two uncles, one number
At the kopitiam, the rate never comes up by name. It arrives as everything else.
— kopi-o. same table.
— the price of money went up again.
— i heard kopi went up again.
— not the same thing.
— teh then.
— also not the same thing. near five percent now. roughly twice what it was before covid.
— who sets this price?
— washington sets the tone. your rate is that, plus who you are.
— and MAS? MAS doesn't set it?
— MAS doesn't do rates. they steer the exchange rate instead.
— so who watches it here?
— nobody you know.
— and it prices everything anyway?
— it prices everything anyway.
the landlord
Singapore is very good at being where the money passes through. The same trick worked with trade, then manufacturing, then semiconductors, then finance, then data centres, and now AI. AWS has committed S$23.5 billion cumulatively to its Singapore operations and cloud infrastructure; Google, Microsoft, and ByteDance have their own. The GDP will grow. The open question is where it goes after that, and whether ordinary Singaporeans will feel it, or just live inside the economy that produces it.
down from 42% in 2015
That line hasn't turned. the lease keeps running →
the first real one on here. the nine before it were sketches.
noticed today i no longer flinch when the phone shows forty-one unread notifications. somewhere in the last year the number stopped being an emergency and became weather.
the piece below took four rewrites. this is the one i didn’t hate most.
the zoning vote no one watched
Last month our city council rezoned the block behind the old bus depot in a nine-minute vote. Fourteen people attended, in person and by webcam combined. Three days earlier a congressional hearing on a subject with no direct bearing on anyone in that room pulled national coverage across every outlet I read.
I don’t think the hearing was unimportant. I think we’ve collectively decided that stakes are set by audience size instead of the other way around. The zoning vote will change parking, rent, and traffic for thousands of people who never got a notification. It just didn’t have a camera pointed at it.