There was literally nothing except an obscure village or two when construction started in 2002, and the official population figure of 900,000 is widely regarded as preposterous. (The video I linked to above guesses 100k tops.)
I took a look at the satellite images. It's a bit hard for me to gauge what the entire area that is supposed to comprise 900k people is, but the official numbers for Pyinmana (inside the capital district but not the capital itself) is about ~100-200k, and Pyinmana is visibly more dense than the city of Naypyidaw itself.
In contrast to Brasilia (which is perhaps the most well-known recent-ish create-a-new-capital-from-scratch initiative), it is far less dense and less occupied. Contrasting to most of the other newer similarly-situated capitals, Naypyidaw is clearly pretty poorly populated and some of its infrastructure is laughably oversized compared to what use it would actually get (Why do you need that road with 10 lanes in each direction? It goes from nowhere to nowhere...).
Putrajaya in Malaysia (est 2001) is an interesting comparison. It's also overly ambitious and oversized, but it's not quite as nuts (the empty highways are 3-4 lanes, not 10), it has a comparatively far more sane location (between Kuala Lumpur and its main airport), and its actual population is around 90,000.
And of course Astana - or now called Nur-Sultan to honour the Kazakh president. Also has the similar highways that can just be used for airplanes if needed. The city was a ghost town in the weekends when I visited 6 years ago, because all government personnel takes the night train to Almaty in the weekends.
Interestingly, Brasilia was modeled after the build-up of Washington DC - a remote capital that would not allow undue influence from any one existing US State.
If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
The reason why we don't focus on deplatforming sites like this is precisely because it's a concrete problem with a concrete solution. If instead you're a culture warrior fighting "fascism" or "the alt-right" you'll never run out of blue check marks to deplatform and your personal influence will never stop growing.
A more fair comparison would be a higher end Camry, Avalon, or L Series Lexus.
The Corolla is a very simple car in every respect and inexpensive. Reliability goes down when systems get more complicated and expensive. That's why the Acura and Lexus equivalents of there Honda and Toyota counterparts are much less reliable.
Lexus was the most reliable automaker according to consumer reports for awhile. Mazda I think recently dethroned them but they are I think still above regular Toyota. Not sure what your source on this claim about Lexus being less reliable than Toyota...
My source is Consumer Reports. CR lists Lexus as a brand of the Toyota Motor Company, and yes Toyota is the most reliable automaker. But if you look at Brands, Toyota, Honda, and Subaru beat Lexus.
Mazda was never in the running. Mitsubishi has better ratings than them.
Going from Idaho to New York is about the same shock as going from Idaho to Australia. The people who make this comparison are the ones who have actually been to many different American states instead of just reading about them on Reddit.
That's not the point, but even if it was, you could also say something like going from Kiryas Joel to New York City is as big of a "shock" as going from Idaho to Australia, even though these two places are in the same state and 30km away. Yeah the U.S is big and varied, but that doesn't mean that the political and societal structures are approximately the same as the EU.
It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states. Then they became a confederacy (twice). There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
> It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states.
The same is true of Canada's provinces and Australia's states – before (con)federation, they were separate British colonies. The big difference between Australia/Canada and the US, is the American colonies rebelled first, and then federated after they had won their independence. The Australian and Canadian colonies federated (with the approval of London) into "dominions", which were more than mere colonies but rather semi-independent parts of the British Empire. (London's power over the dominions gradually declined over the decades to the point that it recognised them as fully independent countries, although neither Canada nor Australia was fully independent at the moment of their respective federations.)
(Australians call it "Federation" and Canadians call it "Confederation" but it is the same thing. Canadian confederation never produced a Confederation in the sense that the American Articles of Confederation or the Confederate States of America were.)
Also, even before the now-independent American colonies formed themselves into a federation, they already viewed themselves as a distinct nation. There was never really any point that New Yorkers (for instance) viewed themselves as New Yorkers rather than Americans or British or British North Americans. American states never functioned as national identities. (Even cases like independent Vermont and independent Texas, they saw largely themselves as Americans waiting to be allowed into the United States, there was never really any independent Texan nationalism or Vermont nationalism.) Prior to the American revolution, there was no difference between Americans and English-speaking Canadians – they all saw themselves as British North Americans. It was only after the American revolution that English-speaking Canadians stopped identifying with the label "American" and began to identify it with the other country to the south instead. The American revolution was really the formative event which split Anglophone Canada and the United States into separate national identities.
> There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.
Texas tried to secede as part of the Confederacy, and the attempt was crushed. Whatever rights of secession some Texans claim exist on paper certainly don't exist in practice.
There are some big differences between American states, yes. (I myself have been to a few, not Idaho though.)
But there are even bigger differences between Indian states. All American states share a common majority language (English). By contrast, in India, different states speak different languages, even completely unrelated ones (Indo-European vs Dravidian). Yet I've never heard an Indian compare countries to Indian states.
There is also a fair amount of diversity within Australia, even within the same state. Sydney is a buzzing worldly metropolis of over 5 million people, at the capital of the state of New South Wales. 1187 km northwest, but still in New South Wales, is the tiny town of Tibooburra, population 134, which I actually visited once with my parents when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I think the difference between Tibooburra and Sydney is at least as big as the difference between Idaho and New York.
Covid is not nearly as high on the priority list for many third world countries as it is for the US. Here covid shuts down everything. In many African countries it is an order of magnitude less impactful than malaria.
There probably is (less infection) due to the more broad vaccines they receive compared to developed countries, which as a second effect create a little more broad immunity.
Due to the much younger population, most of Africa, India, and Pakistan has had MMR, and it's been found that the mumps vaccine provides significant immunity. In the west most over 35 had measles only, or MR combination without mumps.
DOI: 10.1128/mBio.02628-20
For some reason this hasn't been well covered in the media. I got an MMR booster in June based on preliminary findings, my GP thought I was insane.
Sure but getting 1 million units of anti-malarial drugs properly distributed is an order of magnitude more important than the same quantity of covid vaccines. Just look up their death rates.
You're assuming that people on r/wallstreetbets are exactly the same as people on wall street who literally only care about money. The redditors buying don't want to make money, they just want to kill the hedge fund. By wasting a few hundred dollars they are making a larger dent in wall street than congress has made for the last few decades.
That's the future defense against this kind of short squeeze. Funds will engage these subs (or hire people) and deflect interest from the stocks they're shorting and maybe steer it towards competitor's.
