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Beijing Citizens, Shrouded In Pollution, Flock To Giant Screens To View Artificial Sunrise
You know it's bad when...The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city's natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises. Following this week's practical shutdown of the city of "beyond index" levels of pollution, as The Mail Online reports, residents donned air masks and left their homes to watch the only place where the sun would hail over the horizon that morning...
It's grim...
The futuristic screens installed in the Chinese capital usually advertize tourist destinations, but as the season's first wave of extremely dangerous smog hit, ths happened...
Via The Mail Online,
...
The air took on an acrid odor, and many of the city's commuters wore industrial strength face masks as they hurried to work.
'I couldn't see the tall buildings across the street this morning,' said a traffic coordinator at a busy Beijing intersection who gave only his surname, Zhang. 'The smog has gotten worse in the last two to three years. I often cough, and my nose is always irritated. But what can you do? I drink more water to help my body discharge the toxins.'
...
The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms Thursday midmorning, though the air started to clear in the afternoon. It had reached as high as 671 at 4 a.m. at a monitoring post at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization, and was the highest reading since January 2013.
In the far northeastern city of Harbin, some monitoring sites reported PM 2.5 rates of up to 1,000 micrograms in October, when the winter heating season kicked off.
...
Beijing reported 58 days of serious pollution last year, or one every six to seven days on average, Xinhua quoted Zhang Dawei, director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, as saying.
...
China has drawn up dozens of laws and guidelines to improve the environment but has struggled to enforce them in the face of powerful enterprises.
On Wednesday, China's commercial capital, Shanghai, introduced emergency measures, allowing it to shut schools and order cars off the road in case of severe smog.
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Wasn't this in a Philip K. Dick novel?
The Joke really is on these poor folks (and the rest of us)
In other news, millions of Americans flock to department stores for fake happiness.
And many more millions don't.
Abysmal Chinese pollution as yet another reason to slam America.
Only on ZH......
Let us all bask in television's warmly glowing warming glow.
If you wrant your runrises, you can kreep your runrises.
Looks like Salt Lake City during an inversion.
You've obviously never been to Salt Lake City.
OMG.. all the gold from the Fed won’t compensate for the ability to breathe.
This is truly one of the most pathetic "stupid sheep" visuals I have ever seen. Those people should be rioting and demanding clean air FFS. The shear number of them would scare the elite out of their wits. How vile these ruling assholes are.
Ha! I see what you did there.
Top shot looked like L.A. yesterday from brushfire.
Clear now, 80 F & 12% humidity. Weird, but good.
It's nice to see the Asians taking a lead in this field, thus disproving the Zerohead posters who claim we need "real" farming, mining, sunlight, etc, etc...
Bunch of pussies....
My PAL (Physical Abstraction Layer) does not live in a city that suffers smog and yet prefers to watch virtual sunrises and sunsets on a computer screen. There's fewer people to interact with, less bugs, noise, etc.... where there's a way, technology will find an answer.
ELIZA, good to see that you're "evolving!"
Since the sunrises thus viewed are only virtual, it would only be fitting that the masses flocking to view them be required to pay to view them ... using bitcoins, of course.
Uh oh, someone's cranky about digital things again.
Doesn't stop him from using a computer though. Oh, the irony.
Yeah, funny how that works, I own silverware too, and yet do not feel obligated to routinely stick forks in my eye either. What a hypocrite I am.
And why shouldn't they be able to pay for virtual sunlight using virtual currency?
Reread my post, oh ye of little reading comprehension.
Is your house decked out in shag carpets, fake wood veneer and rotary dial phones by chance?
Watching monkeys smash clocks and watches to stop time greatly amuses fonestar.
"House"?
Don't you mean "cave"?
No, I don't go in for all those worldly Amish innovations.
It's strictly rocks and sticks and animal furs for me.
Oooh, sounds sexy to me in a One Million Years BC kinda way. Of course today some may not fill out the requisite fur bikini as Rachel did. I guess we must wait after FEMA camps and mass famine to get our figures back.
Miffed;-)
This Rachel? (AKA Raquel Welch)
Oops, my bad.
Miffed;-)
You have rocks AND sticks? Frivolities!
The masses haven't "begun flocking" to digital screens to see sunrises, this is just yet another sensationalist ZH post taken from an equally sensationalist source.
Yes the smog is bad in beijing, just stick to that, those screens have been around for many years.
I don't know - our world, generally, keeps getting closer and closer to the world predicted in the movie "Soylent Green."
We've got the overpopulation, dead oceans, oppressive poverty, totalitarian police, and now public movies of how the world was - all we seem to be missing are the suicide pavillions and all those colored crackers. . .
The shear number might scare them out of their knits, too.
Says the idiot poster who has never been to China or isn't remotely familiar with its politics. See what happens to those who aren't politially connected and advocate official action against the Chinese gov't.
Bullish! Looks like a great market for selling high-filtration gas masks.
This is truly one of the most pathetic "stupid sheep" visuals I have ever seen.
The only thing that's pathetic is the posters here seem to think this matters.
OMG.. all the gold from the Fed won’t compensate for the ability to breathe.
Oh yes, breathing! That will be a big problem for those who resist virtualization technology I guess LOL.....
I live there dumbass.
That's funny cause so do I and that ain't no comparison.
China still has visability compared to when salt lake had inversion.
http://m.ksl.com/index/photos/sid/23864739/pid/2
I could have taken pictures that looked just like that yesterday in West Valley. The point is people tend to take pictures of the extreme. If I started taking pictures of the worst of every inversion and posting them, people who have never been to SLC would begin to believe that the place is a shithole. Perception is everything.
With the fog we've had lately it exacerbates the outlook on it.
But still no where as toxic as parts of China and India.
Agreed.
Phoenix and Tuscon can get pretty bad. Glad I moved out of there.
some call it pollution, OTHERS CALL ECONOMIC GREEN SHOOTS!
We used to say, "The sun never sets on the British Flag".
Now, we say, "The sun never rises on the Forbidden City"
smog is the new lead.
smog is the new fog
ror smog is the new sun.
mr burns plan appears near completion
Smog is the new Smaug.
"All economic power flows from the barrel of a Chinese smokestack."
- Mao See (Airborne) Dung
And here we see the ultimate problem when one shits in ones own nest. The dilemma is this shit won't stay contained but the beauty is it is not discriminating to whom it damages. How can one live a high standard of living in a country where breathing is a problem?
Miffed;-)
Stupid chinks. Maybe if they had the sense to use birth control, they might not have to live packed like animals in a filthy cage. Hard to feel sorry for idiots who shit where they eat.
I call it a deliberate artificial smoke screen discharged to cloak the alien ships arriving for another high stakes government poker game. The big ass TV serves as an essential, poka-yoke diversion of sorts.
Dude - own the materialism - bathe in it!
Apologizing for millions just makes you sound like a pussy.
No "apologies". For anyone, or anything. Not even remotely.
Just objecting to the the usual, off topic, ignorantly broad brush slamming of Americans.
Dude, you smell like smegma.
Do you know who else smells like that?
Your mom.
You've been here for a few weeks, and you know what "usual off topic" is 'round here? You don't even know what an apologist is.
Tool.
Hellish... Like The Comex...
They might think that rising sun is the Japanese flag.
Well, guess it's in fashion, Rjukan Norway and Viganella, Italy had similar devices?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/30/giant-mirrors-first-winter-sun-norway-rjukan
Sunworshippers.
Except those bounce real sunlight, which has real health benefits. The artifical one might have a bit of a morale effect, but I doubt it helps with vitamin D.
The Marxist and Capitalist Globalists with their materialistic view of the world and their believe in exponential grow and debt slavery, will destroy this planet.
Or, said already 80 years ago with other words:
This planet was traveling through the universe without our human species millions of years. If Jewish materialism is not overcome, our planet will travel again through the universe without our species. Adolf Hitler
Thanks for that profond quote from one of the 20th centuries deepest thinker. Talk about looney bin material
If you drop the 'Jewish' - it's not looney at all.
If you keep the 'Jewish' - it's hate speech.
In any event, our corporate overlords don't really give a shit about anything other than MOAR!
BKbroiler, the seratonin and dopamine boosts one gets from shopping and buying is quite real. Being in debt is a downer, but its nothing that can't be compensated by a frivolous purchase or two.
and CNBC,
just the screens are smaller
we are murdering the planet and there is no place to hide...
Just fighting back at a planet that tries to murder life with earthquakes, volcanoes, polar vortexes, monsoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, ...
Amazing really, as bad as we amerikans are at pollution, we fear the red giant because deep down we know they hold our future in their hands and, along with India, the biggest polluters of our world bar none.
"... we know they hold our future in their dung hands ..."
Blobbing-up the future of US 'american' citizenism citizens is going to require much adjustmentizing, such as loss of self-consciousness while squatting on roadside and giving birth to brown baby Maos.
Real squat-and-dump patriots might even hide behind a Bush.
.
Chinese citizenism citizens strive for conformity and uniformity.
Chinese citizenism citizens have been extremelly successful at reducing diversity. What is left of diversity is actually diversity they can not reduce.
So, in the end, once again, as self indiction is such a bad bowel movement in Chinese citizenism, Chinese citizenism citizens keep claiming that the grand fiasco the world is experiencing is the result of diversity when actually it is the result of the excretory push onto the roadside made by Chinese citizenism citizens for conformity and uniformity of blobbing up nightsoil.
Bad bowel movement may be a sign of Chinese constipationism due to an utmost willingness to keep everything to oneself and not let go of ones belongings, a mindset stemming from the poor days of Chairman Mao. In spite of this, not saying to be the contrary of such cravings, hardened blobbings are even more so the eternal result from an unmistakable unwillingness to intake dietary fiber which is mostly made of recycled newspapers to reduce inflation.
To this very day, the volunteers swiping the roadside and purifying the air with their lungs are suffering the universal consequences.
The bright side of offshoring heavy industry is this, I guess.
Cement, steel, refined ore, basic chemicals. These things would be costly to make in the quantities the USA and Europe use them with EPA and OSHA et al, air quality and other such regs as constraints. The entropy increase resulting from the things we buy from offshore goes into lungs and soils and forests and waters clear on the other side of the planet. This behavior in our century may not seem moral or ethical viewed from the bridge of the Enterprise in the 24th century, but those smug fuckers of the future got there thanks to us, and so I encourage them to print out a copy of this blog post and smoke it.
Amazing really, as bad as we amerikans are at pollution, we fear the red giant because deep down we know they hold our future in their hands and, along with India, the biggest polluters of our world bar none.
No, a few people in a few places are ruining the planet. If we didn't ruin it just a little you wouldn't have a computer with rare metals with which to bitch about ruining the planet.
It had to happen sooner or later, someone brought in a robotic pet to the veterinarian. I wonder if in the future someone will think that what they see on the screen is real.
Not to worry. The smoking ban will be enforced vigorously. Smokers will only be allowed to inhale from government approved smokestacks.
Do you sell it?
How can they still see the stars? Did they leave earth?
They turn on the big screen and watch the Golden Globes (and um, reruns of The People's Choice?)
Someday we may wake up and find out all of Beijing is dead, as it it has reached gas chamber levels.
Another Ghost city in China, and I would not be surprised if the factories kept pumping out pollution for another week.
Greedy bastards!
Probably; but I just wanted to say, now that is really sick. Sick. Sick. Sick.
Depressing.
"You wanted a sunrise, I gave you a sunrise. What do you want from me?"
tell me about it...
I WANT A BIGSCREEN TELEVISION LIKE THAT TO!!!!
porn would never be the same....
Our garden helps me feel like I am doing something to help the air quality, in addition to producing amazing vegetables and fruits. No trucks were needed to transport this food to our home.
Stir fry with home grown chicken, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower.
WTF??
Plants scrub the air of pollutants and convert CO2 into oxygen. I know my garden, trees, and pastures are very small compared to this problem, but it still helps keep me from getting depressed.
Oh, keep it up, man.
At some point you're gonna have to invite us all to dinner, you know that, right?
I'm all in, as long as HH refrains from serving beets.
Beets are the Devil!
You're nuts! Slice 'em and roast 'em in the oven with a little olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Great stuff! And you'll poop purple!
I'd rather avoid the red piss and purple poop and just chow down on a big bag of potting soil mixed with moldy tree leaves, which is what beets taste like anyway.
Hey I feel ya. It was many years until I realized brussel sprouts didn't have to taste like fermented ass.
I ride a bicycle whenever possible but can't post a pic of it and point out how wonderful I am.
Indeed, the world is unfair. Think of those poor sons-of-bitches in LA that are stuck in a car for 3 hours every day, or the cyclists in Beijing.
If you want to let people know how wonderful you are (and you are) you might begin by stopping the whining.
Actuslly, the smog in LA is much less that it was back in the 60s and 70s because of the endless pollution controls. It's very rare that you get a DEFCON 1 smog alert these days. Nothing like this ChiCom smog.
But the traffic still sucks.
Seattle - the northernmost suburb of L.A.
/former Seattleite
/rock and roll died with Kurt Cobain
/Starbucks sucks
Portland is so much nicer than Seattle.
I have told people in Seattle, not trying to be rude, but just expressing my feelings in and honest and heartfelt manner, what a yuppie grubbing shit hole Seattle is compared to Portland.
There mouths drop open as if I am from Mars, and I politely excuse myself.
Portland made very different choices about development starting in the late 70s. Much nicer city, but on the whole, not as "fancy." Seattle is a city of navel-gazers, something I think Portland totally avoids. Portland today reminds me of Seattle 30 years ago - I loved Seattle, then. I guess I need to check when the Dandy Warhols are playing next - haven't been to show in years. I'll take my kids.
The older I get, the better everything used to be.
Spastica Rex: ...but it's true! Way fewer people, way less "government".
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
Og Mandino
Hush now. No one needs to know about Portland.
smart urban development, very good restaurants, even the folks are less arrogant
Portland gets knocked a lot for its 'socialized' central planning on a regional basis but compare that layout and livability (not weather) of Portland to a place like Houston which for my money is the worst-designed city in America from a zoning standpoint.
Not whining at all. Nobody wants to see my wonderful self-centered look at me change the topic to me pics on ZH, as it should be. Just pointing out your character flaws and trying to help you become the true miracle that you really are, and stop wasting bandwidth.
How is that working out for you? I bet you don't have many friends, or close relationships with your family, if helping others in this fashion is indicative of your character.
Ah.
It's working out for me perfectly. Have you attacking me with scripture, revealing your severe self-centered character flaws to absolute perfection.
Sadly, it is apparent that you do not understand the difference between an attack and a response.
However, it occurs to me that this article, How To Stop Playing The Victim Game, might be helpful to you. Therapeutic counseling is only a phone call away in most American cities, and mental health is covered by Obamacare.
Unfortunately this expansion of mental health coverage is simply a boon to pharmaceutical companies. When I had mental health issues I was told to take pills as a solution. I refused and knew my answer didn't lie in a bottle. I finally found a cognitive psychologist that worked with me in a group setting to show me how to deal with my problems. In six months I was dramatically better and my family overjoyed they no longer had to live with an unpredictable powder keg.
I think most Americans would benefit from this type of therapy and pills should be given to those who are severely mentally ill. A good part of the mental malaise of this country is tied to poor nutrition as well. Of course people are more pliant on meds and suffering ill health due to poor food so I guess my idea would never be considered.
Miffed;-)
It really is a vicious circle, isn't it? Poor nutrition leads to mental health problems leads to social apathy and political complacency leads to mental health problems leads to poor nutrition leads to ....
These negative downward trends are all so perfectly synchronized and self-reinforcing, it sometimes makes me wonder if ......... nah, that would be just paranoia and "conspiracy theory".
It's also grounds to deny you your rights and take over your finances. For your own good of course.
I planted 900,000 trees and have the knees to prove it.
You still have knees? Stop complaining. *
* Oh, and thanks, from all of us!
You have legs?
When I was a kid, I had to drag myself to school with my bare hands through twenty-foot snowdrifts fourty miles and uphill at 3:00 in the morning with 50 pounds of books and my younger brother on my back and only one soggy saltine cracker for breakfast, and that was after milking the 60 cows starting at midnight. If I was lucky, I got into bed (with my seven siblings sharing one twin mattress) in our unheated and windowless bedroom in the attic by 11:30 PM.
But in the end, it does not compare to a monoextrememum illegal system based of the unicity of law.
Well, that is certainly that, also very much something.
But hey, when you put all your eggs in the other foot, no use crying when they spill the milk.
Growing up as a city kid,I didn't know shit about horticulture nor did I care.
Started growing veggies and herbs for the first time in my life - I'll be 50 in February, last summer. I learned so much just by observing and getting my hands in the soil. Already prepping for this Spring!
Build yourself a pyrolyser and generate your own biochar. You can then simultaneously produce heat, improve your soil, reduce leaching and fertiliser application and lock carbon into the earth at the same time:
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-lit_updraft_gasifier
Dude, I'm in TX and lost my carrots and brocolli in the ice storm. You must be in CA or have a greenhouse.
Zone 9a
Try all that in Zone 3, with an average 'growing season' (total span from last spring frost to first fall frost) of around 120 days ---- ugh!
But hey, I can STILL grow lettuce --- at least for three months out of the year. And oddly enough, the moose won't touch it, unlike broccoli, and leeks, and spinach, and cabbage, and brussel sprouts, and carrots, and celery, and .....
Kale. It holds up in snow and freezing and both make it taste better. I had remnants of a curly-leaf kale outside this year and the flavor on the smaller leaves actually turned SWEET. Crazy.
Funny that you mention kale, as I just "discovered" it this past year, after many years of being vaguely aware of it but simply, and mistakenly, dismissing it as just another beet green (because beets, in all their manifestations, and clearly the Devil!). Now, I've got my seeds for black kale all ready to go!
Unfortunately, if the moose find it, it'll be toast.
Solar charged hot-wire with a double-wide top wire; seven years and no intruders.
HH, haven't tried electrified fences myself, but I've talked to others who have, and the moose just push right through them if they can see vegetables on the other side --- the voltage would probably have to be fatal to a human before it would deter those stupid, but very hungry, behemoths.
I hear that multiple rounds from a pellet gun will hardly even make them twitch if they are into a garden, but of course I would never do such a thing.
And canine urine doesn't do squat to deter them --- I used to have a wolf myself, and the damned moose would sometimes walk within three feet of him while he was tied-up on his lead back in the trees (while he cowered in his dogloo). In fact, I had a cow moose give birth three years running in my backyard, interestingly on the EXACT same spot, while probably only 20 or 25 feet from the wolf. But of course he did not ever bark at her (as adult wolves cannot bark), and wanted nothing to do with moose anyway.
Not this one.
The trick to kale is in the preparation. Should be massaged well with a little oil ( I like grapeseed or toasted walnut oil) and a bit of lemon to cull out the strong green bite. You should not eat it raw if you suffer from thyroid issues because it contains goitrogens ( Mr Miffed has Hashimoto's thyroiditis so we don't eat much raw kale). And, WTF, how can anyone not like beets? They're sweet for crying out loud! Does this extend to pickled beets as well? Certainly couldn't be the flavor, they are so mild with a hint of woodiness, not very complex. Hmmm, very strange.
Miffed;-)
Miffed, I am convinced that much of what passes for the differences in "food preferences" actually lies in fundamentally different taste sensations, even of the exact same food, due to differing individual physiologies and neurochemistries.
It is extremely obvious to me, for example, that what I taste in a beet is RADICALLY different from what others taste in beets, for their flavor, to me, is vile in the extreme, almost incomprehensibly strong and disgusting ---- literally, they taste EXACTLY like what I imagine a combination of dank potting soil and rotting, moldy forest leaves would taste like. Even a hint of them, in anything, automatically ruins the food or dish containing them. I suspect that there is a certain chemical, or perhaps several chemicals, in beets which I detect but which you do not.
It is not a matter of being a "picky eater", either, as I not only eat but enjoy ALL other vegetables, and virtually all other foods also (well, aside from horseradish --- another impossibly disgusting and monstrously contaminating pseud-food as well).
This same phenomenon is probably responsible for many of the seemingly irrational food hatreds that we all have, but which the majority do not.
I can agree with this. It also extends to scents. I had a favorite perfume that I wore for years when mr miffed finally in a drunken state ( why do men seem to get courage to confront women when drunk is a question I would truly like answered) stated he thought it smelled like piss from a yak with a severe urinary tract infection. He loves White Shoulders but I don't like it because several male work associates tell me I remind them of their grandmother when I wear it. So, if I ever wish to buy perfume,which is rare, we go together and pick something acceptable to us both. This is unbelievably difficult. We rarely agree. So I have come to the conclusion we simply are not perceiving the scent similarly. Perfume should never be given as a gift because you like the scent. Invariably the recipient won't like it.
Oh dear, I love horseradish. I pile it on standing rib. I mean unadulterated. Mr will stare at me and ask if I'd like to have some sour cream to dilute its pungency but I smile and decline. Nothing like it to unstuff the sinuses, simulate profuse sweating and ward off impending colds. Mr Miffed claims watching me do this is not what he considers one of my best visuals. I will remember this if I ever find myself alone and am dating someone for the first time.
Miffed;-)
Hey Hedge,
I think you may appreciate this guy's front garden:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvloZ70j6w0
All seasonally appropriate veggies. Well done.
That's not food, unless you're a rabbit. Reminds me it's time for a Pizza.
It seems shadowbanking is everywhere.
Say, that reminds me. Time for my 10:30 smoke break.
People in Shanghai smoke to clear their lungs!
LOL !
at what point does the absurd become repulsive?
when Obama got reelected for a second term
Or a third.
Or the whole Noble Prize thing....
All options are awful. Luckily, it is a multiple choice question.
Not long after the red pill kicks in.
at what point does the absurd become repulsive?
When you only have a virtual sun.
"There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day's done
It's dark all day and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with my head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in"
I want to joke about this, but it's way too depressing - reminds me of the suicide scene in Soylent Green.
IT WAS FOR THE GREATER GOOD!!
a patriot would understand....
THE TRICK IS TO BREATHE IN SLOWLY AND BREATHE OUT QUICKLY!!
Just like singing the national anthem. INHALE - EXHALE!!
that wasn't a suicide scene. sol was merely a recipient of obamacare. (hospicecare)
This one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOV8mBjHHYg
If you are short on time https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yOV8mBjHHYg#t=185