I think I agree with the idea that it is better to turn the smartphone into the phone you want, but I think it might require a bit more work than just not installing TikTok :)
Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.
I love walking - checking distance tracking on my phone, I walked over 20km in a day a couple of weeks ago. But when it's hot in Singapore, the distances I don't want to walk can become crazy-short at times.
I'm hesitating to judge someone taking a ride-share around the corner. Among many other reasons, I can imagine scenarios where someone would think it worth paying to not arrive a sweaty mess.
I've just remembered whichever version of Sim City I played as a kid used to have the option (and encourage?) to take on debt. I found the interest a killer.
I don't envy politicians having to run a country, knowing that 10% + of all government spending is just going towards interest payments for past spending.
As with all debt, you hope that it was used to buy assets that are earning more than the interest cost, and not just on a consumable.
Thinking about it, I wonder if this doesn't capture the whole picture. It is the percentage of spending, but doesn't capture whether that total spending denominator is itself more or less than the government is earning. Suppose one year, a government spent twice as much as it earned. Even if the interest payments stayed the same, wouldn't the "interest payments as a share of expenditure" halve that year?
~$100,000 every 10 years is expensive, but I think even in a lot of countries with good public transport, there would be a large number of people who would consider paying $1,000 a month to be able to have a car if that was the only way to have one. It seems to me as though a lot families share a car quite widely too.
Even in countries without an expensive on-road tax, people do often choose to pay more than $10,000 a year in depreciation cost, rather than the option of buying a car that has already gone through the early, rapid depreciation. People also choose to get a car loan, again increasing the cost. I'm fairly uninformed whether the interest on those is significant.
Of course, the COE is in addition to depreciation and maintenance, and those are both also expensive in Singapore. Plus people buy the cars through loans. And, excluding everything I've said above, the cars themselves are very expensive to buy!
As an example, a 2.0L e:HEV Honda Civic is US$195,000 including the COE, so approximately US$90,000 without it. Looking on the US Honda site, it looks like the same car is under US$33,000. There must some on-road taxes in the US, and difference in specs, but that's a big difference in price, in addition to the ~$100,000 COE.
Even knowing they're expensive, there's something I still can't get over, seeing a 6-figure price across the windscreen of a base model (and knowing you don't get to take off any zeros when doing a currency conversion to what you're used to).
> You save so much on income tax in Singapore, but consumption is expensive.
It depends on what you are consuming. Sins like driving, alcohol, smoking and gambling are expensive. But the daily essentials aren't all that expensive, especially eating out starts very low.
If you are an American, you have to start looking into the housing deduction to make your taxes work since the foreign tax credit doesn’t go very far in Singapore (and you need the FTC after the foreign earned income credit caps).
> People also choose to get a car loan, again increasing the cost.
Sorry, could you please explain how car loans increase the cost?
> Of course, the COE is in addition to depreciation and maintenance, and those are both also expensive in Singapore. Plus people buy the cars through loans. And, excluding everything I've said above, the cars themselves are very expensive to buy!
In a sense, all these other costs don't really matter: if they increased (or dropped) by a dollar, in equilibrium the winning CoE bid would drop (respectively increase) by a dollar.
It is no hyperbole to say that 90 percent of car loans are between 8-14 percent interenst in the US right now. That is considering branded dealerships, partners, and used/CPO lots.
A 10 percent rate on a 40k loan for a 60k mid-range SUV over 5 years is roughly 10k more in costs to the buyer. THis is the average purchase price/loan term in the US for new cars, at least.
So while a 10k increase in price due to the loan isn't comparable to a 3-6x in price in Singapore, the infinitely higher amount of consumers in US caught in this trap is directly going into the selling agent's pocket. At least in SGP, that COE entitlement cost goes to "the state".
Thanks for looking into that - that claim also surprises me!
It makes sense to subtract the taxes for a comparison between pension and salary, but by taking investments into account, and probably living expenses too, since they depend upon investments, I think you're doing too much work to support that claim.
Presumably it is fairly standard for the average retiree to have more assets/investments than the average worker. Those assets generate income (or reduce living expenses). I think that is too different from the claim that the pension is higher.
To be clear, the claim is false as it is written as far as I can tell.
That said, young people have a lot more expenses. They need to buy houses and raise kids and get bigger cars. Retirees largely don’t have to do those things.
So I can imagine the frustration if I was trying my best reach basic life milestones while at the same time being forced to pay for people who already achieved those things.
Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!
I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).
As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.
That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.
I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?
I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)
But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.
Cables are something I have no qualms about buying from AliExpress, and I'd say they are better quality than what I can buy locally.
I power my laptop with a WOTOBE 100W 3-meter braided USB-C cable, I got three years ago, for €5. I roughly reel it up and throw it in my backpack, and the next day it comes out again.
I actually bought another one this year (as a spare) as I feel I've had it too long and it should break sometime soon. From a visual inspection there's absolutely nothing wrong with it though.
Compare this to paying €10 for a 1.5m cable from the supermarket, which is just a 50c Chinese product in a box that'll last 3 months - great if you need a cable NOW though. Or €30 for something from an electronics store that is whitelabeled with the brand of a phone manufacturer - and neither is actually rated for 100W.
The thing is the stuff retail stores sell locally is just the same stuff I can buy from China. Except they need to make a profit, the local distributor needs to make a profit, and the regional distributor needs to make a profit. So you end up paying 10x more for the same thing and/or they sell lower quality (= cheaper for them) items. I see zero value in them still existing other than convenience, it's not like the workers can tell you anything that you can't just ask Google yourself.
For what it's worth, Apple chargers are, or used to be, pretty high quality. There's this infamous teardown video of a cheap clone showing 0.5mm of air is all that's between you and a potentially fatal electric shock.
I 100% agree regarding Apple charging adapters. It is mostly their cables I have a problem with, and even that seems mostly around strain relief. I don’t mind being careful with the stain on cables, but I don’t want to have to convince others. They also do make some that have a braided exterior which seem to last much better.
In general, when I see people using cheap power adapters, I encourage them to use cheap cables if they have to, but at least the adapter should be from a company that would be embarrassed if it exploded or killed you. Usually people have enough adapters around from when they bought old phones.
My mum has an odd habit of plugging in the phone and then turning on the power switch afterwards. A knock-off Apple charger she was using caught fire with a bang, and somehow threw the phone some distance. I’m not clear how that is possible. The fact she wasn’t holding the phone may have been very important.
Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".
I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!
I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.
"...choose to see black" :)
Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.
I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords.
One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.
As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.
I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
I doubt you'd see many ads in the iPhone Assistive Access mode, which can (sort of) turn an iPhone into a feature phone. You might also need to swap out a few Apple apps though. https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
reply