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Japan is not quite the outlier it is often assumed to be. True, its fertility rate – at 1.41 births per woman – is well below the 2.1 needed to replenish a population. However, according to George Magnus, author of The Age of Aging, fully 62 countries, home to nearly half the world’s population, including Britain, have fertility rates below replacement level. Japan is by no means the world’s least fecund country. Below it come the likes of the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Belarus, Bosnia, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Germany, Italy, Greece and Hungary all have almost exactly the same fertility rate as Japan. China, at about 1.5, is in danger of growing old before it becomes rich. Singapore produces the lowest number of babies in the world – at just 0.79 per woman. “The key feature of today’s low fertility rates,” says Magnus, “is that they are pretty much universal.” full article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/07d4c8a8-7e45-11e3-b409-00144feabdc0.html#slide0 huat! world number 1 again.

I believe many gentlemen over here are waiting for the COE to drop before buying their new car. And I believe among this crowd, there are people who just want a simple car as a transport. Don't care too much on the HP but not 1000cc n below la. And I'm have to searching through online to check which car has the lowest price (excluding those china cars la) And I came out with the following models 1. chevrolet sonic hatchback 2. nissan note 3. Honda fit 4. accent 1.4m of course must consider their cevs then the parf value. And There might be models I missed out. Guys any good suggestion for a lowest price with the best bang for your bucks?

Singapore's private car population has fallen to its lowest level since 2011, and the shrinkage could continue. The latest available figures from the Land Transport Authority show that there were 598,219 cars as of the end of last month - down from 600,176 last year. The number stood at 607,292 in 2013, and 605,149 in 2012. The car population is now at its lowest since 2011, when there were 592,361 cars on the road. The shrinkage is a rare occurrence in Singapore, where a quota system allows the vehicle population to grow annually at a pre-determined rate. Observers said the contraction is a sign that the supply of certificates of entitlement (COEs) is lagging behind actual replacement demand. Since 2010, COE supply has been formulated largely by the number of cars scrapped in the preceding months. This often does not correspond with the number of cars scrapped in the following months. For instance, last year's May-July COE quota for cars was determined by the 7,083 cars scrapped from February to April. But actual scrappage from May to July was higher at 7,514. Over time, this leads to a population shrinkage http://straitstimes.com/news/singapore/transport/story/fewer-cars-the-road-coes-play-catch-20150226

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/th...r/2127rank.html Singapore's fertility rate hit an all time low of 0.78. It is now ranked #222 in the world out of 222 nations according to preliminary CIA estimate. Oh no, is this not year of the DRAGON when more births are expected?

elite man!

Although many people go places like Mustafa for cheap prices.... i knew not all things are cheap in such so-called bargain places... last week i bough a small bottle of "Refres" eye lotion from M, it cost me $11.... i thought it should be quite cheap.... on my way home, i dropped by My Village and lo and behold, in a small optial shop there, i found the same thing selling for only $9.50.......... so I bought it (i got dry eyes, so use lots of eye drops)..... then next door another chain drug store.... i curiuos so wandered in and checked the price..... $12!!! ......... simple thing like this eye lotion varies so much in its price!!! hope other bros can share their experience: Household electrical appliances: which place cheap?? BestDenki, Gains, NTUC Superstore, Mustafa, etc etc?? Similarly for other categories of shopping?? Another question: are items in HDB neighbourhood shops cheaper than other places???

Bentley Turbo R More than 20 years and mileage is 2,905 km? This gotta enter into the Singapore book of records man!

europe or ? i wanna get a sling bag for own use

Hi can the expert pls enlighten me on whether which can of car i shld get? i need a used car ard 30-38k monthly installment ard 500 below which have good fc. I will be driving it for 3yr so can anyone pls advice me which kind of car shld i get with the min dep n i can break even ard 3yr. i have a few car in mind... 1)2007 VIOS manual new facelift type ard 37k, 2)2009 picanto ard 33k 3)2006 or 2007 lancer ard 33k. take it that i take a full loan on the remaining yr and that all the above 3 coe are ard 10k+.. so far the above car are the shortlisted type and i have no intention of getting a new car on 10yr loan or any other used car. i tink i have to get it before the next coe bid if not price will go up again. Tks for all of your advice...

An analysis of the UBS study (Part 1): Singapore has the lowest wages and domestic purchasing power among the Asian Tigers By Eugene Yeo, Consultant Editor The worldwide study conducted and released by UBS lately, titled

Hi ANyone can recommend a 1 year car loan for used car with the lowest interest rate? Thanks

hi, would like to find out the above. tried occ, $3 for a game for ntuc link card member. Any place that is lower than this? thanks

Why Israel is the world's happiest country By Spengler Envy surrounds no country on Earth like the state of Israel, and with good reason: by objective measures, Israel is the happiest nation on Earth at the 60th anniversary of its founding. It is one of the wealthiest, freest and best-educated; and it enjoys a higher life expectancy than Germany or the Netherlands. But most remarkable is that Israelis appear to love life and hate death more than any other nation. If history is made not by rational design but by the demands of the human heart, as I argued last week , the light heart of the Israelis in face of continuous danger is a singularity worthy of a closer look. Can it be a coincidence that this most ancient of nations [1], and the only nation persuaded that it was summoned into history for God's service, consists of individuals who appear to love life more than any other people? As a simple index of life-preference, I plot the fertility rate versus the suicide rate of 35 industrial countries, that is, the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. Israel stands alone, positioned in the upper-left-hand-quadrant, or life-loving, portion of the chart [2]. Those who believe in Israel's divine election might see a special grace reflected in its love of life. In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, "It's easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations." Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes. Nations go extinct, I have argued in the past, because the individuals who comprise these nations choose collectively to die out. Once freedom replaces the fixed habits of traditional society, people who do not like their own lives do not trouble to have children. Not the sword of conquerors, but the indigestible sourdough of everyday life threatens the life of the nations, now dying out at a rate without precedent in recorded history. Israel is surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves in order to destroy it. "As much as you love life, we love death," Muslim clerics teach; the same formula is found in a Palestinian textbook for second graders. Apart from the fact that the Arabs are among the least free, least educated, and (apart from the oil states) poorest peoples in the world, they also are the unhappiest, even in their wealthiest kingdoms. The contrast of Israeli happiness and Arab despondency is what makes peace an elusive goal in the region. It cannot be attributed to material conditions of life. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia ranks 171st on an international quality of life index, below Rwanda. Israel is tied with Singapore on this index, although it should be observed that Israel ranks a runaway first on my life-preference index, whereas Singapore comes in dead last. Even less can we blame unhappiness on experience, for no nation has suffered more than the Jews in living memory, nor has a better excuse to be miserable. Arabs did not invent suicide attacks, but they have produced a population pool willing to die in order to inflict damage greater than any in history. One cannot help but conclude that Muslim clerics do not exaggerate when they express contempt for life. Israel's love of life, moreover, is more than an ethnic characteristic. Those who know Jewish life through the eccentric lens of Jewish-American novelists such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, or the films of Woody Allen, imagine the Jews to be an angst-ridden race of neurotics. Secular Jews in America are no more fertile than their Gentile peers, and by all indications quite as miserable. For one thing, Israelis are far more religious than American Jews. Two-thirds of Israelis believe in God, although only a quarter observe their religion strictly. Even Israelis averse to religion evince a different kind of secularism than we find in the secular West. They speak the language of the Bible and undergo 12 years of Bible studies in state elementary and secondary schools. Faith in God's enduring love for a people that believes it was summoned for his purposes out of a slave rabble must be part of the explanation. The most religious Israelis make the most babies. Ultra-Orthodox families produce nine children on average. That should be no surprise, for people of faith are more fertile than secular people, as I showed in a statistical comparison across countries. Traditional and modern societies have radically different population profiles, for traditional women have little choice but to spend their lives pregnant in traditional society. In the modern world, where fertility reflects choice rather than compulsion, the choice to raise children expresses love of life. The high birthrate in Arab countries still bound by tradition does not stand comparison to Israeli fertility, by far the highest in the modern world. The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith, to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement, joking, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps." In 1903 Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement's secular founder, secured British support for a Jewish state in Uganda, but his movement shouted him down, for nothing short of the return to Zion of Biblical prophecy would requite it. In place of a modern language the Jewish settlers revived Hebrew, a liturgical language only since the 4th century BC, in a feat of linguistic volition without precedent. It may be that faith burns brighter in Israel because Israel was founded by a leap of faith. Two old Jewish jokes illustrate the Israeli frame of mind. Two elderly Jewish ladies are sitting on a park bench in St Petersburg, Florida. "Mrs Levy," asks the first, "what do you hear from your son Isaac in Detroit?" "It's just awful," Mrs Levy replies. "His wife died a year ago and left him with two little girls. Now he's lost his job as an accountant with an auto-parts company, and his health insurance will lapse in a few weeks. With the real estate market the way it is, he can't even sell his house. And the baby has come down with leukemia and needs expensive treatment. He's beside himself, and doesn't know what to do. But does he write a beautiful Hebrew letter - it's a pleasure to read." There are layers to this joke, but the relevant one here is that bad news is softened if written in the language of the Bible, which to Jews always conveys hope. The second joke involves the American businessman who emigrated to Israel shortly after its founding. On his arrival, he orders a telephone, and waits for weeks without a response. At length he applies in person to the telephone company, and is shown into the office of an official who explains that there is a two-year waiting list, and no way to jump the queue. "Do you mean there is no hope?," the American asks. "It is forbidden for a Jew to say there is no hope!," thunders the official. "No chance, maybe." Hope transcends probability. If faith makes the Israelis happy, then why are the Arabs, whose observance of Islam seems so much stricter, so miserable? Islam offers its adherents not love - for Allah does not reveal Himself in love after the fashion of YHWH - but rather success. "The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to 'come to prayer' is the same thing as to 'come to success'. Humiliation - the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it - is beyond its capacity to endure," I argued in another location. Islam, or "submission", does not understand faith - trust in a loving God even when His actions appear incomprehensible - in the manner of Jews and Christians. Because the whim of Allah controls every event from the orbit of each electron to the outcome of battles, Muslims know only success or failure at each moment in time. The military, economic and cultural failures of Islamic societies are intolerable in Muslim eyes; Jewish success is an abomination, for in the view of Muslims it is the due of the faithful, to be coveted and seized from the usurpers at the first opportunity. It is not to much of a stretch to assert that Israel's love of live, its happiness in faith, is precisely the characteristic that makes a regional peace impossible to achieve. The usurpation of the happiness that Muslims believe is due to them is sufficient cause to kill one's self in order to take happiness away from the Jewish enemy. If Israel's opponents fail to ruin Israel's happiness, there is at least a spark of hope that they may decide to choose happiness for themselves. Why are none of the Christian nations as happy as Israel? Few of the European nations can be termed "Christian" at all. Poland, the last European country with a high rate of attendance at Mass (at about 45%), nonetheless shows a fertility rate of only 1.27, one of Europe's lowest, and a suicide rate of 16 per 100,000. Europe's faith always wavered between adherence to Christianity as a universal religion and ethnic idolatry under a Christian veneer. European nationalism nudged Christianity to the margin during the 19th century, and the disastrous world wars of the past century left Europeans with confidence neither in Christianity nor in their own nationhood. Only in pockets of the American population does one find birth rates comparable to Israel's, for example among evangelical Christians. There is no direct way to compare the happiness of American Christians and Israelis, but the tumultuous and Protean character of American religion is not as congenial to personal satisfaction. My suspicion is that Israel's happiness is entirely unique. It is fashionable these days to speculate about the end of Israel, and Israel's strategic position presents scant cause for optimism, as I contended recently. Israel's future depends on the Israelis. During 2,000 years of exile, Jews remained Jews despite forceful and often violent efforts to make them into Christians or Muslims. One has to suppose that they did not abandon Judaism because they liked being Jewish. With utmost sincerity, the Jews prayed thrice daily, "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, for God did not make us like the nations of other lands, and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. God did not place us in the same situations as others, and our destiny is not the same as anyone else's." If the Israelis are the happiest country on Earth, as the numbers indicate, it seems possible that they will do what is required to keep their country, despite the odds against them. I do not know whether they will succeed. If Israel fails, however, the rest of the world will lose a unique gauge of the human capacity for happiness as well as faith. I cannot conceive of a sadder event. Notes [1] There are many ancient nations, eg, the Basques, but no other that speaks the same language as it did more than 3,000 years ago, occupies more or less the same territory, and, most important, maintains a continuous literary record of its history, which is to say an interrupted national consciousness. [2] The countries shown in the chart are: Fertility Rate / Suicide Rate (per 100,000) Israel 6.2 / 2.77 United States 11 / 2.1 France 18 / 1.98 Iceland 12 / 1.91 Ireland 9.7 / 1.85 Denmark 13.6 / 1.74 Finland 20.3 / 1.73 Serbia 19.3 / 1.69 Sweden 13.2 / 1.67 Netherlands 9.3 / 1.66 United Kingdom 7 / 1.66 Canada 11.6 / 1.57 Portugal 11 / 1.49 Switzerland 17.4 / 1.44 Estonia 20.3 /1.42 Croatia 19.6 / 1.41 Germany 13 / 1.41 Bulgaria 13 / 1.4 Russia 34.3 / 1.4 Austria 16.9 / 1.38 Greece 3.2 / 1.36 Hungary 27.7 / 1.34 Slovakia 13.3 / 1.34 Italy 7.1 / 1.3 Spain 8.2 / 1.3 Poland 15.9 / 1.27 Slovenia 25.6 / 1.27 Ukraine 23.8 / 1.25 Bosnia 11.8 / 1.24 Belarus 35.1 / 1.23 Czech Republic 15.5 / 1.23 Japan 24 / 1.22 Lithuania 40.2 / 1.22 Singapore 10.1 / 1.08 Hong Kong 18.6 / 1 Now I dont wish all the pappy clones to tell me to move country etc etc. What is your take on why the author claims Singaporeans are lowest on the life preference index which is Fertility Rate/Suicide rate.

Hey guys maybe you can help me out here. I've blown the 17yr old mids in the Sera and i'm looking for something in 4inchs to but nothing top of the range as the car is going at the end of the year when i head back home (but i would like some music between now and when i leave ) Most of the 4 inch speakers have a 90/100Hz-20/22kHz ranges except for the pioneer and kenwood units which start at a low 45Hz. The pioneer specs show a 127Hz lowest resonant frequency and i'm wondering what that is. I know 4 inch's arent very bassy but i would like to maximise this. The highs arent of any real significance as the factory tweets are pretty good. Any suggestions besides being able to explain what fo is?

SINGAPORE - Oil prices traded at their lowest levels since mid-2005 in Asian hours Friday as the market reacted to high US stockpiles and unusually warm winter weather in the United States, dealers said. At 9:39 am (0139 GMT) New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in February, was down 11 cents at US$55.48 a barrel from US$55.59 in late US trades when the contract sank US$2.73. The contract had not fallen as low in Asia since June 2005 when it traded below US$54. Brent North Sea crude for February delivery was at US$54.85. The sell-off came after data showed rising reserves of United States heating fuel during an unusually warm winter. - AFP/ir http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp.../250757/1/.html basket..why are pump prices NOT back to mid 2005 levels?

Guys.. I'm looking for new tyres already. Cuz my current tyre is already more than 1.5yrs old. More or less a few more months need to change le. I am looking to buy those low profiles type. I've seen a Profile 55 at the lowest for 15". Is there any profile smaller than this? Also, are they quiet? Having lower profile tyre will have overall lower ride, right?