Comments by "Zhi Han Lee" (@lzh4950) on "How Tiny Singapore Became a Petro-Giant" video.

Learnt in a university module that the way Jurong Island was built took advantage of the shallowness of the waters between the islands originally in the area e.g. Seraya , before they were all joined together by land reclamation to form Jurong Island, as that meant less sand would be needed. Also didn't know beforehand that what I thought was the bridge (Jurong Island H'way) to the island from the mainland is actually a floating pontoon so that it could be more easily dismantled in an emergency
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Now Singapore's Raffles Hotel & Asia Sq office towers have also been bought by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund too I think
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Heard speculation that the 3rd road between Singapore & Malaysia proposed by the latter's then PM Mahathir Mohammad would be sited at the Pengerang Integrated Petroleum Complex (PIPC) to make it more accessible & thus more attractive place to work at, as it's otherwise in a more rural region. Analysts doubt the financial viability of this proposal though, with the existing bumboat ferry service to Pengerang (from Singapore's Changi Village IIRC) isn't that heavily used. The 3rd road might be more utilised if it wasn't so far east, perhaps linking Singapore's Seletar & Malaysia's Pasir Gudang regions instead
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@bell-xk5dd Singapore being densely populated doesn't have much land, so it's shrewedly placing its solar panels on high-rise apartments' roofrops & floating on reservoirs
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@TheViettan28 There's been proposals that Singapore could use its refineries to produce other chemicals from petroleum too, besides fuel
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Diversification has long been on the country's economic agenda, though there has been concerns that we're going too far & thus may end up as a jack of all trades but master of none. E.g. we attracted more private universities to setup branches here to become a "global schoolhouse" & develop our education sector, but in the end we had unhappy students/customers as quite a number of universities suddenly closed down (due to financial problems I think) without refunding students. Tourism is another sector we're developing but that's involved building much man-made attractions since we don't have a lot of natural ones, & to sustain tourists' interest some attractions were rebuilt after only a short time, which isn't very environmentally friendly e.g. the Merlion observatory tower was demolished after just ~20 yrs to be replaced by a multi-sensory garden
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Realised 1L of petrol in Singapore also costs about the same as a car tank worth of it in Venezuela, probably as the former taxes petrol quite abit. They've just been raised again, so our prices are now catching up with HK's (~S$2.50/L). Since the 90s you're also legally required to have your fuel tank @ least 3/4 full before driving out from Singapore to neighbouring Malaysia, so you don't end up avoiding too much of Singapore's fuel taxes by refuelling in Malaysia instead (where fuel is subsidized instead, & ~1/3 the price). Heard of some people attempting to get around this by tampering their fuel gauges so its needle can be remote-controlled to overstate the tank's fullness, or rocking their cars when refuelling in Malaysia to take on more fuel.
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@krollpeter Singapore was opportunistic I guess in getting some "1st mover advantage" (e.g. more FDI, military co-operation (it proudly says it's 1 of the only 6 countries to fly the F-15)) by being the 1st country in SE Asia to be friendly with the USA, while neighbouring countries were less so for various reasons e.g. opposition to the Vietnam War, though there've been times where Singapore hasn't been as friendly, probably as part of exercising its sovereignty. E.g. heard some 1 once say something like "Thanks to our military we could cane Michael Fay"
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@cloudyday1617 The tumults that the country faced just before independence (which are quite tellingly prominently featured in our history books) helped to soften resistance against unpopular policies too I think, since now you could look back & compare that we were even worse off previously. E.g. soon after the Hock Lee bus riots by striking workers the gov't required most unions to register under it's NTUC organisation, which brought unions closer to the gov't I think. Now we have the Nat'l Wages Council where there's an agreement that workers have to be more productive if they want pay rises (a social contract that's been rejected by protesters for higher min. wages in the USA I heard). The country's limitations have also been highlighted for the same purpose e.g. saying we can't acede to NIMBYs as we don't have a lot of land (MP Ellen Lee was also brave enough to call her voters 'selfish' in 2012 for opposing an old-folks home being built near their houses, due to -ve association of them with death & thus possible devaluation of their houses' values), saying we can't afford a welfare state because we don't have much natural resources (e.g. so instead of pensions, workers are forced to save part of their salaries for retirement), or saying we can't do much (other than practise more austerity) to control inflation as its mostly imported (since many of our goods e.g. food are imported e.g. vegetables from Malaysia have doubled in price a few times previously due to inclement weather there)
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