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Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by tiktok » Mon, 31 Jan 2022 8:57 am

malcontent wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 9:54 pm

I wish your husband could have grown up in my neck of the woods, where underprivileged whites were the norm, trailer trash, stoners, hillbillies, with a smattering of inbreds too. Heck, people of color were often better off and felt sorry for all the poor white who just can’t catch a break.

From my perspective, this idea of white privilege is just a liberal narrative that elite whites in their ivory towers came up with. I never saw it on the ground where I came from. I believe that is why there is so much division in America today, the elites are simply out of touch with reality.

There is privilege alright, but I believe it’s more about money than skin color.
Maybe you never saw it where you came from, but you can see it in any nice neighborhood of any US city. People bought houses there for peanuts in the post war years, see the price increase by multiples, sent their kids to good colleges, invested in their businesses, and this has gone on for several generations, compounding that wealth and nurturing a good work ethic. Meanwhile, in most areas, people of colour were simply banned from buying houses in those areas, couldn't accumulate any significant wealth, lived in ghettos, compounded by generations again.

That's just one example. Even if things have come a long way, it's fair from a level playing field. And there's no "invented liberal narrative", just a bunch of ignorant people on the defense who like to cherry pick examples to try and disprove the disgraceful history of race in the US.
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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Mon, 31 Jan 2022 2:36 pm

smoulder wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 9:12 pm
Lisafuller wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 7:48 pm

Ethnicity is a great point, living in a majority Chinese country may be quite a pull, although I will say I’m not sure they would identify too much with the Chinese here, even though they’re both Chinese. Other than language, I don’t think they share too much in common. Same same but different.
They are definitely culturally closer to Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese than they are to Caucasians who are the dominant race in the US or Japanese. It's hard to overlook this factor.
Definitely have to agree.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Mon, 31 Jan 2022 2:38 pm

malcontent wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 9:54 pm
MOCHS wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 8:27 pm
My Caucasian American husband strongly disagrees about the US police “being far more capable”.

He is painfully aware that the way he looks unconsciously grants him some form of privilege in the US and it does make him uncomfortable. There are plenty of news articles listing the disparities in punishments for the same petty crime between a White and a POC.
I wish your husband could have grown up in my neck of the woods, where underprivileged whites were the norm, trailer trash, stoners, hillbillies, with a smattering of inbreds too. Heck, people of color were often better off and felt sorry for all the poor white who just can’t catch a break.

From my perspective, this idea of white privilege is just a liberal narrative that elite whites in their ivory towers came up with. I never saw it on the ground where I came from. I believe that is why there is so much division in America today, the elites are simply out of touch with reality.

There is privilege alright, but I believe it’s more about money than skin color.
Important to note that oftentimes there is a correlation between skin color and SES.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Mon, 31 Jan 2022 2:41 pm

tiktok wrote:
Mon, 31 Jan 2022 8:57 am
malcontent wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 9:54 pm

I wish your husband could have grown up in my neck of the woods, where underprivileged whites were the norm, trailer trash, stoners, hillbillies, with a smattering of inbreds too. Heck, people of color were often better off and felt sorry for all the poor white who just can’t catch a break.

From my perspective, this idea of white privilege is just a liberal narrative that elite whites in their ivory towers came up with. I never saw it on the ground where I came from. I believe that is why there is so much division in America today, the elites are simply out of touch with reality.

There is privilege alright, but I believe it’s more about money than skin color.
Maybe you never saw it where you came from, but you can see it in any nice neighborhood of any US city. People bought houses there for peanuts in the post war years, see the price increase by multiples, sent their kids to good colleges, invested in their businesses, and this has gone on for several generations, compounding that wealth and nurturing a good work ethic. Meanwhile, in most areas, people of colour were simply banned from buying houses in those areas, couldn't accumulate any significant wealth, lived in ghettos, compounded by generations again.

That's just one example. Even if things have come a long way, it's fair from a level playing field. And there's no "invented liberal narrative", just a bunch of ignorant people on the defense who like to cherry pick examples to try and disprove the disgraceful history of race in the US.
Very well put. Institutional, systemic racism. Ignoring its existence or its effects would just be myopic.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Mon, 31 Jan 2022 2:46 pm

smoulder wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 11:00 pm
Privilege exists in every country. It's always the dominant race or ethnicity. Caucasians in western countries. Chinese in Singapore. Upper caste Hindus in India. The list goes on and on. Yes, there are exceptions among the dominant race or ethnicity, but they are exceptions and not the rule.

From what I know, the people of color (mostly Asians) who have "bucked the trend" in the US are often immigrants who went to the US riding on privilege in their countries of origin. Meaning they typically came in with some advantages.
You’re exactly right, sometimes it’s hard to tell which privilege overrules the other. Are your privileged because you’re well off, because of your ethnicity, or are you well off because your ethnicity gives way to opportunities.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by malcontent » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 9:18 am

Lisafuller wrote:
Mon, 31 Jan 2022 2:46 pm
smoulder wrote:
Sun, 30 Jan 2022 11:00 pm
Privilege exists in every country. It's always the dominant race or ethnicity. Caucasians in western countries. Chinese in Singapore. Upper caste Hindus in India. The list goes on and on. Yes, there are exceptions among the dominant race or ethnicity, but they are exceptions and not the rule.

From what I know, the people of color (mostly Asians) who have "bucked the trend" in the US are often immigrants who went to the US riding on privilege in their countries of origin. Meaning they typically came in with some advantages.
You’re exactly right, sometimes it’s hard to tell which privilege overrules the other. Are your privileged because you’re well off, because of your ethnicity, or are you well off because your ethnicity gives way to opportunities.
If race was all it takes, then people like my brother should be much better off than he is. He is working as a security guard in the US. He has never made even half of the average wage, he just showed me his W-2 and his income was under $20k for 2021. This is despite having a middle class upbringing in a solid, traditional white family. His Asian wife made more than double that in 2021, and she is a recent immigrant still acclimating to American culture and language. I know for a fact that she didn’t come to the US with any privilege, and she certainly didn’t get any since she arrived. If there was widespread systematic racism, how is this even possible? If you think this is an isolated case, it’s not — Asians on average earn more than whites in the US. I’m not denying racism exists. My wife who is Asian experienced it first hand when we lived in the US. But it didn’t come at the hands of the dominant race, instead, it came from a black lady colleague of hers who completely snubbed her during team breakouts at her employer. This is a media headline you don’t see: much of the racism and violence against Asians in the US is coming from blacks. The liberal media won’t even even mention what race the perp is (when they are black), you’ve got to dig for it — the recent case in NYC of the Asian lady who got shoved in front of an oncoming train and died is just one recent example.
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it - Niels Bohr

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by smoulder » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 10:21 am

Anecdotes vs stats. The stats show that white Americans earn more on average than any other group except for Asians.

Asians constitute less than 10 percent of the population and are also very diverse. But more importantly, the stats I found through a quick search shows that average Asian incomes have increased after the 90s and also corresponds to a large number of highly skilled immigrants coming in. The stats apparently show that the increase in the Asian American population due to skilled immigrants was quite significant. So you can see the correlation there. They weren't quite bucking the trend of racial privilege, neither disproving it - America was quite simply picking the best of the lot and that skewed the stats.

I see a very similar trend in Singapore. The average Indian income rose from the levels they were at during the 90s until now. It overtook the average Chinese income. And it also corresponds to an influx of highly skilled immigrants fueling the tech boom. You can find the data online.

At the end of the day, there is no direct proof for or against the existence of racial privilege. However, there is plenty of indirect proof in the numbers.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by MOCHS » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:06 pm

This one hour video does a nice job about discussing anti-Asian hate, the “model minority” stereotype, they also cover income disparity between the Asian American population (not every Asian American is a high income earner), and also talk about Black and Asian communities (We should be allies! Not against each other)

All the issues the US has is not something that can be succinctly discussed in one post nor can it be solved in a generation.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by malcontent » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 1:34 pm

The thing that bothers me most in the US media is the lack of focus on individual responsibility… the idea that one’s lot in life is always someone else’s fault. They ignore black on black crime and pretend that the high black prison population is all due to racism. In the place I grew up in, I got to see first hand the individual choices people make that cause them to end up in prison. I had several friends of friends that went to prison, and if you got to know them, you would quickly understand why — their mentality was just warped beyond repair, and it didn’t matter the race. Some are genetically predisposed to have this mentality, others are influenced by their surroundings — it’s the old nature versus nurture. But I have never seen racism permanently limiting anyone from becoming a upstanding citizen or a success in life, at least not in the USA. The cream almost always rises to the top, no matter the race.
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it - Niels Bohr

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by tiktok » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 2:06 pm

Of course nothing stops anyone from being a success. It's just much, much easier if you have the right circumstances.

If you kidnap someone from their country, enslave them and treat them like garbage for a few generations, those are not ideal circumstances.
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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by malcontent » Tue, 01 Feb 2022 2:31 pm

I see it like Goldilocks, not too much… not too little. Giving people too much (hand outs) can be bad. They lose the fire in the belly and also miss out on the pride of succeeding on one’s own. You see this when you compare public housing in the US versus Singapore, the US just offers cheap rent — the public housing areas end up crime ridden and dangerous… nobody has any pride in their home.

There are parallels when raising children — doing too much for them is bad, just like doing too little for them is also bad — you want to help them just enough so they can succeed on their own. I saw this when my kids were young in the pool — other kids were given too much help and were scared to be on their own; I showed my kids how to get to the side of the pool and climb out by themselves… you could just see how their confidence was transformed!
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it - Niels Bohr

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Thu, 31 Mar 2022 6:40 pm

malcontent wrote:
Tue, 01 Feb 2022 2:31 pm
I see it like Goldilocks, not too much… not too little. Giving people too much (hand outs) can be bad. They lose the fire in the belly and also miss out on the pride of succeeding on one’s own. You see this when you compare public housing in the US versus Singapore, the US just offers cheap rent — the public housing areas end up crime ridden and dangerous… nobody has any pride in their home.

There are parallels when raising children — doing too much for them is bad, just like doing too little for them is also bad — you want to help them just enough so they can succeed on their own. I saw this when my kids were young in the pool — other kids were given too much help and were scared to be on their own; I showed my kids how to get to the side of the pool and climb out by themselves… you could just see how their confidence was transformed!
Yup, completely agree. Help them too much and they become over reliant on others, don’t help them at all and they won’t be able to develop any life skills.

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by Lisafuller » Thu, 31 Mar 2022 6:47 pm

tiktok wrote:
Tue, 01 Feb 2022 2:06 pm
Of course nothing stops anyone from being a success. It's just much, much easier if you have the right circumstances.
Exactly. Technically nothing ever STOPS someone, but can make things nearly impossibly hard.

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Post by hangmann » Mon, 14 Nov 2022 3:30 am

Bumping this convo up. As an update, I'm still living in Singapore, but my EP is about to end next month. Wondering if I should keep my apartment here as my Asia homebase in retirement. My rent is still pretty cheap so I don't think its too much of a financial burden. I'd only want to spend 6-8 months here. Does everything still think this is a bad idea to do only on tourist visas?

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Re: Spending majority of year in Sing as a Retired Tourist?

Post by jwoods1864 » Mon, 14 Nov 2022 5:47 am

hangmann wrote:Bumping this convo up. As an update, I'm still living in Singapore, but my EP is about to end next month. Wondering if I should keep my apartment here as my Asia homebase in retirement. My rent is still pretty cheap so I don't think its too much of a financial burden. I'd only want to spend 6-8 months here. Does everything still think this is a bad idea to do only on tourist visas?
Do you have a passport that grants you 90 days on an STVP?


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