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Yeah Jakarta was founded as the Amsterdam of the East Indies. Sadly Indonesia doesn't have the near limitless resources of its old colonial owner that keeps Ams
by Feniks 9y ago
Yeah Jakarta was founded as the Amsterdam of the East Indies. Sadly Indonesia doesn't have the near limitless resources of its old colonial owner that keeps Amsterdam/Holland from sinking.
Climate change is going to hurt the poorer countries the most.
- cobbzilla 9y agoI agree but Jakarta is not terribly poor, with a GDP of over $400B [1]. The problem seems more rooted in a low-trust political environment that is riddled with corruption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta
- org3432 9y agoRight, it's the corruption and disorganization that's the problem.
- justicezyx 9y agoWhy not blame the socialism?
- akoncius 9y agobecause socialism is not same as corruption?
- org3432 9y agoThere are actually real problems to be solved, and nonsensical factless arguments don't solve them.
- WillyOnWheels 9y agoWhat socialism? Socialist politics are basically banned Indonesia.
- ajmurmann 9y agoYeah, socialism is why Europe is struggling so hard and Bavarian slums look like a hell hole especially compared to the American South.
- bogomipz 9y agoIndonesia actually has a larger GDP than the Netherlands and the largest economy in South East Asia
- yanowitz 9y agoGDP per capita is more than 4x in Netherlands (on a PPP basis). On a straight per capita basis, it’s even higher. See, e.g., https://tradingeconomics.com/indonesia/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/indonesia/gdp-per-capita
- Someone 9y agoLower GDP generally also means infrastructure works are cheaper. Also, the problem here mostly seems to be not money, but government. As the article states “Nobody here believes in the greater good […] There is no trust”. Short-term, how much more expensive would it be to get clean water from the rivers flowing into Jakarta, instead of from those illegal wells?
- yanowitz 9y agoPurchasing Power Parity is meant to capture elements like cheaper costs of construction. It gives a real sense of the gap between Indonesia (4th most populous country, with China and India neck-and-neck, followed quite a bit lower by the U.S.) and the Netherlands. Corruption may be a factor too, but you can’t squeeze blood from a stone.
- Someone 9y agoIs meant to, yes, but it doesn’t, because it isn’t possible to capture pricing differences in a single number. In general, cheap to transport durable goods (such as electronics) move easily between countries and, hence, are priced similarly (barring taxes and import tariffs). Less cheap to transport (e.g. bricks) or less durable (e.g. fruit) goods move less easily, and labor moves least easily. Consequently, it is way cheaper in poorer countries to have personnel, to pay people for repairing stuff, etc.
- pkaye 9y agoThe article says they are draining the ground water aquifers too fast and causing the sinking.
- harpiaharpyja 9y agoWell, probably one of the biggest factors affecting the aquifer recharge rate would be the loss of forests and mangroves.
- pkaye 9y agoOr maybe they are just overdrawing it above the recharge rate like it happens in the Central valley in California.
- curun1r 9y agoThe article states that overdrawing is one half of the equation, but excessive paving is the other half which prevents the significant rainfall that the city gets from refilling the water table. California is a much more arid region with dry/wet years. Jakarta is tropical, gets roughly 3x the rainfall as San Francisco and has much more consistent/predictable weather, though with climate change, the storms they're seeing are becoming more intense. I'm not sure you can compare the two because California is legitimately a situation of using more water each year than we get in rainfall. In Jakarta, is likely funneling rainfall into the ocean and then draining the aquifers. And while both situations are cases of taking out more water than is being put in, the root causes are very different.
- averagewall 9y agoPeople often say that about climate change but isn't it fairly general and obvious that widespread problems hurt poor people the most? In a food shortage, the people who can't afford for food starve first. In developed coastal land shortage, the people who can't afford mitigations have their lives disrupted the most. When a war happens, the people who can't afford to flee get caught up in it. People who can't afford to move out of a high crime neighborhood are more often victims of crime. Disease causes more harm to people who can't afford medicine. Is being poor really more desirable for anything? Perhaps instead of worrying about global warming, we should solve poverty, then they won't be affected so badly.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoThis is not just global climate change but loca ecological disaster, still the same end result but they have themselves to blame.
- lostlogin 9y agoI go for solving both rather than just one, but that is great angle. Discussing poverty on HN can be a pretty wild ride though.
- BurningFrog 9y agoClimate change is not the reason Jakarta is sinking. That is caused by the Jakartans themselves.
- lostlogin 9y agoBeing under water is a pretty big climate change. To be called ‘climate change’ does the local environment have to change in ways that relate to weather? I’m struggling to find a definition for ‘climate change’ that isn’t hand-wavey, but those I can find all include ‘weather’ in their definition.
- mistermann 9y agoIs the weather causing Jakarta to sink?
- lostlogin 9y agoNo, but it’s predicted to have a radical climate change.
- rsj_hn 9y agoUltimately the resources a nation has are the skills of its people and political will. No nations resources are limitless, and the Netherlands has far fewer real resources but much better skills and organizational capabilities. The fact that the Netherlands was a former colonial power doesn't give them any "colony juice" that they can squeeze onto the ground and dams rise up like apple trees. They still have to design and build the thing given their smarts and labor, and Indonesia has to design the thing given their smarts and labor. The only difference is in the pool of available talent and the organizational abilities of the government to marshall that talent. Given Indonesia's much larger population and greater abundance of natural resources, it's a joke to suggest that it has no resources to build a dam whereas a tiny nation with fewer resources is able to do it. Indonesia's problem is that they are more corrupt and disorganized, and can't marshall their resources effectively.
- defo_nonconvex 9y agoTiny country by land mass maybe, but you know the Dutch East India Company's peak market cap was (inflation-adjusted) 8x10^12 USD, right? If you don't understand the economic impact of early resource abundance, on the ability to construct education systems, universities, professional organizations, infrastructure, and industry, and the 'pool of available talent', then pick up a strategy game. Otherwise just Rand-ian codswallop.
- rsj_hn 9y agoYes, but those nominal amounts are just paper. They are a mechanism to marshall labor, nothing more. They don't correspond to real resources. This is an interesting fallacy -- I remember playing Freeciv, and you would get 1000 coins in the bank, and if you wanted to speed up building of some monument, you just spend the coins and poof, all these things get built, even if you don't have the labor or real resources to do it. The world doesn't work like that. In the real world, if you try to cash out your stock and sell it to build something without the real resources to do it, all that happens is inflation goes up. But a country really only has the labor and land and domestic equipment that it has, and it needs to use that to build all the dams. You can create paper claims valued at hundreds of trillions of dollars if you want, but it doesn't add a single hour of manpower to the country.