Singapore activist found guilty of hosting ‘illegal assembly’ via Skype

Not true, it looks so from where you're sitting. But politics change a lot over time.

It's slow moving and in a two party system, you are unlikely to see big differences between either side.

That said, the world would have looked differently had Hilary won in 2016.

Wait a minute....

I find this very funny in reality because as someone from the US living in SE asia for nearly 4 years, I pretty much prefer everywhere else in SE asia than Singapore, though I guess if you look at from a monetary standpoint I can understand.

Calling him "doing all things right" is a big stretch. The biggest error of him was to cling to power long after his mind went going.

Singapore's economic success was pretty much a meme too. The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.

There were three epochs in Singapore's economy:

First - everybody sat in their campungs and chewed paan. Pretty much nothing was happening till seventies. The only exception to that was that there was pretty much a small scale communist insurgency going on.

Second - reformation and industrialisation. This is the fabled Singaporean miracle. They built MDB flats, and everybody got so happy. A small industrial sector appeared, but it was quickly overshadowed by another kind of activity.

Singapore exploited Western reprehension dealing with Asia, and marketed itself as a "Western outpost" in the middle of barbarian lands. Singaporean companies used Singapore's GATT membership to run trade agencies that bought cheap goods from Asia, and stamp "made in Singapore" on them. That brought the country a big part of its current wealth.

Third - wind down and stagnation. China accessed to WTO, and Singapore's WTO membership no longer meant anything anymore. Singapore got into the middle income trap. People began to feel that Sing's economy was a one trick pony. It tried, but failed to upgrade its economy towards advanced economic activities. From that era, we got the fabulous Nanyang University, excellent primary education, and, back then, liberal immigration policy.

But there was blessing in a curse - China's WTO accession brought tons of money from China's first generation of billionaires to the country. From then on, Singapore fully took on its current identity of the "Luxembourg of Asia."

Oh my, can I ask you where did you pick that up? It feels to me that an average Western person nowadays has been taught more of that stuff than a well studied Chinese.

Well, in the case of Singapore, his son takes over [1]. Interestingly (for the HN crowd) he knows C++ and iirc from an old thread about the current PM, Haskell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong

Or, even worse, when they get old and start losing their faculties.

> Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.

Recently, I also heard the opinion that another country that can be compared to Sing is Kazakhstan... wait?

The comparison is not so ridiculous if you go through with it:

... it is not a city state, but you can say that it is a "two city state." Besides Astana, and Almaty, the nation is effectively a post-soviet wasteland.

... LKY, just as Kazakh president was a socialist and nationalist early on, and of a very radical kind.

... LKY, just as Kazakh president purged every socialist and nationalist the moment he got a nation for himself.

... aside from elites living in ghettos for the rich, the ordinary population is pressed against the wall by low median income.

... to a very big extend, the state gives just enough of handouts to the masses to prevent them from rioting. This way, both Kazakhstan and Singapore can be called a de-facto, but not de-jure socialist states.

... both countries' economies are one trick ponies, despite of decades of dramatic efforts to change that.

... both countries spend lavishly on clearing up their image abroad, but the general populace of both countries can't disagree more with their respective countries popular image.

The biggest noticeable difference is of course that Singapore is cosy with the West, and Kazakhstan isn't.

Good economy, but also good food which matters when you don’t plan to cook for yourself. Good transit infrastructure going anywhere you need or desire to go, so you don’t have to have a car. One level of government, so reduced complexity dealing with all those annoying things that hackers think are stupid and dumb, like taxes. Only thing it is really missing is the kind of critical mass of hackers that would make it into Y Combinator in City-State form.

Singapore has strong censorship mechanisms for the media and Internet. It ranks 151 on the Freedom of Press Index [0].

[0] https://rsf.org/en/singapore

No, he wasn't. He was a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in economics. The closest that gets to being true is that his son, Lee Hsien Long, got a B.A. in Mathematics and Diploma (essentially an M.S.) in Computer Science before getting a Master of Public Administration. His work history immediately after getting the CS degree was as a military officer with a meteoric career path which appears to have been in field command and operations and general staff positions; he does not appear to ever have been a working computer scientist.

> Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected

That generalization goes far beyond what the single example you seem to rely on would support even if it were accurately described.

This is basically the difference between East Asian cultures and Western/American culture. We value a balance of order and individual rights, you guys value individual rights over all.

That says nothing about a permit being required.

    I suppose that organizing or participating in a public assembly without a police permit is illegal more or less everywhere in the world.

If the police deems your assembly a danger to the public or unable to be held as notified (e.g. when you want to hold an assembly on an Autobahn or other major street, or in security zones during foreign state visits) they can either forbid the assembly in its entirety (which is very rare) or modify the time/location (e.g. not on the Autobahn but on a parking lot, or directly outside the security zone). In this case the assembly initiator can go to the courts and initiate emergency hearings, which sometimes (e.g. with the G20 Hamburg protests) can go up to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (our Supreme Court equivalent).

If I rant against Disney land with the dealt penalty, and the video is later played there, I have not given a speech there.

As an expat, that would likely not affect you much. Lots of MNCs have fairly nice working hours, decent pay and 20-25 days/year paid leave (on top of the numerous public holidays)

Cost of living depends on whether you need a big apartment in a posh location and a car. Sending kids to international school is also pricey.

That's like saying “Red, etc., yes, but no colors.”