Yep same experience the whole of this year. @SingaporeAir has peaked. It’s a down hill from here. You can’t justify charging 2x for a business class ticket and not have a dedicated support line.
Two attempts of using @SingaporeAir customer support this week and they’ve gotten so much worse.
They used to solve the problem everytime I need help, and now they just keep saying “we’re customer support we can’t help”
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krenzx retweeted
This is the final aesthetic form of the managerial internationalist order and it is sad that Singapore Airlines has finally succumbed to it. It is truly grotesque.
Welcome to millennial grey or as I prefer to call it, the globohomo aesthetic. It signals the triumph of the neutral, the scalable, and what Marc Augé called "the non-place."
These are spaces designed to erase the friction of being somewhere specific and it has now found its full expression in the airline's newly unveiled cabin interiors.
The whole point of this soulless minimalism is to make the transition between places feel effortless, to optimize for global movement, and the result is the smoothing away of rooted cultures, traditions and visual particularities.
You also see this design now in airports, hotels, new apartment builds and AirBnBs. They employ the same materials, the same restrained color palette, the same soft-touch surfaces, and the same implication of competence. You are everywhere but nowhere at once.
The passenger is not meant to feel the particular hospitality or visual culture of Singapore. Who was this designed for? The bean counter? The management consultant? The flagship cabin has become merely a container for productivity and rest rather than an experience with its own local character and heritage.
This is tragic beyond belief because Singapore Airlines still flies the most distinctive cabin crew uniform in commercial aviation: the sarong kebaya designed by Pierre Balmain, unchanged since 1968, its batik detailing a living fragment of Peranakan culture tied to a specific place and history.
Every other airline has updated or abandoned its uniforms for mass production or modern fashion cycles. Singapore Airlines refrained.
Yet for whatever schizo reason, they've decided to yeet their identity everywhere else that matters. The airline that once treated its visual identity as a point of pride has chosen the path of least resistance. The earthy tones are gone. The leather, the wood trim and the art - all gone. Just safe cool grey interiors that are dreary, corporate and characterless.
You legit can't tell if you're in a Silicon Valley headquarters or a German automaker's concept vehicle or in the waiting room of a medical clinic.
Welcome to the internationally interchangeable visual language, which I suppose is par for the course for what Singapore has become - competent, sure, but risk averse, and increasingly unsure of who it is or worse. It's just a well-run node in the global network.
The new SQ business class colour palette is a friendly reminder that you're still very much at work as your ticket is paid for by your employer.
I don't know where the $2 billion went to or how much of it was wasted on useless consultants.
'Buy Singapore' these days either means you get ripped off by a local company slapping its brand over a Chinese OEM or you grossly overpay for a so-so product that's past its heyday, sort of a reflection of the Singaporean graduate market.
It's honestly hard to justify paying for SQ prices especially in the premium cabins when the competition has caught up and layovers are a minor inconvenience when you're like a full 1/3 cheaper or even 1/2 the price of SQ.
Maybe it's just symptomatic of a wider Singapore problem where once the competition catches up, you realize there isn't too much that makes us intrinsically special and to generate more revenue/profits, the easiest option is to turn to foreign labour and crank up the frequencies.
This is what peak Singapore looks like. It took them 10 years, countless consultants and 2BN to design this.
BMW is a declining brand. @SingaporeAir somehow thought it would elevate their brand to work with BMW. BMW brought SPEED as the theme to luxury air travel which totally makes sense in a jumbo plane. Gone are the beautiful purple hues. Throw a stone in arab street, pick a local designer from there and they would have designed something more cultural attuned and classy.
This reminds of STB hiring a consultant for millions to rebrand what as known as Marina bay. They came back and said the name Marina bay should be preserved.
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krenzx retweeted
If you have an Apple developer account or an app in the App Store, read this now and share it.
Apple rejects your app. The notice is vague, so you fix what you reasonably think is wrong and resubmit.
Apple approves it.
Months later, with nothing in review, Apple terminates your account under 3.2(f) for “a pattern of manipulative or misleading behavior.” Every app gone. No explanation of what you did.
Your crime? Trusting the approval.
Apple’s own reviewer looked at your fix, with your rejection history in front of them, and said yes. Then Apple turned that yes into evidence against you.
So who’s misleading whom?
I ran App Review for seven years and wrote the guidelines. 3.2(f) used to mean real fraud. Now it’s being used against developers who did exactly what Apple approved.
I’ve made this Substack post free for everyone. Every developer needs to see it before this happens to them.
Share it before someone you know gets that email.
phillipshoemaker.substack.co…
The giant mouse is hopeful.
Mechanical pressure on shin bones extended mouse lifespan by 80 days (+9.4%).
That’s the human equivalent of 7–9 yrs.
Bone pressure triggers PIEZO1 sensors to broadcast anti-aging signals to the brain, liver, and immune system.
If this translates to humans, my dunk training is flooding my entire body with anti-aging juice.
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If you are a Singaporean and are not alarmed by the complete silence from the government on the haze issue, you should be alarmed.
NEA measurements are inaccurate. Schools are still open. No health management protocols.
In a few weeks they will announce a haze airdrop to gloss over their lethargy.
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krenzx retweeted
Let's say a frontier model is a 10T MoE on GB300 NVL72. That's ~5 Joules/token or ~50 W at human thinking speed vs our brain at 20 W. The energy grid is $0.08/kWh and eating rice $0.50/kWh. So on an energy-per-thought standpoint rn we're surprisingly similar to frontier models!
Rule number, never assume your customers are stupid.
Stop the PR BS.
We remove reviews that violate our policies, and hosts can't delete them. Only guests who actually booked the stay can leave one.
Ratings on Airbnb skew high partly because we remove listings that fall short of guest expectations.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Hosts cannot directly delete guest reviews but Airbnb policy lets listing owners & cohosts dispute them for alleged violations (retaliation) at any time; upheld disputes lead to removal. Official guides & documented cases show critical reviews removed after host reports
airbnb.com/resources/host…
elliott.org/advocacy/airbn…
airbnb.com/help/article/3… airbnb.com/help/article/2…
x.com/JackEllis/stat…
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krenzx retweeted
I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind.
Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs."
That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong.
The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family).
They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence.
The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building.
What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself.
What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks.
And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead.
So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever.
Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell.
It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor.
And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken.
So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1…).
And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (agripost.cn/2026/08/17/china…).
Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price.
Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (euromeatnews.com/aviagen-ann…)😅
And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources.
If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course.
As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.
krenzx retweeted
Not SGX’s fault if stocks have no liquidity, says chairman: Markets this week bit.ly/4AOfY5M
Same story for me!
A 37-year-old man with a rare blood disease was being sent to hospice.
An AI model searched thousands of existing drugs and ranked a combination no one had tried for his condition.
He responded within a week. He is in remission.
The drugs were already on the shelf. The AI model found the match.
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