Hey sexy momma, wanna kill all humans?

This should be the last of the China posts, and covers miscellaneous things that, while interesting, would not fill a whole post of their own.

Food: spectacular but indescribable. Comparing American Chinese food with Chinese food is somewhat like comparing Ethiopian and French food -- absolutely no basis for similarity that I've found. At least 50% of the ingredients are not even found in the US!

Architecture: very 80s USSR. First, very few private houses, just apartment buildings, although you should have been able to guess that from the population density. Second, some of the newer buildings are quite nice, but the entire atmosphere is somewhat spoiled (for me) by the attitude that if you're building a pretty building, you might as well build 4 or 5 identical ones around it. Picture a suburban townhouse development, except every house is 5 to 40 stories tall.

Appliances: Small. Expensive. Efficient. Every room in the house generally has an independently-controlled combination heater/air conditioner unit. These are variable speed, so they don't kick in for five minutes with a blast of heat, but instead keep the room at a constant temperature. However, the mini fridge-sized outside part does tend to mar the architecture of the building (like I said, one outside of basically *every* window).

Public transport: ridiculously cheap. you can get just about anywhere on a bus without transferring to a different one. In Beijing, the subway is just as cheap and is wonderfully convenient. For that matter, cabs are frighteningly cheap as well, but you might as well take the bus -- it's cheaper and generally not slower, but you might have to wait a while for one.

Desserts (sweets): you can't get any. Don't try. You might get something that looks like one, but it won't taste like one.

Haggling: I've seen it done everywhere except restaurants. I would not have thought of trying to haggle over eyeglasses (in a professional high-class boutique), but Dan's mom got a huge discount.

The first floor of almost every residential building is a series of small shops. In case of commercial buildings, large shops or banks. You don't have to walk far to buy most things.

No one offered me a fork. I felt gratified. Dan says there are none, except in Western style restaurants. At Pizza Hut, you eat pizza with a knife and fork. It's an upscale restaurant there.

No one speaks English. Guide books that tell you different lie to you. With no knowledge of Mandarin, the best you can hope for is to read public signs and hang around in a small subset of shops, offering horrendous mark-ups especially for tourists.

Approved by Dan.

The phrase "going to meet your maker" is an odd duck indeed. It first makes me think of going to have a chat with my parents (separately, since they're divorced). After all, I am made according to their DNA. My mother did physically manufacture me. But the phrase has certain cultural connotations related to religion. Specifically, "going to meet your maker" implies that you are on your way to see God, your maker, and to do this you must presumably first die. This phrasing is ambiguous at best. Does dying cause one to go meet God, who is one's maker, or does dying cause one to go meet one's maker, who happens to be God (we'll ignore that this might simply be a correlation, with no causal relationship implied). Additionally, should it be "meet", or "visit"? Perhaps we've met before...

First, let's examine the idea that dying sends you go meet your maker. This does not coincide with our daily experience in any way. After all, imagine the chaos at the local IKEA if, after a particularly bad office fire somewhere in town, a large number of critically injured chairs, tables, and various other paraphernalia that IKEA sells shows up and demands to speak to the manager. (True, the IKEA store is not in fact the place where these items are manufactured, but go with me on this one, OK?) Therefore, the very idea must rest on the way that the System of Life and Death works. However, what is the purpose of such a design (assuming a designer)? More of that after the next paragraph.

Second, what if dying causes you go meet God? This is (correct me if I'm wrong) a mostly Christian idea, having roots in the existence of the afterlife (after all, you can't go meet anyone if you're dead and there's no afterlife, can you?). While we (as humans) are supposedly made in God's image, that does not mean that God single-handedly created each and every one of us, does it? Perhaps God was concerned with more of the overarching design and prototypes (Adam and Eve), but outsourced the creation of individuals to angels whose time is somewhat less valuable. Does this mean we go meet the particular angel that created us? (Don't even get me started on the idea of an assembly line!)

Furthermore, what does this meeting actually accomplish? Christianity (and Judaism) tells us that God has complete and utter love for each of us. Therefore, we might at least expect God to be somewhat friendly. But what do the two of us talk about? A few years ago I was fascinated by The Judgment -- the Christian God would tell me whether I was destined for heaven or hell based on my deeds during life -- and this judgment would be fair by definition. I was rather looking forward to this. However, someone of some experience in biblical studies (no, I have not checked their credentials) later informed me that I had to believe in Jesus for this to happen. Being an atheist (and a Buddhist one at that), I gather my chances are slim. So, I do not know what to expect from the meeting. God could ask me what I thought of the entire Life experience. Have me fill out a comment card, just for reference for when future Universes are created. I would ask God about the meaning of existence. But both of these things seem pretty silly if I think about them -- imagine a chair, after fulfilling a long lifetime of service and finally being disposed of in a trash heap or burned for firewood, coming back to its designer. What would the designer say to the chair about the meaning of its existence? Whatever it was, I imagine it would leave the chair profoundly disappointed. Additionally, how would the designer react to the chair's feedback? "Supporting all that weight is hard." Well, it's a chair; not much chance of lightening that load (no pun intended).

So, to conclude this inanity, I've become rather disillusioned with the idea of going to meet my maker. I think I would rather go and meet some interesting people at a party and have philosophical conversations over some good drinks for the rest of existence. Or, you know, just be dead. Whatever.

The following conversation took place while stuck in traffic:
Me: There's a police car next to us with its lights flashing, but no one is yielding to it.
Dan: Actually, there is no law here that says you have to yield to police.
Me: So how do they get anywhere in this traffic?
Dan: That's their problem.

Approved by Dan.

This will come as no surprise, but there are a lot of people here. The country is sharply divided between countryside and major cities (a city is considered major if the official population exceeds half a million), of which there are fewer than 80. Of those 80, 46 are considered extra-large cities, with official populations greater than one million. For a total population of more than 1.3 billion people. You do the math. The countryside is mostly farms with some mining, industrial, and power plants, while cities are mostly industrial, commercial, and service-oriented. People frequently come from the countryside to cities in search for work. This is not as easy as it sounds, since you need a permit to work in cities, which are already overcrowded. If you have a job waiting, a permit is relatively easy to come by -- your employer will get you one. Otherwise, you face the same problems as illegal immigrants do in the US. And similar consequences if you get caught. While quality of life is arguably better in the cities, I wonder if the wage these workers get is a living wage. Although living costs here are remarkably low.
This situation causes a large disparity between cost of labor and cost of automation. Labor is extremely cheap. Farm work is done by hand. Carts are pulled by animals or people. I've seen flocks of sheep herded by people. There are a few trucks for carrying heavy loads. In the cities, street cleaning is done by hand -- a person sweeps a street segment, collects garbage a carts, then move on to clean another segment. They pull those garbage carts by hand. Garbage trucks are used in residential districts to collect trash put out by residents. In stores, restaurants, and shops, the service is generally impeccable. It's not unusual to have one (or more) waiter/waitress per table.
Plentiful labor means cheap labor. As a result, everything that can be done manually IS done manually. This is of course shocking to anyone coming from the US, where even farms are so heavily automated that, with a few notable exceptions (that drive up prices for manually-picked goods), they require supervisors and tractor drivers, not laborers. Direct-to-consumer low-skilled labor, such as clothes mending, shoe repair, etc. is shockingly cheap ($0.30 for shoe shines, $5 for shoe repairs). This is fortunate for those of us who do not like to throw away perfectly good footwear just because it happens to have a hole in it. Food is very cheap ($1 breakfasts, $3 lunches, $10 dinners at luxurious restaurants -- per person). I suspect this has more to do with the price of labor (waitstaff, cooks, etc.) than the ingredients. And cooking is skilled labor!
Machinery, on the other hand, is very expensive (more about technology in general in a later post). Imported goods are likewise expensive. For reference, Japan-made eyeglass frames cost more than they do in the US, even though the import costs must be lower here. Prices for US-imported goods also match US prices. Keep in mind that salaries DO NOT match. A restaurant server in a GOOD restaurant can expect RMB1000 per month. That's roughly $147 Per MONTH. There are no tips. In fact, it is officially illegal to accept them. That law is being reversed real soon now.
Anyway, this post is already too long. More later.

Approved by Dan.

Driving here is anything but boring. As far as I can tell, traffic laws are strictly opt-in. Pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and buses share the road at speeds and distances that would give the most aggressive Chicago driver pause. Lanes are mere suggestions. Yielding is for the weak. Red lights are [mostly] obeyed purely because not doing so would bring traffic to a standstill. Pedestrians frequently cross against lights (if they choose to cross at a light at all), and as a consequence cars often weave around pedestrians standing in the middle of high-speed traffic. Due to all this, it is often faster to take a bus than a cab.

I finally figured that driving here is basically a massively-multiplayer game of chicken. You win if you do not yield. To anyone. It's not rare to see pedestrians win this game over cars and buses. These are the character classes:

Pedestrian: -7 speed, +5 agility
Bicycle: -5 speed, +3 agility
Moped: -2 speed, +2 agility
Car: +0 speed, +0 agility
Bus: -1 speed, -2 agility

One would think bus speeds would slow to a crawl, but they do not due to the aggressiveness of the bus drivers. Using the bulk of the bus as a wedge to get into traffic, they frequently manage better time than cars. Not coming to a full stop at most bus stops also helps.

Approved by Dan.