Dear Natascha,
I read with pleasure yesterday that one of your ministries started a new digital interactive media initiative called co-space where the Singapore government encourage schools, industries and government agencies to develop projects that would link up both the real and virtual worlds. My sense is that this is one of your many attempts to "enlarge" the space so that the Singaporeans don't feel ostracized by the rising costs of living and the threat of foreigners who we paid to replace the dying population. The idea is slightly better than the other agency under our minions called A-STAR on search engines.
Seriously, I don't see why you place so much emphasis in making your minions to continue this fruitless science and technology development to an island. After all, this Disney Land of yours with a death penalty is traditionally a trading port, founded by one of my minions, Sir Stamford Raffles. At that point of time, his job for East India Trading Company (a multi-national corporation of that time and one of our outfits in business, compare that to the Tata group today) was out to colonize countries for resources. Singapore is meant to be a traditional port, a place where we export and import goods and a financial hub for us to launder tonnes of money whether they are from the Middle East, Russia, India or China. It is impossible for a small island with so little critical mass to build a research centre.
But the virtual space idea has some credence, I might add. First of all, it is a method to give young and cynical individuals to rant somewhere where the rest of the world don't hear them. The earliest version of such people, we called them the bloggers. Maybe the next generation of ranters would be called avatars in the virtual space. Of course, just like the politicians, we also co-opt the best and hippest to serve in our mouthpieces' (SPH and MediaCorp) ranks. If you have not realized, Xiaxue was blogging for us sometime back in STOMP. Now we dumped her as well. Remember how we threw a heavy sledge hammer at Mr Brown.
Second, virtual worlds are just fads which we placed to move people to do something else, while forgetting what's happening in the real world. The poor Singaporeans are now waiting for April Fool's day to get their cash, how ironic.
Lastly, if you are a talent in this area, where would you be? You can learn to be like this Malaysian foreign talent, who exploited your system to get a better life in America and spent his time making cynical and critical remarks about Singapore and that egomanical monkey servant of yours named Philip Yeo.
In the end, when the casinos are finally up, this whole fad of an innovation and research hub of yours would end. Unless you are thinking of paying those useless old foggies scientists from the US (who also left our shores like Sir David Lane) with our casino money, then it would come back to my hypothesis that Singapore's role in the world is not an innovation hub, but a third world trading port and financial centre for southeast asia.
Thick Face & Black Heart,
Uncle Screwtape
