News Roundup
What’s a whole cottage industry of tax accountants going to do now that the IRS is finally catching up a lot of the rest of the world (hello, IRAS’s auto-inclusion scheme) with their Direct File pilot?
Your next love-matching service comes with food – hello GrubHub.
We’re boiling down here in Southeast Asia. Send help.
Bill payment company Doxo has been very, very naughty.
Watch/Scroll
Collectivist cultures are nowhere near as collectivist as people might think. In fact, competition is just as fierce, and as Lin Yutang put it, it’s more family-first than society-first.
What becomes viral on Chinese social media is a combination of the weird and wonderful. In this case, a song about the exploits about a man who lived more than 1,000 years ago has found a second life as a cover song.
Read
Sharing tea is a time-honoured part of Chinese tea drinking culture, and there’s a bubble tea chain named ShareTea which, in my opinion, is superior to new darling HeyTea. Track the latter’s meteoric rise from small-town creation to international purveyor of milk tea – which, by the way, has a precedent in Chinese culture and is far from a modern invention.
Every had wine borne from ashes? Some of the vines in Lanzarote, Portugal are nearly 200 years ago, thanks to vineyards that were never infested with phylloxera.
Americans get a taste of Chinese working culture – Taiwanese flavour – and it’s hysterical because the Taiwanese are in no way any better or worse than mainlanders, Hong Kongers, Macanese or any other flavour of Chinese boss out there. That makes me and Ma Rui 0% surprised at the Americans’ complaints. Great read, thanks to Rest of World for doing the lord’s work. (Also, what does MSG have to do with chips?)
Ponder
If you’ve ever heard of the “economic miracle” that is my home country of Singapore, you might wonder what the other side of the story is. Who is Albert Winsemius, and what was his role in shaping Singapore economic policy from nothing into something? What other expedient decisions and trade-offs were made in that inexorable drive towards “prosperity and progress for our nation”?