From: Harish Pillay <harish@ganymede.contact.com.sg>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 09:29:24 +0800
To: whgiii@invweb.net (William H. Geiger III)
Subject: Re: Singaporean control freaks & CMR (Re: puff pieces vs tough crypto  issues)
In-Reply-To: <199710231649.MAA26636@users.invweb.net>
Message-ID: <199710240107.JAA16662@ganymede.contact.com.sg>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



William -

Hi.

> In <199710231543.XAA02822@ganymede.contact.com.sg>, on 10/23/97 
>    at 11:43 PM, Harish Pillay <harish@ganymede.contact.com.sg> said:
> 
> >Hi.  For the sake of sanity and completeness, the following has to be
> >corrected.
> 
> >> Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> writes:
> >> > The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social
> >> > controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of
> >> > Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you
> >> > don't, well, you can always delete it. :)
> >> 
> >> The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very
> >> interesting.  Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier
> >> adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate
> >> treatment over there.  I hear (and our Singaporean contributer
> >> confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too.  (Hey you have
> >> the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?)  (I missed the social
> >> control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).
> 
> >Chewing gum per se is not illegal.  I just cannot buy them from any store
> >in Singapore.  I can chew to my heart's content.  I can go up north to 
> >Malaysia, buy a whole month's supply of gum (name your flavour) and bring
> >it back into Singapore.  
> 
> >So, what is moronically illegal is that I cannot sell that pack of gum.
> 
> Signapore is a prime example of "mirco management" at it's worst. Whenever
> such management is attempted either in the public or private sector they
> fail. It should be intresting to see how long Singapore can keep it up.

I don't think the "micro management" is at it's worst in Singapore - not by 
a long shot.  It is true that the Singapore government tries to do so and 
in a lot of what they attempt, they somehow come out smelling roses.  But 
they have goofed up royally as well.  

Regards.
-- 
Harish Pillay                             	  h.pillay@ieee.org
Singapore      *** Ask me about Linux *** http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish