Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore

> America didn't have the capability to provide room for the influx of covid-19 patients

No, America had (and still has) central authority make (making) a conscious choice not only not to direct energy at that purpose but to actively interfere with subordinate authorities attempts to do so for purposes linked to maintaining institutional power by placing blame.

There was no lack of capacity caused by the absence of central authority, there was active prevention caused by the interests of central authority.

And the entire global pandemic is in no small part due to the delay and denial initially by China before they decided they needed to deal with it, again because of the propaganda interests of central authority.

There certainly is utility in central organization in dealing with things like pandemics, but COVID-19 itself, especially the US and China subparts of it, are hardly a ringing endorsement of “central authority good”.

I'm so tire of the Singapore miracle and Lee Kuan Yew hymn as someone who received education and lived early life there. I do believe on certain grounds they are produced and promoted by public relation department of Singapore government, as a counter-measure to all the criticism concerning human rights, free speech, totalitarianism, etc. To put it shortly, Singapore is just China in minuscule, just that Singaporean officialdom knows how to conceal. There are many myths/narrative constructions regarding to this city state. 1, Singapore government is immune from corruption and highly efficient. To be fair, Singapore government is very efficient and officials not corrupted at low levels. However, at high levels, it's a different story. Things are just concealed. One department buying useless software and renewing license for millions every year from some 2-people company, do you think it's corruption? remember it's not a democracy you can hold officials accountable. At top level, well, they own the country. Also, as a totalitarian regime where all decisions are made by a few feudal families, Singapore government made many wrong decisions that cost trillions. For example, it spent a huge amount of resources to biopharmaceutical industries for years in belief that this will have great economic gains, which turned out a total failure. Baisically they can do anything without any kind of mechanisms to check. 2, Singapore is a (economic) miracle. Authority in Singapore since the very beginning has been saying that Singapore before PAP(People's Action Party) is a dirt poor fishing village, in primary schools, on textbooks, in scholar studies, etc. Well, this is a severe distortion of truth to say the least. In colonial era, Singapore had already been far ahead of other regions in South East Asia in every aspect. And that's why Singapore less than 1% of the land counted more than 50% of Chinese immigrant population in the whole Malaysia. People came to Singapore for money! In fact, in late 1800s and early 1900s, you can make about 5-10 times of what you can in other Malaysia cities for same job. 3, Singaporean people are living a happy life. Some certainly are. Majority is not. Singaporean people's life standard is quite low, given its GDP. In fact, the philosophy from top, is, people's very basic needs are to be met, but anything else should be a luxury that they need to labor very hard (for us) to get. Singapore's wage is not high. Very basic food and shelter is not expensive to be fair. But if you want some comfort from life that most people in the world can have rather easily, you are probably not able to afford. I'm not talking about bmw or luxury condo, i'm talking about ice cream, beer, high quality fruit, air-con, Toyota, etc. 4, Singapore is meritocratic and being pragmatical. Again, at low level of officialdom, it is, to a great extent. But there's saying in Singapore, people who got to make public transportation policies never take public transportation in life. You get the idea. To understand this, you need to know some Singaporean/Malaysian history. There's a people called Straights Chineses, to which Lee Kuan Yew's family belong. Straight Chinese is what later Chinese immigrants call them. They don't deem themselves as Chinese. Lee Kuan Yew only changed his name to Chinese and began to learn Chinese in his late years. That history is quite completed. As I said, Singapore is just China in minuscule. Whatever you think of China, be it good or bad, applies to Singapore. I personally don't think highly of it. Actually there's a perennial quitter phenomenon in Singapore. Those who make it thru to middle class, especially professionals, tend to leave.

There are cultural differences here. Japanese houses are seen as depreciating assets, as nobody wants to live in an old house. See https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/03/15/w...

As a result, the phenomenon of hoarding real estate for profit simply doesn’t exist. And the regular tear down of old houses allows density to increase rapidly, at the expense of building waste.

Moving Grab isn't a big deal, considering Grab's founders are Malaysian Chinese, and likely face indirect discrimination thanks to Malaysia's constitution. Malaysia drove them away, Singapore didn't persuade them.

Edit:- to counter your example, devs are not as highly paid for the living costs of Singapore. And they don't even form part of the upper bracket, which is largely populated by people in finance and management.

The Mietendeckel has effectively triggered the death spiral of Berlin's housing market, it's the product of a reactionary local politics and the intransigence of the main political parties at a federal level to either fund housing development or loosen planning restrictions. I came to berlin in 2011 and almost a decade later the problem has only gotten worse, which goes to show that the direction of cracking down on private landlords whilst making negligible efforts to either zone new housing areas or speed up planning permission is ineffective at creating more living space for the 140,000 people who are under-housed.

The death spiral is accelerated by two factors, firstly private landlords have had their income curtailed and are selling up, secondly prospective private investors in rental housing, wary of further unilateral retrospective changes in the future, are walking away. For those that don't know what the Mietendeckel is, rents in Berlin have been reset to circa 2013 levels, where buildings built before 2014 cannot be rented above 6-10 euros per sqm, existing contracts and renovation investments be damned. For example a building in Friedrichshain built in 1890 but completely renovated So this legislation has lead to the current situation where landlords are preferring to sell their properties when they become empty or when that's not foreseeable, selling them with the tenants in them (which can reduce the final sale price by up to ~30%) or just hold off on renting empty properties for now or even rent them on the booming black market. This is evident in the 47% drop in rental listings for apartments in old buildings and the moderate rise in condominium sales.

German tenancy laws read like the wish list of rental activists in America or the UK, they provide comprehensive protection from no fault terminations and are backed by a lethargic court system, the sole reason that can be given for terminating a contract is when the apartment is needed for you or your relatives own use, a lot of people like to imagine that this is abused but the consequences are so severe I can't see any logical person making that choice. A long term tenant who fights this kind of termination can expect to stay in their apartment for up-to 2-3 years, but in the end will face certain eviction and ruinous costs in excess of 15-40,000 euros. Whilst there are clauses to protect vulnerable tenants from eviction, they are not evident in practice, just recently a 82 year old woman with advanced dementia was evicted as the court determined after 3 years that she could be physically lifted out the apartment by her daughters and so is therefore capable of moving elsewhere.

There is nothing to rent here, your sole choice is to buy a place, but you won't be able to afford an apartment which is unoccupied as the banks' valuations don't match that of the realtors. Which leaves you with finding soft targets for eviction, the easy to persuade will have accepted an offer, so take a pick between the elderly or single earner families with kids.