Say you want bookshelf speakers. Going with the budget pick I might get Pioneer SP-BS22-LRs, but they're around 4500RMB here in China. Other reputable brands come in around 10000RMB, which is so far outside my budget its not even funny. But most of these speakers are made in China anyways, so you start sleuthing. K, i find a post on an Audiophile forum that tells me that HiVi(/Swan) makes the drivers for most upscale Audio equipment. Let's check what HiVi has. Ahh, they've got a bloody gorgeous pair of speakers for 1699RMB[0], and a passable one for 699RMB, and an official Taobao store. And they'll do.
Boots I would not buy from China, in China, you can return them and test.
For budget headphones, Senneheiser is what I get in Germany, Tascam if you're in the US, JVC for Asia. Don't know any Chinese brands of note there.
For smartphones Xiaomi is blowing it out of the water right now. Their Redmi（红米） line is incredible value. Then there's Huawei, Meizu, OPPO, Honor, and whatever Hammer(Chuizi) is.
You're assuming that the values of the culture you're living in are necessarily better or more ethical than those held by an individual. But even assuming that is true, the inability to voice ones opinions without ostracism doesn't solve disagreement, it just hides it. Whilst there may be a tremendously pleasing and unproductive perceived homogeneity of opinion around you, that facade is pulled with the curtain of the voting booth.
Stainless is nice, it only loses on thermal mass and non-stickness. But if what you want is food, not perfection, it doesn't narrow your options much, and is much easier to maintain.
For whoever this is news to, check out this XinhuaNet[0] article on holding group administrators accountable for things said in their groups. That they're able to view things is implicit in that. Then check out the pushes for Real Name Identification with online services[1] and phone numbers [2]. Check out the social credit system[3], mandatory by 2020[4]. The national face recognition system [5]. Its actually kinda incredible.
If by "incredible" you mean "a dystopian hellscape" then yes, it is. And with this comment I probably just eliminated any possibility of a Chinese visa!
So you're saying Tim Cook should throw away whatever leverage he has to change these things in order to appear valorous?
Maybe what Cook has said about freedom is a complete farce. Maybe it isn't. Taking a stand against the Chinese government might win him points on HN, but not with the Chinese government. And at the end of the day, they make the call on whether they'll tear down the wall or close the gates.
I didn't say how much leverage he had. Though whatever privacy focused technology they manage to get away with under the watchful eye of the party is still a win on the freedoms front. End-to-end encrypted imessage, secure enclave, etc. And he still gets to consort with the Chinese to whatever degree he is able to.
Now Beijing is 寸土寸金, which is Chinese for "real estate is really expensive". Yet there's still ghost malls. The herd mentality is real.
That said i enjoy Taobao for how i can get out of town prices inside of Beijing. But that pales in comparison to the sheer amount of stuff you can get on there. Want a chair? Done. Want beta-amylase in a 20kg bag? Done. Want socks? Done. Want a reverse osmosis system? A rotary evaporator? 12kg of chicken wings? Done, done, done.
Reminds me of the problem that uses Graham's number, where the lower bound shifted from 6 to 11 to 13, and the upper bound is a number that exceeds the bounds of up arrow notation.
A bit off topic, but the (not very good) novel The World at the End of Time inspired the same thoughts in me.
One of the narrators is an immortal being who can manipulate energy. He has a grand old time in his youth swimming around in the cores of main sequence stars, playing and thinking and scheming for billions of years. He manages to kill off all of his kin, ensuring his survival forever. But eventually the really desirable, hot stars start to burn out. He has to move to longer-living dwarf stars, and turn down his mental processes because they can't be completely supported with the reduced amount of energy available. The universe continues to age and the stars dim and he's forced to let go of large parts of his memory because he can't afford the energy expenditure to keep it coherent. He begins to fear for his continued survival, always hungry and searching for sources of energy. Much later, the stars have burned out to cinders and are nearly at thermal equilibrium with the - by now - extremely dim background radiation. He's terrified of black holes but their Hawking radiation is the best remaining source of energy in the universe so he gets close to a big black hole, a shadow of his former self, holding onto only a few core memories with the energy of the particles emanating from the event horizon. He hibernates for eons at a time, slowly gathering energy until he can afford a few moments of consciousness. The black holes of course eventually evaporate and he becomes effectively insensate, living off the meager energy of protons occasionally decaying.
Say you want bookshelf speakers. Going with the budget pick I might get Pioneer SP-BS22-LRs, but they're around 4500RMB here in China. Other reputable brands come in around 10000RMB, which is so far outside my budget its not even funny. But most of these speakers are made in China anyways, so you start sleuthing. K, i find a post on an Audiophile forum that tells me that HiVi(/Swan) makes the drivers for most upscale Audio equipment. Let's check what HiVi has. Ahh, they've got a bloody gorgeous pair of speakers for 1699RMB[0], and a passable one for 699RMB, and an official Taobao store. And they'll do.
Boots I would not buy from China, in China, you can return them and test.
For budget headphones, Senneheiser is what I get in Germany, Tascam if you're in the US, JVC for Asia. Don't know any Chinese brands of note there.
For smartphones Xiaomi is blowing it out of the water right now. Their Redmi（红米） line is incredible value. Then there's Huawei, Meizu, OPPO, Honor, and whatever Hammer(Chuizi) is.
[0]https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?id=542718449070&ns=1&abbuc...