suicide. Surely that's overreacting a bit? While the DJs involved might not have displayed the best of judgment, it's still sort of like tapping somebody on the shoulder, and having her dash hysterically onto the road and get knocked down by a car - okay, they could be said to be responsible, but a reaction of this magnitude could not have been reasonably foreseen.

I mean, come on, "the humiliation of having to listen to her voice on television and radio asking the pretend Queen to hold on while she passed on the call"? Was there anything even mildly shameful in this good-faith act? Why did the hospital even allow phone calls in the first place then, since it is near-impossible to confidently verify identity over the phone without prior arrangement?

It has been suggested, and might be true, that for all the statements about the nurse not being suspended or disciplined, she may well have been quietly moved to be next in line for a "transfer", "reassignment", "redundancy" or somesuch by a humourless administration - you know how organizations work behind the scenes. I really hope that this was not the case, but we will probably never know.




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4 comments

anonymous said...
you can't watch that youtube without having watched any of the movies it referenced, you fucking asshole (garden state, zooey deschanel flicks)


December 12, 2012 - 22:43 SGT     
gilbert said...
Sir, I am dismayed at your apparent disparagement of my command of contemporary brooding loser movie canon.


December 12, 2012 - 22:49 SGT     
anonymous said...
y leh
u watch transformers ah
transform your penis into building


December 13, 2012 - 22:03 SGT     
gilbert said...
I said I was dismayed at your assertions, I didn't say that they were inaccurate.


December 13, 2012 - 22:18 SGT     

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