I think if you were born as a US citizen or simple a citizen of a western liberal democracy, you have won half the race already, as long as you don't screw up badly. It sucks if you are not a citizen of a liberal democracy ...
There's also nothing about your location that stops you working remotely for a company in any other country. I for example work remotely from overseas, and I live farther from my company's headquarters than you would if you picked up a gig for a company in the Bay Area.
Things are not quite as bad as they seem.
With that part about lack of "civil liberties" you make it sound like you're in North Korea or something...
In fact, Singapore is one of the nicest countries on the planet to live and work in, and lots of ex-pats Americans, including very rich ones, pick it as a place for work and recidence.
Or perhaps you just want to flee "conscription", which is something lots of places as small as Singapore do, as it cannot have an optional army service like the US (which had compulsory conscription back in the day too, for Vietnam, etc). And which more or less its your duty as a citizen -- that's how the country protects its borders.
>I think if you were born as a US citizen or simple a citizen of a western liberal democracy, you have won half the race already, as long as you don't screw up badly.
Compare to what Singapore? 2/3 of the world's population would cut an arm to be able to live in a place like Singapore.
And do you think the millions of homeless, white-trash, poor blacks, latinos etc in the USA have won "half the race"?
Far more people (99.99% of programmers in the USA) never made it big like that or will ever.
Also he's talking about the next Facebook, Twitter, Groupon etc. You don't have to make that (and in all probability, you wont, it's statistics: divide the number of succesful startups like that by the number of programmers).
You can still make a great startup (in Singapore, the USA or even anywhere else) and a decent fortune for yourself outside of the "Valley".
Here's a succesful entrepreneur (and outside the Valley too), who sold his company in the USA and moved to Singapore. And even started some business there too (I think he left again now, after several years).
Here's what he says: "It’s a great place to set up a business, which is important to me."
Only if you believe you owe nothing to your country, and you have some god-given right to roam carefree and enjoy what others have helped build.
Coming from a country with actual experience of having to live under foreign occupation, you come to see things differently.
Of course if you're country is unchallenged and mostly occupies or bullies other countries itself, then that's another thing. But in actual historical real life, and for most countries who are not the US (e.g. who had suffered wars and invasions instead of creating them), you get to live in a free country only if you defend it.
>with a nice topping of state-sanctioned gender discrimination (considering that most countries with this system require only men to enlist).
That was actually meant with the exact opposite intention, so that women won't get involved in the mess that is war. The same way on a sinking boat it was "women and children first". Only over-exposure to PC BS would make people see that, women not getting machine gunned in some barracks for example, as "gender discrimination"....
(Not to mention the second complaint contradicts the first, like in the famous joke: "― The food in this restaurant was terrible", "― Yeah, and so small portions").
Discrimination in favor of women is gender discrimination.
There are many programming tutorials on the Internet. As well as working through one of them you could help translate it from English into {Malay? Mandarin? Tamil?}. You are, I assume, bi-lingual. That's an advantage for companies who want to sell to countries who speak a language that you speak.
Lots of open source software and documentation want help with translation. You could build a strong portfolio and reputation by helping those projects.
People in the 80s and 90s (in the USA) learned coding from a couple or so books they bought and playing with their home computer.
You now have thousands of videos, articles and books online for free, and the whole documentation for languages etc.
Start with small webpages, add JavaScript functionality, learn jQuery, move to learn Ember, React or Angular, and that can be enough to get you a job.