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Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#261

Post by rapsey »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #171
shell0x wrote: post #141

As a German expat who lived in Singapore for 3 years, it’s still the best country I ever lived in and I’ve also worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan HK, and Germany. Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes. Most Western countries just can’t compete and while the UAE is pretty well run in some aspect, there…

As a german, are you ok with the human rights violations happening in Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/singa... As a german, are you ok with the death penalty (for as little as 14 grams of drugs)? Are you with violent and cruel corporal punishment (for as little as vandalism)?

As a European absolutely yes and I wish we had the fortitude to do it. It would literally save the EU. We never will, so right wing populism and the struggle to suppress it will probably destroy Europe.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#262

Post by shell0x »

kdheiwns wrote: post #197
shell0x wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not seem to like a rules based society. I’d have no problem renouncing my German citizenship and become Singaporean. I just want stability, safety, good food, good bars, excellent transit, low taxes and excellent internet.

Germany has always had a massive and influential art and music scene. It's been the source of fine cinema. It's globally known for raves, dabbling in drugs, and wild fashion. I encounter Germans all around the world hiking up mountains in freezing temperatures while wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers and smiling while doing so. Germans are known for their strict rules when it comes to the day to day, but they ve…

Singapore is also a very young country though, so it's not fair to compare to Germany. You do have a point though that there is not much out of the box thinking. I found that to be higher in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#264

Post by drekipus »

somenameforme wrote: post #170
drekipus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully there's infinite people from other countries who can migrate freely and replace the aging population, right? (Serious question)

Where do you propose regularly finding hundreds of millions of skilled English speakers of similar values who are interested in permanently migrating to what will be countries clearly in decline?

India, that's where everyone else gets them. People are just economic units

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#265

Post by panick21_ »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #256
currymj wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland is like this and is also a real democracy. Although the food is not as good.

In Switzerland you're not going to rent or buy any housing. If a miracle somehow happens you'll live in hotel room sized studio and your full time job will be rental laws and regulations. With no housing it's irrelevant how real the democracy is there.

The rail system is good enough that you can live 30min from most cities and be in the country side where prices are not crazy.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#266

Post by lenkite »

JCattheATM wrote: post #249
HighGoldstein wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you know what an opinion is? Cool, what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans? >Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in. Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.

> what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans? Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Not that I'm willing to put in the effort when it already took this much for you to realize I was stating an opinion though. > Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore. If you think casual murder…

> Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct.

Out of curiosity, How can your argument "be supported and shown to be objectively correct" ?

It seems the evidence is actually the other way around. After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%.

I do not support the death penalty myself, but primarily for ethical and moral reasons to preserve our humanity - which is constantly under attack. But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#267

Post by somenameforme »

drekipus wrote: post #264
somenameforme wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you propose regularly finding hundreds of millions of skilled English speakers of similar values who are interested in permanently migrating to what will be countries clearly in decline?

India, that's where everyone else gets them. People are just economic units

Even India's fertility rate is now below replacement, and they're increasingly actively working to turn the tide on their brain drain. And India's economy is both already massive and growing quite rapidly. At current trends they'll pass the US within a decade or two. They certainly aren't just this long term sustainable pool of people to draw from.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#268

Post by somenameforme »

dangus wrote: post #254
somenameforme wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.

I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just do…

Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company.

As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#269

Post by HighGoldstein »

JCattheATM wrote: post #207
virtualritz wrote: post #76

“Disneyland with the death penalty” [1] —William Gibson [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

Yes, still spot on - there's a reason that description lives on so many years later. Barbaric city states like Singapore should be abolished or taken over and reformed.

I love how you're opposed to the death penalty for provably societally damaging criminal activites, but violent imperialism on those that don't agree with you (which would almost certainly entail many deaths)? Completely OK.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#270

Post by philwelch »

breppp wrote: post #258
philwelch wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many traditional cultures don’t really distinguish between homosexuality and pedarasty. That distinction, or at least the cultural recognition of a distinction, is largely a distinctive artifact of the sexual revolution, a western phenomenon.

I don't think that was the case, the executions I saw was for rape and murder of four and eight year olds

Right, my point is that if they were men raping four and eight year old boys, they may very well have been convicted of sodomy rather than child rape like they would in some Western countries.

The state law in Washington even had a similar issue. Bestiality was prohibited by the sodomy statute, which the state repealed in its entirety as a gay rights thing. After the Enumclaw incident the legislature scrambled to re-criminalize bestiality.

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