Rant 568 / Good Morning, Batman.

Migrant workers have shitty lives in Singapore. I didn't think this was news. If the trend for compensations rise due to this case, construction costs are going to rise. I think it's obvious where this line of logic is going. Who's going to pay for the increase in costs? The consumers, of course.

If construction labour pays decently we wouldn't need foreign workers from developing countries.

"Or do we, all too often, take their sacrifice and sweat for granted?"

Oh definitely! I don't know what they think of this job in other countries but I've always had the impression that construction jobs usually aren't the safest or the best compensated for the risks involved.

Or else, what are we supposed to do? Weep a bit before moving in to a new condo for all the people who died building it?

If we have to consider the problems of everyone in the world who are indirectly involved with our lives, we'll have to spend most of our lives feeling depressed for reasons that have little to do with us!

So of course we're going to take their sweat and sacrifice for granted just like the way people change their handphones every six months or waste their food without thinking about how much work went into producing them!

Rice farmers have to toil in the hot sun everyday for our daily meals? Cattle have to be slaughtered all the time to make my cheeseburgers? Babies have to be aborted frequently to meet the demands for fetus soup in China?

Why does anyone expect us to care? In this day and age, we're being force-fed so many problems that these generic bullshit no longer have any effect on most of us.

You think that Indian dude who got crushed by the cement has problems?



There's a serious traffic jam along PIE and AYE just when I need to get home. That's a problem!

I ran out of coffee powder and forgot to buy more before it happened. That's a problem!

I want to get married but my fiance's parents are asking for enough money to build a space shuttle with an EMP cannon. That's a problem!

My antivirus subscription is ending and I don't know if I should continue using this brand. That's a problem!

A construction worker has a broken spine? I have more important issues to take care of!




But seriously, we're being exposed to way too many problems to care about one handicapped foreign labourer.















I can't resist pointing out the caption. What is the Yahoo News thinking?













OMG Natural Selection 2 is going to have different damage types just like in Warcraft 3!! Copypasta from the Unknown Worlds website:

With these in mind, here are the basic damage types that are currently in NS2 (in development, not final):

• Normal - Regular damage (Rifle, Bite)
• Light - Half vs. armor (Sentries, Hydras)
• Heavy (was Puncture) - Extra damage vs. armor (Fade swipe, Pistol, Shotgun)
• Puncture (was Piercing) - Extra vs. players (Minigun, Lerk spikes)
• Structural - Double against structures (Onos gore, SwitchAxe, Rifle grenades)
• Gas - Breathing targets only (Spores, Rifle nerve gas grenades)
• Biological - Living/organic targets only (Parasite, Flamethrower)
• StructuresOnly - Doesn't damage players or AI units (MASC, Whip Bombard)

OMGOMGOMG!! A first-person shooter with damage types! I have never tried anything like this before! This means you can't just have a simple tech routine to get the best weapons asap because they aren't effective against everything.

/drool













Been playing so much L4D2 lately that today when I went back to NS out of nostalgia, I made some significant mistakes. The biggest problem was that I was so used to right-clicking to melee whenever a zombie got too close I did the same when a skulk leaped at me.


Right-clicking in NS doesn't do nothing; it reloads my gun ie temporary downtime. This is what happened... several times:

- Alien jumps at me for melee attack
- Instead of shooting at it, I reload
- I get raped















If anyone didn't believe me when I said that porn is one of the most important reason for the existence of the internet, if anyone still doesn't believe that porn is one of the most frequently used purpose of the web (even after learning that "sex" is the most searched term on the internet), here's the confirmation of this truth.

Even though porn is a commercial product (actually education is a commercial service too), it's going to be given its own domain name. It took this long only because of the stigma of this industry.

Don't get me wrong. I don't totally support the porn industry. Some of the things the women have to do in some films are just disgusting. While the Americans appear to like painful and brutal sex, some of the fetishes and fantasies of Japanese men really humiliate the actresses. I guess as long as there are men willing to pay for it, there will always be women who are willing to do all sorts of things in front of the camera.













While the politicians and BP big shots are pointing fingers and trying to tell everyone "it's not so bad", scientists are finding that this oil spill is going to be bigger than just dead birds and shores. Methane is dissolving into much of the sea in the area and this may cause oxygen to be depleted.

It's no longer just about dead birds, dead fish and dead people. If the methane is really going to cause oxygen levels to drop, what will result are stretches of underwater deserts. Of course dead zones don't stay dead forever unless the conditions that killed them remain unchanged. In this case, if they get rid of the oil and the well dries up eventually, I'm sure life will appear again in those areas after half a century.

This has already been shown by Mount St. Helens featured in May's edition of National Geographic. In May 1980, a major eruption at Mount St Helens blew away the top of the mountain and wiped out all life in a large radius around it. Now trees are growing back and animals are beginning to flourish again.

However, extinct species, if any, will remain extinct.











Ah... if only this is true.