Re: Singaporean control freaks & CMR (Re: puff pieces vs tough crypto issues)

William - Hi.

In <199710231543.XAA02822@ganymede.contact.com.sg>, on 10/23/97 at 11:43 PM, Harish Pillay said:

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Hi. For the sake of sanity and completeness, the following has to be corrected.

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Declan McCullagh writes:

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The relevance? Another example of Singapore's loony politics. Strict social controls and relative economic freedom. I find it fascinating in light of Net-filtering and other attempts at restricting information flow; if you don't, well, you can always delete it. :)

The net-filtering and social control aspects of Singapore are very interesting. Seems that somewhere like Singapore might be an earlier adopter of mandatory GAK -- social ills have hugely disproportionate treatment over there. I hear (and our Singaporean contributer confirms) that chewing gum is illegal, jay walking too. (Hey you have the jay walking laws in the US too don't you?) (I missed the social control aspect of the vote for kewlest public toilet story).

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Chewing gum per se is not illegal. I just cannot buy them from any store in Singapore. I can chew to my heart's content. I can go up north to Malaysia, buy a whole month's supply of gum (name your flavour) and bring it back into Singapore.

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So, what is moronically illegal is that I cannot sell that pack of gum.

Signapore is a prime example of "mirco management" at it's worst. Whenever such management is attempted either in the public or private sector they fail. It should be intresting to see how long Singapore can keep it up.

I don't think the "micro management" is at it's worst in Singapore - not by a long shot. It is true that the Singapore government tries to do so and in a lot of what they attempt, they somehow come out smelling roses. But they have goofed up royally as well. Regards. -- Harish Pillay h.pillay@ieee.org Singapore *** Ask me about Linux *** http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish