Friday, June 29, 2012

Is it fair?

In my neighborhood there are three stalls selling economic rice. They are all selling around $4 each plate. One day, the stall that I've been buying for the past 4-5 yrs decided to change their price. They decided to import better rice and meat and fresher vegetables, with a catch of course. The catch being that they will reduce the quantity of the rice, the meat and the vegetables by about 1/6 of the original amount and it'll cost the same price. Despite being complained by consumers all over the neighborhood, the stall refused to budge with their plans. Their reason is that most consumers do not finish their plates and perhaps only 1% of the people buying their economic rice finish the entire plate. Since 99% of the people could not finish their plate, therefore they would not even notice if the amount of food on their plate is reduced by 1/6.


What's worse is that the surrounding stalls also followed. One of the stall haven't really raised its price yet so maybe I'll have to wait and see how it goes. Despite complaining to the authorities who governed hawker pricing, nothing is going to be changed. In fact, the authorities said that it's fair practice to reduce the amount of food but charge the same price since it's a universally accepted practice in other countries as well.


Seriously, what a bummer.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The hen, the pig and the man

A man has two best friends, one a hen and the other a pig. However, he is unsure what their level of commitment that they have towards him. For all he knows, it may just be a one sided friendship. So one day, he asked a fox for help. The wily fox agreed and set to action immediately. On the pretext that the fox had kidnapped the man, the fox asked the hen and the pig to put out their most valued possession that they have in order to raise the money to pay handsome ransom to the kidnappers.



The hen clucked and said that she would give off 5 of her eggs to pay a part of the ransom. The fox nodded and accepted the offer. The pig, however, took out a knife and was walking towards the fox. Thinking that the pig wanted to attack the fox, the latter shrieked and was about to run for cover when the pig snorted that he is willing to kill himself so that the fox can cure it as a bacon to pay the ransom. Before the pig can plunge the knife, the fox stopped him and said that the intention would suffice for now. With that, the fox ran off to report to the man.



What do you think the fox said to the man? Who is the more committed friend? There's no right or right answer of course.



(To readers who found this story familiar, I twisted the story from Singapore Man of Leisure's blog. I've no idea why this story floated to my mind when I was having dinner tonight. I can't remember the exact story but the fun thing is that it doesn't matter. The gist of it, once captured, can be transmuted in infinite ways and still, it would retain the original flavor.)