These are fair points. Thank you for the response!

Why should we listen to alarmist doomers who believe in near-term human exctinction? Climate change could take down industrial civilization and billions of lives within the course of a few decades or even years, but the idea that in about 1000 days the earth will look like venus and all humans will die strikes me as unhinged. this guy lowballs it, but I think there’s good reasons to be skeptical about the clathrate gun hypothesis

Based

No, the author is not an anticommunist. This book would not be so widely promoted in China if it were anticommunist. His depictions of the cultural revolution are focused on the suffering people went through in a neutral way. I don’t think it’s controversial in China to say that there were issues with the cultural revolution that led to suffering for some. Here’s an official narrative to summarize the cultural revolution on Chinese internet:

文化大革命全称“无产阶级文化大革命”，发生于1966年5月至1976年10月，是一场由领导者错误发动，被反革命集团利用，给党、国家和各族人民带来严重灾难的内乱，留下了极其惨痛的教训。[1][3][4]

The full name of the Cultural Revolution is the “Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, which took place from May 1966 to October 1976. It was a civil unrest that was wrongly launched by leaders and used by counter-revolutionary groups to bring serious disasters to the Party, the country and the people of all ethnic groups, leaving an extremely painful lesson.

惊弓之鸟

I urge you to read To Live. I think it would help you through these emotions

I have no idea tbh

It is true that there are many hotels across NYC that have been repurposed to house newly immigrated people. The people living there are mostly from Latin America, but also there are hotels of people just from sub-saharan Africa, so it’s a diverse mix.

I am in contact with someone who works directly on managing new immigrants for NYC. From what they’ve told me, it is a serious crisis for the city, since they are constantly looking for increasingly creative ways to house everyone. Their allocated capacity would run out and they’d have to scramble to accommodate new arrivals.

I’ve heard good things about dreaming spanish

Maybe we’re both just biased, but it’s crazy what you said about rude airport security because i swear that was the first thing i also noticed when getting back to the USA. Maybe they just hide it better in China, but i swear the workforce in the us is in a state of visible desperation. it’s really sad seeing alternative realities firsthand

Depends on what you’re looking for. Zhangjiajie, Huashan, some Great Wall scenic areas, and other famous sights are definitely reachable via train + didi or bus. However, the Chinese idea of hiking is a little different: most sights are highly developed with stairs, paved paths, trams, temples, shrines, and snack bars throughout. The more popular ones can be extremely crowded like OP mentioned, especially during Chinese holidays.

If you wanted for example to fuck off to somewhere more “pristine” the altai mountains in Xinjiang, that’s much harder chiefly because China does not accept intl driver’s licenses (apparently you can get a permit but you have to go through local offices). Beyond that barrier I’m not sure what else it would take to go on a western-style camping trip.

Thanks for taking the time to write out a response, your insights are really valuable!

Sure thing. I think trip.com is the english version that you can check other routes for. It is super cheap. I think the harbin-kunming and hangzhou-urumqi routes i mentioned are also not high speed rail, but i’m not sure. I think the capability to run HSR on those routes exists, but seems like i’m not able to find those tickets, in which case it would be much faster.

Thank you for sharing! I’m curious how being a 华人 colored your experience. How did this trip inform your feeling of identity belonging to both your 祖国 and 美国? What’s your sense on how the broader 华人 americans / ABCs feel about the above?

Also, I totally agree about the malls. I’m not sure what percentile of people can actually afford it, but some of the shops were really creative. I loved that they were essentially selling themselves as arts and crafts centers, like you could fashion your own leather goods or paint things or make pottery. It felt like that sort of thing is much healthier for society within a consumerist culture.

I spot checked this on 携程 for you. if you wanted to, for example, go from Harbin to Kunming, it would cost you about 400 RMB ($50) and take about 1.5-2 days with 1 transfer, which is comparable to going from LA to DC, or from Barcelona to Moscow. It’s a similar story from Hangzhou to Urumqi. You’re probably better off taking a flight for that distance. Where the system really starts to shine is for something like Beijing to Shenzen, which costs 1000 RMB ($110) and takes about 8 hours, direct, which is equivalent from brussels to kiev, or from miami to nyc. Even then, that distance is about the limit of “worth it on HSR”. The best is when you’re going inter-city within a region. It’s also amazing because there’s no surge pricing/gouging, so you can buy last-minute tickets at the same prices as long as they’re available still.

What other place could have:

• Police on every corner
• Ubiquitous surveillance
• Systemic repression

what’s that? it’s new york city? whoops.

I wonder what it will take for these models to actually “bootstrap” their intelligence and not just feed off human intelligence like it seems they do now.

Does anybody understand what this means? Consciousness is not physically observable?

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