kurosawaa

Multiple bus companies can be a good thing if done well. The busses in Taiwan are also privatized and the service is quite good. In Japan even the metro and rail networks compete in a private market.

When you privatize a company and make it a monopoly though you get the worst of both worlds.

It's still a shame because the batteries are less environmentally friendly than the old trolley busses.

Developers will stop building once there aren't any customers left, which absolutely does happen in countries that allow high density urban housing.

If they built more apartments, apartments with good sound proofing would be more common. I used to live in Taiwan, and every cheap apartment I lived in had excellent sound proofing.

Once there is more competition in the apartment/condo market, quality will go up.

Lemmy is just too small so it doesn't attract the same hard core crowd that it did on reddit. Lemmy also promotes controversial comments by default.

In a well made apartment building you cant hear anything from your neighbors.

Mao and most of the other early communist leadership were southerners. Most of the early KMT was made up of southerners too. I think westerners have this misconception that "Mandarin" is a northern language, but the standard Mandarin spoken in China is largely artificial, and has been a separate language for governance and education for centuries. No one in China back in 1949 would have thought of Standard Mandarin as representing "Northern" Chinese culture, even though it is based on an aristocratic dialect of Beijing Mandarin.

Some of the most endangered languages in China are natural forms of Mandarin in northern China, because it so similar to Standard Chinese and the government has no protections or cultural programs for them, unlike the southern languages like Wu, Minnan, and Cantonese.

China is a complicated country and it's sad to see these misconceptions repeated ad nauseum in English media.

There are way too many answers after you finish this quiz. You should recommend, at most, three options after the quiz. This doesn't help narrow down your options much at all.

Metal straws have gotten very popular in Taiwan, the home of bubble tea. It's not that inconvenient to take a metal straw or other reusable straw with you.

Have you used Java before? It's not a big leap from Java to C#, most of the concepts are the same. At least C# is a memory safe language, although I'm not sure if you're unfamiliar with the code base and languages if it really makes a difference which language you use here. Hopefully your coworkers can help hold your hand a bit here, this situation sucks.

Look at many of America's top companies and you'll see they are run by immigrants. There is a huge demand for skilled labor in America and there aren't nearly enough skilled Americans. If you stop immigration these skilled workers will immigrate to other wealthy countries and build world class industries there instead and outcompete the United States. Immigrants are by far one of America's most important assets.

Motorsports are by far the most polluting form of sport per capita. Hardly anyone can partake in them and those that do inflect massive amounts of environmental damage. It's ok to like something, but we should still be mindful of the negatives a hobby can cause so we can at least minimize the damage. Like golf is fine, but we don't need to use so many pesticides and build golf courses in deserts.