Weird, it was only a few months ago that the incredible real estate bubbles started to pop here. Come to China and be absolutely astonished at the ads for apartments and new complexes. I bet at least 70% of the little plastic advertising frames in Chinese elevators contain ads for a new, swank high-rise complex.
On the high-speed train: when I was first here, in 2008, the only high-speed train of consequences was the one that ran Beijing Tianjin (did it in 45 minutes flat). There have been a truckload of new ones since then, in particular the famous "Harmony" line (hexie hao or wohaai hou) from Wuhan to Guangzhou that has turned the old 12-hour stab-your-eyes-out-in-hard-coach-sleeper trip into a 3.5-hour whoosh.
Here's the kicker - look at the pricing scheme for the Harmony: the old 12-hour trip is 120-ish (US $19) for a hard sleeper, while the new one is 490 (~$75 US) for a standard seat. Is a price quadrupling really enough to pay for the jump in technology, which was probably an order of magnitude more advanced/expensive than the previous system?
You, sir, are a damn fine parent, then.
I am a child of the 90's and early 00's, and while the electronic gadgetry hooked me in, I found a great way to balance it with sports. They complement each other well.
I think the internet addiction is that the Effort --> Reward cycle is so short: want to know something, spend 3s Googling, and you get the serotonin reward. Technology makes that cycle shorter and shorter, and we get further conditioned by it. How to overcome? No idea.
(Note: I live in China at the moment)
Internet café's also require patrons to scan their shenfen-zheng ("Chinese National ID Card") when buying time at a computer console. Not only does it filter out minors, it also filters out all non-Chinese nationals, since foreigners don't have the National ID Cards and the ID scanners can't handle passports.
If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
Good points, but check your arithmetic: you meant to say, they'd have "swept right past us" in the early 1000's, not the early 1900's. Move your decimal over one place.
First of all, I agree with below poster: these men had plenty of self-control, they just lacked it in one or two certain high-profile areas.
Now, the problem with parent poster's reasoning is that, even if the "lacked self-control" claim were true, it's akin to saying, "My grandfather smoked for years and years and lived to be a healthy 90-something, so did another guy and another there..." Of course there are people who lack self-control who are very successful in their careers: they're just statistical outliers. Just like smoking, the statistical majority of those who lack self-control (I'm taking a hard look at myself here...) are going to run into debilitating repercussions.
I feel Wave's potential is ENORMOUS and these suggestions would begin to tap said potential.
1) Be able to handle both email and Waves - if I could get on Wave and check my Gmail stuff, why would I ever use Gmail?
2) Have Video chat enabled natively. Wave itself is inspired by the "Waves" from the Firefly series, so you'd think would be a no-brainer.
3) Clean up the way you can edit posts in a Wave. The "real-time see them typing" thing is unwieldy. A real-time box should pop up that has a colored message "New post coming.." à la the "so-and-so is typing" thing in IM's.
Nationalistic bickering aside, this is very good news. As living standards rise around the globe, labor will get more expensive, sure, and our iPods might cost 20% more or something, and in return, human beings on the other side of the planet have food on their table and work to do. It's good for the world that labor in china is getting more expensive in every way except the most short-term "I want my shit cheap right now" way.
That's a bit shortsighted.
Gadgets are not something like food; their novelty/luxury items. If (when) the cost goes up across the board, people will spend less of their hard-earned money on the things they don't need - ie, gadgets. (Perceived) quality will need to go up a similar proportion as the increase in cost for the product to remain competitive (remember the 'high quality' Erickson, etc. cell phones from a decade ago? - they were supplanted by other products offering a better price value).
In return for the decreased demand, there will be less manufacturing done; this will further increase the manufacturing cost per unit, likely leading to a loss of jobs in the foreign plants (unless they're able to cut costs). Increasing costs to your customers NEVER results in more business unless it is paired with a (perceived) equitable increase in the product.
As for respecting China's culture... sure, I'll get right on that. My first cultural taboo to learn to respect is child labor. After I've gotten over that, I'll work on violent persecution of belief systems I don't agree with (Christianity, Islam, etc.). Then I'll work on agreeing with overt state-controlled censorship, and finally, the wanton destruction of the ecosystem and disregard for dumping toxic waste. In fact, I might start on the toxic waste thing: it's easy, because all I'll have to do is pour some waste oil into the municipal sewer. I figure that by this time next year, I'll have matured enough as a person to start accepting China's particular brand of threats and imperialist encroachment - just in time for their wholesale invasion of Taiwan or Tibet, maybe.
Great post.
Since when are "child labor", "violent persecution", and "toxic waste" dumping part of Chinese culture? That's like saying partisan bickering is part of American culture. It's part of American politics.
The great Freeman Dyson is probably in Princeton right now enjoying the most smug can of Ensure since Bob Dole won the Republican Presidential nomination in 1996.
If you haven't read his "The Sun, The Genome and The Internet" go do so. Written back in '99, it is incredibly insightful given how accurate it has proven to be. Dyson argues that the Internet can and will change education since it can (potentially) eliminate the advantages of students living in large cities have over those from rural areas.
His arguments can be easily extended to politics: one of the original purposes of representative legislatures was to solve the logistical impossibility of disseminating information over long distances, as would be necessary in a direct democracy that isn't confined to a single city, as in ancient Greece. With that obstacle now gone, are we ready to ditch the representation?
Religion and science, imo, are only incompatible insofar as the religion or science one is practicing is untrue or inaccurate. If the proverbial magic wand was waved and we all had a perfect knowledge of the nature of God and the universe, this discussion would probably be moot. That being said, life is as much a personal journey and searching as it is some great ultimate destination, so perhaps that would just defeat the whole purpose.
In any case, I think true religion and science should (formally, at least) just stay out of each other's way. They each (ideally) help mankind progress and develop, just on different facets.
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Weird, it was only a few months ago that the incredible real estate bubbles started to pop here. Come to China and be absolutely astonished at the ads for apartments and new complexes. I bet at least 70% of the little plastic advertising frames in Chinese elevators contain ads for a new, swank high-rise complex.
On the high-speed train: when I was first here, in 2008, the only high-speed train of consequences was the one that ran Beijing Tianjin (did it in 45 minutes flat). There have been a truckload of new ones since then, in particular the famous "Harmony" line (hexie hao or wohaai hou) from Wuhan to Guangzhou that has turned the old 12-hour stab-your-eyes-out-in-hard-coach-sleeper trip into a 3.5-hour whoosh. Here's the kicker - look at the pricing scheme for the Harmony: the old 12-hour trip is 120-ish (US $19) for a hard sleeper, while the new one is 490 (~$75 US) for a standard seat. Is a price quadrupling really enough to pay for the jump in technology, which was probably an order of magnitude more advanced/expensive than the previous system?
You, sir, are a damn fine parent, then. I am a child of the 90's and early 00's, and while the electronic gadgetry hooked me in, I found a great way to balance it with sports. They complement each other well. I think the internet addiction is that the Effort --> Reward cycle is so short: want to know something, spend 3s Googling, and you get the serotonin reward. Technology makes that cycle shorter and shorter, and we get further conditioned by it. How to overcome? No idea.
(Note: I live in China at the moment) Internet café's also require patrons to scan their shenfen-zheng ("Chinese National ID Card") when buying time at a computer console. Not only does it filter out minors, it also filters out all non-Chinese nationals, since foreigners don't have the National ID Cards and the ID scanners can't handle passports.
If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
Good points, but check your arithmetic: you meant to say, they'd have "swept right past us" in the early 1000's, not the early 1900's. Move your decimal over one place.
First of all, I agree with below poster: these men had plenty of self-control, they just lacked it in one or two certain high-profile areas.
Now, the problem with parent poster's reasoning is that, even if the "lacked self-control" claim were true, it's akin to saying, "My grandfather smoked for years and years and lived to be a healthy 90-something, so did another guy and another there..." Of course there are people who lack self-control who are very successful in their careers: they're just statistical outliers. Just like smoking, the statistical majority of those who lack self-control (I'm taking a hard look at myself here...) are going to run into debilitating repercussions.
"For two minutes and seventeen seconds...." (flash to [blackbird]-strewn fields)....
Pretty sure "shiny" is a Firefly reference here.....
I feel Wave's potential is ENORMOUS and these suggestions would begin to tap said potential. 1) Be able to handle both email and Waves - if I could get on Wave and check my Gmail stuff, why would I ever use Gmail? 2) Have Video chat enabled natively. Wave itself is inspired by the "Waves" from the Firefly series, so you'd think would be a no-brainer. 3) Clean up the way you can edit posts in a Wave. The "real-time see them typing" thing is unwieldy. A real-time box should pop up that has a colored message "New post coming.." à la the "so-and-so is typing" thing in IM's.
Capitalism FTW.
Nationalistic bickering aside, this is very good news. As living standards rise around the globe, labor will get more expensive, sure, and our iPods might cost 20% more or something, and in return, human beings on the other side of the planet have food on their table and work to do. It's good for the world that labor in china is getting more expensive in every way except the most short-term "I want my shit cheap right now" way.
That's a bit shortsighted.
Gadgets are not something like food; their novelty/luxury items. If (when) the cost goes up across the board, people will spend less of their hard-earned money on the things they don't need - ie, gadgets. (Perceived) quality will need to go up a similar proportion as the increase in cost for the product to remain competitive (remember the 'high quality' Erickson, etc. cell phones from a decade ago? - they were supplanted by other products offering a better price value).
In return for the decreased demand, there will be less manufacturing done; this will further increase the manufacturing cost per unit, likely leading to a loss of jobs in the foreign plants (unless they're able to cut costs). Increasing costs to your customers NEVER results in more business unless it is paired with a (perceived) equitable increase in the product.
As for respecting China's culture... sure, I'll get right on that. My first cultural taboo to learn to respect is child labor. After I've gotten over that, I'll work on violent persecution of belief systems I don't agree with (Christianity, Islam, etc.). Then I'll work on agreeing with overt state-controlled censorship, and finally, the wanton destruction of the ecosystem and disregard for dumping toxic waste. In fact, I might start on the toxic waste thing: it's easy, because all I'll have to do is pour some waste oil into the municipal sewer. I figure that by this time next year, I'll have matured enough as a person to start accepting China's particular brand of threats and imperialist encroachment - just in time for their wholesale invasion of Taiwan or Tibet, maybe.
Great post. Since when are "child labor", "violent persecution", and "toxic waste" dumping part of Chinese culture? That's like saying partisan bickering is part of American culture. It's part of American politics.
The great Freeman Dyson is probably in Princeton right now enjoying the most smug can of Ensure since Bob Dole won the Republican Presidential nomination in 1996. If you haven't read his "The Sun, The Genome and The Internet" go do so. Written back in '99, it is incredibly insightful given how accurate it has proven to be. Dyson argues that the Internet can and will change education since it can (potentially) eliminate the advantages of students living in large cities have over those from rural areas. His arguments can be easily extended to politics: one of the original purposes of representative legislatures was to solve the logistical impossibility of disseminating information over long distances, as would be necessary in a direct democracy that isn't confined to a single city, as in ancient Greece. With that obstacle now gone, are we ready to ditch the representation?
Whatever the reasoning, this is a sickening story.
Religion and science, imo, are only incompatible insofar as the religion or science one is practicing is untrue or inaccurate. If the proverbial magic wand was waved and we all had a perfect knowledge of the nature of God and the universe, this discussion would probably be moot. That being said, life is as much a personal journey and searching as it is some great ultimate destination, so perhaps that would just defeat the whole purpose. In any case, I think true religion and science should (formally, at least) just stay out of each other's way. They each (ideally) help mankind progress and develop, just on different facets.