There are people who are interested in criticizing the existence of the CCP, and then there are people interested in providing better policies than the CCP.

The former typically end up abroad as political dissidents applying for asylum. It’s a solution that makes everyone happy. The dissident gets to bitch and moan in peace, the CCP doesn’t have to put up with people that will never be happy, the common folk get to have discussions about policy rather than stupid discussions on whether or not the CCP is evil, and the country taking them in get to generate domestic propoganda by claiming to be inclusive, democratic, a good place to live, etc, even if they are hosting a blithering idiot on taxpayer’s dime.

If you are interested in arguing over policies, it is very easy to persuade the government to give you a minor village-level position so that you can prove your mettle. Typically if you graduate from a decent university, there are programs where you can get parachuted directly to a village advisor position (of roughly equal status as the mayor). If you perform well, you will get promoted to the town level, and then small cities, etc. I graduated from Tsinghua and know quite a few people who went on such a path.

What’s interesting is that if you come from a decent university, lower level government officials will go out of their way to ask you for your opinion on local policies, even if you’re not actually a Chinese citizen and don’t have political rights. I was an engineering student operating in some of the remote parts of China, where government drinking water policy failures led to the breakdown of local water treatment systems. I was wandering around in rural Shanxi with a German exchange student, taking water samples and building temporary filters to combat local arsenic pollution in the absence of government intervention. I was curious as to why the policy was a failure, so I paid a visit to the town hall and found the mayor. The conversation went something like this:

Mayor: This is a small town, and I’ve never seen you before. And is that a foreigner behind you??? Where are you from?

Me: Yes, he’s German. We’re from Tsinghua (shows him school ID card). We’re interested in when that water treatment station on the east side of the village was built, why it fell into disuse, and what the villagers are drinking right now.

Mayor: Hey, Dog Testicles! We have some visitors and this is your job!

It turned out “Dog Testicles” was the nickname for the bureaucrat in charge of the village waterworks. The mayor pours us all a cup of tea while Mr. Dog Testicles spends an hour or so describing the construction process of the station, the funding, when it broke down, why the villagers couldn’t come up with enough money to fund its repairs and maintenance, etc. He then asked us what we think they should do.

Me: I dunno, maybe don’t ask a bunch of flat busted farmers to fund water treatment? It’s obvious they can’t pay. The local infrastructure policy was really damn stupid. We’ve been running around all over the area building filters to cover for that mistake.

Dog Testicles: Aha, so you’re the ones building filters in these villages? We found those filters on our own surveys. You kmow that selling filters without a proper license is a criminal offense, right?

Me: Yeah, but I wouldn’t be working my ass off if it weren’t for these stupid policies. You can go ahead and try to arrest me if you’d like.

Mayor: Actually, I think you have a point even though you’re breaking the law. We’ll just ask the police to… look the other direction and let you build those filters. Just make sure those villagers stop using the filters once we get the new treatment systems up and running next summer. Have you considered joining the Party and working at the village level? Lots of university students doing that nowadays. We could use people like you.

Me: I look Chinese but I’m an American citizen.

Mayor: Ah, OK. Could you and the German guy take a photo with us?

Me: Why? Have you never seen a foreigner around these parts before?

Mayor: Well, having these kinds of discussions with university students and asking them for their opinions is very helpful in our performance evaluations. It helps us get raises and promotions. Some… proof… would be useful. So a photo, please?

Basically, if you’re the motivated and well-educated vigilante type who wants to see change and you’re happy with working your ass off to see that happen, the Party is usually happy to work with you as long as you tell them what you’re doing. Very, very few people would go up against the CCP to make changes happen when they’re nice and polite and willing to talk about whether they can help you reach your goal.

Some Big Universities like Harvard, Stanford or Universities in the “Ivy League” have little to zero funds from China. In fact these Universities have a combined total of $ 85 Billion – $ 115 Billion of Funding from Ex Alumni, Americans and US Industries alone. Also included is the MIT or Texas A& M or Caltech etc.

However there are over 187 Colleges and Universities that are barely funded for tuition which need money badly. The Biggest Industries always run to Harvard or MIT without realizing that $ 55 Billion is not really that much of a difference from $ 52 Billion – whereas $ 100 Million up from $ 4 Million is a Huge Change.

In 2018 – China funded and invested $ 3.10 Billion in US Universities and Canadian Universities (Not top tier – The Middle tier), especially funding Laser Related works in association with Top Universities in China like Tong Ji. Over 39000 Research Associates, Professors and US Industries are involved in this Funding and unlike India – No Govt can order this funding to be cut off. You need an Government Act and if you do – there are 10000 Lawyers – American Lawyers who will find loopholes around the Act and Law.

Simple Example:-

The Federal Govt passed a law on US Banks to forbid lending to Chinese Clients based on specific criteria.

What do you think happened?

The US Bank – simply purchased a Near Bankrupt Bank in Maldives or Mauritius or Seychelles and began to route all China business through those banks.

And who suggested it?

US Lawyers in return for Millions of Dollars of PRC Money as fees.

In the end – Thats all that matters – MONEY

Answer is- The Funding simply wont be cut off. It will be re-routed in one way or another and Authorities will turn a blind eye to this re-routing because in the end – Business is Business.

I was working a security job for a friend one winter. Not hard work, but long cold hours outside at temps that regularly hit negative 30C. We were offered a bonus for staying the whole term. And the boss would compound the bonus of people who quit or were fired, so it was split evenly between those who stayed.

We were guarding the building that was a Soundstage, and they didn’t want prop hunters, or stalkers getting into the building. I got to meet a few “famous people” and get fed so much good food.

5 men 3 women were highered to work the site. The three women and one of the men, were dressed for fashion not warmth. And were often miserable, and often complained. And spent a lot of time inside the building we were guarding. I made some pointed hints about dressing warmly, but was rudely brushed off.

I grew up at temps like that and dressed to keep warm. Underwear, thermal layer, sweater or hoodie, insulated jeans, double layer soviet era snow-pants, a SnowGoose Snow Mantra Parka, and a pair of bear hide gauntlets.

The boss asked me why the 4 were always going into the building to warm up. Apparently he had gotten complaints that they were taking advantage of the workers inside asking for favors, hot drinks, or to play music.

And I told him “The skin tight pants, and short fashion jackets. And they won’t wear hats. Or proper mitts. Not little pink or purple cotton gloves, mitts.” I didn’t know that one of the women had been listening from behind a closed door.

I got supreme and royal hell from the 4 of them. I shouldn’t have been criticizing their choice in clothes. How they look is important to them, and how dare I tell them otherwise.

I started laughing and walked out of the room to go see my friend. The next shift there were 2 new women, and 2 new men, and they were dressed for the weather. And I got one fat bonus.

Of course not. The Americans are totally clueless.

They’ve been indoctrinated by their own government.

They’re insular and ignorant of the world outside their country.

They do not know that life can be better than what they have in America. Freedom from gun violence. Freedom from homelessness. Freedom from medical bankruptcy. Freedom from systemic racism (“I can’t breathe”). Freedom from opioid addiction. Freedom from mass incarceration. Freedom from crumbling infrastructure. Freedom from crushing debt, both national and private. Freedom from political turmoil (e.g., January 6, 2021). There is no end to America’s problems.

Take a second, shut your eyes.

You’re going to imagine a world.

In this world, you live in solitary confinement, contained in a small, metal prison.

Every day, you’re brought food and water and your cell is cleaned.

This is all you’ve ever known. Your world never changes.

Until one day, you’re moved to a new prison.

Some man in a white coat puts an IV into your arm. In front of you, there’s a lever.

You try pulling it.

You’re injected with heroin. It reaches your bloodstream almost instantly and your brain just seconds after. It’s almost blissful.

Do you press it again?

This was the life of dozens of rats.

Did they pull the lever?

Of course they did.

Over and over again.

They’d overdose. They’d die.

Because for them, that brief high was the best thing they’d ever known.

Psychologists and politicians were in simultaneous uproar. Drugs were evil and irresistibly addictive.

Only, rats, like humans, aren’t solitary creatures.

So, what would happen if they changed the circumstances. Sure, a prisoner would give into mind-numbing drugs, but would the average person? Would a happy person?

That’s how the rat park was built.

Researchers put rats together in a comfortable setting. They threw in running wheels and wood chips and let them live a good life.

Naptime and recess

Just hanging out.

There are always some who prefer the rat race.

These rats had access to drugs, just like the first set.

The results?

The dotted lines are the park rats, the complete lines are the caged ones.

And even though it would be beyond unethical to run the same experiments on humans, there’s a similar real life example.

Bruce Alexander, the man behind the experiments, explains:

The English colonial empire overran hundreds of native tribal groups in Western Canada in the 18th and 19th century.

The native people were moved off expansive tribal lands onto very small reserves, the basis of their cultures.

Their children were taken from their parents and sent off to “residential schools” to be taught the white man’s culture so they could be assimilated.

They were forbidden to speak their native languages and found themselves strangers in their own communities when they finally came home.

Before this point, Mental illness, personal betrayals, and epidemic diseases occasionally occurred in pre-colonial tribes.

Basically, native people had all the problems of their English colonizers except one.

There was so little addiction that it is very difficult to prove from written and oral histories that it existed at all.

But once the native people were colonized alcoholism became close to universal.

There were entire reserves where virtually every teenager and adult was either an alcohol or drug addict or “on the wagon”.

The drug only becomes irresistible when the opportunity for normal social existence is destroyed.

Before I had a truck, I borrowed my friends truck to move to a different city. I put 2000 km on it and I thought I would do an oil change, fill up with gas, and all the fluids before I returned it to him, with a gift certificate to a nice restaurant and a bottle of wine.

I told him what I had done, and I had messed up. He was using some super expensive synthetic oil and I had just used a good grade of regular oil. I told him to drive it until he needed an oil change, and I would pay for his synthetic oil change as well. However he was worried that switching between regular oil and synthetic would cause problems, so he insisted on changing the oil that very day, so that it wasn’t driven with regular oil.

He had plans for the afternoon, and spending an hour at the quick oil change place, messed things up.

I doubt driving on regular oil would have caused a problem, but its his truck, and I messed up by thinking I was going to surprise him with something extra.

I am a very moderate drinker. Maybe two or three drinks a week.

Although I have dated and lived with a fair number of women, only one of them was a real drinker. I dated her for a few months.

This woman was a high-functioning alcoholic. She held down a management position in retail, she was never falling-down drunk, and I never saw her throw up or get in a fight.

But man, could she drink. She was a world-class darts player, and she played for drinks. She almost always won. She’d hit a bar at about 10:00, and drink steadily until closing time (1:00 AM then). I’d say that in a typical night she’d have 10 drinks or so.

And then she’d head home, go to bed, and wake up the next morning ready to do it again.

And in answer to the question about what I found most unattractive?

It was that I started drinking more as well.

In fact, I decided to break up with her one Sunday. I had bought a bottle of rum on Friday, and on Sunday night I went to make a drink and discovered that the bottle was empty — I had drunk the whole bottle in three days.

That was not good. A bottle of rum usually lasted me a few months.

And that was the end of that.

This is just one comic, not a recurring strip.

I’ve seen this thing floating around for years in a variety of forms. I think it’s brilliant, but I have absolutely no idea who the original author was.

And it really sums up what I like about being a lone coder. I get to play all the roles, sometimes even that of end user. 😉

Edit 20190908:

Looks like we have a genuine mystery on our hands. One commenter said he believed the origin was in some IBM documentation from about the time I was busy being born.

Thanks to Richard Smith for providing these two very interesting links:

• On the origin of the cartoon — Early Tree Swing Cartoons

“Allow” !?

Honey, you couldn’t pay us to join that disaster.

Australians like our freedom. We like our country schools where the fences are little things an adult could step over, if there’s even a fence at all. We like sending our kids to school and knowing nobody’s going to shoot them in the classroom. We like going shopping and knowing that nobody’s going to shoot us in the shopping centre. We like eating food and knowing no corporation has added poisons and carcinogens to it to make it more shelf-stable or more addicting.

We like being able to collect the rainwater off our own roof and not being told we’re not allowed because our own roof water doesn’t belong to us. We like being allowed to put a vegetable garden in our front yard if we so choose without a HOA walking in and telling us we can’t do that on our own land.

We like owning our own bodies. Our sex education in school is pretty good and we have good access to contraceptives, but if an unwanted pregnancy is going to ruin a student’s career or if a wanted pregnancy goes wrong and looks like it might kill the mother, we don’t have to deal with politicians trying to take away our very basic human freedom to decide how our bodies will and will not be used by others.

We like our freedom to get medical care as needed. Nobody wants cancer or diabetes, nobody wants their baby to be born premature and needing a whole lot of very specialised care just to keep them alive, but being able to get the care we need when we need it really matters to us. We don’t want our employer or an insurance corporation deciding that they don’t approve of that care or they just don’t want to pay for it and thus deciding not to let us have the care we need to stay alive.

We like our kids getting a decent education that doesn’t depend on whether the people in our neighbourhood are rich or poor, and isn’t hostage to the whims of a bunch of religious nutters. We like knowing that our teachers are paid an honest wage and they’re not spending their evenings tending bars or driving Uber just to be able to pay their bills. We like our kids getting a facts-based education that doesn’t pretend anyone’s religious mumbo-jumbo is somehow equal to actual empirical science.

We like going to restaurants and not being obliged to tip. Sure, if the server is really great or if we’ve somehow made extra work for them, it’s sweet to leave them a nice gift, but they’re not depending on tips to pay their bills because they’re already paid an honest wage by their employer.

Most Australians wouldn’t even travel to the US if you paid our airfare. As for letting that failed-state disaster take over our country? Not happening.

Not me, my sister. When she was eighteen-nineteen she was pretty serious with this guy. He was nice, intelligent and respectful to our mother; but the dude seemed to have below zero ambition in life. No job, no income, dropped out for reasons I never ascertained, and seemed to live by a philosophy of “if you’re not sleeping on the floor with your leather jacket as a blanket, you’re not true punk-rock.” Polar opposite of my sister.

Some family of his in Minnesota (we lived in California) offered to take them in. God knows why, but my sister was on the verge of leaving everything for a state she’d never been to, to live with people she’d never met, because of love for a guy who’d never shown any indication that he would be seeking gainful employment.

She snapped out of it at the last minute – on her own; nobody had to convince her – and broke up with him. He made the move alone. Apparently he took this really hard; and while to my knowledge he had never been much of a drinker or drug user, he started slamming heroin and she got a phone call about a year later that an overdose had claimed his life.

My sister has a good head on her shoulders. She was devastated, but I never heard her blame herself as some people might. She wished him well, but it wasn’t her responsibility to care for a grown, capable man, and she saw this. He made his choice to live in depression and self-pity. As a recovering alcoholic myself, I can sympathize without excusing. Meanwhile, my sister’s life path brought her to her husband and the two children they have together. It’s sad that her ex couldn’t get his life together and went out like that, but she definitely dodged a bullet.

It depends on a lot of things.

For the near overseas Chinese who live in say Malaysia probably very easily.

For those who live further away? Difficult.

The ease of your reintegration depends entirely on IF you were exposed and picked up Chinese culture when you were young. Myself? As a baby I was given to my grandparents to look after until I was about 6. I absorbed tons of Chinese culture and language. I then visited regularly and kept some of my language skills. But I still grew up in the UK mostly and through osmosis absorbed a lot of their culture and thinking.

My dad grew up here in China and left when he was 16, he’s spent more time in the Netherlands and the UK than here. He can return and fit in with his village clan.

I made a generational seaturtle return.

Here’s the thing though. Neither of us quite fit.

My dad while he was away? His home changed enormously. I remember in the mid 00s standing in the middle of a town and he stood there for a moment. He said when he was a child he used to go fishing and swimming here. The coast was now about 3 miles away.

As such we tend to stick amongst our own groupings.

My dad hangs around a lot with other overseas Chinese who left with him in the 60s. He talks with people here who’ve been here all their lives and finds he hasn’t got all that much in common with them and entirely different life experiences.

Me? Despite this being my 8th year here on a permanent basis? I can count my born here friends on one hand. I’ve got plenty of acquaintances but I’m not sure I could classify them as friends. I find it far easier to talk to and be friendly with overseas born types and that includes Indians, Nepalis and UK born Chinese but not American borns.

It might just be a HK thing, as I was far friendlier with people in the Mainland. So why not move there (again). Well I’ve dug myself a rut already and I’m stuck in it.

But as I’ve written prior, a return isn’t for me (though life wise it worked out well) it’s for those who come after me.

I see my UK nieces and nephews some do ok but they suffer the same identity crises as we did.

Behold.

This also works with common snacks like chips, cheetos, really any “finger food.” Likewise Hara Shidho points out that it works on salads too; eating leafy greens is precisely what chopsticks are really good at in Chinese cuisine. Chopsticks are also much better at deboning fish, with Japanese chopsticks particularly designed for the task. Quite frankly I do not understand how anyone is cleanly deboning fish with forks, especially if the fish have much tinier, irregular bones that do not conform to the spine or edge.

It is also a misnomer to believe that there are no forks, spoons, and knives in China. They just have their time and place, and no they are not imports from the West as they have been around for millennia. I suspect that for Chinese people, ease of dining is where one optimizes for the least switches of utensils while keeping hands clean; removing that latter part gives us Indian hand usage, while the West seems to not care for utensil switching (or just abuses forks to fulfill the purpose of a spoon).

Really though, just think of chopsticks as two very long fingers that are easily washable.

Oh oh!

This happened to a new manager of mine who managed to cause havoc in our office within the first week of his employment.

My previous manager left for a better offer and the replacement didn’t arrive until 1 whole month after he left the company.

So there wasn’t anyone to train, guide or handover the duties/job scope to the new manager.

However, my previous manager, being a very smart man, created a folder with all the job scope, documents, handovers, etc. in our common (computer) server for us to handover to whoever that will take over when he/she eventually arrived.

So, when the replacement finally arrived, naturally very lost and confused, me and my colleagues did our best to guide him along and showed him the folder which my previous manager left for him.

It was one of the busiest periods of the year, so none of us were able to sit down and spoon feed all the details/information to him, as such we pretty much just left him to fiddle his computer and to do his own research.

I mean, he’s supposed to be our manager. He should have some idea of what to expect, right?

Thus, the first week went by, the tsunami was over and my colleagues and I finally got a chance to catch up on our work. The moment we switched on our computer to enter the common server, all of our jaw dropped simultaneously.

The idiot has reorganized the WHOLE SERVER!!

When we confronted him about the server, his excuse was that the server looks very messy and he want to tidy it up. Oh, and if we were to see if anything that is out of place, please help him to sort out into the correct folder.

This idiot had no idea how much damage he has caused us!

For those of you who are wondering what’s the big deal, by reorganizing the server, the idiot rendered all our shortcuts/hyperlinks useless.

Furthermore, a lot of our files & documents are named via codes/serial numbers, without the proper directory we have no idea where are all our past records/documents!!

The worst part is that the damage is irreversible as he had tampered with our backup folder as well…

We spent the next few MONTHS trying to find and sort out all our lost documents but till this day we are still unable to find about 40% of them. (the idiot still insists that he did not delete any of our files, it’s all in there, he just misplaced them…)

The idiot was eventually let go due to multiple accounts of incompetency after 1 year of service (so much screaming from my client).

There were so many stories from this idiot I’m surprised that he managed to somehow last the whole year.

Edit:

Now to verify, yes you can say i’m being harsh for calling him an idiot repeatedly.
We gave him a ton of advice but none were heeded; we tried to be patient with him but when the client openly demanded him to be fired in the meeting with your CEO on speaker phone, you know shit just got real.

And just to be clear, he was hired as a Manager, so not knowing basic computer skill or even some basic level of competency is not an excuse. He is definitely not new in this field and how he managed to secure a 5 figures salary previously is still a mystery to me.

Nobody is a security threat to the U.S. The U.S. is the biggest security threat to itself. Trying to do regime change in other nations is a security threat to the U.S. Starting a colour revolution to the world U.S. a security threat to the U.S. like what Maidan is now putting the US in a step nearer to a nuclear war! If you don’t want to buy batteries from China don’t buy!

China don’t need you to buy! You wanted a cheaper and better value for money battery! If you want your people to buy at 5 times the price go right ahead!