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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

#301

Post by ghaff »

YorickPeterse wrote: post #155
nerdralph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I was in KL for a business event. Can't say I cared for it much but it was just a few days. Didn't interact with public transit at all.

Did like Penang afterwards though.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#302

Post by dboreham »

mc32 wrote: post #185
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.

Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.

Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#303

Post by dboreham »

mandolingual wrote: post #128
CamperBob2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regional abbreviation, or the airport code? .... what? Either works?

Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.

And homeless drug addicts.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#304

Post by dredmorbius »

roughly wrote: post #234
Greduan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_...> (originally by Groucho Marx: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-...>).

Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#305

Post by dboreham »

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…

Quick note that several cities were built from scratch in the UK in the 20th century. E.g. Milton Keynes. (City using the American definition, not the cathedral thing).

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#306

Post by indoordin0saur »

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

Same with India. I heard its absolutely terrible there for small groups of women and impossible for solo travelling women. The advice I've heard that can help (a little) is wearing fake wedding ring and telling people that you're married.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#307

Post by indoordin0saur »

steego wrote: post #59
parpfish wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build. I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport. At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is lite…

If I had Musk or Bezos levels of wealth my middle-age retirement project would be buying a million acres somewhere and playing real life SimCity.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#308

Post by brnt »

brabel wrote: post #293
teekert wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Dutch people can afford cars, but many are on bikes (including cargo/e-bikes), about 27% of all "movements" [0]. This is because of the way our infrastructure is set up, the bike is very often optimal (special bike lanes, shorter routes, better/free parking at destination or public transport hubs). Most people do own a car though. [0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...

True, but if there was a city of 40 million in the Netherlands, I'm afraid very few would venture out on bikes there too.

Car ownership correlates negatively with urbanization in NL, so no, I don't think so. And no 40M city (or 4M city) convinces me driving is an acceptable way to get around.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#309

Post by medstrom »

thedrexster wrote: post #131
bogota69 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila. I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia. The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.

This is such an odd position to create a burner account to argue...

If it seems odd, maybe it's not what they're doing.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#310

Post by RankingMember »

Loughla wrote: post #163
duffyjp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a…

>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach. I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though. I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.

It'd be nice if there was some way to "acclimate" your gut prior to a trip like that.
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