Thanks for replying. I lived in Singapore for a year, and my experience of the place was very different from yours is, so I am interested in your perspective.

From your reply, I understand that you are running a startup in Singapore? I am particularly interested in why you find Singapore good in that regard. Apart from the low taxes, my experience of Singapore would indicate to me that it is a very difficult place for a technology startup for the following reasons (if you could refute these I would be most interested).

1. The large and ongoing diaspora of educated, intelligent engineers who find the constant censorship and nonsensical propaganda distasteful and leave for free-er pastures. Making it difficult to hire and keep technical people locally.

2. The abysmal state of internet services. I found internet to be slow, unavailable, expensive, monitored and censored.

3. Despite the low taxes, the cost of living is very high. The Lee family (through Temasek and the Government) control the supply and demand for housing and use that leverage to apply a 'rental tax' on guest workers which is a way of distributing wealth from the middle class 'migrant' workers to the local population (who receive preferential terms for loans and purchase price of Government housing. There is typically a 300 bps spread between the loan and the rental yield). Food and transport is also expensive.

4. Related to 1 & 2, the general antithetic feeling towards free speech.

5. The city is boring as hell. It has some good museums, and a couple of interesting nightspots, but generally not much goes on. Anyone doing anything interesting risks fining, caning, jailing or all three. For technical people this is a big downside.

Apart from those, there are some things I do agree with you on. 1. The city is very safe (except for Dengue fever), and very clean, something that appeals to technical people.

2. The weather is excellent if you like 28 deg Celsius @ 85% humidity 300 days of the year. (I don't, but SGP does have A/C almost everywhere.)

3. It IS a great base for travelling in SE Asia. For North Asia, I think HK is better.

And some, not so much. 1. The public transport is not particularly reliable, except in Govt. statistics. The buses are often late, are very slow and badly organised. The trains are fine as long as you don't have to change lines, then they seem to be deliberately mis-timed. I was in Singapore when the train breakdowns occurred. On the green line they did not have enough power to run the line, so they started turning the A/C off.

2. The food ranges from mediocre (and expensive) to food poisoning. How you find the food will depend on which country you arrived from. For me, it was uninspiring.

Every place has good points and bad. On balance, I personally felt that the bad outweighed the good, but there were other contributing factors to that decision. I am still curious as to why you think it is a good city for a startup. Regards, o2sd