In China's capital, they're calling it the "airpocalypse"

Spoiler :
When will the human race wise up and realize that higher rates of production at the expense of health and wellness is a profound act of stupidity?


A) The top city looks way cooler and in some ways, healthier.
B) The bottom city lacks high rises, indicating that they are likely outsourcing pollution rather than reducing it.
 
A) The top city looks way cooler and in some ways, healthier.
B) The bottom city lacks high rises, indicating that they are likely outsourcing pollution rather than reducing it.

I hope you're being sarcastic or joking.
 
I hope you're being sarcastic or joking.

I'm not, pictures wise. The bottom city lacked authentic health. It was Disneyland suburbia. Suburbia is destructive. Humanity does a lot better when most of us crowd together to the limits of our technology. The top picture showed a city with culture, even though it had clear problems to solve (like needing a gas mask.... that's pretty horrid). The bottom was a dystopia. If you greened and cleaned up the top city, that would be the best world.

I'm surprised I have to explain this, actually. Not a jab or anything.
 
I'm not, pictures wise. The bottom city lacked authentic health. It was Disneyland suburbia. Suburbia is destructive. Humanity does a lot better when most of us crowd together to the limits of our technology. The top picture showed a city with culture, even though it had clear problems to solve (like needing a gas mask.... that's pretty horrid). The bottom was a dystopia. If you greened and cleaned up the top city, that would be the best world.

I'm surprised I have to explain this, actually. Not a jab or anything.

If you greened and cleaned the top city you end up with something a lot like the bottom city. I don't get how you view a blackened sky, no green anything, people wearing gas mask and all the rest as better. Just because there's so little green in our current cities doesn't mean that they can't be like that and still be host to a lot of people. There's not anything wrong with living in a rural area either. For one thing, the air is much cleaner without having to resort to extreme measures to keep it that way.
 
A) The top city looks way cooler and in some ways, healthier.

I agree. People in the 80's did actually know how to make cyber-punk dystopias look cool.

B) The bottom city lacks high rises, indicating that they are likely outsourcing pollution rather than reducing it.

Haven't you read the captions? Everyone is forced to... plant a tree every day (no kidding). With so many trees being planted in them, skyscrapers ended up collapsing, which is a kind of eco-prediction for 9/11.
 
"Present research in the US, the USSR and Europe indicates that the tokamak nuclear fusion reactor could provide much of the energy for the people of tomorrow's towns."

If one were to write such an article today, you would replace the USSR with China, that is the only thing that has changed.


Also, is there a Concorde in the bottom picture :lol:
 
When will the human race wise up and realize that higher rates of production at the expense of health and wellness is a profound act of stupidity?
Er. Not any time in the foreseeable future?

Is that the right answer?
 
Er. Not any time in the foreseeable future?

Is that the right answer?

Depends on if enough people demand that we change. It also depends on how the laws of physics work. You can only shoot yourself in the foot so many times before lose too much blood to continue shooting.
 
1. People aren't going to demand change which they see as counter to their own interests - which they see generally as in the short term. I don't see anyone volunteering to not take overseas holidays. Or using videoconferencing rather than face to face interviews. I don't see people turning the central heating or air conditioning down either. There's no indication that people would prefer to consume locally grown produce in season either. All they really do is moan about the rising price of everything.

2. The corporations, that generally are responsible for running the global economy, aren't going to be shooting themselves in the foot, are they? I don't really know what you mean.
 
1. People aren't going to demand change which they see as counter to their own interests - which they see generally as in the short term. I don't see anyone volunteering to not take overseas holidays. Or using videoconferencing rather than face to face interviews. I don't see people turning the central heating or air conditioning down either.

Living, breathing (reasonably clean air) and eating are in everyone's own interests.
2. The corporations, that generally are responsible for running the global economy, aren't going to be shooting themselves in the foot, are they? I don't really know what you mean.

It means that while you to trying to make a bad situation worse the effects of doing so will be so bad that you wouldn't be able to.

There's also something known as the law of diminishing returns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
 
I'll help you understand my opinion.



There is no right to pollute and that logic is fracked up. If Americans pollute a lot, that doesn't mean everyone else should pollute a lot as well so we can all be fair. It means the Americans and everyone else should all pollute less. It sounds like how a little child would view a situation: "He's doing something wrong and it's not fair so I'm going to do something wrong as well and then it will be fair."



No, we really don't need to consider other people's viewpoints all the time. I really don't care for a Chinese justification to excessively pollute just as I don't care about anyone's justification to excessively pollute.

Nice, so you deny the fact that countries should industrialize to make their population live in better condition because they produce pollution? I would like to see your reaction if you were a citizen of Congo or whatever 3rd world country and a factory was being build up in your region giving you job and better products. I am pretty sure you would not care about the pollution...

But I have a solution ! Which would be suitable for your thinking: introduce a tax in the USA and send all that tax to industrializing 3rd world countries for purchasing better, more modern, less polluting equipment; like 10% of every American wage could go there...

If you want to decry lazy Americans and their polluting ways, feel free to start another thread guys. We all do need our daily reminder that the world hates the US and that we are the #2 producer of pollution. It's just that this thread is about China, Beijing and the pollution problems they face and not the US.

Oh and about 'lazy' Americans:

Quit being ignorant. Gluttony is not a synonym for either laziness or sloth.

Oh pretty nice chart, the problem is that productivity is being shown, therefore it only shows how much do you produce in 1 hour or whatever time period is described there, it doesn't state how much do you work in a week. Please try to find a nice chart about that too, thanks.
 
If you greened and cleaned the top city you end up with something a lot like the bottom city. I don't get how you view a blackened sky, no green anything, people wearing gas mask and all the rest as better. Just because there's so little green in our current cities doesn't mean that they can't be like that and still be host to a lot of people. There's not anything wrong with living in a rural area either. For one thing, the air is much cleaner without having to resort to extreme measures to keep it that way.

The top city is an exurban tourist trap. It's a lie. It's demonstrates a world that is probably offshoring pollution. There's no convincing city in the bottom. There is a high rise on the left, a small office park or restaurant on the right, and a volcano. The top is a city, and it looks like a city and has the culture of a city, which is healthy. The two look nothing like each other even if you made them the same colors and made everyone mask free and smiling.


I agree. People in the 80's did actually know how to make cyber-punk dystopias look cool.

Hell yeah they did. Much of it has come true if you pay close attention, btw ;)
 
Oh pretty nice chart, the problem is that productivity is being shown, therefore it only shows how much do you produce in 1 hour or whatever time period is described there, it doesn't state how much do you work in a week. Please try to find a nice chart about that too, thanks.
I may go looking for one tomorrow. I don't think that the chart will change much if production is tallied up by the week and certainly not if it were tallied by years given some European nations have a sub-40 hour standard work week and many European nations also have mandatory vacation weeks while we have none and subsequently vacation much less.

The whole point I was trying to make is that Americans may be obese as hell but lazy we're not and I don't think a weekly tally will disprove that.
 
The top city is an exurban tourist trap. It's a lie. It's demonstrates a world that is probably offshoring pollution. There's no convincing city in the bottom. There is a high rise on the left, a small office park or restaurant on the right, and a volcano. The top is a city, and it looks like a city and has the culture of a city, which is healthy. The two look nothing like each other even if you made them the same colors and made everyone mask free and smiling.

They don't have to look exactly the same to have the same basic functions based on similar systems. I find it hard to believe anyone could look at these two options objectively and make the choice of the top city with all its negatives and zero positives. It doesn't make any sense. How is it more real? Because that's what present Beijing more closely resembles?
 
Has anybody estimated how other notoriously polluted places throughout history would do on the AQI scale? For example, the worst of the "pea soup" smogs in London in the late 19th-mid 20th century, such as the Great Smog of 1952? It would be interesting to put this in a historical context.
 
Darkwind said:
Why is there so much China hate here?

Racism. Par the course for OT actually.
 
I may go looking for one tomorrow. I don't think that the chart will change much if production is tallied up by the week and certainly not if it were tallied by years given some European nations have a sub-40 hour standard work week and many European nations also have mandatory vacation weeks while we have none and subsequently vacation much less.

The whole point I was trying to make is that Americans may be obese as hell but lazy we're not and I don't think a weekly tally will disprove that.

I am not saying that you are lazy or not, I am just saying that productivity has nothing to do with how much you work and from this point of view how lazy are you.

I have seen a graph back then where Greece had a really high number of working hours per week, still their productivity was one of the smallest.
 
They don't have to look exactly the same to have the same basic functions based on similar systems. I find it hard to believe anyone could look at these two options objectively and make the choice of the top city with all its negatives and zero positives. It doesn't make any sense. How is it more real? Because that's what present Beijing more closely resembles?

The top city is clearly more densely populated, and denser population generally means higher energy efficiency and higher economic output per capita. That's about as objective a comparison as anyone can get.
 
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