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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

#321

Post by sashank_1509 »

geodel wrote: post #49
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.

Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains. And this…

I’ve liked living in Delhi recently, much less congested than Bengaluru that gnaws on my soul with its insane traffic. The only reasonable way to live in India is to live away from the main streets, ideally in a gated community which is a bikeable distance from work.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#322

Post by lostlogin »

dboreham wrote: post #303
mandolingual wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve never been there, but the US version of the tv series The Killing is so great and it sure gives a grim impression of the weather.

Not that serial killers are any better on a nice day in pleasant weather.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#323

Post by [deleted] »

mlrtime wrote: post #279
vladgur wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others? Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?

It's expensive to control the quality of water from source all the way to tap. Just having visible clean running water is hard.

[deleted]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#324

Post by hearsathought »

defrost wrote: post #269
boxed wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?

Do you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs? There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate

> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.

Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#325

Post by autoexec »

yen223 wrote: post #181
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

I feel the same way about China tbh Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?

Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#326

Post by somenameforme »

jack_tripper wrote: post #288
erincandescent wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids. Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also fu…

Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.

As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.

Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#327

Post by vkou »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #154
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

France had the inverse problem, all the nobles were sequestered away in Versailles, and weren't particularly interested in actually running the state.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#328

Post by itake »

doix wrote: post #236
exidy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thailand is cracking down on visa runs and people staying quasi-permanently on short-stay visas: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visit/thailand-step...

The parent mentions the DTV visa which is the opposite of the visa-run strategy. Realistically though, if you're a "nomad" from a country with a powerful-ish passport you can come to Thailand for 60 days, extend once for 30 days for a total stay of 90 days. After that you can do a bit of a loop between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines in whatever order you prefer and come back to Thailand in…

That is basically my life. I've visited almost every country in the region this year (+ China and Japan) on a tourist visa.

The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#329

Post by lurk2 »

panick21_ wrote: post #258
lurk2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual patterns that crop up are: 1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive. 2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade syst…

1) I really don't see how it prohibilitivly expensive. Much poorer places have built them and there are tons of companies who are willing to do it. Specially if you have a 30 year plan. 2) Another one I don't buy if you have a 30 year plan. Buses have higher operating costs, need more space, have less capacity and the surrounding infrastructure gets more expensive. The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier t…

> The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.

The only thing rice is good at is being a cheap source of nutrition.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#330

Post by quickthrowman »

yen223 wrote: post #181
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

I feel the same way about China tbh Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?

The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.

Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.

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