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A guide to taxes and tax relief
Taxes are another topic that all working Singaporeans will have to deal with eventually, while not fully applicable to those just starting out their careers with smaller incomes, it is good to know and will be useful down the line This post is targeted at young adults and covers the basics about income taxes, with a focus on that of employees as compared to self-employed individuals Full Disclosure: I am not a tax agent or certified professional, for more complicated matters please seek the assistance professional and do your own due diligence If there are any things I missed out please let me know in the comments below
Singapore has a progressive tax structure, with those earning more paying a larger proportion of their income There is a misconception that I have heard
I didn't accept the pay raise because that would put me in a higher tax bracket so I would have to pay more tax
That is incorrect, here is an example Mr A had a chargeable income of $20K and then had a raise bringing his pay to $30K If the statement was true, the entire $30K would be subject to a 2% tax and his tax bill would be $600 What actually happens is that: When assessing his $30K salary, following the chart from top to bottom, the first $20K earned is not subject to tax Afterwards the remaining amount, in this case $10K, is assessed at its respective tax rate. In this case it it 2%, as such he owes $200 in tax, as shown in the chart
While everyone needs to pay taxes, not everyone needs to file taxes One may fall under the No-Filing Service category are not required to submit a tax return, they can log on to the IRAS website and ensure all their income and reliefs are accurate or make any corrections if necessary Others will have to file a tax return, they can do so by following instructions, tips and resources This will most likely apply to those are self-employed
Individuals can choose to pay via an annual lump sum or through up to 12 interest-free monthly installments via GIRO Other methods include (but are not limited to)
Some definitions: Tax Relief: Reduces the amount of income that is subject to tax Tax Rebate: Reduces the actual amount of tax that needs to be paid Illustration here The examples here will fall under Tax Relief unless stated otherwise One can only claim up to $80,000 in tax relief per Year of Assessment
With the current lack of fees and tax relief offered, if one is going to buy Robos/ STI ETF and hold long term anyway, it might be worth it to buy through one's SRS But be aware of the 5% penalty if it is withdrawn early Here are some articles about SRS byFirePathLionandKyith
Considerations
While the potential tax relief may be rather attractive there are some factors to keep in mind before using these schemes For those below the 7% (less than $40K) tax bracket it may not be worth it as the savings VS the amount locked up is quite small That and there's also the issue of policy risk, for a lot of younger investors theres a long time until retirement and there will almost be policy changes in the future Especially since the futures of younger investors may be very fluid, the hard and soft lock-ins warrant extra consideration As usual, it comes down to individual situations and their own due diligence Below is a list of various other tax reliefs that are more situational, one will need to apply to receive the relief unless stated otherwise
Why does no one stand up for mens rights in Singapore?
Why is there no one standing up for Male equality in singapore. Even if there may have been, they will be laughed at and overall treated as a joke because “how can men be disadvantaged in society right?” “Stop whining and man up!!!!” These are a few examples on how men have been systematically(?, not sure if right word don’t POFMA) disadvantaged. -NS. I know this has been repeated for very long. But I feel that people who have not served NS do not understand the true impact on mens careers. Why would any rational company hire a male who has 2 years less experience compared to all of his foreign and female peers AND has to “waste” 2 weeks of precious work time reducing overall company productivity. They will obviously want to hire foreigners or even better females so that they can score diversity points and get benefits from hiring a singaporean. This is best put from u/plstellmewhyitisso
one is a 25 year old local grad, 0 years experience, asking for x salary
Another is 26 year old foreigner, college grad, 3-4 years experience and asking for x salary
Another is 26 year old non-ns female, college grad, 3-4 years experience and asking for x salary plus playing the Women In Tech card and gender diversity card
Why would anyone hire 1??? In todays super competitive world, isn’t this an EXTREME disadvantage? Moreover, the NS pay is literally peanuts, barely enough to pay for food. Even more examples (100% credits to u/appletree911 These phenomena are not merely just socio-cultural but are perpetuated by truly sexist legislative and institutionalised policies. For instance, male preschool teachers are often subjected to abjective limitations with regards to internal gender-specific protocols devised by such institutions. They are not allowed to perform routine care (showering, changing of diapers etc) and have tight restrictions with regards to their physical interactions with children. Conversely, female staffs are not subjected to these limitations. Both genders went through the same training, possess the same qualification and demostrated competence executing their functions, and yet these male teachers are systematically side-lined, solely by virtue of their sex. In Singapore, it is undeniable that females are accorded more rights and protection whereas males are burdened with more liabilities. Let me list some of these examples. Bear in mind that all of these are not merely ambiguous social protocols but legislated and institutionalised policies. S375 of the Penal Code The offence of rape is gender-specific. A woman cannot be charged with rape, regardless of how heinous a sexual misconduct she commits. Amendment to S376 of the Penal Code Prior to Jan 2020 (before the recent criminal law reform), a woman who 'rapes' a man (forces a man to penetrate her with his penis) cannot even be charged under S376 (sexual assault involving penetration). Hence, she can only be charged under S354 (outrage of modesty), which carries the maximum sentence of only 2 years imprisonment. In contrast, a man who commits exactly the same offence is deemed a case of rape, which carries the maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, a difference of a factor of 10. Repeal of S509 and enactment of S377BAof the Penal Code Prior to Jan 2020, males are not protected under the insult of modesty (non-physical sexual harassment) law. In fact, prior to the establishment of Protection from Harassment Act in 2014, there is seemingly no legal recourse for males if they are subjected to non-physical harassment. Currently, women are still more protected than men from modesty related offences. Laws such as S27(1)(d) of the Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act and S4 of the Defamation Act are gender-specific and only protect women. S377 of the Penal Code No provision pertaining to the deviant act of sexual exploitation of a corpse by a woman exist. Under the current legal framework, S377 (sexual penetration of a corpse) applies explicitly for males only. A woman who employs the penis of a deceased man to sexually penetrate herself on her own accord is seemingly not liable for any legal repercussion. S377A of the Penal Code Male homosexual acts of any nature (even private acts) are condemnable under the law (outrages of decency) whereas female homosexual acts are not subjected to this abjective limitation. S366, S372, S373, S373A of the Penal Code, Part XI of the Women's Charter etc Most laws protecting victims of prostitution are gender-specific and are only accorded to females. S61 of the Education (Schools) Regulations With regards to medical examination in school, consent from girls over the age of 10 is mandated under the law if they are to be examined by a male person. Consent from boys over the age of 10 (or of any age for the matter) is not mandated under the law, regardless of circumstances. S83 of the Criminal Procedure Code With regards to body searching, a male officer can only conduct searches upon a female person if he has strong reasons to believe that she is a terrorist and that she is about to carry out an act of terrorism. Conversely, no such limitation is imposed upon female officers and they are empowered to conduct searches upon persons of any sex, regardless of circumstances. S69 of the Women's Charter A woman is eligible to file for spousal maintenance against her husband regardless of circumstances. However, a man is only eligible to file for spousal maintenance against his wife if he is permanently incapacitated before or during the marriage and by virtue of his incapacity, he is rendered permanently unable to maintain himself. A woman is also eligible for file for nominal maintenance in cases where her earning capacity is similar or higher than her counterpart. A man is not accorded this right. Gender-specific financial schemes Schemes such as Working Mother's Child Relief, Basic Childcare Subsidy, Foreign Maid Levy Relief and Grandparent Caregiver Relief are only applicable for mothers. Even single fathers are not eligible for any of these perks. Unequal parental leave Mothers are entitled to 16 weeks of paid maternal leave whereas fathers are only entitled to 2 weeks of paid paternal leave. It must be said that a recent change in policy has allowed fathers to 'siphon' up to 4 weeks of paid parental leave from their counterparts, subjective to their partners' concurrence. However, only married fathers are entitled to paid paternal leave and shared parental leave. Mothers are entitled to paid maternity leave, regardless of marital status. Moreover, fathers, even single fathers are not entitled to paid adoption leave. An adoptive mother is entitled to 12 weeks of paid adoption leave. A married adoptive father is entitled to 4 weeks of shared parental leave, subjective to his partner's concurrence. A single adoptive father is not eligible for any parental leave aside from paid childcare leave. S4(3) of the Adoption of Children Act A single man is not eligible to adopt a female child unless in 'exceptional circumstances'. Conversely, a single woman is free to adopt a child of any sex. Termination of Pregnancy Act A father has absolutely zero prenatal parental rights but is subjected to the full spectrum of parental liabilities. A mother can, with her unilateral decision and without the consent or even knowledge of her counterpart, goes for an abortion and deprive her counterpart of his child, regardless of the father’s wishes or means. A mother can also, on her own decision and without the consent or knowledge of her counterpart, delivers a child, in which her counterpart is expected to fulfill his legal and moral obligations to be responsible for the welfare of the child, regardless of the father’s wishes or means. This is true even in cases whereby the child is a product of sexual assault perpetrated by the mother. The fundamental principle here is 'my body my choice'. Principles such as 'our child our choice', 'my money my choice' and 'its life its right to live' are of little significance. S53(e) of the Penal Code and S325 - S332 of the Criminal Procedure Code; S88 of the Education (Schools) Regulations Only males are subjected to institutionalised corporal punishment (judicial, military and school caning) in Singapore. Females are not to be caned under any circumstances. The principle of equal liberty and liability is of little significance when it comes to gender. National Service Only males are required to serve their mandatory obligation to the state. This is despite the fact that the stature governing the policies of national service (Enlistment Act) is gender-neutral and seemingly applies to all persons, regardless of sex. Persons who completed their mandatory service and persons who are exempted from service are accorded the same statutory rights and privileges. “Equality” Ong Ming Wee, who was acquited of rape. He was even sentenced as guilty by a feminist judge and had to get the verdict overturned thanks to Subhas. The woman who made the false rape claim was never revealed and paid no damages to Mr. Ong, who had to suffer damage to his reputation and paid huge legal fees. https://www.asiaone.com/print/News/Latest+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20121201-387104.html Only men and boys are allowed to be caned. Personal anecdotes from some redditors When I was in Primary 3, there was an incident where an intense fight broke out between a girl and a boy in my class. The brawl arose as the girl had deliberately taken and damaged the boy’s treasured Pokémon cards. Thankfully, none of them sustained any serious injuries. For punishment, both were made to write lines. However, on top of writing lines, the boy was publicly caned whilst the girl was not subjected to additional repercussion. Just before the caning, the disciplinary master publicly admonished and degraded the boy on stage, chiding him for being a scum for raising his hands upon a girl. No such reciprocal statements were made upon the girl, who was sitting right there in the crowd watching him get caned. After the caning, he was made to vow on stage not to lay his hands on a girl ever again. The poor boy was only nine then. How does one expect him to have a healthy and balanced view of society, or to believe that as an individual, he is equally precious when he was subjected to such blatantly unfair treatment and disregard solely due to his sex? Unfortunately, after that incident, he developed severe apprehension and a searing hatred for school and authority. This was despite the school management admitting negligence on their part and had profusely apologised to him and his parents. - u/appletree911 This occurred more than two decades ago. Back then public caning was employed extremely liberally, especially for my conservative Chinese school. The blatant display of preferential treatment for girls was also ridiculously evident. Boys were severely punished for lightly teasing girls but the reverse cannot be further from the truth. In fact, during those days there was a popular "prank" where girls will pull down the pants of unsuspecting boys. All this warrants for is a good laugh at the expense of the boys' fluster and humiliation. Can you imagine the armageddon if the reverse was to happen? I have a mate who had ended his own life at the tender age of 15, with his public caning being probably the last straw. People often just think of the physical aspects of caning without much consideration for the modesty of the subject and the emotional harm that comes along with it, especially for public caning, where one's "manliness" is publicly trialed in the presence of his peers. Yelping or displaying any sign of weakness often leads to bullying and belittling. Moreover, for my school, in cases of class or public caning, girls have the option of retreating from the class/assembly after the announcement of a boy’s offences, if they were uncomfortable with the situation. On the other hand, it was mandatory for boys to sit through the entire process to be ‘educated’, even if they may feel uncomfortable too. I vividly remember an instance of public caning back in primary school where a male pal of the boy being caned broke down and sob inconsolably in tandem to the cries of his friend on stage, both of which garnered jeers from their fellow peers. Only then was he allowed to leave with the escort of his form teacher. As bewildering as it may sound, a friend who was caned and cried on stage described to me that he hoped he was raped instead. That really took a toll on me. It really caused me to be vehemently against caning. Think about the scene of judicial caning for instance, where the subject is stripped naked, bound to the trestle, being forced to adopt such a degrading posture and lashed like a beast in a room full of strangers, sometimes with persons of the opposite sex. I firmly believe that if you do not punish one with rape, you do not punish one with caning. - u/appletree911 When I was in primary school, my male teacher would hit the hand of any boy that did anything mischievous as a form of punishment with the long classroom ruler. If a female student did something mischievous, the most he would do was scold - u/Thefearlesscow Do we just accept it and suck it up? (This is my opinion) Notable comments by redditors (IMO) u/BBFA2020 "Honestly I have being lurking forever but NS is always the ugly head that will appear eventually. Why? Singapore's TFR is currently at 0.87 courtesy of CIA (link below). It means we are at a very real threat of having not enough people to perform NS duties in a few decades time. So the govt will have to seriously consider either fix the problem or "outsource it". I mean who likes NS and asking girls to go for mandatory NS is something I wish for no-one. After all I finished mine and I don't want the next generation to suffer. But until NS is abolished, it will remain a sore point and a potential population issue in the future. And let's not forget that we had several horrific accidents (Aloysius pang anyone) in 2018/2019. So NS isn't exactly a walk in the park either. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/rawdata_356.txt
We were living in Indonesia then and LeanFi in Indonesia isn't a crazy amount of money (it was around $600,000 USD). For 4 years, I'd worked as an independent consultant while living in Indonesia. I got married there to an Indonesian woman and we had two kids. Our expenses were $25,000 USD per year. We lived in a new house I rented just past the 6th hole of a golf course in East Java. It was a gated community with a swimming pool and we had 2 domestic helpers. We lived on the slope of an active volcano that had mudslides every wet season and near a mosque that announced prayer call in Arabic over a loud speaker too, so just to emphasize, it's a whole different world, not just upgrades to a gated community and a maid. Usually we spent about $2,000 a month, but one month we only spent $700. That wasn't a bad month either. We ate out every day, went to the movies once, and I also played a round of golf. Based on that month, I think we probably could have lived on even less than $25,000, but we'd occasionally do more expensive things like go to Bali. My wife's extended family of 5 (her parents, her brother, his wife, and one baby) lives on about $500 a month there, but they're locals. A little more than 3 years ago near the end of 2017, that consulting job ended and I got a permanent job with the same company at their Singapore factory. I wasn't sure I wanted to do it at the time because I really liked Indonesia, but I wasn't confident I had enough money saved. What if I wanted to leave Indonesia? $600,000 is enough there, but it's not enough for America or Australia (countries where I'm a citizen). When they offered me the job, I thought the salary was a bit low given the cost of living in Singapore. I didn't want to go there just to work and pay bills, I wanted to save some money too. That was essential or I wouldn't go, so that attitude resulted in a 30% increase in salary (in terms of the first offer they sent). So we went to Singapore and were careful about how we set-up our life. We didn't live like expats, we live just like middle class locals. We got an HDB flat (government planned and cheaper) instead of a fancy condominium and we don't have a car (no need for it). Middle class (or maybe lower middle class) is a pretty high standard of living in Singapore, so I haven't felt deprived in the least. We did keep a nanny/maid here since it's inexpensive and we kind of needed the help being in a city where neither of us has family. I've consistently saved about 30% per month and almost 100% of every windfall (bonuses). The $600,000 kept growing, untouched except for some rebalancing. Just a little more than 3 years later, we have $500,000 USD more saved. (Edit: This was one of the main points I wanted to highlight in this post, just how much effect 3 more years had on my total savings after the LeanFi mark. It's about 80% more and most of that is simply growth.) On the downside, sometimes work is rough, but the worst month would be about 5 stressful days. Mostly it's not stressful and I have a lot of time off. We took many vacations in SE Asia and would have had a few more if Covid didn't happen. I took 8 week long vacations away from Singapore in 2019 and was going to take 11 one week vacations in 2020. Once or twice, work was even rewarding. I know for sure I've developed some new skills here from the technical parts of work and social interactions that just help me in life in general. And Singapore is just a wonderful city. I'm sure it's the best all-around city in the world. Maybe there are other cities that can beat it in one or two categories, but it ranks high in every category that counts and overall is just far and above any place I've lived before. It's made me see what's possible with people. Living in the cheapest high density housing of almost any other city is going to be unpleasant, but not here. Here it was delightful. I realized that it's all to do with the quality of people you live near and not the price you pay. Singapore seems to have nothing but high quality people. Income taxes are low in Singapore and due to the foreign income exclusion, I've paid very little in income taxes over the last few years. I've paid less in overall tax than I would have paid in social security tax alone. Hospital insurance for my whole family is $30 a month. We get a small allowance for doctors appointments and the dentist, but it except for one year, it covered all those expenses and I paid nothing out of pocket. Last year they closed the borders to most people and we have been here in Singapore almost a solid year. For 3 months, we had a strict lockdown. I live in an apartment with 2 preschool aged children, so it wasn't much fun. Probably the only thing that kept the nanny from throwing herself off the balcony during that time is we're only on the second floor. Before and after the lockdown has been pretty good though. We've got annual passes to all the main attractions in Singapore. There were no crowds this year because there were no tourists, so we did everything there is to do here about 35 times each. Even if you lived in Disneyworld, it would get boring after a few months and that's kind of what's happened. I'm getting bored being stuck on this very nice but tiny island. First, I took kind of a long shot at becoming a high school teacher in the Australian Outback. I applied, but got rejected before the interview. I think I'll eventually sort this out, but I put it on the backburner for now and started looking around for other jobs. I thought it would be hard to find another job in the pandemic. I applied to 3 different jobs in Singapore, America, and Australia and I was surprised to find out I got all three of them. They were all lateral moves, similar to the job I have now in the manufacturing area of a pharmaceutical company. The job I picked is where I grew up in America. I left this town 22 years ago when I graduated college. It's small and rural, but I know a lot of people there and I want my Indonesian wife and kids to experience it. My mother, grandmother, a brother, and some extended family are all still there. It's so far from here, the jet lag alone takes about a month to subside (no joke). If I went just to hang out and not work, I'd want to go at least 6 months and I'd have to buy tickets for my family of 4. This way, I am obligated to stay and work for 2 years, but they're paying for business class plane tickets, my wife's green card, and they're giving me a couple of month's pay in cash to cover relocation expenses. Since my oldest starts kindergarten this year, I really don't want to stay anywhere less than a school year. I'm going to disrupt the education of my kids by switching schools a few times over the next 15 years if things work out, but I want to make those disruptions as graceful as possible. What I'm getting at is the 2 year obligation isn't really much different than what I'd obligate myself to anyway. If for some reason I quit before the two years, I have to pay back some part of the relocation. I posted a much shorter description of this plan on the expat subreddit and got a ton of negative feedback. Almost everyone thinks it's crazy to move from Singapore to a small town in America right now, especially with my biracial and multicultural family. I appreciated the honesty and it helped me see some things I didn't think about. I can see that there will be both pros and cons, but in my experience, that's always the case. I'm excited to move back to my small town after 22 years and excited is just a better word for happy. Part of the reason is I'm not a kid who doesn't have 2 pennies to rub together anymore. I won't be stuck there ever again. In a few years, it's very likely that we'll move again to Australia (me and the kids are citizens) or Indonesia (where my wife and kids are citizens). I have gone on too long and although I have some ideas about those future plans, they're less than solid and subject to change, so this is a good place to stop with my wall of text, but it's shaping up to be pretty exciting for me and my young family. By the time they graduate from high school, they'll have roots and connections to 4 or 5 countries and our freedom is multiplied. A lot of it is about money, but it's really the freedom part that excites me.
Differing theories on what an engagement means...?
Hey everyone, so I'm jumping on here following a conversation I had with my BF which has left me a little perplexed to say the least. I'll preface this by saying we are both very, very young. My boyfriend (23M) and I (22F) have been together 4 years now. We met through mutual friends in college. We were both very involved in the same religious youth group ( even though we grew up in different countries (CA and the US) ) so we were in similar social circles going into uni. I actually became really really good friends with his friends because we took part in the same volunteering trips abroad, somehow though he and I only really met years later. We started dating while I was starting my second year and he was starting his third. Our university only provides student housing and dining for first year students, so by the time we started dating I was sharing an apartment with a good friend of mine and he had just signed a lease on a studio (after living with roomates for a year and deciding he wanted some peace and quiet to focus on his engineering degree). Anyways, our relationship is developing really nicely and maturely. We both were completing STEM degrees, so we rarely had time to go out (most of our time was spent studying and our quality time was relaxing with a drink or TV after a long day of class + studying). We developed our own "mutual" friend circle, had lovely times with them. I think the challenging workload + the transition from dorm life (and thus greater social interactions) to apartment living conditioned us to become HUGE homebodies even though we were 20 yrs old. I realize it's odd to think of college kids as "independent," but when you're financing your own degree, balancing part time work and the responsibilities of apartment hunting, learning how to fend for yourself in a big city, learning to shop and cook for yourself, figuring out how to budget, all while living in a foreign city and balancing full courseloads, I do think you tend to gain some maturity a lot faster than if you're totally shielded from adult life. I saved up enough to move into my own place by my 3rd year. I had a small 1 bedroom, about a 20 min walk from campus. He and I are spending a lot more time together, exploring how to be a couple in a very vibrant and exciting city. He basically moved in a month or so after I settled in. He still kept his apartment, but he never spent any time there. We found pleasure in grocery shopping together, started splitting most bills and such. We were both HUGE savers, so we afforded some weekend trips with friends or "romantic" getaways to the mountains. We built a mutual friend group. Our university is huge (80k), so we kind of built our own little home. We did both maintain our own seperate social circles (which was very very necessary since we were living together). We were quite busy in our final year, I was working as a research assistant in biostatistics and was very involved in public health research projects. He did his co-op with an engineering company (which was a solid hour drive away). We took care of each other. He'd pick me up from the Medical building (where I was working) and make sure dinner was ready. I packed him lunch, he did the dishes, I did the laundry, he got the groceries because I hated walking up so many stairs with heavy bags in the dead of winter. Anyways, very "domestic" for 21-22 yr olds. LOL. We were both very career-oriented so we spent our summers working / interning, usually in different cities (I went to South Africa for 3 months, he went to Singapore for an internship for 2 months). We saved up enough to go to Thailand for a month between my 3rd and 4th year (his 4th and 5th year). Since we knew each other's "rough" schedules we were very accomodating and helpful, but we still felt very independent. Date night once every two weeks (nothing fancy, we were students, but there were many affordable bars and restaurants around where we lived). I always grabbed coffee or had yoag with my friends on certain days, I knew when he was out with his engineering friends or had work events (we usually attended each other's professional events together). Friday nights were religious services + dinner with friends. Saturday morning was dedicated to services. We did hockey nights with his brother who also lived nearby in a shared apartment. At this point, he and I are very well acquainted with each others families. I've been to his childhood home a few times. We've done holidays together (Thanksgiving at my parents place). We've traveled abroad together, gone to multiple family weddings together. Have been through "bouts" of LDR. We're both very career oriented, but he's a lot more "family" oriented in that he comes from a big and very closely knit family. I know his entire extended family and vice versa. The only thing we're "waiting on" is that our parents haven't met in person yet (they've facetimed together, text, and are on each other's holiday mailing list). My parents are more traditional and would want to wait till we get engaged to meet his parents in person. Our interests don't fully line up, but that's fine, we do our own thing and appreciate that we are different. My idea of fun is going out with friends for a drink/dinner or reading at home. He's more into hiking and skiing and all forms of physical activity (which is good for me since I get to try new things with him). We've been living together since graduation, we both work full time in our fields. One day we got a call from his BFF to tell us he'd just gotten engaged. We congratulated him and his fiancee (we both know them very well, went away on a few camping trips over the years). My BF sat down with me and was like "I can't believe my BFF is getting married... he was always such a player and a kid... totally not the settling down for a girl." Also, I should say that in our religious circle it is very normal for people to get engaged around 21, married at 22. It's not abnormal if people wait till they're older, but it's definitely very very very normal to get engaged young. He and I know we'd want to raise a family within marriage. We've discussed how we'd want to raise our kids (religion, ethics) where we'd want to live geographically etc... but something about this moment felt WEIRD. So I asked him "well, have you give any thought to us maybe making that step?" Do you see it happening in the future?"" My BF told me he did see himself proposing one day, but also made it very clear I shouldn't be holding my breath any time soon. I asked him what he thought. He told me he wanted to wait till we were absolutely settled first "ie, he wants to make sure we can keep up the positive cohabitation (lol it's been more than 2 yrs at this point since we've been sharing a space)" He wants to wait till we are super super super settled. I kinda looked at him like, well that might take another 5-7-10 years? We're young and are going to realistically relocate for work/ travel / life happens. What if he moves to Kansas or Australia or somewhere I can't find work or something, are we supposed to follow each other everywhere without a prior form of committment? He seems to think so. I'm not saying I want to / feel a need to get engaged right now. But I worry he's just going to push it off forever if his definition of being ready for an engagement is "when my partner and I are ALREADY fully settled" ? I don't know how I feel waiting till I'm 27 to get engaged to someone I met at 18-19. I feel like we have a different understanding of what an engagement means... tl;dr I think, while my BF and I have somehow talked about marriage and our future extensively, I didn't realize we had different views on when was an appropriate time to get engaged/ what an engagement symbolizes.
How did your parents treat you growing up? Were they a net benefit or detriment?
It's a common theme in this subreddit that parents basically have children to take care of them in their old age, that it's selfish to have children, etc. This sentiment has been so far from what I've experienced that I want to hear from a broader section of sg. For me personally, my parents provided for my every need when I was growing up. Financially, they paid for me overseas study, they gave me money for my downpayment for my first house, they loaned me money for me second house. They saved up plenty for their own retirement, and are still happily working at 65+. In terms of study, they were strict, but then I was a lazy fuck that would throw away my homework and not do it unless I had a tuition teacher literally sitting across the table from me. I'm sure I underperformed academically for most of my life because I wouldn't put in the effort, but not due to any lack from my parents. They did convince me to study law instead of computer science/engineering, but in hindsight (remember, this was in the early 90s) they were right. IT jobs have been oursourced/taken over by foreign talent, and law is still the law. I managed to carve my own niche doing IP/IT law, and I earn enough to buy my computer toys, so it's not so bad. The one thing they could have done better was to teach me social skills, but then they are flawed humans too. Took me far too long to learn to read body language, and build relationships (I still suck). But they did they best for me that they knew how, and I owe everything that I am now to them. I'd like to think I'm doing the same for my children - we've started an endowment fund for each child, with sufficient payout to ensure that they have a lump sum for uni, and individual savings accounts for each of them to have some seed money for when they get married/take a gap yeawhatever. They have plenty of enrichment classes, soccer class, music class, art class, we spend weekends together going to the beach, to the botanic gardens, try to teach them the best we can and not let them make our mistakes (but my eldest seems to be a carbon copy of me, trying my best not to let him turn into an introverted weirdo). This seems to be the case for all my circle of friends as well, those with children and those without. For reference, I'm almost 40. All of them have deep relationships with their parents, and their parents without exception help them out in many ways, financial, emotional, even childcare. I still see this with my own parents, and even my grandparents (when they were around). We're all building to a greater future for our children, and hope that they will pass it on and be useful members of society. Is this such a isolated experience in Singapore? Or is this just the online echo chamber of negativity?
Sapply Compass: x=-7.67, y=6, z=4.69 Six Triangles: • Economics=Control • Personal Freedom=Truth • Culture=Centrist • Equality=Fanatic Anti-Burden • Government=Fanatic Authority • Foreign Policy=Extreme Globalism I am in the Republic of Ireland for reference: What philosophy of politics and ethics do you believe?(ie egoism, altruism, liberalism, socialism etc) Democratic socialism/Chavismo/Bernsteinism/NEP socialism, pragmatism, meritocracy, and utilitarianism. How should government be structured? Dominant-party meritocracy, like Singapore. Efficient unicameral legislature. Corruption should be attacked ruthlessly in the name of clean government. Unlawful state actions should be authorised in the event of national emergency. Ban all political donations and publicly fund elections. Pay our politicians high salaries to dissuade them from taking bribes and encourage the best and brightest to run for office. Ban any far-right, right-leaning or neoliberal political parties, only leftists in government. Democratic centralism should probably be practiced by government. All citizens above the age of 18 who pass a test understanding basic politics and are not currently incarcerated should be automatically registered to vote. Overseas voting rights should be granted to citizens living in Northern Ireland. Citizens who have been married with children for at least five years, yet not old enough to be a grandparent, should be weighed as having two votes instead of the traditional one vote for their greater responsibilities and contributions to society. Politicians should be made do a public audit for each year they are in office. No term limits for politicians that are popular with their constituents. STV should be implemented nationwide. Abolish local governments and replace them with provincial assemblies. Should the leader be democratically elected? How should they be chosen? The Taoiseach should be chosen by the legislature, not by direct election from the masses. Should government be decentralized? (ie states in the US, provinces in Canada and Cantons in Switzerland) No, centralised government is efficient. What level of autonomy should subdivisions have? A high degree or a low degree of autonomy? Each should have a provincial assembly that is weaker than the national assembly. What are your views on social security, universal healthcare, education, housing and the welfare state generally? Love them all. Use welfare state to assist all families and working people. To what extent should production be regulated by the state? Full-scale corporatism. Government should negotiate with trade unions and businesses so everyone gets what they want and economy runs smoothly. What industries, if any, should be publicly owned, and why? ALL key industries should be nationalised. Majority of economy (60-80%) should be under public ownership at all times. Worker cooperatives should be strongly incentivised for domestic businesses. What are your views on “traditional beliefs”, such as the role of family, gender roles, the role of religion in society and so on? Government should always follow the scientific and sociological consensus on culture. Pro-choice, pro-LGBT, secular society, etc. Government should also strongly support the extended family structure. What are your views on immigration and foreign policy? I am a strong globalist and in support of EU, UN, etc. We also need to court foreign investors greatly. Points-based immigration, for maximum efficiency, as immigrants are hard workers who benefit us, not criminals and leeches. Are there any political parties, organizations or movements you identify with, regardless of whether or not you officially support them? I vote for Solidarity—People Before Profit.
Magic is dying. At least that's what my grandmother says. I can't believe her though. It's not like magic was ever real to begin with. Sure it's been several years since the cherry blossoms have bloomed but that doesn't mean they were magic. It's all because of global warming. As I walk outside my apartment complex I take a look at the cherry tree in the front. When I was young every year it would have these beautiful blossoms that would slowly appear, stay for a few days and then fall. It was nice, I suppose. I don't really remember them. I guess I took them for granted as a child. Now the tree hasn't had any bloom for the last four years. It still goes green but there are no petals. Spring time is supposed to be the cherry blossom season. With the white flowers blooming and people drinking under the tree. Taking a branch in my fingers and holding it to my nose I can just smell a hint of the blossom that's hiding in here, but it refuses to come out. Why has nature abandoned us? Is it a punishment for all the hell we've given it? Dam, I'm late for school. I just make the train. It's the same train I've taken for the last four years. When I sit down I see her. Sitting across from me as usual. A foreigner, with long brown hair and big green eyes she looks like something from a fantasy story. She looks a year older than me and goes to a different school. Ishtar I think it says on her label, I don't recognize the uniform though even after the four weeks she's been on the train. She doesn't wear any make-up but she doesn't need it. One of these days I plan on saying "Hi" to her, but the timing is never right. Maybe today will be better. I just hope that she doesn't say no. I'd better wait. I don't want to get hurt. No maybe I should… Here's my stop. Darn. That was too quick. I'll try again tomorrow. It's not like she's going anywhere. Besides I'm sure I'll be able to work up the courage tomorrow. "You got off again. Why do you never talk to me? It's been four weeks since I first saw you. I knew then that you were the one. You are the only one I could ever have, but you ignore me. I know that you look at me and I can feel that you like me but why do you never try? What could you be scared of? One word on your part is all it takes. One word and we could have had a connection. I can't keep coming here any more my Tammuz. Today was my last day. I'm sorry but I no longer believe that you wish to hold me. Farewell my love. I'll try to hold on to the magic as long as possible but I must go home. Please remember me. Find me if you can. If you even want to." I get on the train that evening and try to look for her again. I had a strange dream in class about her but I don't remember much about it. I'm a little worried but not much. She's sometimes here but not always. My evening schedule often changes so I don't always get to see her. I was sure that this time I was going to talk to her. I'd even worked up my line. "Hi." That took me three hours to decide. Oh well. She's always there in the morning. I'll try it again then. "Magic is dying. Can't you see it." I hear my grandmother say as I walk in the door to our apartment. She`s on that topic again. Mom's convinced she has dementia or some sort of psychotic fit, but grandma is pretty much all there. "I'm home." "Tam, sorry could you be a dear and run to the store. I forgot the milk." "Mom I just got home. Come-on." She gives me the money. No choice. I take it and put my shoes back on. "Look at the cherry blossoms. You can tell that she`s not doing her job. It's going to be the death of us all I tell you. She's missing something." "Okay Ba-chan. Do you need anything at the store too?" "Get me some smokes, and don't tell your mother. She'll throw a fit. Here's a 50. You can keep the change." Grandma is cool like that. I know some of the things that she says are weird but that's just who she is. Stepping outside I take another look at the cherry trees. As grandma said I can see them wanting to bud and I'm sure I can smell something but no. Global warming has done its job too well. Better get the milk. I have some homework to do before bed. I leave early the next day and quickly pass the tree in the courtyard. I want to make the train before it leaves. This day I'm going to talk to her, I can feel it. The air feels a little dryer than yesterday and kind of strange. It hasn't rained in a few weeks but I think it smells a little like my closet full of moldy books. I make the train but when I sit down in my usual spot she isn't there. Maybe she changed seats. I get up and start looking down the aisle. I don't see her or her purple uniform. She`s never missed before that I can remember. I remember a bit about the dream yesterday but push it aside. I walk up and down the train aisle and even open the door to the next compartment. Still no sign of her. Maybe she's sick today. I'll have to try her tomorrow. I really wanted to speak to her and I can't really hide my disappointment when I get to school. "Hey why so sad Tam? You look like you lost your dog." "Morning Shin. No I just had a bad train ride. There's this cute girl on in the mornings. I really wanted to talk to her today but she wasn't there." "A cute girl? Really? Don't tell me our resident herbivore is switching diets. The girls will be so jealous. They wanted to be the one to catch a hunk like you." "Very funny. It took me four weeks just to work up the nerve to talk to her. It's not like I get the chance to do that often." "Of course use the school as an excuse. Nobody asked you to go to an all boys academy. You could always transfer to the other one across the street." "That's not it." I could try explaining but they just don't get it. They are always able to talk to the girls that visit. I have trouble just looking at them. I get all tonged tied and fidgety. If any girl liked talking to a pile of sweat she'd be mine. But I don't think that such a girl exists. The next day on the train is the same and so is the day after that. I don't see her for the whole week and next week is the spring holiday. That's two weeks and nothing. Not a glimpse of her. I'm getting kind of worried. "What's wrong Tam?" I look up at my grandma taking a seat across from me at the kitchen table. "You look upset." "It's nothing Ba-chan. Just some troubles with a girl." "Really? Tell me about it." Since I was a boy I could always talk to my grandma about everything. She's been living with us for the past six years and despite her belief in magic she's always been pretty dependable. I tell her all about the girl on the train and how I wanted to talk to her but the minute I got up the nerve to do it she disappeared. I really would like to find her. I tell her how when I saw her bright smile, green eyes and brown hair I knew she was unlike any of the other girls I had ever met. I pour out my soul and she sits there quietly, listening. When I'm done she doesn’t say a word for a few minutes. "Tam have you thought about trying to track this girl down? I know you can draw and she sounds like a foreigner who would stick out. You could probably work up a sketch and ask around." I sit there stunned. Why didn't I think of that. "Thanks Ba-chan. I'll do that." "My pleasure dear. And don't forget to check everywhere. You never know where you'll find her." I draw a description of her uniform with the label on it "Ishtar" and the next day I start asking at the other stations down the line. I don`t know exactly which one she gets on but I know it's probably one of the local stations. I try the first one back and then the next one before that and the previous one down the line. At every station I get the same answer. They've never seen the girl. "Sorry." I go back further and further but no luck Finally I reach the first station on the line, my last chance. "Oh yeah her. I saw her almost everyday. It's kinda odd to see a foreigner out here. I mean this is the middle of the countryside. She get's off the express train coming from Nagoya and transfers to this local one. I don't know where she starts from but I haven't seen her in the last two weeks. Maybe she went home." I thank the station man and sit down off to the side. The Nagoya train? Where does she come from? Maybe she did go home as my dream said. It`s hot and the heatwave doesn't look to be ending anytime soon. Maybe I should just go home too. I know my grandma would be disappointed in me but if there's no way to find her then what can I do. Standing up I look over at the wall of TV's at the side of the station. That's when I see it. Her uniform. It's the same purple and the same design. I tried looking for it on the net but there was no school in Japan that had that design registered. But there it was. The school must be really private. I put my face close to the screen hoping for a glimpse that will tell me where the school is. I'm not disappointed but I wish I was. India. Time passes. "Help me Tammuz I need you. You are the only one who can save me." I wake up in a cold sweat. That dream again. It just started suddenly and now I've been having it every night for the last two weeks. Ishtar is floating in a void of some sort surrounded by billowy clouds and wearing almost nothing. It's a good dream but I wake up just before anything really exciting happens. It`s been five years since I stopped looking for her. After finding out that the uniform was from I school in India I tried to track it down on the net but no luck. I even called the studio that did the piece I saw it on but still no use. My mother wouldn't let me go to India then even though grandma said she'd pay, so that was that. I had to move on with my life and I eventually just forgot about her. That is until the dreams started Beep beep beep beep Ah nut's I'm going to be late. I jump out of bed and quickly pull on a suit. I run out of the house holding the toast my mother made for me and just make the train. Panting I scarf down the toast brushing the crumbs into my hand so I can throw them away later. There are no seats so I have to stand but that's okay, it lets me look out the window. It's springtime again but still no cherry blossoms. They just haven't been appearing anywhere. Even the tress no longer smell like they have something waiting to sprout. If anything they smell like my old socks which is not a good smell. The heat is becoming oppressive and there is no end in sight. Ten hours later I'm still at my desk. Working for a big advertising agency is all well and cool but they do drive you hard. I've been here for two years now but I'm still getting used to the job. This place is better that what it was though. That big scandal last year over the girl who committed suicide really forced them to cut back the overtime hours, even if it doesn't feel like it. "Hey Tam we're about to go out for some drinks. Wanna join us?" I look up at Jun and Soichi, My sempai. They know how to work the system at this company to get out of the worst of the overtime but I don`t want to go. They head out almost every night and the last time I got so drunk I woke up on the station steps. Besides I don't think my wallet can handle it. "You're going out for some drinks? Do you mind if I tag along?" Dammit the boss. There's no way I can say no now. "You're going to the usual place right? I'll catch up. I just have to finish this report." "Okay, but don't take too long we'll be waiting." I wave bye to them as they head out the door. Another night of drinking. And being the youngest they like to force the beer on me. They say we're bonding but I think they just like to get me drunk. I'm so tired and this report is staring me in the face. Five minutes. I'll just close my eyes for five minutes, dash this off and head to the party. I'll beg off after one drink and head home. Five minutes. "Tammuz I need you. Where are you? Why have you never tried to find me? Why did you give up? The magic is dying Tammuz. You are the only one who can rescue me Why have you forsaken me? Why!?" I wake with a start. I'm groggy and look around unsure. It takes me a second to realize I'm still at work. I look at the clock. 3 am. There goes the party and my report was erased when my head hit the computer. Tomorrow's going to be hell. I'm not disappointed. My boss chewed my out for messing up the report even though it turns out they didn`t need it. Just some busy work. Jun and Soichi ignore me, so that's good but I heard them bad mouthing me to some of the other sempai because I didn't come to the drinking party and left them all alone with a boss who doesn't like to pick up the bill. When I finally get home it's 12 am. I've been at work for two days straight and my socks are standing up on their own. "Tam are you okay? You weren't home last night and I couldn't contact you on your phone. You aren't overdoing it at work are you?" My mother is waiting for me at the kitchen table. I shake my head but don't answer and head to the shower. The hot water feels so good. "Tammuz." I jerk awake. Sleeping standing up is dangerous. I quickly finish and drag myself to bed. I gotta wake up at 6 am tomorrow to get to work. "Tammuz are you happy? Is this what you want? Do you wish me to go? Is this your desire? Like the last time?" I reach for her but she turns away from me and vanishes. My heart is breaking. I feel like a pit is swallowing me up. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Again I wake up. 5 am, early this time. I don't think I'll be able to sleep again and after that last dream I don't want to. Getting up I go to my desk and pull out an old notebook. Inside is the sketch I made of Ishtar. The same one from my dreams. I remember what it was like seeing her on the train. It was like I'd always known her. She had a presence about her that felt hypnotic even after all this time. I wanted to find her then and did everything I could but, well, life got in the way. She asked me in my dream was I happy and I had to think about that. When my mother wakes up an hour later I'm sitting at the kitchen table. "What is it dear?" She sounds worried. I wish grandma was still here but she passed away last year. She was easier to talk to. "Ka-san do you remember me wanting to go to India a few years ago?" She tilts her head. "I want to go there again. I have something I have to find there." "What about your job?" "I hate it and I don`t like my co-workers. I can't say no to them and they know that so they're always giving me the worst jobs available. Just like in school. I can't stand it. I've made a choice. I want to try and find her." My mother is silent. The last time we had this conversation she used every sneaky mother trick she had to make me feel so guilty that I quickly gave up any desire to go. "I can't talk you out of it this time can I?" "No. My mind is made up." She silently goes to her drawer takes out a thick letter and gives it to me. Then she starts to make breakfast. I`m puzzled but I open it up. There is a piece of paper in it and a huge wad of 100s. I stare at it with my eyes wide. Opening the letter I recognize Ba-chan's writing. "Dear Tam. If you're reading this letter than you have finally made the decision to follow your dream. I made your mother promise that when this day came she would give you the money and no guilt. With it you can start your journey. It's all I can do to help you find the magic again. I think you need it as much as it needs you." "Is this for real?" I look up at my mother. She's just finishing the toast and putting some salad on the table. "Ka-san?" Silent she looks at me. "Your Ba-chan wanted you to follow your dream. I guess I did too, but after your father was transferred up north I guess I didn't want to be alone. I think I may have placed too much on you." She sat down at the table. "After seeing what your job was doing to you I didn't want you to continue but I didn't know what to do. I know you love design but the hours and pressure. I'm afraid that if you continue like you are I'll lose you too." This was the most vulnerable I've ever seen my mother. I get up and give her a hug she returns it for a second then her usual cynicism comes back and she pushes me away. I feel great. My bosses at work almost refused to let me go. They kept telling me how valuable I was and how much they needed me but I couldn't take it. Two years without a vacation, 40 hour weekly overtime shifts and useless make work projects are finished. I was really happy to see the back of Jun and Soichi. They were made for this company. I have my ticket and passport. All that's left now is getting there and finding the school. I have done all the research I could and I know it's in the south in the main coffee producing area of India. From there I'll have to expand my search. It's been five years but I feel better than I ever have. Making this decision was the best thing I could have ever done. I really wish I had done it earlier. Even the smell of the trees is getting better. I could swear that I smelt a hint of cherry and not the usual pungent socks order. It's too bad blossom season is almost over. The way I feel now seeing the petals would put me over the top. "Tickets please." I find my seat on the plane and look out the window at the airport. Since making the decision to do this I have never been so scared or excited in my life. A few times I wanted to back down but no. This is the most confident I've ever been about something. I can't wait to get there. The only sore spot is that my dreams have stopped. I don't know if it`s a good thing or I bad thing. I kinda miss them though. "Excuse me is this seat taken?" I shake my head while still looking out the window. I can't wait to get started. The woman sits down next to me and I catch a whiff of her perfume. It`s a nice smell. It reminds me of spring as a child. Fresh and green. I love this smell. I close my eyes trying to remember where I last smelt it. Maybe the train? "Please fasten your seatbelts. We'll be taking off shortly." I risk one last look out the window as the plane taxis to the runway I swear I saw a white flower on the tree outside. Maybe global warming hasn't killed them all yet. "Is this your first time traveling?" I look at the woman sitting next to me. About as old as me but more fashionable than I could ever be. She reminds me a bit of Ishtar. "Yes. I`m on my way to India." "Really? What are you going to do when you get there?" "I`m looking for somebody. I have something I must tell her." "Thant sounds very romantic. Is she waiting for you at the airport.?" "No. I have no idea where she is. All I have is a memory and a picture." I show the woman the picture I drew. She looks at it and wishes me good luck and opens her book. She was nice but I can tell she thinks I'm kind of strange. I mean who travels around the world looking for a woman they don't know. The only other person who knows what I'm really doing is my mother. I think my grandmother guessed I'd do this before she died but that’s it. The funny thing is I feel more alive now than I did working that job. Maybe this was the right choice. I mean just talking to the strange, attractive woman should have unnerved me but it didn't. I'm really looking forward to finding her. It's been five years since I've been home. India was beautiful and I've been able to learn so much about this wonderful culture but I still haven`t found her which is disappointing. The dreams haven't come back either but I don't know how I feel about that. When I arrived in the country it took me a while but I found the school. It was located in the south western part of the country, close to the tip. It's name was Ishtar girls academy so that told me I was on the right track. It was local, very small, elite and difficult to access. When I got there I tried to find out if anybody from the school had ever gone to Japan. It took some doing because they were very private and protective of their rich clients but I found that a few had. When I showed my sketch the headmistress said she recognized her but refused to give me a name or any information beyond the fact that she had graduated. None of their records were available online and after getting that much information I was shut out of the school. They refused to let me back in after that. So I searched. Starting around that school I searched everywhere. Spreading out in wider and wider circles. No luck. Everyone I met who looked like the picture I drew just wasn't her. Many times I wanted to give up but the memory of that last dream, the loss I felt, spurred me on. I also spent time learning how to grow coffee, farming silk and just cultivating the land. The experience was eye-opening. The work was harder than the advertising company ever was but I didn't feel the weight of a soul-crushing presence over me. In Japan I was used to concrete. The hills to protect against landslides. The rivers to prevent flooding. The parks we had were small and dedicated to the spring cherry tree which had stopped blooming. Nature was controlled for the most part. But here it was alive. Not once in my time here did the trees smell like my socks. Sometimes they smelt worse but that was just because of the fertilizer. From what I could see global warming had nothing on this place. And the people. They were so friendly. I was able to make so many friends that when I told them I was heading back to Japan they threw me a farewell party. They had to rent a huge hall to hold everybody. When I compare my time here to my time in Japan I can't help but love it. Even if I couldn't find her. However it was time to go home. My mother is getting older and I am the only one who can take care of her. I don't know if it's what Ba-chan would want but I miss her. I know what I'll do when I get there. After spending all this time learning how to farm I'm going to continue. I still have some of Ba-chan's money left so I'm going to use it to invest in a farm and grow something. Besides it'll give me time to continue searching and maybe do some drawing in my free time.. My life replays itself as I land at Kansai airport and am reminded of how sterile everything is here. After so much time in the sun I don't know if I can take it. The smell hasn't really changed. I already miss the fresh smell of dirt and don't know if I can take sock again. "Tam is that you?" I look around and a man is approaching me. It takes me a minute to place his face but then it hits me. "Soichi. How have you been?" I can see he's been successful. His suit is freshly pressed and he has on an expensive watch. A Fred Perry. He's carrying a Louie Vuitton suitcase as well. Those things cost money. "Pretty good. I've been made head of the department and we just got back from a business trip to Singapore. I couldn't believe it when I saw you here. It brought me back to the old days, remember?" I can see a subordinate behind him looking frazzled and stressed. His suit's not as clean and it looks like his suitcase has seen better days. "That's good to hear. How's Jun?" "We got married three years ago and have a daughter. I don't get to see them much because I'm always busy but they are doing well. I try and get back home once a month. In fact I'm going to stop by there before I head back to my place in Tokyo." Watching his face as he spoke I felt that he was missing something. His image now was all he had. It was too perfect. He was always trying to do as little work as possible and take it easy, but now? I can't quite put my finger on what it was until I asked. "Are you happy?" He looked startled at the question and tries to blew it off like he usually did before. I think if I was the old Tam I wouldn`t even have asked him. However five years of living in the sun and talking with people, not at them, have changed me. I'm not the same man I was before I left. "Yes really happy. Anyway I have to go. Talk to you later." Soichi looked quiet as he left and gave his subordinate a sharp wave to follow after him. He's no longer quite as carefree as I remembered him. Getting on the train from the airport I take it home. I missed this. Not the silence on the ride, the sights. Looking at the people sitting staring at their smartphones and completely ignoring everything around them I have to smile at what they were missing outside the window. I partly can't blame them. It's spring again so the cherry's should be blooming if the heat hadn`t been so strong. When I transfer to my local train and sit down I can't stop a smile coming to my face at the memory of her. This was where I first saw her. The moving train lulled me to sleep. Near home a bump wakes me up and there she is. Ishtar. Sitting across from me. This must be a dream but she hasn't appeared to me there in over five years. This can't be real. Groggy I rub my eyes and pinch myself for good measure but no it's real. There she is. I'd spent ten years of my life looking for her and she pops in right on the same train I've always ridden. My grandmother always said magic was everywhere and looking at her I could understand why. She was beautiful. If anything the years have made her even more perfect. There was still no need for makeup. Her long brown hair and green eyes sucked me in just like before. I want to jump up and dance for joy. My journey is over. All I need to do was talk to her. To tell her "Hi." But I can't. After all this time it was like I was back in high school. What if she says no? What if she rejects me? That same herbivore that burst into a pool of sweat at the mere thought of talking to a girl was back. Is everything I had experienced over the last ten years gone? No! I won't let this slip away again. "Arriving at Akameguchi station. Please remember to take your bags and belongings when you exit the train. Watch your step and have a nice day. "Hi, my name is Tam. Nice to meet you. What's your name?" "Next station is Nabari. Please stand away from the doors as they close. This train is departing the station. Thank you for riding and have a nice day."
Hey everyone, so I'm jumping on here following a conversation I had with my BF which has left me a little perplexed to say the least. I'll preface this by saying we are both very, very young. My boyfriend (23M) and I (22F) have been together 4 years now. We met through mutual friends in college. We were both very involved in the same religious youth group ( even though we grew up in different countries (CA and the US) ) so we were in similar social circles going into uni. I actually became really really good friends with his friends because we took part in the same volunteering trips abroad, somehow though he and I only really met years later. We started dating while I was starting my second year and he was starting his third. Our university only provides student housing and dining for first year students, so by the time we started dating I was sharing an apartment with a good friend of mine and he had just signed a lease on a studio (after living with roomates for a year and deciding he wanted some peace and quiet to focus on his engineering degree). Anyways, our relationship is developing really nicely and maturely. We both were completing STEM degrees, so we rarely had time to go out (most of our time was spent studying and our quality time was relaxing with a drink or TV after a long day of class + studying). We developed our own "mutual" friend circle, had lovely times with them. I think the challenging workload + the transition from dorm life (and thus greater social interactions) to apartment living conditioned us to become HUGE homebodies even though we were 20 yrs old. I realize it's odd to think of college kids as "independent," but when you're financing your own degree, balancing part time work and the responsibilities of apartment hunting, learning how to fend for yourself in a big city, learning to shop and cook for yourself, figuring out how to budget, all while living in a foreign city and balancing full courseloads, I do think you tend to gain some maturity a lot faster than if you're totally shielded from adult life. I saved up enough to move into my own place by my 3rd year. I had a small 1 bedroom, about a 20 min walk from campus. He and I are spending a lot more time together, exploring how to be a couple in a very vibrant and exciting city. He basically moved in a month or so after I settled in. He still kept his apartment, but he never spent any time there. We found pleasure in grocery shopping together, started splitting most bills and such. We were both HUGE savers, so we afforded some weekend trips with friends or "romantic" getaways to the mountains. We built a mutual friend group, which were people we mainly saw through religious activities or services. Our university is huge (80k), so we kind of built our own little home. We did both maintain our own seperate social circles (which was very very necessary since we were living together). We were quite busy in our final year, I was working as a research assistant in biostatistics and was very involved in public health research projects. He did his co-op with an engineering company (which was a solid hour drive away). We took care of each other. He'd pick me up from the Medical building (where I was working) and make sure dinner was ready when I'd come home from long hours at the lab/the gym. I packed him lunch, he did the dishes, I did the laundry. Anyways, very "domestic" for 21-22 yr olds. LOL. We were both very career-oriented so we spent our summers working / interning, usually in different cities (I went to South Africa for 3 months, he went to Singapore for an internship for 2 months). We saved up enough to go to Thailand for a month between my 3rd and 4th year (his 4th and 5th year). Since we knew each other's "rough" schedules we were very accomodating and helpful, but we still felt very independent. Date night once every two weeks (nothing fancy, we were students, but there were many affordable bars and restaurants around where we lived). I always grabbed coffee or had yoag with my friends on certain days, I knew when he was out with his engineering friends or had work events (we usually attended each other's professional events together). Friday nights were religious services + dinner with friends. Saturday morning was dedicated to services. We did hockey nights with his brother who also lived nearby in a shared apartment. At this point, he and I are very well acquainted with each others families. We've traveled abroad together, gone to multiple family weddings together. Have been through "bouts" of LDR. We're both very career oriented, but he's a lot more "family" oriented in that he comes from a big and very closely knit family. I know his entire extended family and vice versa. The only thing we're "waiting on" is that our parents haven't met in person yet (they've facetimed together and text cute, and they are on each other's holiday mailing list). My parents are more traditional and would want to wait till we get engaged to meet "formally". Our interests don't fully line up, but that's fine, we do our own thing and appreciate that we are different. My idea of fun is going out with friends for a drink/dinner or reading at home. He's more into hiking and skiing and all forms of physical activity (which is good for me since I get to try new things with him). We've been living together since graduation, we both work full time in our fields. One day we got a call from his BFF to tell us he'd just gotten engaged. We congratulated him and his fiancee (we both know them very well, went away on a few camping trips over the years). My BF sat down with me and was like "I can't believe my BFF is getting married... he was always such a player and a kid... totally not the settling down for a girl early for a girl." Also, I should say that in our religious circle it is very normal for people to get engaged around 21, married at 22. It's not abnormal if people wait till they're older, but it's definitely very very very normal to get engaged young. He and I know we'd want to raise a family within marriage. We've discussed how we'd want to raise our kids (religion, ethics) where we'd want to live geographically etc... but something about this moment felt WEIRD. So I asked him "well, have you give any thought to us maybe making that step?" Do you see it happening in the future?"" My BF told me he did see himself proposing one day, but also made it very clear I shouldn't be holding my breath any time soon. I asked him what he thought. He told me he wanted to wait till we were absolutely settled first "ie, he wants to make sure we can keep up the positive cohabitation (lol it's been more than 2 yrs at this point since we've been sharing a space)" He wants to wait till we are super super super settled. I kinda looked at him like, well that might take another 5-7-10 years? We're young and are going to realistically relocate for work/ travel / life happens. What if he moves to Australia or Kansas or somewhere I can't find a job or something, are we supposed to follow each other everywhere without a prior form of committment? He seems to think so. I'm not saying I want to / feel a need to get engaged right now. But I worry he's just going to push it off forever if his definition of being ready for an engagement is "when my partner and I are ALREADY fully settled" ? I don't know how I feel waiting till I'm 27 to get engaged to someone I met at 18-19. I feel like we have a different understanding of what an engagement means...
Who is Scott Borgenson? Profile from 2016 in “Institutional Investor”
(Note the connections) CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data Scott Borgerson and his team of quants at hedge fund firm CargoMetrics are using satellite intel on ships to identify mispriced securities. By Fred R. Bleakley February 04, 2016 Link to article One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. At Ramos’s feet sat Helios, his brindle pit-bull-and-greyhound mix. All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship. CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures. There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly. “We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp. Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade. That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified. “My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.” According to Borgerson, CargoMetrics is building a “learning machine” that will be able to automatically profit from spotting any publicly traded security that is mispriced, using what he refers to as systematic fundamental macro strategies. He calls the firm a new breed of quantitative investment manager. In unguarded moments he sees himself as the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of portfolio management. Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies. For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?” Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about CargoMetrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.” CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows CargoMetrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities. “We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself. At his firm’s headquarters — where the lobby displays a series of colored semaphore signal flags that spell out the mathematical equation for the surface area of the earth —Borgerson leads the way to his server room. It’s the size of a closet; inside, a thick pipe carries all the data traffic and analytic formulas CargoMetrics needs. That computing power alone would have cost $30 million to $40 million, Manzi says. CargoMetrics is pursuing a modern version of an age-old quest. Think of the Rothschild family’s use in the 19th century of carrier pigeons and couriers on horseback to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars to their traders in London, or, in the 1980s, oil trader Marc Rich’s use of satellite phones and binoculars for relaying oil tanker flow. Other quant-focused Wall Street firms are latching onto the satellite ship-tracking data. But, Borgerson says, “I would bet my life on a stack of Bibles that no one in the world has the shipping database and analytics we have.” The reason he’s so convinced is that from late 2008 he was an early client of the satellite companies that had begun collecting data received from space and on land to build a large database of all the world’s vessel movements in one place. That’s what caught Hill’s eye at Blackstone when he learned of CargoMetrics a few years ago. BAAM now has a managed account with the firm. “If anyone else tries to replicate what CargoMetrics has, they will be years behind [Borgerson] on data analytics,” Hill says. “We know that a number of hedge fund data scientists want his data.” But too much reliance on big data can go wrong, say many academicians. “There is a huge amount of hype around big data,” observes Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “Many people are saying, ‘Let the data speak; we don’t need theory or modeling.’ I argue that even with using new, massively parallel computing systems for modeling and simulation, some forces in nature and the economy are still too big and complex for computers to handle.” Shih’s skepticism doesn’t go as far as to say the data challenge on global trade is too big a puzzle to solve. When informed of the CargoMetrics approach, he called it “very valid and creative. They just have to be careful not to throw away efforts to understand causality.” Another big-data scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden, also urges caution. “What worries me is that models become trusted but then fail,” he explains. “You have to validate and revalidate.” Borgerson grew up in Southeast Missouri, in a home on Rural Route 5 between Festus and Hematite. His father was a former Marine infantry officer and police official, and his mother a high school French and Spanish teacher. The family traveled 15 miles to Crystal City to attend Grace Presbyterian Church, which was central to young Borgerson’s upbringing: There he was a youth elder, became an Eagle Scout and received a God and Country Award. The church was across the street from the former home of NBA all-star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, whose backboard Borgerson used for basketball practice. When it came to choosing what to do after high school, Borgerson was torn between becoming a Presbyterian minister and accepting an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy or West Point. He went with the Coast Guard because, he says, “the humanitarian mission really appealed to me, and I had never been on a boat before.” At the academy, in New London, Connecticut, Borgerson played NCAA tennis and was also a cutup, racking up demerits for such antics as placing a sailboat on the commandant of cadets’ front lawn and leading bar patrons in a rendition of “Semper Paratus,” the school’s theme song. Still, he graduated with honors and spent the next four years piloting a 367-foot cutter — which seized five tons of cocaine in the Caribbean — then captaining a patrol boat that saved 30 lives on search-and-rescue missions. From 2001 to 2003 the Coast Guard sent Borgerson to the Fletcher School at Tufts University to earn his master’s of arts in law and diplomacy. While at Tufts he volunteered at a Boston homeless shelter for military veterans and founded a Pet Pals therapy program for senior citizens. Following graduation, from 2003 to 2006, Borgerson taught U.S. history, foreign policy, political geography and maritime studies at the Coast Guard Academy, and co-founded its Institute for Leadership. While there he would get up at 4:00 each morning to work on his Ph.D. thesis exploring U.S. port cities’ approaches to foreign policy. He would also travel to Boston to complete his course work at Tufts and meet with his adviser, John Curtis Perry. Borgerson’s military allegiance runs deep. One weekend last fall he played football in a service academy alumni game. On another he attended the Army-Navy game. Still militarily fit at age 40, the 6-foot-5 Borgerson works out regularly at an inner-city gym aimed at helping youths find an alternative to gang violence; a few weeks ago he was there boxing with ex-convicts and lifting weights. Leaving the Coast Guard was a hard decision for Borgerson, resulting in part from his frustration with the military bureaucracy’s stymieing of his bid to get back to sea for security missions. With his degrees in hand, he applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow. Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.” Morse himself had, earlier in career, gotten the jump on official oil supply data by hiring planes to take photos of the lid heights of oil tanks in Oklahoma’s Cushing field. Working for the CFR in New York reconnected Borgerson with his Missouri roots. Bill Bradley’s aunt called the former senator to say: “The son of a family who went to our church in Crystal City is in New York. Would you welcome him?” Bradley did — and would later play a part in Borgerson’s career development. While at the CFR, Borgerson became an expert on the melting of the North Pole ice cap, writing numerous published articles on its implications; this led him to co-found, with the president of Iceland, the Arctic Circle, a nonprofit designed to encourage discussion of the future of that region. Borgerson recently spoke to 50 international generals and admirals about the Arctic and is co-drafting a proposal for a treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would help resolve the differences the two countries have in allowing international ship and aircraft travel through the Northwest Passage. His Arctic research led to an aha moment early in 2008, while he was still with the CFR, on a visit to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca with his Fletcher School classmate Rockford Weitz and their former Ph.D. adviser, Perry. Seeing the mass of ships sailing through the strait, Borgerson and Weitz decided to build a data analytics firm using satellite tracking of ships. Like many successful entrepreneurs, the two struggled to find financing before reaching out to a network of friends and their contacts. One was Randy Beardsworth, who had sat with Borgerson at a 2007 Coast Guard Academy dinner, where Beardsworth, then the Coast Guard’s chief of law enforcement in Miami, was the guest speaker. Borgerson “made references to history and literature, and I thought, ‘Here is a sharp guy,’” recalls Beardsworth. “We have been friends ever since.” But Borgerson didn’t turn to his new friend in his initial fund-raising. “He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team. Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away. “To be honest, it wasn’t his idea, it was Scott I invested in,” says Doan, who provided $100,000 in capital and introduced Borgerson to a few friends, who added $75,000. Manzi came on board as an investor in 2009, having been asked by Bradley to check out Borgerson’s plan for a data metrics firm. (Manzi knew Bradley from the late 1990s, when the latter was considering a run for U.S. president.) With Doan, Doan’s friends and Manzi as investors, CargoMetrics was finally able to garner its first venture capital commitment in early 2010, from Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners. That gave the start-up the capital it needed to hire a bevy of data scientists to build an analytics platform that it could sell to commodity-trading houses and other commercial users. In 2011, CargoMetrics added Summerhill Venture Partners, a Toronto-based firm with a Boston office, to its investor roster, raising roughly $18 million from venture capital and angels for its data business. By then Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee. Among those he consulted was serial entrepreneur Peter Platzer, a friend of one of CargoMetrics’ original investors. Platzer, a physicist by training, had spent eight years as a quantitative hedge fund manager at Rohatyn Group and Deutsche Bank before co-founding Spire Global, a San Francisco–based company that uses its own fleet of low-orbit satellites to track shipping, in 2012. “We had lengthy conversations on how to set up quant trading systems and how [commodities giant] Cargill had made a similar decision to set up its own in-house hedge fund to trade on the information it was gathering,” recalls Platzer. So Borgerson reset his course. Doan describes the decision as a “transformative moment” for the CargoMetrics co-founder. “The military trains you to be a strategic thinker,” Doan explains. “Scott had been tactical until then, making small pivots, and like a general who sees the theater of war, he moved into strategic mode.” Borgerson’s ambition to succeed was in no small part fueled by the early turndowns by many venture capital firms and a fierce determination to best the Wall Street bunch at their own game. “There’s a lot that motivates me, including — if I’m honest — I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, MBA crowd,” he says. “They’re bred to make money, but they’re not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections.” (Bred differently, he spent last Thanksgiving visiting his parents in rural Missouri. After breakfast he and his father were in the woods, shooting assault guns at posters of terrorists, with Gunny, his father’s Anatolian shepherd dog.) Borgerson’s plan was not met with enthusiasm from the company’s then co-CEO, Weitz. CargoMetrics had been gaining clients and meeting its goals, and was on its way to becoming a successful data service provider. Weitz, who now is president of the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based Institute for Global Maritime Studies and an entrepreneur coach at Tufts’ Fletcher School, did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment. For his part, Borgerson says: “A ship cannot have two captains. The company simply matured and evolved into a streamlined management structure with one CEO instead of two.” Eventually, Doan went along with Borgerson’s plan. “We believe in Scott and that shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” he says. But buying out the venture capital firms several years ahead of the usual exit time would require a hefty premium over what they had invested. Once again Borgerson’s early supporters played a key role. Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor. A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name. When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012. Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor. Bradley, now an investment banker, has yet to invest in CargoMetrics, explaining that he is unfamiliar with quantitative investing. But he may eventually invest in Borgerson’s firm, he says, because “we are homeboys. I believe in him and that things are going to work out ” — pausing to add with a smile, “based on my vast quant experience, of course.” Borgerson has been in stealth mode since CargoMetrics’ early days, when he moved the firm from an innovation lab near MIT because the shared space was too open. He is much more forthcoming when boasting of the firm’s “world-class talent.” The team includes astrophysicists, mathematicians, former hedge fund quants, electrical engineers, a trade lawyer and software developers. Hoogerwerf, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Netherlands’ Leiden University, built distributed technical environments for scientists and engineers at Microsoft Corp. Solomon Todesse, who works on quant investment strategies, was head of asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors. Aquil Abdullah, a team leader in the engineering group, was a software engineer in the high-performance-computing group at Microsoft. And senior investment strategist Charles Freifeld (Daniel’s father) has 40 years’ experience in futures and commodities markets, including nine with Boston-based commodity trading adviser firm AlphaMetrics Capital Management. “All were self-made people; none were born with a silver spoon,” Borgerson notes. One of his blue-collar-background hires was James (Jess) Scully, who joined as chief operating officer in 2011, after his employer Interactive Supercomputing was acquired by Microsoft. “The team we built treasures team success, which is Scott’s motto,” Scully says. “We want shared resources, one P&L, not ‘How much money did my unit make?’” Both Scully and Borgerson say CargoMetrics is like the Golden State Warriors, a leading NBA basketball team known for putting aside personal glory and playing as a band of brothers having fun. Borgerson says he fosters a no-ego policy with “lots of play because investment teams are built on trust, and playing together builds trust.” Team building at CargoMetrics includes pub crawls, picnics at Borgerson’s house, poker nights, volunteer work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, Red Sox games and visits to museums. Trips to the Boston docks or Coast Guard base are intended to remind the CargoMetrics team of the real economy. There are also occasional “touch a tanker” days. On one visit to a tanker, everyone was amazed that the ship was the size of a city building, Borgerson says. “They could smell the salt on the deck,” he recalls. “Wall Street can lose sight of the real fundamentals in the world. I don’t want that to happen here.” Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms. At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity). Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings. If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If CargoMetrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies. “This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.” Borgerson says CargoMetrics is building a systematic approach that will work even when cargo cannot be identified — on containerships, for instance. It already knows a large percentage of the daily imports and exports into and out of China and island economies such as Japan and Australia. And although the firm cannot glean from its calculations on satellite AIS data the type of cargo, such as iPhones from China, it can measure total flow, which shows present economic activity. CargoMetrics’ data scientists are working on linking such activity to the firm’s data set of the past seven years to measure the evolving global economy. That will lead, Borgerson maintains, to more trades on currencies and equity index futures and, eventually, trades on individual equities. “Uncorrelated” is a mantra of Borgerson and his team. Well aware that correlated assets sent the performance of most asset managers, including hedge funds, plunging in the financial crisis, CargoMetrics is determined to come up with an antidote. Careful not to say too much, Borgerson lays out the simple principle that the process starts with placing many bets among uncorrelated strategies in different asset classes, like commodities, currencies and equities. The goal is diversification, staying as market neutral as possible and remaining sensitive to tail risk in different scenarios. CargoMetrics’ analytic models help find asset classes that are outliers. Those may include a publicly traded instrument such as oil, another commodity or an equity for which shipping information was a leading indicator during times when other asset classes marched in lockstep. The historical ship data is then blended with this new information to seek opportunities. Identifying mispriced spreads among different trades within an asset class is another way of avoiding the calamity of correlation. Borgerson says the firm’s models will find instances where one type of oil should be a short trade and another a long one. The same goes for whole asset classes — shorting one that will benefit if virtually all asset prices plunge and buying another that will rise when oil prices gain. “We’re counting cards with the goal of being right maybe 3 percent more than we are wrong, as a way of making profits during good times and staying afloat during times of sudden, unpredictable but far-reaching events,” Borgerson says. The key, he adds, “is to know your edge and spread your risk.” CargoMetrics’ uncorrelated approach worked during the dismal first three weeks of this year, says Borgerson. Dialing down risk as volatility in the markets soared, the firm was on track in January to have its best month since it began trading. To improve the firm’s models, eight of its data scientists hold a weekly strategy meeting, nicknamed “the Shackleton Group” after the band of sailors shipwrecked in the Antarctic from 1914 to 1917. Hoogerwerf and Ramos co-lead the group. At one recent meeting they were deciding how much risk, including how much liquidity, there was in a possible strategy; reviewing whether to keep previous strategies; and assigning who would research new ones. The Shackleton Group’s meetings are free-form, with a lot of “I’ve got an idea” interjections that disregard official roles. “We hit the restart button a lot,” says Ramos, a former director of business intelligence and a quantitative economist at law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf who joined CargoMetrics in late 2010. “That’s why our motto is ‘Never lose hope.’” A bet on oil, related to Russia’s production, was stopped at the last minute in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some currency-trading strategies have been abandoned in theory or after failing. Strategies the Shackleton Group likes are passed on to the firm’s investment committee of Borgerson, Scully and Ramos for a final decision. CargoMetrics has a unique set of big-data challenges. Historical shipping patterns may not be as useful in the new global economy now that shipping freight prices are plunging, a sign that trade growth rates may be changing. And analysts point out how hard identifying oil cargo can be in certain locations and instances, even in more-predictable economic times. “While it may be easy to say that ships leaving the Middle East Gulf are typically carrying crude oil, knowing the type of crude is sometimes quite difficult,” says Paulo Nery, senior director of Europe, Middle East and Asia oil for Genscape, a Louisville, Kentucky–based company that analyzes satellite tracking of ships. Borgerson maintains his team is well aware of the dangers of data mining and getting swamped by noise. “If you run computers hard enough, you can convince yourself of anything,” he says. To make sure CargoMetrics’ algorithms for identifying cargo are valid, the firm spot-checks manifest data filed at ports and imposes statistical confidence checks to guard against spurious correlations. Getting the jump on official government statistics is likely to become tougher too thanks to the recently formed High-Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics. Although the U.S. is not a member, Canada is a key player helping to lead the mostly European nation group (including South Korea) in coming up with a global blueprint for measuring and reporting economic activity. Reflecting on his journey to Wall Street — raising money, hiring employees with different skill sets, making changes to CargoMetrics’ culture, overcoming legal and regulatory hurdles — almost gives Borgerson second thoughts about whether he would do it again. “I’ve sailed ships through tropical storms, captured cocaine smugglers and testified before Congress [on his Arctic research],” he says, “but this was the hardest.”
Here are some tips how to get married in Indonesia for foreigners. Meet the requirement; The most important requirement is, for female, you have to be 16 years or older and for male,you have to be 19 years older. In UU Marital of Indonesia, Procedure for getting married in Singapore. The procedure for marriage in Singapore for foreigners is similar to that for Singapore citizens. It starts from filing an online Notice of Marriage to the Registry of Marriages (ROM) with complete information about spouses and their two witnesses. The first step to getting married in Singapore is to register and solemnise your marriage with the Registry of Marriages (ROM). You will need the proper identification and proof of citizenship. You have to file a notice of marriage online with the ROM. All persons, including American citizens, who desire to marry in Singapore, must do so according to Singapore law. Persons intending marriage, whether Singaporean or foreign, are required to produce passports and evidence of the termination of any previous marriages, if any, i.e. divorce decrees or death certificates. Don’t get too fazed by all the acronyms, it gets easier over time! PRE-MARRIAGE Pre-Marriage Long-Term Visit Pass (LTVP) Assessment (PMLA). Estimated waiting time: Up to 4 weeks; Once you and your NC partner have decided to settle down in Singapore, things will start kicking in in stages. Getting married in Denmark is so easy, but some strict conditions apply. You must be at least 18 years old to marry in Denmark. If either of you have been previously married, that marriage must have been legally dissolved before you can marry again. To get married in Denmark you need to be able to legally enter the country. How to get married in Singapore. 1st November 2019 by Expat Living 2 Min Read. Everything you need to know about getting married in Singapore is available on the Registry of Marriages (ROM) website. All marriages that take place in Singapore (and Rules for getting married in Singapore. Search for Marriage Records. Services / Transactions. Can 2 foreigners marry in Singapore? Do I need to re I am a Singaporean above 21 years old and getting married to a foreigner. Proceed to marriage solemnization (on the booked date/time), in the presence of a licensed solemnizer and 2 witnesses above 21 years old Otherwise, your application will be void and you will have to repeat the entire process. On the upside, both foreigners and locals can get married in Singapore without further restrictions, provided at least one of you has been in Singapore for at least 15 consecutive days before filing your notice of marriage.
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