5 Cities Around The World Dealing With Surprising Problems

It's not uncommon for people to take a quick 60 in a fast-food restaurant, but those unfortunates tend to be homeless and jobless. But while Hong Kong's McRefugees have their share of runaway teens and the mentally ill, over 70% of guests at the Hamburglar Inn are functioning adults with jobs and homes to get to. Except that, in their case, said jobs and homes are so terrible they necessitate crashing on Ronald McDonald's couch now and then.

For many Hongkongers, their work is so exhausting and hard to travel to, it sometimes makes more sense to just not go home but walk to the nearest McDonald's and put their heads on one of its least sticky tables. Not that they have a lot to go home to, anyway. With the city having the most expensive housing market in the world, many citizens can only afford "cage homes," filthy, tiny, badly wired rooms in dangerous neighborhoods where the number of roommates rivals the number of cockroaches under your bed. Compared to those living situations, hanging out in a well-lit, spacious McDonald's in the better part of town is like a four-star hotel experience.

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In under a decade, the demand for air travel in Sao Paulo became so great even traditional chopper services couldn't keep up. So it was only a matter of time before services like Cabify or Voom, the aerial equivalents of Lyft or Uber, came swooping down offering to teleport people across town for prices as low as a hundred bucks. But that has only further opened the floodgates of competitive cheap air travel. Now, of the 1,300 take-offs that occur every day in Sao Paulo, a lot of them are performed by hundreds of rogue "pirate taxis," private choppers and small planes offering off-the-books transportation services for prices so low they're in danger of hitting the ground. Just like their taxis.

To save you money, these sky (s)cabs keep costs down by not investing in proper permits, licenses or even training for their pilots. How does that affect their customers? Uh, fatally badly. In the past years, several of these illegal taxis have fallen out of the sky killing dozens, including a famed journalist, a pop star, and a bride on the way to her wedding. Fortunately, Brazilian authorities are starting to crack down on these illegal air taxis, which includes educating the public to report illegal activity and also maybe stop trying to bargain hunt when stepping onto a whirling machine of blades and death like a bunch of lunatics.

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So when that base then turned into an international airport, Angeles soon became one of the biggest centers of sex tourism in South East Asia -- and that's saying something. Today, after over five generations of mass sex work, the job is embedded into the DNA of the community. Almost literally, as countless fair-haired, fair-skinned young Filipinos walk the streets of Angeles. These kids, who are derogatorily called tisoy or "Amerasians," are all the children of prostitute mothers and sex tourist fathers, men of whom they know little, often not even where they came from.

Because their absentee fathers abandoned them and their (often underage) prostitute moms cannot support them, sex tourist kids have it rough. They tend to grow up in abject poverty and get bullied for looking different. And while their prospects in life are slim to none, sadly, they can always step into the family business, with many of the young men going to work as drivers, pimps and security guards while the young women try to fill the stripper heels of their mothers and their mothers' mothers before them. Can we just restart human civilization again to make it less overtly horrible?

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Over the past years, India has made a colossal effort to provide toilets to all of its people, installing more plumbing, constructing public restrooms, and even launching an extensive public information campaign complete with an anti-pooping theme song. Yet many Indians are still taking dumps on telecom towers and in open fields, and those who think this is a poverty issue are looking at the wrong side of the caste system.

In part thanks to President Modi's revival of Indian nationalism, a portion of upper-caste Indians defecate in public as a matter of tradition. They believe that even flushing a toilet counts as having cleaned up feces and that's a job only fit for Dalits, the lower caste who in the past were forced to clean all the public toilets. So to make sure these "untouchables" still have to put up with their shit, traditionalists prefer to squat it in the street and let it drop like a nervous elephant with the pigheaded expectation that someone else will have to clean it up.

Of course, the practice of exploiting lower castes has long been made illegal, meaning a lot of major Indian cities now have a depressing amount of human waste stinking up the place. But elsewhere, Human Rights Watch has observed that hundreds of thousands of Dalits are still forced into collecting the feces of these elite street shitters under threat of garnished wages, exile, or even violence.

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Jakarta is too holey. For decades, Jakartan citizens, businesses and factories have found a loophole around drawing water from the city's heavily polluted rivers by digging an actual hole. From poor families to 5-star hotels, almost everyone in Jakarta has private wells and cisterns accessing the city's vast underground freshwater aquifer layers. And as a result, the ground underneath the Indonesian capital has been turned into Swiss cheese.

All those tunnels into its swampy land have further turned the ground underneath the megacity into quicksand, making this megacity sink at an almost visible speed. That problem was made monumentally worse thanks to our old urban friend, concrete. Apart from its many small holes, Jakarta is basically one giant slab of concrete mixed with asphalt. Not only does all that weight cause the city to sink into the shifting sediment even more quickly, it also prevents rainwater from seeping into the ground and replenishing the water. And with nowhere to go, these storms flood the city like someone forgot to pull Jakarta's bath plug.

But the government has finally pulled the plug. With the prediction that 95% of North Jakarta will permanently be underwater by 2050, Indonesia has decided to let the soon-to-be-former capital drown and start anew somewhere else like some sort of metropolitan Noah. Soon, an entirely new capital city will be built from scratch on the island of Borneo. When it's finished, the underwater people of Jakarta will be more than welcome. Their shovels won't be, though.

Top Image: PxHere