From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.
Landlines only work when there is no power if:
- you use an old school landline phone (not cordless)
- your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery)
- upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power
I think specifically for example of getting Nvidia chips to China, many Singaporeans would say that that is only illegal because the US deems it so. There is no moral reason.
I agree with you that the migrant workers are effectively a serf class. However, I think it's fine that the SG government severely discourages owning a car. It's a small island with lots of people, there would be gridlock if everyone wanted their own car. The public transportation system is amazing and works well.
I think you could replace Nextcloud's syncing and file access use cases with Syncthing and Copyparty respectively. IMO the biggest downside is that Copyparty's UX is... somewhat obtuse. It's super fast and functional, though.
There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.
There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.
There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.