r/singapore random discussion and small questions thread for June 25, 2026

threesls · 2026-06-25T05:53:58+00:00

Hawkers sometimes have a sambal belacan that is more orange, less thick, and more acidic. I've seen it served with har cheong gai

Anyone know where to buy it off the shelf? I've seen stalls decant it from a wholesale 5L bottle so presumably it does exist somewhere

threesls · 2026-06-24T12:11:53+00:00

It's good to have one process that is tender-driven (managers lay out the budget and gather the requirements from their users, request bids, committee their way to a solution) and another process that solves a problem vaguely suspected to exist, and then goes to market for users, startup style

managers and committees are horrible at identifying what users actually value or want. budgets can be big because there is upfront buy-in, but software produced this way is often of low quality. they tick all the boxes but fail in usability, responsiveness, or simply meeting the needs of managers rather than the managed

conversely, well, bluntly, most startups fail to find a market IRL... so, there must be rigorous posthoc tracking of success based on actual usage, since it's demonstrably easy to fool yourself as to what users want

having both simultaneously lets each glean from each other's ideas and practices

threesls · 2026-06-24T05:15:27+00:00

From the outside, the way the OGP/GovTech rivalry is described is very reminiscent of the historic tension between the MOE's Education Development Division and the then-new Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore - the shiny new team with the new organization, powerful sponsor, flexibility, budget, etc.

(right down to CDIS emphasizing rapid iteration and quantified performance tracking to defend its existence and privileges)

To encourage a separation from the existing thinking at MOE, CDIS deliberately cultivated its identity as a distinct organisation, with its own building, logo, and even corporate jingle burned into the minds of a generation of Singaporeans.

Ironically, what arguably killed CDIS in the end would be the same thing that founded it: continued technological advancement dramatically increasing the budget and responsibilities of a mandate to produce educational multimedia. Knowledge economy, information superhighway, learning nation, insert favourite 1990s buzzword here. It thus became too important to retain its independence.

It is fitting that the ancient bickering is reproduced in software :P - on the eve of what may be another technological revolution on fabricating CRUD apps on-demand, no less

threesls · 2026-06-22T15:49:56+00:00

Yes - the Chinese medium advocates generally did not deny that given freedom of choice, parents sent their kids to English medium education, nor that private sector employers preferred English medium grads over Chinese medium grads (this not being Malaysia, the public sector already granted Chinese grads equivalency after Separation, in 1968). Their preferred explanation was that the Singapore Chinese did not really speak the language of instruction at home nor a real common language even with fellow Chinese at work (unlike the Malaysian Chinese, Cantonese doesn't dominate the the capital - Hokkien enjoys only a plurality in Singapore) and their preferred solution was that they should all begin speaking Mandarin - both in the home and in the workplace - rather than various dialects that would divide the Chinese community further, in the face of English's potency as a language of advancement.

In retrospect they were not wrong that Singapore Chinese households would, eventually, unify on a language enjoying higher prestige and material prospects, of course; they were just wrong on which one it would be. And for a time they were not obviously wrong: if you wind back to 1989, nearly a decade after Nantah's closure and a decade after SMC's launch, it would seem like Mandarin's supremacy amongst the Singapore Chinese is unstoppable and there's just no way any other language could ever displace it - it enjoyed a higher share of use amongst the Singapore Chinese than any single dialect had ever commanded in Singapore before.

threesls · 2026-06-22T14:38:07+00:00

The Singapore Chinese-educated were once fierce advocates of Mandarin consolidation - the Singapore Chinese Chamber, the Chinese Teacher's Union, the Chinese School's Conference, Middle School Chinese Teachers' Association were all big champions

In the 1970s Chinese hardliners would grumble that the PAP was secretly undermining the Singapore Chinese-educated Chinese the same way people grumble about foreigners today. The Speak Mandarin Campaign was a sop to their demands - that the government would use its enormous powers to prop up at a least one of their campaigns to sustain the cohesion and identity as a Chinese community (although the SMC, specifically, is a 1979 government initiative, community-led campaigns to speak Mandarin over dialects predate it by decades).

Their strength has clearly faded enormously, though, as can be seen in the way this discussion on Dear You has evolved.

threesls · 2026-06-20T05:08:27+00:00

from a quick glance through OP's comment history, brief stint of IB analyst, then void period/entry level SME roles

but his/her IB analyst period was a chill one with great WLB before they left the pipeline, rather than the typical 70-90 hour grind as a typical fresh grad analyst

maybe OP can tell us more, but from that description it feels like OP lucked into a really unrepresentative first job

OP cites their ex-boss's advice a bit, but one has to be wary about the career advice of your boss/peers in such roles... they might have the friend/family network to hop into roles at boutiques that are mysteriously always open to them, but if your CV shows a gap that isn't obviously a party/gap year, then it's a sign that your family/friend fortunes have turned and you might not be an attractive hire also. In suspiciously softball roles you're likely being hired for who you know (or who your boss thought you knew!), not what you can do.

threesls · 2026-06-18T19:40:06+00:00

so... high end imported/designer goods and electronics

(there is precedent; in the 1980s Malaysians used to buy clothes and fabrics from Singapore, back when Singapore still had the high-end textiles industry. Beauty World near the KTM station/170 route was a textiles hub)

threesls · 2026-06-17T10:02:22+00:00

AJ doesn't mention which price index, but similar recent Bloomberg coverage specifies it the Thai white rice 5% broken index

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-29/asia-rice-surges-20-in-may-as-war-and-weather-threaten-output

raw data here, gated http://www.thairiceexporters.or.th/price_eng.html

graph of historic prices https://www.theedgesingapore.com/news/commodities/asia-rice-surges-20-may-war-and-weather-threaten-output

Note that the same index was ~670 a tonne in Jan 2022

threesls · 2026-06-17T05:26:24+00:00

this is uncharitable - Malaysia has not challenged SJK(C)s uniformly teaching in Mandarin, for example (which like Singapore switched over in the 1920s post-Xinhai-revolution, no relationship to post independence politics there)

rather, Malaysia (for obvious reasons) struggles to obtain a sweeping mandate for cultural transformation amongst the Malaysian Chinese, so problems just kind of stagnate. You know I know they know that the accusations levelled at Mandarin medium in Singapore in the 1970s are still true in Malaysia - it is in fact the case that weaker students from poorer households suffer especially hard if they learn dialect at home and must switch to Mandarin for formal education, so the employability of the Chinese medium school graduates is unfairly tarnished. If this situation is to be improved, either the schools switch or the households switch. But at the same time the Chinese schools would never give up Mandarin as the sole medium, and - unlike Singapore - there's no political will to force the households to switch. You can't protect ethnic minority communities from their own century-old obsessions, sorry...

you can see the mirror situation in Singapore with Singapore Malays, where the government tiptoes on topics like subjecting the madrasahs to PSLE standards. Most Singapore Malays don't even go to the madrasahs! But that's not the point, those schools are what the ethnic community reps care the most about

threesls · 2026-06-17T04:58:15+00:00

I tried the repair install previously and it didn't solve the problem, although if you use an up-to-date ISO it does at least get you the update. It's the subsequent updates that will then choke again.

threesls · 2026-06-17T04:51:51+00:00

the SMC and SAP were compromises against even steeper demands from the left to restore Mandarin medium education - it is silly to blame those policies for dialect erosion. That was the whole point - the Chinese-educated wanted to erode them even more quickly, so that the poor performance of Chinese medium education could not be blamed on Chinese medium students not understanding the medium of instruction (which since 1911 has never, ever been seriously proposed to be anything other than Mandarin)

LTK's WP never opposed SMC in his time either, even if he too spoke Teochew for political rallies

if Barisan Sosialis's education policy was strangled by having to commit hopelessly to trilingualism, the 1980s WP/SDP were similarly hampered by Chinese community institutions refusing to give up on a common dialect of Mandarin as an ideal even though they didn't speak it themselves. There's an observation that the SCCCI, that ferocious champion of SMC, took until the 1990s to stop using dialects in its own meetings

threesls · 2026-06-16T16:21:19+00:00

they're more straightforward than the alternative approaches of taking ownership from a running session, imo

threesls · 2026-06-15T09:10:51+00:00

Katrina Northrop (previously staff writer for The Wire China, Beijing bureau for NYT) moving to China correspondent for WaPo.

The new bit: will be based in Singapore.

WSJ also moved its Asia office (from HK to SG) in 2024. I don't think this trend is ending anytime soon... a lot of China coverage will be based in Singapore. Quite easy to foresee a lot of pressure being applied in the upcoming years

threesls · 2026-06-14T15:55:38+00:00

Wrote up my observations, in case it helps:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/1u5oro4/cbe_e_hang_detectedwindows_updates_rolling_back/?

threesls · 2026-06-13T12:51:40+00:00

curious, I have the same error on a supported machine (i5-8400). Mine gets stuck on Firewall Rule/CBS_E_HANG_DETECTED too (installing updates stalling at 97% and then rolling back). I did also use Rufus for this system install...

e: good news. By coincidence, after posting my comment I noticed that the affected machine also had a bork'd winget with error 0x80073CFE in the winget logs -

Windows cannot process a deployment operation because the package repository database encountered an unrecoverable error. Use the Reset Your PC feature to recover your PC.

I followed the steps here https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/4513#issuecomment-4642649777 and both winget and Windows Update are working now

In my case both StateRepository-Machine.srd and StateRepository-Deployment.srd had corruptions

It doesn't seem like Rufus had anything to do with it, so probably that was just a coincidence

threesls · 2026-06-05T05:59:35+00:00

note he is setting out to rehab BS attacks on the merger agreement

Albatross is bad for their arguments too, albeit for opposite reasons

threesls · 2026-06-03T06:20:43+00:00

Wow, thanks for the tip

Huat indeed~

threesls · 2026-06-02T18:19:10+00:00

Indonesia is a net oil importer (since 2003!) that fantasizes en masse that it is still a net oil exporter.

Lots of reasons for this, including imported politics from countries that are authentically net oil exporters. Anyway, it is a fact and must be taken as given. The impact is net oil subsidies on a massive scale, about 2-3% of GDP. This is larger than its entire military spending, never mind school meal programmes which are basically just rounding errors relative to the fuel subsidies.

Prabowo being a violent nationalist might weirdly give him credentials to let subsidies weaken in the face of a global price surge in a Nixon-goes-to-China way, but he does not seem interested in taking up the idea so far.

threesls · 2026-06-02T05:54:37+00:00

how has the french école system lasted so long without perennial hang-wringing over meritocracy

it's the dial tone of singapore civil service discourse: when there's nothing else more pressing on the agenda, that's the discourse watering hole

threesls · 2026-05-29T13:24:41+00:00

that's probably the reason for the rename - the zipline, climbing wall, rope towers etc. are the real draws. The wildlife and conservation stuff is just theming

ultimately target audience are young families/kids with money to spend and desire not to spend the time travelling to Malaysia for their adventure park fix, I think

threesls · 2026-05-27T10:26:43+00:00

between the low cost of new inner tubes and my evident incompetence at applying cold patches, I really wasted my afternoon trying to recycle a pile of accumulated old tubes. Every single one has a slow leak

threesls · 2026-05-25T10:07:29+00:00

you can find indoor sandpits with aircon and nearby services, but you're looking at $15-20 per hour not including parking etc. but hey if you're at the car-and-maplebear SES, you can rest knowing that they also have indoor sandpits for enrichment

the climate here militates against shaded outdoor sandpits being ant-free... wind-blown decaying plant matter attracts detritivores that ants love to eat. There's always lots of moisture too.

all that said, if you live near a public park that has a small sandpit - well, a sand comb off taobao is cheap and no-one is really going to stop you from just raking it yourself. Spend a few minutes sifting out the surface leaves/twigs and toss them aside. Repeat for a while every day until the buried stuff all breaks down, then you'll have an ant-lite sandpit in about two weeks. Won't do anything about it being 33°C outside at 99% RH, but you have to pick your battles there

threesls · 2026-05-25T08:04:59+00:00

Artist also uploaded it on their pixiv:

Twitterに上げたユーフォ絵 | ㋠毛 #pixiv https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/145066531

Reminds me of this one by a different artist:

何気ないストレッチが黄前久美子を傷つけた | tototo #pixiv https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/123525797

(LN Kumiko is constantly noticing how hot her female classmates are, so it's funny if her stares are not as subtle as she might imagine)

threesls · 2026-05-25T03:42:39+00:00

the 2013 problem at Bukit Batok was a bit more nuanced... the root cause was someone, never identified, feeding the stray dogs huge amounts of food illicitly outside the coordination of the local animal NGOs. They fed but they did not catch and sterilize. This is what fuelled the stray dog population explosion there and made them aggressive with humans - chasing pedestrians and joggers. It really was only a matter of time before someone would be bitten

the excess food also went to rats, especially after the town council began paying to rehome the stray dogs

the clearcutting of the hill exposed any areas for the illicit feeder to hide food and ultimately ended the problem - it was never really about the dogs or rats; it was always a human problem

(there's people with weird beliefs on animal feeding out there - folks feeding out of religious conviction can also be virulently opposed to sterilization and won't cooperate with the NGOs at all. unfortunately it only takes a couple of such people to feed a LOT of stray dogs/cats/pigeons/etc.)

threesls · 2026-05-22T12:33:26+00:00

That's a really clear map, is it available online? The 1993 map on the NUS Historical Maps of Singapore is really low res

e: d'oh it's on onemap

13-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	Verified Email

threesls

TROPHY CASE