> It's said that nothing gets stolen in Singapore, until you speak to Singaporeans.

A friend of mine left her cellphone in a mall bathroom once, on the bench when she washed her hands. Went all the way home and realised she forgot it.

After ~4 hours when she reached the mall. It was still sitting where she left it.

> Your "Hawker Centers" have people in their 70s bent forward cleaning up tables to some earn money.

There is no social safety net in Singapore. So once you get old, there's no benefit or dole, or any government funded programs to give you a comfy life where tax payers pay for you. The idea is you life off your CPF. Because there are people who have no savings. The government subsidizes their salaries. If a company hires them then the government will pay a portion of the salary, this gives incentive to businesses to hire them.

You could raise taxes for businesses and individuals, but then who would move their business or come work in Singapore?

Keeping the elderly working is not an absolute negative.

Keeping the elderly working is slave labor. Instead, you should make sure that there's always opportunities for them to do meaningful work.

That's an interesting take. Why do you define it as slave labor?

> Safest in the world, hands down. Any figures to back that up?

Googling it seems ranked about no 5 to 7 in the world eg https://safearound.com/danger-rankings/

Democratic Iceland seems to be #1 mostly. Fun Iceland fact:

>It [has] the oldest surviving parliament in the world, a claim shared by Tynwald. The Althing was founded in 930 at Þingvellir ("thing fields" or "assembly fields"), situated approximately 45 kilometres (28 mi) east of what later became the country's capital, Reykjavík.

> Any figures to back that up?

A simple Google search will show you Singapore and Tokyo are regarded as the 2 safest cities on Earth, which one is first depends on which report you read.

And Tokyo happens to be quite democratic and non-authoritarian. So an argument that people necessarily need Big Brother to behave falls flat on its face.

>democratic and non-authoritarian

japan also has something like a 99 percent conviction rate, not sure how that aligns with being anti authoritarian.

It means that they don't prosecute people unless they have a perfect open-and-shut case.

21 days to be arraigned is nothing to be proud of, however.

> So an argument that people necessarily need Big Brother to behave falls flat on its face.

Japanese culture is very different from pretty much any other culture. They respect each other and their country and environment. (except whales) They are raised from a young age to look after each other and respect each other. Something the rest of the world could learn from.

Japanese culture did not spring up out of the innate goodness of ancient Japanese. Culture is nurtured.

Japanese culture is largely a product of developing on an island archipelago where there's not much livable space (much of the land is mountains) and there's almost no natural resources. Add to that the various contacts with Western culture they had, and you get what they have now. The bit about respecting the environment (which isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than many other countries) is an example of this: when you don't have much space, you have to work harder at keeping your environment good because you don't have the option of just moving west when it gets too crowded, like they did in the US. Of course, they tried emulating the Europeans and doing the colonization thing a while back, and that didn't work out too well.

Culture is a product of your environment.

>The city seems super clean, but mainly because low paid workers clean the city really often.

As opposed to, say, cleaners in the West, which are paid more than engineers,