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Singapore is a surveillance state. Don't be fooled by its corporate friendliness and general societal progress. The government is every bit authoritarian which

Singapore is a surveillance state. Don't be fooled by its corporate friendliness and general societal progress. The government is every bit authoritarian which at this point increasingly looks like a euphemism for totalitarian. https://www.aristeon.net/2019/04/singapore-as-pioneer-of-capitalist.html https://www.aristeon.net/2019/04/singapore-as-pioneer-of-cap...

mparramon 6y ago
>Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/2020 https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...
jesterson 6y ago
Corporate friendliness is not a disguise. It's needed to sustain the surveillance state cashflow. As for general societal progress, I am really not sure what are you talking about. There is no progress whatsoever.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > There is no progress whatsoever. Economic progress is a thing. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview > Singapore is a high-income economy with a gross national income of US$54,530 per capita, as of 2017. The country provides one of the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs and is ranked among the world’s most competitive economies. > In the decades after independence, Singapore rapidly developed from a low-income country to a high-income country. GDP growth in the city-state has been amongst the world’s highest, at an average of 7.7% since independence and topping 9.2% in the first 25 years.
  - jesterson 6y ago
    It is, but original commenter was referring to societal progress which I found interesting.
    - f6v 6y ago
      Never been to Singapore, but if there’s really low crime rate and people don’t litter on the streets - I’d call that progress.
      - kbar13 6y ago
        i dont understand this focus on litter on the streets. yes clean streets is wonderful but i dont rank it anywhere near freedom of speech and social equality or something like standardized healthcare in importance. my hunch is that "clean streets" is mostly important to those who are not sensitive to social injustice...
        michaelt 6y ago
        If you start from the proposition that the state implements the will of the people and the state's laws are just and true, then a strong state is a just state. After all, if you can't enforce anti-littering laws, how can you hope to enforce anti-discrimination laws? To be effective at convert the law's promises into reality is a good thing, if the laws are a good thing. Of course, I don't accept the proposition and I don't think anyone else does either - otherwise lawmakers would all have retired because their work was done.
        f6v 6y ago
        Yeah well, people have different priorities.
      - jesterson 6y ago
        If you'd stay here for a while, you'd understand why there is low crime rate and no litter on the street. What even probably surprise you more is why it's happening and what it has to do with progress. Short answer - nothing.
gbtw 6y ago
And this article written by William Gibson is still relevant all these years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...
- iridium_core 6y ago
  Singapore also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at only 1.16 children per woman. Living in a controlled and apartment-dominated country seems to crush the desire and ability to have many children.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Correlation != causation. I expected HN readers to know that.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      GP said it seems, and just because correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't mean everything that correlates literally cannot have a causal relationship.
      - Twisol 6y ago
        In other words... just because there's a correlation between things being correlated and things not being causally related, that doesn't mean that correlation causally implies acausality?
      - f6v 6y ago
        The default mode when operating with data is to assume there’s no causation. Doing otherwise creates room for too many misconceptions and erroneous interpretations.
        read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        Clearly you can make a hypothesis though.
jariel 6y ago
So general societal progress and their control of covid is evil? The 'tracking for criminal cases' is clearly a 'bad thing' but ... it's also legit democracy with excellent universal healthcare and rule of law. ... careful with the easy characterizations.
- half0wl 6y ago
  Any perceived "societal progress" comes at a (heavy) cost of personal liberties; the Singapore government have always "preferred" the former. > it's also legit democracy If your interpretation of a democracy boils down to mere voting rights and choice, then sure, it's legit. But I think we should also consider the trickle-down effects of having the same party in power ever since the government was formed. Your ethics, beliefs, judgment, and mentality determines how you vote - it's not that hard to sway the majority to your side if you are always in total control of how lives are shaped across generations.
  - jariel 6y ago
    You are saying that those voters who are making choices of their own free will - are dim? (There is no voter suppression, murder of journalists or opposition after all) And consistently vote against their own best interests? Rather an Orientalist view, no?
bigiain 6y ago
> Singapore is a surveillance state. And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared. I guess being part of FiveEyes makes any fantasy of me _not_ living in a surveillance state pretty lame...
- asiando 6y ago
  Having an app per country was unnecessary to begin with. All that Google and Apple had to do is supply the UI and accept government requests to enable the system in their country.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Apple and Google’s “exposure notification” is less useful in some important ways - it isn’t capable of backtracking to find associated contacts of infections further back in the chain. Bunnie has a good blog post about that here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69 Apple and Google’s thing was late to the party too, both Singapore and Australia had published their apps before the in built OS exposure notification because a thing (and I’d ballpark over 90% of Android phones haven’t got OS upgrades available that let them use the Google one anyway, none of my Android devices have it, being stuck with no manufacturer support or locked down by carriers). So Australia and Singapore pushed on with their non OS native versions of the apps, even though the Bluetooth implementation on iOS made it very unreliable if the app wasn’t running and in the foreground. (The Android version’s Bluetooth is more reliable, if just chews through battery at a very quick pace...) The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covidsafe-app-identified-close-contacts-in-just-20-nsw-cases-in-six-months-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covid... Just 20 “close contacts” identified, and the government stalling on freedom of information requests to find out if any active cases were identified from those.
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      > The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here The article seems to blame the lack of uptake. Singapore doesn't have this problem, having dangled further relaxation of lockdown restrictions if more of its residents downloaded the app: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-end-of-year-unless-more-use-tracetogether-experts https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-e...

mparramon 6y ago

>Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/2020 https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...

jesterson 6y ago

Corporate friendliness is not a disguise. It's needed to sustain the surveillance state cashflow. As for general societal progress, I am really not sure what are you talking about. There is no progress whatsoever.

ekianjo 6y ago
> There is no progress whatsoever. Economic progress is a thing. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview > Singapore is a high-income economy with a gross national income of US$54,530 per capita, as of 2017. The country provides one of the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs and is ranked among the world’s most competitive economies. > In the decades after independence, Singapore rapidly developed from a low-income country to a high-income country. GDP growth in the city-state has been amongst the world’s highest, at an average of 7.7% since independence and topping 9.2% in the first 25 years.
- jesterson 6y ago
  It is, but original commenter was referring to societal progress which I found interesting.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Never been to Singapore, but if there’s really low crime rate and people don’t litter on the streets - I’d call that progress.
    - kbar13 6y ago
      i dont understand this focus on litter on the streets. yes clean streets is wonderful but i dont rank it anywhere near freedom of speech and social equality or something like standardized healthcare in importance. my hunch is that "clean streets" is mostly important to those who are not sensitive to social injustice...
      - michaelt 6y ago
        If you start from the proposition that the state implements the will of the people and the state's laws are just and true, then a strong state is a just state. After all, if you can't enforce anti-littering laws, how can you hope to enforce anti-discrimination laws? To be effective at convert the law's promises into reality is a good thing, if the laws are a good thing. Of course, I don't accept the proposition and I don't think anyone else does either - otherwise lawmakers would all have retired because their work was done.
      - f6v 6y ago
        Yeah well, people have different priorities.
    - jesterson 6y ago
      If you'd stay here for a while, you'd understand why there is low crime rate and no litter on the street. What even probably surprise you more is why it's happening and what it has to do with progress. Short answer - nothing.

gbtw 6y ago

And this article written by William Gibson is still relevant all these years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

iridium_core 6y ago
Singapore also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at only 1.16 children per woman. Living in a controlled and apartment-dominated country seems to crush the desire and ability to have many children.
- f6v 6y ago
  Correlation != causation. I expected HN readers to know that.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    GP said it seems, and just because correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't mean everything that correlates literally cannot have a causal relationship.
    - Twisol 6y ago
      In other words... just because there's a correlation between things being correlated and things not being causally related, that doesn't mean that correlation causally implies acausality?
    - f6v 6y ago
      The default mode when operating with data is to assume there’s no causation. Doing otherwise creates room for too many misconceptions and erroneous interpretations.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        Clearly you can make a hypothesis though.

jariel 6y ago

So general societal progress and their control of covid is evil? The 'tracking for criminal cases' is clearly a 'bad thing' but ... it's also legit democracy with excellent universal healthcare and rule of law. ... careful with the easy characterizations.

half0wl 6y ago
Any perceived "societal progress" comes at a (heavy) cost of personal liberties; the Singapore government have always "preferred" the former. > it's also legit democracy If your interpretation of a democracy boils down to mere voting rights and choice, then sure, it's legit. But I think we should also consider the trickle-down effects of having the same party in power ever since the government was formed. Your ethics, beliefs, judgment, and mentality determines how you vote - it's not that hard to sway the majority to your side if you are always in total control of how lives are shaped across generations.
- jariel 6y ago
  You are saying that those voters who are making choices of their own free will - are dim? (There is no voter suppression, murder of journalists or opposition after all) And consistently vote against their own best interests? Rather an Orientalist view, no?

bigiain 6y ago

> Singapore is a surveillance state. And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared. I guess being part of FiveEyes makes any fantasy of me _not_ living in a surveillance state pretty lame...

asiando 6y ago
Having an app per country was unnecessary to begin with. All that Google and Apple had to do is supply the UI and accept government requests to enable the system in their country.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Apple and Google’s “exposure notification” is less useful in some important ways - it isn’t capable of backtracking to find associated contacts of infections further back in the chain. Bunnie has a good blog post about that here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=69 Apple and Google’s thing was late to the party too, both Singapore and Australia had published their apps before the in built OS exposure notification because a thing (and I’d ballpark over 90% of Android phones haven’t got OS upgrades available that let them use the Google one anyway, none of my Android devices have it, being stuck with no manufacturer support or locked down by carriers). So Australia and Singapore pushed on with their non OS native versions of the apps, even though the Bluetooth implementation on iOS made it very unreliable if the app wasn’t running and in the foreground. (The Android version’s Bluetooth is more reliable, if just chews through battery at a very quick pace...) The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covidsafe-app-identified-close-contacts-in-just-20-nsw-cases-in-six-months-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covid... Just 20 “close contacts” identified, and the government stalling on freedom of information requests to find out if any active cases were identified from those.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here The article seems to blame the lack of uptake. Singapore doesn't have this problem, having dangled further relaxation of lockdown restrictions if more of its residents downloaded the app: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-end-of-year-unless-more-use-tracetogether-experts https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-e...