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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

#341

Post by [deleted] »

bogota69 wrote: post #48
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#342

Post by zarzavat »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #300
wraptile wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.

This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city. After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singa…

It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.

No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)

Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#343

Post by [deleted] »

Greduan wrote: post #230
throwaway2037 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#344

Post by BurningFrog »

wraptile wrote: post #225
BurningFrog wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That makes sense, but I have to assume driving a scooter is a pretty dangerous way to get around a giant city?

I have biker friends who call cars "cages", and I get the sentiment. But they have a lot more concussions than any other group of people I know.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#345

Post by dredmorbius »

paxys wrote: post #161
refurb wrote: post #111

I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn. Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.

These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.

Demographics and geography approaches this through the notion of "metropolitan statistical area" (MSA) in the US, or equivalent concepts elsewhere. An MSA is defined as a "geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the region".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area>

Other rough equivalents are metropolitan areas (UK), census metropolitan areas (Canada), functional urban areas (FUA) (EU), urban agglomerations (India). All of these use functional and behavioural characteristics to get around simple boundary-demarkation. Urbanisations may even span national borders, as with the greater Basel region, Lake Constance, or Strasbourg-Ortenau.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#347

Post by seanmcdirmid »

realusername wrote: post #339
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.

That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that. The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.

Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#348

Post by jeromegv »

decimalenough wrote: post #177
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.

For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food. About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which…

I guess we just have different experience of Manila. In most places you would go as a visitor, either tourist or business, you're not really likely to see a lot of violence. I've been there 10 times over 10 years, and really nothing truly bad happened or even seen or heard by fellow travellers. I've been harassed by street kids, that's about it.

Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.

Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.

But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#349

Post by kjs3 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #201
BlaDeKke wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.

> We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping. This is nice to hear. A real win. Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?

Does "I'm just not going to be a dick to these people for ultimately trivial reasons" really need an explanatory framework in your world?

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#350

Post by screye »

Froztnova wrote: post #46
cdmckay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which assumptions are those?

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…

There no middle-eastern countries among the top 5 muslim countries by population.

It goes: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh & Nigeria, in that order.

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