World News Random, Random

[ponchi101]

Can we expect a clean election?

[dryrunguy]

Can we expect a clean election?

Very clean. In the sense that the result is pre-determined. Doesn't get much "cleaner" than that.

[Suliso]

I wish I could answer this with any confidence. Second round is likely in my opinion.

[mmmm8]

Yup,runoff likely on May 28.

[ponchi101]

Erdogan has to go. That is the only thing.
I am surprised that if the result was "rigged", it will go that far. Very strange for the dictatorial type not to take care of this sort of issues.

[dryrunguy]

I thought we had a Climate Change thread somewhere? Anyway, did anyone else not know that they're moving the city of Jakarta? Today's NY Times newsletter provides a summary.

::

800 miles away
“Jakarta has a lot of problems,” says my colleague Hannah Beech, The Times’s senior correspondent for Asia, “but its most existential one is that it is sinking in some places by up to a foot a year.”

Climate change is part of the reason: The Java Sea — which surrounds Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital — is rising. But an even bigger factor is that Jakartans, desperate for access to clean water, have dug thousands of illegal wells that effectively deflate the marshes underneath the city. Today, 40 percent of Jakarta lies below sea level, and flooding is increasingly common.

The encroaching sea presents a threat to one of the world’s most densely packed cities, where 10 million people live in an area about half the size of New York City, and another 20 million reside in the surrounding region. To deal with that threat, Indonesia’s popular president — Joko Widodo, in his ninth year in office — has devised an audacious solution: He is moving the country’s capital.

The new capital, now under construction, is called Nusantara. It is being built from the ground up, about 800 miles from the current capital. Joko promises that the city will be a model of environmental stewardship, carbon neutral within a few decades.

Unlike Jakarta, which is in Java, the region that has long dominated the country’s politics and economy, Nusantara is in Borneo, where residents have felt overlooked. “Indonesia is more than Jakarta,” Joko told Hannah on a recent tour of Nusantara. “Indonesia is more than Java. So we must make the capital in a place that is far away.”

But it remains unclear whether his grand plans will succeed. Joko wants the new capital to open next year, before his second — and, by law, final — term as president ends. Not all his potential successors support the plan. And it seems to be behind schedule: No residential towers have been built, and the lead architect is worried that the rapid construction schedule could compromise safety.

“People want Nusantara to succeed because it means that the developing world — despite all the problems that were placed in its path by the legacy of imperialism, by the legacy of colonialism — that a country can succeed on its own terms and can be a successful democracy and can create its own vision for itself,” Hannah said. “But it’s a very, very challenging thing to do.”

[mmmm8]

Had no idea - thanks for posting!

[ponchi101]

Extremely odd.
But what do you do with the actual city? Let it sink and vanish? What sort of environmental issues would that bring (just imagine the effect of hundreds of thousands of septic tanks leaching into the water).

[ti-amie]

A certain orange blob wants to do the same thing...

[ti-amie]

I haven't posted about it but things in Peru haven't calmed down either.

[ponchi101]

Meanwhile, a little bit further north, in the Republic of Colombia, us Venezuelans that live here are telling Colombians that, when your president starts saying that he needs more years to fix the country, and attempts to take over the judicial branch of government, it is time to head for the hills.
What Drop Shot told me years ago: moving from one L. American country to another is simply changing cabins in the Titanic.

[ti-amie]

Meanwhile, a little bit further north, in the Republic of Colombia, us Venezuelans that live here are telling Colombians that, when your president starts saying that he needs more years to fix the country, and attempts to take over the judicial branch of government, it is time to head for the hills.
What Drop Shot told me years ago: moving from one L. American country to another is simply changing cabins in the Titanic.

What a sad state of affairs.

[Suliso]

Perhaps here is part of the answer why South America and non-oil Middle East is not doing so well economically? Mathematics and science seems to be taught way better in Eastern Europe (a bit old data, though).

[ponchi101]

All I can I say is: math was frequently loathed by my fellow students and friends. So no wonder Vennieland is not even in the graph.
And I always say that math in S. America is taught in such a way that it is a turn down.

[mmmm8]

Meanwhile, a little bit further north, in the Republic of Colombia, us Venezuelans that live here are telling Colombians that, when your president starts saying that he needs more years to fix the country, and attempts to take over the judicial branch of government, it is time to head for the hills.
What Drop Shot told me years ago: moving from one L. American country to another is simply changing cabins in the Titanic.

Didn't he just get elected last year? Usually the prepping doesn't start till the year before the election.