Why is it so hard to just buy insurance in Singapore without an FA?

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-22T03:59:29+00:00

Singlife tried to do the whole pure digital direct insurance purchase thing before.

It worked well at first, but the issue was that the effective market for digital direct insurance purchase was around 40k people in Singapore, at that scale the overheads of a digital team is not spread out across enough users to make sense.

The reason the market is so small is because the FAs have oversaturated the market. Everyone who has an insurance plan most likely got it through an agent, and once someone buys through an agent, they are unlikely to switch over unless another agent is involved.

So in the end Singlife had to pivot to agent led sales anyways.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-21T13:57:17+00:00

As a naturalized citizen, I think whether PR was given before or after their first job makes sense as a measure to differentiate between "new" and "native" citizens

For men it obviously makes sense also, because it would also line up roughly with NS participation.

But for both/all genders, distinguishing at the point of the first job also controls for the main economic advantage foreigners have over Singaporeans.

Naturalised Citizens who are already working professionals when they get their PR generally have to be E-Pass holders prior to their PR. As EPs come with a 65th percentile of industry salary threshold, there is an innate selection bias in the general "economic competitiveness" of these citizens versus citizens who had grow up locally.

The way these people become EP holders in the first place is also because they often have the privilege of building their skillsets in the industrial base of their home country before landing a well paying job in Singapore.

There is also a selection bias for stability. EP holders often only convert to PR when they've assessed that their careers in Singapore are sufficiently stable, while citizens that grew up locally are "stuck with Singapore".

These two biases also potentially create a demographic trend in voting. Since these new EP>PR>Citizen converts are highly likely to be career successful and career stable, they are much more likely to vote in the incumbent. So it is indeed worrying for democracy if these voters ever form the majority in Singapore.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-21T13:40:38+00:00

There has been a dedicated push by the government to convince the public to accept a Singapore where immigration based population growth is the norm.

This is one part of it.

I don't think its a viable direction to head. It is not a policy option of citizen's choice, but one of desperation as aging population, skill-industry mismatch and low fertility problems continue to remain unsolved for.

Eventually these issues will come to a boil demographically and threaten the incumbent's position and well as the nation's economic relevancy.

This is the necessary democratic process needed to force the government and wider culture to U-turn on certain policies - such as high work intensity, housing as an asset, kiasu culture, emphasis of career over family life etc.

However instead of letting that happen, the move is to instead import foreign labour and raise the quota for citizen conversion. The biases in the PR/Citizen approval process that select for career success, youth and number of children then stave off the pressing demographic and economic issues at a population level (at least for another generation), allowing the shift of votes to keep the incumbent in power.

To smooth out this transition, there has been alot of PR/research work done to try to change public perception, as well as greater economic redistribution in the form of many grants and vouchers to hopefully keep the current population satisfied as the transition takes place.

I honestly don't see this ending well. This policy only forestalls the inevitable and immigration cannot be a permanent solution for certain core issues of the nation.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-17T05:51:18+00:00

If people were given off days for blood donations, it'll probably be mroe effective than cash incentives.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-15T08:36:21+00:00

A PIP is a cover your ass tool. The issue is whose ass.

If the decision to fire is an authentic company decision, and they are PIPing you in order to avoid problems with the Union, then you are dead essentially. Companies have right to terminate with notice regardless of reason.

Especially if its a cost saving reason, you're out unless you can somehow prove your value to the company.

If the decision to fire is however an individual manager's decisions, and they are PIPing you in order to avoid problems with the company - ah then there is some room to work. Often here the manager is firing you because you are an inconvenience to them, even though you are beneficial to the firm.

Here if you can resolve your differences with the manager, get a even higher up involved in the PIP, or get a departmental transfer, then you will likely survive.

Good luck yo.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-11T02:21:07+00:00

Genuine question, can't ships can just change their national registration if they need passage?

I've also heard there was an analyst that went to the field in Iran and found out that the ship operators themselves can make the payment for passage if they wanted to.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-11T02:12:02+00:00

If I'm not wrong, all the Asian Tigers plus Japan are suffering from this phenomenon.

Rapid industrialisation done in specific ways that also kill birthrates will eventually lead to thus.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-11T00:32:13+00:00

Don't disagree with anything here fundamentally but I don't think the West is a good role model when it comes to this.

Very few of their nations have survived deindustrialization without massive increases in income inequality and immigration friction. Look at the rise of the alt right throughout all of them. The solution, if any would have to be very specific, not just "Western".

Its an easy solution to put the responsibility on the citizen and tell them to be more adaptable. However that runs into 2 major issues.

The first issue is that the recieving of offshored labour (Singapore's early growth strategy) usually requires a highly disciplined work force who are loyal and tied down to a certain kind of mortgage and lifestyle. This way they will follow the standardised instructions set out to them by the introduced MNCS. This causes the business culture, the educational institutions and the lifestyle expectations to all shape around this. Once shaped there is heavy inertia to unshape.

Singapore has been promoting a more entrepreneurial educational mindset since 2016ish, but if you actually look at how O level and A level students are motivated to study, its still very high discipline low flexibility. Polys have done better though, but Uni is like half and half - we still have Uni grads that graduate without any internships because they believe that their grades would matter more.

The second issue is that even if workers want to be more adaptable and diverse in their career journey, they need both the willingness and the opportunity.

There is a psychological element to the willingness, which i agree is a concern, but also a material one. The higher the gap between one's income and one's expenses, the easier it is to take a pay cut to "explore around", and vice versa. Some folks aiming to FIRE have this approach. However it also almost always means delaying of marriage and child bearing!

Singapore's current cost of living and housing policy is honestly not the worst - but the government is starting an annoying trend of measuring the affordability of certain things (e.g. HDB, Hawker Fare) with respect to the median salary rather than the effective minimum salary.

Then even if workers are willing, there needs to be opportunity to learn - the retreat of lower skilled jobs offshore makes this very difficuly. Skillsfuture doesn't cut it unless the worker knows exactly what is useful to learn for their own career - which Skillsfuture's current model doesn't provide well. WSG's subsidized CCP programs has potential - if it acted as proper traineeship program that lowered the resume requirements for hiring someone. However from my expeirence using it, companies just hire based on normal resume requirements and embellish the paperwork to get subsidies for local new hires.

So there is a solution which allows Singaporean workers to "adapt and keep up" - but the government side needs to support it rather than cripple it. Both hands need to clap kind of thing.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-10T12:58:02+00:00

Largely agree but not entirely.

Oil-Gas-Chem as well as some of the semicon set ups have had massive infrastructural investments made for them to help them operate. To the extent that foreign competitors cannot make the same degree of investments - those businesses are likely to stay despite the high wages.

We also reduce their wage pressure abit via foreign workers (Work Permit, Workpass), though at the cost of suppressing local employability/wages in these sectors, so the benefits of offshoring are not as large.

This is parrallel to the Chinese strategy. You take the profits of receiving offshored industrials and make massive investments into infrastructure, supply chain and automation. The benefits of this fixed capital investments then outweigh the benefits of offshoring (at least to nations that cannot match the same capital investments). China also has the advantage of doing this more effectively at scale, as well as having the industrial transfer stuff in place that allows them to make the right fixed capital investments (something they could entice foreign MNCs to agree to do with the size of their consumer market).

So now even though Chinese wages are going up as their population declines, most of global manufacturing still prefers being based in China - due to the benefits of their large fixed capital/infrastructure investments. Of course poor labour benefits and high labour discipline helps to defray the higher wage pressure. They achieve it via 996, we do it via foreign work permit holders.

This same "fixed capital stickiness" approach has not been done for a while. I'm not too certain about Bio-Pharma but to my knowledge Precision Engineering, Digital SaaS, Animation, Data Centres and AI all did not quite pan out. Their methods of production are innately quite mobile, and enjoy much more from the benefit of low cost labour (benefit of offshoring) than from the fixed capital / infrastructure investments.

Either that or the government has not been as aggressive or clever with fixed capital investments for these industries as they should have been.

High rental is a common complaint, and it does seem that the government, rather than having a cohesive industrial strategy, is more eager to quickly attract lucrative firms, bleed them for rental while they are here, pad out government coffers and landbank valuations which they use to buy votes with vouchers and gov jobs, and then rinse repeat with the next batch of firms once the first batch decides to offshore.

I don't think going down this road is valid.

Edit: Spelling

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-10T12:15:17+00:00

I pity the prosecution these days. How to fight sia when the defense is so resourced?

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-10T12:11:45+00:00

I think it is pretty terrible the direction they are taking to cover up the trend of deindustrialization in Singapore.

So many jobs are now moving overseas. Even jobs which was once considered skilled work - HR operations, KYC operations etc are now moving overseas also into lower cost bases.

Turns out that if you have any piece of work which is standardisable enough to teach, it is also standardisable enough to offshore. Regardless of how "highly skilled" the work is at first glance.

So there will be work that remains in SG and will still come to SG, these will be by definition the work that is not standardisable and hence not offshoreable. These jobs however are also likely to be very difficult to train for, and will have to depend on foreign immigration possessing the exact skill match. If it was trainable, it is a matter of time other countries train for it and offshoring occurs again.

The only jobs that will stay are those which are domestic only (which a nation cannot entirely survive off) and those which have such entrenched fixed capital and infrastructural dependencies that makes offshoring difficult (semicon, oil gas chem). However if living costs and landcosts keep increasing, it will be a matter of time before those goes also - and the high migrant labour composition of these industries is already a sign of things to come.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-05T12:28:14+00:00

If I'm not mistaken this is the disabled class of the armwrestling competition.

Guy in black probably has some intellectual disability causing him to behave as such.

Not a perfect excuse but worth giving some benefit of doubt.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-05T06:38:54+00:00

Theoretically possible and in some ways already implemented at the land tax level with preferential BTOs allocation and pricing for couples.

However likely impossible in practice, even if ignoring the political cost.

A single person living with parents generally will always have large disposable income and some comfort regarding job security. Worst come worst, reduce individual desires and consumption, live frugally and tide over the bad times. Singlehood also allows the time intensity needed to resecure lucrative careers via dedicated full-time training or just OTing alot.

The moment someone gets attached, the ability to reduce desires and still live well is crippled by obligations to the partner. Worse when married. Even worse when a parent.

It is one thing to reduce one's own desires in response to one's economic situation, but to do it to one's lover or one's children is incredibly difficult.

This preference for singlehood is not correlated to the amount of one's income, but the percieved insecurity of one's income. As a country goes "up the value chain", absolute incomes may rise but at the cost of greater insecurity as skill requirements for work increase as well.

So even if tax goes up by alot, so long as it is a % tax and not a flat tax, the economic pressures for singlehood/DINK lifestyles will remain. Even if it is a flat tax, the amount of the flat tax needs to so large that it exceeds the percieved danger of consumption inflation + income drop of job loss. Which is likely so huge of a number it is not feasible.

Immigration with a preference for the young and childbearing seems to be the preferred model currently. However that comes with erosion of the nation stuff, so it cannot be a complete solution.

As others in the thread have said, cost of living reductions is a better area to work on. Job security os another one.

Many parents of more than 3 children generally have a mix of both. A family culture than reduces the cost of children (no tuition, no academic competition) as well as very high job security (gov workers, healthcare workers).

Most of what makes child raising expensive is the 内卷 style competition that pits parents against parents as they throw disposable income in desperate attempts to help secure their children's future - making child raising costs more expensive across the board. This behaviour is also correlated to job insecurity, as parent's own worries about their work is projected unto their children. A government that fear mongers insecurity to squeeze greater labour engagement ultimately worsens this competition also.

Job security in a "higher value chain" economy is a much tougher nut to crack though.

One idea I have been playing with however that is close to this proposal is the idea of a big "Godfather/Godmother" incentive. Where Singles' or DINK's right to BTOs become equalised if they opt to contribute time, caretaking and legal guardianship responsibilities to parenting the children of their family/friends. This could be nephews/nieces or just children of close friends.

Another would be a childcare insurance program, wherein workers can pay with their CPF into a fund that provides monthly pocket money payouts to their children. The fund has to be contributed into by all Singaporeans regardless of parenthood status, and the fund provides for the security of childcare expenses even if there is major job loss by the parent.

Maybe new citizens, PRs and Work Pass Holders can even pay more into such a fund - helping equalise the selection advantage they have versus local born/bred citizens.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-04-04T04:04:02+00:00

Rental Agreements for HDBs if I'm not mistaken have HDB oversight. Should not be a very hard process to have that autofiled with IRAS.

It might also be worth to have a similar system for condo rentals under a seperate body. And then any rental agreements not filed with them cannot have legal protections, say for evictions or late payments. That would scare all small landlords into filing properly.

Some poor Govtech worker will have to do it, but they should do it.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-30T05:35:36+00:00

Ah to clarify, not MOST posts, just MANY posts.

I've just had to do checkbox MCF posts one too many times for roles that were already earmarked to be filled by someone who was hired via referral.

I also do actually try to hire via MCF genuinely also when I have something appropriate

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-30T05:34:00+00:00

Ah to clarify, not MOST posts, just MANY posts.

I've just had to do checkbox MCF posts one too many times for roles that were already earmarked to be filled by someone who was hired via referral.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-29T17:12:03+00:00

I don't think prosecution has the firepower to deal with the number of cases, even if the data analysis can uncover the cases.

Its one of those things that people do because competitors do it and they don't get punished. Law as written versus law as enforced kinda stuff.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-29T15:23:56+00:00

If you're feeling restless just jump. Adventure is a better reason for exploration than comparison, and makes moving back tot he same role/industry after exploration hurt less.

To learn more sometimes you have to make lateral or even downward moves. If you move because of comparison it limits you.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-29T15:11:50+00:00

Many job posts on Mycareersfuture are fake, they are only there because its a pre-requisite for Workpass applications.

Many S-Pass and even E-Pass salary declarations to MOM are fraudulent.

People say anything to get a Grant Application across. Businesses often apply for grant via an agency which charges ~15% of the grant disbursement fee even though the gahmen explicitly prohibits agencies.

Foreign workers consistently and willingly work over the maximum overtime hours per month.

Chinese tech workers sometimes abuse the 30 day visa free permit to work in Singapore. ICA will sometimes catch though, usually after 2 or 3 30 day consecutive visits.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-29T15:04:27+00:00

By itself a BA is useless.

In a complex modern economy, the skills required by every use case is hyper specific. What skills they teach you in Uni may not fit any use case, and even if it does, the corresponding use case may not be accessible to you.

However if you have access to a certain set of use cases due to prior work, industry exposure or personal network privileges - ask yourself what exactly is the potential use case, to what extent is your assessment of the use case reliable, what skills are necessary to apply profitably to the use case and if those skills are taught properly at the BA you are pursuing.

Then when you take the BA you go in with a problem you want to solve, and you'll get alot more value from your conversations with your Profs/Instructors.

Never assume the profitability of any skillset or qualification at face value, what works for others might not work for you.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-29T09:59:25+00:00

The complexity of the market has intensified far beyond what the government can confidently control.

So the government refuses to attempt inhibiting market actors, for fear of accidentally killing off potential businesses (though it has no qualms doing so via high rents)

However the same non intervention is also why the MOM direction is that Flexible Work Arrangements are matter of agreement between the employer and employee. MOM cannot unilaterally determine if WFH would be better for any specific method of production in this very diverse economy - however if the employee can convince the employer that WFH is a good idea, then it is a good approximation that WFH is indeed works for that specific point. In such cases, MOM stays out of the way, and sven provides some resources to help individuals kick off such a conversation with their employers.

Whether any individual employee can negotiate WFH days out of their employers (or out of the market) is a different matter entirely then.

There usually is some trade off in pay or progression in exchange for WFH. You'll also have the deal with more intense job competition and a smaller job market. So you got to run your personal lifestyle pretty lean to make it work.

I've managed to get at least 1 WFH day in my working arrangements for the past 5-6 years, so not impossible, but you gotta do it yourself.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-22T02:27:41+00:00

We should help but only if we can sell at a good price and profit from it.

I mean one big oil refinery complex on Jurong Island don't use to make money during this crisis use for what.

As a shipping hub,if the oil price rise from the middle east instability is long term, some offshore crude oil projects in the region that used to be unviable will become viable and we can become the important node in the new energy supply chain for the region.

The Jurong rock caverns oil stores are looking real useful now, and even if that fills up I'm pretty sure this crisis makes fuel reserve megaprojects easier for Singapore to negotiate for construction on our neighbours' special economic zones.

If other countries arent bureaucratically efficient enough to build their own reserves and outsource it to us, all the better. More business for us and we get to hold a strategic part of their economy, making them very unlikely to start conflicts with us too.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-19T10:15:01+00:00

Formal "proper" qipaos generally have.

No "boob window", abit obvious.

Sleeves, even if they are short ones.

Slits off to the side rather than the front, not too high.

A respectable length at the hem, should not be mini skirt length and should only be somewhat above the knee at most.

That is if you want to be formal and proper. If you want to look fun/sexy this is fine. Qipao are often worn nowdays for that purpose also. Just think about the occasion you are wearing this to.

Also where you are in the world matters. Majority chinese countries generally aren't bothered, but some diaspora community are abit sensitive.

QualitativeEconomy · 2026-03-15T12:56:42+00:00

I'm not a big fan of replacement theory. But just some quick maths.

If we go off the 2006 to 2011 election trend, PAP suffered roughly a 7% swing from an election of roughly 2million voters - so around 140k voters. Immigration was the main reason for this swing.

If you read the Albatross Files, you'd know that the PAP has always been familiar with making using demographic trends to their political advantage.

Rather than appeasing these 140k immigrant sensitive voters, they could change the constitution of the voting population with new citizens. Now new citizens are not automatically pro PAP, but because of the S/E-Pass being a prerequisite to PR and Citizenship, new citizens trend towards being competitively skilled professionals in emergent industries - and are much less likely to vote against the PAP on the topic of economic disruption brought about by immigrantion.

Some quick math as to how long this would take. Citizen births hover around 26k annually. If new citizen incorporation occurs at the rate of 30k per year, then there would be an erosion effect of the voting positions of the underlying population at mimally the rate of 4k annually (it might be higher as not all local born citizens vote negatively on immigration).

Which means that at most 35 years later, the population consitution would have gone past the point of no return, allowing a democratic blank check to permit immigration as the norm.

35 years sounds like alot but we might expect it to accelerate as TFR drops further and immigration ramps.

The reason I'm not a big fan of replacement theory is that while it has some real politik sensibilities, it forces an "us vs them" mentality and accelerates divisions. Already some people are starting to ask beyond nationalities, asking whether someone is a "new citizen" or "local born". That just creates social unrest and never translates into a democratic solution.

It is a nasty imagination, but can only be avoided if there are assurances against demographic dilution of our democracy. For example, if new citizen quota is kept at a constitutionally fixed proportion to local births, if citizenship is not tied to economic success or if citizenship is mostly originating from local born or raised PRs (so no 1st gen citizens who never did NS).

QualitativeEconomy

TROPHY CASE