The epidemic alert level has been lowered from orange to yellow. This means, in practice, that all those people taking the temperatures of everyone going into work buildings have disappeared. Now only vendors and visitors have to register, and nobody bothers about their temps. My spouse’s department has many thermometers ready to hand out, in […]
This is something we did over the weekend. Late one afternoon we got off the MRT at Raffles Place and headed towards the river. From there you can look across at the Asian Civilizations Museum (yellow building on the right), the Stamford Raffles Landing Place (white statue) and some other stuff. We didn’t cross over, […]
Swine flu hasn’t been spotted here yet, but Singapore lost 11 people in the SARS epidemic of 2006 (I think), and they learned to take public health seriously. So now people getting off planes in Singapore get their temperatures taken (aurally, which is fast) as they disembark. Every school child has his or her temperature […]
Well, there’s no popular demand for this, but I found a new (to me) smoking warning today. Just thought you might like to see what the Singapore gov’t uses to scare away smokers. I don’t think they’re impressed, even by pictures of gangrenous feet. The pack that I found on the ground, needless to say, […]
This is more hearsay-based. In the 1960s, and ever since, the Singapore government made its first priority to build housing for the teeming millions living in slum conditions in the city – you know, five or six in a room, no running water, a communal tap in the street and two toilets for a building […]
Before we came here, a friend told us, “Singapore is a country of rules. But the rules can change.” Here’s an example of how it can work, admittedly from a government-run university, but I think it’s applicable to the wider business world, since the Singapore government has its finger in most pies: A non-Singaporean professor […]
In my taxi home from grocery shopping yesterday we went by a vast new complex of modest housing. “Worker housing,” said the driver, “So now we can keep track of them.” Like other countries I could mention, Singapore depends on hordes of underpaid immigrants to do almost all the landscape and construction work while the […]
Why, you ask, would an island with two monsoon seasons and two pre-monsoon rainy seasons per year need to recycle its water? Because of a drought in 1967, or thereabouts, and the threat that it could always happen again. Singapore uses a lot of water for both chip manufacturing (silicon chips, not potato) and general […]
Here’s the sign on our local bus telling us not to carry durians aboard. You can’t carry them on trains either. I guess you either have to eat them where you buy them, or take a taxi. Unless you own a car, in which case you’re welcome to stink out your own property.
This week’s news from California is that, four months after the 2008-9 fiscal year began, the California legislature has managed to pass a budget, one that will try to cover its $42 Billion deficit. The reason for all the delay is the legal requirement from Proposition 13 (1978) for a 2/3 majority to pass any […]