Can you put “Free Palestine” on them?
error: not recognized as a country by the US
The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
191–200 of 318 posts
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public transportation, affordable healthcare, & weechat are all things that are significantly better in China. — An American that spent a few weeks in China.
The healthcare thing doesn't jive with what I've heard from my native Chinese friends; I've heard if you have the right connections (and by association, wealth) you can get exactly what you need, but without that you can't get anything.
On the contrary, I believe most people will be better off with the Chinese healthcare system than the U.S. one, because nobody go bankrupt from going to the doctor. Office visit cost at most $20 - that's without insurance. Every thing has a fixed price, so you will never get a surprise bill afterwards. If you insist on visiting the best doctor in the field, wait time can be long; but otherwise you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly. Meanwhile, in the U.S., I have good health insurance through my employer, yet I am still terrified of going to the doctors, especially, god forbid, the ER.
As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much.
Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chinese ethnic minorities visiting Beijing are themselves something of a tourist attraction; tour guides leading Westerners around point and stare and talk about those minorities sort of the way you'd point and stare and talk about a wild animal you found roaming the streets. On a related note, in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China saw fit to have the flag be brought in by 56 children wearing the traditional costu…
>They were all Han. dumb question: is it possible to tell?
Err it’s easy to tell a Han from Uyghur, Chinese Kazakhs and many others closer to Russian and Middle-East origins.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transportation, not healthcare. High speed rail is ridiculously good, it connects just about every major Chinese city, it’s affordable, very comfortable and fast. I would consider healthcare an exception, it may be affordable but outside of a few expensive clinics in Beijing and Shanghai it’s really bad. Mobile payments are way ahead of other places (you can pay any random person you meet instantly with your phone, a…
> WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. That's interesting! At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)
It may be a case of Google lagging behind others yeah, I’m not overly familiar with translators other than as a casual user. WeChat is very “smoothed” in that it gives you something that makes grammatical sense and sounds native, in preference to being a direct translation. Which usually works really well but occasionally gives hilarious results. It also seems to take the context of the conversation into account rather than just the message you’re translating.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t speak to healthcare generally but one of my college roommates was from China and she just could not wrap her head around the politicization of birth control in the US. I remember her asking us if Americans thought it was dangerous or addictive because she couldn’t understand why it was so controversial that the affordable care act required birth control to be covered.
A sibling comment has already mentioned the one-child issue, but I wanted to say... Chinese culture is so deeply different from American culture about all sorts of things about reproduction and fertility. Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all! In the U.S. it's common for people'…
I want to add:
I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.)
I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fear of being taken to a dark hole somewhere for making fun of the ruling junta, especially the top boss AKA the President/Chairman. /s
Pretty sure that fear is very much alive in Portland right now
Sure, let’s point to a single, or two, case in one city in the US, in which case the DHS is being sued last I checked, to contrast a ground up system in the whole of China.
Just today, or yesterday, a respected prof got fired from Tsinghua for being critical of CCP and Xi in particular.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples? From my direct experience from a 3 weeks journey 5 years ago: A super app like WeChat. I'm happy we don't have one because super app == super control. (BTW WhatsApp was still legal back then.) A ban on gas powered small motorcycles. All of them were electric, some with a retrofitted electric engine, some natively electric. I wish we did the same. I can't think about other things that were or could look bett…
Half joke/half serious: 1. Food(any objection?) 2. Public transportation: high speed rail road 3. Huge and fancy malls: USA is behind believe it or not 4. E-payment & WeChat: Chinese people think differently. 5. Food delivery and all kinds of half-day delivery 6. Free of Racism: invisible ceiling 7. Cultural recreational activities that you don’t understand 8. Crowded.
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Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#198Here's another angle. The increasing censorship within China leaves less and less opportunity for the greater Chinese population to learn about the capabilities of other countries. A few examples of excellence that are still available to Chinese citizens are the NBA, Apple products, US education and Tesla cars. Most nations export excellence of some type to China. Having these examples in their hands or on their scre…
While I think your point is mostly valid and benign, Your impression of China seems outdated and tone might seem a bit arrogant to a native Chinese. Chinese people recognize the gap and appreciate the excellence in their daily life. The CCP rarely censored in the way you described(e.g. it never says China’s education/manufacturing is the best, instead they call out the remaining gap constantly). As a matter of fact,…
While there is some truth in what you say, many overseas Chinese get their news from Chinese sources even if they have access to better options. It creates a vicious cycle of cognitive dissonance.
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half joke/half serious: 1. Food(any objection?) 2. Public transportation: high speed rail road 3. Huge and fancy malls: USA is behind believe it or not 4. E-payment & WeChat: Chinese people think differently. 5. Food delivery and all kinds of half-day delivery 6. Free of Racism: invisible ceiling 7. Cultural recreational activities that you don’t understand 8. Crowded.
China's great if you have a decent amount of money -- labor's cheap, so all sorts of stuff (food prep, transportation, delivery services) that's heavy on labor is dirt cheap in China even if it's unaffordable in the West. But racism... speaking as a rich white guy who was treated as nicely as you'd generally expect, even I could tell it wouldn't be fun to be an ethnic minority there. Chinese ethnic minorities visitin…
But you were an ethnic minority too when you were in China right?
I never understood this line of thinking though - the way you describe it sounds like it was out of pure curiosity rather than racism. It's interesting seeing the difference of how people define racism based on who they are and where they grew up.
For example - racism in Australia can be seen through racial slurs and physical violence from the moment they start interacting with others (preschool) up to adulthood. Or it can come in many subvert forms in the professional workspace. Contrast this to where I hear of racial minorities coming into Asia who for the most part get treated at best above everyone and at worst out of curiosity (e.g. staring)
Re: The NBA bans customers from putting ‘freehongkong’ on customized league jerseys
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is about 15 years out of date. There isn’t much that is “excellent beyond what is available” in China anymore. This type of thinking is why western foreign policy continues to get China totally wrong. Chinese people who study abroad are more often confused by the things missing in the west than they are liberated in the way you describe, in my experience.
Examples? From my direct experience from a 3 weeks journey 5 years ago: A super app like WeChat. I'm happy we don't have one because super app == super control. (BTW WhatsApp was still legal back then.) A ban on gas powered small motorcycles. All of them were electric, some with a retrofitted electric engine, some natively electric. I wish we did the same. I can't think about other things that were or could look bett…
Here's one of the most important things I can think of that's pushing me back to China more and more each day:
I live in one of the major NA cities and I dont feel safe walking outside after dark (after 8pm).
I have a friend got robbed on knifepoint around 11pm this past March. The case hasn't been closed. Numerous friends' homes got broke in and stuff stolen and cases are all cold.
And I was almost hit by a left turning car on a quite street. The car sped away without checking if i'm ok.
Yes I miss getting my privacy striped away by all the CCTV cameras and feeling safe. I miss all the speed cameras and red light cameras. All the cameras that the existence of them having the deterrent effect for thieft and robberies and traffic violations.
I'm aware of the quote: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Because I've been telling that to my friends before I left China and live in NA. But now I think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs more often than that. (https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#:~:text=Maslow'...)
Culturally I'm just used to a higher level of safety I guess. Japan, Singapore, Taiwan other than PRC are like that too. So it's more of an Asian thing.
And that heirarchy actually explain a lot why Chinese seems to be not on the same frequency with westerners on human right issues. Because I guess Chinese are still at a lower level of that hierarchy right now.