I see the “unrelenting taxes as some form of perverse mea culpa for political mismanagement” school of local economist has abruptly shut its doors. What was the final straw, 18% more for Netflix? Or turning off the Temu tat spigot?

calling safe, mostly clean bars frequented predominantly by working class men “dodgy” certainly says a thing or two about the person doing the describing

no one is in the mood for fun, frivolous data gathering anymore. I get it. But I still want some hard data to point a finger at the much awarded fancy bar down south; primary instigators of cocktail price inflation in Colombo

5k a pop is crazy money, let no one pretend different

there is no good answer to this, but sometimes the worst outcome of a data breach is that it falls into the hands of an untrained data “journalist” with no scruples

the tragedy with all the freshly minted tariff experts around is that some of them actually do economics in their day job

all fun and games living in a lightly regulated environment, until a natural disaster strikes and you no longer know if the skyscrapers are safe (or if the inspectors are being paid off)

so the much publicised relaunch was only to put the bar back in the media spotlight, and didn’t even warrant changing the faded cushions in the seating area?

I think the morality debate about accepting an award and posing for photos with representatives from a dubious political administration is perhaps a little further advanced in America than it is in local journalism circles

why, yes. The continued inability of
the government information technology department to deliver anything meaningful can in fact be solved by dismantling it and creating two new bodies with overlapping remits.

Genius idea

and here I thought getting the commies elected would stop brat princelings and their thuggish bodyguards from picking fights with bouncers

socialism has evidently fallen short once again

a good use for social media: compile a list of places that use the absolutely rank edinborough mayonnaise in their food so they can be boycotted.

Look, it’s cheap. It’s aggressively marketed. I get it. But does no one actually taste it?

[me, in the unfamiliar confines of a night club] is that smoke machine smelling funky or is something on fire?

The Veddah folk really need some kind of medal if they can get the laugh-a-minute dipshits to shut up

out of sorts is an idiom, and therefore descriptive (17th century typographers) while out of fucks is a literal statement? If that makes sense - in my head it sort of does

[clears throat] it has now been brought to my attention that I may have interchanged Hasan Minhaj for Mehdi Hasan

Not unhappy about my credentials of barely knowing anything about either of these people

This was apparently (not even glazing) the most well read, articulate politician the country had to offer. And he got destroyed by a B tier talk show guy

We truly do live on an island

Aww, man. 20 years of Ubuntu? already? Where did the time go

12 hours into being well and truly earwormed by a Fleetwood Mac song at the supermarket

that AI committee is amply illustrating how absolutely minuscule the tech scene in Colombo really is

every commentary on the national budget gives clues about who probably shouldn’t have passed O/L maths

Music discovery works so differently now (and has done for the last few years) that I barely noticed two rappers yelling at each other in diss tracks last year; and it was seemingly a top tier cultural event - judging by reactions to the rerun at the halftime show

people are finding out foreign state sponsored donor funding to local NGOs doesn’t work the way they think. News at 11

When they’re younger (and for quite a few, before they have your own kids) the “hey, we turned out fine inspite of the beatings” argument seems to hold

Some people never grow out of that, and it isn’t surprising that a cesspit like that other site seems to broadly reflect those regressive attitudes

People (thankfully) mock guys who continue to make their high school their identity well into their 40s and beyond.

Every year a few more people from my time in school also join the camp where the scales fall from their eyes and they realise a lot of stuff that happened to us was simply not OK

I was a “good” kid, and was liked/influential/lucky enough to avoid bullying. I was smart enough academically that I wasn’t targeted. Basically, I was OK.

Many of my peers weren’t.

Sometimes the trusties in that entire system (called prefects) were the worst abusers, and it went mostly unchecked

I went to high school at a time when corporal punishment (yes, beating kids) was deemed acceptable. Many of the teaching staff would resort to this, but there were also,upon reflection, true psychopaths among them. The stories I could tell were, with some blood curdling outliers, very much the norm

Saddened, but unsurprised at the number of SL folk who still think forcibly cutting a kid’s hair in the name of high school discipline is desirable

this feels like the least predictable presidential election (in my neck of the woods) in the last 40 years. Which isn’t saying as much as it could, since the overwhelming favourite didn’t win in 2015

“it’s a machine, how can you even trust it”, shouts someone who just asked the same machine to faithfully reproduce text written by someone thousands of kilometres away

look, I understand you write science fiction for a living but when did you start huffing that supply to think you knew how to design a tax system?