Earlier quoted context omitted.
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But it's not somebody who directly lived through it. Even the father's account was well after the war.
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Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you. Graffiti is property destruction. It shows lack of respect for property rights. Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.
> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property. I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.
Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls. I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social…
Greece has always had a huge problem with graffiti. I did a semester abroad in Athens, new graffiti popped up all the time, but I never felt unsafe.
It's really an old problem, there were graffiti in Greece in 200AD !
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#134I love Lee Kuan Yew and his story. He's revered not just in the West but East as well. Obviously people can't see past his style but they'll never tell you it wasn't effective. There is a lot to learn from his philosophy and there used to be countries that were on a similar track that also saw similar transformation from a backwater agrarian society deciding from marxism to market economy. His legacy speaks for itsel…
>His legacy speaks for itself His legacy as a statesman is unparalleled, but his legacy as a parent falls short, given how poorly his son did at maintaining the country his father built. His father surrounded himself with smart people and welcomed criticism, while his son surrounded himself with yes-men and prosecuted critics. And now Singapore is becoming increasingly unappealing to MNCs due to recent discriminatory…
I disagree LHY inherited a major challenge, one with completely different variables such as a larger aging population along with all the typical balancing act to prevent it being a hollow shell for internationalists and easing burden on the middle class that keeps the whole order intact.
None of the problems you listed are unique to Singapore. Chinese buyers who often serve as effective money mules for capital out of China have inflated real estate prices globally and the enablers at home profited from the transaction, fully aware of the demographic impact it can have.
Singapore acted the best for its citizens in protecting them from outsider speculation compared to Canada for example.
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#135I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic polici…
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#136I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's entirely because it's one of the more obvious tells of AI writing. Most keyboards don't have an easy way to enter an em-dash, so they haven't been part of casual conversation for... decades I guess. AI has no such restrictions, and is trained on formal writing, so it uses them commonly. Similar but less strongly for semicolons. Most people just don't know how to use them. Regardless of whether you're using AI (p…
Maybe it would be better to use an AI translator. Because GPT has AI memory features, right? So when it translates, it often doesn't include hyphens or em dashes. But if you use a Korean translator, it has a function to attach hyphens to the language (kind of like Google Translate). In Korea, it's not that difficult to input an em dash because you can type it using 'ㄱ + chinese characterbutton' (both based on the Kor…
> I had no idea that typing an em dash is difficult overseas.
It’s not. On Apple platforms, you can type two hyphens in a row and let the default text replacement convert it; or you can hold down the hyphen and pick from hyphen, en dash, or em dash; or you can press Option-Shift-Hyphen. I think it’s about as easy on other platforms as well.
Don’t listen to them. The em dash is not some obscure punctuation nobody but AI uses.
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#138I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?
Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic polici…
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
Re: Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic polici…
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!