Nothing shows the ignorance of most mof the western world about modern Asia most than falling back to 27 year old articles at every time a place is mentioned. I guess we all need to reference Reagan's Star Wars program whenever we talk about the US to get an equivalent feel.

As someone living here (queue US coworkers 'why would you move to China?'), that article has not aged well.

Children are so so much better supported here than the US its not even funny. Public libraries, lavish playgrounds, sports activities, public transport (yes your 8 year old can take the metro to school, safely), science programs, free museums, ...

Singaporean here. If anything, one reason I'd say that Singapore isn't like Disneyland now is because its "management" has lost touch with the ground, and things aren't as well-maintained as Disneyland.

My estate (a ruling-party-managed one, too) is showing its age, with plenty of rats and cockroaches running about at night.

Uhm, its the tropics? My non hdb property has those guys and there is nothing you can do about it outdoors.

But then again people probably expect some foreign worker to come and hunt them individually while taking to the internet to complain about there being so many foreign workers ;)

it's also quite funny how Singapore generally avoids language such as "planned" or "state owned", and rather refers to its many state owned businesses as "government-linked", it reminds me a little bit of Palantir's "forward deployed engineers". It's no wonder that Gibson has come up a lot in this thread because that kind of Blue Ant-esque language is all over Singapore and this strange fusion of government and private power that you see in places like Singapore.