I think the most interesting aspect of Singapore's government is they pay government officials multimillion dollar salaries. This makes them very hard to bribe. If you think about the size of the budgets government officials have authority over compared to their salaries, the temptation to be bribed and thus be dominated by corporate interests is overwhelming. In Singapore the incentives are reversed. Any allegation of corruption risks a lost job. In other countries they would get fired and go to work at the companies that bribed them but in Singapore the private companies will have difficulty competing with their government salary, not to mention the prestige that comes with being a government official.
I would be in support of that being tried in the U.S, especially for senior level positions. It would probably save money in the long run.
I've heard this theory quite a few times, but the fact that there is virtually zero low-level corruption (eg. cops asking for bribes) despite low-level public salaries being quite low doesn't jibe that well with this.
More disturbingly, despite that high pay there are regular reports of corruption in the highest ranks, only a few of which even see the light. Here's one particularly unedifying saga that only made the news because the head honcho of a government-linked charity, paid $600k/year plus stupidly generous expenses (fleet of 8 cars etc), was foolish enough to sue a state-owned newspaper.
They are ranked 7th best in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index which is just about the most objective measure of relative country corruption out there so you can't really objectively say that they are just as corrupt as everybody else.
Uh, I actually said is "there is virtually zero low-level corruption", which is entirely in line with that.
I'm just taking exception to the rather glib claim that high salaries eliminate corruption at higher levels, because quite clearly they do not, even in Singapore. But this is not the kind of thing that affects perceptions in day-to-day life, while the Malaysian cop asking for an on-the-spot fine or the Indonesian immigration dude finding a "mistake" in your visa does.
Bribery/favor system isn't usually for personal gain, its to pay for re-election campaigns. That's why we have this incredibly complex and huge political lobbyist system in the US.
Even someone worth millions can't personally pay out their own election campaign or just may not want to waste their personal funds.
>I would be in support of that being tried in the U.S, especially for senior level positions
Roughly 50% of Congress are millionaires with a median of about $3m. In other words, they're all fairly well off as-is.
> Bribery/favor system isn't usually for personal gain, its to pay for re-election campaigns.
You've missed a big part of the favor system if you aren't looking at where people who lose campaigns end up working and how well they are paid -- even after they've written off any future campaigns for public office.
In other words, the fact that the foundations of the political process depend heavily on money is what spoils the whole thing. Nothing will get fixed as long as that remains true.
The only way to do that now is with a constitutional amendment. The Wolf PAC is working hard to get one passed and has actually succeeded in several states.
How exactly do you propose to achieve that, though?
The problem is that political positions bestow power. People with money want that power, and I don't see how you can prevent them from using their money, directly or indirectly, to attain it.
I actually don't have a problem with newspapers printing whatever the hell they want. However I do have a problem with it, when it's broadcast television or radio which is explicitly (and necessarily) a government-mandated monopoly, and to a lesser extent cable television which is in most cases an effective monopoly due to various stupid policies at the federal, state, and municipal levels of government. Assuming we eventually shitcan net-neutrality, I will have the same reservations there, as well.
Basically, as long as there is no physical limit to the number of voices that can be heard (as with broadcast television), and the barriers to entry are reasonably low (unlike with cable television, and possibly internet in the near future), then absolute freedom of speech works very well. Otherwise, all you're left with is propaganda under cover of freedom of speech, and it fucking sucks.
Even if you ban/regulate giving money to candidates, are you willing to ban the ability of citizens to buy ad time and say something political? Who defines what "political" is?
Would you ban:
An ad that promotes preserving a specific forest while there is a referendum about increasing environmental spending.
An ad that says the schools are falling apart and understaffed while an education millage is being voted on.
An ad that says you shouldn't be forced to buy healthcare while a candidate/party's platform is strongly tied to that policy.
With increasingly-replicated data that increasing seniority levels of leadership and simply the plain wealthy over-represent sociopathic and psychopathic traits when compared to the general population, I doubt the idea of paying government leaders more will move the corruption needle any appreciable amount. Generally, it seems the prevalence and diffusion of these traits is semi-stable depending upon the cohort or even industry (financial services, for example) under observation.
Note we're still talking about relatively small groups even so: single digit percentages at most is all I've seen for US population cohorts of various selection criteria. The positive takeaway is that in the US at least, while leadership overrepresents these traits, you are more likely to simply meet well-intentioned and honest leaders (or well-intentioned but ineffective) leaders than those who exhibit the aforementioned traits.
What paying government leaders more CAN pave the way clear for however, is for far less "privacy" of their daily lives, and far stricter anti-corruption regulations. Something along the lines of a bodycam streaming straight to a replicated digital vault, accompanied by rules like unexplained gaps in the stream are grounds for instant, unappeal-able, permanent dismissal with revocation of all retirement benefits, with the ability to let third parties also vault the encrypted streams if desired. If they're paid so much out in the open, then it will probably be easy to sell the voting public on keeping such "digital tabs" on the leadership. Still wouldn't prevent the corruption, but I'd be happy to root it out before it rots out the infrastructure from underneath us.
You could go some way to solving the problem by making all financial transactions public, no exceptions, with extremely severe penalties for attempted non-disclosure.
This suggestion often makes heads explodes, but some countries do something similar already.
The price of bribery/lobbying is related to (price to influence) * (number of officials). Instead of raising the price to influence by paying them more, I recommend raising the number of officials.
If congress had 10k members, bribing enough to get something passed would get quite expensive. (6320 would be the current min size of the US House of Representatives by the original method in the Constitution of at least 1 per 50k)
I guess that would raise costs to 6320/435 = 14.5x. At $1.6 million per seat [http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/how-much-does-...] you could buy congress for $10.1 billion. The federal budget is about $3800 billion, so... this seems like an attractive price if the congress you buy is willing to steer a few percent of the federal budget into your pocket.
In a country with a 16 trillion dollar GDP and a 3.5 trillion dollar budget how big would the salaries need to be to make our government officials incorruptible?
"We are mostly law abiding because we are afraid and repressed and we have no choice, not because we are inherently well behaved or “good.” We’re not Disneyland by a long shot but it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.
"Gibson was a visionary in that he saw clear through the hype to the disturbing underbelly. It turns out our government doesn’t have the secret to prosperity, and progress and they are clearing failing in technological innovation and creativity. But others still believe in the hype and if the PAP’s model for pseudo democracy takes off then new democracies everywhere are in danger."
Note that author Kenneth Jeyaretnam is the son of J.B. Jeyaretnam, a veteran opposition policitian who got royally screwed over by the Singaporean government, and the leader of a (small) opposition party himself, so take that with a grain of salt. Not that this invalidates his views, but he's certainly not a neutral observer like Gibson was.
Having grown up in Singapore for 3 years (first through third grade) I for one was completely in love with the place. This was in the late 70s, however, and some of the "dirt" still existed at that time. In fact, our flat (a 20-story apartment building) was right next to a "kampung", which was a shanty tin-roof village with chickens running this way and that, inhabited by very poor native people. Their sole means of income, from what I remember, was by pulling magnets out of TVs and radios and selling the magnets... to whom I have no idea.
It's my understanding that none of those kampungs exist in Singapore any longer, and I've often wondered where all of the people were sent.
In those pre ceramic supermagnet days those were probably alnico magnets (aluminum, nickel, cobalt) and although you get $4/lb for scrap nickel you'll only get $1/lb or so for alnico magnets from a scrap metal dealer, today.
Where you'd get your feedstock from is a complete mystery as the scam of "recycling" by shipping used electronic to the 3rd world is pretty modern. If you could get an infinite supply of gear (rejects returned to manufacturer?), I don't think it would be a challenge to rip apart speakers of that time and generate a roughly minimum wage income.
Nickel is really quite valuable. Prices always vary but a tenth the cost of equal weight of silver is semi-stable-ish. Figure maybe a hundred times what you'll get for scrap steel. Or maybe two or three times what you'll get for copper. If there's precious metals, and semi-precious metals, I'd say nickel is just one step below the semi-precious, like wanna-be precious metal.
That page says rent is $13 per month for each of 28 homes, and the entire thing had a purchase offer of $33 million which was rejected. Interesting place, for this an other reasons.
Most of them probably ended up in the same nice little flats everyone else in Singapore now lives in, unless they weren't Singaporean citizens. There's a reason people keep voting for the PAP, and it's not just the prevailing culture being rather more tolerant or even favourable towards overbearing government than Americans.
There are a lot of valid concerns with regards to Singapore's excessive central planning, governmental and social disapproval of nonconformity, etc. But this piece really does sound like the perspective of a disappointed poverty tourist. There is a huge difference between visiting filth and slums and red-light districts and desperate people struggling to get by, and having to live there all your life.
Singapore did a lot of things wrong, but part of the reason it is so (unnervingly) clean and prosperous and ordered is because the government has made an effort (not completely successful, and again perhaps with not all the right methods) to provide the denizens of the country with places to live and ways to make a decent living.
All that is also possible because of stupidly cheap labor from Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India. Nearly every middle class household here has their own maid. They are not treated that well...
Driving around Singapore you see trucks carrying loads of migrant workers everywhere you go. When you first arrive its heartbreaking to see, but of course one gets "used" to it over time.
Great find! Not just for the article, but for the idea of 'hacker tourism.' Is that an established thing/industry/practice? [...] A bit of googling turned up this thread, which looks useful for ideas an inspiration:
Wow. I remember reading this in print when it was first published. I had just gotten a dial up internet connection at home. 28.8 kb/s!!!! Now I'm typing this on my phone. All lot has changed in 22 years.
Re-reading this article makes me think of a scifi short story that I read a while back that I can't remember the name of.
I thought it was by Bruce Sterling but apparently not. About a guy who went to (Dubai?) to reprogram some "ancient" assembly-line robots, and had trouble because access to the "net" was highly controlled, and he needed to get documentation. He hacked into a payphone, only to find that there was a lively "underground" scene on the net, and some of the royalty he had encountered was active on it.
It seems that it won't be news for anybody here, but it was for me as I never heard of this article and didn't know who this Gibson guy is as well (I don't like science fiction), but the article appears to be so influential that there even is wikipedia article about that with quite interesting details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Penal...
The fun thing is how you can "date" this great essay to pre-2000 since it includes ";-)" instead of the more modern ";)", has anyone ever looked at the development of the use of emoticons over time?
I don't use the nose, but I have taken to adding a space between the eyes and the mouth so that skype or facebook - or whatever other horrible chat service I'm using - don't transform it from text to their godawful cutesy images.
A zero-width space works fine for this. :3 appears as a whole cat in skype; :3 (which includes such a space) appears as a colon and a three as it darn well ought.
Less informative than I hoped. Seems they're using the "nose" to drive readership in the sub-heading.
The earliest and strongest claim is that emoticon use varies like accents or dialects. He claims that the nose is associated with more conventionality or adult interests regardless of age, but doesn't disclose the strength of the association. Based on the call out of the nose in the subheading, I suspect it's primarily mentioned to make the article more interesting.
Relevant portion of article:
Schnoebelen has found that use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class—just like dialects or regional accents. Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. “You start using new emoticons, just like you start using different words, when you move outside your usual social circles,” said Schnoebelen. He discovered a divide, for instance, between people who include a hyphen to represent a nose in smiley faces— :-) — and people who use the shorter version without the hyphen. “The nose is associated with conventionality,” said Schnoebelen. People using a nose also tend to “spell words out completely. They use fewer abbreviations.” Twitter notoriously obscures demographic data, but according to Schnoebelen, “People who use no noses tend to be tweeting more about Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber. They have younger interests, younger concerns, whether or not they’re younger.”
I thought the dated thing was going to a "music shop". I can remember that we used to do that, although I can't remember the last time I did so. Admittedly, when I lived in Singapore I only bought CDs while out of the country on business. Still, this essay makes me think that Gibson didn't actually spend a great deal of time in Singapore. Even around the millennium one could find grime if one were so inclined. And "transvestite prostitutes", even if one were not actually inclined. Were did he think all the guest labor lived?
This is an excellent read! It is also included in Gibson's collection of non fiction writing - Distrust That Particular Flavor, which I highly recommend.
This is so in line with French philosopher Baudrillard and his discourse on hyperreality. Baudrillard also mentions Disneyland in his work (can't recall in which one). Many of his ideas are tightly related to the Matrix saga and, to some extent, Neuromancer.
I would be in support of that being tried in the U.S, especially for senior level positions. It would probably save money in the long run.