Get ahead of the game and sign up for a few years service now. That way, if you are called up for actual combat, at least you know how to survive, unlike the other dude, who be dead within a week. Jokes. What you are correctly promoting as benefits of societies - like Sing and Japan - are the positive outcomes of having reduced freedom. They are not freedoms themselves. If you take the philosophical approach a step further: what blows me away in many counties that HAVE great freedoms from gvt... is that it is their fellow citizens who take those freedoms away. Yet in countries with less freedom due to the gvt, fellow citizens DO NOT take freedom away from each other. Seems many people with freedom are too primitive to have the freedom.
Reduced freedom is present in every country and every industry. It is called regulation. Without proper financial regulation, I see more people losing their pants in financial markets. Without proper health safety regulation, more people will die eating the wrong food and/or medicine. Having 100% freedom, 0% regulation is surely a bad thing. So is 0% freedom, 100% regulation. Reduced freedom can be good or bad. It really depends on how effective the regulators are. To create the right environment to make money, there must be right amount of regulation(not too much, not too little) and the right regulations in place.
I've not talked about Japan. And actually in Japan, I think it's not that safe especially for women but women are considered sub-citizens there so... Anyway, you should try to live in Singapore. It's not the very strict country that you imagine! Of course, unlike in our western countries you can't get away with tagging subway, taking drugs, or pick-pocketing in Singapore... But there are plenty of other things that you can do here. As a resident, I found that the most bothering restriction in Sg is the size of the country. After few years, you will know basically every places, every park/reserve, every attraction. Luckily you can hop easily on week-ends for Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand...
Yes. I heard that before. But I am not sure why. There's no natural resources! Economic relationship with the 2 big neighbors is very strong. Military power is at least equivalent to the neighbors one. And and and ... it's too far from China for it to suddenly declare Singapore as part of China because there was one random PRC guy that visited the island long long ago.
Not sub-citizens, but it is a patriarchal sexist society (however not as bad as Korea). Japanese women are strong, smart, confident and can kick-ass. It is Japan's great loss that the men are too old fashioned (and lacking confidence and smarts) to let Japanese women make the country much much better. Anyway, I am often pushing to relocate to Singapore. It is a good spot. It has the best rooftop pools in the world.
I understand all your comments The philosophy of freedoms is something I believe all humans need to think about more deeply. On average, it doesn't matter what the outcome is, because in the short blip of an individual human's lifetime, most of us do ok. But with the view of humans being a continuous experiment, not a set of discrete individual lifespans... it does matter how much people think about it. It will add up over the millennia. Imagine looking back in 2000 years and realising we have earned no more freedom then than we have today. That would be a failure. In a nutshell, my view is that: 1) humans should strive to optimize for freedom, but it is a long path to get there. It has to be earned, and we are mostly failing at it. Example: imagine 10,000 humans relocating to the planet Mars and living in a bubble. Obviously, very restricted freedoms are required at first. But those humans should strive to achieve maximum freedom in the next 2000 years, 5000 years. We need to prove that we can get away from reduced freedoms. Humans should not need to be managed and owned, but we are born into that way, so never really question it. 2) anything structural that reduces freedom needs to be thought out of existence with time, so that humans can evolve to our full potential. Without freedom, we are not human. It is a spectrum, and we are doing ok, but could do a lot better in the future. Structural impediments to freedom include governments and gods. Ideally, all must go. Along with structures that limit competitive evolution and hence freedom, mainly due to resentments, and fear of failure. See #1.
They don't have the same rights as men unfortunately. That classifies them as sub-citizens. So many Japanese females working in Singapore because they want to have a carreer that is not limited by their gender or simply be allowed to have a career AND children. Best rooftop pool in Sg is often considered to be MBS one. But it's too touristic and crowded. I prefer yours. Which one is it?
I do wonder what rights women in Singapore have that women in Japan do not have? I'm not sure Japanese women are legally deprived of rights to a greater extent than they are in any other modern country. That pool was.... maybe Jen on Orchard?? I actually can't recall exactly. I think it was Jen. Maybe W. Have not been to MBS, as you say, the tourist factor. Yep, we stop in Sing for a few days on the way to a few days in Malaysia I have this thing for pools in recent years.
We don't need to imagine. We can just look back 2300 years ago at Athènes! Citizens were a minority of the population but their democracy was far more democratic than any country today. It didn't go in the right direction. We will all be part of one galactic Empire led by Sheev Palpatine!