alt Hacker NewsAll that is true, but I was not claiming it is the primary driver, but that safety and comfort mattered too.
With seatbelts I think the biggest problem is most people simply do not understand how much safer you are if you wear seatbelts - people who will pay a premium for a "safer" car and not wear seatbelts.
I as not familiar with the term 2LDK. it seems to be a Japanese term for a two bed flat? The places I know are less crowded and the equivalent would be a house or somewhere a lot bigger (at least for anyone who could afford higher education abroad).
> All that is true, but I was not claiming it is the primary driver, but that safety and comfort mattered too.
Absolutely! Though comfort would be rated much higher than safety.
> I as not familiar with the term 2LDK. it seems to be a Japanese term for a two bed flat? The places I know are less crowded and the equivalent would be a house or somewhere a lot bigger (at least for anyone who could afford higher education abroad).
In India and Vietnam, a 2 or 3 bedroom flat/condo would often be part of a gated community/society that includes 24/7 security, park/greenspace, gym, swimming pool, playgrounds, and schools, and would have a mall across the street that includes a mix of Western (eg. McD, Starbucks, Levi's) and domestic (eg. Chaayos, Third Wave, VinFast) aspirational brands.
A good example would probably be this gated community/society [0] in a Tier 3 industrial town called Bhiwadi - most residents would be working as Mechanical, Automotive, Chemical, Electronics, Tooling, Semiconductor, and Automation Engineers or Managers at companies like Honda, Tata, Saint-Gobain, Lumax, Maruti Suzuki, Motherson, or Sahasra with a take-home in the $8-20k range (and with 0% income tax below $13k). This is the Indian (and Vietnamese) Dream.
Most of the residents will have studied in regional engineering colleges and polytechnics and then started off as trainees, and have close familial roots in the region, as regional mobility in India is extremely low [1], and as such factories have decided to move to small towns and Tier 2/3/4 cities in order to be closer to labor. You this all over India like in Mysore with DigiLens [2], Anantapuram with Hyundai-Kia [3] Baddi with AstraZeneca [4], and others. Even in my ancestral village, there has been a wind turbine factory operating since the mid-2000s that exports to the US and Western Europe, and a home-turned-EV battery factory operating since the early 2010s that exports to ASEAN.
In Vietnam it's the same story except labor moves away from small towns to megacities because in much of VN, the rural safety net (derisively called "freebies" in India) is weak-to-nonexistent pushing labor migration away from small towns to Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong.
Finally, at $10-20k/year, international education isn't that expensive - at that income you can get a loan term for US$20k-25k/yr, which is what international tuition (including dorm fees) tend to cost in the UK, Australia, and Canada - people in the Tier 2 and below middle class don't know the difference between Oxford and Oxford Brookes, and crap tier universities in the Commonwealth take advantage of that (eg. Oxford Brookes and RMIT), pissing off domestic students and leading to the immigration backlash and pissing off Indians and Vietnamese who are starting to view British and Australian services as an inferior good. The same thing happened in China a decade ago as well.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=krPLXO38ZxY
[1] - https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/why-labour-m...
[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251003VL202/xr-optics-kayn...
[3] - https://www.kia.com/in/discover-kia/kia-in-india/india-plant...
[4] - https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2010...