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>Singapore is similar. Tons of cabs. In fact in Singapore you could book cabs in an app / online since like 2009. You get told the number of your cab so when lots of cabs are driving up you know yours is #27B-6. I had similarly nice experiences. I tried to tip a driver $3 for a $7 fare just so I could give him a $10 and he was like "too much lah!" and gave me $2 back.

Singapore's cheapness is due to its extreme levels of labor suppression. A couple of years ago they imprisoned bus drivers striking over unfair pay (they essentially had explicitly racist pay scales * ). They've deported and imprisoned other union activists. In the 80s the prime minister stepped in to break a strike in Singapore Airlines staff promising "I will, by every means at my disposal, teach you a lesson you won’t forget. And I’m prepared to start all over again. Or stop it!" and subsequently threw the strikers in prison.

The practical upshot if this is that they have huge income and wealth inequality compared to other countries less brutal to labor movements and the workplace cultures are usually "keep your head down and don't EVER criticize the boss" (small wonder very little decent software is created there).

Food and taxis and other similar services are embarrassingly cheap. If you're relatively wealthy and gaping inequality doesn't bother you, it's pretty awesome. It scores really high on those "economic freedom" measures because of this.

This is also partly why Uber - whose USP involves is capitalizing on other countries trending towards low wage commoditization by accelerating that process, isn't doing especially well there compared to incumbents.

* * Yes, it's true. Please read this before instinctively hitting downvote: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/12/05/singapore-drop-charges-ag...

> (they essentially had explicitly racist pay scales * )

Wrong. You're talking about Chinese-national bus drivers getting paid less in a country that's 75% Chinese ancestry.

In Singapore the 'racial' hierarchy is: Chinese Singaporean -> White -> Malay Singaporean -> Indian Singaporean -> Malaysian -> PRC Chinese -> Bangladeshi

The bus driver salary hierarchy was : Singaporean -> Malaysian -> PRC Chinese

PRCs are regularly denigrated with terms like "foreign trash" and "PRC scum" - they get the epithets much worse than most other immigrants - with the exception of Bangladeshis. I don't know why they look down on them with disdain given their shared ancestry but they do. If you want to see this racism for yourself, look at the comments of a website called 'stomp'.

In any case, the salaries accurately reflected the default prejudices of the society. It would be like if American bus drivers paid whites more than latinos who in turn got more than blacks.

They went on strike because of this and got beaten up and thrown in prison before being deported.

The salaries also reflect the negotiating power of people from somewhat poorer and much poorer countries. If they decided to lower Malaysian and Singaporean bus drivers to the same level as PRC, there wouldn't be any Malaysian or Singaporean bus drivers. The pricing of labor is exactly what you'd expect from economic and political incentives: don't lay off native labor, source foreign labor from multiple countries so they can't form a powerful union bloc, pay as little as possible.

>The salaries also reflect the negotiating power

Right. And the 0 compensation of slaves before emancipation in the United States reflected their relative negotiating power.

>The pricing of labor is exactly what you'd expect from economic and political incentives

Right. If you get the police to beat up union organizers and throw them in prison it does tend to exert downward pressure on wages - which was exactly my point.

That's partly why it's the "2nd best country" to do business according to CATO: docile, servile labor.

Note that the only disagreement I have here (that I felt like articulating) is that the pay scales are "racist." Though I do want to point out that prohibiting unions from forming based on racial or country-of-origin lines is obviously a very reasonable thing for a country like Singapore to do. And so is prohibiting strikes without notice, or strikes, period, in essential sectors -- if you don't like it, go work in a non-essential sector.

Worth mentioning that in Singapore taxi's have special stops where people queue up just to get into one (much like a bus stop).

I wonder how Uber drivers get away stoping everywhere they feel like. It is somewhat of a traffic disruption.

Don't know about Singapore, but they do it the same way as taxis the world over - they either find some place that's out of the way of traffic, like a side street or driveway (especially if the stop will take a while)... or they just sit there disrupting traffic and make people deal with it. Usually it's either a multi-lane road, or a smaller low-speed road where traffic can slow down a little and squeeze by. Not strictly ideal, but people cope.

Well one Uber driver at least got fined and jailed.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/uber-driver-ja...

But punching an LTA officer sure does not help improving the image.

The taxi stops are there simply for the convenience of drivers and people looking for taxis. Taxis can still stop and pick up passengers anywhere cars are allowed to stop (double yellow line).

What's the lah mean exactly? Heard it a lot in Kuala Lumpur but did not check then. Can sort of guess, but good to hear from someone who knows. Enjoyed being there.

Cursory googling revealed that "lah" in Singaporean Colloquial English signifies agreement. You know what I mean, right?

It doesn't really have meaning it's just used to add emphasis at the end of a sentence.

Americans sometimes put 'yo' end of a sentence to similar effect. Yo.