Only for quantities consistent with trafficking, meaning a minimum of 500 grams. You won't be hanged for a joint.
You may, however, be sent to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre, which is co-located with and effectively a part of Changi Prison, and about as pleasant. Most first-time offenders get away with a probation scheme called the Enhanced Direct Supervision Order though.
And that makes it a super pleasant place to live, I don't ever have to smell that junk on the street. I prefer the smell of good food and that's pretty much what all of Singapore smells like.
Others have already replied this is not exactly the case and it's trafficking weed and other drugs that gets you hanged.
That being said, I'm not so chill about weed. Weed people, like smokers before them, don't consider weed to be a big problem for the people around them and ignore anything you might have against it. That means you'll be laughed at when you ask neighbors to stop smoking two floors below you, to stop growing the plants in their tub, etc. It also means you'll have to go through a lot of places that smell like shit because people smoke weed there often.
> I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
I don't know if they are really capable of thinking of the second and third order effects of what they're doing. There is something psychologically broken about many of the ultra-rich today where their behavior comes across as compulsive.
When you have a hole in your soul that can't be filled with a billion dollars, it simply can't be filled, and that black hole drives much of their behavior. You look at people like Trump and Musk, and they seem... miserable. Like, have you ever heard Trump have a genuine laugh of joy? Not the sort of sneering snicker of a bully, but one that comes from delight? Because I haven't.
We are all at the mercy of their actions, but it's almost like they're at the mercy of their irrational compulsions too.
Not that I'm saying they are deserving of sympathy or aren't responsible for their actions. But if we're looking for someone to pump the brakes on the crazy that's happening these days, it's sure as hell not going to be those hollow men.
I don't like being conspiratorial but it genuinely feels like the people at the top know some major catastrophe is coming and are just grabbing whatever resources they can while they can before retreating to their bunkers. Even the white house is trying to build a massive underground bunker using the ballroom on top as a excuse. I don't see why else they would all be willingly destroying society as they are right now unless they don't think it matters.
I still enjoy the things that are not overtaken by big tech (although it isn't much). Anna's archive and streaming niche movies.
I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.
The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.
I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.
Both can be totalitarian. Both are shit imho. I just don't buy the argument that China is worse because of it.
But if we start nitpicking the US also executes people all over the world without trial and has secret prisons worldwide where they put people (guess what) without trial.
It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money.
As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.
Terminological nitpick: equality is a relation, not an operation. What you refer to as a "commutative operation" is more accurately described as a "symmetric relation".
It's not about believing. It's about a lack of alternatives.
There is no real meaningful competition between money systems. Every nation has one national money system and it's a government mandated monopoly.
Your options are basically complete autarky or using the national money system with nothing inbetween. Even if you were to use a cryptocurrency, you'd still need to pay taxes in USD.
Then there is the fact that cryptocurrencies don't really meaningfully change the rules either. You're supposed to accumulate them forever and profit off of latecomers joining in it at inflated prices. Meaning the supposed competition just amplifies the worst part of money that people would rather get away from.
Anyone who earns an income from work is by definition going to be a "latecomer" by the end of their career. Basically, you're defining yourself by the first few years of your career, e.g. buying thousands of dollars worth of BTC in 2013. By 2026, there is not much point buying more BTC.
Money is given an inherent bias towards the past being more important than the present or the future, which thereby inevitably causes the collapse of the future, which then becomes the collapsed present through the simple passage of time.
This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.
I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p
> because they think it will be beneficial
The Capital-class have, on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.
When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic.
It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job.
Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
> You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
They know that, they just don’t want their kids to go to school with the kids in the bottom 4 quintiles. Also, I probably would have foregone kids if it meant I was not going to be financially independent by age 50. Incomes are too volatile, and healthcare too expensive to be in that age 50 to age 65 period where a healthcare issue or loss of employment can derail you forever.
They optimize for enriching shareholders and experiments like exploring the market for brick phones is a needlessly costly one when existing trends can be exploited.
reply