Owning a car in Singapore, one of the world’s most expensive countries, has always been something of a luxury. But costs have now soared to an all time high.
Cars are a significant source of pollution, and Singapore has space issues. Honestly, this is probably a good thing. The cultural thing we have going on with burning oil in the form of gasoline is going to kill everybody in the next few decades if we don’t work to stop climate change.
I’m not one to defend Singapore much, but owning a car there is a very unnecessary luxury, so this is a pretty unfair reason to dislike Singapore (I can give you some better ones if you’d like).
Honestly in other big cities (NYC, London) most people would benefit from a COE scheme keeping car traffic under control.
but owning a car there is a very unnecessary luxury
I live in a huge urban city (about 10M ppl) with one of the best public transportation system in the world. Only real reason I NEED a car is a) when I go out of the city or b) move a lot of things.
Even in the case of b), I use rental car something like this:
It’s a compact car that can move some serious shit(image is the van version. you’ll normally have all the passenger seats like a normal car). Perfect car in the urban area imo. Bigger than that is honestly almost unjustifiable.
I mean, fuck cars but people are not going to be ditching cars any time soon because it’s just darn nice to have, even when there’s public transportation readily available in basically anywhere in the city. Transitioning to reasonable cars like this might be something we can work on for the short term?
I mean, as far as movement is concerned there’s a lot more freedom than in most of the US.
Singapore, you can pretty much get around anywhere you want quickly, safely, and cheaply using any of a variety of transportation modes.
US you’re forced to use a car and if you can’t afford one you can use someone else’s (taxi or rideshare) at a markup. Most people live in places that have no other viable modes, even though 80+% of people live in towns and cities that would have tons of alternatives pretty much anywhere else in the world (and would save money on their municipal budgets in so doing).
Charging people for the social cost of their personal luxuries, especially luxuries that have immense social cost like cars, in order to fund social goods is not something so ridiculously unreasonable. You should probably pick something actually bad if you want to criticize Singapore.
I have total freedom of movement in the USA. I have a car and a motorcycle that are both paid in full, reliable, and efficient, and I live in a beautiful rural area where there is almost zero traffic congestion.
I can drive anywhere I want with total control over my own direction and destination. That is actual freedom.
If you actually live in a rural area, it shouldn’t have “almost zero” traffic congestion. There should be actually none. I suspect you don’t actually live in a rural area – you probably live in a faux-rural suburb of an actual town that you need to regularly go to. And again, nearly everywhere else in the world someone living in such a place would have choices for how to do that. Take a bike ride, hop on a train, jump in your car, whatever you feel like that day.
If you actually live in the country, you’re not actually getting in your car to make trips often at all because most of the time, you’re staying on your property. You’re self-supporting. If your lifestyle requires making long trips on the roads and highways every day, you’re relying on massive government infrastructure spending to conduct your business. You have to either pay your fair share for that infrastructure – which is WAY more than any current vehicle and fuel taxes could even get CLOSE to supporting – or else you’re going to have to accept that your lifestyle is only possible thanks to others subsidizing it.
Others who don’t want the same things you want. Others whose idea of freedom is to be able to decide for themselves instead of having someone else pick for them.
Meanwhile I took a rideshare from a site visit at 5:30pm and there was already some congestion on the expressway. I cannot imagine what it’d be like if it was a free-for-all for cars.
Well here in my part of the USA, I can hop in my car and be at the front door of several restaurants or grocery stores within 5 minutes because I live in a nice area with low population density. Traffic jams almost never happen in my area. I have my own house and land where I can do anything I want. I work from home most of the time and don’t have to travel at all. On the days when I choose to work from the office, it’s an easy 20-minute drive from my home with zero traffic jams.
On top of all that, I can have any kind of alcohol I want and medical marijuana is legal. I can criticize my government leaders in public without fear of reprisal. I could be gay and have anal sex with men legally if I wanted to.
It’s funny how all of you America haters constantly talk about how we “don’t have any freedom” but you can’t provide any example of anything that I don’t have the freedom to do. Please go ahead and educate me about what freedom you think I don’t have, because I do whatever the fuck I want pretty much all the time.
Well I checked out your links, and you are wrong because I can do any of the things on those lists of allegedly missing freedoms. Literally I do have the freedom to do any of those things.
Drugs - legal marijuana here, in the process of being Federally rescheduled at the moment
Gambling - legal casinos here
Traffic Laws - using the example of no speed limits on the Autobahn in Germany as the sole example of non-American freedom… yeah I don’t have that but I can drive as fast as I want illegally and I do on a regular basis with the aid of a radar detector
Prostitution - legal in a state that I can access by car which I own and am able to operate currently, plus easily accessible illegally
Speech - we do have freedom of speech, and your StackExchange article lists a weird example - “Although the US has more freedom of speech than many countries, fighting words are not protected.” - This was covered in a law class that I took in college, and it means that if you say reprehensible things to an individual to the point that you enrage them to the point that they attack you, your speech was not protected. Basically you can get your ass kicked for insulting people, and this is not what I would call a “lack of freedom” but the natural order of things as they should be. However this is noted by legal scholars as being a very difficult legal defense to mount without specific evidence that the “fighting words” were used and were bad enough to justify violence. My law teacher gave an example of a man he knew who used it, whose wife was being harassed by a man who would leave sexually explicit messages on their answering machine, talking about wanting to rape her and describing it in detail. Her husband kicked that man’s ass, pervert then sued, and the ass-kicker won the suit because he had the tapes of his messages.
Abortion - legal in the USA and accessible in states near me
Immigration - This is not a “freedom” that a citizen could make use of, being already a citizen. Every country has an immigration policy to screen the entrance of immigrants, no?
Discrimination - This is a freedom that individuals have to freely exercise in private, but businesses are prohibited from discriminating based on many demographic factors against hiring or customers. I don’t see an issue with that.
Voting - Voter ID is mentioned as a lack of freedom, but it has never stopped me from voting. I literally have the freedom to vote as I choose so I’m going to label this one as FALSE as well.
So now that I have reached the end of your first list. I’m not going through the other links because this first one you offered was a pile of bullshit, and I have listed the reasons in detail that those are bullshit.
Now please go on again about my “lack of freedom” since you utterly failed on the first attempt.
It’s sad that you can only reach places such as shops by driving.
Also you can’t even get an abortion, being trans is likely to get you genocides by a conservative, being black is likely to get you killed by a cop, you can’t see tits or swear but you can have blood and gore everywhere, your cops can no knock raid your house and drag you out to a detention centre and steal your children, you have little employee rights, and very few social protections, you’re banning books from libraries, stopping women getting healthcare, etc.
And on top of all that, you can’t even have any alcohol until you’re 21 and weed is still federally illegal and millions of innocent people are in gaol for decades because of it.
Honestly Americans are the least free of any developed nation and that’s only trending downwards for them.
I feel perfectly safe every day without guns, I choose to have them because it’s my right and a privilege that I celebrate. I don’t carry a gun to go out in public because I live in a nice safe area where violent crime is extremely rare.
It’s funny how all of you America haters constantly talk about how we “don’t have any freedom” but you can’t provide any example of anything that I don’t have the freedom to do. Please go ahead and educate me about what freedom you think I don’t have, because I do whatever the fuck I want pretty much all the time.
Well fuck Singapore, you can’t even do drugs there. What’s the point of living in a freedomless police state that costs a fortune? Masochism?
Cars are a significant source of pollution, and Singapore has space issues. Honestly, this is probably a good thing. The cultural thing we have going on with burning oil in the form of gasoline is going to kill everybody in the next few decades if we don’t work to stop climate change.
I’m not one to defend Singapore much, but owning a car there is a very unnecessary luxury, so this is a pretty unfair reason to dislike Singapore (I can give you some better ones if you’d like).
Honestly in other big cities (NYC, London) most people would benefit from a COE scheme keeping car traffic under control.
I live in a huge urban city (about 10M ppl) with one of the best public transportation system in the world. Only real reason I NEED a car is a) when I go out of the city or b) move a lot of things.
Even in the case of b), I use rental car something like this:
It’s a compact car that can move some serious shit(image is the van version. you’ll normally have all the passenger seats like a normal car). Perfect car in the urban area imo. Bigger than that is honestly almost unjustifiable.
I mean, fuck cars but people are not going to be ditching cars any time soon because it’s just darn nice to have, even when there’s public transportation readily available in basically anywhere in the city. Transitioning to reasonable cars like this might be something we can work on for the short term?
I mean, as far as movement is concerned there’s a lot more freedom than in most of the US.
Singapore, you can pretty much get around anywhere you want quickly, safely, and cheaply using any of a variety of transportation modes.
US you’re forced to use a car and if you can’t afford one you can use someone else’s (taxi or rideshare) at a markup. Most people live in places that have no other viable modes, even though 80+% of people live in towns and cities that would have tons of alternatives pretty much anywhere else in the world (and would save money on their municipal budgets in so doing).
Charging people for the social cost of their personal luxuries, especially luxuries that have immense social cost like cars, in order to fund social goods is not something so ridiculously unreasonable. You should probably pick something actually bad if you want to criticize Singapore.
I have total freedom of movement in the USA. I have a car and a motorcycle that are both paid in full, reliable, and efficient, and I live in a beautiful rural area where there is almost zero traffic congestion.
I can drive anywhere I want with total control over my own direction and destination. That is actual freedom.
If you actually live in a rural area, it shouldn’t have “almost zero” traffic congestion. There should be actually none. I suspect you don’t actually live in a rural area – you probably live in a faux-rural suburb of an actual town that you need to regularly go to. And again, nearly everywhere else in the world someone living in such a place would have choices for how to do that. Take a bike ride, hop on a train, jump in your car, whatever you feel like that day.
If you actually live in the country, you’re not actually getting in your car to make trips often at all because most of the time, you’re staying on your property. You’re self-supporting. If your lifestyle requires making long trips on the roads and highways every day, you’re relying on massive government infrastructure spending to conduct your business. You have to either pay your fair share for that infrastructure – which is WAY more than any current vehicle and fuel taxes could even get CLOSE to supporting – or else you’re going to have to accept that your lifestyle is only possible thanks to others subsidizing it.
Others who don’t want the same things you want. Others whose idea of freedom is to be able to decide for themselves instead of having someone else pick for them.
It’s one of the safest places on earth?
Lol, an American thinking they know best again.
Meanwhile I took a rideshare from a site visit at 5:30pm and there was already some congestion on the expressway. I cannot imagine what it’d be like if it was a free-for-all for cars.
Well here in my part of the USA, I can hop in my car and be at the front door of several restaurants or grocery stores within 5 minutes because I live in a nice area with low population density. Traffic jams almost never happen in my area. I have my own house and land where I can do anything I want. I work from home most of the time and don’t have to travel at all. On the days when I choose to work from the office, it’s an easy 20-minute drive from my home with zero traffic jams.
On top of all that, I can have any kind of alcohol I want and medical marijuana is legal. I can criticize my government leaders in public without fear of reprisal. I could be gay and have anal sex with men legally if I wanted to.
You sound insufferable af.
You’re just mad that you don’t have all the cool freedoms that I have. I do literally whatever I want every day and it’s great.
The US isn’t even close to being the country with the most freedom, but please continue to fall for your government and corporations propaganda.
It’s funny how all of you America haters constantly talk about how we “don’t have any freedom” but you can’t provide any example of anything that I don’t have the freedom to do. Please go ahead and educate me about what freedom you think I don’t have, because I do whatever the fuck I want pretty much all the time.
Fortunately, you’re not the first person to have asked this.
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-countries-guarantee-freedoms-that-the-united-states-does-not-have
Here’s a good, dark list: https://www.salon.com/2012/08/31/ten_ways_americans_have_lost_their_freedom/
This is a softer article, but helps put some things into perspective: https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/10-facts-about-america-that-show-we-re-not-really-free-7555741
Well I checked out your links, and you are wrong because I can do any of the things on those lists of allegedly missing freedoms. Literally I do have the freedom to do any of those things.
Drugs - legal marijuana here, in the process of being Federally rescheduled at the moment
Gambling - legal casinos here
Traffic Laws - using the example of no speed limits on the Autobahn in Germany as the sole example of non-American freedom… yeah I don’t have that but I can drive as fast as I want illegally and I do on a regular basis with the aid of a radar detector
Prostitution - legal in a state that I can access by car which I own and am able to operate currently, plus easily accessible illegally
Speech - we do have freedom of speech, and your StackExchange article lists a weird example - “Although the US has more freedom of speech than many countries, fighting words are not protected.” - This was covered in a law class that I took in college, and it means that if you say reprehensible things to an individual to the point that you enrage them to the point that they attack you, your speech was not protected. Basically you can get your ass kicked for insulting people, and this is not what I would call a “lack of freedom” but the natural order of things as they should be. However this is noted by legal scholars as being a very difficult legal defense to mount without specific evidence that the “fighting words” were used and were bad enough to justify violence. My law teacher gave an example of a man he knew who used it, whose wife was being harassed by a man who would leave sexually explicit messages on their answering machine, talking about wanting to rape her and describing it in detail. Her husband kicked that man’s ass, pervert then sued, and the ass-kicker won the suit because he had the tapes of his messages.
Abortion - legal in the USA and accessible in states near me
Immigration - This is not a “freedom” that a citizen could make use of, being already a citizen. Every country has an immigration policy to screen the entrance of immigrants, no?
Discrimination - This is a freedom that individuals have to freely exercise in private, but businesses are prohibited from discriminating based on many demographic factors against hiring or customers. I don’t see an issue with that.
Voting - Voter ID is mentioned as a lack of freedom, but it has never stopped me from voting. I literally have the freedom to vote as I choose so I’m going to label this one as FALSE as well.
So now that I have reached the end of your first list. I’m not going through the other links because this first one you offered was a pile of bullshit, and I have listed the reasons in detail that those are bullshit.
Now please go on again about my “lack of freedom” since you utterly failed on the first attempt.
“cool freedoms”
Hah!
So cool, hip cat. You show those squares, daddy-o.
I did
Yeah we’ve all seen how depressing America is.
It’s sad that you can only reach places such as shops by driving.
Also you can’t even get an abortion, being trans is likely to get you genocides by a conservative, being black is likely to get you killed by a cop, you can’t see tits or swear but you can have blood and gore everywhere, your cops can no knock raid your house and drag you out to a detention centre and steal your children, you have little employee rights, and very few social protections, you’re banning books from libraries, stopping women getting healthcare, etc.
And on top of all that, you can’t even have any alcohol until you’re 21 and weed is still federally illegal and millions of innocent people are in gaol for decades because of it.
Honestly Americans are the least free of any developed nation and that’s only trending downwards for them.
Gun control?
Yes I have full control of my guns. It is another great part of our freedom in the USA that we can own guns.
What is Singapore’s stance?
Nah, you only think you have control over your guns, but owning them is not controlling them.
Know how to actually control your guns?
Lock them in a safe where only you have access to.
I doubt you are actually a responsible gun owner that does so.
And that is why the US has less freedom than the majority of the developed world.
You need a gun in order to feel safe in your own home since criminals run around with one too. Which isn’t the case in a non-shithole country.
I feel perfectly safe every day without guns, I choose to have them because it’s my right and a privilege that I celebrate. I don’t carry a gun to go out in public because I live in a nice safe area where violent crime is extremely rare.
It’s funny how all of you America haters constantly talk about how we “don’t have any freedom” but you can’t provide any example of anything that I don’t have the freedom to do. Please go ahead and educate me about what freedom you think I don’t have, because I do whatever the fuck I want pretty much all the time.
Which is like… The majority of countries.