Singapore is no place to spend quarantine

This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a baked spumoni of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here.Today’s Agenda Travel to Singapore should com [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a baked spumoni of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Agenda - Travel to Singapore should come with a [hazard warning](. - Shopaholics turn a [blind eye to inflation](. - The U.S. stock market is [beyond pricey](. - The Soviet Union [lives on](. ​​​A Quarantine From Hell Imagine this: You test positive for Covid-19 and begin self-isolating at home. It’s Day Two of quarantine and you’re happier than Kevin McCallister in “Home Alone.” You’ve already completed a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle and binged the entire second season of “Emily in Paris” on Netflix. Everything is just peachy — until some authorities in hazmat suits barge in on you, half-naked with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in your hands. You barely have time to grab your belongings before they whisk you into a van that’s hotter than the Totino’s pizza rolls you burned your mouth on earlier that day. They take you to a quarantine hotel and introduce you to your new roommate for the next three weeks: Bill. This man somehow looks even more disheveled than you. He tells you he forgot his glasses at home. You forgot your toothbrush, so things are looking pretty dire … Could you survive three weeks of this? In Singapore, horror stories like these are no longer that rare. Rachel Rosenthal writes that due to omicron, [travelers headed to the Lion City are dealing with all sorts of inhumane and haphazard rules](. People have been shoved into ambulances with no information. They’ve been urged to abandon their pets at home. They’ve even been told to hand their unsupervised children off to authorities. The average flight from New York to Singapore costs over $800. You know what else you can buy with $800 that doesn’t involve rooming with Bill for Christmas, or getting your child mercilessly ripped from your hands? A completely unnecessary but aesthetically pleasing [red velvet espresso machine](! [An NFT]( that you could make with remedial Photoshop skills! [Air compression boots]( that make you look worse than Jeff Bezos in space! And that money doesn’t even begin to cover the post-quarantine fallout: Nothing quite says “happy holidays” like a [mountain of unexpected hospital bills](. Bonus Quarantine Reading: - Christmas in isolation wouldn’t be so terrible if I could get a decent cup of coffee. [In Hong Kong’s 21-day Covid quarantine](, all I have is Nescafe and a hermetically sealed window. — Shuli Ren - For the uber-rich and famous, escaping the worst parts of the pandemic was easy, thanks to [private jets that flew to Taiwan, New Zealand and Dubai](. — Tim Culpan Inflation?? I Don’t Know Her (Yet). It’s no secret that humans are [obsessed with stuff](. Every year, Americans buy about [2.65 billion Christmas cards](, which fills a football field 10 stories high. In the U.K., little boys and girls tear through [108 million rolls of wrapping paper](. And Australians toss about [5 million tons of food]( straight into the garbage. It’s absolute absurdity! And yet, we still do it, year after year. This holiday season, the U.S. is set to go all-out: Sales are expected to rise 7.5% from last year, the strongest gain in at least three decades. Robert Burgess says that “[the highest inflation rate in 40 years is having little effect on U.S. consumers](.” Bring on the $230 [Timothée Chalamet sweatshirts](! But now that omicron is here, Andrea Felsted [isn’t so confident that these good vibes will stick around]( in 2022: “January is always a grim month for retailers, restaurants and bars. It’s when credit card bills land and trends such as dry January and Veganuary take hold. But this year it could be even more brutal.” Dampening the party even further is the fact that [the U.S. population is growing at the slowest rate in recorded history](. Tyler Cowen says Uncle Sam’s economic engine is fueled by an ever-expanding population: More workers will create more stuff — toys, wrapping paper, Christmas cards — and more stuff will end up offsetting the pressures of inflation. Thankfully, Tyler thinks we can get ourselves out of this mess: “Allowing more people in the country is like allowing more people to fill the empty seats in a theater for an excellent performance: Why not?” Telltale Charts The S&P 500 is more bloated than your stomach after eating two servings of Uncle Jim’s famous baked spumoni on New Year’s Eve. Nir Kaissar points out that there are tons of oft-overlooked alternatives to large growth companies in the U.S., including [small companies, value stocks and foreign markets](. [The Soviet Union officially ended 30 years ago](. “We post-Soviets are citizens of the world now, with our survival skills and our often grimly unfashionable worldviews. We’ve brought the Soviet Union — hated or loved, as the case may be — with us,”  writes Leonid Bershidsky. Further Reading Vladimir Putin wants to use energy as a weapon to divide the West. [Here’s how to stop him from doing that](. — Bloomberg’s editorial board [Democracy isn’t headed to the morgue](. Sure, America has many flaws, but it’s not like 2021 rewound the clock back to the 1960s. — Jonathan Bernstein NASA has no Plan B if its [$11 billion James Webb Space Telescope]( fails on Christmas Day. — Adam Minter The Soviet Union was a case study in the costs of controlling an entire population. For China, the lessons are clearly getting [lost in translation](. — Clara Ferreira Marques Throughout the opioid crisis, lots of people sued the [Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma](. They’ve done a good job of hiding their money. — Matt Levine Boris Johnson’s “war on woke” is an egregious case of [White male privilege](. — Pankaj Mishra ICYMI Merck’s Covid pill got emergency authorization by the FDA today. [Don’t take it if you’re pregnant](. Joan Didion’s [six-decade career]( was nothing short of remarkable. Former Minnesota police officer Kim Potter, who mistook her gun for a taser, was found [guilty of manslaughter in Daunte Wright’s death](. Taste the Kickers Apparently, there’s a difference between [cake pops and cake popsicles](. Americans ate way too many of both in 2021. “[On average, chickens can surf better than humans](” is a sentence you’ll probably read in 2022. (h/t Scott Duke Kominers) If [lickable TV screens]( actually become a thing, humanity might be doomed. (h/t Mike Smedley) No words. Photographer: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters Notes:  Please send surfing chickens and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net. 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