I haven't been in Singapore and have read very little on why Singapore is so successful.

Three of Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) are more democratic/free and equal in prosperity comparing with Singapore.

IMHO, a great strategic port and super effective government are probably key reasons that power the its great achievements. I hope people don't consider quasi-dictatorship style of governing the cause of economic miracle.

One trade policy that they followed that was identical to that of Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea was the suppression of the value of their currency by purchasing US treasuries. That gave a much needed boost to their exports and allowed them space to create an industrial ecosystem.

China did this too, later.

I don't see how you can say Hong Kong is more democratic/free. It was a colony, now it's a SAR of PRC, which has been tightening its fingers. The people are certainly more free to protest (for the time being), but their politicians are hand-picked by Beijing. Not really better than Singapore where the administration sets up arbitrary barriers to opposition political activity, and announces elections on short notice while gerrymandering new districts to divide and conquer and pockets of opposition support.

The question comes down to how you evaluate things. Are the growth rate and money the only measures here?

God doesn't favorite China. Looking at its past 100 years, huge political unrest and communism experiments kept the country so behind the rest of world.

The technology, free market reform and globalization help China quickly escape from its historical baggage and catch up with developed world. The question is what value would win out at the end now everyone has equal footing.

Culture, political system and work ethic are the deterministic factors going forward. Would you prefer a world looking more like America or China?

Thank you so much for your insightful post and prospective.

I have a question on how you imagine/think. People with eye sigh often think with pictures. Even thinking about abstract things like programming. I often visualize how a data structure looks and how it interacts with other code. I have found it tremendous useful as I can replay/test such scenario in my head.

Do you have similar experience when you think? Do you construct mental picture (such as circle, a binary tree) in your head? What is it like?

that question is both very easy and incredibly difficult to answer. Yes, I visualize code the way you guys do, but not with pictures. Let us take a 2-dimentional array as an example. I tend to visualize this as a table. A table, for me, is a construct with columns and rows. Naturally, I do not have a spacial picture of this, the closest I can get is a tactile representation of either a chess board or a scrabble board. In both cases, a single array index becomes a tile, which makes me able to visualize it. But just like dreams, I would not use a visual frame of reference here because that simply isn't an option, it is a tactile representation that I somehow translate into a mental ...'picture' for lack of a better word. If you think that is tough, think of how incredibly tough it is for me to visualize CSS ;)

Thank you for answering my question. I think I now get a sense of thinking using tactile representation. I can imagine it is incredible hard to work on things that don't have 1-to-1 mapping between visual and tactile.

It is a fascinating topic. I hope to have a chance to understand how brain really works in my lifetime.

Thank again!

I didn't notice it until you mentioned it. I didn't feel cheated though since I got good amount of info from the article and was curious about how Aerospike did it.

I wish all ads were like this.

A big topic can be easily broken down to small chucks. It's just easier to consume that way. I don't think they really took time to condense the content to focus on the essentials.

I really want to enjoy the jokes/small talks, but they are really flat and not funny at all.

Does unique throw-away card number really reduce fraud? If so, can't Visa/Mastercard implement them too?

You got a point. We will see one team on full attack which is not always the case when both team are cautious. but thinking about it now, it is not necessary interesting football that way.

I think your analysis makes more sense to me than that article. I am from north and barbaric.