“If you don’t need it, leave it!” said the train conductor in the movie The Taking of Pelham 123 as she led hostages off the train.

I don’t know about you, but for someone who doesn’t actually buy that much stuff (besides books), I still manage to accrete it over time. Worse still, I get attached to them. This makes it that much harder to stay mobile. That much …

This is a map of “all 13,000 ‘or so’ McDonald’s restaurants in the US. How simultaneously gross and delicious.”

From Gizmodo.com

“Kia-su” is Hokkien (the Chinese dialect commonly used in Singapore) that literally means “fear of losing”. According to the unkind, this “fear of losing” is allegedly a Singaporean trait – though I would postulate that it is more of a universal trait when it comes to how some practice business.

“Kia-su” has its basis in fear. The fear of scarcity. Which in turn drives greed:
Take it even if you …

Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Embarq (the big players in broadband services) are trying to persuade the North Carolina state government to ban community-owned broadband services.

“The argument is that the big companies can’t turn a profit and compete against a community-owned enterprise that essentially sells service for cost, but we’re not buying it – if anything, TWC and Embarq can invest the extra profits they’ve been earning in …

Many taxis in Singapore have a video screen mounted behind the head rest of the passenger seat. The purpose being to inundate passengers with more in-your-face (literally) advertising and other noisy detritus.

There is a perfunctory gesture towards providing information such as restaurants and movies. Touching these options merely brought up massive alphabetically organised lists of restaurant names, current and upcoming movies, and theatres. No …

I have often talked about how we don’t really pay for the actual/real/whole cost of most of the goods we consume. The actual/real/whole cost is distorted by mass production, government subsidisation, trade arrangements, currency exchange etc.

So this price for Jello actually shocked me. The price shown is in Singapore dollars. This is roughly equivalent to $16.59 AUD or $11.29 USD.

That price gets you …

Karin Gottschalk used coined this great phrase to refer to what she sees as “the inertia and lack of desire for better things” in Australian society. Linked in to this concept are the “Cult of Cheap” and “The Lust for Mediocrity.”

I think these are possibly common across much of the Western (and Western-wannabe) cultures on this planet.

Consider how as consumers we value:

Quantity over quality – a badly …

Watch this.

I was speechless and horrified. I know this happens, I just had not realised it is at this scale. I can’t even start to think about how this could be “made better”…

Please share your reactions below.

The fear of being an individual is a more noticeable trait in Singapore. This is the fear of standing out “inappropriately”, in a way that is not approved by the majority. This is not surprising given the country’s Confucius heritage which places a lot more emphasis on the collective than the individual.

Shopping is a national pastime. But there is an apparent shortage of independent brands here. People …

I spotted a rather nice looking simple desk clock in a local homeware store over the weekend. It was a rectangular white box with a square cross section. The face was made up of numerals formed by a matrix of bright white LED bulbs. All rather understated and nice looking.

The problem was on the back. There was a sticker which said: “Do not turn on …