391–400 of 488 posts
if it exists in abundance like the air that we breathe no amount of conspiracy will be able to monopolize it.
finance only works in a very narrow band of environmental conditions. we are very well past that.
You know who they didn't interview: those who regret saving so much. Many of those people are dead and so the regret is something we can only apply on assumption that they would. I've known a few people who unexpectedly died before they hit retirement age. I've know a few people who retired and died suddenly. The vast majority of people in a "first world" country have an expected lifespan of about 80 - but there is a…
People who save a lot are typically people comforted by sitting on a big nest egg. Saving a lot for retirement and then dying the day before retirement isn’t necessarily going to be a source of regret, because they had 30 years of warm fuzzy feelings about eventually hatching their nest egg. They could have spent it all instead, and had a life full of anxiety. You’re looking for people who didn’t want to save but beg…
Now, I realize that this is a privileged position. I have a yuppie software job that pays well, and as such I can afford to have savings and still afford to do fun things. I don’t go on luxury cruises or super fancy restaurants, but I do try and travel fairly often with my wife, and as long as we’re a little frugal about it we can go on a “big trip” once or twice a year without it being something that hurts us much financially.
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I think it's also relevant that CPF is not only a pension schema but most importantly also a home ownership scheme via HDB OA https://www.cpf.gov.sg/member/home-ownership/using-your-cpf-...
The "gotcha" here is that the home is, legally and technically, on a 99-year lease from the government. So, the government is free to take it back once the lease expires. This happened a couple of years back with an old enclave - the "owners" had to vacate their units as their lease had expired and the government needed the land for developmental purposes. In fact, this had become a hot button issue in the elections.…
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> the forced savings has a wildly inflationary effect on housing prices Housing prices are inflationary independent of CPF, because flats in Singapore are powerful investment vehicles. For HDB flats, however, there is means-testing and rebates to the amount of ~50%, sufficient for anyone on the 30th percentile and above to afford.
Since the government controls the supplies of HDBs, it controls the price inflation. So it would be more accurate to say “housing prices are inflationary because the government wants them to be”. Yet this introduces a ton of new problems as well. In order to keep them “good investments” it becomes ever increasing prices with ever increasing rebates to help lower income afford them. But eventually prices will stop goi…
American cities could solve their housing shortages in short order but it'd piss off too many people who are "invested' in housing so we accept dead bodies in our streets and social instability instead.
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So you think healthy living will prevent you from needing medical care until you are 65 ?
For the chronic stuff, yes. For acute accidents, who knows! With carnivore: I'm off almost all meds, my mobility and flexibility are amazing these days (I am sitting on the floor right now with crossed legs).
Doesn't matter how well you take care of yourself if a random cell decides to divide in just the wrong way.
Did US have economic shocks? Compared to, say, Eastern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, all people who lived through real economic shocks and hyper-inflation tend to save less , not more. Because they know the savings can evaporate one day.
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Listening to political speeches from Singapore are so refreshing compared to the juvenile garbage that we have to endure in the US from US politicians.
Singapore is a dictatorship wearing a democracy's outfit. One party has been ruling continuously since its formation and you can't go against its ideas. There is no real competition for ideas like we have in the US. So, yeah, the "discussion/debates" will be high quality when it is one sided. Just like North Korea is free from low quality debates, Singapore too is free from that. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/a…
So is the facade of democracy much different from a dictatorship?
I'm not here saying that Singapore is doing everything right. I'm just noting that public political presentations from Singapore seem vastly better than watching Trump, Leavitt, Noem, Bondi, Patel, or virtually any other "leaders" speak. The quality of communication - message aside - is utter garbage. It's a very sad state of affairs. What we see here is dumbed down language that caters to the least educated, most easily misled masses. And this illustrates where democracy fails: democracy assumes a reasonable level of education and comprehension. We don't have there here, especially when psyops tactics have been employed by some news networks for two decades now.
A confounding factor here is that savings behavior is cultural rooted: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6135367/ . Studies show that people within a country can have substantially different savings behaviors, robustly correlated with their origin countries, even among people who are third generation immigrants. It’s a mistake to treat either the U.S. or Singapore as homogenous populations for purposes of this…
I once heard a linguistic explanation for this. European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me." While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the sam…
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Singapore is an effective slave/permanent underclass state with few personal freedoms that is ethnically and culturally homogeneous (in each class). Not trying to do a "who's the bad/good country" but nothing about it really applies to the US or should.
Ethnically homogeneous? Do you know anything about Singapore?