Wait, Hougang Green Shopping Mall?
I swear that at times, I have no idea how to process the different crazy names that we give to our places. The reason for my incredulity is that despite being called a ``shopping mall'', Hougang Green is more like some kind of open-air two-storey commercial building, something that is a little bit more removed from what one might normally consider a shopping mall. But to be fair, the idea of a multi-storey air-conditioned shopping mall is only common from the late nineteen nineties or so, when the regional centres (a concept from the early nineteen eighties) started having these centralised multi-storey air-conditioned buildinds that mimicked the shopping malls that were to be found in the major shopping district that is/was Orchard Road. Many of these regional centres had terrace house-like shopping arcades that were the proto-shopping malls, just about a step above just setting up shop along the road.
And when the regional centres had their upgraded shopping district-esque shopping malls (and the subsequent ``super-scaling'' into multiple such malls within the same region---see Tampines and Paya Lebar for examples), the fringe areas like Hougang and Sengkang started to have smaller scaled versions of such shopping arcades that were multi-storey buildings that were better classified as ``shopping malls''.
Anyway, Hougang Green Shopping Mall had quite a few interesting shops there. My favourite fried chicken place, Arnold's Fried Chicken, has a branch there. I did not eat there though, getting accidentally shanghaied into trying food from Chef's Hats that was also located in the shopping mall. I tried the burger set lunch, the carbonara penne, and escargots. They taste alright, and their price were closer to that of a café pricing, which is also okay I suppose given the slightly more up-scale choice of ingredients and cooking style. I would eat there if I wanted the ambience to do something else in addition to having something more traditionally western in style as opposed to the usual bak chor mee, but if I just wanted to have a tasty ``high class'' burger or escargots, I would probably choose somewhere else, if not for the fact that Chef's Hats was literally within walking distance.
Eh, support local. They have their good points, I suppose. ``Satisficing'' is often a better deal than ``optimising'' anyway, if the recent chapter that I was reading in OpenStax College: Organisational Behaviour is anything to go by. Sometimes I feel that the lengths that some people go to find the ``perfect'' food place is just a bit too excruciating---sure, the ``perfect'' food place probably tastes more amazing than the less-than-perfect one, but when one starts factoring in the effort/time taken to research to find that place, and then the time/effort needed to actually get a spot in the queue to eat there, all that ``perfection'' gets severely marred, with the expectations set so high that when reality strikes, it hits like a truck, and in a bad way.
My rules of thumbs for a lot of things are very simple, really:
- Is it good enough, objectively?
- Is it ethical?
- Is it cost effective enough?
- Is the effort to get the next better option an opportunity cost that I want to pay?
Put in that way, it would seem that I am not exactly an achievement hunter. And anyone who comes to this conclusion is much closer to the truth than they would be expecting. Don't get me wrong, I dislike losing like the next person---I'm not so inhuman that losing causes absolutely no reaction in me. However, I am not one who only seeks to win, which is problematic in this world because the ``need'' to win is the very definition that powers this post-industrial capitalistic world. To many people, this need to ``win'' ensures that they are more likely to make decisions that can go against their conscience and/or put them in a long-term advantage, if their short-term goals can be met.
For a ``win'' cannot be defined without a goal. Long term goals are muddy by definition---for instance, what does ``long term sustainability'' as a goal mean? More importantly, how can that ever compare against the much easier to articulate (and actualise) short term goal of ``maximise shareholder value''?
For the record, I am not demonising the idea of business. Business is an important process to match what people need against what can be created to satisfy this need through the resource allocation process via economics. But the conduct of business can sometimes be rather shady and superficial. Many regulations that are devised as laws govern less over science and technology per se (reality acts as the final arbiter of what can and cannot be done) but govern more over the various ways businesses may be conducted. New laws are often created to patch any loop holes of some previous conduct of business that was either deemed to be detrimental to society by the rabblement, or by the government, either through the government's independent observation of the abuse, or through the various lobbying efforts by other businesses whose existence and success may be negatively affected by the loop holes that were exploited.
Business is one of the few things that take something that modern societies value the most (money) and make more of it (i.e. more money), and thus gains a certain amount of fascination and obsession by many people. Many do it against good ethical/moral behaviour and the ``more noble'' approach of advancing human knowledge, just so that they can gain the type of recognition by being an amasser of large quantities of what modern societies value the most (money).
So my admonition still remains: as crude as it sounds, whenever anyone makes a pronouncement about how something is ``good'' or ``bad'', always look deeper into their motivations, with money being a very important source of motivation for many, or as they say, ``follow the money trail''. If they are believers, the standard of behaviour required is higher, because they are supposed to know God's views on what counts as moral/ethical behaviour, so they have little excuse to do things that are morally sketchy in the pursuit of money. Non-believers have no excuse either---they may not know of God's views on correct morality, but they should at least have enough critical thinking present to really see what it is that they are doing.
In either case, I am not advocating being the vigilante to demand that these pronouncers follow what one believes in---that is stupid and unlikely to work. But at least when one needs to deal with such people, with a better understanding of their motivation and the inherent ethics/morals, one knows the better way of interacting with them to avoid either promoting that which is morally/ethically questionable, or to just walk away.
Anyway, that's all I have today. Till the next update.
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