This is strange. Hong Kong is not that large, as compared to South Korea or Japan. Many people in Hong Kong live in tidy space. Why are there abandoned villages in Hong Kong?
> In the 1950s and ‘60s, as Hong Kong grew as an industrial hub, many people migrated to the rapidly expanding urban centers for better working opportunities. “It’s hard farming and fishing out there in these remote areas, so a lot of people moved to the city to work in the factories,”
That explained why they were abandoned, but not why they haven't been reoccupied, since HK's population has exploded since the 1950s.
The short answer seems to be corruption: a cabal of property developers colludes with the government to ensure prices are sky-high and nobody outside the system (like, say, whoever owns the land in these abandoned villages) gets building permits.
A missing part of the story is that so many moved abroad. So the land rights now belong to first or second generation migrants and there just isn't enough pull to get them back. Yet there are sentimental and family reasons to hold onto the land--it costs nothing. And the land plots can't really be sold to developers at a high price unless the whole village, or a section of it, all get together and agree.
I added “really” to imply it’s impractical. What developer would pay a high premium? They can’t build a big tower unless they have a ton of adjoining plots. The village is abandoned and the owners are all abroad or just disinterested. The developer would have to do a lot of leg work just to find these people. And if one of them objects then the thing stalls.
It’s a lot of effort and high risk. Much easier to buy out active villages where you can knock on a door, show them a check and do it that way.
Edit: actually it may be even more difficult than that as the inheritance right appears limited to the heir building one house. I’m not sure the plots even can be sold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_House_Policy
Do you want to live in the city with utilities and transit infrastructure, or do you want to live in the middle of a mountainous island with nothing but a ferry connection to shore?
I don’t know unfortunately. It was a mix between NetBSD workstations, Solaris servers when I left. And for the students a pool of Scientific Linux machines (RHEL)
It's "big in Japan". Used on many ISP routers there, for example Internet Initiative Japan's "SEIL" family, as well as most workstations in a few Japanese universities.
pkgsrc enjoys mild popularity in the scientific computing community, a lot of NetBSD use is probably in education - Cambridge University uses it for their thin clients too.
I'm not sure, however, it seems that the game does not have the element of borrowing / lending of money. I think the optimal strategy will be quite different than yours, when the economy has the loan component.
That type of repression isn’t possible in Russia. It requires a cult and people who haven’t heard of the free world for a generation.
It can be as isolated as Iran however, which is pretty remarkable considering how close the now prosperous St Petersburg is to Helsinki and Tallinn. The contrast from today to a year from now will be extreme.
It's difficult to overstate just how big of a turning point this is for the world, especially Europe, because I can't see how Russia returns to anything like normal relations in the foreseeable future. There's no way they leave Ukraine entirely, and therefore the sanctions will remain indefinitely.
Europe is still heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas, but this is clearly untenable. If and when that business dries up, they will be truly isolated from the west.
I think you're half right: China will allow Russia to circumvent trade sanctions, like they do with North Korea. But, like any irreplaceable middleman, China will extract as much as they can from Russia in the process. China loses a powerful ally, gains a loyal vassal state, and Russia loses its political power. All in all, not a terrible outcome for the West.
I don't think China will be quick to help them evade sanctions. There will certainly be some of that, but Chinese banks are already cutting ties with Russian businesses for fear of secondary sanctions.
Yeah, it was a massive, massive disaster. The expenses associated with the new (hopefully) cold war will make europe weak and irrelevant on the global stage. That includes Russia. And what was this all for?
Many thousands of north koreans still work abroad every year. Hard to keep an entire population completely isolated from the world when you have thousands constantly travelling abroad.
I'm a FreeBSD developer and run FreeBSD on my desktop, and MacOS on my laptop. I have not had a great experience with any *nix other than MacOS on a laptop.
My main objection to MacOS & why I don't run it on my desktop is that I can't configure window management exactly how I want it, like I can with KDE or LXDE. Most of what I can't do centers around muscle memory for window management tricks involving mouse buttons and modifier keys. This goes away on a laptop with a trackpad, since the muscle memory is different with a trackpad than with a mouse.
I used FreeBSD on desktop for a number of years and switched over to OSX and I've been through some of the window management pain. I generally do as much as I can with keyboard hotkeys but I do have a trackpad connected to my desktop now as well.
As far as window management, I use contexts for my switcher, rectangle for hotkey-based window management, and stay for automated per-app & per-display window management
This has also been true in Linux developer conferences. About 10 years ago, it was difficult seeing anyone running desktop Linux, and even more difficult seeing non-Apple hardware. Last 5 years situation changed significantly.
