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Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#81

Post by bandrami »

wrfrmers wrote: post #79
bandrami wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that the universally recognized setting for a grim cyberpunk dystopia is not a theoretical prediction but a memory of an actual city just north of Hong Kong that was demolished 30 years ago

Cyberpunk has always been, "What if what happens to those people happened to us ?" "Us" being the relatively affluent and stable first world, "those people" being the put-upon urban poor and working class (which I usually summarize as "black Americans" for American readers - to shake them out of their myopia regarding the social and racial politics of the genre - but, as you point out, should include people in Asia a…

Great points

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#82

Post by tim333 »

bandrami wrote: post #49
thenthenthen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which city? Are you talking about Kowloon Walled city?

I am. The memory of it somehow became the universally-accepted built environment of the future.

It wasn't that bad. I wandered in a bit. Crowded but none of the evil stuff mentioned above.

I tend to think of cyberpunk as more Blade Runner which is kind of spread out with room for flying cars.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#83

Post by bobthepanda »

rsynnott wrote: post #60
snapcaster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow you're not kidding! looked this up and revenues are somewhere like 10x-20x of macau compared to vegas. That's pretty nuts, didn't realize there was that big of a gap

AIUI gambling is still pretty much entirely illegal in mainland China, so it pretty much has a captive market of 1.5bn people. Vegas has a much smaller _obligate_ market; gambling's far more (legally) available in the US than in China. Like, if you like on the American east coast, and enjoy gambling, Vegas may be a place that you'd like to go, but you have other closer options.

Vegas has definitely pivoted more into showbiz and entertainment.

Macao has not only China but is a quick flight for most of the world's population, particularly NE and SE Asia, and most importantly most people are not residents of Macao. In East Asia, where gambling is allowed it's usually not permitted for the residents of the country (e.g. Singapore)

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#84

Post by misantroop »

lawgimenez wrote: post #44
misantroop wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philippines is corrupt to the core as well, from courts to police to civilians. So the real reason why POGOs were thrown out of the country was that the didn't pay off the right people. Nothing gets done in Philippines without bribes.

I live here my whole life for over 40 years, anecdotal I know, but I have only encountered one corrupt scenario in my lifetime. Nothing gets done is just too dramatic.

Correct, I should have specified it applies to more significant events. Simple paperwork is typically not an issue. Lived there for 10 years and was amazed at how even relatively small cases aren't handled honestly. For example when my vehicle was hit, the police registers the crash and and the driver afterwards flees, the courts determined that they cannot say who was driving. Absurd in any civilised country as then the vehicle owner is responsible or at least interviewed. This is my personal experience, one of quite a few, not hearsay.

I also had friends dealing with legal for multinationals, for things to work you needed to know the right people or pay the right people. Otherwise your licenses and approvals would mysteriously simply never be processed.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#85

Post by gs17 »

api wrote: post #69

For those who don't know -- Boca Raton, Florida is well known in the US as a major center of scams and borderline-scams like MLMs. Utah has a history of being a home for this stuff too, as well as a lot of quack supplement companies and self-help nonsense. Just pointing this out so we don't think this doesn't exist here.

You also might be in the category of "those who don't know". The scammers here are absolutely nothing even remotely comparable to MLMs. Most MLMs are questionable, but AFAIK Herbalife isn't kidnapping people in Canada to keep as sales-slaves in Florida, and MLMs might try to ruin you financially if you attempt to leave, but they usually don't torture you to death. See the case of a Chinese celebrity kidnapped in Thailand and brought to Myanmar, who managed to get rescued largely due to being famous enough: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd606l1407no

Yes, there likely are things like that which do happen in the US, but it's the exception and not what Boca Raton is built on. The only group holding hundreds of thousands of people against their will to do unpaid labor here is the prison system.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#87

Post by doctorpangloss »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #50
feverzsj wrote: post #32

It's not just some scams. It's the darkest thing ever in the whole human history. After China banned using of death row organs around 2014, the world's largest organ black market has moved to southeast Asia. There are estimated more than 100k victims (mostly Chinese) annually. Some of them may be released, if their families can afford the ransom. The remaining victims are treated like livestock. They are forced into…

Please don't take this as a criticism but do you have a source documenting what you're describing? I'd really like to read up on it.

I guess a better question is, when donation rates in Asia are so low, where are transplanted organs coming from?

Somebody already linked to a variety of research on this topic, it is the consensus that organ procurement in China is exploitative, even if people don’t know the exact details.

Should surgeons even perform transplants in Asia? Many interesting questions.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#88

Post by awongh »

v3ss0n wrote: post #64

I am from Myanmar and Shwe KoKo is the biggest scam hub of the world . Not just online scam they are operating all kind of illegal activities.Myanmar Junta is also part of that and china bordering Laukkai. Laukkai is now liberated and scammers arrested as revolution forces won. Shwe KoKo is last one to be eliminated . They advertise recruitment ads of 8000$ a month for working in IT so many youth went there , and for…

Sad that what's going on in Myanmar isn't more widely reported in international news.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#89

Post by selimthegrim »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
GuB-42 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not British, I am French, and when I think about a city with casinos, that's definitely Las Vegas, and I think that it would be even more true for the British, who have more ties to the US than the French. And yes, more Las Vegas than Monaco, even though it is a 2 hour drive from where I live. Monaco is not famous for casinos (plural), it is famous for one particular casino, that is the Monte-Carlo casino. And i…

> And if they specified Asia, Macao would have popped up in my mind The Xi Admin cracked down on Macau around the 2016-18 period as part of the larger crackdown. It was during this time that most of the gambling (in reality money laundering) operations moved abroad to Phillipines, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc.

Koh Kong also comes to mind.

Re: Shwe Kokko is accused of being a city built on scams

#90

Post by aaron695 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #74
zemvpferreira wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take this as a criticism but do you have a source documenting what you're describing? I'd really like to read up on it.

https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-cambodia-illegal-organ-... https://hir.harvard.edu/for-sale-the-pervasive-organ-trade-i... https://amp.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/32... I bet crime by Chinese against Chinese in other countries is not very reported because local gov won't waste resources on non locals and because CCP won't want it in the news to protect their image And a bonus for the dead comme…

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