“Control” of what? The type of thing is relevant. E.g. Nobody says regulating trains or airlines belongs to states. Similarly, nobody says the internet should be regulated by states.
Would you say growing wheat to feed your own farm animals should be regulated by the federal government? SCOTUS decided in Wikard v Filburn [1] that a farmer growing wheat for private use was in fact inter-state commerce. This decision has been used to uphold all manner of federal laws that on their face appear to regulate private conduct totally within the confines of a single state.
haven't countless of red American states passed age verification laws in relation to adult entertainment recently? Or is that different because there's only AI but no porn oligarchs in Washington?
It's not different and it should also be done on a federal level, instead of 50 different governments passing random crazy internet laws. When you have to do compliance for hundreds of laws in 50 different states it basically becomes impossible to do it and you end up in this weird position where you're probably breaking a law somewhere and you don't even know about it.
> Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions
The Chinese population share in Singapore is similar to the white population share in Nebraska (75%). And Singapore has maintained the same 75% Chinese supermajority since 1960, despite Malays having about double the total fertility rate of Chinese since the 1980s.
Many post-colonial societies (Arabs, Indians, etc.) puff up their supposed past wealth and success, but that’s the real propaganda. Even when these countries were on important trade routes or whatever, the per-capita GDP of these places never went much above the subsistence level. High estimates of the per-capita GDP of the Roman Empire have it at around half of modern India. These societies were very poor in pre-colonial times.
> Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore
The place that is now Singapore had less than 1,000 people when Raffles got there. So what happened?
There’s lots of places with strategic locations or natural resources or such advantages. The U.S. has the largest contiguous stretch of fertile land connected to one of the largest navigable river systems in the world. But the north american indians did essentially nothing with it. It’s not easy to make a modern civilization out of even a favorable geographical situation.
Need to check the veracity of this 1000 population claim by the master colonial no less.
The British took over Malaya from Dutch with minimum effort, by exchanging some of their Indonesia colonies after an agreement with another colonial power. Fun facts, that's how Batam Islands got under Indonesia.
The first thing they did was to create Strait Settlements with strategic and rich Malayan States including Penang, Malacca and Singapore, definitely any of these was not an obscure fishing village [1]. These are the major trading ports for Asian major empires including Langkasuka, Srivijaya, Majapahit, Chola, Malaccan Sultanate, etc.
By what definition was LKY “racist?” He presided over growing prosperity for a multi-ethnic country of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. I’d submit that, if LKY fits within your “definitions of racism,” that’s not a useful definition.
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then.
LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.
To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
Singapore's location on the straight of malacca is one of the most valuable resources in the world. #2 in container throughput worldwide even though they barely manufacture anything.
I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty.
A better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.
That’s a different kind of misleading narrative, the “$PLACE was rich in pre-modern times” narrative. Places decline. Heck, by the middle ages, Rome’s population had dropped to just 30,000.
I can assure you Ptolemy never been to India let alone Singapore.
But hey you just deleted your Ptolemy narrative, are you misleading a narrative?
Ironically although Ptolemy never been to Singapore it's apparently recorded in his book as Sabana [1]. Perhaps that the reason you deleted your Ptolemy entry.
It's also recorded in ancient Chinese record in the 3rd CE Chinese traveller's record describing an island at the same location called Pú Luó Zhōng a transcription of Singapore's early Malay name Pulau Ujong, literally meaning Tip End Island because it's located at the southern most tip of Malaysian Peninsular.
The famous Indian Emperor Chola also said to briefly conquer Singapore/Temasek in the 11th CE [1].
Singapore by any definition for the past two thousands years was not an obscure fishing village. It's always has been a bustling metropolitan with international entreport status. Anyone who said otherwise is lying through their teeth and pushing their own wicked narrative.
I edited because I realized Rome was a much easier example. But at least according to Wikipedia, chittagong was one of the major seaports of the ancient world and appeared on Ptolemy’s world map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chittagong. The map was based on Greek knowledge of Asia through trade. But Ptolemy also described the Malay peninsula.
As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time. The Arabs built a huge civilization a thousand years ago. But by the 19th century, there wasn’t much left.
>As to your other point, again, you’re overlooking that places change over time
Not much change for Singapore, I know this because I learnt my history and geography properly, I hope you too.
Strait of Malacca has always been the busiest maritime trade route in the world continously since recorded history even until now, and at the heart of it is Singapore Strait where Singapore or Temasek is located.
Even until now most of the world's trade are performed via maritime route even with advent of aircraft, and guess what most of these trades when through Malacca and Singapore Straits. Maritime industry called these Straits the world's busiest trading choke-point. I'm not even exxagerating to say that Strait of Hormuz is nothing compared to this chokepoint, especially in the ancient time.
On top of that, more than quarter of the world's population since recorded history are living in China and India, and in between these two most populous nations are connected via maritime sea route through Straits of Malacca and Singapore.
In the old days, or most of our maritime trading history for thousand of years, we do not have engine for ships neither steam nor fuel, only for very short period recently starting from late 19th CE [1].
During most of our maritime history we use sails. People or sailors travelling between India and China, and returning back rely entirely on wind power that are based on alternate monsoon seasons. This where we got the famous saying of "time and tide wait for no man".
For one season (half a year) they used for travelling westward and another half season they travelling eastward. Either way, ancient sailors from Europe/India/China/Arab/Japan they need to stop over somewhere (read Malay Peninsular or Singapore/Temasek) while waiting for monsoon to change before returning back home. Since Singapore/Temasek at the end of this Peninsular, it's the most natural transit point for these ancient/modern sailors. Whenever you fly over Singapore take a look down to see these multitude of these ships. Although now in theory they don't need to stop for monsoon due to fuel, but realistically the ships still need for refuel/rest/transit/etc.
This is a weird premise. India (and Bangladesh) has virtually 100% access to electricity and adequate generation capacity. The concept of temperatures exceeding the wet bulb temperature makes for a scary fiction novel. But I bet even my dad’s village in Bangladesh could afford to put a few cheap Chinese mini splits in the school building and other gathering places. They are extremely efficient in the heat and wouldn’t cause a huge strain on the grid.
As the article notes, people certainly will and do die from such conditions. But it’s in the tens of thousands, not millions. And about 50,000 people a year die from heat waves in europe, too.
Problem with events like this is that they affect tens of thousands of people all at once. The first 1% of people will buy all of the available air conditioners. This happened in Australia in 2019: we had a huge bushfire with smoke affecting ~600K people. The available air filters sold out in hours.
> But I bet even my dad’s village in Bangladesh could afford to put a few cheap Chinese mini splits in the school building and other gathering places. They are extremely efficient in the heat and wouldn’t cause a huge strain on the grid.
Mini-splits have a maximum operating temperature in the 47-50˚C range.
The headline in this article seems to indicate some places have hit that limit, and so the external units (compressors) may not be able push the heat out of the refrigerant any longer.
> virtually 100% access to electricity and adequate generation capacity
Tell that to all the brown- and black-outs I experienced while traveling there. Renting a room with AC was double the price, at least, abd then there wasn't enough electricity to power it. There frequently wasn't even enough to fully freeze icecubes in the freezer.
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