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Saturday, Oct 12, 2013 - 22:16 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

More Ado

Big week for us, kicking off with the taking down of the USA a peg, for having the audacity to enter hibernation (not-too-subtle subtext: isn't being a one-party state so much better?), following precedent. Hopefully they continue seeing us as plucky and adorable, if straightlaced, underdogs.

For rehashed idea of the month, we have the proposed transition to fully-electric private transport, the further extension of which was studied here last year. So far so good, but the writer goes on to angle for a bottom-up initiative, citing the example of billionaire Elon Musk, disregarding this being a canonical example of regulated change making the most sense. Are normal citizens supposed to club together to fund islandwide recharging stations and face hostile petrol cartels head-on now, after simple innovations like food vans got legislated to death? The government sure weren't joking about shaking their legs...

Oh, and self-assemblers are up to cubes.

It's still dandy on the surface though, with another former top civil servant mysteriously backtracking on his straight talk, in tandem with the concurrent upswell in patriotism that has seen 90% of local women categorically refuse to volunteer for national service; oops, wrong headline, it should be "One in 10 S'porean women willing" in the nation-building media.


Thanks for the motivation
(Source: Reddit)


Well, the survey-takers did have the decency to admit that women having a more upbeat impression about full-time national service is likely due to the lack of actual personal experience, so they do have that going for them. Of course, there remains a general sprinkling of doubt about findings and opinions published by a press accepted as 149th. Then again, making stuff up does certainly work for the SAT.

It's harder to find fault with the latest move to send some of the best principals to neighbourhood schools, which probably came after the belated realisation of just how pointless the changes to the PSLE are going to be. However, I doubt that this will do that much to raise the schools' profile, if the higher-performers still congregate in the usual suspects.

Actually, this might not make that much sense - Gladwell for one notes it is worse for smart students to wind up near-last in elite institutions, than to do well in slightly-lesser ones and get a confidence boost, which brings up an interesting suggestion I once heard: offer a scholarship to the top X% of each school, which encourages talent to diffuse naturally.

At the end, all this grumbling ultimately has its roots in a single overarching cause - a perception that the future is insecure, that others are out for our lunch; but more than that, the nagging suspicion that while not being complacent is one thing, propagating inequity is another (Swiss protestors are perhaps going too far, though)



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Next: Sticking To The Script


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