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In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the "mirror world" of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:
For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:
And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right's obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247
Think of the conservative movement's all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:
Trump's most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump's first-term "Kids in Cages" policy:
Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump's second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending "unborn children" are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:
As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump's central role in history's most prolific child rape scandal:
This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.
Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):
To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America's weak public health system and America's weak regulation of the supplements industry:
But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions.
I've been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani's campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against "mediocrity" and promised "excellence":
Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be "universal mediocrity.”
Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of "socialist perfectionism" ("John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes") who advocated for the public provision of excellence.
He identifies Marx's own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.
(There's a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you're a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you're improving the rate of tumor identification. If you're a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you're increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):
(In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)
After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government "where excellence is no longer the exception":
Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani's vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:
Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.
Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani's governance promises:
During the Mamdani campaign, "efficiency" was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city's finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:
Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city's people and built environment pays off handsomely.
Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business's shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans' framing that a good government is "run like a business").
The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time in now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.
Mamdani's proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he's going to cut waste in government. He's ordered each city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" who will "review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery." These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:
Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE's project was to make cuts to government in order to make government "run like a business." Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:
But Mamdani's mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It's these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.
The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:
As Lynch writes, DOGE's purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani's ambition, meanwhile, is to "restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence."
As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, "For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."
Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn't managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:
After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies' headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA's many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.
So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he's making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden's government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!
Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!
As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it's even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:
The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.
Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a "shadow civil service" that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.
These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled "ArriveCAN" contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.
Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.
Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan "City of Sound" Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.
The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.
Running your public institution "like a business" is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government "like a business":
The US government's own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).
Medicare "upcoding" – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:
Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:
The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It's not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that's just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:
The conservative version of "efficiency" cashes out to "efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers." Mamdani's (good) mirror world "efficiency" means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.
New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:
Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education's 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He's rolling out "fiscal training and certification" for any government employee involved in procurement.
Mamdani isn't pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city's finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC's millionaires, and ask the state to "rebalance" its relationship with NYC's taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).
As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city's bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.
Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency "the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics":
Mamdani is reviving the tradition of "sewer socialism," a governing philosophy based on "bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways":
Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right's obsession with "government efficiency." On the conservative side of the mirror, "efficiency" is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left's side of the mirror, "efficiency" is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow's excellence by making long-term investments today.
Image:
DAVID ILIFF (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_Midtown_Skyline_at_night_-_Jan_2006_edit1.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
If you collaborate with eugenicists, you’re a collaborator.
This shouldn’t have to be said, but apparently it it does have to be said. And I guess Katelyn Jetelina of the popular substack “Your Local Epidemiologist” is a proud collaborator. It’s really amazing that she even uses the term bedfellows to describe it.
Screenshot of the substack headline of Your Local Epidemiologist by Katelyn Jetelina that states openly with the headline that she has moved from conversation with MAHA to collaboration.
Reminder that Katelyn Jetelina was a paid communications consultant for the CDC under the Biden administration. Is she so mercenary that she’s now vying for a position in the Trump administration for a chance to propagandize her liberal audience into MAGA MAHA adherents? Conservatives may very well be interested in going that route since they have before.
MAHA is a movement involving anti-vax eugenicist principles. Even if you can pick out one little part of it that sounds ok, do you really want to sign on to the stink of eugenics? Chloe Humbert Jun 11, 2025 I realize some people are also busy being big fans of Paul Offit and Katelyn Jetelina, imagining that they will lead The Resistance to anti-vax by solving this thorny problem — but they both have problems. Katelyn Jetelina has a history of being a terrible communicator when it comes to accurate information — leading with the lies and helping anti-vax to spread25 under the guise of being a debunker influencer.26 Her popular newsletter has always seemed to exist to soothe and coo people to believe everything’s going to be ok no matter what, telling people what they want to hear.
Top Civil and Structural Engineering Consulting Trends in Singapore
Singapore is known worldwide for its cutting-edge urban landscape, where sustainable development, technology integration, and efficient land use are crucial to the nation's growth. With limited land space and a dense population, civil and structural engineers in Singapore face unique challenges that push them to adopt the latest design, technology, and sustainability trends. As Singapore strives to remain a Smart Nation, civil and structural engineering consultants embrace these trends to drive infrastructure resilience, efficiency, and sustainability.
Below are some of the top civil and structural engineering consulting trends currently transforming the industry in Singapore.
Green and Sustainable Building Practices
As Singapore aims to meet its Green Plan 2030 goals, sustainable building practices have become a cornerstone of civil and structural engineering. Engineering consultants are adopting eco-friendly materials, efficient designs, and green technologies to minimize environmental impact and reduce energy consumption.
Green Mark Certification: Civil and structural engineering firms work closely with the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) to meet Green Mark standards and promote sustainable building practices. Like those in Marina Bay and the Central Business District, green buildings are designed with energy-efficient systems, natural ventilation, and innovative cooling solutions.
Carbon-Neutral Infrastructure: Many consulting firms are incorporating carbon-neutral designs, using renewable energy sources and materials with low embodied carbon. Projects are planned with lifecycle carbon analysis to understand and reduce emissions at each stage of a building's life.
Smart and Digital Infrastructure
Singapore's Smart Nation initiative pushes the envelope to integrate technology with infrastructure. Civil and structural engineers now embed smart sensors, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and data analytics to optimize building operations, monitor structural health, and ensure safety.
Building Information Modeling (BIM): BIM has become a core tool, allowing engineers to create digital models that enhance project planning, improve coordination, and reduce construction errors. Engineers can simulate various scenarios, identify potential issues, and ensure projects remain on budget and schedule.
Digital Twin Technology: Digital twins – virtual replicas of physical structures – are increasingly used to monitor real-time performance and simulate different operational conditions. This helps facility managers conduct predictive maintenance and optimize the efficiency and lifespan of infrastructure.
Prefabrication and Modular Construction (PPVC)
Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) and other modular construction techniques are gaining traction in Singapore rapidly. PPVC involves creating modular units off-site, which are then transported to the construction site for assembly, reducing construction time and labor needs.
Reduced On-Site Labor and Waste: Prefabrication significantly reduces on-site and construction waste, addressing Singapore's limited labor pool and sustainability goals. This method also minimizes disruptions in dense urban areas by reducing on-site construction activities.
Quality Control and Faster Project Delivery: Engineering consultants can better monitor quality and adhere to high safety standards by manufacturing components in a controlled factory environment. The streamlined process allows projects to be completed faster without compromising on quality.
Resilient and Climate-Adaptive Design
With Singapore's vulnerability to rising sea levels and extreme weather, resilient and climate-adaptive design has become critical. Civil and structural engineering consultants focus on creating infrastructure to withstand future climate challenges.
Flood-Resistant Infrastructure: Engineers are developing elevated foundations, stormwater management systems, and permeable pavements to prevent flooding in low-lying areas. Coastal areas like Marina Barrage have advanced drainage systems to protect against rising sea levels.
Heat-Resistant and Weather-Proof Materials: Using durable, weather-resistant materials that reduce heat absorption is now a priority. Engineers are incorporating innovative materials that adapt to Singapore's tropical climate, such as cool pavements and high-albedo coatings, which reflect rather than absorb heat.
High-Density and Multi-Use Developments
Singapore's land scarcity drives the trend towards high-density, multi-functional developments that maximize space efficiency. Engineering consultants design buildings that combine residential, commercial, and recreational spaces within the same structure, creating "vertical cities."
Efficient Land Use: High-density buildings make the most of limited land resources, meeting demand for housing, office space, and amenities. These developments reduce travel distances and support walkable, connected communities.
Community-Centric Design: Many developments incorporate public green spaces, communal areas, and easy access to amenities, aligning with Singapore's "City in a Garden" vision and fostering social interaction within urban environments.
Enhanced Safety Standards and Regulatory Compliance
Singapore's strict regulatory environment requires engineering consultants to comply with rigorous safety standards to ensure structural stability, safety, and environmental responsibility.
Advanced Safety Modeling: Safety simulations, using technologies like finite element analysis (FEA), allow engineers to test how buildings will react to stress, wind, and seismic forces. By predicting structural vulnerabilities, engineers can enhance safety and compliance.
Sustainable Compliance and Audits: Engineering firms perform regular sustainability audits to ensure projects meet environmental regulations. Consultants work closely with government bodies to ensure all structures adhere to the latest environmental and safety standards, which is critical for maintaining Singapore's reputation as a global leader in urban planning.
Use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning transform how civil and structural engineering consultants analyze data, predict structural performance, and manage projects.
Predictive Analytics for Maintenance: Machine learning algorithms analyze data from sensors embedded in buildings and infrastructure, identifying wear-and-tear trends to predict when maintenance is required. This predictive approach helps avoid costly repairs and reduces downtime.
Optimized Structural Design: AI is helping engineers design structures with optimal material usage, reducing costs and environmental impact. AI tools can process data from similar projects to propose the most efficient and durable designs for new projects.
Underground and Vertical Expansion
As Singapore's population grows, civil and structural engineers look underground and upward to expand the city-state's usable space. This trend is essential in meeting the demand for infrastructure without encroaching on limited green spaces.
Underground Infrastructure: Singapore is expanding its subterranean network from underground expressways to data centers. Civil engineers are exploring how to optimize underground spaces safely and efficiently, reducing surface congestion.
Skyscraper Engineering: With advancements in structural materials and design techniques, engineering consultants are pushing the boundaries of vertical architecture. Skyscrapers are designed to withstand strong winds, optimize natural light, and incorporate energy-efficient features to minimize environmental impact.
Emphasis on Lifecycle Assessment and Circular Economy
Singapore's construction industry embraces lifecycle assessment and circular economy principles to minimize waste and promote resource efficiency throughout a building's lifespan.
Recycling and Reuse of Materials: Engineering firms are repurposing materials from demolished buildings, reducing demand for new raw materials. By prioritizing recyclable materials in building designs, consultants contribute to Singapore's Zero Waste Master Plan.
Lifecycle-Based Design: By considering the entire lifecycle of structures, from design and construction to decommissioning, engineering consultants can maximize long-term value and sustainability.
Conclusion
Singapore's civil and structural engineering landscape is rapidly evolving as consultants adopt innovative solutions to meet the unique challenges of a growing, land-scarce city. From sustainable building practices to integrating AI and digital technologies, these trends are reshaping Singapore's infrastructure, ensuring it remains resilient, sustainable, and adaptable to future demands. As these trends continue to evolve, Singapore's civil and structural engineers are set to remain at the forefront of global urban innovation, building a future-ready city that balances growth with sustainability.
