One Tenth of China's Farmland Polluted With Heavy Metals

eldavojohn writes "A report form China's Environmental Ministry reveals that one tenth of China's 1.22 million square kilometers of farmland are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins. The AFP lists 'lead, mercury and cancer-causing cadmium' and points to the rapid pace of China's industrialization as well as factories and their operators flouting regulations and laws. Cheap batteries and lead refineries are slowly turning China into a land where whole villages are poisoned (11 incidents so far this year). According to Human Rights Watch the government's response to this scourge is laughable. The poisoned are denied treatment and China's Environmental Ministry offers no possible help: 'The report documents how local authorities in contaminated areas have imposed arbitrary limits on access to blood lead testing, for example by permitting only people living within a small radius of a factory to be tested. When tests are conducted, results have often been contradictory or have been withheld from victims and their families. And children with elevated blood lead levels who require treatment according to national guidelines have been denied care or told simply to eat certain foods, including apples, garlic, milk, and eggs.'"

Comments

It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[elrous0]

Heavy metal was everywhere back then.

If you need to get rid of it, just bring in some grunge and hip-hop groups.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[OakDragon]

Heavy metal was everywhere back then.

If you need to get rid of it, just bring in some grunge and hip-hop groups.

The cure was worse than the disease!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[anagama]

Sorry, but The Cure was neither a grunge nor a hip-hop group.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[trum4n]

They were however, pretty terrible.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

In Chinese Democracy, Guns & Roses contaminate YOU!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[couchslug]

"The cure was worse than the disease!"

There's always Disco! (runs)

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[CrazyDuke]

Of course! The solution for every problem is to remind people that it could be worse; therefore, they should just shut up and take it. /SARCASM

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[nschubach]

Unfortunately, it will take a long time and when it does come nobody will want it anymore.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[ProzacPatient]

I'm not sure what the problem is because I've always heard plants grow better to the sound of music.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

So's your face!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Aphoxema]

Of course! The solution for every problem is to remind people that it could be worse; therefore, they should just shut up and take it. /SARCASM

Why are you complaining? You could be mute, deaf, blind and limbless and not be able to complain at all!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[styrotech]

The disease? Is that a euphemism for Anthrax?

Then again, reality is much much worse - China has been inflicted with Poison!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides, everybody loves The Cure.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[realityimpaired]

I'm not sure what the problem is because I've always heard plants grow better to the sound of music.

Well, the hills are alive, after all...

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know heavy metal caused Rapid Eye Movement.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[lennier]

Why are you complaining? You could be mute, deaf, blind and limbless and not be able to complain at all!

But you'd sure play a mean pinball.

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[treeves]

Robert Smith is gonna come cry on you!

Re:It was that way in the U.S. in the late 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a while back hearing about a group who had access to not only the poison, but also the remedy (the pulsating rhythmical remedy IIRC)..

The United States of China

[Frosty Piss]

This sort of thing combined with Chinaâ(TM)s very questionable use of banned pesticides and other sketchy farming chemicals is why I do not by food products marked as being from China. I know that many of the other âoeready madeâ food that I eat probably has ingredients from China, but at least I can reduce the amount of poisons I intake. I try to buy local produce, organic when I can, but this tends to be a little spendy. And of course avoiding processed foods and actually making real food in the kitchen goes a long way to avoid the poisonous crap that China exports.

Of course, there are some of the same issues here, but far far fewer.

Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.

Re:The United States of China

[rubycodez]

Your comment about regulation is nonsense, there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible. And note we've already had numerous instances of food poisoning and heavy metal contamination in consumer products (found long after the fact of their being let in).

I'd suggest a more sensible approach, don't do business with China at all. Let their system collapse. If the dollar devalues and forces us to become more self-sufficient, that's a good thing that will dramatically increase employment and internal economy.

Re:The United States of China

[jeffmeden]

This sort of thing combined with Chinaâ(TM)s very questionable use of banned pesticides and other sketchy farming chemicals is why I do not by food products marked as being from China. I know that many of the other âoeready madeâ food that I eat probably has ingredients from China, but at least I can reduce the amount of poisons I intake. I try to buy local produce, organic when I can, but this tends to be a little spendy. And of course avoiding processed foods and actually making real food in the kitchen goes a long way to avoid the poisonous crap that China exports.

Of course, there are some of the same issues here, but far far fewer.

Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.

It's scary and even regulations on labeling can't be imposed thanks, apparently, to the need to keep the government out of the way of business. According to the USDA, in 2007 50% of the apple juice consumed in the US came from China. That number is sure to increase.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats not the kind of regulation hes talking about. He didn't say anything about import regulation. He's talking about pollution and environmental regulation within the US that prevents our farmland from being poisoned with heavy metals. L2comprehend

Re:The United States of China

[zill]

there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible.

It's hard so let's just give up? Wow I gotta remember this excuse the next time I forgot to do my homework.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

"don't do business with China at all. Let their system collapse"

We'd collapse too based on our dependance on their cheap labor costs (and obvious lack of any consideration for the environment). We'd already handed off most of our manufacturing overseas with a good chunk of it to China. We'd see a dramatic increase in unemployment, not employment, as business are starved for parts. It would take generations to rebuild manufacturing here and see a net growth in jobs. Good luck in the meantime.

I also have a nagging suspicion that lots of people here would scream bloody murder if they saw prices shoot up at their Target-Mart from having to pay American wages to feed their consumer habit.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

The Tea Party and the Republicans do *not* want do get rid of regulations concerning uncontaminated food and a clean environment. They do want to get rid of ***hats like yourself who think more government equals effective government.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

The sort of "Job Killing Regulation" the idiots of the Retardican party have been screaming about this year.

When they talk about abolishing the EPA, I take one look at what goes on in China, remember that this is what the Republicans want to let happen in the USA, and I know why nobody who loves their kids should EVER vote Retardican.

Re:The United States of China

[Moryath]

Funny thing about that... 20 years ago, Wal-Mart was all about "Buy American."

Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories. Like, say, the 15-20% of workers unemployed today (if you follow Real Unemployment rather than the government's "officially skewed" numbers that lose a lot of people).

Hey, wait a minute. We could actually employ people in the USA by rebuilding the manufacturing sector. Shocker of shockers... of course, that would require placing tariffs on dumped goods and stringent requirements of quality standards, in order to account for the price discrepancy of Chinese slave labor and complete lack of environmental regulation. Which is the last thing the current group of people running the House want to do, since it would be a popular move and they don't want to share any of the credit with the other side even though it's something probably 90% of the USA can agree to.

Re:The United States of China

[ArcherB]

This sort of thing combined with Chinaâ(TM)s very questionable use of banned pesticides and other sketchy farming chemicals is why I do not by food products marked as being from China. I know that many of the other âoeready madeâ food that I eat probably has ingredients from China, but at least I can reduce the amount of poisons I intake. I try to buy local produce, organic when I can, but this tends to be a little spendy. And of course avoiding processed foods and actually making real food in the kitchen goes a long way to avoid the poisonous crap that China exports.

Of course, there are some of the same issues here, but far far fewer.

Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.

Um... yeah! Because China is the right-wing "city on the hill" that all "teabaggers" wish to emulate.

Actually, what TEA Party members want is less government power. The example you ares seeing in China is fine example of why less government is a good idea. See, the all-powerful government that leftists like you want allows a government to set up all the regulations required to keep a population safe from those evil capitalist pigs. Unfortunately, it includes government power to choose who to apply those regulations to and when.

TEA Partiers are very similar to Libertarians when comes to central government power. They both want the 10'th Amendment followed. The Constitution grants the federal government to regulate trade, meaning that the TEA Partiers agree that the federal government has the power to inspect and regulate trade with China. In other words, your entire argument against those greedy "teabaggers" is nothing more than a red herring. If you argument was sound, you wouldn't need to resort to lies and distortions to make your point.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

China is the Republican Paradise.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

China is the Republican Paradise for authoritarians.

FTFY

Re:The United States of China

[Canazza]

if you overlook the communism

Re:The United States of China

[h4rr4r]

They don't have any communism. They have fascism rebranded as communism.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting rid of the EPA, does not equal, getting rid of the rules that the EPA has in common with 10 other federal agencies. Somehow you seem to think getting rid of the EPA equates to allowing food supplies and the environment to be poisoned. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you want to believe that, but their words and actions speak completely counter to your claims. The parent poster is actually being pretty forgiving.

Sorry, you picked wrong this time. Time to admit it. You fuck up? You man up! Then you shut the fuck up, man.

Re:The United States of China

[xaxa]

It's scary and even regulations on labeling can't be imposed thanks, apparently, to the need to keep the government out of the way of business. According to the USDA, in 2007 50% of the apple juice consumed in the US came from China. That number is sure to increase.

Things I buy often say things like "contains Thai chicken", but I had a look at UK law and can't see where this is required. The best I can find is a proposed bill to change the law to require it to be said, but Parliament ran out of time to debate it.

Does anyone know?

(Actually, I very rarely buy the kind of processed food that would say "contains Thai chicken", but when I do, most of the time the origin of the meat is clear. Fresh fruit and vegetables in the supermarket generally say "Grown in Kenya" or "Grown in the EU". All fish and dairy things say where they're from. But there isn't much consistency. Some things just say "Produce of several countries.")

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

should have continued reading. He says quit trying to regulate and inspect; instead, just don't buy anything from China. Don't need to regulate or inspect what you don't import. He's not saying "give up" he's given a solution that would work. The effects of such an action are hard to predict, though. So it may not be as simple as quit importing Chinese goods.

Re:The United States of China

[SuseLover]

You are completely off-base with that comment about the Tea Party. I (as a tea partier) have no problem with unions in general except for public position unions and the ridiculous demands and perks they get paid for by the taxpayers. Unions are unnecessary if they work for the government since it is the government that sets most of the workplace environment regulations to begin with which makes unions redundant.

Add to that the fact the union dues are used to support or lobby for political positions that all the members do not necessarily agree with but are forced to pay into and therefore support.

Re:The United States of China

[phantomfive]

Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.

One of the most idiotic partisan debates in the US is whether regulation is 'good' or 'bad.' There is no disagreement that causes dumbness on both sides. Both sides are wrong. Regulation is neither bad nor good by itself, it depends in great measure what regulation is in consideration. Some regulation is clearly good, some regulation is clearly bad. If you want to know, you have to investigate the particular regulation and consider whether it is good or bad. But go ahead, jump to your party line, it will keep you from needing to think.

In this case, the problem is caused partly BECAUSE of bad government regulation, look at this awful one from the summary:

The report documents how local authorities in contaminated areas have imposed arbitrary limits on access to blood lead testing, for example by permitting only people living within a small radius of a factory to be tested.

Makes you wonder if the average people will find out about this, or if another Chinese government regulation, against free speech, will prevent people from finding out and creating the kind of regulations that can actually fix this.

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

"Don't do business with China" is sort of like proposing "don't breathe" as a solution for air pollution.

Do you have ANY IDEA how reliant we are on their manufacturing base? Do you have ANY IDEA the HELL that would come about in this country if we stopped trade with them? Any whatsoever?

I'm not just talking about consumer gadgets either. I'm talking chemical feedstocks, electronics, machine components, and much, much more. Are you willing to pull the trigger that starts a trade war that ends with a US with no medicine?

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

China is the Republican Party's Paradise
since they are both fasicst

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

And yet their government is half the size of ours.

Re:The United States of China

[ElectricTurtle]

Tariffs create artificial markets completely divorced from reality, and the cost of that is passed on to the consumer. Purchasing power parity in this country would zoom straight into the sewer, and we'd end up paying 10x as much for basically everything, which would destroy the middle class.

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

> Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away
> with, this is how the United States would be as well.

There's no nice way of putting this: You are retarded and whoever modded this nonsense "insightful" should be denied mod points indefinitely.

This comment is nothing but baseless bashing of 'them' without any thought at all. You don't even have a pretense of understanding the Republican or Tea Party (real mature BTW) points. Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all? Or that one can go about regulation differently? Or, geez, that even if there was _no_ regulation how public outcry from everyone would still provide a good deal of incentive to not do it? Not that I'd rely on that, but still we wouldn't be half as bad as China.

But of course, because you have no clue what you're talking about you don't get that. Did you know, for example, that China only recently phased out leaded gasoline? And that it's still being produced in rural (e.g. farming) areas? Well, yeah, probably, because I bet your point was that the "Tea Baggers" wanted to bring back leaded gas.
(and I could go on about why China isn't like the US and how the differences are much more cultural than regulatory, but I made my point.)

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not talking about about abolishing what the EPA does but the agency itself.

You have Joe watching to make sure Seth doesn't cross the line to the North and James making sure Seth doesn't cross the line to the East.

To have Joe and James is redundant. Seth will continued to be watched.

Re:The United States of China

[ElectricTurtle]

Indeed, what people are blind to in this matter is that China is demonstrating what happens when government is doing everything. People are so ignorant they think there are no environmental regulations in China, but China has regulations and equivalent of the EPA (even mentioned in the summary, the Environmental Ministry).

The problem is that because China's industries are still significantly state-owned there is an insurmountable conflict of interest. The state is effectively asked to prosecute itself, and in a one-party authoritarian system where all dissent is violently crushed, the motive to protect profitable state industries is higher than the motivation to protect citizens from harm. The Chinese regime is not sufficiently accountable to its people which it more profitably subjugates than protects.

Re:The United States of China

[cyfer2000]

Based on this report (PDF) from USDA, "Apple juice imports from China totaled 420 million gallons in 2007, which was 60 percent of the U.S. supply. Industry reports suggest that the share of garlic imported from China exceeded 50 percent in 2007"

But "Food imports from China as share of U.S. food supply" is 0.4%.

Re:The United States of China

[Runaway1956]

This ^

Only a damned fool is going to buy stuff made in China. And, only a double damned fool is going to buy food products from China. FFS, did no one's parents teach them about QUALITY?!?!?! WTF are they teaching in home economics today?

Ohhhh - let's say that you want some bottled water to take on a camping trip or something. Where can you learn whether one brand or another is better than the others? How 'bout a google search. Oh, wow, look what I found!

http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation

Based on that one report alone, I'd probably be better off allowing the kids to drink from the streams where we camp. Crap, I can just boil the water, and have safer water than I can buy!

Do you think anyone looks at reports like that though? Not only "NO!", but "HELL NO!" People are chumps. They buy that bottled water because some MARKEDROIDS told them to buy it!

Americans are just chumps - no research, no comparison, nothing. Whatever is advertised on television is good enough for them. At the market, whichever brand is cheapest and/or comes in the prettiest package is good enough. DUHHHH.

Hey - if you won't shop intelligently for yourself, or your children, maybe you'll at least treat your dog right.

http://www.dogfoodscoop.com/dog-food-comparison.html

Notice that some of the best known, and most expensive, brands of dog food are less nutritious than a shit sandwich. Some of the unknown and cheaper brands are actually pretty good. The cheapest brands are what you would expect - worthless. Give Fido something decent to eat, alright?

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate global trade innitiatives with countries of differing environmental regulatory standards?!? //tongue firmly in cheek

I have to wonder if this is how China, and the likely coming strain on global food supplies, will keep population at a plateau. Will this be the limitor before disease or other natural stop-gap kicks in?

Re:The United States of China

[WindBourne]

You will find that the Buy America was from Sam Walton. His kids flipped it to China as soon as he died. Oddly, we can still employ ppl here. We actually have cheaper energy than does China. Even the east coast's expensive energy is cheaper than China's. The way that China keeps it cheap is subsidies. Once they destroy an American arena, they then up the price and use profits from there to subsidize energy for other areas. That is actually illegal per the treaty that Clinton signed as well as WTO/IMF. They just ignore it.

Re:The United States of China

[WindBourne]

That is why I only consume stuff now from Colorado grown orchards. I KNOW that these came from here. The big labels are using China. That is also why I do not order apple juice out of any restaurant, and esp. NOTHING from California. California does not grow enough apple trees to produce and yet, they create a lot of apple juice. Can you say mercury? Sure you can.

Re:The United States of China

[TubeSteak]

Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.

Your comment about regulation is nonsense, there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible.

It seems like you've misunderstood the plain intent of his comment.
Republicans and Tea Partiers want us to have about as much regulation as China does,
which will inevitably lead to the same disastrous health and market failures.

I'm not sure how you got from there to "regulate and inspect Chinese imports"

Re:The United States of China

[GameboyRMH]

I thought it was Mexico.

Re:The United States of China

[roman_mir]

In the short term by not trading with China, USA will feel much more pain than China, because USA has no production capacity to satisfy its demand. 90% of sea food is imported into USA from Asia. USA even orders bridges to be made in China. China will see standard of living rise inside the country if US dollar collapses and Chinese can then buy more for their money, they are a much bigger market than USA and they can actually pay, because they work for money.

In the long run USA becoming self sustaining again is a good thing for everybody.

However creating artificial barriers to trade is not a good thing for anybody.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you were modded overrated. To those that don't know, that means the following:

I have mod points and I don't agree with your statement. Unfortunately, your statement is sound and 100% solid so there is nothing I can say to counter it. So, instead of making a futile attempt at challenging your point, I will mod it "overrated" in an attempt to make sure that no one else is able to read it.

Re:The United States of China

[Attila Dimedici]

You do know that China is the model that Obama Administration members have repeatedly held up of how they would like to do things don't you?

Re:The United States of China

[NetNed]

Yeah I recall it being a "Republican Paradise" every time I think about Pres. Clinton getting China in to the WTO and brokering the deal that opened up the trade flow with China.

I still can't believe, here, on slashdot, that there are people foolish enough to think one side is so much worse then the other. When all the fooled people start to realize that BOTH parties will sell us all out to make a buck this country might begin to correct itself.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

Their government doesn't have to compromise or reach consensus between ruling parties with vastly differing ideologies and goals.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

(if you follow Real Unemployment rather than the government's "officially skewed" numbers that lose a lot of people).

So we should follow your skewed numbers, which include people like stay-at-home moms, students, and the retired in their numbers of who's "unemployed".

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

Only a damned fool is going to buy stuff made in China.

So where'd you buy your computer from? How about the chips inside it?

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

And ours does? From a non-US perspective, the actual actions of Republicans and Democrats rank them as very nearly exactly the same right of center sort of ideology, and all of them have the same goals, get more money for their districts.

They also don't have a welfare state. Interesting, since they are supposedly communists, while we are supposedly capitalists.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize there is a medium between "no regulation" and "too much regulation," right?

Re:The United States of China

[Medievalist]

Their government doesn't have to compromise or reach consensus between ruling parties with vastly differing ideologies and goals.

Neither does ours. However, our government does have to reach consensus between 437 individual points of graft, corruption, incompetence and greed. Which takes a lot of work, especially with that incompetence thing.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

Um... yeah! Because China is the right-wing "city on the hill" that all "teabaggers" wish to emulate.

When it comes to the regulatory environment concerning businesses, yes, it is.

The example you ares seeing in China is fine example of why less government is a good idea.

Nope. Considering they barely have any regulations to speak of, and any they do aren't really enforced, they're not going to be a example in your favor on this. If they actually had regulations, and enforced them, and this happened, then maybe you'd have a point.

Almost no regulations, and lack of enforcement of those regulations is what the Tea Partiers want. Coincidentally, that's what they have in China.

Re:The United States of China

[Microlith]

Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all?

You assert we are at the extreme end of regulation?

Or that one can go about regulation differently?

One can always do things differently, but whether it is still effective is what matters.

Or, geez, that even if there was _no_ regulation how public outcry from everyone would still provide a good deal of incentive to not do it? Not that I'd rely on that, but still we wouldn't be half as bad as China.

We'd probably end up like China, or at least like we were in the early to middle part of the last century (can you say "superfund"), real quick. And people would die needlessly before the uproar was enough to drive them out of business or, as is the policy these days, they sell their assets to a new company and the shell goes under.

I've heard nothing out of the likes of Bachmann, Perry, or Cain that suggest they have some plan for alternate forms of less intrusive regulation while still protecting the environment. Instead, they seem to desire to tear down regulations and environmental protections wholesale, for the sake of "jobs" and as in Cain's case the Koch Brothers who are, in his own words, his "brothers from another mother." Yeah. I think we know where his loyalties lie.

Re:The United States of China

[khallow]

Your comment about regulation is nonsense, there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible.

Yet the US does it anyway despite the claims above.

I'd suggest a more sensible approach, don't do business with China at all. Let their system collapse. If the dollar devalues and forces us to become more self-sufficient, that's a good thing that will dramatically increase employment and internal economy.

Or it'll cause the US system (or whatever country you're a member of) to collapse. I doubt you're going to get cooperation from the neighbors. For example, for the US it'd be trivial to ship goods into Canada or Mexico and import them from there. That would add at best a small cost while circumventing the import restrictions. So you'd have to add import restrictions for every country that still does business with China (and whoever else is on your "bad" list). I think it would boil down to becoming a nearly isolationist state with considerable, reciprocated trade barriers.

And looking at history, it is possible for an isolationist country to build an advanced economy, Japan and Paraguay did it in the 19th century. But it's also possible to fail hard as China did during that same period or the US during the early years of the Great Depression.

Frankly, I don't think most developed world countries are willing to make the sacrifices that would need to be made to maintain technical and economic progress with the absence of international competition. For example, there are a lot of people who are obsessed over the advantages that the most wealthy have. Many of those advantages would have to remain such as the wealthy not paying their "fair share" of taxes or having outsized influence in the government (both success stories above were fascist states).

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

You are completely off-base with that comment about the Tea Party. I (as a tea partier) have no problem with unions in general except for public position unions and the ridiculous demands and perks they get paid for by the taxpayers. Unions are unnecessary if they work for the government since it is the government that sets most of the workplace environment regulations to begin with which makes unions redundant.

FALSE. There is absolutely nothing of basis or worth in this statement. There is nothing wrong with public unions. Your right to collectively bargain and form associations should NOT change depending on who your employer is. And those "demands" are not ridiculous, just about every major study on the subject has found that public sector workers are compensated LESS than their private sector counterparts.

PS: When you see someone who has an actual pension, or better working conditions than you do, the answer is NOT to say, "Why does he get that and I don't? We need to get rid of it!" The answer is to say, "Why does he get that and I don't? How can we get that from our employers as well?" Just because they have stronger bargaining positions than you do is no reason to hate them.

Add to that the fact the union dues are used to support or lobby for political positions that all the members do not necessarily agree with but are forced to pay into and therefore support.

I can say the exact same thing about donations made by corporations. My hard work and effort went into the company getting that money. Furthermore, I have shares in that company. Yet, I am forced to let those revenues go to support political positions that I despise. If you're going to bitch about union political donations, you must be against corporate political donations as well.

Re:The United States of China

[CyprusBlue113]

That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Government is not 1 grand magical unified entity. Every hiring group has their own policies and goals, and they are not interested in what is best for the workers, but what is best for themselves. This fantasy that government is a single anthropomorphic creature is a complete lie and should be obvious to anyone with a clue.

Re:The United States of China

[h4rr4r]

They have no social services to speak of, they have no regulation or enforcement that anyone cares about and have little to no need for public buy-in or consensus. You show me an efficient government and I will show you an oppressive one.

Re:The United States of China

[itsenrique]

its not real communism, its more like fascism. sort of like our system at its worst points...

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Tea partier here, and hell yes I agree to higher import tarriffs.

Re:The United States of China

[Dr_Barnowl]

It's what happens when government is in concert with corporation - in China, many of the top corporations are, as you point out, effectively state owned.

Here in the West, it's the other way around ; the government is in large part, owned in influence by the corporations. Happily, some part of it remains in public hands.

I don't think your expressed desire for less government is unreasonable from the idealistic point of view, but this is not tenable in real life. Really, I suspect the majority of powerful people who express a wish for less government really mean - "less of the kind of government that gets in my way". I suspect they are not opposed to more of the kind of government that supports them by bailing out their banks, spending tax money on war materiel, and passing laws that continuously erode the original spirit of collective bargains like copyright and patents. Even the Tea Party doesn't put its money where its mouth is, and keeps its cash in a bailed-out bank.

Much of the the West is currently governed by the right wing ; well, China is the furthest end of right wing and has probably always been so - one mighty corporation in all but name. They have much less government than the West, and the common man is much worse off.

Re:The United States of China

[ArcherB]

Um... yeah! Because China is the right-wing "city on the hill" that all "teabaggers" wish to emulate.

When it comes to the regulatory environment concerning businesses, yes, it is.

The example you ares seeing in China is fine example of why less government is a good idea.

Nope. Considering they barely have any regulations to speak of, and any they do aren't really enforced, they're not going to be a example in your favor on this. If they actually had regulations, and enforced them, and this happened, then maybe you'd have a point.

Almost no regulations, and lack of enforcement of those regulations is what the Tea Partiers want. Coincidentally, that's what they have in China.

The problem with China is not regulations, it's enforcement of those regulations. Like another post said, since industry is effectively state owned, when it comes to regulations, you are asking an all powerful, very corrupt state to regulate itself. That's just not gonna happen.

As for China's regulations:

China has already enacted a comprehensive set of environmental laws. The statutory scheme is not perfect, however. For instance, penalties for noncompliance with some of China's environmental laws are so low that it is often cheaper not to comply and pay fines than to undertake the actions necessary to meet the statutory mandates. In other instances, companies have disregarded statutory requirements because the PRC government has not yet issued implementing regulations. But China's lawmakers cannot be entirely blamed for the current state of the environment; China's law enforcers—and the lack of a compliance ethic among Chinese businesses—are the chief culprits.

Re:The United States of China

[geekmux]

...I'd suggest a more sensible approach, don't do business with China at all. Let their system collapse. If the dollar devalues and forces us to become more self-sufficient, that's a good thing that will dramatically increase employment and internal economy.

Ah, a common-sense approach. If it were only that simple, it would have been done long ago...problem is greedy Americans want their cake at eat it too, so unless you're going to convince that pretentious spoiled American kid to work for $10/month instead of $10/hour, be prepared to try and convince the rest of the country that $500 is somehow a reasonable price to pay for a US-made electronic device that used to cost $50 when manufactured overseas.

Good luck.

Re:The United States of China

[khallow]

should have continued reading. He says quit trying to regulate and inspect; instead, just don't buy anything from China. Don't need to regulate or inspect what you don't import. He's not saying "give up" he's given a solution that would work. The effects of such an action are hard to predict, though. So it may not be as simple as quit importing Chinese goods.

In other words, he gives up without saying he's giving up. I don't care what the words are, I care what the outcome is.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother is a public school teacher.

Re:The United States of China

[demonbug]

That is why I only consume stuff now from Colorado grown orchards. I KNOW that these came from here. The big labels are using China. That is also why I do not order apple juice out of any restaurant, and esp. NOTHING from California. California does not grow enough apple trees to produce and yet, they create a lot of apple juice. Can you say mercury? Sure you can.

California is the 5th largest apple producer in the nation, and the 2nd largest apple exporter in the U.S. In 2008 (the latest year I can find complete numbers for), California produced 360 million pounds of apples; Colorado produced 18 million pounds (for comparison, the number one state, Washington, produced over 5.6 billion pounds). Of that, 160 million pounds were used "fresh", while the remaining 200 million pounds were processed into juice and other products.

Data from here.

California does indeed import apples, but a lot of the imports actually come from Chile. Apple season in California runs roughly September - December, which overlaps with production in other states (Washington tends to be a little earlier, I think August-October), and imports from South America are popular to provide fresh apples during our off-season (as opposed to China, where the apple season is similar to ours). The larger juice makers do indeed import a lot of juice from China, though this is true throughout the nation and is not specific to California.

Re:The United States of China

[RearNakedChoke]

Indeed, what people are blind to in this matter is that China is demonstrating what happens when government is doing everything. People are so ignorant they think there are no environmental regulations in China, but China has regulations and equivalent of the EPA (even mentioned in the summary, the Environmental Ministry). The problem is that because China's industries are still significantly state-owned there is an insurmountable conflict of interest. The state is effectively asked to prosecute itself, and in a one-party authoritarian system where all dissent is violently crushed, the motive to protect profitable state industries is higher than the motivation to protect citizens from harm. The Chinese regime is not sufficiently accountable to its people which it more profitably subjugates than protects.

All of China's pollution problems have nothing to do with communism and everything to do with capitalism - the factories pollute because its more profitable. Its not political ideology, its fucking money. And its that same money that would drive our own corporations to [i]try[/i] - they lobby Congress to relax regulations, they fund horseshit anti global warming "studies" and try to convince the dumbass public that its a good idea to shit where you eat.

Re:The United States of China

[Dragonslicer]

if you overlook the communism

The Republicans want Communism?

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

>There's no nice way of putting this: You are retarded and whoever modded this nonsense "insightful" should be denied mod points indefinitely.

There is no nice way of putting this but you, yourself, are delusional if you think the Republicans and the John Birch Society in drag (tea party) want anything less than burning rivers and brain addled lead paint chewing children, which got us the regulation in the first place.

If you are a slavering Dominionst (which Dominionism is rampant in the Republican party these days, wot, with their prayer breakfasts and whatnot) you believe the end of the world is nigh, raping the planet is nothing compared to the raining blood and plagues which are to come shortly. If you believe the end of the world is coming, the least of your worries is preserving it.

The only reasonable candidate that isn't a Dominionist or Bircher is Huntsman, and he's toast. This is what you get when you chase all the reasonable people out of your party.

That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

The situation you have now is one where the tariffs are just disguised as subsidies and we call it "Free Trade". The USA needs to realize as long as other countries want to compete in businesses they will find ways to make sure it is not a level playing field.

Re:The United States of China

[timeOday]

Sorry, but this is a valid partisan issue. If you are saying there would probably still be some environmental protection under Tea Party rule, then technically you are right. But if you are claiming it wouldn't be hugely destructive setback to the environment, then you are flat out wrong.

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wants to padlock the E.P.A.â(TM)s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.

Representative Ron Paul of Texas wants environmental disputes settled by the states or the courts. Herman Cain, a businessman, wants to put many environmental regulations in the hands of an independent commission that includes oil and gas executives. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, thinks most new environmental regulations should be shelved until the economy improves.

Only Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has a kind word for the E.P.A., and that is qualified by his opposition to proposed regulation of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming.

But maybe they're just talk? No, not if you remember George Bush.

Re:The United States of China

[Bucky24]

Personally I'd have no problem working for $10/month if I thought I could actually live on that. Problem is $10 will buy maybe a sandwich (ok, maybe two if I go to a cheap cafe), and I have a whole month of food I'll need to buy. Not counting rent and bills. The cost of living here just doesn't allow people to survive on wages that low.

Re:The United States of China

[itsenrique]

Riiiight, the country that only inspects 10% of incoming produce is going to do 'more with less' somehow in this situation. Keep dreaming please.

Re:The United States of China

[fiannaFailMan]

If the dollar devalues...

"If"? Where have you been for the last ten years?

Re:The United States of China

[nschubach]

Sure, if you want to have a government agency regulating something that doesn't exist... I guess that logic makes sense.

That's like advocating that we instantiate slave trade regulations to keep those activities in check instead of just stopping slave trade.

Re:The United States of China

[nschubach]

Energy is not the expense. Labor is. If factories were allowed to replace labor with robotics without a union throwing a fit... we might be able to compete.

Re:The United States of China

[ElectricTurtle]

Profit motive is universal, it becomes problematic when a group with a monopoly on force, AKA the government, has a stake. Where communism is the popular ownership of the means of production, communism is in fact directly responsible. If these were wholly private companies there would less of a conflict of interest for separate government agencies to prosecute breaches of existing regulation. You and others commenting on this keep closing your eyes to the similarities and dissimilarities because it undermines your ideological belief. Both the US and China have regulations and regulatory bodies, but China has a far greater problem with government being both the offender and the prosecutor. This is a systemic problem that occurs here as well, not because of that evil, evil capitalism, but the simple and more direct matter that it remains a conflict of interest for government to police itself.

Re:The United States of China

[jbengt]

You do know that China is the model that Obama Administration members have repeatedly held up of how they would like to do things don't you?

No I don't.
Can you please point me to a direct quote that substantiates your assertion.

Re:The United States of China

[SuseLover]

Your understanding of what the TP is all about is completely wrong, you've been getting too much of your opinion of the TP from the the far left. Nowhere is it in the TP's charter to end all regulation, only the size and scope of government and entitlement programs (including foreign entitlements). The name says it all: Taxed Enough Already is what the TEA in tea party means.

I am against all corporate political donations as well. I think the SC decision that corps are people and can donate to campaigns was wrong and should be either reversed or a law passed to disallow corps from donating like that. I dislike most of what Obama is doing, but I felt the same shock and disbelief he exhibited when he made that comment about the supremes on the floor about that decision.

I believe the only entities that should be able to donate anything to the political campaigning process are registered voters. I also believe that lobbyists should only be allowed to lobby on behalf of voters (not corporations) as well. Corporations should be allowed to live or die by the investments/business decisions they make and not be bailed out or subsidized like many are now.

Re:The United States of China

[khallow]

Sure, if you want to have a government agency regulating something that doesn't exist...

That's like advocating that we instantiate slave trade regulations to keep those activities in check instead of just stopping slave trade.

Or instituting regulations on importing grapes instead of just banning the importation of grapes.

Re:The United States of China

[TheSync]

Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories.

American factories produce far more today than they did 20 years ago. With less workers, and more automation. The factories are being filled with machines.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

In the short term by not trading with China, USA will feel much more pain than China, because USA has no production capacity to satisfy its demand. 90% of sea food is imported into USA from Asia.

Where have you been the last ~50 years? The USA is a "service" economy. It doesn't "produce" things. It provides "services" that people value

Yea, US is importing its seafood, then it charges its customers for the "service" it provides - the service of giving people easy access to seafood from around the world, at almost any time of year.

Telling US businesses to stop importing will do about as much as prohibition of alcohol, and what's been happening with marijuana

But it would be funny to see people getting jailed over eating a piece of imported fish

Prisoner 1: "What are you in for?"
Prisoner 2 "Heroine. You?"
Prisoner 1: "Fish and chips"
Prisoner 2: "Is that slang for some drug?"
Prisoner 1: "Erm no... it's just... fish... and chips"

Re:The United States of China

[hairyfeet]

I hate to tell you something friend but there is NO free market, the Chinese are rigging their currency and using slaves, all the other countries except the EU likewise have almost no regulation and allow their people to be poisoned. We would be doing the world a favor, a hell of a lot more than stirring up wars in third world shitholes.

Re:The United States of China

[Runaway1956]

Taiwan, for my Asus mainboard.

Either Dresden or Taiwan for my CPU.

Individual chips on the mainboard, I'm not certain about - some of them may have come from China.

Logitech produces roughly half of their products in China. I've never actually checked to see if my stuff is Chinese or not.

Netgear is a US company, but they outsource some of their stuff - I'm not sure where it comes from.

Need I go on? I do attempt to purchase European, American, and/or other Asian products. Given the opportunity, I'll buy African before I buy Chinese. Granted, it's impossible to ensure that no component of any given electronic product was made in China - but I'm not buying the cheapest shit on the market, all of which is produced in China.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a damned fool is going to buy stuff made in China.

So where'd you buy your computer from? How about the chips inside it?

Taiwan :P

Re:The United States of China

[WindBourne]

Unions account for a small amount of American production esp. in manufacturing. And we are perfectly able to compete iff the playing field is leveled. That means that nations like China have to increase their environmental standards. Likewise, they need to honor their word and quit subsidiziing, dumping, trade barriers, etc. but most of all, stop the money manipulation.

At this time, I would like to see us raise trade barriers against China slowly, or simply dump our money on theirs.

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

> > Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all?
> You assert we are at the extreme end of regulation?

Um... no. How do you even get that? Well, I guess by misunderstanding my point. Regulation is a sliding scale. Just as there's space between our current amount and zero for 'less regulation', there's space between our current amount and 'extreme' for 'more'. I explicitly excluded that side of the scale though because it was irrelevant to my point and figured readers would be smart enough to figure that on their own.

> > Or that one can go about regulation differently?
> One can always do things differently, but whether it is still effective is what matters.

Which is exactly my point. Some people thing the current system is poor and that the same (i.e. current) end result could be accomplished with more streamlined regulation and less bureaucracy. Some people think the the current system is poor but it is as good as can be. I don't know many people that think the current system is particularly good. (Some people also think that we need more or less regulation, but that is irrelevant to this point and touched on above.)

> We'd probably end up like China, or at least like we were in the early to middle part of the last century (can you say "superfund"), real quick.

Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits.
Culture had changed, as we realized that safety _is_ more important than a couple cents. Yes, it doesn't always work that way for everything, which is why I _explicitly said_ I wouldn't rely on it, but the notion that we'd just start laying waste to the land without regulations is ignoring an awful lot of cultural changes. The same changes to drove these regulations in the first place, I should add.

Re:The United States of China

[houghi]

Ohhhh - let's say that you want some bottled water to take on a camping trip or something

If you intend on doing that, you are already part of the problem: The Story of Bottled Water

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

All I can really say to this is is wow. You literally said that the Republicans _want_ burning rivers, spouted a bunch of unsubstantiated BS, then closed with 'if you don't believe me you're just a denier'. And you got modded up. Wow.

Re:The United States of China

[Reverand Dave]

Well stated sir, I wish I had mod points for you.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying AC to preserve moderation.
Tariffs and subsidies do not have the same effect on trade. They are used for different means, and if you think the US doesn't subsidize certain industries, you are in for a rude awakening.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

hey look on the bright side 20 years down the line maybe China will outsource the cleanup crew jobs and toxic shipping / dumping processing to the Usa

Re:The United States of China

[Antisyzygy]

Re-puking-can is another one, since they continually spout the same bullshit all the time.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

I get all my chips from China, except potato ones because you know.. there are too much heavy metal there.

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

We set a river on fire 40 years ago.

This was one of the triggers of the EPA legislation, signed by a Republican President - Nixon.

Today's Republicans want to "padlock the EPA." What do you expect to happen if this actually does happen?

What part of this do you not understand, exactly?

The fine Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater would be hounded out of today's GOP as a RINO. Look at Mr. "I trust science" Huntsman. He's pulling a whole 1 percent of the vote because the GOP leadership and the GOP at large want him gone. Look at who is running along side him: God botherers and Birchers.

Yeah, I'm way off base.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[Aphoxema]

I'd suggest a more sensible approach, don't do business with China at all.

But then they'd want to come conquer the US and use this land to make poisonous foods and toys to sell to other superpowers!

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

>Culture had changed,

And it can change right back. That's what's wrong with your assumption that people won't go the "cheap way"

> as we realized that safety _is_ more important than a couple cents.

You're kidding, right? What about all these "free marketers" (there is no such thing) saying that companies are obligated to maximize profit /at the expense of everything else/? If it's no longer illegal, it must be OK, right?

"Nobody ever goes out there, go dump it out in those trees over there"

The only people who deny this are the ones who don't remember what it was like and still don't realize that it's the thin line of environmental regs that keeps people from doing things like that.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[Aphoxema]

Hey, wait a minute. We could actually employ people in the USA by rebuilding the manufacturing sector.

And just then I could just see them finding a way to break down the electronic waste we ship overseas and us buying back our own garbage... probably by having the current farmers and factory workers chisel away at the shit.

Re:The United States of China

[farble1670]

Do you have ANY IDEA how reliant we are on their manufacturing base?

if not, consider that the failing of a tiny, insignificant nation (greece) has the potential to throw us into a global recession.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. O's been in office for 3 years and how many food scares (and deaths) have we had? Get off the Republican=Bad and understand that what we have now is a business-government partnership no matter what party controls the White House.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet we can spend BILLIONS on searching for non-existent explosives/nukes/military-grade-poisons in shipping containers.
WTF????

Re:The United States of China

[St.Creed]

Taiwan is outsourcing a LOT of their production to China these days. Just like Philips and other big electronics manufacturers do: they do the marketing, but the creation and assembly is mostly done in China (except where assembly means you can avoid/evade import taxes and put a different sticker on it, like "Made in the USA")

Re:The United States of China

[Paul Fernhout]

Always was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA (see Chomsky about five minutes in)

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

You are way off your base because your post contained nothing but baseless partisan rambling. This post is different. Note how you actually cite things, like "padlock the EPA". That's actually something we can discuss.

Compare and contrast to:
You spouting mindless hate with the burning river nonsense. No one (outside a villain on Captain Planet, I guess) actually _wants_ that. The real accusation is that Republicans don't _care_ if a river burns provided it means more profit. In other words, they want money, not burning rivers. That we can discuss. Outright lying like you do only serves to demonstrate you have a completely closed mind about the topic and have already made up your mind with a deep misunderstanding of the actual issues.

Then there's the bizarre logical thread of prayer breakfast -> apocalypse -> rape the planet. Somehow I don't think that someone that actually believes in God and heaven is going to, in your words, "rape the planet" for what really only amounts to material gain. Sounds like a good way to get to hell, but this is so baseless and flawed there's really no point discussing it further.

"That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED." I shouldn't even have to point out how off base it is to preemptively say anyone arguing with you is "denying reality". But I guess I just did.

So, moving on, "padlock the EPA". Well, yeah, that sounds bad if you presuppose that the EPA is the only one that can save the environment. Let me ask: if there is not EPA and you're living next to a river that catches fire, what are you going to do? I'm going to guess it'll be something like making a picket sign and walking down to the mayor's office and saying that if he doesn't do something about it NOW you won't rest until he never get elected to anything for as long as he lives.

The point is, the EPA is just a federal agency. Closing them down doesn't destroy the environment any more than shutting down the Dept. of Education destroys education or the Dept. of Energy electricity. There are ways to do things _without_ giant federal bureaucracies you know.

> because the GOP leadership and the GOP at large want him gone ... oh, back to this... Oh well

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Lewis Black about bottled water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5GBuk-GQ (from 3:08 on)
(Note: Drinks bottled water the whole time while ranting. ;)

By the way: Here in Germany, the water from the tap is often even *better* than the bottled one (which already is good), like before it was "not cleaned as much" in the US. It's very important and cities take pride in it.
This should be no problem in the US, considering you got really good water, and it was already done before. And it should be a lot cheaper too. Hell you could shower in water better than the most expensive bottled water!
My grandma does it every day.

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

Then address my other message, the one you ignored, the one where I ask what will happen with "it's not illegal anymore, so it must be OK?"

It was illegal to dump toxic waste into the Cuyahoga river. It caught fire. It was said to ooze rather than flow. Here the local joke was the Providence River. Instead of "save the bay" it was "pave the bay"

So what happens when we take away enforcement? What happens when environmental issues are just another line item to cut from company budgets? "They wouldn't dare" you might say. Oh, yes, they would, because if it's not illegal, it's another place to wring some more profit.

What fairy tale world do you live in where companies are altruistic in any sense of the word? What fairy land do you come from where the companies think beyond the end of the quarter?

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[St.Creed]

Let's turn this around: if the state is the corporations, then are the corporations not the state?

"If we take Moscow," he said, "with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take the huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can be truthfully said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed." - Lenin

In other words, it wouldn't be the first time that this would happen.

I think the Chinese bureaucrats are quite numerous, but not as big as the corporations. Often, they *are* the corporations. So who is doing exactly what? To separate government and companies in this case is silly: it's not a question of big government, or big oil, or big banking: it's a question of an entire layer of people organizing a state to do their bidding, and to hell with the 99% of citizens who aren't at the top - whether in a corporation or as bureaucrat.

I say that, even if the Chinese government does the same thing as the Russian government, and suddenly declare themselves to be capitalist (which is merely a de jure pronouncement of the de facto situation) and dissolve government, it would not change one iota to the power structure, the pollution, or anything else in China.

The problem is not the exact lay-out of how the ruling class is governing China. Changing that is similar to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The problem is *that* they are the ones governing China. And you can apply that to the US as well.

Re:The United States of China

[St.Creed]

What? Gas and oil executives aren't the best protectors of the environment Mother Nature could ever ask for? What a shock :)

Anyone would immediately realize that such a committee would sacrifice most of the environment to increase profits. Not at first perhaps, but when pressure is getting higher they most certainly would choose profit over planet. And Herman Cain knows this - he's not entirely stupid. But in all likelihood he'd probably profit as well: you get more donations from rich people when you make sure they get even more money in return. Call it whatever you want, but when someone is selling out everyones birthright in order to increase profit for a few, I'll call that corrupt.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy posting below me is a total fucking retard, don't listen to what he's saying.

Re:The United States of China

[RearNakedChoke]

Profit motive is universal, it becomes problematic when a group with a monopoly on force, AKA the government, has a stake. Where communism is the popular ownership of the means of production, communism is in fact directly responsible. If these were wholly private companies there would less of a conflict of interest for separate government agencies to prosecute breaches of existing regulation. You and others commenting on this keep closing your eyes to the similarities and dissimilarities because it undermines your ideological belief. Both the US and China have regulations and regulatory bodies, but China has a far greater problem with government being both the offender and the prosecutor. This is a systemic problem that occurs here as well, not because of that evil, evil capitalism, but the simple and more direct matter that it remains a conflict of interest for government to police itself.

Whether through government conflict of interest (communist or otherwise), corrupt government or less government - corporations will pollute indiscriminately. The net effect is that factories don't get regulated and so China's polluted landscape is EXACTLY what could happen in the US if we continue to let corporations erode EPA regulation and enforcement.

Who the hell cares whether its through communist conflict of interest or a democracy infiltrated by corporate interest? Or for that matter, a group of nutjobs that think no government will somehow make these corporations suddenly stop fucking up the environment?

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, working with computers and not a hard goods industry you don't need to file 10,000+ page reports for the EPA. I think you are missing one the biggest problems, there is simply to much regulation and even worse insane regulation. If you want to start a new production line here in the USA of any size. You are going need two things one lobbying money and thousands of pages to send to the EPA. The money will be needed to get the EPA to "read and approve your thousands of pages." before you file for bankruptcy. Please note, I am not saying you want to do anything illegal or harmful to the environment you just want approval so you can get started.(You realize the regulations and approval from the EPA are what are holding back most "Shovel ready Projects") Not that I think anyone at the EPA wastes their time reading every pages of the reports and those pages they do are usually not understood. Based on the feed back I get. I will say these though it employs a bunch of people who really don't seam to know much about the environment in both goverment and private sector jobs. Obviously the EPA has good to do, but often lacks the will act before it's to late.

What is really sad beyond the wastefulness, is that companies that want/need a new production line look outside the USA where it can be started in a matter of days and for less money in bribes and labor. Unfortunately, this means more pollution because lets face it the companies want do it as cheaply as possible and won't even do the cheap and high return for the environment stuff. But worse still do you think the EPA can survive a Federal Bankruptcy?? No, and all will suffer the price should that happen. So, the USA economy will recover once the federal goverment starts with sane regulation or no regulation. One of which is coming ether way. BTW, you should vote republican if you live in a area where democrats always win and you should vote for democrats if it's republican stronghold. For no reason more then to tell the parties not to give you dud candidates like we have in California. The worst thing for the country is a seat guaranteed to one party.

Re:The United States of China

[frosty_tsm]

They also don't have a welfare state.

Which state is that? Delaware?

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

I find it exceedingly ironic that you would ignore my entire message and complain about how I ignored your other message. Well, I ignored your other message because it, like this one, ignored mine. Why should I reply to someone that is clearly showing that they don't want to think or even consider what I wrote? (And if you take exception to that, instead of complaining, how about actually understanding and addressing the points I made before.) The answer is I shouldn't, but I will a little anyways.

From your other post:
> What about all these "free marketers" (there is no such thing) saying that companies are obligated to maximize profit /at the expense of everything else/?

When I go to the store and I buy, say, a table I get a table. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not make a table and give me a rock instead? Yes, it would... until people sued them for not selling the right item and no one bought their crap ever again.
The point is that "maximize profit" IS NOT THE SAME AS "rape the land". I already gave you examples that you simply ignored:
Organic food. It costs more, but people buy it. The maximized profit here is accomplished by producing a safe and quality product. People buy it (at an increased price) because they want the quality and want to support that. BP works with carbon credits/cap-and-trade to maximize their profit because their cost is less than the good will generated.

I'd say more, and once again point out that I don't support complete deregulation anyways, but you won't read it.

Re:The United States of China

[lennier]

Given the opportunity, I'll buy African before I buy Chinese.

My very dear and honoured friend, what a lucky coincidence this is! My close friend, President-General Mbutu Kiwali of the Nigerian Interior Ministry of Anti-Corruption, has just embezzled US$1500 million and is willing to share half of it with anyone who can help him launder the money. I am offering you, most gracious and learned colleague, the chance to help him clear some unavoidable legal difficulties by purchasing two shiploads of Pentium motherboards which, of course, will contain no actually functional chips but will allow you to receive a high rate of return on this investment. This is a completely trustworthy business deal and requires only a small $10 million deposit...

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it deeply saddening that the above is being used as an insult.

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

>When I go to the store and I buy, say, a table I get a table. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not make a table and give me a rock instead? Yes, it would... until people sued them for not selling the right item and no one bought their crap ever again.

But that requires laws and regulations for that to happen. Someone has to be legally wronged in order to have standing to bring a lawsuit. No regulations, no standing and "get the fuck out of my courtroom" to put it bluntly.

Good day sir.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[AlamedaStone]

(if you follow Real Unemployment rather than the government's "officially skewed" numbers that lose a lot of people).

So we should follow your skewed numbers, which include people like stay-at-home moms, students, and the retired in their numbers of who's "unemployed".

The official unemployment rate is based only on people who actually collecting unemployment benefits. It's fun to pretend that real unemployment can be deduced from it, but that doesn't make it true. A significant number of the unemployed are not "stay-at-home moms, students, and the retired". Just because you don't qualify for assistance doesn't mean you don't need (or aren't looking for) work.

Re:The United States of China

[AlamedaStone]

WTF are they teaching in home economics today?

It's similar to the curricula in civics and music classes.

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

ug... I shouldn't but...

Tort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort
Regulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Federal_Regulations

Seriously: Read. Understand. Please don't try to put the legal system bluntly when you don't know the first thing about it.

You would sue the producer of the 'table' for under the very old, very general _tort_ liability of fraud (probably). You have no standing under, for example*, the _regulation_ against false advertising. All you can do is write the FTC and complain. They'll tell the company to stop, but you still have to sue (again, probably for fraud) to get your money back. Try to sue for for false advertising and NOT fraud and they will tell you to 'GTFO'. (Though since they aren't so rude and ignorant, they'll probably just say "you mean fraud, right?" as that is a type of fraud but has nothing to do with the regulation).

* Which doesn't apply to labeling, BTW, but is a well known example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Regulation_and_enforcement

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

>Please don't try to put the legal system bluntly when you don't know the first thing about it.

That's because you're a Wikipedia lawyer, right?

I said "laws and regulations"

That covers tort /and/ criminal law and administrative law. Everything, actually.

But whatever.

I'm done.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[AHuxley]

Sure at the top end both parties in the US bail out the too big to fail banks with no real questions.
At the low end its more about the fog of market forces for your average US citizen buying a car, home, education, medical care, pension plan ect.
So many in the US have to pay for the very costly mistakes of a few "Captain of industry" types and their global games.
What taxes are still paid in the US as a total by any sector are held up as a net "positive" and the constant use of tax havens never questioned.
As for China, the 195/60's killed anyone who might question the use of land. The next generation of workers know to do their jobs and know not to speak out.
The rest is good PR until China has the local tech to fix their farmland. They will not admit to the problem, spend up on very expensive outside tech or slow down.
The top party officials in China enjoy very safe food, just like the politicians in the US enjoy good healthcare.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

Yes. And for you to pretend that there aren't significant differences between the parties, especially as regards this topic, is childish.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

You can try and say my understanding is wrong all you want, but the actions and words of the TP legislators say otherwise.

Re:The United States of China

[e40]

Without an enforcement agency, which is contained in the EPA, the regulations aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

If you don't think the Republicans want to get rid of the EPA so that companies don't have to follow the rules, ... wait, what?! AC? I've been trolled.

Re:The United States of China

[Artraze]

No, I'm someone that understands the legal system. But go ahead and assume that your poor understanding of it is better than the pretty good summary on Wikipedia.

Yeah, sure, you did blindly cover everything with "laws AND regulations", but you also said "No regulations, no standing..." which makes it quite clear you had no idea how regulations actually work.

But you know, whatever. Defend your ignorance. Being ignorant and persistent is better than actually learning something (and God forbid, admitting you were wrong). So, yes, you're done. You've completely proven the point I made at the very beginning: You are close minded and have such a shallow understanding of the issues you can only spout ridiculous hate speech.
That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an Apple 2e. American made! I refuse to buy Asian.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible.

It's hard so let's just give up? Wow I gotta remember this excuse the next time I forgot to do my homework.

This is the tragic comedy of Conservatism. When it comes to bombing the daylights out of smaller countries, they're all big and tough and mean.

But they magically turn all weak and whimpery and helpless when the going gets tough.

Over 10 years controlling the bulk of the government and therefore allegedly driving the economy, yet somehow when the Democrats get ahead, it all comes down like a house of cards. Big mean old Democrats. Even though Democrats are so internally fractious that they can hardly get anything done because they have so many defectors. Whereas Conservatives march in lock step, terrified less Rush Limbaugh should single them out for being RINO.

Re:The United States of China

[Johnny5000]

Actually, what TEA Party members want is less government power. The example you ares seeing in China is fine example of why less government is a good idea. See, the all-powerful government that leftists like you want allows a government to set up all the regulations required to keep a population safe from those evil capitalist pigs. Unfortunately, it includes government power to choose who to apply those regulations to and when.

China may have a strong government, but they're not using that government power to enforce any environmental regulation. At all.

The comparison of the Tea Party/Libertarians to China is their desire to remove all government enforcement of environmental regulations, thus turning the landscape into a polluted nightmare resembling China... which you would know if you weren't deliberately missing the point.

Re:The United States of China

[Archangel Michael]

Because we can only discuss things by making extreme examples of the other person's positions. Nice Slippery Slope points. Hope your logic instructor is proud.

You say John Birch, I say Communist and Nazi. See, now we're even. You say Republicans, and I say Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi Democrats, we're even. You say Dominionist and I say Greentards, we're even.

And you haven't made a single point that makes a point, only to call people names. Typical Liberal argument.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a plain mis-understanding of minimal government and its role in civilization.

The situation in China is not one of 'no regulation'. It is one of 'no rule of law'.

If you have strong property rights, built into the fundamental law of the land, e.g. the Constitution, nobody can pollute your soil, water or air without compensation for both the loss of use of that property and for the inconvenience that loss has caused.

For some reason, everyone thinks that regulations are a substitute. They absolutely are not a substitute, and in fact are a built-in corrupter of the government, because "money buys power".

This is a reason that you cannot name of a regulatory agency that does NOT produce very serious perverse outcomes from their regulations, e.g. the FDA is the largest killer of people on the planet, the educational bureaucracy in the US produces large numbers of illiterates who hate reading books, the Fed produces booms and the resulting busts, the various home ownership programs have produced very high foreclosure rates, the SEC protects Wall Street's Bernie Madoff, ...

"Money buys power", so the rich get the laws, rules and regulations they want. If you don't like that, you have to go back to minimal gov, strong property rights and laws that assume honesty and put the burden of proof on the party that can't document their full-disclosure of all information necessary for the other party in a transaction to make an intelligent decision, said information being of a level and form that is understood by the other party, and the method used to verify that the other party in fact did understand the information.

There is no substitute for honesty. There is no design of government that is stable except minimal gov, and even that needs a lot more restrictions on gov than Jefferson, et al understood at the time. We have the huge advantage of having seen a lot more varieties of gov fail than they did.

Re:The United States of China

[jwhitener]

How times change...

The EPA was formed under a republican president.

From Why the GOP is going after the EPA

Beyond the economic argument, do we really want to go back to the days before the EPA? Nixon's first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, describes that time in the Wall Street Journal:

   

"We humans with our big cars and our big factories and our big cities were discharging terrible stuff into the air and water, and it had to be stopped or we would soon make our nest uninhabitable. The public was growing increasingly outraged. Every night on colour television, we saw yellow sludge flowing into blue rivers; every day, as we drove to work, we saw black smudges against the barely visible blue sky. We knew that our indiscriminate use of pesticides and toxic substances was threatening wildlife and public health.

        "But we didn't do much about it. Until 1970, most regulation of industry was done by the states, which competed so strongly for plants and jobs that regulating companies to protect public health was beyond them.

        "Environmentally, it was a race to the bottom."

Re:The United States of China

[nomadic]

"The Tea Party and the Republicans do *not* want do get rid of regulations concerning uncontaminated food and a clean environment. They do want to get rid of ***hats like yourself who think more government equals effective government."

You're a damned liar.

Re:The United States of China

[TubeSteak]

If you have strong property rights, built into the fundamental law of the land, e.g. the Constitution, nobody can pollute your soil, water or air without compensation for both the loss of use of that property and for the inconvenience that loss has caused.

This presumes that someone can be compensated for (as an example) the loss of a family farm that's been worked for 8 generations.
It also presumes that whomever is causing the loss/inconvenience will be able to compensate the aggrieved party(s).

There are so many assumptions and presumptions required for your version of reality to take place.
And the big fucking problem with your worldview is that right now, alongside the regulations, we have
a legal system to provide compensation for both the loss of use of that property and for the inconvenience.
And that hasn't prevented or deterred anyone who thinks they can get away with abusing the environment.

To cap everything off, you neglect the massive power imbalance between a company like BP and a fisherman.
BP could have easily afforded to tie up the Deepwater Horizon spill in courts for years.

If the government hadn't forced/shamed BP into setting up a fund, most of the affected individuals would have been
completely and utterly fucked until the legal system chewed up their case and spit out a settlement or judgement.

The tl;dr version: strong property rights are not a replacement for (Federal) government regulation and enforcement.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses I think would prefer being regulated by the EPA, a single entity, rather than 50 different States, each with their own set of regulations, or who knows how many hundreds of other local entities.

Re:The United States of China

[lennier]

Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits.

Yes, that's pretty much exactly what would happen. Leaded gas makes cars go faster. Contaminated effluent is cheap, and food contamination is a huge problem in China. Organic food is already marketed as a niche luxury item for rich people, while poor people are expected to eat cheap genetically engineered food laced with dangerous additives. The market has basically decided that only the rich deserve to eat healthily and sustainably. And carbon credits only exist because of regulation - that's the whole point of creating a carbon credit market, to address the failure of the market to not act like a horde of locusts with no broader plan for the future than "nom nom rarrgh belch".

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

>You say John Birch,

I say John Birch because of the the people running for President with an R next to their names are sucking up to the Koch brothers. Herman Cain infamously so recently. "A brother from another mother" he put it.

I'll give you three good guesses what society Fred C. Koch (their dad) helped found.

It's not hyperbole. The Tea Party is the Birchers in drag.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

The official unemployment rate counts everyone who is seeking work but can't find it, and includes people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. It doesn't include people who have given up on seeking work, but that's because it's a very hard group to count: do you include things like "given up on seeking work and decided to retire three years early"?

Re:The United States of China

[Sprouticus]

Your assumption that we are at one end of the regulation spectrum shows your ignorance and political leanings.

I am not saying regulation reform might not be useful (less overhead or conflicting regulatory departments, clarification of rules, and for the love of jebus take politics out of the science behind regulation), and Im about as anti-nanny state as a reasonable person can get, but I would argue that we need more total regulation, not less. What we have now is a bare minimum to maintain a healthy society.

The problem today is that our regulations work well and are almost invisible to most people so they dont think they are needed. When people whine about reducing regulation I just point to fracking and the problems in China in the last 10 years and watch them back pdeal until they pull a quad.

Re:The United States of China

[nazsco]

> implying the US has good environment regulations.
> implying the US has good labor laws.

wake up, please. US is on the bottom of both those areas. Not flat on the ground as china, but on the bottom.

Re:The United States of China

[steelfood]

Americans are just chumps

This is what happens when your populace becomes a bunch of uneducated couch potatoes. Some very smart people realized at the same time that you can't market effectively to smart people, and that dumb people are easy to trick. So they take an already-failing education system and make it as bad as it possibly can be. Today, there are still a lot of people able to recognize society's problems. In twenty years, nobody'll know what happened or what's going on, only that somewhere, somehow, they got the short end of the stick. Soon enough, those wall street protests will turn into riots. And that's when we lose, and the rich and powerful finally win.

You can actually draw a lot of parallels between the state of the U.S. and the end of the Roman Empire. Towards the end, the populace was so distracted with entertainment that they couldn't see the world around them crumbling into dust. It'll be the same here all over again.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let ideology and all that fancy talk fool you.

The Republican Party == The Chinese Communist Party.

True conservatism is very different from what this Republican Party champions, just like true communism is very different from what the Chinese Communist Party champions.

(Not saying that true conservatism or true communism is good, but just point out how, despite their radically different ideologies, these two parties are really the same beast.)

Re:The United States of China

[Archangel Michael]

George Soros. Next point.

Re:The United States of China

[bmo]

That's your rebuttal? "George Soros"?

Fine. Talk to the hand.

--
BMO

Re:The United States of China

[Archangel Michael]

Typical, can't win, so you run home to momma's basement.

Re:The United States of China

[gmhowell]

They also don't have a welfare state.

Which state is that? Delaware?

Nope. Looks like Alaska just edging ahead of MD and VA. (I don't count DC.)

Re:The United States of China

[nobodie]

as someone who taught in China I can affirm that a scary number of students exhibit symptoms of heavy metal poisoning today. Not to mention the underbelly of kids who are socially promoted out the top (flushed out so to speak) with no skills. In the west we see the best and the brightest, but i worked with kids from rich families who could not process anything that required any thinking skills at all. Their parents were paying gobs of money to have them educated. There is no problem too large in China that it cannot be ignored by the government AND the parents

Re:The United States of China

[Gr8Apes]

Your comment about regulation is nonsense, there is too much importation from China to inspect and regulate, it's impossible.

No, it's not. It's expensive. And perhaps we should do exactly that. It would raise the price of imports while providing jobs, which would stimulate an increase in manufacturing domestically. That would be a win-win-win for the US.

Re:The United States of China

[Anonymous Coward]

GP's accusation, true or not, is summarized in his last line: "The Tea Party is the Birchers in drag"

Your response was to point out, apparently, that the opposite side is the same

Thing is, whether or not the other side is the same doesn't change the anything about the Tea Party

Think of it this way: if I say you cheated on a test, and you come back saying I cheated on another test, that doesn't mean that you're off the hook that you yourself cheated on this test

Re:The United States of China

[vaporland]

, and we'd end up paying 10x as much for basically everything, which would destroy the middle class.

Don't get out much, eh? In case you haven't noticed, the middle class is going downhill and sinking fast in the midst of "everyday low prices" at Tar-Mart.

When nobody (ok, the "99%") has enough money to live with any quality of life, it doesn't matter what prices are - people can't buy stuff.

Domestic manufacturing and middle class employment / wages per capita peaked in 1977. I seem to recall a lot more people were doing better then than they are now.

Free trade and removal of tariffs have devastated the middle class. Granted, unions contributed with greed, but the majority of the cause is exporting real jobs overseas and replacing them with "welcome to Tar-Mart" for $7.39/hr.

Re:The United States of China

[Frosty Piss]

I never realized how many Tea Bagging asshats hung out at Slashdot...

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

So, you are saying that by definition, large governments are not oppressive?

Really?

Before you answer, please note that the US has the largest prison population in the world, which is largely composed of ethnic minorities serving exceedingly long sentences for non-violent crimes. Does that sound like a free country to you?

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

Name three significant policy deviations between Bush II and Obama.

Three out of literally thousands.

If they were different, we wouldn't have the TSA any more. Drug policy would be different. Obama wants to expand healthcare benefits--Bush expanded health care benefits. Guantanamo is still open, but discussion has been clamped down on. No new openness. "Exciting" new wars opening up everywhere.

Same policies==same party.

Re:The United States of China

[Duhavid]

What I would like to know is this:
If conservatives can see this effect ( the conflict of interest when asked to govern ethically ) ( and can they see that? ) why do so many believe that putting the same responsibilities in the hands of corporate executives is good? Both are nominally "overseen" ( the electorate in govt, the market in corp ), both seem to ignore this oversight.

I think what we need is a certain amount of antagonism between corporations and government, like how the courts and executive and legislative branches are separate but equal in nominal American government.

Re:The United States of China

[Duhavid]

China is not really communist, though. The proletariat there is nothing more than bodies to be exploited as in capitalist systems.

Note, I am not saying Communism works, just saying you should be criticizing an autocratic regime, not a communist one.
Another note, I agree with the point that being offender and prosecutor leads to abuse.

Re:The United States of China

[Duhavid]

First, start with "what is a Republican". It is a large group of people who are socially conservative, fiscally conservative, believe in the market, business leaders who prefer their mantra on regulations and business environment and others.

So, do Republicans want burning rivers?

No, none of them do.

But, certain parts of the group ( I would argue, those with more control than others ) are more concerned with business profits than about whether rivers burn or not. That group is pushing for no/less regulation of these matters. We have the regulations we have because we have seen that the ones pushing for no/less regulations did not do a great job of keeping the rivers from burning when they had no/less regulation.

So, for me, the notion that returning to a no/less regulation environment meaning that we will return to having burning rivers has a good deal of traction.
You are right, they dont want burning rivers, but their actions seem likely to put us there regardless. And as long as those in control don't have to live near those rivers, little will be done about it in a market driven environment. So,"want" is irrelevant.

Re:The United States of China

[s73v3r]

Oh bull shit. Obama got Don't Ask, Don't Tell repealed, for one. Obama has also decided to stop defending DOMA.

And you need to come up with a FAR better comparison than "Bush expanded health care benefits, Obama wants to expand health care benefits." That is just the shittiest of comparisons. It's like saying that sausage and hamburger are the same thing, because they're "both made of meat."

Re:The United States of China

[tmosley]

Lol, you can't think of three. That is HILARIOUS.

How sad

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can think is how sad it is. Poor people.

1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called "POPULATION CONTROL" because China is bursting at the seams with too much population growth. They are going to let a percentage die off in order to further control population growth by denying health care and so on to those affected by it all.

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Implausible. Heavy metal poisoning is only modestly fatal, either at alarming doses or if you draw the short straw in the carcinogen lottery; but has a huge band of unpleasant but nonfatal effects at lower doses.

With uncontrolled emissions into the environment, you would likely see a uselessly small die-off, largely among people with occupational exposure, and a huge number of subtly to seriously impaired people with cognitive issues, chronic health problems, or both. Killing nearly nobody and creating a large number of chronically sick people is not exactly a clever population control strategy, even if you don't have any ethical reservations about it...

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

This really isn't a good way to control the population... This sort of contamination just makes people sick, weak, or chronically ill. I'm sure there will be higher incidences of cancer, but its only a blip on the radar of China's population problem.

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[jellomizer]

Stuff like that kicks in after 30-40 years. They already had their kid. "Population Control" Failed. You did however manage to kill of your most productive segment of your population.

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

Lead exposure at the levels that are caused by leaded fuel appears to be a cause for increases in violent crime.

http://www.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeNBERWP13097.pdf

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[sgbett]

Stories of nature finding a way in places thought uninhabitable due to radiation. Of fish that have modified proteins to live in water thought too toxic to sustain lives.

Or not?

Perhaps humans are more complex and it won't work the same way. I'm certainly not saying its the chinese government are right - its a pretty ghoulish social experiment - but I wonder if the law of unintended consequences might apply.

Imagine a nation with not only economic superiority, but also a genetic advantage of living in hostile environments!

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[khallow]

The author only considers the time period 1985-2002 and can already be explained by demographics and social policy. I imagine the premise would completely fall apart, if they extended the analysis back to say 1900.

Re:1 10th of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy

[Taibhsear]

Implausible. Heavy metal poisoning is only modestly fatal, either at alarming doses or if you draw the short straw in the carcinogen lottery; but has a huge band of unpleasant but nonfatal effects at lower doses.

Never heard of bioaccumulation I take it?
(GP is clearly wearing a tinfoil hat though...)

Feed the Poor

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Dog food and bargain foods come from China. Good way to reduce population, feed poison to the poor!

Re:Feed the Poor

[ajlitt]

At least that will solve our rare earths shortage.

Unions

[MarkvW]

Look for Chinese labor movements. The Poles were able to do it in the face of oppression. Maybe the Chinese can also.

And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing.

Re:Unions

[elrous0]

The only reason the Poles were able to do it is because they were getting money and help from the CIA (ironically, even as the same administration was fighting against unions at home).

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

"And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing"

yes, the heavily indoctrinated ones who are still asleep.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

And there was a pretty good PR campaign going on. St. Ronald Reagan and the Pope were out there helping the image of the Polish workers.

The main difference as I see it, the Soviets were broke and couldn't really address the Polish problem. In this case, the U.S. is broke and probably couldn' t address the Chinese problem, even if the G20 let us. In Soviet Russia you try to buy American jeans from the Americans. In 2011 American, you buy American jeans from the Chinese. That pretty much sums up any chance of a workers revolt.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Not likely when there are billions of desperately poor Chinese standing in line for any job. Go ahead and strike, you will all be replaced without any trouble.

Re:Unions

[tmosley]

Unions are valid gatherings of people. Unions in this nation, however, have degenerated to a sort of mafia, that forces people to join, uses their influence to corrupt government and legal structures, and basically become bloated parasites, all while citing instances of abuse from a hundred years ago or more.

Yes, China needs unions, but not for long. Already, working conditions are greatly improving. Instances of (real) slave labor have all but disappeared. Pay is rising. These are natural processes that do not require unions. But unions are good for stopping abuses, and enforcing safety regulations (which need not be government based).

Re:Unions

[khallow]

And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing.

It depends wholly on what those unions do. If they're freeing workers from an oppressive government, that's good. If they're just implementing a vote buying scheme (which is what most, if not all, public sector unions do in democratic societies), then that is bad.

But who cares about details, right?

Re:Unions

[roman_mir]

Unions are not a bad thing in themselves, anybody should have the freedom to association.

Unions are a bad thing when exactly like other entities, they take a hold of government power.

Re:Unions

[damn_registrars]

Unions are a bad thing when exactly like other entities, they take a hold of government power.

Now if that had actually happened in the last several decades, you would have a legitimate concern. But in the US, in reality, the unions have repeatedly given up power to everyone else.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for Chinese labor movements.

China has something like seven hundred million people that have not yet entered the ranks of disposable workers. They're still peasants. China also has large numbers of immigrants arriving to occupy industrial jobs. The incumbent workforce has no leverage while new, exploitable workers are forever appearing at the factory doors ready to work. What you predict might occur eventually, but probably not in your lifetime.

And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing.

Unions are a symptom of a constrained supply of labor. Once the workforce is tapped out workers have leverage. Not before. Thinking unions have some power independent of supply and demand is naive.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Again this troll is searching out my comments. Hey troll, what are you going to do if I stop posting here?

In USA the only actual unions that still exist are government unions, because outside of government the unions helped to destroy the companies or helped those companies to outsource the work somewhere else, so you are full of shit.

Re:Unions

[Attila Dimedici]

Wow, that's a great idea. Chinese workers should join the Chinese unions to protest the government...wait, the Chinese unions are branches of the government. It would be like a U.S. worker joining a U.S. union to protest Democratic Party policies.

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

Technically, the communist government IS a labor movement........

Re:Unions

[sbrown123]

>If they're just implementing a vote buying scheme

You mean a scheme to steer politics in their favor? What is difference between a union lobbyist and a lobbyist from a business? Take for example the airlines where you have airline union lobbyists on one side and airline lobbyists for the airline industry on the other. If you remove the union you give the airline industry lobbyists no one to compete with.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

haha bullshit. little help came from the outside. If it was as you say, eastern germany would've been freed much earlier.

Re:Unions

[khallow]

What is difference between a union lobbyist and a lobbyist from a business?

A union lobbyist has both money and votes to buy political favors with.

Take for example the airlines

That's not public sector. Hence, it's irrelevant to the point I made. I don't mind private sector labor unions or the airlines playing political ball, as long as neither party gets favorable treatment from government.

Re:Unions

[hittman007]

Communists act the part while the movement is happening, but when they take over they are anything but.

Once they have control those in power move to maintain control, in two separate countries (china and the soviet union) these governments caused the largest amount of peace time deaths in the history of nations, then it happened again and again. Under Stalin and Mao you will find several instances of this. They let their own people starve to death either in an effort to control them or through lack of caring. This and other brutal measures are what was required to keep said government in power. Ironically they never even met the stated goals of Communism after decades of "trying".

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Rebellion is not part of east asian history. You serve the authority, or you serve the other authority. To create your own...thats crazy talk.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the communist government pretends to be a labor movement, while actually being a plutocracy.

Re:Unions

[damn_registrars]

I don't know who the hell you are, but I'm willing to wager that roman_mir won't stop posting on slashdot any time soon. He's beside himself to see his idol getting so much popularity in the mainstream press - though for some reason surprised that slashdot is also giving him copious amounts of coverage - so he'll keep coming around for some time to tell us how wrong we all (well, all 8 of us here who aren't hardcore supporters of his idol) are.

So if you, the dim-witted and half-hearted troll, stops posting here, I won't care. And if roman_mir stops posting here, I won't care either. I've made plenty of posts here that have had nothing to do with him. And I will continue to do so no matter what he may think.

Re:Unions

[St.Creed]

Already, working conditions are greatly improving. Instances of (real) slave labor have all but disappeared. Pay is rising. These are natural processes that do not require unions.

Natural? Everywhere in China these have been hard fought items. Only in the face of labor shortages have some concessions been made (and they can be un-made just as fast), but many labourers still face sexual and other violence, unsafe working conditions, low pay, and get killed when they speak up. Unions provide the most effective way to take the fangs out of the power of an employer.

Re:Unions

[St.Creed]

Some people are forming independent unions - the Chinese government is quite scared of that. Some other people are pressing the bureaucrats in existing state unions to become more effective. Given that there is a (limited) form of democracy in these unions, once you get a lot of angry people in the meetings they are able to outvote, outshout or physically remove state stooges from their positions. In any case, the Chinese unions are slowly getting more balls, if only to try and defuse the tension. However, in the past this scenario hasn't really worked out for the ruling government, so the Chinese bureaucracy is in difficult straits there.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I'm from Poland and there is one thing that has to be said: the first and main reason of 1980 strike was economic crisis and rising prices of food. Political demands came later. If we had economy with 10% GDP growth then no factory or shipyard worker would care about democracy or freedom of speech.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is why public union lobbyists are bad:

1. Public union lobbies for more money or more union positions.
2. Public union acquires more money or more union positions, paid for by the taxpayer (which does include aforementioned union members, yes I know this)
3. Goto 1.

It strikes me as perverse that taxpayer funds are being used to lobby for more taxpayer funds and steer the political process.

Re:Unions

[blahplusplus]

"And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing."

Thanks to billionaires propaganda see here:

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2011/10/2011102683719370179.html

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, the communist government IS a labor movement........

Supposed to be. China isn't communist though, it's an oligarchy/crony-capitalism dictatorship (stuff is privately owned and you need to be a member of the right 'golf club' and make the right 'campaign contributions' to get anything done).

Re:Unions

[shutdown -p now]

No legitimate labor movement would ban independent unions.

Re:Unions

[makomk]

Not really. Take a close look at who was involved in the fall of Communism in Poland, for example; it turns out that actual labour movements are really inconvenient to communist states.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. This is a silly comment.

I am in China ATM (and yes, scared about much of the food). A while ago I was invited to take part in the local labor union at my job. I do not know the details but it was clear that there were very close ties between the union, and the local party branch. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is simply an extension of that.

Any change here, if desired, will not come from the unions...

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

Sure. Feel free to define 'legitimate' however you want.

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

Your post is the Western view of communism. If you ask a Russian, you will end up with a completely different view of Stalin.

Re:Unions

[shutdown -p now]

"Legitimate" means one that actually is a labor movement rather than masquerading as such. Grassroot unions are undeniably labor movement, so someone who tries to ban them cannot represent one in any meaningful way, no matter what they call themselves.

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

There are so many other ways to view it. As one example, consider the idea that people are naturally selfish and cruel, and if they have a chance to rise to power, they will take advantage of that power to tread on the faces of their fellow man.

Given that premise, it makes sense to organize society in such a way that one person does not have too much power. Organic, grassroots movements are unpredictable and may end up giving one person too much power, which he will use to tread on the faces of his fellow man.

Re:Unions

[tmosley]

Uhhh, yeah. That is a natural process. Labor is not infinite. Skilled labor is even rarer. As more skilled labor is required, working conditions and pay improve for everyone. This is the nature of industrial revolutions EVERYWHERE. The terrible bad that is seen is the result of the old corruption being washed away by the healing waters of capitalism. In the west, we went from serfdom to free markets. In the east, they go from Communism to free markets. Just as many places in the West retained a shell of their old ways (see the continued existence of the anachronistic royal family in Britain), so will China likely remain a "Communist" nation, but eventually the party will lose its power (if they are to be successful as a nation, anyways), just as the Royals did.

Re:Unions

[hittman007]

I wouldn't call it just the western view, from what I've seen it was the view of many in the countries that Russia took over to form the Soviet Union.

How many of those countries wanted to stay in the Soviet Union, to my knowledge none, that is why Russia is Russia today, and not the Soviet Union as those other countries that were forced in left when Russia fell on hard times.

Re:Unions

[hittman007]

The Russians got off easy when it came to the Soviet Union compared to others. Russia dominated 14 other countries to create the Soviet Union. How many of them stayed when they had the chance to leave? How many of their citizens share the view of the Russians?

Also I knew a Russian back in college, good friend, he definitely was not a fan, his whole family risked their lives to escape.

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

lol yeah, it was really rough to be one of those satellite countries, sucked in under soviet idealism, and too small to resist it.

Re:Unions

[phantomfive]

The Russians got off easy when it came to the Soviet Union compared to others. Russia dominated 14 other countries to create the Soviet Union. How many of them stayed when they had the chance to leave? How many of their citizens share the view of the Russians?

Yeah, there was definitely a big difference between the views of Russian soviets, and non-Russian soviets. The Russians were the ones who wanted it, the others had it forced on them.

Also I knew a Russian back in college, good friend, he definitely was not a fan, his whole family risked their lives to escape.

He was probably Armenian. ;)

Low prices

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't keep down manufacturing prices in some magic way, those cheap gadgets do have their cost.

Can't see the point of the article

[Rogerborg]

China doesn't care what anybody else thinks, we can't realistically threaten to boycott them (what are you reading this on, and where was it made?) and they essentially control the dollar and are making big inroads into the Euro as well.

This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another. Until then all we can do is wring our hands and cry "Oh, the seething hordes of yellow sort-of-humanity! Oooh, new iPads!"

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally care about this article as Canada is a major importer of food (both processed and raw ingredients) from China.
If you live in the US you should be even more concerned, as China is now the third largest source of U.S. agricultural and seafood imports. Have a look at this article from the Federation of American Scientists

Don't be fooled; China's food problems are OUR problems until we refuse to accept their food imports.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[El Torico]

This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another.

I wonder when the Chinese people will remember this quote? "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Tse-Tung

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[magarity]

I personally care about this article as Canada is a major importer of food (both processed and raw ingredients) from China.

Canadians should be equally concerned that Canada is a major importer of Chinese officials' ill-gotten gains. Many of them feel safe to exacerbate the pollution and corruption problems in China because their families (and bank accounts) are safely accepted into Canada.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Rob the Bold]

This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another.

Hardly a domestic Chinese problem. A number of foods in my grocery store -- particularly spices and fish -- are labeled "Product of China".

I'm not "boycotting" their food to get them to change their ways, but for somewhat more personal reasons.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Sir_Sri]

Or when the government decides it's serious enough to deal with, or when low level officials stop taking bribes. The people in china are part of the pervasive corruption, not the solution.

Like most developing countries, it's not china's laws that are the problem. It's the fact that an envelope full of money will make the law disappear.

Sure, in the US it's the same way, but the amount of money required is extraordinary. In the US (and the EU and canada) you pay off members of parliament, congress, the senate, you don't pay off the local mayor, city inspector, city engineer in cash, on a daily basis.

In rich countries you pay to have the law rewritten, which at least has the benefit of everyone seeing the new version of the law. In developing countries the law just melts away.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Sycraft-fu]

Do you mean my computer or monitor? My monitor was largely made in Korea. It is an LG Displays IPS panel, which are made in Korea. The electronics were made in Japan. final assembly was done in China but could easily be done elsewhere.

The computer is made from parts all over the place, few from China. The power supply is the only component I can think of that was made in China. The CPU was fabbed in the US, packaged in Costa Rica. The SSDs were made in the US, the HDDs in Malaysia. The memory was made in Taiwan. The graphics card was fabbed in Taiwan, assembled in the US. Final assembly of the system was done in the US since I put the thing together myself.

I'm not trying to argue that China isn't a massive producer of goods but please let's stop the stupidity of "China makes everything the US makes nothing!" Computers are largely NOT made in China.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[gl4ss]

where did the minerals and chemicals come from? the pollution problems are largely problem in places where the raw materials are extracted and processed.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[geekmux]

...I'm not trying to argue that China isn't a massive producer of goods but please let's stop the stupidity of "China makes everything the US makes nothing!" Computers are largely NOT made in China.

Yeah, you're right. They're largely not made in China(heavy metal poisoning). They're made in Taiwan(massive flooding), with assistance from Japan(nuclear fallout?), so I guess there's practically no cause for concern(yeah right).

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

My LG IPS panel was made in china, it as a beautiful sticker on it. So, yeah, they are not all made in korea...

For your information: no, assembly cannot be easily done elsewhere. In theory, it could. In practice, it's way too expensive.

Congratulations, you named major components of your computer! Where does the metal of your case comes from? Where the capacitors, resistors, leds, etc are made? What about the copper?

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[muon-catalyzed]

> they essentially control the dollar

China is in control of dollar or the Euro? How? Last time I heard this is determined at the bid/ask spread over at Forex machines. Meanwhile China has not even dared to float its currency yet. Now Euro is beating dollar again this week as investors see how well diversified the Euro is even if Greece defaults -- what a hard currency, poor underwater US shorts and their desperate US media relentlessly bashing and trumpeting Eurozone meltdown and impending EU demise, but still, European titans like Ferrari, Porsche, Bayer, Nestle, Audi, BMW, Ikea, Adidas, Roche, UBS, Allianz.. etc. etc. are fine and totally annihilating Chinese crap as usual... And our food, agriculture and tourism industries are just as fine also. --insert obvious Ha ha! guy pic--

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Taiwan != Thailand

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another. Until then all we can do is wring our hands and cry "Oh, the seething hordes of yellow sort-of-humanity! Oooh, new iPads!"

So the correct response is: only start worrying about what it's like to live in the totalitarian hell hole next door when your boss, your police and your politicians are chinese? Because it won't be that long.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[future assassin]

>This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another.

Exccept if they do they'll be slaughtered and no one in the US or EU will say anthing about it. They'll just call it an illegal uprising, done....

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice. The bank bailouts were 5% of United States GDP.

Meanwhile Belgium's biggest bank (Dexia) is so over-leveraged it would make Lehman Brothers blush, and a full bailout of it would be in excess of Belgium's GDP.

And Belgium is one of the *better off* countries in the Eurozone.

I wish I could return a hearty "Ha ha," but Europe is so royally fucked that the rest of the world will be smarting from this for years. And whilst the United States started the ball rollling the Eurozone did everything possible to accelerate it to supersonic speeds.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Many South Korean companies have factories in North Korea where conditions are far worse than mainland China. Slave labor all but in name.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Arlet]

If there are enough people protesting, they won't be slaughtered anymore. It's just a matter of time.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG.
The mercury is coming mostly from the coal plants that they run in China. To make matters worse, China has some horrible coal. Loads of mercury, plutonium, etc. So, they are burning some wicked stuff.

Much of the lead is from their work on batteries. It is not really the mining that is producing it, though to be fair, it is not helping.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[farble1670]

China doesn't care what anybody else thinks, we can't realistically threaten to boycott them (what are you reading this on, and where was it made?) and they essentially control the dollar and are making big inroads into the Euro as well.

it's economic mutually assured destruction. both economies will collapse if the relationship changed.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, a significant amount of the US bail-out money actually went to foreign banks.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget americans cannot separate themselves from racism and stereotype.

Here's a refresher:

"Illegal Immigrant" == Mexican (regardless of status)
"Chinese" == Slanty eyed, yellow skin.

Good enough for GRATEST CUNTRY IN DA WERLD!!! YEW ESS AY! YEW ESS AY!

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[loyukfai]

This is marked score:5 informative...?

Did you also check where the capacitors, resistors, PCB, or the rare earth elements used came from...?

With regard to switching the place of the final assembly, as another AC mentioned (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2513116&cid=37975866), it's not that simple. Just ask the Chinese government how's it doing trying to migrate some of the factories away from the Pearl River Delta area.

Like it or not, we're living in a global economy now, and we're more or less depended on and inter-related to each other, more than ever. It doesn't mean every one depends on China - Without the western technology developed in the past century, many of the factory workers in China maybe working on the field now (whether that is bad or not is up to debate, though).

BTW, it kind of saddens me when people tell me "China is good" because a lot of cheap things come from China, I try to explain, whenever possible, that the many many workers and people in China suffer from excessive working hours, poor working conditions, uncontrolled and unmitigated pollution and damage to the environment, just to name a few.

Sigh.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[steelfood]

Most of your boards, the components on your boards (capacitors, etc.), and the raw materials thereof all had their share of time in a Chinese factory. The high-skill parts certainly are manufactured in Japan, Korea, the Americas, or Europe, but no small amount of the raw materials for those parts came from China. Most of the minor parts came from China. A lot of your boards are assembled by Taiwanese companies, who have all outsourced the majority of their factories to mainland China.

Do you really think anything's "Made in x" where x is not China anymore? There are varying regulations (or none at all) on what that means, depending on the product, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Re:Can't see the point of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the common practice is to manufacture parts in China, then send them to a different country to be assembled. So with electronics, its quite possible that a significant portion of the machine was manufactured in China, even if it has a "Made in Japan/Korea/USA" sticker.

Check your preserved/frozen fruit labels.

[vlm]

one tenth of China's 1.22 million square kilometers of farmland are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins

Ah, that explains why food has begun to appear at my local store from China. I knew it couldn't be any good, just wondered about the details.

Vermont Village Organic applesauce is "canned" (is fruitcupped a verb?) in Barre, Vermont, according to the label on my desk (guess what I'm eating for lunch today?). Not sure where they're grown, Vermont is so small it probably only has like two trees. The fact they don't say where they're grown is disturbing.

Generic/big corporate apple fruit cups are proudly labeled as made in China. Frozen fruit comes from China also. I have stopped buying that for health reasons. Read your labels, or suffer the consequences...

Re:Check your preserved/frozen fruit labels.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd feel safe eating your VT applesauce (New England has more than two apple tree I can assure you) but the fruit cup label gives me the creeps. I wouldn't trust any food product coming out of that cesspool of a nation.

The people of China are going to regret their "progress at any cost" mentality for many generations to come. The Soviet Union made the same mistake but it seems they mainly polluted some areas with nuclear waste and fertilized most of Siberia with human corpses. Lead pollution alone will drive down average IQs in children.

Re:Check your preserved/frozen fruit labels.

[WindBourne]

Apple trees are actually heavily grown in the northern parts of USA. They actually NEED a long cold spell to allow them to fruit in the spring. Without that, they will not have any. That is why you will not find many fruit bearing Apple trees south of mid-Colorado.
The big issue is that you will find apple juice coming from California, Texas, and even Florida. Almost all of that is now from China.

Re:Check your preserved/frozen fruit labels.

[dkleinsc]

Apples grow quite well in Vermont, with a lot of small orchards around. Now, they may be buying apples from outside of Vermont too, but the most likely places would be upstate New York, New Hampshire, Quebec or possibly Maine (which has a very significant apple industry).

Re:Check your preserved/frozen fruit labels.

[djdanlib]

I used to live in the area. So let me make some comments about it.

If you go to their website, http://www.vermontvillageapplesauce.com/about_us.htm - it looks like they are following the norm for farms in the area, which is to buy from local farmers. You could email them and ask which farms are contributing to your particular variety of applesauce. Different farms will be involved for non-organic varieties, since organic farming is more expensive.

Vermont is actually a great place to farm once you get past all the rocks in the soil. There's a lot of extremely fertile topsoil and the climate is conducive to farming. Its relative size on the map doesn't mean much - it's estimated around 30,000 square kilometers. That's a lot of space and a large amount of it is farmland, which I can attest to, having lived on the border. It's a significant producer of apples and organic farms are popular in the entire New England region. (Lots of health nuts. Benefits the rest of us!) Apple trees are fairly compact, so you can grow a lot of them in a tiny space. From the UVM website: "Today, the majority of mature orchards in Vermonthave densities between 200-500 trees per acre, but many growers are switching to higher density plantings in order to maximize production and precocity." ( http://orchard.uvm.edu/uvmapple/hort/AppleHortBasics/plantingsystems.htm )

You should visit a Vermont orchard and go apple picking sometime, I think you'll be pretty satisfied =)

EPA

[radaghast]

Meanwhile in the U.S. the EPA must be abolished if we want jobs again. Maybe so if we want more oncologists.

Mercury

[Verdatum]

Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.

Source?

Re:Mercury

[ColdWetDog]

Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.

Would you (could you possibly) eat and entire Chinese farm? Would you be hungry and hour later?

Re:Mercury

[vlm]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18396555

Claims 111 to 213 mg of Hg ions per Kg of soil, which seems a wee bit high. mg per Kg is basically a wordy version of PPM. I'm not sure if that scales, that would imply all of China's dirt added together would be some multiple of the total planetary store of Hg, wouldn't it?. Note this is the dirt that is washed off the mountains annually, so its probably the highest possible soil concentration.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2005JG000061.shtml

Claims plain ole Canadian forest dirt has 200 ng/g aka PPB. That seems like a reasonable number. High enough to fit with historical coal burning, low enough not to instantly kill anything grown in it, etc. Note this is just "bulk dirt"

I suppose soil levels in China could very well be 1000 times higher than in a forest in rural Canada.

As for the thermometer, fever thermometers used to have somewhat less than a gram of metallic non-ionized mercury. I am no expert on rectal thermometers. But I'm willing guess "somewhere in the gram level" is about right. Think about it for a second, goatse aside, the orifice is usually smaller than the mouth the oral thermometers use.

So to make one thermometer, you need something like all the soil in an entire medium sized Canadian farm, or a couple shovel fulls of Chinese dirt.

The big problem is liquid thermometers were made with Hg decades ago, alcohol solutions a decade or two ago, and are electronic now. Somebody putting Hg in your rear in 2011 is making a weird internet video, not doing a legitimate medical procedure.

Re:Mercury

[tmosley]

Would you eat a farm?

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

Sealab 2021, I believe the episode is Waking Quinn.

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

With #6, you get lead poisoning.

Re:Mercury

[WindBourne]

Based on your comment, I think that many already assume that your parents fed you the thermometers. Hopefully, not used.

Re:Mercury

[nitehawk214]

Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.

Yeah, but would you eat something that has been up someone's ass?

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

Before or after using it?

Ah, fetishists...

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who need to see the relevant clip,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUFOwlOYuk4

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercury is technically a group 12 element, not a transition metal.

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

But you drink tea!

Re:Mercury

[dcavanaugh]

Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.

Would you (could you possibly) eat and entire Chinese farm?

Not all at once, but mercury stays in the human body for a long time and humans eat three times a day.

Re:Mercury

[Carnildo]

It really depends on the form the mercury is in. A gram of metallic mercury is no big deal -- it'll go in one end and out the other without causing much fuss. A gram of dimethylmercury, on the other hand, is enough to kill a half-dozen people.

Re:Mercury

[Anonymous Coward]

No I wouldn't eat a thermometer. But then I wouldn't eat an entire Chinese farm either.

Easy win to the new Cold war

[thomasw_lrd]

Looks like China may have figured out how to win the next Cold War before it even begins. Poison the citizens of the US with contaminated foods. Glad Russia didn't think of it.

Re:Easy win to the new Cold war

[Surt]

Russia thought of it, but we were big exporters at the time, so they couldn't implement it.
They're lucky we didn't think of it, or the soviet union probably would have collapsed.

More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Shivetya]

under Soviet rule. You haven't seen environmental horrors until you see what they did under Soviet rule, where not only the people bend to the will of the government so will the land. Of how production results are all that mattered, not how it was done. Where you had rivers you could not walk next to. (some might point to Cleveland and such but we ain't holding a candle to some places I have seen over there).

So, keep your derogatory and misinformed slights about the Tea Party and Republicans out of this, what you are witnessing is the same thing that happened under the Soviets in the 50s through 80s. You are witnessing so much government that it is not answerable to anyone.

Let me give you a hint, our government is close to that now, the only difference is not so much environmental impact but the damage it is doing to our society.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[CannonballHead]

The view that we need NO government regulation (e.g., get rid entirely of EPA and replace it with nothing) is roughly as stupid as saying that the government can fix anything, we just need to give it the power to do so (which does seem to be a very real viewpoint).

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

You are insane.

This is what happens when business or ANY enterprise is NOT accountable.

Our government is headed TOWARD this type of environmental nightmare, by allowing, nay using unconditional tax breaks to ENCOURAGE this sort of behavior. And tools like you are responsible - and I am CERTAIN you will find some way to avoid responsibility for your actions. That IS the modus operandi of the Republican Party after all - and don't bother with the nonsense about tea partiers not being Republican. EVERYBODY but tea partiers sees through that lie.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[jpapon]

So, keep your derogatory and misinformed slights about the Tea Party and Republicans out of this, what you are witnessing is the same thing that happened under the Soviets in the 50s through 80s. You are witnessing so much government that it is not answerable to anyone.

Exactly... when the people can't regulate what the government can do, you get into trouble (as in China, and in the USSR). The same is true of corporations though; when the people can't regulate corporations (through the government) you get into the same sort of trouble.

The truth is that regulations were put into place for a reason; to protect people and the environment. They were put in place because industry was poisoning the earth... in spite of the "protections" of a free market. Removing regulations may have a positive impact in the short term (may, I have yet to see proof of this), but whatever benefit is far outweighed by the long term negative impact.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to ignorantly defend the teabaggers and their lapdog republicans. They DO want to repeal all environmental regulations and talk constantly about closing the doors of the EPA. How could you not have seen tape of the current leaders and the republican presidential candidates making the same threats against EPA?
 
The "damage" that environmental regulations are doing to our society are a figment of your imagination, stoked by Fox and Friends and other propagandists.
 
Just like poor people, you are voting against your own interests. Unbelievable.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[rtb61]

You are no witnessing government, you are witnessing corpor/fascist state, the conjunction of corporations and autocratic government. In the Soviet era is was the police/autocratic state, where it was all about individuals gaining and maintaining power and everything else was subjugated to that.

The psychopaths in charge of those corporation also have another objective in mind, the complete breaking down of the US labour market and the extinction of the middle class. A new three class structured America and the rest of the West, 1% with everything, the enforcement class and the working in poverty class.

Reality is of course, whilst the 1% will create the police state, just like the Soviet Union, the enforcement class will soon enough turn their power on the ones that gave it too them, the 1% will find themselves in the gulags along with the protesting intellectuals (those that give power can take it away, hence they must be eliminated to maintain that power).

The rich and greedy of course never learn, that is not the nature of psychopathy, basically damn the consequences I want everything now. Sparta was a classic example, their were no rich helot merchants, any uppity helots will simply executed as combat practice for the warrior class, the Spartans, the class created to protect those that owned the land and the resources.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Grishnakh]

Removing regulations may have a positive impact in the short term (may, I have yet to see proof of this)

You don't need proof, it's common-sense that they would have a positive impact. Removing regulations would allow corporations to save money on their bottom line, and then give giant bonuses to their executives. This is a positive impact. Are you one of those OWS hippies that thinks corporate executives shouldn't get $100million bonuses, even if it means poisoning everyone else? That's unAmerican. The only people who matter are the top 1%; everyone else needs to worship them and sacrifice so they can have more, it's the American Way.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[s73v3r]

So because a completely different system had too much government, the answer is to become like the other system that has destroyed the environment, which has no regulation?

And no, our government is nowhere near close to what was going on under Soviet rule.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[GameboyRMH]

The only people who matter are the top 1%; everyone else needs to worship them and sacrifice so they can have more, it's the American Way.

And there's the last three decades of American politics summed up in a single sentence.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[MYakus]

"Draining the pond to catch the fish." That's how the Chinese refer to the current political and business environment in China. There isn't any long term view in China, it's all get what you can while you can. I've often wondered it was a matter of faith or ethics, those people were removed from the population during the Cultural Revolution. How do people in a society develop a long term view on things in an environment defined by Communist rule since 1949 and the millions where removed who were simply inconvenient to the ruling class?

BTW, I don't believe that Sparta is a good model for a modern political or economic system. The tools that they used were relatively simple to manufacture and the gunmen are an inexpensive commodity in much of the world right now. China is short about 40 million girls due to the one child policy, so they have lots of expendable males.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[gl4ss]

You are insane.

This is what happens when business or ANY enterprise is NOT accountable.

Our government is headed TOWARD this type of environmental nightmare, by allowing, nay using unconditional tax breaks to ENCOURAGE this sort of behavior. And tools like you are responsible - and I am CERTAIN you will find some way to avoid responsibility for your actions. That IS the modus operandi of the Republican Party after all - and don't bother with the nonsense about tea partiers not being Republican. EVERYBODY but tea partiers sees through that lie.

you didn't quite understand how total government power and control works in china and how it worked in soviet union. the "corporations" _are_ the government and vice versa - and there's no real elections, but production and income numbers are real, so they are the only metric they use. so the government doesn't answer to anyone but the government and the government decides where to build, where you can dig, where you can dump. and the local sections of the government want production and money and again only answer to them self and _nobody_ is looking at the big picture - because it's taboo, covering up is done as much to cover up from the general populace as it is done to cover up from other tentacles of the same government. censorship and media control helps a lot with that as it did in the soviet union.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Overbearing environmental regulations have ruined lives. Just go to any small Massachusetts town and ask around about Title V. There are families ruined, kids not being able to go to college, because of Title V nightmares.

And it isn't a case of "well they shouldn't have built there." We are talking houses that were built 30+ years before Title V. With Title V, homeowners are faced with nightmare scenarios. Without very costly measures, approved at the whim of a local incompetent bureaucrat, the house can become legally unlivable (you'll still owe property taxes and mortgage of course). I personally know of one family this has happened to.

Limits on externalities is acceptable and necessary, libertarians will certainly agree. But yes, there is A. too much environmental regulation, that is B. not evenly or consistently applied, and C. this is a bad thing, and D. just because you haven't been affected doesn't mean real people and real families haven't been -- your claim that the whole thing is "propaganda" notwithstanding.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Bucky24]

The sad thing is I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not... And I'm usually pretty good at determining that.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Moryath]

the "corporations" _are_ the government and vice versa - and there's no real elections,

And this differs from the USA how, precisely? At best, we have a smaller minority of honest people left in government doing their best to enforce existing regulations and prevent abuses like - oh hey that big gulf oil spill thing - while being stepped on by the Tea Party "gubmint iz bad 4 bizness" crowd.

In the city I grew up in, the main waterway - which had a history of being used for travel and recreation and fishing and shipping - was so polluted that there WERE no fish left and you only went swimming if you wanted tetanus. These days it's looking much better, but only AFTER heavy duty intervention by the EPA that the Republicans hate so much.

I want my kids to grow up with a safe environment. I want them to grow up not having the air polluted to a degree that people have to walk outside with masks on, I want them to grow up in a world where asthma is declining instead of massively rising due to the concentration of urban airborne pollution.

Meanwhile, to the Tea Partiers/Republicans screaming "waah gubmint is bad regulations kill jobs"... fuck you. I refuse to go back to the 1920s when factories were allowed to dump raw sewage and waste directly into lakes and rivers, I refuse to go back to the 1930s when factories had no regulations forcing them to watch their particulate emissions, and I refuse to even go back to the 1980s when if you landed at JFK or La Guardia, your eyes started to burn as soon as you walked out of the airport.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Moryath]

"Title V Nightmares" - you've been listening to too much hate Radio haven't you?

Title V, for those uninformed about what the Anonymous Ranter is talking about, is a part of Massachusetts building code concerning the efficacy and design of septic systems. Houses built before the law are grandfathered in with building code, but like any other part of building code, the house or building has to be brought up to code before it can be sold. Additionally, if your septic system FAILS, the new system you replace it with has to be up to code.

In essence, Title V says that your septic system isn't allowed to leach large amounts of human waste directly into the soil.

http://www.sellmyhomeinmetrowestma.com/Title_V_Septic_System/page_2245492.html

Strangely enough, the State of Massachusetts offers some pretty hefty benefits to help homeowners who are in situations necessitating septic repair, in the form of major tax deductions and low-interest loan programs. It's also possible (and depending on circumstance, desirable) to have your septic system insured as part of your homeowner's insurance, much as you would insure against flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake in other parts of the country.

In short: "Title V Nightmares" are not what the Tea Partying idiot suggests they are. Staying up to building code is a cost of living anywhere, no matter where you are.

Also, the "Nightmares" are pretty rare. From the Title V FAQ:http://www.mass.gov/dep/water/wastewater/faqsgen.htm

Does Title 5 require every cesspool to be replaced?

No. Only those cesspools that exhibit signs of hydraulic failure, are located extremely close to private or public water supplies, or otherwise fail to protect or pose a threat to public health, safety or the environment will need to be upgraded (310 CMR 15.303). Also, cesspools must be upgraded prior to an increase in design flow (e.g., the addition of a bedroom to a home or seats to a restaurant).

But why listen to me when some wack-job on right wing hate radio can get you all flustered about a "regulation" designed to keep the drinking water supply free of raw sewage?

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Grishnakh]

Ok, that is pretty sad. But I can see why you're confused: there's an entire political party where its voters actually believe that stuff literally, and they even have a new wing, called the Teabaggers, who take rich-people and corporation-worshiping to a whole new level.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

"Title V Nightmares" - you've been listening to too much hate Radio haven't you?

Um, fuck you?

1. The people this happened to were family friends.
2. Show me ANY radio show in the past 10 years that has done *anything* about Title V.

Title V, for those uninformed about what the Anonymous Ranter is talking about, is a part of Massachusetts building code concerning the efficacy and design of septic systems.

Correct.

Houses built before the law are grandfathered in with building code, but like any other part of building code, the house or building has to be brought up to code before it can be sold.

Incorrect. There are only two aspects of state building code that must be addressed at sale-time:
1. The installation of carbon monoxide detector(s) ($30 and 30 seconds of labor to install)
2. Septic system must be up to modern standards.

In all other aspects, the building can be grandfathered in. You can legally sell a house with century-old wiring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_and_tube_wiring) if you want (though don't expect much money for it).

Additionally, if your septic system FAILS, the new system you replace it with has to be up to code.

Have you actually been through a Title V process in a small Massachusetts town? Homes that were sited in accordance with codes 40+ years ago suddenly have "failing" septic systems simply because they are now regarded as too close to wetlands. The septic system could still be functioning as designed just fine, but they are in failure merely due to this change of law.

In essence, Title V says that your septic system isn't allowed to leach large amounts of human waste directly into the soil.

In essence, that was the law before, which no one had a problem with. Or do you think there were massive cholera outbreaks in 1960s suburban Massachusetts?

Strangely enough, the State of Massachusetts offers some pretty hefty benefits to help homeowners who are in situations necessitating septic repair, in the form of major tax deductions and low-interest loan programs.

Yes, there are such programs. And homeowners who happen to be near a sewer line (and if they aren't upper middle class) will find the assistance valuable. But most places lack the simple expedient of hooking up to sewer. The bills for Title V compliance can be well into the five digits, and the tax credit and low interest loans don't help much.

It's also possible (and depending on circumstance, desirable) to have your septic system insured as part of your homeowner's insurance, much as you would insure against flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake in other parts of the country.

Whilst I am fairly sure there is no such insurance, I may be wrong on that. Luckily I will be calling my insurance agent later today about something else, and I'll just ask that.

In short: "Title V Nightmares" are not what the Tea Partying idiot suggests they are. Staying up to building code is a cost of living anywhere, no matter where you are.

See my points above. I understand that you are very much threatened by the truth, but there is no need to resort to ad hominems.

Also, the "Nightmares" are pretty rare. From the Title V FAQ:http://www.mass.gov/dep/water/wastewater/faqsgen.htm

The quoted FAQ cited cesspools, which are not septic systems.

But why listen to me when some wack-job on right wing hate radio can get you all flustered about a "regulation" designed to keep the drinking water supply free of raw sewage?

Because this "wack-job on right wing hate radio" has actually *seen* the consequences. I have seen real live cases of families ruined over this. Real. People. This isn't fear mongering, I assure you. And for what level of safety? Sourc

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Paul Fernhout]

See the Chomsky section about five minutes in to support your point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

I have relatives in Massachusetts.

I've heard quite a bit about Title V, including one cousin who had to - yes - replace the septic system behind his house after it caved in.

It's not the "nightmare" you describe, and the cost to him came to about $4k (his insurance deductible) since septic tank failure was in his PIA list for his insurance.

Oh, and if your particular insurance company won't put it on your PIA, there's always third party options.

As for the vitriol, I was looking to respond to you much the same way because you came off as a liar, misrepresenting the situations (which you're still doing). For example, you assert that the only thing that has to be handled at sale time is septic systems and carbon monoxide detectors; in actuality, building codes and requirements thereof vary by county, and many counties require more stringent checks and have other items which are no longer allowed to be grandfathered in due to major safety concerns. And of course, depending on the county, any sort of structural alteration to the house may require the upgrade of other affected systems - for instance, putting in an addition to the house may necessitate checking the entire structure and bringing junction boxes or wiring itself up to code.

Many of these things are done due to known problems with older systems which were not known about at the time they were considered "good" under building code. For example, some older wiring develops known cracks and problems with the wire insulation after 30-40 years, which can lead to electrical fires as shorts and arcing develop. In an environment with strong enough temperature variation, this can be a scary prospect. I've known one person to have to completely rewire their house after it was discovered that this type of faulty wiring (granted, their particular brand also had a recall listed, long since expired of course) was used in the construction in order to be up to code to sell the house, even though it was considered "code compliant" when the house was built in the early 1970s.

So, your blanket assertions are simply not relevant in the overall circumstances. If your friends have had trouble with major septic repair, there ARE programs available to help. And the costs you assert are simply not the norm - if anything they are the extreme, extreme end and are the result of major neglect on their part to do the regular maintenance on their system that any homeowner should do.

Re:More like a repeat of Eastern Europe

[benhattman]

You don't need proof, it's common-sense that they would have a positive impact.

I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but even this assertion isn't true. Removing certain regulations would definitely help businesses (E.g. regulations limiting emissions from coal power-plants harm the profits for those plants), but many regulations have been in effect so long that removing them would not necessarily help anyone. For instance, CFCs or asbestos have been so thoroughly eliminated from use, that even if regulations were lifted you probably wouldn't see massive spikes in profit.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if some chinks get poisoned. I need the latest iShiny!

More like China

[Anonymous Coward]

And still people look at China and say that we should be more like them. They say its cost to much to build a company or factory here in the U.S., too many regulations. Its funny how easily people forget. The majority of the rules and regulations are there for a reason. Its may be cheap to build a factory in China but I can guarantee someone is paying a hefty price for it.

Re:More like China

[zill]

The simple solution would be instead of "all goods manufactured in US must obey blah blah blah regulation" we use "all goods sold in US must obey blah blah blah regulation".

Of course our corporate overlords will never allow this pass to in congress.

Re:More like China

[tarball]

I haven't heard from anyone at work, from my friends, or anywhere on the net say "we should be more like them".

You are completely daft.

tom

Uh, umm The government is a labor movement?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what happens when you create a labor movement in a communist country? You get shot by the competition.

The U.S. is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The poisoned are denied treatment and China's Environmental Ministry offers no possible help."

Dude, I HAVE HEAVY METALS POISONING. I've been in chelation therapy for 14 years and NOBODY does anything to help. Check Medicare, Medicade, any insurance company and you will see that support for heavy metals poisoning is nowhere to be found. Ask your doctor to do a simple RBC minerals assay to check for heavy metals and watch the blank expression on his face in reaction. I'm doing my therapy all on my own.

Heavy metals CAUSE CANCER. Why aren't people being screened for heavy metals when cancer is suspected?

UN FUCKING BELIEVABLE.

Re:The U.S. is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's more unbelievable is that you don't get some real therapy. Is fourteen years of quackeopathy really cheaper and better than going to real doctor? But I guess your post at least proves that heay metals have indeed damaged your brain.

Re:The U.S. is better?

[tmosley]

Take active selenium (nonmethylated). Selenium forms an insoluble salt with many heavy metals, including arsenic and mercury, which is the reason high metal content in fish doesn't cause toxicity either to fish themselves or to those who eat a great deal of fish.

Re:The U.S. is better?

[Jeng]

So would Brazil nuts work?

Re:The U.S. is better?

[Paul Fernhout]

Look into iodine, vitamin D, and eating lots of vegetables, fruits, and beans:
http://www.iodine4health.com/special/metals/metals.htm
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Re:The U.S. is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chelating heavy metals is pretty complex and not for the faint of heart. Read "Detoxify or Die" by Sherry Rogers

Re:The U.S. is better?

[tmosley]

This is not chelation, rather the formation of an ionic salt. Selenium doesn't bind to anything vital to your body.

Re:The U.S. is better?

[tmosley]

That is a poor method to take it in, especially given that the selenium content varies DRAMATICALLY between different areas, according to the soil content. Honduran brazil nuts have no selenium whatsoever, as I recall.

The best way to take it is the "yeast" form, though that can be hard to find. Check your local pharmacy.

Lemmy Von Kilmister for Chinese Secretary of Ag.

[Anonymous Coward]

His moles clearly indicate he's been eating tainted produce (not to mention shitting rock 'n roll) for years now.

Was that Chicken I was eating

[Kagato]

One of the interesting aspects of globalization is a lot of restaurant food (Mostly Asian for now) is starting to come from china. There's no disclosure requirements there. Makes one think twice before heading off to the low cost Chinese buffet.

I would also say, don't assume organics gets you out of dodgy Chinese agricultural goods. At one point Whole Foods was sourcing their frozen "Organic" vegetables from China. An acquaintance of mine with USDA out of Beijing mission finds that extremely laughable. Since it's their job to visit farms and see the conditions they won't eat any of the food in China. Everything they eat is imported from US or Europe.

Re:Was that Chicken I was eating

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Many businesses in Seattle do not run Windows. Why? because they know better. Then you have companies like Airbus that push to put MS in their cockpit (they actually asked Gates to get Windows DO-178B certified (thankfully gates told them not a chance in hell). Boeing will not push for Windows in avionics.

What it comes down to, is that those who do not know, will try to push things that should not be. We should not import ANY food from China, and to be fair, we should not be importing most of what we do.

Re:Was that Chicken I was eating

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's their job to visit farms and see the conditions they won't eat any of the food in China. Everything they eat is imported from US or Europe.

My boss' wife has the same job in a Caribbean country, and similarly she only eats food imported from the US and Europe, even though it's very expensive vs. the local food.

Re:Was that Chicken I was eating

[fiannaFailMan]

At one point Whole Foods was sourcing their frozen "Organic" vegetables from China

The only reason to shop at Whole Paycheck is if you want to pick up chicks of the human type.

Re:Was that Chicken I was eating

[Vegan Cyclist]

A lot of non-organic frozen vegetables are also from China - i was surprised when i looked at the back of a package of Europe's Best frozen veggies, and it was from China (China's Best?), as were a number of items from their brand...leaves me a little worried (and i stopped buying them.)

Apple Juice

[Tighe_L]

Almost all the apple juice sold in the United States has some concentrate from China. And SO many people give apple juice to their children. Also apple juice concentrate is used to sweeten other beverages "naturally" like cranberry and lemonade and fruit punch. Fortunately Ocean Spray recently switched to using cane and beat sugar to sweeten their cranberry juice. They previously used high fructose corn syrup which can contain mercury depending on how it is manufactured.

Re:Apple Juice

[Microlith]

They previously used high fructose corn syrup which can contain mercury depending on how it is manufactured.

No offense, but, source please.

Re:Apple Juice

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost all the apple juice sold in the United States has some concentrate from China. And SO many people give apple juice to their children. Also apple juice concentrate is used to sweeten other beverages "naturally" like cranberry and lemonade and fruit punch. Fortunately Ocean Spray recently switched to using cane and beat sugar to sweeten their cranberry juice. They previously used high fructose corn syrup which can contain mercury depending on how it is manufactured.

All of the high-population areas of the northern parts of the United States have a local apple industry (Washington/Oregon, Minnesota/Wisconsin/Michigan/Indiana - covers the Chicago metro, New York/Vermont/New Hampshire). It should be possible to find a local brand of apple juice that contains only local apples. In the case of the Chicago metro, we buy Indian Summer apple juice (it's from northern Michigan) - the price is pretty much the same as all the national brands except the cut-rate stuff that tastes watered down anyway.

We also buy Florida's Natural orange juice, which uses oranges exclusively from Florida. But unless it is on sale it is more expensive than all the rest. Perhaps those from the southern parts of the United States have the opposite situation. Local orange juice is cheap but guaranteed-American apple juice is expensive?

Re:Apple Juice

[Tighe_L]

If you want local apple juice it pretty much only comes in the form of apple cider. Which is fine cause everyone in my family prefers it anyway.

Re:Apple Juice

[Tighe_L]

Here is the source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601831.html HFCS manufacutrers may use soduim hydroxide produced using the Castner-Kellner process which contains mercury. There is no way to know how the HFCS in food was produced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castner-Kellner_process

Re:Apple Juice

[MobyDisk]

This study is interesting but highly incomplete. I won't cut HFCS out of my diet based on this alone.

The paper states that "Overall, we found detectable mercury in 17 of 55 samples, or around 31 percent" which doesn't mean anything without a quantity. There is some amount of mercury in the atmosphere so without a number the finding is meaningless.

This also doesn't relate to China at all, because the plants listed in the article are located in "Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia." I think HFCS is produced in the US because the US produces lots of corn.

Re:Apple Juice

[Tighe_L]

What I was referring to was that some beverage producers are switching from HFCS to apple juice concentrate because people are don't want to eat HFCS. But for all we know the apple juice concentrate may be far more harmful if it comes from China with all their pollution. Presently there is no way to know what the country of origin of the apple juice concentrate was from, and in most cases it is mixed, USA, South America, Canada, and China. It least that is what I found out when I called juice companies to try and find out where they get their juice from. Some manufactures do put where the juice comes from, but it is at their choice.

Re:Apple Juice

[jwhitener]

By almost all, you mean 60%. But yeah, it was way more than I expected it to be. And 50% of garlic.

Having grown up in an agricultural based town, it is baffling to me why those numbers are so high.

And the cynic in me is guessing that any of the cost savings that stores make by purchasing from China is not passed down to the consumer. Just more profit.

I know it's more expensive, but I hope more and more folks support local business and local agriculture by shopping at responsible mission driven stores and co-ops. Like here in Portland, http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/talk-with-us/our-story

Re:Apple Juice

[MobyDisk]

Ahhh, okay. I see what you mean.

Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[damn_registrars]

I have been wondering about the safety of the Mandarin Oranges I have been buying (in cups) at the grocery store. They say product of China right on the package (regardless of whether they are name-brand or store-brand); maybe I'll switch to pears and/or peaches instead.

Re:Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[couchslug]

Why "maybe", when you do not need them?

Re:Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[damn_registrars]

Why "maybe", when you do not need them?

Hey you just never know. I live in the middle of the continent, I could come down with scurvy and need vitamin C urgently!

Though really, I just buy them because they are convenient. Fruit cups have a shelf life that is almost on par with canned vegetables.

Re:Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[bugs2squash]

Yeah, switch to Tuna instead...

Re:Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[Tighe_L]

Mushrooms too frequently come from China.

Re:Maybe I won't buy those oranges this time...

[Paul Fernhout]

Yes, in my local store I found two cans of mushrooms by the same brand (one for slices and one for pieces) that looked almost identical except one said made in USA and one said made in China (in small print).

I've been amazed how much food comes from China in a typical small grocery store.

Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[sl4shd0rk]

Maybe:
- stick with your current phone for 4 years?
- skip your next computer upgrade for 5 years?
- settle on a 24" LCD instead of the 92" plasma? ..Not a chance

It's disturbing that we've put our own neck in the noose but just keep tightening the rope.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I've got this covered pretty decently.
My current phone (Nokia Xpressmusic 5310) is about 4 years old, and I have zero intention of replacing it. I love this thing, and will be pissed off when it eventually dies.
Computer upgrade? I haven't done that in like... 8 years. I'm honestly surprised this beast is still running. Although I DID replace the hard drive about 2 years ago since the other one kicked it.
We've had a 36" LCD for about 3 years now, again, with no intention to upgrade it unless it completely dies.

I'm all about the 'keep using it until it's just downright silly to keep trying to push it further'.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[confused one]

We're not all conspicuous consumers.

My phone gets replaced when it breaks -- current phone is less than a year old but had last one 3 1/2 years.
My primary home computer is 5 years old. My laptop is 3 years old. I expect to get another year or two out of them.
I am still using a SD TV, a CRT. I don't plan to replace it until it becomes necessary. Why scrap a functional piece of hardware?

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[gregfortune]

Agreed, but phones are a poor example right now.

My phone is getting replaced at the two year mark this time because I caught the front end of the android market with a cheap android phone two years ago and the advance in hardware/software is too great to ignore. Once phones slow back down a little, I'll go back to long spans with a single phone (my last phone was 8 years old when I replaced it, good old Motorola V550). Stuff's just changing too fast right now for that to be realistic on phones.

On the computer front, it's now more realistic to run a computer for 5-10 years without upgrading. Current upgrades are pretty small jumps and even newly released games are running on much older hardware than they have before. I increased RAM on my desktop from 4GB to 12GB a couple days ago and that should extend the life of that machine by another 2-3 years before being handed down to my kids.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

i do not see why we need to do anything. If China is ok with killing off their own people or creating a HUGE environmental/medical disaster, who are we to judge them. We, the USA, need to get our noses out of everyone else's business. Sure we should test all food coming into this country for a whole mess of things and then deal with those that fail. But seriously, the world would like us better and attack us less if we stopped trying to tell everyone else how to live.

Fuck Em.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[roc97007]

The problem is, when the TV is manufactured across the ocean where you don't see the resulting poisoning of the water table and increased illness in the local population, it's easy to convince one's self that the only real issue is proper recycling of the old unit. Especially when there's an Energy Star sticker right on the new model.

I've even heard people argue that we should change out our electronics regularly to take advantage of new advances in power consumption. I personally consider this a way to talk one's self into a new iphone or a bigger TV. Personally, I'm with you. I tend to buy higher quality than I really need, and then I don't replace it until it breaks in a way that I can't fix. For big ticket items the first accessory is the service manual. But to most people, electronics are consumables. Partly because they don't last very well, but mostly because new features are attractive.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[djdanlib]

You're right, sometimes we need to settle for "good enough", but we also need to let corporations know that there is a strong demand for products that are produced responsibly. They won't start making products responsibly if there's insufficient demand for it. People are voting with their checkbooks: They want cheap, and don't care about the consequences. Education goes a long way.

We need to be willing to pay the appropriate cost, because it costs more to do the job right.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

- stick with your current phone for 4 years?

Make a smartphone that holds up for 4 years and I would be on board. When (cost to repair) > 1/2 * (cost to replace), it is time to replace.

- skip your next computer upgrade for 5 years?

Personal PC going on 7 years. (Pentium M power!)

- settle on a 24" LCD instead of the 92" plasma? ..Not a chance

24" vs 92"??? Is there no in-between?

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! The downward pressure on the market and pressure to produce high volumes from our free market economy is destroying our environment. Sure it's china's environment right now, but as the production from their farms goes down, they willl over fish their oceans more than they already are, all the while producing more and more pollution that goes everywhere in the environment which will effect us. I've seen reports on China's environment, and it is nasty, even the recycling of materials is a disaster over there. My bet is that is will continue until the people demand change, which in their system might be quite dificult to implement on a grand scale, but if they develope the will to change, I think it would turn around quite quickly. The downside for us is the stuff we buy will be more expensive, which means that the we would see the true cost of equipment. From our end we need to demad that companies that sell here, have a fully responsible supply chain, which needs to be standardised by a green seal of some kind. Hard to get people to pay more for the phones and computers we use just to be "responsible".

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[phorm]

How many people have had a phone/computer that *LASTS* 4 years.
Products aren't just replaced for upgrade purchases, planned obsolesce is a factor as well.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Inda]

You get 8GB. The kids get a 13 year old PC.

They must love you ;)

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[gregfortune]

Nah, I have an older computer that I upgraded from 4GB to 12GB. In a few years when that computer no longer performs in the way I need for compiling code and running games, I'll get a new computer. At that point, my current computer turns into the family model for browsing the web and doing homework. Those tasks don't take next year's top end computer to run.

The point here is that some people still use hardware until it dies rather than buying a new computer every three years. For most tasks, older computers are perfectly capable. Some of us are already "lessening our impact" and have been doing so for years.

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[krinderlin]

With the exception of a video card replacement and a monitor upgrade, I've been running a Core 2 Duo E7xxxx with 8 gigs on a ASUS motherboard. The motherboard bit some dust and I sent it in for an RMA. They "repaired" it by disabling one of the 2 sets of RAM channels. But I never really saw a drop in performance. The computer is rapidly approaching 4 years old and I will likely stick with it till whatever comes after the Core i3/5/7 stuff in a few years.

I'm guilty of phone hopping a little too much, but that's just a result of the shitty mobile provider situation here in the US. My first employer had Verizon, so I bought a Droid myself because it was buy my own or get a BlackBerry. After I left my employer, I got a Nexus 4G because my new employer said that they had Sprint and would let me use any Sprint phone I wanted. When I started, they changed their minds and left me with a Sprint bill of about $95/month in the cheapest arrangement. So, I paid my Early Termination Fee* and jumped onto Virgin Mobile and hacked CM7.1 onto an Optimus V. That said, I will run this phone into the ground before I buy another. It's phenomenal for what I use it for.

* In an aside, has anyone else noticed that the increasing monthly fees with post-paid smart phone plans makes it easy to justify paying an ETF? I mean, at $35/month that's $60 a month. That means in 5 months I've made back my ETF, 2 more months and I've made back the cost of the phone, and by the time I'm 1 year in I'm net $300 in savings. Seriously? Does no one else realize this shit?

Re:Are you interested in lessening your impact?

[Belial6]

The trick is finding a way to get them to actually make the products responsibly as opposed to just slapping a "responsible" sticker on it and charging more for that.

Don't Worry:

[Hartree]

These wild environmental accusations are just malicious rumors spawned by outside interests.

The Chinese government is handling the problem as outlined here: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/26/1924201/china-detains-internet-users-for-spreading-rumors

And this is suprising how?

[WindBourne]

China has no pollution controls installed AND RUNNING. They purposely disable pollution controls contrary to their agree with Japan.

Re:And this is suprising how?

[hackingbear]

If you read the TFA, the report is from China's Environment Ministry. If the (central) government wants to cover up, why would they release such a report. And in China, producing bad foods can be punishable by death sentence, as seen in the baby milk powder scandal a few years back. Like most other problems, the core of China's problem is that a) there are too much competition for jobs and businesses; b) higher governments have little control over the lower ones unless the problem gets real big, as the famous saying goes "Whenever there are policies up there, there are work around down below."

Like everywhere else, when (and only when) the problems hit front pages, the problem has reached their peak. These kind of reports are hitting media front pages everyday in China; just go visit one of the major Chinese Internet news portals. So they will be solved or reduced substantially, but it will take a long while to solve the problems. The core solution will be lowering the population and increasing per-capita income; both will drive lower the level of competition.

Some of the problems may also be exaggerated in today's media. For examples, if foods in China are poisonous or having excessive amount lead, we would expect people there to have much shorter life span or young people having IQ deficiency; but neither is true. China is facing population aging problem and lots of young people come to study in the Western world and get their Master's and Ph.D.'s. I think it is like gun problem in this country, it is a big problem but most people are still not really affected by it.

Re:And this is suprising how?

[Guppy]

If you read the TFA, the report is from China's Environment Ministry. If the (central) government wants to cover up, why would they release such a report.

Faction fight. China actually does have a decent set of laws. However, the Environmental Ministry is dwarfed in power by more business-friendly factions, so they rarely manage to enforce anything. One of the groups that supposedly does get policed heavily is foreign multinationals -- it gives the government a way to show who's boss, while giving an advantage to indigenous Chinese companies.

Re:And this is suprising how?

[WindBourne]

China's situation is far worse than what they admit to.

Re:And this is suprising how?

[hackingbear]

Yes, but that's nothing new. It is the same everywhere as well. In the end, when the economy grows and there is a growing middle class which is definitely the case in China now, things will be improved. It is like you first create soemthing and then try to optimize it later. But it takes times, quite a lot of times.

Offshoring

[msobkow]

I blame offshoring of manufacturing services. Offshoring has proven a boon to industries that wish to export their toxic manufacturing processes and slave-labour "wages" to foreign countries. Can you think of any cases where the "cheap" manufacturing wasn't accompanied by lax employee and environmental safety regulations?

Re:Offshoring

[WindBourne]

Good points. But you should blame the large box stores as well. They continue to push that nightmare. In fact, Walmart, target, K-ZMart are NOTORIOUS for 'buying' American goods and then simply not paying. They really want to deal with a relatively small number of Chinese manufacturers that are partially owned by Americans, who then steal American ideas.

Re:Offshoring

[MaWeiTao]

Blame the west all your want, but the fact is that the Chinese would be doing all this with our without outsourcing.

Re:The US will catch up soon

[damn_registrars]

Once President Perry eliminates the job-killing EPA!

President Perry? Why wait? President Lawnchair will beat him to it! Just wait until the rest of the conservatives tell him that he is being unpatriotic by not eliminating the EPA and that they won't talk to him about anything at all until he does and then ... POOF! Gone is that pesky EPA, courtesy of President Lawnchair.

Q: Mr. President, can you collapse under pressure?

A:Like a Lawnchair!

Only 1/10?

[ahoffer0]

One-tenth sounds conservative.

The answer is more industrialization

[Freedom Bug]

Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.

Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.

Re:The answer is more industrialization

[microbox]

History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000.

After that, the pollution is just exported to another country, right?

Re:The answer is more industrialization

[demonbug]

Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.

Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.

The problem, of course, is that at this point the damage is already done. It is extraordinarily more expensive to get pollution out of the soil and groundwater once it is there than it is to prevent it in the first place.

Re:The answer is more industrialization

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the Indian government will take a while to notarise all the complaints in triplicate (especially if it was made by persons of low caste), so the problem will be unreported there for at least 50 years, by which time it will have moved back to the new third-world countries in the former USA.

Re:The US will catch up soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your freezer, I bet half the produce in there has the ol' Grown in China label. The size of your government pales in comparison to corporate greed.

kewl

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets import some food.

Under Soviet rule:

[Hartree]

Aral Sea pollutes you!

See what happens in a Commie Country?

[cellocgw]

If only China were capitalist, the Invisible Hand would take care of those poisoned people right snappy.

or maybe...

heavy metal

[wolv]

heavy metal ain't noise pollution

This is partly why China is buying US farms

[Anonymous Coward]

China also recognizes what it is doing to it's own farmland (building on it, poisoning the rest) and they're just preparing for the after effects.
China is buying up farms in North and South America.

For investors looking for a place to bet their money - there is no current bubble to ride - they're looking to food now... it's an investment opportunity which "lacks a consolidated market" (ie, not enough monopoly).

I got heavy metal poisoning in China

[Anonymous Coward]

I taught at a University in China for a year. The month after I returned, all the hair on the top of my head turned white and fell out (at 30 years old). Pesticides and contaminated food were rampant in China. Heavy metal contaminated dust clings to your clothes when you walk down the street in almost any Chinese city or town.

Chemical spills are so common, they don't even bother trying to sensor them in the press. Whole rivers just go dead all the time. If you drive by a coal power plant, your eyes will be stinging for at least 100 km before and after you reach it. No scrubbers or filters on them.

Now, as for getting medical treatment in China. When I was there, they had multiple public scandals with reprocessing needles and the like. Going to a hospital in China is really more dangerous than simply living with whatever you might have. One jab of a "clean" needle at a hospital in China is a death sentence.

So, none of this is news. Perhaps the only news is that China is reporting it themselves. It was classified as a state secret when I was there, even though it stuck to everyone's clothing.

Re:I got heavy metal poisoning in China

[tarball]

"I taught at a University in China for a year." followed later by "Chemical spills are so common, they don't even bother trying to sensor them in the press."

"Sensor"? And you taught at a university? Even China should be ashamed.

Welcome to 20th Century Capitalism

[bfmorgan]

Industrial growth is always a surprise to agricultural economies that try to modernize using manufacturing as a basis. Great Britain in the 19th century, USA in the 20th and now China. China has the money, but I'm afraid not the will to avoid these types of environmental disasters. A central government should be able to recognize this and make the changes, but if they have succumb to the capitalist influence pedaling method used in the West, they are doomed. It will take the will of the people to force the changes. Welcome to the club,

Re:Welcome to 20th Century Capitalism

[0123456]

A central government should be able to recognize this and make the changes, but if they have succumb to the capitalist influence pedaling method used in the West, they are doomed. It will take the will of the people to force the changes.

Uh, no. They have succumbed to the communist influence peddling system used in much of the East.

Re:Welcome to 20th Century Capitalism

[gl4ss]

ironically this is actually less of a clusterfuck than what has already occurred in china during past half-century.

if they did go exactly like the west, it wouldn't be such a problem.

Stupid assesment of why people buy

[SuperKendall]

They buy that bottled water because some MARKEDROIDS told them to buy it!

Sorry, no. Most bottled water sold is large generically branded stuff.

The reason why people buy the bottled water is convenience. It's packaged to easily take with you. It has nothing to do with marketing, it's that it's easier than buying and filling your own leak-proof containers. Heck, even if you did buy and fill your own conners it turned out you were probably worse off with the BHP scare (though that was overdone).

Lots of what people buy has very little to do with marketing in the abstract - as in, marketing might partially determined what bottle of water they are going to buy but not if they are going to get bottled water or not.

People don't investigate much because by and large the stuff is safe. The crap in bottled water you are trying to scare us all with is in such trace amounts it hardly matters. Also how do you know even with what they found in the bottled water it's still not better than some local tap water?

Coming to a country near you soon

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as we can get rid of there "Job Killing Environmental Regulations" and the EPA, American businesses will be able to complete with their Chinese competition.

All regulations are there for a reason

[Quila]

Just not necessarily a good one. Some are there in order to stop upstart companies from being able to compete with the established ones, because they have a harder time fronting the cost for compliance. Other regulations are simply the result of scaremongering or nanny state, and some just don't make sense and even cause perverse incentives (such as the 3-S with endangered species).

Now as far as dumping mercury and lead into the public waterways, and other such things, I'm all with you on the need to regulate that according to the science.

One Half of U.S. Land Polluted +5, Helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

by Industry.

Yours In Minsk,
K. Trout, Epidemiologist

Coal pollution - solution in 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

The good thing is China will basically burn its entire coal reserves, 3rd largest in the world, within the next 30 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#World_coal_reserves
http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

This means that China will only pollute 3x more than it currently has before it has to switch to something else, most likely nuclear.

Anyway, very few care about the environment in China so this will continue for foreseeable future.

PS. Remember leaded gasoline? At least now we only pollute our ground water with MTBE..

http://www.rense.com/politics6/usgrnd.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether_controversy

I'm not much for using ethanol as a fuel, but ethanol is used as a replacement for MTBE.

Of course this all boils down to too many people. 1,000,000 could pollute almost as much as they wanted without any issues. But 7000x as many can't even piss and shit into the oceans at once without causing a problem.

Remember that when drinking Apple Juice

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the ingredients on a container of apple juice the other day and the apples came from China... just saying... watch where you get your food.

Re:Uh, umm The government is a labor movement?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why Solidarity failed.

they need a tea party

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to vote in some people that will turn all that nasty pollution into a liberal hoax.

Re:they need a tea party

[Paul Fernhout]

"They need to vote in some people that will turn all that nasty pollution into a liberal hoax."

LOL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

And: "Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAH-o7oEiyY

Produce from China is already here....

[madhatter256]

At my local Bravo and Aldi supermarket. You can buy very cheap garlic cloves. A pack of 3 whole garlics for $1.50 compared to $3.50 for a package of four at my local publix. The reason it's so cheap is that they are from China.

This is hardly surprising

[roc97007]

Do a google search on "china environmental disaster" and you get millions of hits. Part of that, as said in the article, is fueled by China's push to industrialization at all costs, but another big part of it, (and something we should be personally ashamed of) is the perception in the West that if the manufacturing didn't occur here, then the pollution never happened. It's the "point source" thing all over again. If the great unwashed public doesn't see pollution happening right in front of them, they're more likely to think of the product or process as "green".

Re:This is hardly surprising

[Jeng]

It's not that people don't think that pollution is happening, they just don't care if it doesn't directly effect them.

I would much rather buy something that polluted a land far far away from me rather than one that is polluting my neck of the woods. In fact I would actively boycott any local industry that polluted as much as they do in China. It would be in my best interest to.

When China becomes a larger consumer market they might have a say in whom gets polluted.

Re:This is hardly surprising

[LunaticTippy]

I agree that china has a lot of terrible environmental problems, but google hits don't reflect that for various reasons. There's about 6x as many "US environmental disaster" here

Re:This is hardly surprising

[Daetrin]

There are a large number of people in the US who would be happy to impose tariffs on products from countries with poor environmental or human rights records. All else being equal the US government would be happy to do the same. It would be something they could brag about to the voters at the next election cycle, both because it's what "we" want and because it would help support local farms and manufacturing.

The problem is the people who don't want this are 1) a bunch of corporations in the US who make money from selling stuff someone else made rather than making stuff themselves, 2) pretty much all the corporations in China and, most importantly, 3) the government of China.

Trying to impose such tariffs would trigger a monumental legal and political battle, spearheaded by the government of the people the environmental protections would actually be protecting. Which means that it's never going to happen.

There is a simple solution for this

[WindBourne]

It is time for nations to put a tax on food based on the pollution from whence it comes. If they apply it to ALL foods (local and imported), then it is not considered a tariff, but a simple tax (ala sales tax). This approach rewards nations that drop their pollution, while punishing those such as China that live off the pollution. As long as this is applied to ALL food prior to hitting the retail store, then it is legal.

Kamakiriad

[ThatsNotPudding]

...the HDDs in Malaysia. The memory was made in Taiwan...

"The frame is out of Glasgow
The tech is Balinese"

Re:Kamakiriad

[Pope]

Some kids just drive too fast.

The ox is slow

[ThatsNotPudding]

but the earth is polluted. The ox is screwed.

Um

[Anonymous Coward]

There is far more serious things going on right now for us to be worrying about this. Gay marriage still hasn't been made illegal and Herman Cain is still screwing random women. Those things are more important than some stupid pollution issue.

Finally

[Tailhook]

It's nice to see people in the West finally discussing this. Has it become, at long last, no longer be possible to exempt China (and others) from Kyoto with a straight face?

This conversation has been a long time coming.

Erecting domestic regulatory regimes while exporting our industrial base and its pollution to Asia is hypocritical. We have a moral obligation to correct this. Another consequence of this hypocrisy is a rapidly widening wealth gap between our now surplus working class and everyone else. We have a fiscal imperative to correct this, one you can observe at the Port of Oakland right now. Cheap, plentiful imports flooding mega-stores with shiny disposable stuff has created an ugly consumer culture. We have a cultural need to correct this. The Asian escape valve has permitted us to indulge NIMBY-ism via our bureaucracies and the abuse or our civil law by pressure groups. We're all going to have to grow up a bit to correct this.

Re:Finally

[robsku]

Mod parent up!

The end of the Chinese economic miracle

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in Asia 15 years ago and one could see this coming.
I believe the 10% number is way low.
It will eventually be the end of their economic miracle.
Those pesky environmental regulations the US and Europe have in place drives up our cost of manufacture, but in the end keeps our water, land, and air more-or-less usable.
Eventually the Chinese will despoil enough land and water that they will have to change their ways - and then the manufacturing will move to another art of the world. One still willing to ruin their environment for economic progress.

Great Leap Forward contamination?

[TheSync]

I wonder how much of this is due to contamination from the Great Leap Forward. Modern factories are located more central to urban areas, but during the GLF there were inefficient & not well controlled backyard smelters in almost every country village in China.

Privatize the profit, socialize the expenses

[Quila]

That's how this pollution happens. They rake in all of the profit, but the expenses in environmental safety are left for everyone to pay.

Simple capitalism: They can keep the profit it they also assume the expenses. Regulation is required only so far as to make sure they assume their rightful expenses, to keep things capitalist.

Re:Why vote for Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Vote republican! Save us from the authoritarian nanny state by installing a theocracy!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Why vote for Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's hilarious that you believe that we've been bankrupted by Democrats.

Who exploded the deficit in the 1980s in an attempt to out-spend the Soviet Union?

Who inherited government surpluses at the turn of the century and then instead of paying down the debt, passed trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts?

Who led us into a controversial and optional multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq? (Some might ask the same thing about Afghanistan.)

Who passed and signed Medicare Part D (the prescription drug program) without even attempting to pay for it?

Protip: The things that you are told on talk / shortwave radio, in church, on Fox News, etc. are not always true. In some cases, these people are filling you full of complete fabrications. You are allowed to think for yourself, do your own objective research, and come to your own conclusions. Be warned, however, that these conclusions may represent a drastic departure from the insular dogma of your particular echo chamber.

So why is this a revelation?

[sfarber53]

We have yet another, the last, communist regime that doesn't give a rodent's rump about its people, despite their protests to the contrary. It is difficult to take China seriously as they run their country like one big capitalist enterprise but profess to hate everything capitalist.

Re:Why vote for Republicans

[mellon]

I'm sorry, but this is just naive. The problem we have is that we do not punish politicians for doing evil. This is true both of the Republicans and the Democrats. I won't argue that the Democrats will save us from overspending, because unfortunately they waste nearly as much money as the Republicans. But if you want to see a change, stop painting this as Republican versus Democrat. It's not. It's competent governance versus graft. Show up at the primaries. Pay attention to what the candidate did in office last time. If they voted for graft, and against competence, fire them by voting for their opponent in the primary. If neither candidate is an incumbent, look at what they did in their previous job. Think about it critically. Don't listen to their ads: pay attention to what they did in the past. Try your best to figure out if they really want to govern, or if they just want a ride on the gravy train. Vote accordingly.

It's absolutely sickening how few voters show up for primary elections these days. And it's absolutely sickening how little thought and effort they seem to put into their votes (if what you said above is anything to judge by). Stop being a sheep. Be a citizen.

Its happening here too

[Anonymous Coward]

China long embraced using sewage sludge/industrial sludge to fertilize farm land - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969797054260

USA follows their lead - http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/PDFS/LandApp.pdf
(read subpart B) http://yosemite.epa.gov/r10/water.nsf/NPDES+Permits/Sewage+S825/$FILE/503-032007.pdf

You would be amazed to know how much sludge is in your diet....

Farmland is still communal

[anarkhos]

While commercial properties have been privatized farmland is still communal, so who can claim damages?

This situation won't improve until the Chinese reject authoritarianism and demand a free society.

schadenfreude?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of you will need to google these: Minamata, Love Canal, not to mention Deepwater Horizon, ...
Furthermore 100% of America used to be covered by lead paint, asbestos insulation, lead gasoline additives, DDT, ...
Everybody's got skeletons in the closets.
Is there room for improvements? Absolutely.

The hypocritical sinophobes then goes on a hissy fits because the Chinese decided to reduce rare earth outputs due to pollution concerns (so they say).

And we're pretty selective in our outrage: We like to drag in sidekicks the likes of India and Brazil to bask in the glow of a dynamic China.
But hey, only the godless Chicoms pollute this good earth. The Chicoms obviously need to learn from the likes of India (yeah, shitpit India) in responsible economic developments.

I did not say remove all regulation

[Shivetya]

nor has anyone implied such idiocy, but I know strawmen are very popular here. The point is, there is no accountability in China because the regulators and the people violating the regulation are the Communist party.

For the people and by the people, just not all people. Corporations do what is profitable, you make it unprofitable to pollute and you can get some very good behavior. You put the fox in the hen house and China is what you get.

Re:I did not say remove all regulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. It's a popular subject on the right, trying to out-deregulate eachother.

Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry and Cain all want to eliminate the EPA - though Gingrich (with a funny name like Newt he MUST be a socialist) wants to replace it with an agency that finds new technology (that doesn't exist yet) to solve our problems - because, after all, the EPA *FROWNS* on new clean technology, right?

really, if you are going to claim such things, you should pay attention to what your champions say.

That's how the Tea Party worked

[Quila]

They had established Republicans running scared, even cost them some primaries.

Of course for having the fortitude to run against the establishment, they are labelled with various derogatory terms by the press, even getting away with mentioning explicit sex acts on the air in the process.

Re:That's how the Tea Party worked

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh. 'the 99%' of tea partiers would never vote anything but Republican.

The were, are, and will be Republicans.

Re:That's how the Tea Party worked

[mellon]

You missed the part about how you were supposed to select candidates *intelligently*, not hire stupid extremist ideologues.

How to Test?

[Gregory Arenius]

Does anyone know of any fairly inexpensive way to test for lead in something like apple juice? Something that can be done at home without sending something out to a lab? Just curious. Some posters have stated that a lot of juice sold in the US has apples from China and instead of just fear mongering it would be interesting to test and see if there are actually unsafe levels of heavy metals in the juice. -Greg

Re:Why vote for Republicans

[Quila]

I think it's hilarious that you believe that we've been bankrupted by Democrats.

Much of it can be traced back to FDR. That's when the big spending really got in gear.

Who exploded the deficit in the 1980s in an attempt to out-spend the Soviet Union?

And we won because of it. We had been spending lavishly over the prior few decades maintaining the Cold War, and it needed to end. Afterwards, Bush Sr. started closing down unneeded Cold War bases, expensive Cold War programs were canceled.

Who inherited government surpluses at the turn of the century and then instead of paying down the debt, passed trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts?

First, there's no way I'm going to defend RINO (Republican In Name Only) Bush. That's why I said Republicans haven't been doing much better.

But there never was a Clinton surplus. It was entirely illusory, with accounting tricks. The national deficit never even dropped to zero during one of his budgets, the national debt never decreased. The government covered its deficit by borrowing from Social Security income, which was pretty fat at the time due to the dot com bubble.

Who led us into a controversial and optional multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq? (Some might ask the same thing about Afghanistan.)

There's Bush again. Although Afghanistan might not have even been necessary had Clinton been doing his job. He was having too much fun lobbing the occasional Tomahawk at Saddam for no real reason, and bombing Chinese embassies in the Balkans, to accept Bin Laden on a platter from the Sudanese.

Who passed and signed Medicare Part D (the prescription drug program) without even attempting to pay for it?

And Bush yet again. We can go down a big list of his failures where there might as well have been a Democrat in office. Illegal immigration? Check. Further centralizing control of our schools at the federal level? Check. Check, check, check...

That's why we have to make sure we don't get another Bush. Cain looked good, but now that he's the frontrunner suddenly he's getting the Clarence Thomas treatment.

The things that you are told on talk / shortwave radio, in church, on Fox News, etc. are not always true.

Guess what, what the various Soros-funded machines tell you is usually not true, neither is what the DNC or the current administration tells you.

That's changing the party

[Quila]

If the Tea Party keeps up its influence, established Republican candidates will have to change, be more fiscally conservative, in order to stand a chance against a Tea Party backed candidate in a primary.

Rather than being its own successful party, which in this country is pretty much impossible the way elections are run, it is having more success as an influence on an existing party.

They were Brittish.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was like they just stood there and did nothing while singing and smiling.

Truckers at-least swing and swivel their hips. Even Scotch lady of Garbage pranced to Calipornia! Everyone wants to move when singing! BEST MURIKKA!

How does China have extra food?

[wanzeo]

The U.S. and China have the exact same land area, but they have four times the population. We should be doing the selling.

Sadly, that happens in primaries

[Quila]

People do vote very stupidly when swept up in the moment.

How else do you explain Obama?

Western countries might be in for the same problem

[MassiveForces]

I am an environmental scientist in Australia. A widely employed and growing trend is to take the solids from waste water treatment plants and dump them on farmland with minimal processing. Currently the theory is that although these fertilizers are high in metals, they won't become quite as bioavailable because plants won't take them up readily.

There's research into the resulting quality of food, but not as much as you might expect. We'll have to wait and see pretty much.

Re:Why vote for Republicans

[fruviad]

Republicans are the lesser of two evils only when it is republicans who define "evil".

Or for independents, as I am

[Quila]

In the immortal words of the great Cartman, "Democrats piss me off!"

That is sick

[hesaigo999ca]

Yes, the sad part is that China knows all about which plants are the worst as they too get pay offs, unless a plant is not paying, then they become fodder to be used to show the world that China is doing a clean up...just like in the US, my GF is in textile and sells to Walmart, I have heard countless stories of when they go over there to review the goods, of what they see, and it is sickening that is it 1) so blatant, 2) the gov just does not care as long as they make their profit
3) People being taken advantage of to the point you want to throw up....

Third world countries should not exist, this is where my World order comes in.... the G20 should take one after another of these countries that are 3rd world and help set them up to become 1st world countries.... of course that would be only countries that want the help.

Say (i don't know much about this country) Cameroon wanted to become a 1st world country and ask for help to establish itself, it would
1) take on the helping nations money tender....
2) start creating infrastructure to support itself the way that helping country does...
3) use the same helping countries standards for government (such as laws, paper supplies etc...) to lessen the load of development...
4) integrate closely with inter national exposure, allowing them to become an extension of that country.

Consider it a merger of sorts....so now Canada fosters Cameroon, and it becomes another province that needs to follow the same laws etc....
Overnight you would see an improvement, and travel would be no problem....

The "gold" rush to this, is that so many countries would want to foster these smaller countries to assimilate them into their Nation.
By 50 years or so, you would be left with maybe 20 countries world wide....