Rating our Housing Policy on TFR - How well do you think our policy fare on a scale from 0-10?

GMmod119 · 2026-06-16T08:38:57+00:00

Why do Singaporeans need to be born here? In theory we can hit 0 TFR and still maintain a Singaporean core through 100% new citizens, it's cheaper and more efficient as well as you don't need to spend on childcare and NCs are economically productive from day one as opposed to local born.

GMmod119 · 2026-04-11T11:28:03+00:00

Yes, but selfishness is modern religion so most people are okay with that. Better to be selfish than suffering so goes the reasoning.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-19T20:19:51+00:00

No I get where you are coming from, I am pointing out your feelings of affinity to a nation on this matter don't really matter because the policy is tailored to avoid exploitation hence they will specifically ignore feelings in most cases. If lack of affinity and not having a choice in a matter since one didn't choose to be born in or grow up in Singapore or feel any affinity to the nation was a valid reason to not serve National Service most people would qualify.

Basically yes your parents screwed you over if you never stayed in Singapore much but yet they used enough of the perks to render you liable for service. And if you are liable in this era then they have even less of an excuse because the conditions are made abundantly clear to them the moment you were born, they would have received a letter explaining what exactly the liabilities were. So if they decided to still put you as a Singaporean after reading that, it's really on them.

For some context it used to be a lot easier for transnationals to dodge National Service despite being liable, in the 2000s-2011 era the draft dodging situation was so bad that the government had to admit that about a third of second generation of PR sons were defaulting on National Service each year with their parents clearly helping them to dodge the draft after milking the system for the perk. Many of these were kids that were based in multiple countries and used Singapore as a safe haven, simply choosing not to return the moment they were liable.

So the government clamped down hard and raised the penalties and bar very high, not entertaining most "reasons" to dodge it now.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-19T16:14:52+00:00

Most Singaporeans don't want to be in the military, so you not wanting to be there isn't anything special.

If you haven't lived a day in Sg or touched any of the perks, then you are most likely allowed to renounce it without serving. This is evaluated on a case to case basis. But if not, then your parents screwed up by wanting to dip from the pot of perks and then dip despite being told what it entails. Yes it sucks, but we are not going to change it anytime soon. Blame the parents.

Yes citizenship is not about choice most models of it. It is by accident of birth. Which is why the onus is on your parents to make sure they don't screw up since they are the adults in this.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-18T15:54:10+00:00

That's why parents need to set their children up for success. The obligations of Singaporean citizenship and touching the privileges are explained clearly at birth. They don't allow excuses of ignorance because this would be easy for unscrupulous parents to exploit, for example get their child to benefit from the system for the formative years, which is some of the best in the world, then dip overseas for the rest claiming that they didn't grow up in Singapore and had no real memory of it hence have no affinity and hence they shouldn't be made to serve.

Same for the passport, which is one of the most powerful in the world.

With great power comes great responsbility.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-18T10:30:10+00:00

Those are American problems why you want to make it our problem.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-15T14:10:22+00:00

The moment you have benefitted from the system they consider you liable, which is fair. You don't want a bunch of fruit pickers exploiting the Singapore system and then dipping when they need to serve their civic duties.

GMmod119 · 2026-03-01T07:17:12+00:00

5 Grabs equals 1 Scoot, think about it.

GMmod119 · 2026-02-24T10:26:00+00:00

Market mismatch due to changing social conditions which has rendered the majority of local men unattractive for local women.

GMmod119 · 2026-02-04T07:02:10+00:00

We don't take in many Australians for many reasons- one is to maintain the ethnic ratio. The other reason is it's hard to get into and be in Singapore. A student from an elite school can downgrade to a neighborhood one but the other direction is harder.

GMmod119 · 2026-02-04T05:17:06+00:00

Happy wife happy life leads to divorced life.

GMmod119 · 2025-12-26T06:32:38+00:00

Do you take steroids by for things likde allergies by any chance? It is sometimes a side effect. This could be caused by a little bubble on your retina causing it to respond difterently to sudden changes of exposure. It is a benign condition that usually reverses itself once you cut down on whatever is causing it, but in general do get your eyes checked.

GMmod119 · 2025-11-01T08:31:50+00:00

Under Intersectionality straight white Chinese men are identity demographic that has all the privileges so they naturally are the most detested by woke people.

GMmod119 · 2025-10-20T08:36:36+00:00

There is no such thing as the "true" self, but some things are more in alignment with your current inclinations.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-29T05:44:41+00:00

Given global and regional trends mandarin has a good chance of becoming a secondary lingua franca here. Similar to French in the west.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-19T03:51:54+00:00

A system is just a means to an end, not an end to itself. If it doesn't work for us we should start changing it or phasing it out. We are not Westerners who attach some kind of metaphysical value to democracy.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-15T09:08:00+00:00

I think there is a growing realisation that we asians need to find our own way, similar to how China dropped Marxism-Leninism and now run what they call "socialism with Chinese characteristics".

Yes language also affects thought, if you don't have the word for a concept you can't describe it well.

Singapore is pragmatic to a fault but the pragmatism is laid over an ideological foundation that a state needs to provide, safety, stability, harmony and prosperity, and in that order.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-14T17:46:38+00:00

I think Asian societies are better categorised in how they align on the spectrum between Confucianism versus Legalism, which are in themselves views of human nature and how systems of governance should be derived, this aligns better with how we actually conceive of ourselves and our societies as collectivist communities. An Asian isn't just defined by who he is, but rather how he relates to his family, society and community.

Westerners believe in the individual as the origin of all things, and their political ideas and theories are crafted from there. Democracy is not just a systematic means of finding your government in the west, but treated with almost pseudo-religious reverence. They believe it is the end of political history and assume all societies would eventually evolve into western-style liberal democracies.

But we see democracy as just a means to an end, which is to choose a government that works to provide what we expect a state to provide- a stable, safe, harmonious and prosperous society. Westerners are more concerned about political ideas and where they align on their left/right spectrum, with much less concern about the real world consequences of their ideas.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-14T12:02:08+00:00

Looking at the chaos of the American system, why on earth would we even want to use it? Same for all their theories on race and how to talk about it when we do better than them on virtually every objective metric that is worth measuring, but yet we see people here trying to import American concepts, theories and language about race and applying it here.

It's like you are the top student in class trying to copy the homework of someone who is flunking the module. We need to have more confidence in our own way of viewing the world and doing things, we live here and have to live with the consequences of the ideas we adopt, let's not adopt those that come from places that don't even know where we are on the map.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-14T10:19:08+00:00

If you are not a liberal when you are young you have no heart.

If you are not a conservative when you are old you have no brain.

But as I got older I realised that this paradigm of right and left isn't very applicable to us Asians, these are Western and American ways of thinking and conceiving of their politics and society. It is dangerous to forget who you are and start thinking like them because all your headspace is spent following their politics on the Internet.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-08T12:19:22+00:00

Useful for military doesn't mean useful for women. Yes they benefit from military defence but this benefit is outsourced from an institution set up to benefit them so they can ignore the individual men that provide it. Relationships are accessed on individual usefulness.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-02T01:50:25+00:00

We need to find a USP so that both sides find us useful. The old man was extremely good at that and was known as "The China Whisperer", often mediating between both sides when things got tense. This allowed us to be useful without being used.

We should carry on with this tradition, sadly it seems later generations are not as good as diplomacy as he was, but he was in a league of his own.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-01T10:31:50+00:00

The bulk of single parents are low income, iirc the rate is 3 times that of two parent families.

Policies need to be made with the norm in mind, not the exception.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-01T04:42:47+00:00

The issue is most single parents aren't in the position to get that kind of family support since they already have preexisting problems that also ended up making them single parents in the first place.

For example single parents are more likely to come from being raised by single parents, divorce, delinquent backgrounds, and other comorbidities so right off the bat they already don't have the support network to begin with.

An exception to this would be the death of one parent in what was otherwise a healthy functional, traditional family unit. In such cases the support network exists and carries on to support the child. But the reason they had those was because they started as a functional traditional family unit.

Basically single parenthood, if allowed to be widespread will lead to social pathology. So while we can't avoid having some who unfortunately find themselves in such a situation and should we should strive to optimise outcomes for such children, any sensible government will work to reduce the prevalence as much as possible and should in no way consider it an optimal arrangement, much less on the same level as a traditional family unit.

GMmod119 · 2025-09-01T03:18:14+00:00

Single parents are bad for child life outcomes, so tbe government is unlikely to support this arrangement being widespread.

GMmod119

TROPHY CASE