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

here's a video with english subs to explain why 云南 is so special. here's another video that's more about 昆明 tourism

It's sad to see 苏州 (suzhou) characterized by its relationship to 上海 (shanghai), when 上海 is merely a city invented by China within the last 100 years to interface with the capitalist west. 上海's culture draws from the original, ancient cities of 杭州 (hangzhou) and 苏州. If history had played out slightly differently, 普通话 (common speech) would probably be their 吴语 (wu chinese) due to 南京 (nanjing)'s influence.

Chinese people I've heard from generally say 昆明 (kunming) is the best place to live, at least from a natural scenery and weather perspective. Here's a map, where 昆明 is outlined in the 四季如春 (four seasons as spring) area, meaning the weather year-round is like spring. Beyond the climate, 云南 (yunnan), where 昆明 is located, is a mountainous province that is also a biodiversity hotspot. There's bountiful microclimates and many local cultures as well. Definitely not a "Max GDP" sort of place, but the other factors are incredibly good.

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.

What other place could have:

• Police on every corner
• Ubiquitous surveillance
• Systemic repression

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

here's a pretty solid list of recommendations that you can adjust to your level. I enjoyed watching yolo and 喜羊羊 is a favorite kids show similar to spongebob in the west.

While we’re at it, we may as well make it 4 continents: Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica. I think there’s even an argument for combining Afro-Eurasia and the Americas too, since it’s just one big contiguous landmass during ice ages. This has important biological consequences for the historic exchange of humans and other animals via Beringia. It also makes it easier to understand the close linguistic and genetic relationships between Siberian peoples and Native Americans. I hope you have enjoyed this argument for why a 3 continent world mental model is good, actually

here’s the old and new without distortion from the original platform. i think they look lighter, but this looks to be mostly just from simplifying the depiction to make it more cartoonish. now i’ve really read into this too much

I agree. they definitely just made these kids whiter lmao that’s why they are wearing long, sun-protecting clothes.

It’s funny how big the projection is on making this about sexuality. I think the real story is that they made these kids extremely pale and made them wear long sleeves and pants to avoid the sun. If there’s anything toxic here it’s East Asia’s obsession with paleness (and they are so good at it that they are often paler than euros at this point lmao). For this textbook it’s probably just to convey the innocence of the children, seeing that they’ve been protected from the aging rays of the sun. I’m not Chinese or even Asian for that matter so what do I know though.

Paris is actually quite close to New Caledonia…provided you go through the center of the Earth. I’m sure controlling an island on the other side of the world is a trivial task that the French will surely succeed in! /s

Yeah, I’d venture to guess most people alive in China today spent their childhoods in rural areas based on the urbanization trend. There’s been a lot of recent progress in marriage law within the last year or so. The gist is something like for a woman to divorce her husband you needed evidence of him wronging you and had to wait a cooldown period. Those rules have been relaxed in a drive to combat domestic violence.

One thing people haven’t touched on is how socialism could be more effective at fighting obesity. At the end of the day, farmers produce surplus calories for the rich world far beyond the per-capita caloric needs. Sellers are able to create demand so farmers can get paid by making high calorie foods unsatiating and ubiquitous, which creates an energy surplus as the population level. An obesity epidemic is implicitly a policy decision.

Production could be planned to meet caloric and nutritional needs for the entire population if a society looks past the profit motive. Furthermore, certain food ultraprocessing methods could be better-controlled to contain foods that are basically poison for the body’s energy balance

Thanks for taking the time to write this out! I really appreciate it. Having secure physical resources that are immediately useful is a good idea, I’ll think of what I can do to that extent.