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Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

VS where? I'll praise Singapore. It's clean, safe, has great food, fun clubs, cheap and plentiful taxis, wonderful public transportation, late night food options.

Compare to SF. SF I think there are 5 restaurants in the entire city open past 2am (5 might be wrong but the number is small. SF clubs have a curfew. SF has homeless everywhere. Just got the pleasure of having one squat and defecate in front of me in front of the local market. SF has car breakins and garage breakins all over.

I'm not saying Singapore doesn't have problems but if any other city is worthy of praise so is Singapore. All cities have problems, they're just different problems.

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Comparing to SF you have an island 20x30km which you cannot leave (or rather it’s quite difficult to return back) vs the enormous country with plenty of places to travel. Before the pandemics you could at least travel around Asia etc, now you just stuck there. In addition to that, Singapore has quite chaotic “covvid prevention” rules that make life even more depressing.

So what you are saying is that Singapore is San Francisco but with the lower tier of society all locked-in in some kind of legal confinement.

For the last two years Singapore has had a hard closure of all eating establishments at 1030 - they will literally come and take your drink off of the table. For the last several months any and all background music has been banned in restaurants in case 'music causes people to speak more loudly and encourage the spread of covid "droplets"'.

What you said may have been true in the past, but it hasn't been true for a long time, and at this rate may never be true again.

You mean for whom. Most places are great if you are wealthy, powerful or both.

no there some cities which are absolutely horrible to live in even if you are rich. Its not because you can afford to live in a nice quarter that it makes up for the city at large.

"Most"

  "[Mars] must be a great place to live"
  "Sure, if you're rich"
  "Then I'm sure we will be quite happy."

- Cowboy Bebop EP1, Asteroid Blues

> has great food, fun clubs... late night food options

SG nightclubs have been closed since the beginning of covid (over 1.5 years now) so I'll be surprised if many are left when it finally reopens (a reopening which is nowhere in sight now in spite of Singapore having 85% vaccinated).

When they eased restrictions numbers of new cases climbed. They tightened restrictions again. 3480 new cases today.

We are not even 2 years into the pandemic. Not that many countries are sufficiently vaccinated. There are going to be lots of different strategies and there’s not much to do but wait and see what pans out.

None of that changes that being shut down for 2+ years has a high chance of killing most nightclub businesses.

Singapore clubs are boring

>Compare to SF. SF I think there are 5 restaurants in the entire city open past 2am (5 might be wrong but the number is small. SF clubs have a curfew. SF has homeless everywhere. Just got the pleasure of having one squat and defecate in front of me in front of the local market. SF has car breakins and garage breakins all over.

I can't vouch for the nightclubs and bars bit but there are plenty of cities like Detroit, Gary, Newark and Baltimore (the list goes on) that don't have nearly the frequency of petty property crime and poo in places other than the sewers. Don't get me wrong, these cities have their problems but the baseline level of petty lawlessness and flagrant anti-social behavior is far lower than it is in the west coast cities. You don't have to oppress the heck out of the poors Singapore style to prevent people from crapping on the sidewalks.

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