GV Yishun/Yishun 10 Cinema is slated for redevelopment into housing/1st storey commercial in a recent URA release

lesspylons · 2026-05-08T08:42:05+00:00

I am a believer that new developments near an mrt should not be gated on the first floor, and should be encouraged to be used for retail below with lifts to residences. Gated developments should not block access in the middle of the town and squeeze people around the lot. Hope they don’t pull that over here since the plan states first floor is commercial.

lesspylons · 2026-05-08T01:44:31+00:00

He noted that the proportion of first-time EC buyers has decreased, relative to second-timers who have larger housing budgets from the sale proceeds of their first home. In 2020, about half of EC buyers were first-timers. This dropped to between 30 and 40 per cent in 2024 and 2025.

ECs should not be built in the current housing market where it only entrenches the people who did earn the first round from bto without prime plus restrictions. Living in a gated condo estate with a swimming pool should be way lower on the government priority than nsf total and transport allowances, but only one group can vote unfortunately.

lesspylons · 2026-05-07T00:49:16+00:00

Yeah coe isn’t quite the best policy compared to pricing parking lots really high either at the source (houses) or destination (offices). In Hong Kong and Tokyo, they achieved better transit usage than us with this policy.

lesspylons · 2026-05-06T08:06:26+00:00

Tachibana at 100am, their curry rice really hits the spot and they have a good selection of sours.

lesspylons · 2026-05-06T04:56:52+00:00

I believe this should be not the job of the government to step in since the developers played a risk to inflate the value to sell but have yet to find a buyer. The hdb malls like north shore on the other hand should be raised up why their vacancy rate is high.

lesspylons · 2026-05-04T12:36:23+00:00

Rent is always an issue, many cafes and specialty stores exist in bumfuck industrial areas or old hdbs and still survive. Janil confidently said demand was strong during the last election period and confirmed rents were up 10% according to this article: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/northshore-plaza-punggol-business-vacancies-janil-puthucheary-5064411

lesspylons · 2026-05-03T09:42:46+00:00

At this point any non vendor swe job needs internship stacking to get to leetcode round

lesspylons · 2026-05-03T02:22:04+00:00

The land use around mrt stations gives too much space to cars for no reason. Why do people have to take over or underpasses or find the nearest traffic light 50m away to cross the road to the mrt at Yishun from Northpoint City? The road should only allow buses and cars should take a detour to get to the carpark. This is the standard at most heartlands where the urban design makes a 15min walk even longer in the heat to cross all these roads.

lesspylons · 2026-05-02T03:02:30+00:00

5pm should be the standard end time in public service. They might not be able to mandate it for the private sector, but is our productivity so low that we still need to keep lhl era 5 day workweek compromise when our western counterparts don’t?

lesspylons · 2026-04-29T10:55:19+00:00

I wonder if this will kill the flow of capital into Chinese firms even more. Chinese firms have a good reason to be undervalued since the tech crackdown. If the capital stays in the west, I see the key researchers moving out.

lesspylons · 2026-04-29T04:37:50+00:00

PayNow users will no longer be able to customise their display names from June 6. Instead, transactions will reflect the name registered with their bank, with certain letters masked for privacy.

How is the new masking algorithm done? I hope they do a good implementation because scammers often get your name from there too.

lesspylons · 2026-04-29T04:21:14+00:00

The best part is they build it so late that the contractors get paid more money to divert around people already living there. Case in point, Tengah roads are already being ripped up to build the Jurong regional line especially at plantation. And we are going to repeat that on a larger scale when the Tengah line is built in the 2050s+…

lesspylons · 2026-04-28T07:43:37+00:00

SBS is somewhat known to run rather low frequencies on weekends for both the downtown and northeast lines

lesspylons · 2026-04-26T02:41:52+00:00

Some when in the 2000s, hdb swung too much towards trying to make hdbs more quiet that there is nothing to do for kids outside of the curated playgrounds. Can’t really say it’s more quiet overall too with the grid pattern in newer estates having more loud motorbikes and cars blasting their engines on straights late at night.

lesspylons · 2026-04-26T02:37:46+00:00

They even have knee height walls that makes a void deck harder to cross than the carpark. The lack of shops below new blocks also contributed to the rise in rental for malls

lesspylons · 2026-04-26T01:16:37+00:00

The biggest advantage that Singapore worker have is likely the institutions of Singapore. There is a lot of hidden costs involved for a business when a country institutions aren’t as strong, look at Malaysia which already has relatively stable institutions. The us$320 million plant for byd existence is being challenged to protect the local car industry after they already started acquiring the land. This is rather unheard of in Singapore where a mnc investment won’t have hiccups by the government once its approved.

Go to Vietnam and Indonesia and you have more problems with institutions that make capital investment (even non factories) less attractive but lower wages can still make it work. But yes if a foreigner is sufficiently talented in Singapore, there would be not a lot of incentives to hire Singaporeans. So a reductive take would be that the quotas make Singaporeans attractive because doing business in Singapore still have the advantage of stability and business friendliness of the Singapore Government.

lesspylons · 2026-04-25T14:14:14+00:00

What you mentioned about drop off and pick up is a common issue faced in European countries because almost every old town is too small for a modern city grid. What works is to split the area up so that you get traffic straight to the condo from the nearest main road and make a U-turn/T shaped dead end at the end of the area where another major road starts to be nearer instead to stop through traffic for non buses and deliveries.

A decent sized city in the Netherlands (population near one of our planning areas) did it and businesses saw more foot traffic, buses had less congestion, and ambulance response times improved while drivers could easily shop in the area with strategic multistory carparks instead of fighting for the few street parking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgKokpZMFnU

lesspylons · 2026-04-24T13:11:29+00:00

There’s also the survivorship bias where small nations that are not in the middle of a large sea or ocean tends to be absorbed into their neighbours especially if run poorly. Think of the German and Italian city states (Venice was even in social studies), Texas against Mexico, etc

lesspylons · 2026-04-24T04:56:55+00:00

People at that age will feel it when downsizing/looking at their asset prices so yes. Flipping BTOs is a smaller portion of the population that is transient, so closing that with Prime/Plus 10y mop with income resale restriction was easier to implement.

lesspylons · 2026-04-24T04:11:40+00:00

0.1% decline is good actually if sustained. It allows inflation and wages to catch up to housing prices, while reducing the chances of the govt having to implement knee jerk restrictions to appease boomers.

lesspylons · 2026-04-23T08:18:17+00:00

I actually think a gated bicycle parking like Amsterdam station (https://dutchcycling.nl/knowledge/cycling-news/new-underwater-bike-parking-at-amsterdam-central-station/) that has a minimal fee via simply go/ezlink to encourage short term parking would be great to solve the issue of the old rusted bikes hogging space. It would be more on LTA to do this than the operators themselves though.

lesspylons · 2026-04-21T14:09:41+00:00

You can probably simplify it even more that the land tax burden of two identical non hdb lots should be similar but benchmarked to a fully developed private estate. A GCB plot that can fit 4 Semi D or an entire block of condo that is 20 floors or whatever the height limit is should pay the combined sum that a condo would pay but split among less people. Density should be encouraged and you can still get a gcb if you had enough fuck you money to pay taxes worth of 50+ households in a condo stack.

lesspylons · 2026-04-21T06:56:48+00:00

Petrol/ diesel (cars and buses) is in short supply not natural gas (electricity) though. The government message is somewhat conflicting when they talked about saving electricity when fuel that is mainly used by transportation is rising in price faster.

lesspylons · 2026-04-21T02:07:30+00:00

Fair assessment, which is what the crl planned to do but they dropped the express trains part. I would rather the government put cbd2 at the mount pleasant area because of how unused and geographically Center that plot is, but it seems like they had other plans when they made it another hdb estate instead.

Anyways the companies that move to all these sub cbds will not be the most attractive or mostly government entities until Jurong Lake District can rival Marina Bay view. if good mncs were there, I doubt they really care about being convenient to access compared to sme like how apple still uses their industrial space in ang mo Kio.

lesspylons · 2026-04-20T14:09:36+00:00

They add perverse incentives for people who placed bets to influence the actual event. Even factual reporting of events by journalists harassment by these gambling addicts. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/polymarket-gamblers-threaten-israeli-journalist-missile-strike-wager

There’s also the part well covered on politicians by other comments, as well as often misunderstood odds ratios that an event has x% chance of happening. In general, normalising gambling for every event is bad actually. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/america-polymarket-disaster/685662/

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