Out of Pod Experience

Shocked at this, I sometimes get angry when I smell a bit of too much smog when I walk near a crowded street here in Panama, the levels there on the other hand are insane!

Discuss!

kkthnx!

China is such the concentrated Petri Dish now that I think some kinda weird end is inevitable. And soon.


edit: Probably through a mass die-off of ALL farm animals or something. Look at what happened with all those pigs earlier this year.

YaaaYY!!!!!11111 Nooooo Regulation!!!! Must be GREATTTT!!!!!





























































oH wait

OHHH wozza if that is true smh violently


EDIT: I just thought about it for a second and it clicked we are so FUBAR it is not even funny if the above is true. The delicate world economy is balancing on China artificially inflating their economic strength by burning coal unnecessarily

miasma

such a fun word.

You think that's bad, I live next to a nuclear power plant and that thing...

Doesn't do much actually. Just sits there quietly generating the power for this computer.

I'm sure it will kill us all though... any day now...

Nothing wrong with smog, puts hairs on your lungs!

And yes... going to Shanghai and Beijing gives you the feeling after a while that youve smoked a pack of 20 unfiltered cigarettes and gargled sand.

Check the writer of that article: Gordon G. Chang - a regular contributor for none other than the Glenn Beck show - has been doom mongering about China for decades, it's his personal agenda and axe to grind, incorrectly predicting that China is on the brink of collapse, as detailed in his book "The Coming Collapse of China"... written back in 2001. And yet, for the last 12 years China has stubbornly refused to collapse, quite the contrary actually. Ooops.

Actually, China's GDP growth, after slowing down during Q1 and Q2 of 2013, has again picked up during Q3. And no, it's not simply due to coal plants being ordered to burn more coal.

China's big cities air quality have paid the price of growing too fast for the last couple decades, as traditionally China has relied too much on coal for its energy production - as was the problem in Britain back in the 60s - but that has been changing quickly over the last years.

Yes, Western media loves to report on these sort of horrid pollution stories. But not so keen to report that the Chinese government has been and is investing enormous amounts of money on switching the country away from coal as its primary energy source, to the point China is now the world's largest renewable energy producer. I'm seeing solar panels are being installed everywhere, even the most unlikely rural villages.

Yes, I've seen that same photo you posted above being passed around all over the interwebs, people seem to have some sort of morbid fascination for that sort of thing, don't they?. I do spend a lot of time in Beijing (I'm a Westerner though), and indeed there are days that look like that, very foggy. This leads people in the West to believe China must be some sort of fetid industrial wasteland, when actually Bejing is a surprisingly, green and well - tended, city (I took those photos myself inside Beijing), despite the quality of the air.

What the Western media doesn't seem to be so keen to report, is that right the next day Beijing may look like this. Of course, that wouldn't sell well as news to our disaster-obsessed collective of media consumers, would it? I took that photo, as well as this one and this one, while hiking around the hills that surround Beijing just on it's northwestern edge, a beautiful and clean environment. Quite unlike the experience I had trying to hike on the hills surrounding Los Angeles by the way, when I had to leave in disgust after seeing random garbage littering the whole damn place, and even graffiti on the f*cking rocks. The air may be bad, but you don't see that sort of thing in Beijing.

Like William Gibson said....The future is here. It just isn't evenly distributed.

Most Russians outside of big cities have exactly 2 choices: burn coal, or buy clean fuel for a monthly price that matches their monthly mortgage. What would Kanye do ?

That article was the first to pop-up from a Google search.

My in-laws live in Beijing, so I get to hear many of the complaints. I also get to hear some of what is becoming a scandal for the government even in the state-controlled press there. Are there days when it is clearer? Like after a rain, or when the wind picks up enough to blow the pollution out? Certainly. But there are fewer and fewer of those days. Statistical incidence of respiratory ailments are on the rise.

When living there for two weeks, my in-laws would keep the window open. The apartment would need cleaning and dusting every other day, as all of the surfaces built up a film of dirt. When you (and by "you" I mean me) went outside, even on the seemingly clear days, you had to shower when you came back home because you'd be covered with a film of dirt. And "outside clothes" were not to touch the furniture. You had to change clothes to indoor garb.

My mother and father in-law wear masks to exercise outdoors.

China may be the biggest producer of solar panels and wind power equipment in the world. Perhaps they should try consuming this particular category of product.

Now, all that said, the air in Beijing looks like Newark in the 70s. China is trying (and mostly succeeding) to go through the entirety of 20th century industrialization in the space of 2 decades. They're letting their citizens pay the price, though.

Here's a non-Gordon-Chang article on the same GDP issue: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100967912

I have no idea if that guy has any connection to Beck because I never listen to / watch Glenn Beck