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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

It's not that different in Singapore which is supposedly a much more humane nation.

Very true. The working conditions for maids in Singapore are atrocious. Work 6 days per week, 14-16 hour days, salary Is SGD 1,000 / month on average. I live here as an expat (no maid, I refuse it) and my neighbours really treat their maids like 2nd class humans. There are often reports of maids being beaten up or abused by their “masters”.

> no maid, I refuse it

I've always been against hiring people to do my chores, but eventually I can only defend this from the perspective that doing my own chores makes me a better person. (Instinctively I don't want to do it, but morally I cannot justify not doing it now.)

I don't believe that hiring servants is bad. Ultimately, it creates an opportunity for them as well.

If you have a maid and pay them well, give them better than average working conditions, and don't punish them when you have emotional problems, you give them an opportunity to grow an alternate career on the side.

If you "refuse to participate", that does not fundamentally create more equality in itself.

Right, you could hire a maid and give them double the salary and normal working hours and now everyone wins. And if they move on to a better career, great, the system worked.

As long as the money does go to the maid, which is far from being certain. Even in a country as strict as Singapore, some are hostages rather than free workers. I'm sure it's much worse in others.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/some-bosses-holding-o...

If you're the employer, you get to be a part of the system that ensures this.

1) Almost no one ever pays them well

2) You should pay them to do something for the world, not yourself.

The next step is wondering if you trust yourself staying true to those intentions. I think it's safe to assume that most people who are bad examples never intended to and still believe they are the good guys. We are amazing at deluding ourselves.

Average working conditions might be a very low bar in the first place.

That’s why I suggested better than average.

> I refuse it

Why not provide a good experience for one person?

Pretty sure slavery is corrosive to the slaveholder too. Source: slack ass economies love slaves

Not disagreeing with you but..

I was once thinking like the OP too. However, life taught me that you can find someone to do any sh*t job (provided you pick from a large enough pool). Likely because their circumstances are improved by it, at least a little.

Hence I'd rather try to improve things a little bit for one person, unlike my purist (and naive) younger self.

I must admit though, personally I still find it hard still to make someone else do something I myself loathe doing.

> I must admit though, personally I still find it hard still to make someone else do something I myself loathe doing.

Not sure how you avoid it. I assume you don't pick all of your own apples or slaughter your own cows or mine your own iron or cobalt. Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization.

Because I don’t want to feed the system / make it legitimate. It’s a matter of principles.

Then they would be doing the same work for even worse pay and conditions back home.

Then I’d happily pay more then 15% income tax in this country so we can provide better foreign aid to said countries so they can afford a better education. Encouraging slavery does not solve the root cause.

They could also be giving money to an "agency" with less scruples, or encouraging 3 other people to enter the trade. There's no telling.

Opting out of an exploitative system is self-justified.

Presumably you're someone quite well paid and can afford to pay a cleaner at western rates (I pay mine 15 GBP per hour in London).

A cleaner will clean better and faster than you, letting you not only enjoy a clean stress-free home, but also enabling you to make a more productive use of your time.

I do not understand what maids could be doing for 14 to 16 hours per day for 6 days per week. Singapore abodes are small, and surely they have washers/dryers? Are they also serving as cooks, nannies, nurses, and shopping assistants?

Yes. At least from what I’ve seen. They do anything for the home. That’s similar to servants/maids in other countries I’ve seen.

In most homes they are nannies, dog walkers, shopping assistants, and cooks in addition to keeping the home clean and orderly.

They hang people for dealing drugs. Does not fit the much more humane narrative

on the other hand, the USA has close to 100K drug overdose deaths per year and singapore has close to none - not sure we are being very humane in the USA by allowing so many people to die from a preventable causes - maybe singapore is harsh in their methods, but maybe we should learn something.

The US has tried to be "harsh" on drug dealers for decades, and it hasn't really fixed a thing.

Maybe they should just stop prescribing opioids, for a start.

It’s not even the prescription opioids alone - germany has a similar prescription rate for opioids as the US (or at least had for a very long time), and we still don’t see the same effect.

The way these treatments are administered and checked upon matters, too as well as the underlying social dynamics.

How has 'the US tried to be "harsh" on drug dealers for decades'? In San Francisco the Honduran drug dealers gather around luxury SUVs for catered meal breaks before resuming their murderous work. We are currently wildly out of control. Enough Fentanyl was seized in California in 2022 to kill everyone in the USA twice. God only knows how much more got through and into people's bodies.

Check the amount of alcohol present on the shelves of US stores. There's enough to kill the roughly half-the-population who consume several times over.

The point is not to compare alcohol & fentanyl, but to note that "enough X to kill Y" is a really bad way to think about quantities of drugs.

Tell that to Newsom

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/12/23/california-seized-enough-f...

> How has 'the US tried to be "harsh" on drug dealers for decades'?

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, for starters.

It’s not like there isn’t some kind of middle ground - germany has about 1000 drug overdoses per year and we managed to get there without hanging people. Portugal, a country that has decriminalized drug consumption in 2001 has even better numbers, much lower than most other European countries.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/911927/drug-overdose-dea...

Tackling drug overdoses by hanging dealers doesn’t even try to address the underlying issues that cause drug usage and overdoses.

That's a very strange and myopic view, only taking two countries and comparing 1 statistic and 1 element of drug enforcement.

There's a huge list of cultural, demographic, political, sociological and historical factors to take into account here.

If heroin was legal and pure, there would be far fewer fentanyl overdose deaths.

The number of deaths from not-fentanyl is low so calling it "drug overdose deaths" instead of "fentanyl overdose deaths" is disingenuous.

We shouldn't learn anything from fascist Singapore.

Doesn’t SG tightly control their press? So how do we know how many overdose deaths they have? Also, they have a population of about 6M, including expats, compared to 300M in the US.

Or Hong-Kong. It's borderline slavery. Although in Hk most of the maid don't seem to suffer too much, I can imagine how worse it could be in Singapore considering the local culture and population.

Really? From my country news, seems foreign workers sent to SG or HK fared better than those sent to SA and M'sia.

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