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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

#221

Post by lurk2 »

deepspace wrote: post #103
Froztnova wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got aroun…

That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.

> What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography?

This doesn’t fall under the category of basic geography. I can guarantee you that the majority of people you attended school with would not be able to locate Indonesia on a map, much less tell you about the religions practiced there.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#222

Post by renewiltord »

justonceokay wrote: post #117
tim333 wrote: post #114

For Europeans wanting a megacity experience within weekend jaunt range, Cairo can be kind of a mad experience, with things like the Garbage City https://www.adventuresnsunsets.com/cairo-garbage-city/ and cave church https://www.egypttoursportal.com/en-gb/blog/egypt-attraction... plus the usual pyramids etc. Very cheap Ubers like $8/hr.

Try not to be a woman

Family went together. Mum, dad, and us two boys. ‘07 or so. Very friendly people. But armed soldiers everywhere. Perhaps have changed since then.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#223

Post by lurk2 »

Froztnova wrote: post #137
deepspace wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.

TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.

He’s being obtuse, it isn’t common knowledge at all.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#224

Post by renewiltord »

parpfish wrote: post #36
skx001 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.

I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan? does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right? or would the g…

City of Irvine corp and California Forever corp are two examples. But billionaires in the US are constrained by everyone else. The power of democracy is strength in numbers and we have them now though we didn’t fifty years ago.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#225

Post by wraptile »

BurningFrog wrote: post #202
mcmoor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative. I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are…

Americans use cars because we can afford them. The Indonesians would too if they could.

How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.

Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.

Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#226

Post by wraptile »

superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

Opression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#227

Post by pezezin »

mc3301 wrote: post #205
rester324 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level cr…

noisy street advertisements.. and jingles... shops of all shapes and sizes blaring music...

I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#228

Post by realusername »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #112
rafram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.

How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages , with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.

> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?

Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#229

Post by aurareturn »

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…

Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.

I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#230

Post by Greduan »

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…

Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.

Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.

It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?

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