What's happening with your example is just that the symbols chosen for the phonemic transcription are non-Latin so they're unfamiliar to read aloud and harder to type for non-speakers. What I meant was if we all wrote with all of our individual idiosyncrasies of speech without converging on a prescribed standard (a writing system separate from speech transcription).

"Amnu ge sum'm frum upsterz, gimmi u sek" but even more so, with IPA characters for all the 40-odd individual sounds of my dialect of English - then you write your response in the same level of phonetic detail. Exactly what a writing system shouldn't do.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

The article didn't really convince me that the homes are going to be significantly devalued or that people are going to be thrust into poverty. It says so, and dismisses out of hand claims to the opposite, but doesn't give much in the way of evidence for its points.

I'm sympathetic to the agreement for the original donation. If the original deed said that the stipulation of donation was not only "only use this for a park" but also "never sell to anyone who might do something else," then I do think the city owes some very large compensation amount to somebody. If not, though... the city sold the land in 2008 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, at which point it doesn't really sound like the original deed has much value. If you buy land from someone privately and 18 years later it turns out it was gifted to them with the stipulation that they never sell, how much recourse should another party really have to stop you doing what you want with that land?

And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.

So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.

One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.

I learned on arrival that the city was not in fact color-graded and filled with beautiful slow motion video opportunities. Since then, every time I mention to any Pole that I've been to Bydgoszcz, the question is always "Why?"

All my memories of two fairly long trips around Poland are now ten years out of date, and I've heard only good things about its development since then.