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 natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.

Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)

Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)

> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.

That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.

Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?

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.

> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization

Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.

The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.

A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.

Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.

To be fair, this describes any sort of preserved or "reuse" food: toast, pickle, …

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

Burmese food in the US is very different from the food you encounter in the country itself.

Those restaurants had none of the food I ate in Burma

Not sure if it's still there, but Burma Super Star is the one I go to and it's good.

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 crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc

Neither the US, nor Japan are considered developing countries. I'm confused by your comment.

I presume they mean South East Asia.

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.

The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.

You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.

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

Bottled (mineral) water is a big business in Indonesia. Not sure if "people" are incentivized to change that anytime soon.

> it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.

So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.

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

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.

> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this

you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.

Are you from Mumbai? or a place with notably bad AQI? Do you smoke?

Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on earth, many people report being unable to perform aerobic exercise or describe breathing the air as being similar to smoking.

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

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

For anyone interested in the issues with Indonesian economy, politics and development may I suggest a great book: Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani.

Even in the US, a lot of right-of-ways were taken by the government for rail and, later, highways (which intersected with earlier railroads in many cases) before it would have been as difficult a process as it would be today. Not a political comment so much as an observation that it's harder to just take private land today.

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 to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.

3) This is much more likely.

But Ill grant you what BRT might allow you do to is ban cars from a corridor without to many people being angry, and that is a win by itself.

That is a fair argument. China's level of infrastructure development is pretty absurd.

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).

KL?

For electric vehicles, in third world countries the most obvious bottlenecks are pricing and infrastructure. However despite that, I'm quite surprised by how fast adoption actually is even when it's not as fast as first world countries.

For bikes, we already have TON of powered bikes. I can actually see electric bikes opening the eye of Americans on the wonder of scooters.

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...

Even in democratic Taiwan they have this mindset to an extent - private land must not stand in the way of infrastructure.

> I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country

As better public transport infrastructure vastly reduces the number of cars, and centralizes the requirement for both material and energy, I doubt that is the case. Buses and trains need far less of both than the population-equivalent number of cars/motorcycles.

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...

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.

I got curious to see how many people have cars in Jakarta. While cars per capita of Indonesia is extremely low (~80 / 1000 people), the one for Jakarta is at respectable ~300/1000 people, not far from NYC at ~400/1000 people. Still far away from other cities though.

From my experience also, scooter is still heavily used even by people that have cars because there's just a lot of small roads and neighborhood where it's very unsuitable for cars. This also makes scooter taxi very popular here since it's cheaper, faster, and can reach the deepest parts of Jakarta.

Americans use a car because their infrastructure was build to support it. If they had cities like exist in South East Asia they wouldn't use it. Because if they did it would literally be no traffic, because the city would barly move and you wouldn't get anywhere.

These cities already have to much traffic while only a small number of people have cars.

As far as I can tell, that export mostly came out of Hong Kong and has mostly stopped.

> 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 live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.

The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.

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.

India (also not Middle Eastern) has the largest population of Muslim people, but it is not 'majority Muslim'.

Only 20% of the Muslims in the world live in the Middle East.

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

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

It seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing?

https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/

Yeah if i only went by TV news i'd come to the same general conclusion. And if i narrowed it down to just Fox i'd probably think it was the UK.

Maybe. Could be somebody was repeating some sort of misinformation. Quick check says more like 20% in 10 years.

Not sure if I'm being whooshed here, but a large chunk of those people are not from China.

Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian

Bruce Lee is American, baby

A lot of the others are Hong Kong celebrities, from before Hong Kong was returned to China

(Probably should've specified Chinese as people from China, specifically the mainland)

Random Chinese culture routinely comes up on my IG reel.

tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines.

I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.

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.

Down substantially from the peak in 2022. And that's nominal prices. Adjusting for inflation will show that real prices are lower now than they were in 2017.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/average-house-prices

Looks to be averaging around 250,000 per year over the last decade. That'd be over 12 per 1000. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-starts

At no point did I mention the current immigration rates in Canada, over the last five years. Instead, I mentioned historic growth, which is not necessarily immigration, going back 100 plus years.

In the early 1900s, on farms, Canadian families were much, much larger than they are now. Immigration was certainly a thing, and contributed to those numbers, but most of that growth was through simple population growth domestically.

Speaking to the development of cities in the past, that development was within certain strictures and guidelines, but entirely handled by the private sector.

No state-owned companies were developing houses. There were very, very rare exceptions where during situations like the end of World War II, Canada paid for base housing for its soldiers returning from war. Yet these were extraordinary circumstances. This was during the tail end of a wartime economy, and part of the transition to a peacetime economy. This was not, and is not the normal way that Canada operates as a democracy. Not only was it to provide housing for all of the returning soldiers as they slowly left other countries that they were stationed in, it was also to provide jobs for people leaving factories that were producing munitions and other instruments of war.

Canada managed this transition exceptionally well, primarily due to projects just like this.

The point in all of this is that growth was driven organically by people simply moving to the cities. Again, yes, the cities have a planning department which dictates what may be where, how much residential space can be in a certain area, if there are going to be shops or malls or local shopping locations, where roads are going to be and so on. But that is an overall contributed by the community development plan. Developers have a say. Citizens have a say. This is called democracy.

Do not confuse nimbyism, which is primarily an American problem, with issues that have to do with building in Canada.

Again, I did not say there are no issues, I said NIMBYism is primarily in the US.

The real problem in Canada, and this is a solid show of how democracy works, is that people are concerned about things like the environment.

It's a little difficult to stomach that the very same people that will scream their heads off if environmental issues are not handled correctly, then get upset that building a house requires environmental assessments of land, environmental assessments of how population density will affect the land, insistence is that developers build parks, paths and green spaces.

When you hear the astronomical cost of building a house, when you hear the cost of red tape, what's being left out is that parts of the red tape are commitments to build things like parks, green spaces, paths, places for people to bike and walk without getting hit by cars.

All of these things add cost to the price of a house. They also add cost because developers do not follow plans, but constantly want to renegotiate over and over, and this indeed stretches out the time to build an entire subdivision.

Developers are also on hook for certain things, if they're building an entire subdivision. Roads, traffic lights, all sorts of things like this, including making sure that there's space for a local grocery store, so you don't have to drive or walk endless miles. Even things like the sidewalks when you're building a whole subdivision.

As a democracy in Canada, we like this. We prefer this. We prefer that you can get around with a car, but also you can get to your local grocery store if you want to just walk or take a bus a short distance.

If you are a person buying a single lot and wanting to build on that lot, things are not anywhere near as complex or onerous.

Yes, there are still environmental assessments. But who wants those environmental assessments? That's right, everyone, including the person buying the house, unless, of course, it might mean that they don't have a house quite as cheaply. Then, suddenly, they aren't environmentalists.

As someone who has bought land, that was pretty much the largest block on building. When it came to digging a well, when it came to building the house, when it came to the building plan that I submitted to my local municipality? All of that passed with flying colors unless of course I was doing something weird, such as building too close to the edge of the property or something else that was covered by simple, easy to understand bylaws.

I certainly support environmental assessments, but again I reiterate for a single person building a house they are typically not a problem.

There are certain segments of any society which believe that there should be no government involvement, in almost any portion of a society. These people are too far on one side, just as communism or dictatorships are too far on the other side. As with almost anything, moderation is key.

In Canada, we try to enable free enterprise. We try to keep red tape and other such issues as easy to bypass, and easy to work with as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that there is some degree of central planning and management that also has democratic citizen input.

Yet you will constantly see people of that belief trying to claim that all the issues with building houses have to do with some amount of red tape. Of NIMBYism. Yet when I look in my local community, I see people of all ages. I don't see the disparaging term that you used, boomers, causing a problem. There are people young, there are old people, there are people in their 30s, all owning houses.

Most people in Canada do not buy houses until their 30s or 40s. You may think this is a strange claim, but who wants to buy a house when they're in university? Who wants to buy a house on the first couple of years of their first job? Who wants to buy a house before they're even married? It doesn't make sense. It's not logical.

While I am an older person, I'm certainly not a boomer, as you call it, yet at the same time I did not buy a house until I was in my late 30s.

In Canada, housing pricing is where it is because of two primary reasons. The first is foreign investment. It's been so bad that in the past, that we have actually had motorandums on people that are not Canadian citizens buying houses. We have put, for example, in cities like Vancouver, taxes on empty houses because so many people from China were buying houses as investment structures.

The second reason is the lowest rate of inflation for the longest period of time, for decades.

Prior to the last few years, interest rates have been lower than they have ever been, and for a period of time longer than they had ever been.

This made housing cheaper than it has ever been before. Cheaper because when the low interest rates appeared, what the cost of a house is, is set by something called the market. Pricing is market derived. Pricing is predicated upon by what people will pay. So when interest rates drop dramatically from an amount of say 10 or 12% down to 0 or 1 or 2% over a period of about 5 or 6 years, suddenly housing is immensely more attractive. If you go to any mortgage calculator and use Canadian mortgage calculators, you can see the moving of interest rate from 1 or 2% at the bank, which I have had personally, up to say 11 or 12%, will literally more than double your monthly payment.

This means that if this condition exists for a long period of time, say almost 20 years like it did in Canada, slowly the price of houses will increase because people can afford more. This is how markets work. If people can afford more for housing then housing prices will go up just like any other type of free market competitive economy.

You can see this happening on any graph with the average price of housing compared to the price of inflation and you can see over 20 years the pricing of Canadian houses going up more than the rate of inflation and this is primarily why. Conjoin that with the massive speculation in the Canadian market and the pricing increases more.

If you take a house at $200,000 at 12% interest and you take a house at $400,000 at 2% interest, you will pay the same monthly payment approximately.

Canadian housing was quite affordable until interest rates went up. And slowly, as interest rates are higher, the price of Canadian housing cooled off and had started to come down a little bit, but now once again rates are dropping.

There are always blips in the marketplace. There are always shifts and changes. I have personally been through three separate recession events including the 2008 recession event, and all of these situations cause hardship for people first entering the housing market.

But this will pass. And it will pass and be solved. It won't be solved by turning to communism, to dictatorships. It won't be solved by getting rid of environmentalism or getting rid of planned communities.

It will be solved over a period of a few years as the market adjusts, and people can once again afford housing.

It will do so because the very people making the decisions, are not demonic old people. People have children. They have grandchildren. They want the best for their children and grandchildren. They want the best for their community.

You can be any age and be on the town council. You can be any age and be an MP.

Canada has had MPs who are under 20 in the last decade. Canada has had many MPs that are in their 30s.

There is no conspiracy. There is no attempt to stop young people from getting houses. There is no attempt to stop there from being a higher density housing in communities. We have plenty of land in Canada. We have plenty of space in Canada.

This lengthy response was engendered by the fact that you quite literally put words in my mouth. It was also engendered by the fact that people seem to think, even in Canada, that problems existing in Silicon Valley or in high-density US cities are the same problems that exist in Canada. They aren't. They are not the same problems. They are not caused by the same problems. It is not like you can copy and paste issues from American megacities into Canadian, much smaller cities.

The best way to fix some of the problems in California is to enforce open bidding on houses. When you do that, you reduce the uncertainty in bids, you reduce market pressures to increase the price of housing.

doener had submitted it previously.