darylsng.com
Public sector sustainability & strategy consulting at Accenture. Former Singapore diplomat & climate policy guy. Proud papa. Loves cities, wordplay, trivia, food, sport. Pronounced “suhng”
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John ScaldingHotLovezi
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I guess Stubhub thinks I’ll watch anything that involves Chasing Cars
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Yeah, which is why for those of us raised on types of English that pronounce buoy as “boy” (British, etc.) the American pronunciation seems so funny – it kind of comes from nowhere
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I grew up in the Singapore evangelical church and one worrying thing is the increasing influence of American evangelical Christianity on Singaporean churches
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The buoy / buoyancy distinction is entirely a function of the funny way Americans pronounce “buoy”!
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Centrist affect is very powerful
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I can see that point of view. Might be better to frame it as becoming one of the many people who turn on captions because sound mixing in films has become so terrible?
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My reading has mostly been escapist fiction – beach reads, murder mysteries, that sort of thing
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After the election I decided to take a social media break and just read fiction… turns out all that time I was spending could’ve been used to read actual books!
The best thing I feel is that my attention span seems to be lengthening as a result
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Annoyingly it’s not in any of the libraries I’m a member of, will try out the audiobook on Audible then
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Reddit absolutely loves this book (particularly in audiobook form) – I take it from your post that it isn’t just hype
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Saying that not every experience is universal is not the same as saying that there are no universal experiences
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It’s funny what can take you out of a sense of verisimilitude – this is a whole work of speculative fiction and I had no problems accepting that people could lose their shadows or that DC has warring factions based at the Iowa and the MLK library, but hated that the Beltway was called “the” I-495
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Though people often attribute price rises to external forces while they attribute raises to their own capability at their jobs
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Oh and a fast Thursday and Friday NYT crossword this week as well, both very enjoyable. 4:32 (Thursday), 4:48 (Friday)
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I think you might like Janice Hallett's "The Twyford Code", which is told in an interesting way (man speaks into transcriptions) and centres on acrostic / code / wordplay elements.
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Are you looking for more the rom-com type of book or a murder mystery type?
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This is my number one complaint about the NYT. The writing quality is just bad. They write second-order news stories that depend on you already having read the news elsewhere to decipher what the heck they are talking about
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I am doing some work on industrial decarbonization for my clients in the US and it’s completely fascinating. Cement (and on a related note building embodied carbon) in particular is so challenging
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The latter is “policed” by corporate HR and subject to many of the same issues as many things governed by corporate HR policies: inconsistency, weaponised use of the issue to actually hit at unrelated issues etc.
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This conversation is making me think that there are two worlds of the “language policing” discussion that are related but not exactly the same: the one about language used externally (like a hospital website etc) and the one about language used in the workplace
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I suspect people are less scared of being “cancelled” on social media by leftists (since most people don’t have prominent social media profiles) and more riled that language use has become a thing that can go into their HR file (or at least is perceived that way)
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I kind of think you’re both right, in that there’s not a lot of actual language policing, but there has been a lot of language change – certainly in the world of large corporates – that people read as policing
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Best-acted movie of the last year
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It’s also telling to describe Fox News etc as “open”: they are open because you pay for them via a cable subscription. They are about as open as CNN or MSNBC in that regard.