Maintaining my college Yahoo! Singapore email account has its privileges – I found this:
http://sg.yfittopostblog.com/2010/06/21/oliver-fricker-to-be-the-next-michael-fay/
The opinion I am about to express is based on what little I read here, and despite the risk of being judged an unfit parent, I say:
I’m with Singapore on this one.
There are signs. The whole “Low Crime Doesn’t Mean No Crime” bit. For goodness’ sake, this country banned gum (which we Malaysians are secretly pleased about – the day Singapore decided to ban the sale of chewing gum, sales in neighboring Johor Bahru probably shot up. Chewing gum became the gift for your colleagues if you took a long weekend in Malaysia.)
Did the highly publicized fate of a certain last-named Fay person escape this guy? What could possibly possess a person to choose to vandalize in a country like that? Maybe drugs. Oh wait, they throw the book at drug traffickers in Singapore too. It’s called the death penalty. So you should probably do your vandalizing in Hong Kong where, I think, they don’t cane you (please correct me on this one because I see much more graffiti and chewing gum marks here.)
It was raining heavily at Cyberport Kosmo. Those men with umbrellas are trying to get a teenaged gwailo boy out of the tree while his wrestling partner (barely visible in red tee) looks on. They’d been wrestling in the rain (including with large tree branches they seem to have ripped off the trees) just outside the Cyberport Management Office for some time…
Spot the potential vandals – they carried on their wrestling match in the rain until the Men With Umbrellas came back out to confiscate said tree branches.
I spent 10 years in Singapore, and am on my 6th in Hong Kong. I arguably did better career-wise here than there, though that might partially be discounted by work experience levels (since I was a college student and then fresh grad when I was in Singapore.) I’ve heard some of the arguments for and against living there, BUT:
There is a reason people choose to live in Singapore. Some people happen to like living in a place with no gum, thanks very much. It’s not like Singapore ever hid how they feel about vandals or gum. Why should they now come under fire for well, being true to what they have always portrayed themselves to be? You don’t do the crime there, unless you can do the time there.
(Barring the wrongly-accused of course.)
Awhile ago when we lived in Grand Promenade, Sai Wan Ho, I drafted a heated email. When we bought the apartment in the (then) brand new development, it was dog heaven. The security staff knew JD (who is fully trained and has won Agility competitions) and she could run relatively freely in the quieter, unoccupied corners of the development. Years later, the dog-haters outnumbered dog-lovers and I found myself being refused entry into the lift lobby one evening because JD was with me – the guard didn’t even deign to speak to me, he simply spoke to the guard on my side of the door, announcing loudly that he would not be allowing me entry while there were people in the lobby who had a problem with sharing a lobby with a dog.
I wrote an angry email about how dog lovers can only stay in apartments that allow dogs whereas dog haters are free to stay anywhere and can choose a development that bans pets. How could you then penalize dog owners in a supposedly dog-friendly development? The dog haters could have chosen not to live here if they hated animals too much to share a lobby with them. The other dog lovers in the building told me they had attended the building AGMs and even written in – it had been no use, the dog haters now outnumbered and outvoted the dog lovers.
We eventually sold the apartment.
If Rome decides on a complete overhaul, what happens to the Romans?
And in the meantime if people in Rome don’t vandalize, well, you know the drill. Do like they do or get thrown to the Merlions.
