Tzu Chi Foundation (慈济, CiJi) often travel (via hired chartered buses) to rural outskirts 50-150km (or farther) from Kunming to provide supplies & assistance to those in need.
This Kunming-based charity organization may welcome foreign English teachers for their frequent missions. Not sure. You'll have to touch base with the Tzu Chi volunteer leaders (info end of post).
Many of the members are Buddhists, but you don't have to be one to join. Compassion & time, all that are required. Tzu Chi has world-wide reach. Their members consist of retired or active professionals with day jobs who find free time to help the impoverished, the sick, the foster children, or the elders.
For reference, here's an old English article published by their foundation, titled "Tzu Chi Delivers Winter Aid to Thousands Across China - Yunnan:"
Then POTUS Bill Clinton couldn’t dissuade the caning of American graffiti kid in Singapore. Granted punishment strokes were reduced as a show of diplomatic goodwill.
The most infamous among Singapore's laws was forbidding gum chewing. If memory serves right, the gum ban was the city-state's response to a bygone social protest of sticking gum all over the transit system.
That said, officers eschewed enforcement of gum chewing. Trivial restrictions are regularly overlooked to avoid reigniting social unrest. Outside Orchard Road, locals chew gums (smuggled from Malaysian border) or spit regardless. After all, they're just gum, not guns.
Department store bathroom smokers will annoyingly persist. Cameras won't be installed in WCs anytime soon...
but outside smokey water closets, the advent of A.I. surveillance w/ automatic social credit deductions may pick up the slack in the cat & mouse enforcement game.
Newly developed machine learning cameras will be upgraded with capabilities of identifying civilians by their walking gait and body shape in the event faces are concealed from view. Detection accuracy will be in question, but incrementally fine-tuned. That’s the neural network power of machine learning.
This harks back to the discussion from another thread on why vehicles have begun yielding to pedestrians at intersections.
Rules are abided when laws are strictly and automatically enforced. Civility ensues when drivers receive instant text messages of ticket penalties as caught by automated traffic cameras. Just don't read the messages while driving.
---------
In regards to popular online gaming, which Chinese youths are seemingly addicted to these days. It’s my understanding Tencent Holdings Limited (parent of WeChat/QQ) monopolizes the gaming industry in China.
Piggyback off the omnipresence of smartphones, Tencent’s multiplayer online battles such as role-playing Honour of Kings harbor 200 million monthly subscribers. This and other popular blockchain esports require players to login and verify age in order to connect with the vast online community of gamers in real-time. These aren’t the standalone, offline games one would download from torrent magnets.
Like Alipay/Wepay cashless payment services @tiger mentioned, players’ personal records and transaction history are logged. Gaming accounts with mandatory age verification are linked to police database. So for the vast majority, they can and will be traced.
Tencent will readily hand over jurisdiction of user profiles if called upon from higher power. Minors or adolescents who play nonstop would be automatically logged off from the games. The "nanny" eyes of T.J. Eckleburg will be watching your child.
For those heading northwest next month, you're in luck!
The new high speed rail section from Dali to Lijiang is scheduled to run in December. The 161 km public maiden voyage will only take 50 minutes. Hence, approximately 3 hours from Kunming to Lijiang (vice versa) via the high speed rail.
which begs the question. When is surveillance too much?
Like Ray Bradbury, dystopian novelists paint doom & gloom not to predict the future, but to prevent it. Figuratively & literally speaking, firefighters create burnout control lines to prevent the flames from escaping the boundaries...
apparently the downwind of surveillance and societal control is blowing faster in our direction than anticipated.
I'm grateful to have learned a thing or two this morning from @red, thanks!
The long-distance bipedal locomotion of modern humans is quite impressive, rivaling some of the most prolific distance runners in the animal kingdom. It makes sense to gradually abandon hairy insulation to make way for more sweat glands, which outnumber those of animals. Sweating is an effective natural body cooling system. Particularly useful when chasing food or being chased by rival clans. Otherwise crashing mid-chase like an overheated CPU may be detrimental... not only for the runners, but for the women & children relying on them for food or protection.
——————-
@lemon "An explanation might be that the wearing of clothing stops the hair from growing."
So either you're bald like a lemon in the nether regions, or you waddle about Spring City without underpants like Donald Duck. Both scenarios are quite disturbing. lol
How could you @alien? Look at how adorable they are!
I'm in no mood for Kevin Bacon jokes.
The recent halt of soy bean imports from the U.S. may inadvertently result in protein deficiencies for these piggies. Weakening them and their immunology. As a result, more antibiotic-resistant super bugs may spawn. Potentially crossing over to virally infect humans.
Furthermore, what alternative feeds will be given to these livestock? What are the cocktail of chemical fertilizers infused in the production of these substitute feeds? Surely, these unclassified chemical compounds will imbue their cellular tissues. Making their way on to your dinner table. And eventually interacting with your gut flora in a cascade of chain reactions.
Animal fat by themselves have already been shown to have adverse health effects, let alone the addition of industrial substances.
@dolphin: "how come people who are descendants of people living in Siberia for centuries don't have furs on their skin?"
Fossil records show our earliest ancestors started out in either Africa or China. It may have took them many generations to migrate outward to Siberia... diversifying across Europe and Asia.
In my above mate-selection analogy in dolphins, perhaps a hairy face & neck weren't attractive traits as they resembled those of our simian cousins or Neanderthals, and were telltale signs of cognitive inferiority.
Those sporting animal furs symbolized power and intellectual prowess needed to survive and thrive in prehistoric harsh environments. Women sought after those men in lieu. Men picked women with less less bodily hair. This merry-go-round stigma ensued. Over generations, full body hair dissipated prior to their arrival in freezing cold Siberia.
If you think stereotyping & racism permeate our societies now, they were pretty nasty hundreds of millennia ago. Heck, humans wiped out the hairy Neanderthals. Just decades ago Hitler nearly succeeded in wiping out the Jews.
@alien: "Well, I guess they could have been dragon bones..."
Fire or ice breathing variety? lol
—————-
@redjon
Well said, and to speak nothing of vestigiality of land or marine mammals...
one convenient example would the vestigial pelvic bone or the extra set of fins endowed by dolphins. which perhaps may be remnants of hind limbs.
50 million years earlier, dolphins shared a common ancestor as hippos and deer that roamed the lands on all fours. Like whales, their distant ancestors fared better near water, and eventually beneath it. Granted both dolphins and whales still need to come up to the surface to breathe air with their lungs. They don't have gills like fish.
I'd presume in their gradual transition from land to ocean, their female counterparts would seek out the most impressive males. The most prolific in hunting in shallow or deep waters. Being good swimmers or have longer jaws to scavenge near surface would definitely help. Offspring would endow these traits, incrementally becoming more pronounced over generations. Btw, dolphins still retain a single lower jaw bone common to mammals.
If wolves can evolve into miniature, toy dog breeds in a mere 30,000 years, granted with help of selective breeding. Imagine 50,000,000 years of evolution by natural selection.
————
Based on @dolphin's posts in the past, I don't believe he is completely trolling in regards to the rejection of evolution. If a totally random site like GoK is imparting contradictory knowledge of preconceived world views, you'd think one would start questioning it... which he is. That's a good sign. Science is always such a fascinating topic worth diving into.
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Gulls arrival in Kunming warrants special treatment
发布者Siberian seagulls have returned. Here's a historic picture of their first arrival in Kunming:
i.imgur.com/407pqOo.jpg
Stone Age graveyard discovered in Yunnan's Chuxiong Prefecture
发布者I'm grateful to have learned a thing or two this morning from @red, thanks!
The long-distance bipedal locomotion of modern humans is quite impressive, rivaling some of the most prolific distance runners in the animal kingdom. It makes sense to gradually abandon hairy insulation to make way for more sweat glands, which outnumber those of animals. Sweating is an effective natural body cooling system. Particularly useful when chasing food or being chased by rival clans. Otherwise crashing mid-chase like an overheated CPU may be detrimental... not only for the runners, but for the women & children relying on them for food or protection.
——————-
@lemon "An explanation might be that the wearing of clothing stops the hair from growing."
So either you're bald like a lemon in the nether regions, or you waddle about Spring City without underpants like Donald Duck. Both scenarios are quite disturbing. lol
Swine fever scare temporarily shutters Yunnan pork industry
发布者How could you @alien? Look at how adorable they are!
I'm in no mood for Kevin Bacon jokes.
The recent halt of soy bean imports from the U.S. may inadvertently result in protein deficiencies for these piggies. Weakening them and their immunology. As a result, more antibiotic-resistant super bugs may spawn. Potentially crossing over to virally infect humans.
Furthermore, what alternative feeds will be given to these livestock? What are the cocktail of chemical fertilizers infused in the production of these substitute feeds? Surely, these unclassified chemical compounds will imbue their cellular tissues. Making their way on to your dinner table. And eventually interacting with your gut flora in a cascade of chain reactions.
Animal fat by themselves have already been shown to have adverse health effects, let alone the addition of industrial substances.
Stone Age graveyard discovered in Yunnan's Chuxiong Prefecture
发布者@dolphin: "how come people who are descendants of people living in Siberia for centuries don't have furs on their skin?"
Fossil records show our earliest ancestors started out in either Africa or China. It may have took them many generations to migrate outward to Siberia... diversifying across Europe and Asia.
In my above mate-selection analogy in dolphins, perhaps a hairy face & neck weren't attractive traits as they resembled those of our simian cousins or Neanderthals, and were telltale signs of cognitive inferiority.
Those sporting animal furs symbolized power and intellectual prowess needed to survive and thrive in prehistoric harsh environments. Women sought after those men in lieu. Men picked women with less less bodily hair. This merry-go-round stigma ensued. Over generations, full body hair dissipated prior to their arrival in freezing cold Siberia.
If you think stereotyping & racism permeate our societies now, they were pretty nasty hundreds of millennia ago. Heck, humans wiped out the hairy Neanderthals. Just decades ago Hitler nearly succeeded in wiping out the Jews.
Stone Age graveyard discovered in Yunnan's Chuxiong Prefecture
发布者@alien: "Well, I guess they could have been dragon bones..."
Fire or ice breathing variety? lol
—————-
@redjon
Well said, and to speak nothing of vestigiality of land or marine mammals...
one convenient example would the vestigial pelvic bone or the extra set of fins endowed by dolphins. which perhaps may be remnants of hind limbs.
50 million years earlier, dolphins shared a common ancestor as hippos and deer that roamed the lands on all fours. Like whales, their distant ancestors fared better near water, and eventually beneath it. Granted both dolphins and whales still need to come up to the surface to breathe air with their lungs. They don't have gills like fish.
I'd presume in their gradual transition from land to ocean, their female counterparts would seek out the most impressive males. The most prolific in hunting in shallow or deep waters. Being good swimmers or have longer jaws to scavenge near surface would definitely help. Offspring would endow these traits, incrementally becoming more pronounced over generations. Btw, dolphins still retain a single lower jaw bone common to mammals.
If wolves can evolve into miniature, toy dog breeds in a mere 30,000 years, granted with help of selective breeding. Imagine 50,000,000 years of evolution by natural selection.
————
Based on @dolphin's posts in the past, I don't believe he is completely trolling in regards to the rejection of evolution. If a totally random site like GoK is imparting contradictory knowledge of preconceived world views, you'd think one would start questioning it... which he is. That's a good sign. Science is always such a fascinating topic worth diving into.