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The Super Rich Are Choosing Singapore as the World’s Safest Haven

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When Singaporean car dealer Keith Oh first read the Facebook message, he wasn’t sure it was real. A Chinese client ordered a S$1.1 million ($830,000) Bentley—sight unseen—over the social network.

“They just asked for the price and when we could do the delivery, that’s all,” he said. “It’s a million dollars to us but it’s probably nothing to them.”

The quick sale was the latest sign of a wider trend: Money is sloshing around Singapore like never before. As the coronavirus pandemic hammers Southeast Asia and political turmoil threatens Hong Kong, the city has become a safe harbor for some of the region’s wealthiest tycoons and their families.

For rich people “who can decide where they want to live and settle down, Singapore is a place of choice now,” said Stephan Repkow, who founded Wealth Management Alliance in 2015 after four years at Union Bancaire Privee. He said two of his foreign clients had become residents in the past 12 months and more are on the way.

Singapore has long been a draw for wealthy Chinese, Indonesians and Malaysians who would come for short trips to shop, play baccarat at the casino or get medical check-ups at world-class clinics. Mount Elizabeth Hospital Orchard, just steps from the flagship stores of Gucci and Rolex, features a UOB Privilege Banking Centre in the lobby.

The pandemic has changed all that, prompting many tycoons and their families to stay for months, in some cases seeking residency to ride out the storm. On a per-capita basis, the mortality rates in Malaysia and Indonesia are more than 10 and 30 times higher than in Singapore, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

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Marina Bay in Singapore, on Jan. 28, 2021. Photographer: Lauryn Ishak/Bloomberg

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Click the link below for the article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-05-26/singapore-during-covid-is-city-of-choice-for-billionaires-and-their-families

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Is Gerrymandering About to Become More Difficult?

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The word “gerrymandering” prompts an image: district maps that look less like a tangible community than a Rorschach blot—perhaps one that suggests a “broken-winged pterodactyl,” as one federal judge referred to Maryland’s 3rd district. Read a line like that, and a certain intuition kicks in: There must be something wrong here.

The problem is that our intuition isn’t necessarily correct.

“While badly shaped districts are a fairly successful flag that somebody was trying to do something, they don’t really tell us what their agenda was, or whether it was nefarious or benign,” says Moon Duchin, a mathematician at Tufts University and an expert on gerrymandering. “Bad shapes are not necessarily bad, and good shapes are not necessarily good.”

For the past five years, Duchin has led Tufts’ Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group, a lab that has quietly upended conventional wisdom about how gerrymandering works by approaching the issue less as a political problem than a mathematical one. As the country sprints into a new redistricting cycle, understanding redistricting in those terms has taken on new importance—especially in light of a controversial change to the Census Bureau data that will be used to draw the new district maps.

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An illustration featuring "The Gerry-Mander" political cartoon by Elkanah TisdaleGerrymandering

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Click the link below for the article:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/27/redistricting-gerrymandering-2021-moon-duchin-interview-491199

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The Age of the Influencer Has Peaked. It’s Time For the Slacker to Rise Again

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It’s hard to remember a time when scrolling through Instagram was anything but a thoroughly exhausting experience.

Where once the social network was basically lunch and sunsets, it’s now a parade of strategically crafted life updates, career achievements, and public vows to spend less time online (usually made by people who earn money from social media)—all framed with the carefully selected language of a press release. Everyone is striving, so very hard.

And great for them, I guess. But sometimes one might pine for a less aspirational time, when the cool kids were smoking weed, eating junk food, and… you know, just chillin’.

Back in the 1990s, our heroes were slackers: the dudes and the clerks, the stick-it-to-the-man, stay-true-to-yourself burnouts we saw in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Slacker, and Reality Bites. In the latter, Winona Ryder’s character, Leilana, chooses the disillusioned musician (Ethan Hawke) over the TV exec (Ben Stiller), and it’s presented as an excellent choice. Nobody cool was trying to monetize their lifestyle back then or rake in the brand endorsements. Selling out (remember that?) was whack.

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three guys with long hair and jeans smiling and sitting on a slope of cementNirvana, patron saints of nineties slacker-dom.  Photo by Getty Images/Mark and Colleen Haywar

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Click the link below for the article:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-age-of-the-influencer-has-peaked-it-s-time-for-the-slacker-to-rise-again

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When to Reply on Social Media—and When to Not

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I have a tenet that I follow when it comes to social media conflagrations: Don’t add your air to someone else’s fire.

This rule has saved my butt multiple times. For example, during one social media snafu, a writer responded to a post I made of an article I’d written, saying she wanted to discuss our opposing views—in a Facebook forum of thousands of people. The wording and tone of her comment showed she wasn’t interested in a real dialog, so I didn’t respond. Had I agreed to the requestor made a snarky comment like “Get your own damn articles published,” I would have been following her playbook to gain attention for herself and undermine me and my work. Should I have done something else? I figured I’d check with the experts.

“You did the right thing by not responding,” says Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of Thrivers. “No response is a great response, and often the most powerful response. The person wants the attention, and you are not giving it to them. She clearly wanted to use and undermine you by hijacking your platform. If you shamed her, you would have lost credibility and would be in a position of defending yourself.”

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cracked glass in front of phone screensPhotograph: Artur Debat/Getty Images

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Click the link below for the article:

https://www.wired.com/story/when-to-reply-on-social-media-and-when-to-not/

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Tampa, FL, USA

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Tampa is a city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city sits on Tampa Bay as the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and is the seat of Hillsborough County. With an estimated population of 399,700 in 2019, Tampa is the third-most populated city in Florida after Jacksonville and Miami, and the 47th most populated city in the United States.

Tampa functioned as a military center during the 19th century with the establishment of Fort Brooke. The cigar industry was also brought to the city by Vincente Martinez Ybor, after whom Ybor City is named. Tampa was formally reincorporated as a city in 1887, following the Civil War. Today, Tampa’s economy is driven by tourism, health care, finance, insurance, technology, construction, and the maritime industry. The bay’s port is the largest in the state, responsible for over $15 billion in economic impact.

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An image from Tampa, FL, USA

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Click the link below for images:

Tampa, FL, USA – Bing images

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9 Doping Scandals That Changed Sports

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Throughout history, athletes have been willing to ingest just about anything to improve their performance on the field. Some ancient Greeks turned to figs, while others used mushrooms, and ancient Egyptians believed that ground mule hooves could boost their athletic prowess. In 1807, an endurance walker in Britain took laudanum to stay awake around the clock in a competition. A runner in the 1904 Olympic marathon imbibed a mixture of strychnine, raw eggs, and brandy and won his race (though he barely survived and quickly quit the sport). And in the 1930s an English football club bragged about dosing its players with monkey gland extract. 

In recent times, however, performance-enhancing substances consist of steroids, human growth hormone, and blood-boosting erythropoietin, and taking them courts both danger and censure. Doping in the 20th and 21st centuries has produced tainted victories and infamous scandals

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Cyclist Tommy Simpson before the first stage of the Tour de France on June 21, 1966, in Nancy, France

Cyclist Tommy Simpson before the first stage of the Tour de France on June 21, 1966, in Nancy, France.

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Click the link below for the article which shows 9 scandals:

https://www.history.com/news/doping-scandals-through-history-list

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How to Be Mediocre and Be Happy With Yourself

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In the novel Catch-22, the author Joseph Heller famously wrote: “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

He’d taken a quote by Shakespeare on greatness and turned it on its head.

The implication was clear: mediocrity is a bad thing, to be avoided. Yet most of us go on to live what by most measures are pretty ordinary lives.

So what’s wrong with settling for mediocrity?

It’s a subject that became a field of study for two Italian academics, Gloria Origgi, a researcher and philosopher at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, and Diego Gambetta, a professor of sociology at Oxford University.

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_90847224_thinkstockphotos-104774976.jpg

Photo from Thinkstock.

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Click the link below for the article:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-be-mediocre-and-be-happy-with-yourself

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Great Wall Of China

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The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic groups from the Eurasian Steppe. Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC, with selective stretches later joined together by Qin Shi Huang (220–206 BC), the first emperor of China. Little of the Qin wall remains. Later on, many successive dynasties built and maintained multiple stretches of border walls. The most well-known sections of the wall were built by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Apart from defense, other purposes of the Great Wall have included border controls, allowing the imposition of duties on goods transported along the Silk Road, regulation or encouragement of trade, and the control of immigration and emigration. Furthermore, the defensive characteristics of the Great Wall were enhanced by the construction of watchtowers, troop barracks, garrison stations, signaling capabilities through the means of smoke or fire, and the fact that the path of the Great Wall also served as a transportation corridor. Wikipedia

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An image of the Great Wall Of China

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Click the link below for images:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=great+wall+of+china&go=Search&qs=ds&form=QBIR&qft=+filterui%3Aphoto-photo&first=1&tsc=ImageBasicHover

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13 Better Ways to Cook With Garlic

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Garlic is a ubiquitous, ever-present ingredient in most kitchens, and for many good reasons. Depending on how you treat it, it can bring heat, pungency, sweetness, and/or umami to your delicious dishes.

While always adding more garlic is one of the ultimate cooking hacks, over the years we’ve explored a ton of other ways to put this flavor bomb to good use.

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Illustration: Vicky Leta

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Click the link below for the article and slideshow:

https://lifehacker.com/13-better-ways-to-cook-with-garlic-1846977755

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How the Rembrandts’ ‘Friends’ Song Became the Most Iconic TV Theme of the ’90s… and Beyond

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No one told them the song was gonna blow up this way.

The Rembrandts were putting finishing touches on their third album, “L.P.,” when a sidestep into television drastically altered their course in 1994. Now, 26 years since “I’ll Be There for You” debuted on “Friends,” band member Phil Solem is reflecting on the ups and downs caused by the track, how a few beers led to its iconic claps, and witnessing Brad Pitt enjoy a performance of the hit more than the cast.

Solem and bandmate Danny Wilde, who previously had a hit with 1990’s “Just the Way It Is, Baby,” will forever be associated with “Friends,” yet they initially asked to remain anonymous while working on the tune after viewing the pilot. “In those days, it was uncool for a band like ours to be involved in television,” Solem explains.

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friends reunion song theme i'll beThe Rembrandts

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Click the link below for the article:

https://variety.com/2021/music/news/rembrandts-friends-theme-ill-be-there-for-you-1234983082/

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