|
IronClaymore posted:I'm more worried about soil resource depletion. China has a lot of people, that's a lot of food and a lot of nutrients and a lot of farming. What'll run out first? Phosphorus will be fine unless globalisation dies and we can't keep dissolving Morocco with sulfuric acid. Iodine maybe? It'll be slow in coming. Some other trace element might come up? china is hosed in the long run and there is very little to be done about it
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 18:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 02:40 |
|
|
Fojar38 posted:china is hosed in the long run and there is very little to be done about it We're ALL hosed in the long run. Just depends on the timescale. You've got human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity, then the glacial ice age cycle, then the sun's increased luminosity doing weird poo poo to carbon sequestration, then the sun getting fat, then the sun dying from being too fat, then all available energy in the universe being used up. I just want to see what happens first. And what they do when it happens. Civil war? War of desperate expansion? Mass famine and death? Nuke loving everything? Some weird sci-fi option?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:21
|
|
|
20 years ago people were saying China was hosed agriculturally and their food supply collapse was imminent, but they embraced GM crops early whether planting or importing them. So that doom's day scenario might not be too soon. What's more likely to happen first is that their farmers are not going to have enough women to breed with and marrying corpses has not been a proven way to yield offspring.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:26
|
|
|
Skeesix posted:Won't it gently caress Bangladesh harder? At least the survivors in China could move to whatever the new coastline is (likely still in China). A few hundred million refugees of the old coastline hitting the underdeveloped new coastline is going to be hell on earth for the current social order. IronClaymore posted:I'm more worried about soil resource depletion. China has a lot of people, that's a lot of food and a lot of nutrients and a lot of farming. What'll run out first? Phosphorus will be fine unless globalisation dies and we can't keep dissolving Morocco with sulfuric acid. Iodine maybe? It'll be slow in coming. Some other trace element might come up? I did mention desertification too. It's a hammer and anvil type situation.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:35
|
|
|
isme posted:20 years ago people were saying China was hosed agriculturally and their food supply collapse was imminent, but they embraced GM crops early whether planting or importing them. So that doom's day scenario might not be too soon. What's more likely to happen first is that their farmers are not going to have enough women to breed with and marrying corpses has not been a proven way to yield offspring. That's sociological. Hopefully their Communist party still remembers how to look a few decades ahead, and still has absolute despotic totalitarian control, then they can make having daughters in preference to sons seem like the highest duty, and make daughters favoured and a sign of family prestige instead of sons (come on! they managed to do away with so much of the medieval/late-iron-age crap of the old China, surely they can do this. I have faith in the Communist Party's tyranny!). Of course, that'll lead to all the young men of now having a bunch of young women around twenty years from now, when the men are in their 40s and 50s. Could be kinda creepy if the men are all sex-starved and lecherous.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:38
|
|
|
IronClaymore posted:That's sociological. Hopefully their Communist party still remembers how to look a few decades ahead, and still has absolute despotic totalitarian control, then they can make having daughters in preference to sons seem like the highest duty, and make daughters favoured and a sign of family prestige instead of sons (come on! they managed to do away with so much of the medieval/late-iron-age crap of the old China, surely they can do this. I have faith in the Communist Party's tyranny!). the communist party will fix all of china's problems with their obvious technocratic competence
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:42
|
|
|
Fojar38 posted:the communist party will fix all of china's problems with their obvious technocratic competence Lol no. Whenever China gets centralised control their ingenuity suffers and they don't advance. Hell, they invented gunpowder and paper, and had an amazing navy, and then spent two thousand years in stagnation under autocratic control of emperors, ready to be picked off and exploited by some tiny little island that figured out that gunpowder + ships + education = win. They can either get autocratic control and "fix up" social problems like gender imbalance, and lose ability to deal with the outside world, or they can deal with the outside world and develop increasing problems internally.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:56
|
|
|
It's cool that this incarnation of the thread is actually informative instead of being all ching chong ning nong with small ding dong  and acting like doing that is "sticking it to the great firewall"I don't actually have anything to contribute but I just wanted to say that.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 19:57
|
|
|
IronClaymore posted:Lol no. Whenever China gets centralised control their ingenuity suffers and they don't advance. Hell, they invented gunpowder and paper, and had an amazing navy, and then spent two thousand years in stagnation under autocratic control of emperors, ready to be picked off and exploited by some tiny little island that figured out that gunpowder + ships + education = win. their navy was actually always pretty poo poo and at its largest extent was mainly designed for the purposes of hauling tribute rather than fighting and lol it is a bit more complex than "gunpowder + ships = win", friend
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:01
|
|
|
Fojar38 posted:their navy was actually always pretty poo poo and at its largest extent was mainly designed for the purposes of hauling tribute rather than fighting A fighting navy is ultimately a bit of a niche. Frigates are fun, they can deny the sea to an enemy or at least make it difficult, but they neither project power nor do they run an empire. Cargo and trade is where an empire is had. But they turned inwards! China could have had Indonesia and Australia, but there's the idea that the Mongol invasions made them look inwards and focus on the land. I simplified the gunpowder ships bit. But what I meant was that they had a big relatively-stable empire with no real pressures, and such a stable social system that there was nowhere for new ideas to expand in to. Oh that doesn't do it justice...you just get so many advancements (mostly war-based) if you have a bunch of little kingdoms in a small area like Europe, all trying to kill each other, then they take those advancements elsewhere and just massacre everyone outside of that social ecosystem. I can't really explain what I mean, but I'm sure you can get it, guy.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
I liked the pseudo NatGeo narration in the OP.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:34
|
|
|
H.P. Hovercraft posted:i think you will find that the chinese government is in fact less than 100 years old, op Those 5000 years are a quite strange rhetorical figure. Isn't there only a very thin veneer of anything that would qualify as authentic and unbroken culture left on the mainland?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:45
|
|
|
Face it, China is good.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:49
|
|
|
BONGHITZ posted:Face it, China is good. whoa
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 20:56
|
|
|
Mercury_Storm posted:I found this tea at a local market: its some watermelon parts with glauber’s salt/Sodium sulfate
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:04
|
|
|
5er posted:Did you just ask them why? Well... maybe I will!!!!
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:09
|
|
|
Encrypted posted:its some watermelon parts with glauber’s salt/Sodium sulfate Yeah, it's not going to be anything too weird. Mostly salt and sugar at worst. Turns out that weird-rear end sciency sounding chemicals are just too drat expensive. And Chinese suppliers might be evil exploitative manipulative bastards who poison the world, but they're still not homeopaths.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:15
|
|
|
a hole-y ghost posted:It's cool that this incarnation of the thread is actually informative instead of being all ching chong ning nong with small ding dong There's already a discuss chinese poo poo "informatively" thread in Debate and Discussion.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:26
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:Those 5000 years are a quite strange rhetorical figure. Isn't there only a very thin veneer of anything that would qualify as authentic and unbroken culture left on the mainland? I think someone in the previous thread said that the most anyone was willing to claim before Communism was 4000 years with 3000 being more likely. Then Mao decided that as nice a round number as 4000 was, 5000 was even rounder.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:30
|
|
|
Skeesix posted:I think someone in the previous thread said that the most anyone was willing to claim before Communism was 4000 years with 3000 being more likely. Should just go with fossil evidence. Yes, humans lived in this area for X-thousand years. Doesn't matter if they had written language or easily-salvageable pottery, they would have had their own unique culture and society. Modern Chinese culture would be totally alien to Chinese culture a hundred years ago, and a hundred years ago to 5000. To say now is the same culture as then you may as well cast yourself back right to the start of Homo sapiens and say it's all your culture and be done with it. Don't look too far back. It's all just peasants anyway. I suppose I'm privileged though, I'm from a place build on immigration, and most of our culture is from somewhere else. We got Chinese people back when they still had an emperor. And Vietnamese and Irish and Greek...yeah gently caress the distant past, getting people from everywhere is great for the present.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:47
|
|
|
china has had 3000 years of unbroken civilization in the same way that America is a province of the Roman Empire
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 21:53
|
|
|
genesplicer posted:It boils down to "don't be a dick." And being racist is being a dick. I closed the other thread, because it had degenerated into a thinly-veiled "white people are superior to these silly Chinese" sort of thing. As long as you keep it civil and funny you are good to go. Use this thread to act in a way that Stormfront would approve of, and it will go the way of the other one (along with a few bans.) Somethingawful is all about being a dick. Hence the reason we're called loving goons. You've been here just as long as me and should loving know better. Stop trying to bring back the tumbler hugbox.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 22:14
|
|
|
Man lovely speculative claims about China and human impact on the environment is way better than funny anecdotes. Thanks genesplicer!!!!
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 22:58
|
|
|
Bum the Sad posted:Somethingawful is all about being a dick. Hence the reason we're called loving goons. You've been here just as long as me and should loving know better. Stop trying to bring back the tumbler hugbox. Hey Bum, how's the night shift? Anyway, if my experience is anything to go by, people are the same. Some dudes are good, some are lovely. It's never depended on "race". (And how the gently caress is that a thing anyway? Humans are so homogenous genetically.) Or gender. Personally, maybe you can be a dick about culture? A little bit? The thing about bad parts of culture, it's something any of us could have done, being in that situation, been a part of that. I like being sarcastic about other cultures doing horrible things, but I know that if I was there in that time I wouldn't have been able to stand up to it. I'm not arguing cultural relativism or whatever it's called, I'd have known some things were plain wrong, just saying that I'm weak. And my own culture did some terrible, terrible things. We murdered children! gently caress! But good parts? That's something to be proud of. If you can sift them out from all the poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:01
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:china has had 3000 years of unbroken civilization in the same way that America is a province of the Roman Empire please do not hurt the feelings of the native american people, who invented tobacco, medicine, the hypodermic needle, peppers, corn, and chewing gum, and have 16,000 years of culture which you should respect H.P. Hovercraft fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:10
|
|
|
IronClaymore posted:A fighting navy is ultimately a bit of a niche. Frigates are fun, they can deny the sea to an enemy or at least make it difficult, but they neither project power nor do they run an empire. Cargo and trade is where an empire is had. But they turned inwards! China could have had Indonesia and Australia, but there's the idea that the Mongol invasions made them look inwards and focus on the land. I get what you're saying, competition breeds progress, or at the very least encourages it. China had a few periods where it got its poo poo together too well, and didn't have some opposing force to make it stay sharp. In your opinion, would you say China is feeling that way in modern times?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:38
|
|
|
are we still allowed to compare modern chinese society to tolkien orc camps
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:49
|
|
|
Kallev posted:I get what you're saying, competition breeds progress, or at the very least encourages it. China had a few periods where it got its poo poo together too well, and didn't have some opposing force to make it stay sharp. In your opinion, would you say China is feeling that way in modern times? yeah, I'm in no way an expert of chinese history but I know enough of it to know there are long stretches of time where china was fragmented kingdoms with distinct cultures hostile to one another. I'm going to assume these were the times when ideas and technology advanced, and the times when china was one giant autocratic state are when society was at its most stable but also when ideas and technology stagnated.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:55
|
|
|
If China ever launched nukes would they even work? I can imagine the person charged with refilling rockets selling all the rocket fuel and filling them with butane instead and they all kinda take off then flop over and they end up nuking themselves.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
Kallev posted:I get what you're saying, competition breeds progress, or at the very least encourages it. China had a few periods where it got its poo poo together too well, and didn't have some opposing force to make it stay sharp. In your opinion, would you say China is feeling that way in modern times? Maybe the most paranoid communist dudes feel threatened, and look for conspiracies everywhere and always desire enemies, but otherwise not at all. They're doing great, they're secure they have trade they have resources. Culturally they probably still want to capture Taiwan but it would take their entire strength and they'd wreck themselves (militarily and financially) doing so and end up with a blasted deadland of their own creation, gaining them nothing except the temporary satisfaction of the bloodlust of their own Hawks. The modern world doesn't lend itself well to regular land army takeovers. It's all about trade and influence. Why conquer the world with armies when you can get the inhabitants of a land dig up its minerals and sell them to you for a fraction of their worth? And unfortunately that means China is looking a little bit static again. They send their students overseas for education, which is fine they don't yet have enough teachers in certain fields, but they send them to become technicians and doctors, not scientists and medical researchers. They shouldn't be satisfied with breaking even, someone has to put the USA in its place so it may as well be China, they should strive ahead and do something awesome and ridiculous that people actually talk about.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 00:08
|
|
|
Simstim posted:yeah, I'm in no way an expert of chinese history but I know enough of it to know there are long stretches of time where china was fragmented kingdoms with distinct cultures hostile to one another. I'm going to assume these were the times when ideas and technology advanced, and the times when china was one giant autocratic state are when society was at its most stable but also when ideas and technology stagnated. Nah, there was a bunch of exploration under one giant state, then that same state stopped it. Then they got overthrown by northern invaders, and those people annexed some western territory but were also kinda stagnant.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 00:09
|
|
|
Simstim posted:yeah, I'm in no way an expert of chinese history but I know enough of it to know there are long stretches of time where china was fragmented kingdoms with distinct cultures hostile to one another. I'm going to assume these were the times when ideas and technology advanced, and the times when china was one giant autocratic state are when society was at its most stable but also when ideas and technology stagnated. part of the problem is that there are very few reliable investigations of chinese history by western scholars and consequently their technology levels the "china was super advanced and invented everything" narrative basically comes from one source, and that's a collection of books collectively called "Science and Civilisation in China" based on the work of a british sinologist named joseph needham its definitely a useful source but like all sources it suffers from numerous biases including needham often making spurious claims based on 20th century thinking (he claims that the chinese invented helicopters because a taoist text describes "straps fastened to returning blades" and needham concludes that meant helicopters because he "couldn't imagine it meant anything else") combined with the fact that needham was writing in the 50's and 60's and was a huge CCP fanboy and unapologetic communist but because of the massive language barrier making it hard for western scholars to study chinese history, plus the cultural revolution destroying a bunch of historically valuable things such as records and archaeological artifacts, plus the CCP's desire to maintain absolute control of the historical narrative, needham's heavily flawed writing is all we've got i don't think that it's a stretch to argue that maybe all these questions agonizing over how china "fell behind in technology" are flawed because we have been consistently overestimating ancient chinese achievements unfortunately we probably won't ever know because of the aforementioned "CCP trashing anything of historical value in the cultural revolution" thing
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 00:12
|
|
|
Marky Marx posted:If China ever launched nukes would they even work? I saw a reliable estimate that in the 80s, at the height of funding, only 2/3 to 3/4 of US ICBMs would have left their silos. The rest would have failed in one way or another. Imagine China's ratio.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 00:18
|
|
|
IronClaymore posted:Personally, maybe you can be a dick about culture? A little bit? The thing about bad parts of culture, it's something any of us could have done, being in that situation, been a part of that. I like being sarcastic about other cultures doing horrible things, but I know that if I was there in that time I wouldn't have been able to stand up to it. I'm not arguing cultural relativism or whatever it's called, I'd have known some things were plain wrong, just saying that I'm weak. And my own culture did some terrible, terrible things. We murdered children! gently caress! Separating culture from race gets a bit difficult when the culture itself is a bit racist, and ends up racially homogeneous (or close to). By and large, most folks making fun of the Chinese itt seem to be making fun of the culture, but I can see where it could get confusing. Something something I could not possibly comment.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:08
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:china has had 3000 years of unbroken civilization in the same way that America is a province of the Roman Empire *Fat Italian in the room perks up
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:13
|
|
|
Marky Marx posted:If China ever launched nukes would they even work? As soon as your post pierces the GFoC and reaches Beijing, some
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:15
|
|
|
TheRagamuffin posted:Separating culture from race gets a bit difficult when the culture itself is a bit racist, and ends up racially homogeneous (or close to). By and large, most folks making fun of the Chinese itt seem to be making fun of the culture, but I can see where it could get confusing. When we have most people in this thread praising HK and Taiwan (#1), but hating the PRC, seems clear cut to me. Should I post my pictures of trying and failing to see Mazu last week?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:36
|
|
|
the thing about the 5,000 years of history is two-fold for me. if people want to tell me about china's 5,000 years of history (and trust me...they do), that's cool. i get it, and it is something to be proud of, even if it isn't 5,000 years. chinese history is cool and interesting. what gets me is 1) the ridiculous fetish of it, how people claim it like it is something that makes china so superior to other countries. that's bad enough, but then 2) i walk outside, after listening to someone fetishize this incredible unbroken string of years of history, culture and society, and i see some person cheerleading their 7 year old child while the kid is making GBS threads all over the sidewalk outside of a starbucks, while everyone just walks by and does nothing. well, one person may hawk up a huge loogie and spit it out as he walks by, and another may stare at the one white person, one might even scream "OK LA!" as i walk by. it doesn't matter how many years of history and culture you have if this is the culture you currently have
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:36
|
|
|
You know who else has had 5000 years of history? Iraq and Syria. The Chinese decided to go "gently caress it " over their history a century ago for a reason.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 01:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 02:40 |
|
|
IronClaymore posted:someone has to put the USA in its place so it may as well be China
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2016 02:04
|
|