Elysium

Lay of the Land

Posted by snow under china

In the countrysides of China, the people are organized into small farming towns, each about a half an hour’s walk appart. These are a cluster of maybe a hundred homes that farm the nearby fields. Each family uses about 8 mu of land, roughly 5336 square meters or 1.32 acres. Back in my father’s generation, much of these fields were farmed completely organically: weeds and insects were removed by human labor, fertilizer was either the remains of the last harvest or manure and other composted wastes. Nowadays, it’s a completely industrialized process with small scale tractors, herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers and such. This change, according to my father has brought about an over 4 fold increase in yields, at the expense of sustainability. Much of China’s modern destruction of farmlands for cities relies heavily on the bigger yields that the remaining farmlands can produce.

The types of crops varies depending on region. The wetter South is known more for exotic fruits (like lychee) and rice (i’m not so familiar with Southern agriculture) while the dryer North grows a lot of corn, wheat, millet, cotton, yams and a plethora of vegetables. Most of my grandfathers fields grows two cycles of crops: wheat in the late fall spanning into early summer (around early June), corn after that into late summer. Though in some areas, people grow three crops a year. For us, wheat is grown in late fall and it has time to sprout before the snow sets in. From what i understand, the sprouts can’t be too large or they’ll freeze to death over the winter, but having theses small sprouts makes the crops ripen faster the next year. Before the wheat is even harvested, corn is planted into the fields. When the wheat is cut, 2/3s of the stalk is left in the field because corn is about that high and removing all the stalk will damage the corn. The stalks are left in the field as fertilizer and are flipped under the ground (i believe) after the corn is harvested.

There are some communal plots as well where some people grow a little bit of vegetables like beans or cucumbers. My uncle assures me that nobody bothers your plots, though this being China, i had my reservations about the system.

The image is the roofs of a Chinese village. The pointy house in the foreground is built of ceramic tiles while the rest are of concrete. Ceramic tiles is the traditional method, it’s more expensive, but is much cooler in the summer and doesn’t leak.

Abandoning the Past

Posted by snow under Blog, china

China is an interesting place. Despite the modernity of Shanghai, or Beijing, its success is very much a modern phenomena. In the countryside where time passes more slowly, the traces of the old world have not completely given way to the new. Dig one or two generations back and an almost mystical world unravels itself, one without electricity, modern industry or concerns. Now, these relics and ways of life are slowly slipping away into history while the rest of the nation is focusing on the future.

When i was a child living in the countryside, not having electricity was the default state. There were so many brownouts, during the day that it could not be relied on for any part of our life. It was not uncommon for there to be no electricity for weeks or months. Bedtime was usually when it was too dark outside to do anything productive (8:30) and we owned no appliances. Nobody seemed to mind. We had a wood stove to cook food and on some days, the smoke from burning corn stalks would mask the courtyard like gunpowder flashes on a battlefield. I use to splash water into it and be chased away elsewhere to play. Everywhere in the house, there were strange devices of wood and bamboo that seldom saw use: a roomful of equipment for making cloth from cotton (something my dad told me took up the majority of a wife’s time), carpenter tools for making furniture, a chisel for printing ‘money’ to send to deceased family members. It was all strangely fascinating and i soaked in these sights without much appreciation or thought: they were just part of ‘life at grandpas’. When i go back now, i can hardly find any trace of that lifestyle. The ancient foyer table for the lord and lady of the house had been disassembled, the cotton weave burned, the carpenter tools sold, various homemade straw hats, mats, baskets being replaced by their modern counterparts. I was even hard pressed to find candles about the house. I look at the next generation and wonder: will they know what it was like to be Chinese then? will they ever understand the easy, agrarian lifestyle passed down for countless generations on which i was weaned?

China is very much a country of culture, ancient traditions and sights still dominate our lives. Yet, with today’s modernism and focus on material wealth, much of the joys and guidance our past offers us is disappearing. Many relics of thought and identity are lost to make way for progress. I can’t help but wonder, a hundred, five hundred, years from now, will they still understand what it means to be Chinese? what it is that we value? that we strive for? Perhaps this is the way it’s meant to be, the future should cannibalize the past to grow. I wonder how many in similarly old cultures hold similar thoughts.

::EDIT::
I’ve decided to at least pull my weight in preserving the past. I’ll put up pictures and blog posts about the little i know of this lifestyle.

Tolerance

Posted by snow under Blog

This arose in a discussion with a friend recently.

If we see wrong in this world, should we actively seek to fix it? I suppose all of us would say yes for this question and each of us would envision a different scenario, say an old lady being mugged, or a corrupt tax official punished. But where do we draw the line? How about a person eating him/herself to death off of junk food, or a country imposing a stringent dress code on their population? When should we stick out a hand to help and when should we respect the fact that we don’t know enough about the situation to act meaningfully?

My friend, a revolutionary, was . . . displeased with my passive attitude and on several matters disagreed with my lack of action. In my eyes, we should not act to change the life of another unless it’s directly causing immediate harm to another person – eg. violence or swindling. All other matters we should empower the individual with the proper ideas and tools to help him/herself. Why? Because each of us experiences a different reality, created by our different circumstances and experiences. Our views make perfect sense in each of these unique realities. To criticize another’s behavior while not experiencing another’s reality is not only pointless, but also destructive. More helpful is to listen, to empathize, to immerse oneself into another’s reality, but subjectively and free of the emotions that another is experiencing. The way to interject is not by forcefully altering the landscape of another’s reality, but by offering glimpses of one’s own reality to another and providing a path out of their current plight. Give him/her an idea that can allow him/her to escape their present situation. I feel this not only applies on a personal level, but scales to a communal, national and global level. To fire down criticism from out rocking chairs as the mass media society would have us do and to act brutishly on these often misguided perspectives is arrogant, offensive and often causes more harm.

Currencies

Posted by snow under Theory

Spending time with elderly people really highlights the change in demands and their price through our life. To them, time is hardly a valuable asset whereas happiness is the ultimate desireable. Money is sandwiched uncomfortably somewhere in between, pricier than time, but not quite worth as much as happiness. With them, days go by quickly and no task is more pressing than the tiny details of life.

Reflecting on my life, money is much less precious than time and happiness is an annoying necessity to keep productivity high. It would be interesting to graph these three variables over age and see how a person evolves through the span of a lifetime.

Beauty in Tragedy

Posted by snow under Theory

There is a certain beauty to tragedy or stife that’s very refreshing. If one delves a bit deeper, the root becomes apparent. It’s not the tragic calamities that are beautiful, but the tenacity and perseverance of life that is beautiful.

Take a look at a mother hen facing off with a dog to protect her chicklets, or a tree desperately trying to grow out of a jagged cliff. There is beauty because there is struggle for life, a cause we can relate to, something that makes us reevaluate the luxuries of our lives

I think people are not meant to live in a ‘utopian’ world. Rather, we were designed to struggle. Though we have all we need in life, we continually seek that fight to add to our lives and so we try to find purpose. If you look at our entertainment, it’s always centered around a ‘just fight’ or a fight for survival.

Unpriced Goods

Posted by snow under Theory

When we speak of bribes, we speak of detestable practices by the rich an corrupt to somehow hurt others. While this may be true, reflecting on it gives an interesting look on society.

Bribes are really payment for a service with a missing pricetag. If you think about it, everything in this world is available at a cost. Laws only serve to increase the price by one of two factors: 1. increasing the penalty of getting caught or 2. increasing the amount you have to pay under the table to do some things. If you think about things from this perspective, China is one of the most materialistic nations in the world where there are few barriers to arriving at the absolute price for goods & services.

So in this model, there’s a secret auction going on for positions of power, rights, and resources of all kind, some in public, others in private. The reason that the latter are so expensive is the same as with anything else, supply and demand. If man’s morals fail, and we cling to social stability, such would be the world.

The Benefit of Loss

Posted by snow under Theory

Our society puts such an emphasis on winning that ‘losing’ becomes something disgraceful, to the point that we are no longer learning from our mistakes. If you beat up a 2nd grader, you may feel good for a couple minutes (well, then again, maybe not), but only after getting your butt kicked by a secret assassin will you become stronger. Why?

Winning boosts one’s confidence, but not proportionately, one’s skill. Winning doesn’t tell you why you won or the weaknesses in the strategy you are using. It doesn’t tell you anything about all the ’secret sauce’ others have out there in the world, it doesn’t give you anything than a sense that you are superior to the problem, person, or thing in question. Although confidence goes a long way, it can’t replace knowledge. Getting an A on your economics test doesn’t prepare you at all for a subprime meltdown, or even something as basic as valuing a company with skewed financials, or even what kind of bank account to put your earnings from your summer job in for a good return. Yet, it gives us a false sense of understanding the world proper.

This is my biggest gripe about the modern education system. It emphasizes so much on performance and benchmarking that it doesn’t teach students the proper way of learning. They are measured by how well they can memorize a set of data and how well they can regurgitate it into a particular problem. Learning in real life consists of seeing where one has made a mistake, having the courage to admit that one has made it, understanding why it happened and prevent it from happening again. The response to failure that the modern education system promotes is: you are inferior to everyone else n00b. People hide from their mistakes for shame, or subconsciously block them out when they should be embracing them as a chance to learn and become stronger.

The Necessity of Suffering

Posted by snow under Theory

To the pessimist, the human future is bleak. For all the advancements we have made in the last millenia, little has really changed: we no longer kill ourselves with sticks, but rifles. We still fight over resources, often resources we don’t need. The base instincts haven’t changed, though the way they manifest themselves have. Going along this line of thought, there is no real point to improving the quality of life for humans. Even if we expand into space, increase our numbers and wealth exponentially, we will never appreciate it because we will expect ever more luxuries and appeciate ever less. What then is the point when those centuries ago lived more happily than us now (albeit shorter).

Here is where suffering plays a key role. Suffering is like the shadow cast behind the object. If more light shines but there are no shadows, it’s hard to tell how bright it really is. Suffering from war, poverty, insecurity, oppression, grief, confusion, social unrest, or anything that breaks the established order of society makes us appreciate the true value of life and all that we have. Waking up with the reality that there is a chance that i may never see my loved ones again makes me appreciate and cherish them that much more. Consider the value of the last few months of a cancer patient’s life and the wonders some of these individuals have accomplished in that time.

So, those lost in wars, or those suffering cruel fates are a (unwilling) sacrifices that bring about greater happiness for the majority. It is the sacrifice of this minority that gives humanity hope, a clearer sense of values and a better appreciation for life even if it’s just for a single generation.

Dry Skies

Posted by snow under Blog

During my most recent international flight of ~3000 miles, American Airlines didn’t serve drinks for it’s passengers for free. Instead, they were asking for $1 per drink. I gauged my personal reaction and did the math. It didn’t seem like a good business move..

The problem is not that $1 is a ridiculous price to charge for a drink, but the ingrained concept that drinks should be free on a flight, that they are bundled into our seat price. Of course, we can rationalize this by thinking “the ticket was cheaper”, but it leaves a poor impression. More importantly, judging by how few people asked to buy drinks, people are generally thrift in this issue and would rather bear the discomfort of slight dehydration than pony up $1 for a coke. These two cause me personally to feel dissatisfied with the service both physically (being less hydrated) and mentally (feeling ripped off). This is worsened by the ban (or nuisance of bringing) liquids onto airlines. While the actual demand for the drink may be several dollars, the price passengers are willing to pay is very low. This is a very dangerous situation for a merchant.

I did the calculations, It costs the airline roughly $0.62 per passenger to provide everyone who wants a drink a drink (excluding those who bought a drink). In my opinion, American Airlines is giving it’s customers an impression of a stingy company that’s uncomfortable to ride with at the gain of less than a dollar per traveller, a deal I wouldn’t make.

Assumptions for Calculating $0.62:

- 1 can of coke is 241 grams (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_can_of_soda_pop_weight)
- 150 people on the plane
- 125 cans of soda is consumed
- with paying, 25 cans of soda is consumed (roughly from my tally on my flight)
- 42.8MJ/kg for kerosene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)
- 1.1 MJ / available seat kilometer (http://www.transportenvironment.org/Publications/prep_hand_out/lid:398)
- each seat is roughly 80 kg
- price of kerosene: $1.31/gal (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm)
- assume price of drinks is $0.5 per can

cost of shipping the drinks is: 43.26
cost of drinks: $50 -> 93.26 more per flight, or 0.62 per ticket

That which we are accustomed

Posted by snow under Blog

Windows’ start menu didn’t load properly when i clicked on it today. That’s not surprising, what is surprising is that i instinctively just clicked the desktop and tried again. This blatant acceptance and forgiveness for screwups in software is quite crazy. I lose count on how many such issues occur on a daily basis with Windows, but imagine if something similar to this happened when you went to a restaurant. You sit down, the waiter trips over you with hot coffee, then brings you the wrong meal and brings you a cheque for three times what you ate and goes home before returning your credit card. You’d leave and never come back!… so why is it linux doesn’t have crazy market penetration? The same reason why not everybody raises their own cattle: there may be no artificial growth hormones, but it’s quite a hassle.