China is a smog-filled hellscape

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Mothra
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mothra » Wed Oct 07, 2015 11:12 am

Huh. The more I look into Tencent as a company, the more weird sinister it gets. Apparently they bought out Riot Games a while back, thereby owning League of Legends.

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 07, 2015 11:33 am

A guy I know is arguing with a straight face that this is just China trying to implement a credit rating system.

Which may technically be true! But... UHHHHHHHHHHH...
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mothra » Wed Oct 07, 2015 11:44 am

Been chatting with Frocto about it, and he was lollin' with his friend:
[0:23]Frocto: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/c ... -americans welp
[0:24]*Liru memes softly.
[0:25]Bell: well thats a touch horrifying
[0:25]Jiche: It's IRL Elo
[0:26]Jiche: "i'm stuck in elo hell gg"
[0:26]Jarsh: wot
[0:26]Frocto: tencent own riot games too
[0:26]Liru: >tfw all your friends are capitalist pigs
[0:26]Frocto: and they made a personal rating system where your friend's poor performances can drag you down
[0:27]Frocto: THE JOKES MAKE THEMSELVES
[0:27]Liru: >tfw forever stuck in <500 ELO
[0:27]Liru: >tfw buy angry birds on smartphone and went from 750 to 600
[0:27]Liru: ;_;

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mothra » Mon Dec 07, 2015 11:48 pm

Beijing Issues Red Alert Over Air Pollution for the First Time

If carried out properly, the temporary restrictions will affect many of Beijing’s more than 20 million residents. From 7 a.m. on Tuesday to noon on Thursday, schools will be required to close; cars will be allowed to drive only on alternate days, depending on their license plate numbers; and fireworks and outdoor barbecuing will be banned (grilled kebabs are a hugely popular street food in the city). In addition, government agencies will have to keep 30 percent of their automobiles off the streets.

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Mon Dec 07, 2015 11:55 pm

Terrifying images here.
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Grath » Tue Dec 08, 2015 12:40 am

Mothra wrote:Beijing Issues Red Alert Over Air Pollution for the First Time

If carried out properly, the temporary restrictions will affect many of Beijing’s more than 20 million residents. From 7 a.m. on Tuesday to noon on Thursday, schools will be required to close; cars will be allowed to drive only on alternate days, depending on their license plate numbers; and fireworks and outdoor barbecuing will be banned (grilled kebabs are a hugely popular street food in the city). In addition, government agencies will have to keep 30 percent of their automobiles off the streets.

It was twice as bad (300-range currently vs 600-range then) last week, it's just that this time they're like "hey so we need to acknowledge this because that was REALLY bad". Apparently if the wind's blowing east, days like this will fuck with people in Seoul, with yellow powder getting deposited everywhere and people having trouble breathing.

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Wed Dec 16, 2015 12:22 am

We're now in Science-Fiction Land people.

Telegraph: Chinese people are now buying bottles of fresh air.

It turns out actual reality is a lot less funny than the Mel Brooks version.
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby beatbandito » Wed Dec 16, 2015 7:54 am

I tend to outright not believe anything that sounds too crazy to be real except if they say it's in Asia.

However, I am willing to believe that an idiot with a weird idea did decide to bottle air. And from there I'm willing to believe that 500 bottles of it could conceivably be sold across the entire population of China. I just don't get why it's news.
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Mon Sep 25, 2017 6:58 pm

Yeah, they've been threatening VPN crackdowns for a number of months... which of course gave everyone plenty of time to prepare workarounds.
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Mon Oct 16, 2017 2:23 pm

Globe & Mail: When a recent astronomical announcement came out, many Chinese were very disappointed to learn it was not the end of the world

"I want to die immediately. Living in Beijing, the survival philosophy of this city chokes me," said Geng Chuandi, 26, a magazine editor who was disappointed to discover there would be no actual doomsday announcement.

People in China today are, on average, no happier than they were near the beginning of the country's period of breakneck growth, according to the World Happiness Report 2017. In fact, "well-being today is probably less than in 1990,"

One study showed that 40 per cent of first-year students at Peking University, the country's most prestigious, consider life meaningless – a startling number of brilliant minds with brilliant prospects who, one academic said, suffer "Empty Heart Disease."

Jesus.
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Smiler » Mon Oct 16, 2017 4:58 pm

I'm really glad that millennials in China are on the same page as the rest of us.

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:37 pm

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jan 13, 2018 1:55 am

[EDIT: Moved to here from the Facts thread, because, hey I remembered we have an actual China thread]

Today I learned...

The majority of pre-peeled garlic (something we do not buy, 'cause we go out of our way to avoid any food grown or manufactured in China where possible) is Chinese in origin and is peeled by Chinese prison camp inmates whose fingernails generally fall off as a result. Once they lose their fingernails, they typically then use their teeth.

sauce (The Atlantic's review of a documentary on global food production)
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 20, 2018 2:18 am

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mothra » Sun May 20, 2018 3:10 am

Good lord.

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jun 02, 2018 12:29 am

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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Fri Sep 21, 2018 6:29 pm

I spent this afternoon watching perfectly reasonable people argue that China's Social credit dystopia, was potentially great and that it somehow represented Asian values that we overly individualistic Westerners were ignorant about.

As opposed to being an Orwellian nightmare with little precedent in human history - Western OR Asian.

All I could think of was how for the first several decades of its existence, there were no shortage of Western intellectuals saying the EXACT SAME THINGS about the USSR. How a dictatorship was a more traditionally Russian form of government, how Bolshevism would bring greater prosperity and social happiness, etcetera etcetera.

I'm trying to get all the hairs on my body to lay back down again.

Meanwhile, China's most famous actress has been missing since June
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 02, 2018 3:13 pm

HUIZHOU, China — They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.

Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.

That’s when the party realized it had a problem.

The authorities moved quickly to crush the efforts of the young activists, detaining several dozen of them and scrubbing the internet of their calls for justice — but not before their example became a rallying cry for young people across the country unhappy with growing inequality, corruption and materialism in Chinese society.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/worl ... tests.html
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Re: China is a smog-filled hellscape

Postby Mongrel » Fri Oct 05, 2018 1:46 pm

Longread

Bloomberg: Thanks to a shell company, China pulled off one of the greatest physical hacks in history.

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
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