Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Thursday, Sep 09, 2021 - 21:58 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Three Tales Of Commerce With Two Interludes


I

The first tale begins with a Grab ride home, from my workplace within the SGH Campus. My driver struck up a conversation of his own accord, in which he revealed himself to be a (former?) civil engineer - well, such (temporary?) displacement seems to be only getting more common, especially with the ongoing coronavirus dislocations. This soon drifted into his thoughts on myopia treatment, and whether I was a doctor (a fair question given the pick-up point), to which I gave my usual response of kinda yes, but in computer science, and not the medical kind.

At hearing this, the driver launched into a blanket dismissal of standard myopia treatments (refer example coverage in June by The State's Times) such as Lasik surgery, atropine eye drops and orthokeratology, and to be frank I was fairly impressed by his spitting out all this terminology, given that I had only just come across some of them in the course of my research. Apparently, he has had... unpleasant discussions previously with actual medical (eye) doctors on these put-downs, which I suppose is only to be expected; they haven't spent half their life on earning an M.D. and various specialty fellowships, to get their knowledge poo-poohed by outsiders, after all. I mean, if the driver had suddenly started dissing particular data structures or machine learning models, I would probably have had a thing or two to say about that too.

Anyway, his choice of alternative treatment would be one Leo Angart's vision training (note: distinct from visualization training as for aphantasia) regimen, which he claimed had reduced his myopia from some -3 diopters to -1 diopters in a fortnight, to the extent that he no longer required glasses (with a wave of non-prescription sunglasses for emphasis). Curious, I did some digging once home, and found that Angart's visiotherapy workshops have been around for a long time (1998 at least), with the general view being skepticism that such exercises (e.g. the Bates method) could work.

With the disclaimer that I have not paid for the actual courses or training packages, some of the exercises appear fairly harmless (e.g. adjusting focus once in a while) and not all that far removed from generic "look away from the screen every half an hour"-type advice. I suppose the main issues are whether this is worth paying for, whether it can actually reverse myopia as opposed to slowing progression (for which vision training seems rather less controversial), and whether it could be harmful (e.g. excessive sunning). On that last, it seems that spending time outdoors (and, one supposes, buffetted by sunlight in Singapore at least) may indeed be correlated with myopia prevention, though one might imagine that it might be less due to the sunlight per se, and more due to one's eyes being regularly made to accommodate for various distances when in the open, as they were meant to.

I suppose the elephant in the room is whether appropriate vision training can actually cure myopia, with the main objection apparently being that the physiology doesn't allow for it, i.e. there is no known mechanism that physically shortens the eye. To this, a (naive?) counterargument is that it seems accepted that bad (reading/computer) habits can encourage myopia (i.e. elongation of the eyeball) - if over years or decades - and if so, why might not the sustained adoption of good habits/practices achieve the opposite (maybe due to age)? In my case, however, it'll sadly be academic for now - I can't see myself taking enough time off screens to make a difference.



Ronaldo


Back where it began (after Sporting Lisbon)
(Original source: footyheadlines.com)


Haven't blogged about it, since I had to be sure - yes, that's Cristano Ronaldo back at Manchester United, confirmed! I sure didn't see this coming; one moment, all the reports were teasing him hopping over to City after his noncommittal statements, which reportedly had some disgruntled fans burning his jersey; then, when I woke up resigned to the inevitable, it turned out that CR7 had re-signed too. Well, said aghast shirt-burners might put in an order for the new one now, after Cavani very graciously gave up the Seven (apparently assigned to both at one point), following a lot of poring over Premier League bylaws by fans all over the globe. They may have a while to wait, though - Ronaldo's direct Spain-based rivalry with Messi might be over, but knowing him, he'll probably be going all out to beat his longtime nemesis... in shirt sales, to begin with.

A leaked recording suggests however that Ronaldo had actually been seriously weighing a move to City, but his old mates were having none of that - cue Bruno flooding his WhatsApp, Ferdinand ringing him up immediately, and the likes of Rooney, Evra and Ole also urging him to come to his senses. What tipped the balance, however, was probably Sir Alex Ferguson, who probably didn't need more than a single brief call - you don't turn down The Godfather, you just don't.

That said, I don't generally put it against footballers looking out for their own interests. Many United fans appear to retain a beef with Heinze, Tevez, Rooney (not as much) and Di Maria for actively seeking to join rivals (and/or disrespecting the club once gone), for example, and more recently against Pogba (for not renewing his contract, which will leave the club with no transfer fee when it expires) and Jones and other fringe players (for renewing their contracts, and taking up salary space that could have been allocated to better replacements). This is of course hardly unique to United, with PSG's Mbappe (for not renewing) and Barca's Umtiti (for sitting on wages) getting ragged by their respective club's supporters too. It's mostly just a commercial transaction after all, in most cases; at the right price, many of these guys would be gift-wrapped by their club and out of the door, before one can say "loyalty".

United have probably tended to hang on to their favourites longer than absolutely necessary, admittedly, for example in the case of Phil Jones, which seems to have been playing on his mind. To this, I can only advise against him trawling online United forums, from how cruel fans can be - but on the other hand, it's just part and parcel of the game, and if a guy takes gallery banter too seriously, he isn't gonna enjoy his time; Tottenham chairman David Levy once went as far as to insist on chrome fire extinguishers in his stadium, instead of the usual red, to eliminate the colours of archrivals Arsenal, so the pettiness is hardly limited to the lower tiers. Pity Dan James though, after he got shipped out to Leeds for some £30 million. Guy always had a top attitude and might well have become a Park Mark II on workrate, but there frankly aren't enough available places to fit United's bevy of attackers, as it is.

Assuming a 4-2-3-1, the goalie will be either De Gea or Henderson, and the first-choice back four largely picks itself (Shaw, Maguire, Varane, Wan-Bissaka). At least one of Fred/McTominay should be included in the double pivot, often both, with Pogba/Matic getting some cameos. Then you have Bruno (deservedly) making the Number Ten role his own, which leaves three spots for, let's see, Ronaldo, Cavani, Pogba (if not in the double pivot), Martial, Rashford, Sancho, Greenwood and maybe Lingard and the younglings (note Van De Beek still not getting a look-in). It has to be considered a pretty incredible transfer window when one realises that Sancho was the third-biggest attraction, and that Ronaldo cost like twenty-odd million Euros, which the club can probably recoup on his iconic shirt and other merchandise alone.

There's been plenty of grousing (most by opposition fans) on whether Ronaldo has declined appreciably and how United are going to fit him in the team (with a clear temptation for three at the back when attacking at least), but look at it this way: Ronaldo is a clean-living (nutrition-wise) physical machine, who has a fair claim to being the best footballer in history. Yes, yes, Messi, but honestly if I had to clone ten of one player to play outfield against some invading alien squad for the fate of the world, it would probably be Ronaldo (or Keane or Barton for the lulz), especially if prep time is available. Most complete for now he may or may not be, but I gather he has both the mental and physical attributes to warrant a try. I suppose Ole is running out of excuses for not lifting a trophy now.

And oh, r/soccer has figured out who forced Messi out of Barcelona, after in-depth research: it was Troy Deeney at Watford with a last-gasp counterattack, all along!


II

For the second tale, we have to rewind several years, to back when I was in Baltimore in 2017 for a conference. It hasn't yet been told in my posts pertaining to that trip, so here goes. A guy has to eat, right, and there was this (only slightly-overpriced) concession stand at the convention center. After surveying the options, I figured that I might as well ask the vendor (who happened to be a Black chap, these details seem important nowadays) for his recommendation. He gave me what was on hindsight a slightly odd look, before naming the most expensive hot-dog on the menu.

As I clutched my bulging wrapper, I mused over how I should have responded - was he expecting the "make me one with everything" quip? - before it struck me. Obviously he was going to push the most expensive item, all the more as I wasn't gonna be a regular or anything. They are a profit-maximizing business, after all! It definitely wasn't their job to worry about my budget, but at a few extra bucks, it was a cheap lesson - or not even that, since I was pretty hungry. Well played, vendor!


Disaster In Slow Motion


With endurance like this, who needs conditioning?
(Sources: france24.com [16 April 2021];
theonlinecitizen.com [23 August 2021])


Diplomacy never sleeps, unlike the current POTUS, and his VP (congruent with past assessments) would be in Singapore in late August, to perform some good old-style globalist jawboning. More of the usual stuff really: one orchid named, amusing observations made, our PM's generous offer of one (1) tanker aircraft towards evacuating Americans & collaborators from Afghanistan, and a few more-interesting proclamations on cybersecurity and space. Notably, however, Harris' overseas trip appears to have largely been cast as having "gone missing" during an ongoing emergency in the U.S. domestic media, but at least it doesn't seem to have affected her popular image much if at all, if mostly due to where it was starting from.

However, at the end, the buck has to stop at the top, whoever it is pulling the strings up there, and to be entirely honest my heart goes out - if just a little - to Biden here. Amidst crashing approval ratings, condemnation by both his closest allies and political opponents, and broad-spectrum buyer's remorse and incredulity, he deserves as much rest as he can muster. But let's play possible Alzheimer's advocate here: the entire Afghanistan misadventure was doomed from the start, and I can credit him for having enough wisdom and courage to fulfil his predecessor's grand strategy, in finally making a clean break of this particular misbegotten Forever War.

There has been scattered agitation towards returning to the previous status quo (i.e. a [costly] re-invasion) in the establishment FAKE NEWS, often with tear-jerking appeals to "think of the women and children!" or somesuch... which, of course, was always a convenient excuse to begin with. Mahbubani's recounting of ground realities in Foreign Policy probably comes much closer to describing the true objectives:

Lockhart met a villager in Afghanistan who told her the story of US$150 million literally going up in smoke. She recounts the man saying: "We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back from exile, and we were very pleased."

"This was the summer of 2002," Lockhart goes on to describe. "The village was in a remote part of Bamiyan Province, in Afghanistan's central highlands, and several hours' drive from the provincial capital - utterly cut off from the world. U.N. agencies and NGOs were rushing to provide 'quick impact' projects to help Afghan citizens in the aftermath of war. [That money] could have transformed the lives of the inhabitants of villages like this one."

But it was not to be, as the young man explained: "After many months, very little had happened. We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid. So we went to find out what was going on. And this is what we discovered: the money was received by an agency in Geneva, who took 20 per cent and subcontracted the job to another agency in Washington DC, who also took 20 per cent. Again it was subcontracted and another 20 per cent was taken; and this happened again when the money arrived in Kabul. By this time there was very little money left; but enough for someone to buy wood in western Iran and have it shipped by a shipping cartel owned by a provincial governor at five times the cost of regular transportation. Eventually some wooden beams reached our villages. But the beams were too large and heavy for the mud walls that we can build. So all we could do was chop them up and use them for firewood."

Then again, hearing it put this way, it was always sorta incongruous that anybody in the know actually meant for a hundred-fifty million bucks to be put into the service of some unknown backwater village - but I guess the children of select U.N. agency and NGO heads and subcontractors have put the funds to good use, in Geneva and Ibiza and elsewhere. And, let's face it, the occupying Coalition forces can hardly claim the moral high ground either; as attested by many actual Afghans including a Shakira (not Pique's wife) in The New Yorker, the U.S.-led coalition openly allied with literal child rapists and former mujahideen, and between corrupt globalist invaders that deal random death and homegrown theocratic despots that at least don't tend to kill you if you obey them, it's perhaps understandable that some might prefer the second option. Sure, the long-suffering Afghanis will (rationally) claim to support whoever has the guns currently, but once the guns go (or are left behind), their actual level of commitment will be revealed.

Now, I really don't want to get into the habit of defending President Biden, but some of his excuses were actually quite valid. While he has gotten panned for blaming the puppet Afghan leadership and army for all but instantly surrendering, it has to be remembered that the U.S. and friends have been there for a full generation; if the ANA still can't stand on its own feet, it likely never will. Moreover, while there were probably a few brave and willing Afghan National Army soldiers - just not nearly enough - and it seems that many of the local troops on the books might not have existed in the first place. Well, for two trillion and change, America might well have converted to 90+% nuclear power against The Climate Change, with some bullet trains and revitalized inner cities thrown in.

The twenty-year debacle was perhaps most aptly summed up by Biden vowing to avenge the Kabul airport bombing that had killed 13 American troops... only for it to be reported within the week that the reprisal droning had slaughtered ten from the family of a former interpreter aid worker ally, including six kids (which could have been a metaphor or something), in stark contrast to GEOTUS's targeting of the top brass. Fine, perhaps this was a very tragic and regrettable accident based on faulty intelligence, but then one reads reports about how the U.S. coalition proactively handed over the names of their Afghani collaborators to the Taliban - while not actually being sure of who exactly they are evacuating (or who their own troops are, if it comes down to that), how they abandoned the critical Bagram airfield without even informing the new Afghan commander, and how they left their dogs behind, and one has to realise: this cannot be ordinary everyday negligence or incompetence; one would have to go all out, to try and fail this hard!

In this case, one supposes it fair to hold the generals in charge responsible, but the response to the various lower-ranked commanders demanding accountability has been dismissal, demotion or outright gaslighting, alongside orders to stop disrespecting the "leadership". As observed by some, common soldiers can get court-martialled and thrown in the brig, for losing their rifle (or even just a firing pin). Lose enough materiel to literally outfit an entire national army, however, and nothing happens. Since it's come to this, we can only hope for the Taliban to turn over a new leaf to an extent after their unexpected windfall, and perhaps come around on education for females, more inclusiveness, wider economic development and appreciation for the finer things in life. At the very least, they shouldn't have any issue with the scourge of identity politics, so they have that going for them.


III

Unlike the previous two tales, this is entirely fictional, but possibly still instructive.

A homeowner discovers that a pipe has sprung a leak in his basement, and dials for the plumbers. The plumbers arrive, observe the water running out for some minutes, and solemnly inform the homeowner that the entire pipe has to be replaced.

"Well, that's a solution." the homeowner admits. "But isn't there anything else you can do? Like, I don't know, tighten the mains tap, or slap some paste over the leak?"

The plumbers hem and haw. "I'm sorry, sir, we're not authorized to try that."

"But what harm can it do? Why not give it a go?"

"We just can't, sir. And in fact, we can't even replace your pipe right now; we need the approved type of pipe that has undergone all the required tests, which will only be out in a few months, if everything goes well. But we will be happy to take your preorder, if you wish."

"Look, just try tightening the mains tap at least. Maybe it works, maybe it won't, but it won't take long."

"Sir, that can be very dangerous."

"Tightening a tap is dangerous?!" the by-now incredulous homeowner, who is beginning to regret bringing the "experts" in, splutters. "What's next, turning the doorknob can strain my wrist? In fact, there are tutorial videos all over YouTube and TikTok, by ordinary folk all over the world, demonstrating how to D.I.Y similar cases!"

"Sir, are those videos peer-reviewed?"

"Let's just try it, okay?"

"Sir, consider this report of a victim who died after slipping and hitting his head on the tap, after trying to tighten it."

"...That's just stupid, and you know it." *strolls over to mains tap* *gives it a hard twist* "Ah, see, the flow of the leak seems to have reduced by maybe a third; let's give it another twist and see..."

*Plumber steps in and twists the tap back to its original position, water gushes out again*

"What the hell are you doing?!"

"Sir, turning the mains tap clearly doesn't work."

"I... you... you saw it yourself! Never mind, we can do it again, let me just twist..." *Plumbers block way to the tap* "What?"

"Sir, due to the danger, we can only allow you to twist your mains tap under the condition of a properly-designed and registered randomized controlled trial. Guidelines of the World Plumbing Association."

"...what does that involve?"

"Well, we will have to recruit a thousand of your neighbours, and bust half of their basement pipes too, to create a fair starting point. Oh, it'll also take two years and ten million dollars to set up. Why not you just wait to buy our pipe?"

"This is an outrage!"

"Sir, you are getting angry; why are you anti-science?"

"Just get off my property, okay?"

"Sir, we can't do that, government safety regulations. What if you choke on the tap?" *answers phone* "But lucky you, your preferred solution has just been approved - you just have to buy the approved tap, and we can attempt it for you!"

"This looks like... basically a tap."

"Ah, but it is *our* approved tap - just $99 a month, in thirty easy instalments!"

"'Your' approved tap?"

"Yeah, the World Plumbing Association says that our tap doesn't work, but don't you listen to those idiots."

"But you just said I shouldn't try turning the existing tap, due to WPA guidelines?"

"Look, they know best, except when they don't, and we decide when they do or do not know best, understand? Mastercard or Visa? Or are you a racial supremacist?"



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Right To Refurbish


Related Posts:
Double Tap
Twelve Mostly Men
Mr. Robo's New Profession
Hard Ham Truths
Gone Astray
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.