Comments by "Zhi Han Lee" (@lzh4950) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. My parents have said that they think both Taiwan & S Korea have too many universities & their their workforce is overqualified, intensifying competition for jobs
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  2. I remember my mother once bristled: " *You mean respect is supposed to be earned? * " because Asian society generalises more in some areas, such as assuming that older people are more experienced (but in today's fast changing world, need to see also how much of it is still relevant today) & thus must (almost) always be right, & thus cannot be questioned or not respected. They might invoke 1 of our sayings: "I have eaten more salt than you've eaten rice"
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  3.  @andyyang2797  Think SIngapore could be an example of how government intervention doesn't always have to be negative (maybe it's been seen that way as its associated with protectionism, which might be seen as molly-coddling), if say the gov't itself practices market discipline too to, say, reduce wastage e.g. it maintains high standards at its national airline & airport as they're seen as inextricably linked to the country's reputation too
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  4. Well in 2018 I rmb S'pore's PM once said something like: "But our immigrants from less developed countries aren't asking for work-life balance"
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  5. 1 of my university lecturers used Park's impeachment to warn us against skipping his lectures (because apparently the scandal that led to the impeachment was 1st discovered when a undergrad in Korea was wondering how the daughter of Park's friend managed to score 'A' in a module despite skipping some lectures, which should've been impossible there. So there was suspicion of cronyism)
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  6.  @starzies  Also realised how differently different media outlets portrayed the accident e.g. Singapore's CNA said most of the coast guards sent to the scene weren't trained in diving (e.g. into the sinking ferry to rescue more passengers) & thus could only ride in boats to rescue/pluck out passengers who managed to swim out of the ferry & float on the water, while a NY media outlet claimed the coast guard was obsessed with assembling cameras for the rescue operation so as to generate positive PR & ended up not committing enough manpower to the rescue itself
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  7. While IIRC there is a UN push to end corporal punishment in schools, meanwhile in Singapore a 14-year old student was ridiculed when he opined online that he felt that his school's caning of him for vaping was harsh
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  8. Semiconductors is still a big business in Singapore today (~1/5 of all manufacturing here, or 4% of the country's GDP) but now mainly by multi-national companies as foreign investors e.g. Micron buying over & expanding TI Semiconductor's plants here as well as it's JV with Intel (IM Flash), Samsung/Siltronic & Jabil setting up shop in Tampines Industrial Pk
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  9. I'm in Singapore & that reminds me of a news article about a mother of 3 young children who faced challenges taking public transport e.g. prams had to be folded before boarding a bus, (until 2017). In response my father said it was irresponsible for that mother to have that many children if she couldn't afford a car (which are heavily taxed here), perhaps exemplifying some of the more conservative attitudes present in the region
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  10. Guess in some industries S Korea may have the challenge of being regarded as neither as cheap as China nor as quality as Japan e.g. Sigma got blacklisted in my country after too many of their lifts in public housing estates broke down. Interesting that S Korean companies dominate in some industries e.g. semiconductors but in other industries e.g. trucks & buses, we may be 'bypassing' Korean brands by directly going from Japanese ones e.g. Mitsubishi, Isuzu to China ones e.g. CAMC, Yutong, perhaps as quality in China catches up
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  11. My secondary (equiv. to middle/junior high) school is named after him, supposedly because its founders admired him
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  12. Yup perhaps some races/cultures are more competitive-minded while others are more laid-back e.g. my father (Chinese) had found it difficult to fathom that 1 of my English teachers (who's Malay) had earlier switched from a Merill Lynch career because he preferred to have more family time
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  13. Also noticed that much of the Cantonese pop we know are mainly from the 20th century & less from the 21st, maybe because its seen as less significant as the Mandarin pop industry of mainland China has grown
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  14. Singapore's government spending as a % of GDP is relatively low too I recall (~25%, & our biggest component of government spending (defence) is 'just' 3.5% of GDP), & it's less on welfare handouts/benefits (because there isn't much populist political pressure to have that; we can argue that it'd be delusional/spoilt to demand that because we lack natural resources, we used to be poor & don't want to be complacent etc.) but more on longer-term projects e.g. - career retraining & other education (as a small, densely populated country, we probably have more economies of scale, as our population is spread over a smaller area, so you can serve them with fewer bigger schools (typically ~1600-2400 students/school, & previously we had some classes schooled in the morning & others in the afternoon, so each classroom can be reused daily by 2 classes, saving on the infrastructure needed). They typically get closed down/merged with other schools once the student population dips below ~500 (3 classes per level in secondary schools, which is equivalent to 7-10th grade), but in more rural areas in other countries I think some schools won't even have that many students. - infrastructure (might help too that construction labour is cheaper since they're mostly migrant workers who remit their pay to their families living in countries where costs of living are lower, & aren't allowed to move to Singapore to live too (unless they're working here too). The government can be quite conservative with expanding transport infra too sometimes e.g. waiting for a neighbourhood to be populated for a few decades before adding a train station there, usually choosing the lowest bidder for construction projects (though sadly some contractors have gone bankrupt halfway). Fortunately public transport fares are cheaper here, probably because while other countries may discourage private transport by having highways privatised & higher tolls charged by the private companies that have the highways' concessions, or having more expensive parking fees in downtown, which leads to the negative externality of private transport e.g. congestion, air pollution be internalised by private companies, in Singapore these are internalised by the government instead e.g. high car taxes, though parking & tolls are cheaper (our roads aren't privatised either), & the government can use the derived revenue to fund public transport projects), - health insurance (but our government's healthcare spending/subsidies can be more discriminating in some circumstances e.g. 1 of my ex-schoolmate's mother was reportedly not insured by the government's vaccine insurance programme when she faced chronic arm pain after her Pfizer-B&T CoViD-19 injection & had to go for physiotherapy/TCM treatment, as our Ministry of Health allegedly refused to recognise that as a "vaccine injury" (& might've blamed that on other factors in her lifestyle too e.g. other pre-existing (?) chronic illnesses/ailments). Another countrymen also found himself disqualified from public health subsidies at a public hospital that he was referred to by an outpatient doctor (who wasn't sufficiently equipped to treat his condition) as that doctor was in a private instead of a government clinic. Dental procedures are also often not insurable in this country, & our government had also announced it'll refuse to subsidise treatment for those who travel overseas (earlier on) & now unvaccinated people too, if they get infected by the pandemic.)
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  15. Recall sometime in 2018 that when Singapore's PM was talking about work-life balance, he said something like: "but immigrants from less-developed countries aren't asking for that". Which to me risks adding new meaning to the phrase "race to the bottom"
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  16. IIRC in 2009 a Malaysian consular staff in Sweden was convicted of child abuse after he spanked his child, while meanwhile in Asia we have a saying: "Spare the rod & spoil the child"
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  17. Singapore's TFR broken down meanwhile is ~1.06 for Chinese, 1.96 for Malays & somewhere in-between (I couldn't remember the exact number) for Indians
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  18. Canon didn't really believe in mirrorless technology I remember (probably due to doubts over its effectiveness). Generally Japanese companies are more conservative & practice more incremental than radical innovation I think e.g. a rice cooker whose pot has a convex base for more even heat distribution (a design adopted from traditional Japanese cooking pots too). Toyota also continue using 4-speed auto transmissions as late as 2012 e.g. in the Corolla Altis, & introduced direct injection to it only in 2013 (8 years after Audi launched it on the A4, though also becuase Japanese car companies sell more cars to developing/undeveloped countries, where petrol is dirtier & would foul up the more delicate direct injection engines)
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  19. Japanese companies still have a global monopoly over photoresist chemicals though interestingly, which affected S Korea's fabs when Japan decided to reimpose customs restrictions on the chemicals' export to S Korea after a S Korea court ruled that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) had to pay compensation for slave labour employed during WW2 & the colonisation of the Korean peninsula
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  20.  @jimseah7089  That's more due to the fixed/more rigid timetabling of the trains' CBTC signalling system I think. The trains are programmed to automatically close their doors after being open for a fixed duration at each station without anyone checking if anyone are still in the doorways I think (though there're warning sounds and lights before the doors close)
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  21.  @myerwerl  Malaysian Malays might have less incentive to migrate/commute to Singapore for work I guess than since Malaysia's government policies give them priority I heard
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  22. Actually some government policies do favour Malaysians over other foreigners I think due to their greater cultural similarity to locals, & thus the likely greater ease of assimilation into the local society e.g. they're excluded from having to follow the racial quotas imposed on residents/tenants in various neighbourhoods (since the government wants to spread residents/tenants of different races & nationalities (there're cultural differences between people of the same race but different nationalities too e.g. accents of Singaporean Chinese & Indians vs native ones) evenly across different towns, neighbourhoods etc. so that they have enough opportunity to mingle around)
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  23. 8:38 Singapore should have less issue down the line with funding the government's social policies promised to elders' as instead of pensions, the retired are expected to live off compulsory savings made back when they were working (under it's Central Provident Fund (CPF) scheme), so it's more self-sustaining financially & less dependent on government funding. Since employers are legally required to chip in to fund these savings too, & the CPF scheme is for locals & PRs but not other foreigners though, there's also concern that they might favour hiring foreigners over PRs & locals since then the employer can save on having to chip in
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  24. 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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  25. Singapore has a lot of public housing (housing 85% of the population, & ~1/4 to 1/2 the cost of private housing), so housing cost is probably a smaller issue here than elsewhere. Economic competition might be a bigger issue I guess, with many of my fresh grad friends often working late at night, which I don't think will be sustainable once we have children. I also recall our prime minister had been more dismissive towards work-life balance also, by saying that immigrants from less developed countries were less demanding
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  26. At least in my factory now in Singapore it's also 2 12h shifts daily
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  27. Yep Canon & Nikon also have a duopoly in DSLRs
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  28. Heard of the belief that Singapore's government could manage to pursue a "divide & conquer" -like strategy by being friendlier to Johor's state government & monarch ( sultan ) than Malaysia's central/federal government (I think what also comes into play is that many Johor residents (~300,000?) work in Singapore due to its higher incomes)
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  29. Singapore would like to diversify into multiple industries to make it's economy more resilient I think, though in the past there was some concern about us becoming too much of a jack of all trades but master of none. E.g. Singapore wanted to attract more IPOs & private universities too (to become an educational hub, or "Global Schoolhouse" as officially called) but ended up with companies mired in governance issues (e.g. China Aviation Oil (CAO) accounting scandal) and universities that suddenly closed down without refunding their students. Singapore had success in tourism (before CoViD-19) but I'm not sure if it's sustainable in the long run as it seems to be significantly dependent on frequent hardware renewal e.g. the demolishing of the barely 20-year old Merlion observatory tower on Sentosa island to be replaced by a sensory park to be able to remain 'relevant' & continuously "renew our offerings". The Underwater World aquarium which I don't remember as being that old was also replaced by the S.E.A. Aquarium & in the process we lost the ability to view sea creatures while standing on underwater travellators. In the process, dolphins were also imported from the Phillippines where there were also opposition campaigns against the importation (especially as 1 or 2 of them died during importation), over concerns about the stress the dolphins are subject to while in captivity
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  30. Unless 1 day some of the lower-pay jobs are combined with higher-paying ones (e.g. if office staff end up having a duty roster to take turns to sweep the office floor), which I imagine might happen 1 day when more people are educated including those in developing countries that get more developed in the future, & thus less of them migrate to take on lower-wage jobs) & eventually it becomes impossible to hire any 1 for a lower-pay job
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  31.  @hailyrizzo5428  Malays might be less likely to migrate I guess as they're mostly in Malaysia, where the NEP favours them, or in Singapore, which is more developed (though I'm not completely sure if people in Indonesia would be classified as Malay too)
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  32. Neighbouring SIngpaore meanwhile has moved up the value chain by hosting front-end fabs too, but I think the semiconductor companies there are now all foreign-owned, after Chartered was sold & turned into GlobalFoundries after sustained losses. In light of this, I'm thinking how Singapore's performance here can be assessed & compared.
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  33. Thought Taiwan/ROC has a mature Chinese pop music industry that attracts Chinese singers from other territories too such mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore e.g. By2, Ivy Lee, Tanya Chua (though its facing competition from K-pop)
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  34. Mandopop singers A-Mei & A-Lin are from aboriginal families too IIRC
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  35. Panasonic also shares a duopoly with Thales I think in the market for aircraft in-flight entertainment with its eXi system
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  36. That could mean that Singapore will have demographic shifts in the future i.e. Malays & Indians (whose replacement rate is in-between that of Chinese & Malays) will become bigger minority races than they are now
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  37. Heard Japanese companies also have a global monopoly over photoresist chemicals, as S Korea found out after Japan cancelled their exemption from export customs bureaucracy, allegedly in retaliation to a Korean court ruling that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was to compensate comfort women who'd worked/been enslaved under it until WW2
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  38.  @arbaz79  You probably are referring to photoresists, which are coated on wafers. Japan previously added more customs red tape for their export to S Korea after the latter convicted Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of using slave labour in WW2.
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  39. Have seen peer pressure in my country also meaning things like your friends accusing you of being stingy & inconsiderate because you don't want to shell out more money for a bigger data plan, & thus you would want to wait till you get home (where there's Wi-Fi, so that you can conserve data usage) after a night out of them before uploading/sharing the wefies you took together, instead of uploading/sharing on the spot before going home, & thus your friends have to wait longer to see the wefies
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  40.  @theodorechan5010  I was from CCHM. CCHY branched out of CCHM when it's student population grew too big for its campus I think
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  41.  @Asianometry  Heard from another YT documentary that Taiwan/ROC not echoing mainland China's/the PRC's territorial claims would violate the "1 China" principle & thus spark war. & since the latter challenges the former's sovereignty, ASEAN countries would be unwilling to establish ties (at least formally) with the former. Back in 2013 a Taiwanese fisherman was fatally shot by a Philippine Coast Guard in an area of the S China Sea where both Taiwan/ROC's & the Philippines' EEZs overlap, & the latter has refused to negotiate with the former to de-conflict their EEZs because the spokesperson said IIRC "Taiwan is not a country"
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  42. Singaporean electricity is ~A/S$0.25/kWh (~US$0.18) & the country is already buying a greater % of its natural gas from Malaysia & Indonesia (~70%) (much of which is used for power generation) than Germany used to from Russia (~55-60%)
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  43. Meanwhile somehow in Singapore the big companies are either foreign or gov't founded/linked, so they aren't as influential on gov't policy. The few private large companies here e.g. Far East Org'n, CDL, BreadTalk Group, OCBC, UOB Bank meanwhile aren't as politically vocal as companies in other countries I think
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  44.  @julianpark390  Think Asian economies were less affected by the 2008 financial crisis as their culture is more conservative & made less risky investments. So protest movements like Occupy didn't gain so much traction here. One of my countrymen even argued that their protesters are lazy in contrast to the 'hardworking' bankers
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  45. 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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  46. Also learnt in 1 of my university modules of how Singapore's Association of Science, Technology & Research (A STAR) had setup the Data Storage Institute (DSI) to research into hard disk drives (HDDs) (to facilitate the industry here). It was recently shut down though as HDDs are becoming more obsolete, but I was thinking how possible would it have been to repurpose DSI to research newer technologies instead e.g. flash memory
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  47. Interestingly I heard it's due to a lack of typhoons last year
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  48. Imagine if 'soufflé' was translated into 泡蛋煎饼 (puffed-up eggs' pancakes) instead of directly transliterated into 舒服累 (literally meaning "comfortable (&) tired")
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  49. Meanwhile large companies in Singapore are often foreign investors or gov't-linked, which probably limits how much political influence they have e.g. S'pore Technologies (ST) sells APCs (e.g. Bronco/Warthog) & MAN buses, services aircraft & is a defence & electronics contractor (it lost a bid to NCS to build the latest ERP2.0 (our local ETC system)). Maybe NTUC is seen as a conglomerate too - besides being the association for trade unions here it also sells insurance (Income) & runs the largest supermarket chain (FairPrice) here, while it also runs Warehouse Club that's modeled after CostCo
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  50. Singapore might be like: Me too me too
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  51.  @Asianometry  We've quite a number or reservoirs to collect rainwater too, besides desalination & water recycling (NEWater) plants plus some water bought from neighbouring Malaysia. There's also a 30% water tax that goes up to 45% if you're a domestic user & your consumption exceeds a certain amount
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  52. Think many things in life have a trade-off between efficiency (that'd favour economies giving up manufacturing for services as they develop, since the latter might be more profitable per unit area of land needed) & resilience (that'd favour having a more diversified economy e.g. enacting gov't policies to retain some manufacturing even as the economy develops). Singapore also has a negligible primary industry e.g. a handful of vegetable, egg & fish farms as it was deemed less profitable per unit land area than other industries but didn't completely eliminate it probably for food security reasons (my teacher was saying that in case food imports get cut off, @ least we'll still remember how to produce our own food)
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  53.  @hessanscounty3592  Because S Korea's government wanted to grow the conglomerates so that they'd be big enough to be "national champions" with s significant international presence also I think (which can be a source of national pride too)
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  54. 1 of my classmates mother tongue is Hindi (instead of Tamil as is traditionally more common among Indians in Singapore) & he was saying he found it less useful in Singapore. Well I guess it's more useful for this job
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  55.  @jlo7204  Yup I think Micron now has an IT office in Hyderabad. & China (the other major countries that many Singaporeans' ancestors had migrated from) also has many different regional languages (or dialects as they're called, as they share the same script as Chinese but with each character pronounced differently) e.g. Hokkien, Foochow/Hockchew, Shanghaiese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, but China was more forceful than India in pushing everyone to speak the same language (Mandarin, the language native to the Beijing capital region). This is probably reflected in Singapore's educational policy too, where multiple Indian languages are offered as subjects (Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali & Hindi, besides Tamil, though only available in 1 level of difficulty instead of 3) but the only Chinese language offered is Mandarin.
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  56.  @dylantkl  As a Singaporean I also recalled a time ~10yrs ago when the country's electronics industry was in more of a doldrum, possibly because we were still making components mainly for PCs whereas it was smartphones & tablets that were become the 'in' thing then. The situation has improved though probably as the market has changed
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  57. Yeah was noticing that Taiwanese don't seem to hate the Japanese as much as the Koreans for some reason. Maybe because some of the latter were enslaved (& now form an enclave in Tokyo) during Japanese colonial rule
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  58.  linkzable  Think a few years back some of Micron's subcontractors (from UMC) were also paid to steal some of their blueprints for a Chinese competitor ( Fujian Jinhua ) who'd earlier unsuccessfully tried to buy (at least part of) Micron, but they were caught
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  59. In some ways Singapore's immigration policy is liberal (non-citizens are almost 40% of our population (including PRs), & our politicians often espouse the importance of being open, & previously foreigners got the same healthcare subsidies as locals, & still can do so for university education if they sign a 3-yr bond to work in a local company (including foreign ones that have operations here) after graduation). In other ways it isn't though e.g. 40-60% of foreigners (excluding PRs) are blue-collar workers e.g. domestic helpers, construction workers mostly under the Work Permit scheme, which has some similarities to the kafala system used in the Middle East e.g. cannot change jobs unless you leave Singapore & re-apply for a new job & residency permit, need health check-ups 2x/year & can be deported for having STDs, cannot marry or become pregnant locally. A possible advantage of this arrangement I can think of is that the government is less likely to face social problems e.g. it can have less unemployed people locally, who might be more incentivised to commit crime e.g. robbery, if it requires foreigners looking for work to secure Singapore employment 1st before coming over (as required by the scheme I think)
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  60. Some costs associated with child-rearing have definitely risen over time in Singapore, where I reside e.g. milk powder prices have risen so much (S$50-80/tin now; or ~US$35-60) that the government has setup a task force to look into it, which I think has also been partially attributed to demand for child-rearing-related goods & services being more price inelastic - since parents want the best for their children, it's believed they'd be more willing to pay more for child-rearing goods & services e.g. childcare, which was ~$250/month ~20 years ago (at government-run ones; private operators could charge closer to S$1000) when I was a child but ~S$900 today. Monthly school bus fares was also ~s$40 ~20 yrs ago (which has been traditionally lower than market rates) but can be ~$200+ now, which on the flip side has also brought them closer to market rates I think (~S$120/trip/~47-seater bus), so drivers might not be as incentivised to ferry students to school much earlier than school starting time (I've heard it can be up to 50min before the school start time of 0715h; though in my school the buses usually reach around 7 instead, but anyway it still means that students have to wake up even earlier for school), as that'd allow drivers to also ferry factory workers (who're more profitable as their employers pay market rates for the service, & factories here, including their offices), usually start work around 0800h). For comparison, a fresh graduate's starting pay here is around S$3-4k monthly
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  61.  @blanyeeast2928  Liberal arts doesn't necessarily mean doing only humanities degrees/majors I think; their main difference from other universities is the way they teach IIRC i.e. more general & broad-based rather than specific
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  62.  @MustraOrdo  Meanwhile students in my country who hail from mainland China are seen as more outspoken & willing to ask questions in class, & its believed to be driven also by the injustice felt when seeing the misuse of power that sometimes happen in their home country. On the flip side I recall that has also triggered some patients there to assault their doctors when they suspect that the doctors are scamming them
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  63. I see quite a lot of Malaysians working in Singapore's semiconductor industry
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  64. A challenge I forsee for S'pore is when the countries it imports petroleum from (since we don't have any of our own reserves) develop their own refinery industry/infrastructure, which might compete with S'pore's own, which are significant economic contributors e.g. Shell's refinery has been at the offshore Bukom island since the '70s. If diplomatic ties with neighbouring countries go south, our airspace, which is tiny & surrounded by theirs (e.g. we've to rent airspace from neighbouring Indonesia as the stacking pattern flown by planes landing @ our Changi Airport overfly Batam island ~20km south), could ended up being 'sieged' if neighbouring countries decide to close their airspace & cause a blockade. That'd be bad news for our airport too, which is significant in our economy also. Seletar Airport also had no flights for its 1st 3-4 months of opening as Malaysia, whose Pasir Gudang industrial estate is just 4km north of the airport, blocked the airport from upgrading to an ILS system (by rejecting flight plans filed by airlines flying to the airport)
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  65. 5:23 Yep & 2.5 years later HGST decided to offshore their hard disk factory from Singapore to Thailand ;) due to "cost advantages"
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  66. 17:33 "...stem the flow of foreign companies in their own markets..." sounds more like protectionism & I can imagine some people arguing that such behaviour is self-deceiving i.e. not wanting to face up to the reality of free-market competition
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  67.  @theodorechan5010  Ah I graduated in '10
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  68. There's Singapore also, & its reliance of foreign labour & talent has been believed to also have been a limiting factor to how tightly it could close its borders during the pandemic. We also import ~90% of the food, so when their prices rise, the gov't would be more easily able to blame it on imported inflation also I think (vegetable prices from neighbouring Malaysia have doubled in some years, while some fishes now reportedly go for almost S$10 (~US$6.35)/100g during the Chinese New Year festive season as of the time of writing)
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  69. Actually IIRC in the few years around 2010, Singapore's electronics industry was in more of a slump than it is today, with 1 reason I think being that it made chips mainly for PCs while people were moving away from them & more to smartphones & tablets (which Taiwan/ROC capitalised on earlier I think)
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  70. 2:45 Meanwhile that'd be Singapore's current % of students that enter publicly funded universities (which are seen as more reputable than private ones (which often partner with overseas ones too)), because the government here is worried about over-qualifcation (& the rise of the "associate professional" careers mentioned in this video), so university education wasn't expanded as aggressively here. From what I hear diploma & vocational certificate (what we call the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) here) holders here shouldn't find it too difficult in general to get a job, but there can be quite a big difference in salary (~S$1000+/~NT$20k per month) & promotion opportunities between them & degree holders, though I heard this is changing (more so in private companies than the government sector I heard) to give more recognition to work experience too. 8:18 Reminds me that one of my university professors once asked why most post-graduate students in Singapore were foreigners. I guess a reason is because Singaporeans see more limited improvement in career prospects with a post-grad qualification, with most careers I see sufficing with a Bachelor's & those that don't currently mostly concentrated in R&D & academia (& data scientists too more recently)
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  71. I'm guessing they think what they do e.g. gaslighting will just toughen you up, & thus its condoned, while more senior staff having experienced this too previously might thus feel little incentive to have it easier for the more junior staff now (which I heard also explains the inertia to shift away from, say, the whopping 30h long shifts that doctors in my country sometimes face)
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  72. I've hardly seen some of their product lines e.g. AsusPRO though, but in university Zenbooks are almost as common as MacBooks here
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  73.  @ristekostadinov2820  Meanwhile in Singapore I received a government SMS saying my company has nominated me for vaccination (probably because the company is in an industry deemed essential, so more staff are allowed to work in office/on site), and included a link to choose my vaccination time slot. For the general population, I heard that older residents are automatically registered by the government, but then can then opt out of vaccination later
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  74.  @JohnnieHougaardNielsen  Speaking of "using their expertise in chemical production", meanwhile I understand that FujiFilm did just that & switched to selling cosmetics (under the Fanuc brand) as apparently they have similar chemistry to film
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  75. Singapore's way of promoting marriage is to give married people significantly more priority in buying public housing, which is significant since private housing is like 2-4x the cost & since parents don't really bequeath their properties to their children for them to start their own families when they grow up (it's seen as spoiling the child to do that, & also most houses here are bought on land that has only 99-year leases (i.e. when that is up the government can legally acquire the property for free))
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  76. 3:45 In Asia us as children are expected to know that everything that our parents do towards us are "for our own good". "Tough love" as they call it I think. There was a case reported in our newspaper where a father felt slighted when his son asked why he was ordered to run 5km every early Sun morning: "I'm the breadwinner; don't ask questions"
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  77.  @Ccb88888  Closest I can think of is Chip Eng Seng Contractors branching out into property development (with a subsidiary called CEL Development which I think might own some properties overseas), as well as shipbuilding & oil rig builders e.g. SembCorp, Keppel that have business worldwide. Both of them are government linked, as is Surbana, which did the architecture designs of some public housing in Singapore, & I think the planned (but now cancelled) design of the new state capital of the newly created state of Telangana in India. Though its true that Singapore's economic policy has focussed more of making ourselves attractive to foreign investment, not just by giving tax incentives & subsidies, but aligning its education system to the economy's needs, & having friendly industrial relations
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  78. KIA was bought by Hyundai during the Asian financial crisis I think
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  79. 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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  80. Generally there's a trade-off between efficiency & survivability among many things in life I think. HK's policy probably is more 'efficient' as the financial industry is more profitable than manufacturing, but Singapore values survivability more & chose to diversify its economy more by reallocating more resources to manufacturing too, & a more diversified economy also has the advantage of being better able to provide employment to more people with more diverse interests/qualifications
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  81. Day/child care has increased a lot in Singapore too, now ~S$1000 monthly/child, while ~20 years ago it was more like ~$250, though I think there are some government schemes present to help defray some costs. Milk powder is also expensive here (S$50-80/tin) to the extent that the government had setup a task force to look into the matter
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  82. Meanwhile my country seems more ready to move on to manufacturing new products as the economy evolves e.g. we previously had Ford & Morris car factories but they've since been replaced by semiconductor ones, which're seen as more profitable, & also because our domestic car market has shrunk even more with heavy taxation (as the gov't is worried about traffic jams). It probably helps that our gov't is constantly drilling into us that we have to be ready to retrain ourselves from time to time to suit changes in demand for the manufacture of different goods & services over time. Think we also have a law that legally allows workers to be retrenched if their job becomes economically obsolete & they refuse to be retrained for a different career
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  83. There was outrage too that Thales had sold its Catherine (thermal?) imaging system for use on Russian tanks, in light of the invasion of Ukraine
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  84. Which is something my country is concerned about due to the food wastage resulted
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  85. Heard Hyflux was overambitious & underbid for the TuasSpring desalination-cum power generation project (the fuel burnt to desalinate water would be used to generate electricity too), & the company became financially undone as electricity prices became lower than expected (maybe the company is secretly cursing at the country's Open Electricity Market introduced in 2018 for lowering electricity prices), to the extent that the value of the TuasSpring reportedly became negative (the company lacked funds to maintain its water filters too I heard), & I guess to make it sound nicer the Public Utilities Board (PUB) proposed to take it over for free
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  86.  @alantan9863  Meanwhile Singapore argues that it also sells back to Malaysia some of the water it treats after importation from Malaysia at below-market rates at 20 sen /gal
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  87.  @ChrissySlora01  It merged with Siemens right?
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  88.  @Al-ng2wn  Actually I think Singapore's gov't did hint that the country's reliance on foreign labour also limited how tightly it could close its borders during the pandemic, though the construction industry still took a big impact when the country banned travel from South Asian countries after a 2nd wave of infections in India mid-2021, as many workers in the industry hail from there. The gov't suggested hiring from mainland China instead, however I heard that less people there are attracted to work here as their own country has more job opportunities too now
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  89.  @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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  90.  @TheViettan28  There's been proposals that Singapore could use its refineries to produce other chemicals from petroleum too, besides fuel
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  91.  @goytabr  I saw music amplifiers made by Nakaimichi too
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  92. Remembered in 2014 HGST (a WD subsidiary) retrenched ~500 staff here in Singapore after it decided to offshore it's factory from there to Thailand. Am thinking if the Navnakorn factory is the one that's the result of this, or if it'd alr existed bef that?
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  93. Sounds like how desalination is done on the Greek island of Symi (saltwater is pumped into a greenhouse-like dome IIRC where water evaporates & then condenses on the inner surface of the roof, leaving the salt behind)
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  94. Speaking about submarines, more recently Thailand had found iteslf in a fix as it's planning to buy subs from China, whose engines are to be supplied by German company MTU, but which is no longer possible as EU is now more strictly enforcing export sanctions (introduced after the Tian An Men incident in 1989) against the engines being sold for use to China (since the engines could be used not only for civilian but also for military applications)
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  95. What if an earthquake strikes the factory with those CNC machines?
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  96. 7:04 Actually I remember the PS Move wasn't very successful, & while Kinect was, I read that it put off hardcore gamers too
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  97. Might be a more pressing issue in Singapore as it's birth rate is declining while it's population continues to rise (due to immigration), meaning there'll be less people to defend more people (in my JC/high school's CCA/club for instance, I was the only one who served conscription), unless we attract more immigrants to take up citizenship/PR here
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  98.  @Ccb88888  Heard might've caused some conflict with nearby Indonesia as it's said it'd cancel citizenships of its citizens who serve in foreign militaries (perhaps including Indonesians who hold Singapore PR?)
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  99. Think in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century mainland China was also caught up in political instability e.g. Cultural Revolution & thus might've been too preoccupied to research into nuclear power
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  100. Thailand gave more incentives for car companies to setup factories there I heard e.g. there was a time period when the government subsidized car sales there too, helping to boost factory activity
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  101. Think Intel previously planned to in-house their chip production more through their JV with Micron (IM Flash) but they've since gone the opposite direction I guess
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  102. Well in S Korea the economy is quite reliant on these family-led conglomerates & their leadership though e.g. there've been petitions for Samsung's CEO to be pardoned from prison after he was convicted of bribery, as people believed he'd be able to negotiate for more vaccines to be sold to S Korea (& probably help manage its relations with the USA e.g. with the building of a new factory in Texas)
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  103. 'Face' has the same meaning as 'dignity' in this context
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  104.  @ihl0700677525  Relying more on the invisible hand could also mean greater de-industralisation of countries/territories as they become more developed due to rising costs, which I think was what happened with HK (on the other hand SG had more gov't intervention e.g. with the state strategising which types of industries to focus on & developing more partnerships between factories, research institutes & universities/polytechnics). A disadvantage then is that the economy could become less diverse so there're be more students of more types of diploma/degree courses that find themselves with less jobs to find
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  105.  @ihl0700677525  I'm guessing transitioning a country's jobs to being the "architect who design things" from being " the worker who build the thing" might also need some gov't involvement e.g. having research institutes as well as tertiary institutions to educate students/workers with the added skills needed, otherwise upscaling might lead to a more service-dependent economy e.g. HK & London are centred more on finance with less career opportunities in, say, engineering than, say, Singapore I think
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  106.  @ihl0700677525  That I think also depends on exactly how much funding a gov't provides for the industry, like maybe enough to maintain an industry as a certain though maybe smaller % of the economy so as to preserve an economy's existing diversity & thus resilience (e.g. Singapore has maintained its secondary industries as ~20% of its GDP), while its probably another thing to pump more funding to try to be dominant
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  107.  @davidt02  Singapore didn't require foreign investors to enter into JVs unlike Japan & mainland China, perhaps to increase its attractiveness to foreign investment. Long-term though I guess we may need to focus more than we prev thought on developing indingenous expertise if we want to maintain our position on or move up the value chain, since I believe the foreign investors are still going to retain the highest elements of their value chain e.g. R&D in their home countries, while eventually other developing countries could catch up & our factories e.g. fabs might end up being offshored there isntead. Maybe we'll be able to discover a new market for a new architecture/product line/type to be invented
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  108. 1 of my greatuncles was recounting what he heard in Malaysia: "Malaysia has the word 'Malay' in it after all. But when we're in China you can use the same argument against me." Meanwhile Singapore might be like: " Come to me " (~7% of it's population is Malaysian, or ~400,000)
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  109.  @Asianometry  Can imagine the country's petroleum industry on such a scale might be politically impossible in some other countries though due to environmental opposition. Also reminds me of how the country was ranked the world's worst environmental offender in a 2008 study (that the government slammed) because of the country's large amount of bunker fuel (probably due to the country's large petrochemical industry too) (apparently the only other metric/criteria/factor considered by the study was the % of each country's land that was developed; Singapore as a city-state has a % of above 60%)
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  110.  @thetigerii9506  As a citizen there I'd say a difference for Singapore is that our big businesses are either mostly government-founded & linked (via the gov't investment companies Temasek Holdings & GIC, similar to Qatar's QIA) or foreign MNCs, so the gov't isn't subject to much political lobbying. Relying more on foreign investment e.g. the MNCs to grow the economy meant both that you'd need to eradicate corruption (to attract them) & provide favourable working conditions e.g. lower corporate taxes (though some other taxes are high), more agreeable labour unions (likely made more possible after the gov't, somewhat opportunistically, took more control of them after some bus driver unions caused riots in ~1955). So we sometimes get told things like that we "must understand" that we "don't deserve" a pay rise because we haven't been more productive (but meanwhile such a conditional arrangement has been rejected in other countries e.g. by protesters campaigning for higher minimum wages in the USA). So citizens often aim 'higher' when it comes to occupations e.g. favouring white collar more strongly over blue collar jobs (as they're seen as getting less protection), & it also happens that many people working in jobs more likely to be unionized e.g. blue collar ones are immigrants, who're banned from unions also. Think our former PM also accused staff of our national airline of treason when they went on strike previously, & thus had them deported. & you could more easily fight against calls for more work-life balance with warnings like that we'd become uncompetitive, that our foreign investors e.g. MNCs could always pack up & leave, that other countries/competitors are always waiting by to "gobble up our fish", or when our PM previously countered by saying something like "But our immigrants from less developed countries aren't asking for work-life balance though"
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  111. Singapore has a pretty successful semicon industry but the companies are mostly if not all foreign also (we tried setting up Chartered but it didn't go down well in the end), but on the other hand we've managed to setup more established local companies in other industries e.g. SembCorp & Keppel for oil rigs
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  112. Meanwhile what we call dialects in Chinese (e.g. Hokkien, Cantonese, Foochow/Hockchew) might be as different as Ukrainian is from Russian
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  113. 13:35 Am reminded that Singapore's 2013 Population White Paper was controversial as it was planning for a population of up to 7m, so people feared overcrowding. The opposition political party proposed a 6m population instead but our prime minister dismissed that as 'irresponsible'. Meanwhile I also saw some one write in the newspaper: "Is the Singaporean life supposed to be easy?" Can't fathom comments like this being politically survivable in, say, Taiwan/ROC
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  114.  @90taetaeya  Malays as a proportion of Singapore's population might increase over time as their birth rate is highest among the main ethnic groups here (with a TFR of close to 2, as opposed to a TFR close to 1 among the Chinese)
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  115. Think Singapore is an example of how government intervention does not necessarily have to mean 'mollycoddling'/'spoiling'/'pampering'/'shielding' comapnies or any other negative action against the 'discipline' that free market forces/economics would bring & require from companies. The government didn't really practice much protectionism or give direct subsidies to companies but I think it focused more on attracting foreign investment e.g. tax incentives, promoting science & tech tertiary education (with research institutes & partnerships with polytechnics/universities etc.), spending relatively more on infrastructure than welfare & greater influence over labour relations. We have the "Progressive Wage Model" where if you ask for a pay rise you might get chastised I think for not being more productive. Another thing I guess is that many blue collar jobs here are done by foreigners, who're legally barred from worker unions. Additionally 'retraining' is the buzzword here (which the government offers quite an extensive network of I think, for careers); when HGST offshored its hard disk factory here to Thailand in 2014, we didn't stop them & 1 of our ministers said we "need to accept the pain of restructuring" (The labour union association eventually found alternate employment for those retrenched from that factory). Not sure if it's the same in other countries, but here I think you can legally be terminated if your job becomes obsolete & you refused to be retrained for another role. Working for MNCs (which are major foreign investors) here is also seen as more reputable (compared to a more locally-based SME) so I guess they're seen more positively here, & thus there's also less political pressure on the government to rein them in
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  116. I remember the PM had previously brushed off the state media ranking for supposedly ignoring journalistic quality, but I don't have a way yet to verify who is more accurate
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  117. Wii U's concept lives on in the Nintendo Switch though I remember, which I heard is more successful
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  118. Singapore is also buying hydropower from Laos further up north
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  119. I had the impression that policy-making/governance is more short-term there? i.e. focus more on the more attractive fruit i.e. finance, which is more profitable, while Singapore on the other hand chose to hedge its bets & diversify its economy more, giving more resources to the relatively less profitable manufacturing industries too
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  120.  @omegaasura21  Meanwhile I've seen YouTubers pronounce the 'J' in Johor as 'Y' instead probably because they're from Europe & more used to Germanic phonetics
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  121. 8:16 IIRC HK's government makes about half its revenue from land sales & taxes; meanwhile unlike HK Singapore has a consumption tax that alone is about a third of its government's revenue (HK past proposal to have a similar tax was met with street protests I remember)
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  122. Was previously thinking also how China's Communist Party might've felt too when seeing Ops Coldstore & Spectrum plus other anti-Communist activities in Singapore previously, & also when seeing that there're rebels (Naxalites) in India that revere Mao Zedong IIRC
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  123. 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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  124. I remember when Wii U came out & its graphics look dated compared to the competition
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  125. Wonder how many other countries also tax water like Singapore (30-45%)
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  126.  @kevinavila9489  Am from another country where my parents also would say that teachers are too busy with academic teaching to realistically care about bullying, while classmates will think you're incompetent if you look for a teacher for help against bullying
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  127. Taiwan/ROC meanwhile has a 4th nuclear power plant that's never been opened since it was built in the 1990s due to public concerns over safety, especially after the meltdown @ Fukushima's No. 1 plant
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  128.  @Kaif08610  5 yrs only actually in Singapore (for land for housing), before the developer is charged 35% stamp duty, & they have to sell all houses by then also. With the pandemic delaying construction however, ironically now some public housing take longer than that to build. & its in more recent years that land use became more flexible here e.g. allowing buildings to be both factories & offices, or industrial land to house supermarkets/IKEA (under the Warehouse Retail Scheme (WRS)); before that there were raids on factories being used as offices. Also heard of a case where the gov't changed the law when a shopping mall (Liv@Changi) was built halfway to ban it from having eateries following nearby "residents feedback" about "traffic & noise". Which is a pity as that's the only mall in that area for the next few km (surrounded by "lower-rise" (~8 floors) condominiums), & I heard the mall is thus unable to rent out any of its shops
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  129. 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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  130.  @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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  131.  @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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  132.  @lordlee6473  Heard ASML has now agreed not to sell EUV machines that'll be destined for SK Hynix's fab in Wuxi , China at USA's behest
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  133. I thought 推論 is closer in meaning to 'hypothesis'
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  134.  @ronunderwood5771  I'm from Singapore & meanwhile 1 of my university's capstone project group members' late grandmother survived Japanese occupation of our country in WW2, & after that she lost all appetite for Japanese food, & the member didn't dare to tell her he was visiting Japan for his grad trip. She also never spoke her mother tongue (Chinese) again (as that'd tell the Japanese that you were Chinese, the main target of their wartime atrocities, in apparent revenge over mainland China's resistance of their invasion by Japan in & before WW2)
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  135.  @ronunderwood5771  Heard about that book but not read it yet! But know that the author committed suicide after being accused of lying. Such an accusation is probably deemed as heinous as denying the Holocaust
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  136. Singapore meanwhile replaced farmland with public housing & factories (as the latter was more profitable) & probably retrained the farmers to work in factories
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  137. There's also the Chinese transliteration/translation for ' sungei ' ('river' in Malay) - 双/雙溪 (shuāng xī, which sounds similar to the Malay word, & also literally means "double creek")
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  138.  @reinerfranke5436  This might show the limitations of using foreign investment to drive a country's economy e.g. Singapore, so eventually trying to setup some local companies might be more justifiable, though it doesn't always have to be in the more visible customer-facing industry i.e. it can be doing B2B sales too instead
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  139. Quite a number of IndoChinese languages are distant relatives of Chinese too I think, & is probably why the Chinese names of some places there sound quite different from their English names e.g. Kanchanaburi, Thailand - 北碧 (bĕi bÌ; sounds like 'baby'; literally means "north jade"), Vientiane, Laos - 万/萬象 (wàn xiàng; sounds like "one hsiang"; literally means "10000 elephants")
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  140. Might be interesting to compare Singapore with other developed countries with similar populations but spread out over much larger land areas e.g. Scandinavian ones, Ireland, Finland; I'm guessing they might face additional challenges e.g. village depopulation as their population is more spread out also
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  141. Singapore is also pretty near Malaysia with its lower costs (& Iskandar, the part of Malaysia's southern state of Johor that's closest to Singapore, has sometimes been called "the next Shenzhen") but these are under different governments that compete against each other/one another (e.g. Malaysia had under former PM Mahathir Mohammad been angling more strongly to replace the Causeway connecting the 2 countries with a bridge, as only the former blocks the Johor strait (which separates the 2 countries) & thus would theoretically (realistically I'm not so sure since the strait is relatively narrow (~1km), so I imagine it might also be proportionately shallower, and thus more unlikely that larger ships could sail through there) divert more container ships away from Malaysia's ports to Singapore's port (on the other side of the country, the southern coast, facing away from Malaysia). Johor's state government can sometimes disagree with Malaysia's federal government also I think, & I've heard of some 'conspiracy' theories that Singapore might want to drive a rift between them by being friendlier to Johor's government (with many of its residents working in Singapore too before the pandemic)) so I can imagine Singapore put it more effort to prevent too much of it's industries from offshoring to Malaysia (though I heard ASM doing so. Maersk Sealand also hopped from Singapore's ports to Johor's Port of Tg Pelepas (PTP) as it was cheaper & more flexible, but I heard it later returned to Singapore in 2017 as it was more efficient). As for HK & Shenzhen I'm thinking how much of the decision-making lay with the central government (based in Beijing) rather than the more local governments of those 2 cities, so I'm also not sure how much control HK would have had over the offshoring of its secondary industry to the mainland
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  142. I think Singapore pegs the minimum salary for residency permits for foreign higher-skilled workers e.g. S-Pass to around that of a local fresh diploma graduate while, that of Employment Pass holders are pegged to around that of fresh degree graduates
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  143. Reminds me that I was earlier thinking whether the judiciary in Singapore is feeling sidelined/slighted by our government, after the passing of laws like the Protection frOm Falsehoods & Manipulation Act (POFMA) (where the government gave itself the power to declare information as fake & legally force the publisher to declare as such too, as the government claimed the judiciary would act too slowly in the face or the digital era (where information is updated more regularly)) & the Foreign Interference (Contermeasures) Act (FICA) (where if one wants to challange its invocation (e.g. if the government argues that information shared is other countries trying to interfere with local politics), the challenge won't be heard in a court, but instead by a minister-recommended tribunal. The government justifies this arrangement on the grounds that national secrets may be involved, but there's concern too I think that the tribunal won't be sufficiently independen)
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  144. My father refuses to believe that HK island was ceded in perpetuity in the treaty that was signed in the 1830s
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  145.  @lennyvalentin6485  Actually I remember Kodak didn't want to capitalize on digital camera IP as that would cannibalize its existing market for film & film cameras, but in the end other competitors still went ahead with selling digital cameras & the film market still ended up being cannibalized
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  146.  @Slav4o911  Yep I've heard of predictions before of how Intel might face long-term challenges as people use more smartphones instead of computers. As for Nokia I remembered their 1st few smartphones still used "dumb phone" hardware e.g. 3x4 keypads instead of QWERTY keyboards, directional pads & soft keys instead of touchscreens, & they continued to use them even after the iPhone w its touchscreen was launched. The Symbian S60 OS used by Nokia's smartphones was also less user-friendly e.g. you won't be able to find any "Delete file" option in the file manager until you 1st selected the 'Mark' option (to 'mark'/select which files you want to delete. Samsung handphones wasn't popular previously (I didn't like that their UI was inconsistent between different models, unlike Nokia & Sony Ericsson) but they doubled down on touchscreen models soon after iPhone arrived, which I think helped drive their adoption
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  147.  @andrewsitu3472  Heard from somewhere that SMRT is planning to downsize it's bus business also as it's relatively less profitable to, say, it's rail business
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  148.  @andrewsitu3472  Not sure, they may not be downsizing all the way to 0
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