China is a smog-filled hellscape

[Bal]

There are a few videos out there debunking the 21 tons number. If that fireball is as big as the nearby markers indicate, it's more than 100 tons in magnitude. Also, you don't get a two mile blast radius out of 21 tons of TNT, the MOAB is 20 tons, and it's nowhere close to that.

[Grath]

[Mongrel]

Goddamn, what the hell blew up? That's Halifax Explosion levels of disaster (and indeed, in that case it was a whole munitions ship which blew).

...of course the likelihood of getting a totally straight answer is low.

[Grath]

Goddamn, what the Detroit blew up? That's Halifax Explosion levels of disaster (and indeed, in that case it was a whole munitions ship which blew).

...of course the likelihood of getting a totally straight answer is low.

One theory from Chinese social media is water + calcium carbide = acetylene, acetylene is highest hazmat "fire diamond" rating for flammability and second-highest for instability/explosiveness. Oxygen + Acetylene =

(God bless rednecks for doing stuff so we don't have to)

[Mongrel]

Well, the BBC posted this image today:



and are again quoting the official numbers of 50+ dead and 700+ wounded.

The after image is not sourced from the Chinese government and does not seem to show 1km radius of flattened buildings; more like a large block (so maybe a quarter or half of a km? Hard to tell).

Maybe things aren't *as* bad after all?

Also the carbide (and other chemicals which are MASSIVELY reactive) seems to be trickling out as the legit explanation. Essentially there was a fire, so the local firefighters rushed to put it out, only the shit that was on fire was all shit YOU ABSOLUTELY DON'T WANT TO GET WET.

[Grath]

This is a picture of the opposite side of a high rise apartment building from the blast, with most of the doors/windows/etc blown out this side of the building. This is presumed to be the building (or a similarly-located one) where there was security camera footage of someone in the lobby probably dying when the entire front of the lobby blew in.

A map of the location, showing the nearby apartment buildings which are within the 1km radius required by law. There are reports of a European entrepreneur whose entire staff lived in one of those apartment buildings, and they are now "missing".

[Mothra]

<Mr_Saturn|Laptop> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... refighters oh for fucks sake, it somehow got worse
<Mothra> UH, "sodium cyanide"?
<Mothra> Like, cyanide cyanide?
<Mr_Saturn|Laptop> yes
<Mr_Saturn|Laptop> that cyanide
<Mothra> So the blast radius is covered with fucking cyanide now
<Mothra> Woooooooo weeeee~
<Mr_Saturn|Laptop> unclear if it got blown all over the place but they have the anti-chemical weapon people from the army there now

[Mongrel]

Look at the size of this fucking hole. Holy shit.

[Mongrel]

New Republic: The secret Corn War between the US and China

[Cthulhu-chan]

China can't stop exploding.

[Bal]

The new explosion:



Stop exploding, China. There are better ways to get attention.

[Cthulhu-chan]

China decides to allow pensions run by local government to invest in the stock market.

Literally the next day...

[Mothra]

Is this for real? "Citizen scoring" people-ratings run by the two largest social media corporations in China?

• Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
  
• The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
  
• In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
  
• It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create.
  
• Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
  
• Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it.
  
• Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa.
  
• Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

[Thad]

THAT'S what happened to Peeple!

[Mongrel]

Jeeeeeeezuz.

Can't wait for the lone trolls to loudly take pride in their 350 scores... from jail. :/

[Mothra]

There's no way this is real. It's so, so, unbelievably, cartoonishly evil.

[Mongrel]

It's prrrrreeetty much going to give the lie to any pretense of China being a decent country at all.

[zaratustra]

how... how would you even manage such a gigantic system

[Spooky Skeleton]

Jeeeeeeezuz.

Can't wait for the lone trolls to loudly take pride in their 350 scores... from jail. :/

I can't read the end of this post without thinking of

[Grath]

how... how would you even manage such a gigantic system

Mainframes and enterprise storage systems. Probably purchased from IBM.