Now I'll have to admit that I haven't been to an Indian wedding in India before, so it's very possible that I may be wrong about the quantity of food wasted. But as a Chinese, we do have similar customs regarding food when there are guests. Most people outside China do not follow this custom but some hosts do order too much food when they are having dinner with guests in restaurants. This is especially true in Shanghai, where they order so much food in proportion to the number of people that it can be quite shocking for those unprepared for the sight.
Still,
Food minister K.V. Thomas calculated nearly 15 percent of all grain and vegetables in India was wasted through weddings and other social events, the paper said.
I guess there is a point but this seriously is the wrong way to go about doing it IMO.
I was about to suggest that they could do it like Singapore, raise food prices and give a few hundred bucks to the citizens. One thought led to another, and now I wonder, how much are those hundreds of dollars of Growth Dividends worth in comparison with the price hikes in recent years?
In other words, how much did the expenditure of an average person among "the poor" in Singapore increase due to rising prices this year? Is it S$800? Remember, "the poor" aren't supposed to eat a lot, especially when a lot of them are retirees who didn't have sufficient retirement funds.
If so, is that how they came up with those numbers when the government decided to give out money? Such an amount, if the amounts do correspond, would theoretically help the poor maintain their budgets while not benefiting anyone else.
$800 in a year means about $67 per month or slightly over $2 per day. Y'know, this number looks about right. Slightly insufficient perhaps, but looks like it's almost enough to cover the $0.50-$1 increase in most of the prices in the market in my neighbourhood.
I haven't seen anything regarding the general expenditure of the elderly and the needy in Singapore, so all these are just conjectures and guesses. Again, I could very well be completely wrong and they might as well wipe their asses with the 800 $1 bills. Or scrape with 800 $1 coins, whichever works.
Also, I've known a lot of people who buy stuff on impulse despite their budgets. I'm just saying that giving out cash isn't exactly the best idea for the undisciplined. I bet some people would be buying a frickin iPhone or something with the money and then complain for the rest of the year about how the government isn't doing anything to help the poor. But that's just my guess.
Minecraft. It's everywhere. Half the streams on livestream.com are showing Minecraft.
It's even in my home.
I'm not playing the game. Seen some screenshots, watched my bro play. Despite the conspicuous absence of Silicon-Age computer graphics, it's apparently still a pretty good game, judging from its popularity.
Here's an example to properly express how great it must be:
My bro would rather play Minecraft than Bad Company 2.
Really! I gave him the EA account thinking he would find it more fun than I did. I've already described my experience playing the game and that I can only play Vietnam in the US and EU servers. At over 200ms ping, the fun factor is somewhat limited for me.
So a day later when I asked him about the game, he told me it was way too troublesome to download both the EA download manager and the game (why can't it be transferred to Steam? D:), and it was not worth the trouble.
While he was playing Minecraft.
Minecraft, from what I've seen and read, is the next step from Lego. You can build anything you want with cubes of different colours and show off your masterpieces when you play on an online server. You can build a castle, a ship or even an entire city.
According to the collective wisdom of 4chan, ie internet trolls, it is Paradise-in-PC for the autistic. Personally I think the game's the successor of Lego on the PC platform.
I'm not saying it's childish or anything. I've nothing against games that children play. There's absolutely nothing wrong with an adult playing with real Lego bricks, let alone a PC version of it. Furthermore, my late father used to build complex stuff with them, including the 12-inch-tall (?) hen that's still somewhere in my home. We place old 1-cent coins behind it to symbolise the hen laying cash instead of eggs, ie bring good fortune.
It's not a surprise given that he was an artist, a painter initially and then a designer-cum-wholesaler later.
Speaking of which, how the heck do I save these oil paintings he left behind?? Like the one depicting the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus.
For my case it's an oil painting copied from this or whatever the original was, but with a plain blue background and with slight differences in the details. There's a big crack on it but I have no idea how that can be removed at all. Furthermore, most of them are sagging too.
Fck me. I can just google! :\
...
So it's called art conservation.
Not many art conservators in Singapore. Worse, nobody is mentioning prices. A random guess says they're in the 4-digit range. Fortunately there's one close to Holland Road. Maybe someday.
Google, the next best thing to a hivemind.
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