That’s what they did in the early days, but to make construction safer from earthquakes they started to put ‘shear’ walls in concrete instead of dividing walls in brick, which are not load bearing walls per se.
There are probably people here who illegally and dangerously remove walls that make a building safer. These people should be penalized heavily (flat owners, building management, and wrecking crew). While you could argue that most walls make a building safer, there might be walls that contribute nothing to the safety of the structure and hence can be safely removed. I was thinking of those of course.
Unfortunately most of teh people who do that are large tenants on the firsts floors, for business reasons, as the examples in Taipei on 921 or Tainan a couple of years ago state.
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Brick walls in older or new buildings are just fill-in walls, they can be removed without problems. The concrete frame system in Taiwan can withstand earthshaking (up-down), but not lateral movement without shear walls.
OK, Taipei has this new thing going on:
“humans of taipei 我是台北人” seriously? Look for some one that can translate it correctly! Because it’s not even close. What next? Animals of Taipei?
Just Google it! Or click here (FB) at your own risk!
just typical selfish assholes who can get away with it because the culture here is to be non confrontational. if you observe you can see all kinds of selfish anti social nonsense going on here. much worse in china though still.
That was one of the contributing factors to the Tainan collapse. I was in Tainan at the time and not too far from that building. I had been in that 3C store before. I still cry when I read the address the Principal of 崑山國小 gave to his students, since that school lost several students. It was something to the effect of “dear students, some of your classmates won’t be back with you anymore. They are in heaven now.” (Sorry, highly paraphrased). It reduces me to tears for two reasons: 1) the engineers filled the walls with empty oil cans during construction (and had their wives try to take out money from their accounts as soon as they heard the news) and 2) the 3C company did the idiotic removal of load-bearing walls to increase their sales floor. A tragedy, even more poignant since it was probably avoidable.
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Ah the new Taipei City Government FB page. Because everything used to be under Mayor Ko’s page.
Is that the same lunatic mayor that came up with the idiotic idea of “New Rou Mian” to appeal to an international audience? If so, what a jackass! I mean, a real bonehead! I don’t know about the northerners in Taiwan, but the rest of us mocked him.
Good sunscreen is expensive everywhere.
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Actually that has been going on for 14 years. He stopped it for 2 years and this year gave in to pressure, because you know, business.
Actually the page of Humans of Taipei - not a mistranslation, but rather copying the popular Humans of New York- is separated from Ko’s stuff.
Thanks for the clarification. “New Rou Mian” struck most of us a stupid and ridiculous ploy.
Edit: It didn’t strike me as a mistranslation, but rather a copy of another city’s brand. As typical in Taiwan, a copy-paste situation.
At least it’s not Taipei People UP. 
No hay por donde.
I knew someone in that building myself. Actually one of the last people to be pulled out alive. He lots multiple family members though.
I don’t know the difference between good and bad sunscreen, I just know I got a 500ml bottle for about 120 ntd back home, which protects me from sunburn just as well, whereas the cheapest I’ve seen one of those tiny squeeze tubes here is 300.
I don’t think that is a mistranslation, per se. They’re probably just copying this:
What I said.
I find it whack that foreign trained local government officials, in spite of being educated abroad and possibly punished for plagiarism, still keep doing it, looking unprofessional yet thinking they are sp clever and cool.
One of my all-time pet peeves. People who copy instead of coming up with their own ideas and creations. Getting inspirations from other is OK and every creative mind does it. Simply copying what others did is so lame and embarrassing. In Taiwan especially, there are so many examples where it fails miserably because often the attempts to copy something from abroad are done without much thought and consideration for the cultural differences. But of course it’s not a Taiwan-specific problem. It’s part of what humans do, taking shortcuts. Not putting in the hours, too lazy to use their imagination. These people might lack resources and brains, but most of all, I feel they lack pride.
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Ugggggghhghhhhhhh 
Don’t open a restaurant here if you hate that. Ever little thing I do gets copied. It makes me unbelievably angry.
Now I just give away “free” food like bread before a meal ect… the Taiwanese will never give anything away for free so they can’t copy me in that reguard at least.
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Taiwan is a land of shortcuts!
At times, it’s a strength. At other times, it’s our weakness.
Guy
The KMT’s new slogan is “Lean in Together”. Wonder where they nicked that from?