4 ms·
As a Singaporean, I'm pretty proud of the direction of my government, and I'm pretty surprised by the Haskell/LYAHFGG & C++ namedrops. How did Minister Balakris
by creamyhorror 12y ago
As a Singaporean, I'm pretty proud of the direction of my government, and I'm pretty surprised by the Haskell/LYAHFGG & C++ namedrops. How did Minister Balakrishnan even find the time to dabble with hardware and programming? These top civil servants are very, very busy!
Great quote about Singapore citizens trusting the government to do their taxes:
"...we introduced electronic tax-filing back in 1998, since ages ago, before anyone else did it, and today, 97% of tax payers file their taxes online. Because we have kept our tax code simple, you do not need to buy Quicken, Intuit or any of such things. Also, because we have automate the collection of information and populate the table for you, you do not need to work quite so hard – it is a little harder to cheat and so 3 in 5 taxpayers do not even bother about filing taxes. They just take in on trust that our Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore has done their sums right. So e-Government works in Singapore."
That said, the 3 verticals of the whole Smart Nation programme (the elderly, transport & data) seem somewhat orthogonal to much of the SV-style explosive-growth consumer apps. Yet those consumer-app areas are where many SV-style fortunes are made and where young tech entrepreneurs want to go - so there's a disconnect between the two directions.
For example, I don't see massive adoption of a new app/device by the elderly happening very easily - they largely (1) don't know English, (2) aren't used to relying on tech so heavily, and (3) won't be able or willing to pay much for it. It tends to be younger people who try new things - and in fact Singaporeans are relatively less adventurous than Americans or other Asian cultures in adopting new apps/services. Things might be different if Singapore were as big as the US, but it isn't. So I wonder how the Smart Nation thing will play out - maybe the biggest customer will be the Singapore government instead of end-users.
(Tangentially, it's personally been a bit frustrating that the VCs that draw on government money seem to prefer e-commerce/B2C apps instead of industry-specific B2B software. The government puts its money where its mouth is, but still relies on VCs to make the picks...and those guys go for hot, mainline trends. So fundraising has been difficult.)
- visakanv 12y ago> How did Minister Balakrishnan even find the time to dabble with hardware and programming? These top civil servants are very, very busy! He blogs quite a bit about it here: http://vivian.balakrishnan.sg/ http://vivian.balakrishnan.sg/
- 2Pacalypse- 12y agoHow did he even find the time to blog quite a bit about it? That's amazing!
- Cephlin 12y agoIt's called not being over worked like a slave.
- saiya-jin 12y ago(work) life is about priorities, and if he really wants to give back in this way, he can apparently delegate enough stuff to achieve it. Probably all politicians can, if they wanted... I wish more (all!) countries would have similar people put into places of real popwer in governments.
- nitrogen 12y agoIs the blog itself also delegated? I've seen CEOs send out "personal" notes that were drafted entirely by a PR team.
- jwiley 12y agoWonder if you have FoxNews or a similar variant in Singapore? Do they characterize the Prime Minister as a professorial egg-head elitist out of touch with the common man? If not you have something to look forward to, in the early days of our republic, we generally appreciated educated statesmen. Now we prefer our elected officials to be fun-loving guys next door who see the internet as a system of tubes.
- l10nf15h 12y agoSingapore is a one party state with a terrible human rights record. If anyone criticized the government, they would be thrown in prison and/or fined.
- visakanv 11y agoSingaporean here, have criticized the govt multiple times, protested govt policy, am doing perfectly fine, thanks!
- hdhdhshw 12y agoWhat is with your political rant? Singapore's prime minister is a free market conservative.
- jwiley 12y agoMy rant was about a cultural trend in the US of demonizing politicians for being educated and/or intellectual. FoxNews has worked hard to become a mouth-piece for this viewpoint. I wasn't commenting on his political views, party, or human rights background, which I know nothing about.
- Locnil 12y agoNot really, not in the same way - most of our anti-government "media" is on the fringe. And even if we did, Fox News would glorify our PM, not criticise him - by American standards, he's a hardline Tea Party Republican, except without the same regard for civil liberties.