This is the "dictator" that you're allowed to run for election against and the "no chewing gum" bylaws Singaporeans sell T-shirts joking about the system to foreigners, right?

Try doing that in mainland China...

There are many ways to keep yourself (and your son, after, like in SG). You can use arbitrary force and secret police, as it is the case in DPRK or China.

Or you can use the fact that you basically own the State to pit everything against your political opponents. There are various ways to do this, and at different intensities. SG's PAP is famous for using lawfare against political bloggers, newspapers and political opponents who question their rule.

Western democracies, where the selectorate is currently fearing for a populist takeover has started to do the same: German politicians filed more than 4,000 defamation cases, vague "hate speech laws" allow to selectively try your opponents, the State funds compliant press and NGOs, and so on. The EU functions in a way that democratic oversight and popular will is so dilluted that it isn't a real constraint, while keeping the "democratic" varnish and some legitimacy.

At least in SG, DPRK or China, things are clear and not hypocritical, maybe it's better for everyone.

so is USA and Trump, why people call Trump a dictator?

i failed to understand the enthusiasm for politics memes.. it's a good point, i just dont undertand the fuss. in the end, you want to something changes in your life, not only something like 'i can joke about our system'. if it can change the system and the policy, i totally support them. but i dont see many cases. If i have to choose one, i will always choose the gum.

i read so many pepople complain the ICE on rednote and on reddit complain Trump and jokes about him, i just don't see the changes. Does Trump retreat any of his major polices? If not, are people just lives in the bubbles?

Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.

Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.

Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)

Everywhere you need to be is air conditioned, which is pretty cool I guess...

(Humidity's high but peak temperatures aren't particularly extreme; it's just never cold)

That's just south east asia in general.

the "we didn't know" trope is actually somewhat believable in the cases of people that casually met a socialite at the behest of others. Less so in the case of somebody like Chomsky who was getting emails from Epstein asking him about how to defend himself in the media and responding with commentary about "the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women"

The nicest spin you can put on it is that it wouldn't be the first time that Chomsky had endorsed something without too much scrutiny because it aligned with his personal beliefs about who were motivated to manufacture lies, and the others involved politics rather than paedophiles

Yep.

In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...

Yep. In practice, you've probably got a group of over 70s who are much safer drivers than the average 17-24 year old and some with declining eyesight who are worse. The test proposes to distinguish between the two

The issue is that the "over 70s" group, while on the whole averages out to moderate safety, includes a number of individuals that are very dangerous drivers (to themselves, and to others). If one looks at the overall statistics, the group as a whole looks ok, but those dangerous outliers are the ones that get the "press coverage" on the nightly news when they do cause an incident, skewing peoples view of "over 70s drivers".

I am not objecting to the test. I am disagreeing with the sweeping statement.

I think testing eyesight is important. In fact you need to make a declaration about your eyesight when you first get a license and when you renew after 70. There is no real enforcement of the former either (they just ask you to read a number plate at a distance IIRC).

I doubt Patrick is the world's biggest Nick Shirley fan, but that's not really how it's conveyed in the article.

Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota government's response that the state's own compliance checks had found them open shortly afterwards but that some of them were under investigation.

There's an interesting point to be made that detailed, bipartisan evidence collected by suitably qualified officials that some daycenters were closed at times they were claimed to be open gets less attention than a YouTuber with an agenda rocking up at nurseries at what may or may not have been their opening times, but that's not how it's actually expressed. Rather it seems to be arguing for face value judgements of his video and against journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.

The way I phrased that point was "The investigators allege repeatedly visiting daycare centers which did not, factually, have children physically present at the facility despite reimbursement paperwork identifying specific children being present at that specific time. The investigators demonstrated these lies on timestamped video, and perhaps in another life would have been YouTube stars."

Being brought up believing you have a divine right to rule and a duty to enlarge your kingdom isn't a selection effect, but worked to pretty much the same outcome in terms of brutality. Even in European states where there were pretty straightforward primogeniture rules of succession, you ended up with hundreds of years of "legitimate" inheritors displaying fondness for foreign military expeditions and tactical ploys to acquire tendentious claims to other territory, and as soon as a direct adult male descendant from a single wife wasn't available succession selected for ambition and ruthlessness considerably more than a parliamentary system.

I remember a few amusing examples which weren't strictly inaccurate but were pretty blatant official lines, like how the US uniquely got to stress a "strong democratic tradition" as its political system, whereas everywhere else in the Western world was just "parliamentary democracy" or "constitutional monarchy" and at least the Cold War era versions had a "Communists" line item which purported to identify how few people in democratic societies were members of Communist parties...

Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where there isn't any strategic value to dissembling or being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are, of course, smart and well connected people that want someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of attention occupying the centre of attention.