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Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

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Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#151

Post by cholantesh »

itake wrote: post #43
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed. Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car. Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either. Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at…

>Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).

I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#152

Post by Muromec »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #132
duffyjp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears... I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.

In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when nati…

>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar

It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#153

Post by markdown »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.

> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]

> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.

> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#154

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

vkou wrote: post #33
awongh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved. And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the c…

New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.

Some say the straight Paris boulevards were intended for cannon grapeshot ...

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#155

Post by YorickPeterse »

nerdralph wrote: post #60
ecshafer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.

KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.

If you leave KL city and go to the surrounding areas, such as Petaling Jaya or Subang Jaya, it becomes more manageable (entering KL from there feels like a 5-10C temperature increase). It gets better the further you go of course, but for tourists that may be a bit tricky as it won't be as easy to get around (at least not without a car).

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#156

Post by paxys »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #89
itake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed. Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car. Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either. Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at…

Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA

Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#157

Post by mcmoor »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #136
itake wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. It's even worse when you're sitting on the back of a motorbike 6ft away from 10 other gas powered bikes. There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).

> Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street. And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison. https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/taiwan/kaohsiung/kaohsiung https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/…

Hmm it's a bit surprising. Usually when I checked, it'll never be under 100. Maybe the current rainy season helps?

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#158

Post by Affric »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #140
Affric wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting Indonesian below Filipino food is quite something.

I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.

lol... try being in poultry. Every time you go to the Phillipines it's: all Balut, all the time.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#159

Post by esperent »

vladgur wrote: post #127
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with. Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart

Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map....

So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries.

I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if you zoomed in, due to old lead piping and so on.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#160

Post by ghaff »

exhilaration wrote: post #142
alephnerd wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states. Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China t…

In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics. Wow...

And, while you can pick and choose data, Beijing's Olympic stadium is not really very widely used as far as I can tell. Of course you can also debate whether a lot of urban revitalization projects--even if leading to popular settings/venues--were worth the cost to neighborhoods that were basically flattened.
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