patrick.net

I’m more worried about the situation of a suicidal culture, as posed by Jared Diamond

Unless you're on an island, that's almost confusing the company for the market. The species itself will survive, though cultures may not. Drawing on the synchronicity of Slashdot and digg threads, I'd like to quote one poster who supposed that a motivated group of 24 (educated) people could, in a resource-rich location, get back up to a pre-atomic level of technology in about a decade. (That unfortunately assumes they don't have to play politics with other groups of survivors.)

Don't worry Astrid... If history is any guide, our wasteful and decadent era will be followed by one or more of the following: massive war, genocide, famine or plague. Have a nice weekend! :)

The species itself will survive, though cultures may not.

How about cuisines? :(

@GC,

Isn't the "Epoch Times" a portal for the Falun Gong movement itself? Not saying the Chinese government isn't evil and repressive (it is), just that I'd be a little suspicious of extreme claims, like coerced live organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners. This story just sounds a little too urban-mythy for me without some independent sources to back it up. Kind of reminds me of the chain email warning about people waking up in bathtubs full of ice cubes in Vegas --minus one kidney.

What the hell……..the sun will be cold one day anyway…….

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

I am absolutely horrified and disgusted. This is worse than combat-related kills and massacres. It’s not just the greedy cadres. It’s the police, doctors, unsympathetic press and populace. I guess this is one of the reasons why my parents would never go back to China.

Maybe these folks are affiliated with the ones that harvest moon bear bile,

tinyurl.com/k5fe7

or the ones that force very young girls into prostitution by strapping them to a branch and submerging them up to their armpits in a cesspool full of leaches.

tinyurl.com/hqymr

Ahh the middle kingdom, full of history and mystery.

But I digress, the Chinese are world leaders in the finance of American debtors, clearly we can look the other way on such trivial matters as human rights or basic dignity, can’t we? I mean after all, look at all the cheap crap we get in return.

There are other suns, and other planets. Until every star is dead, and every mass decayed to cold iron, there is still hope for the species.

You really believe in ET's? :)

HARM:

Ever read Niven? He hypothesized that offering people life-through-transplants would encourage people to favor such harvesting programmes for criminals. A depressingly possible future, especially if you already have a culture that places a greater importance on the society than the individual.

Which reminds me... I did see "The Island" in the past month. Yummy!

requiem,

True enough, but that's hardly much comfort for me, since I'm highly unlikely to be amongst that 10.

Although the island effect is most obvious in geographically isolated pockets, there's no reason why similar effects cannot apply on a larger scale. Humanity is on an island, we don't yet have the technology to escape the Earth if we mess it up.

If we do make some sort of breakthrough and do continue on (perchance one day to become an enlightened culture of energy beings operating on a couple double A batteries...well, then I demand reincarnation personally and the ability to continue blogging with you all.

Peter P:

There's plenty of time before the sun goes red giant to spread to other systems. Being able to leach technologies from other species (assuming such exist) would be nice, of course, but not required.

requiem@,

Yes, Larry Niven's one of my favorite sci-fi authors, as he writes in the classic tradition (as in more emphasis on actual science). I would much prefer organ cloning to organ harvesting though. As Peter P would say, stealing someone else's organs invites bad karma. :-)

Still holding out hope for someone to invent "Boosterspice" before I croak, though.

GC,

I don't condone such coerced organ donations. However, I'm not surprised - once they start dehumanizing prisoners as less than human, it's easy to justify harvesting their organ to save "better" people. I under you can understand the position, as you're an admirer to ubermensch and as such, you'd agree that most of human society is mere cattle, there for the use and pleasure of the elite (though potentially dangerous and sometimes difficult to handle).

The end result may well be live organ donation, last seen in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

On the other side of the slippery slope, why restrict such rights to humans. Why are we still eating veal, and boiling lobsters and crabs, and factory farm raising chicken, and swatting mosquitoes?

But if a "taken" organ can give a party hardy boomer another year on the bong, isn't this in itself a good thing? There are what 2-3 billion chinese, surely they won't miss an organ or two. Think of all the good that can be done by prolonging the boomer bong time. Boomer bong time, even sounds kind of Chinese.

Speaking of the Island, anyone read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro? I keep meaning to read it, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

I think harvesting organs from freshly executed prisoners is well justified. This is partly why I favor hanging over lethal injection.

@astrid, X & requiem,

Again, I'm a little suspicious about the source of that story. Live coerced organ harvesting seems a tad extreme even for the Chinese government. Shooting dissidents and running over student protestors with tanks, sure, but organ harvesting??

Good grief!

Are you sure you people are Californians? You’re giving me a bummer.

Huh?

@Peter P,

Let me translate in Californian: He means to say you're harshing his buzz with all the totally bogus gloom-n-doom talk.

MA,

You're confusing NorCal with SoCal:) Have you checked out the fog coverage in SF during summer?

HARM,

Though I don't believe the source at all, organ harvesting from condemned prisoners would be something 80+% of Mainland Chinese could get behind. Condemned prisoners are gonna die anyways, so why not let their organs "serve society"? China is the land of historic female infanticides and lots of gender selective abortions (and not few female baby crib deaths) to this day. Is coercing a couple condemned organs really so heinous in contrast?

HARM,

I don't generally follow politics on the other side of the Pacific. So I could be fooled.

Peter P,

I am a cultural relativist, in that I believe every society defines its own rules and adjust those rules over time to suit their conditions. I'm not a cultural relativist in that I think people can disobey on the books laws (eg., no bondage, no female circumcision) of the society in which they live.

I may not like how most governments of Africa run their land, but I sure as hell don't want the US imposing its moral authority (if any remains after Abu Ghraib) on these countries.

GC,

Come on! It's the Epoch Times, can you really not know?

I would actually like to get a job in Shanghai (or preferably, bi-coastal btwn Shanghai and SF). China's not really that bad, if you have money and AC and connections and no uncontrollable impulse for social justice.

However, China proper (excluding HK) has no world class city yet.

I really don't know its actual backing. Seriously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_Times

It's basically like the anti-CCP version of a Marxist tabloid rag.

I admit the story is plausible enough and I've heard of similar accounts before. But the source! It's like having the National Inquirer unearth Abu Ghraib. Sure it's a deadly serious matter, but it's the National Inquirer!

MA,

Yes, a common mistake for non-Californians. But really CA is like five or six states cramed in together. Most parts of CA resemble neighboring states (or countries...cough Mexico cough) than they do each other.

I figured you were extending the joke from earlier about outsider misperceptions about CA's beach bunny/tanned outdoorsy dude reputation.

I personally couldn't bear to live in SoCal. I was there for college and I hated my first two years there. The next two were kind of funny because I still didn't like SoCal but made good friends with people who were walking valley girl cliches.

Compared to SoCal, BA weather and traffic is pretty nice and you catch glimpses of green here and there. However, BA's natural beauty is a bit exaggerated. The Marin Headlands and Mt. Tam are nice, but otherwise, BA is not a great access point to the outdoors. Pt. Reyes is at least an hour away, Yosemite is at least 2.5 hrs away, and most of the Sierras is 4 or 5 hours away.

google,

To be fair, Falun Gong is a fairly crazy cult modelled on Scientology (no medicine, attracting lots of sick people hoping for a cheap cure-all), so a slightly higher than average incidence of death should not be a surprise.

The other thing that my parents used to bring up about the GLP and CR is how the experience utterly destroyed the Chinese morality and civil society. Chinese people today are on average quite selfish and self centered. According to my parents, back in the 50s and 60s the people cared much more about each other and their community, and venerated the CCP leadership. Nowadays, people are so callous that there are often reports of public rapes and beatings in crowded areas, where nobody in the crowd lifted a finger to help the victim.

MA,

It really depends on when you visit BA. Come November through May and you'll see green hills. Come March through June and you'll see some wildflowers, but it gets brown quickly afterwards. I guess that's what goes for seasons in the BA.

However, PNW summers are particularly glorious. I took a short roadtrip one summer up the 101 to Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier, and the blooms at Paradise were like a dream. You guys have foxgloves and beargrass and avalanch lilies growing willynilly everywhere, and you have blackberries the size of my big toe just growing in ditches next to the road. B

I hated LA. Maybe it's not so bad on the westside but once you get into the valleys, the smog is just horrible in the summer and there's very little tree cover. The nice neighborhoods with huge water bills look okay, but the rest of the place was just depressing.

And the dust is horrible too. My (fairly new) college dorm got more dust accumulating in a week than my parents' home in VA would get in 3 months.

NorCal also has slightly better roads. SoCal roads are just unbelievably bad and congested

And the dust is horrible too. My (fairly new) college dorm got more dust accumulating in a week than my parents’ home in VA would get in 3 months

astrid,

You're right on the money here. I recall being shocked at how infrequently I could get away with dusting my apartment or washing my car when I lived in Atlanta. In L.A., you pretty much have to vacuum & dust your place at least weekly, or it really builds up and coats everything. If you don't wash your car at least bi-monthly, it starts to look abandoned.

MA,

I don't know what part of SoCal you're talking about (south OC maybe?) but most of L.A. and the Inland Empire is a polluted toilet. You must have visited some very select areas. Certainly not downtown, Hollywood or the Valleys.

The other thing that my parents used to bring up about the GLP and CR is how the experience utterly destroyed the Chinese morality and civil society. Chinese people today are on average quite selfish and self centered.

This is so sad. :(

Umm, you may want to read your history before making such stupid comments. The Great Leap Forward caused 20-30 MILLION Chinese to die of starvation. And the Cultural Revolution, whilst not as lethal, seriously screwed their society up for decades.

These are extreme tragedies but I doubt we can prevent similar disasters from happening again sometime, somewhere. :(

The flu pandemic in 1918 killed 20-40 millions. Are human catastrophes worse than natural calamities?

Peter P,

I think so. Other than famine, natural disasters tend to play out faster and be less traumatic. There's also less bad blood after the fact.

huh?

I hate all you hurricanes, yer good for nuttin' An you earhtquakers, I'm not gonna forgit, I can't stand what ya dun to us, we'se enemies now ferever!

Yep, I agree, bad blood usually follows the human tragedies. Tsunamis, fire and earthquakes, that's just any old indiscriminate bloodin', ya know.

"Speaking [tangentially] of realtwhore comments… one of the guests at a party I went to recently was a realtwhore.

She kept whining about how the “Main Street Media” (sic) was being pessimistic and scaring off the buyers from this wonderful buyers market.

So I think I heard wrong, so I say ‘what media?’

And she goes, ‘The Main Street Media, you know - newspapers and tv’.

I tried not to laugh out loud, and the cocktail I was drinking nearly snorted out my nose…

SP"

She's a walking example of "If you think education is expensive..."

I don't think one should prepare for the eurology of the US economy.

I am not sure about India, but I know the engineering situations in China very well, since a few of my friends are running big outsourcing outfits in China taking projects from Japan and the US. Their coders are surely cheap compared to us ($1000 USD/ month), but far from being good. Most medium to high level engineering projects cannot be outsourced, and experienced coders over there command easily $2K USD / month, although his skills are not that advanced measured by our standard, his cost is staggeringly expensive if you take into consideration of the admin cost required on top of his $2K/m salary. The consensus is, China will hit a glass ceiling trying to climb up the food chain.

If you have ever been to the recruiting fairs at the top Chinese universities, which I have, you will have even a more sober picture of the country. English is the number one priority on their list, so you can find a lot of fluent English speakers - with little engineering or science skills, because those creme de la creme engineers are already on their way to the US and Europe trying to compete with engineers here on equal footing by becoming one of the local guys. So what's left are pretty mediocre quality engineers who can just get the basics done.

Regarding innovation, I am not going to cast my bet on a country with a Geat Firewall.

Organ harvesting in China is true, because I know someone (American) who is an investor in such an organ harvesting system. It is an extremely lucrative business, and the paying patients come mainly from developed countries. Organs are typically sourced from prisoners on the death row, but occasionally you do get desperate village peasants who want to raise enough money for their kids' education.

While it seems very unethical on surface, I am not sure if I should condemn it or actually promote it. The only problem I have with this is, the money earned from organ harvesting is passed on to the corrupt officials along the "value chain" instead of being given back to the family of those on the death row. If you have a beloved one who is dying because he can't find a suitable organ donor, would you want to buy an organ for him from the black market? I know I would.

In an idealistic world, all life is created equal, or at least that is what we strive for. But in reality, if you are a peasant in China with absolutely no hope of making it, and life is absolutely misery, so you'd like to sell one of your kidneys so that your kid will stand a chance in the future, should you be denied that opportunity? Perhaps not. It is the same thing as prison labor, I personally have no problems with prison labor if they are not forced to work in a compromising situation.