(original date 10/14/2010)
Whatever China has accomplished, it has accomplished it in the absolutely most inefficient manner humanly possible. A few examples:
Today’s email motivator: the courtyards between the apartment buildings needed mowing. Maybe 50′ by 150′, with a kidney shaped landscaped bush area in the middle. The American way: a riding lawnmower, right? Maybe 5 minutes for each courtyard. If you insist on perfection, maybe, maybe, a little touch-up with the weedwacker. In China, they mow the entire courtyard with a weedwacker (gas powered, with a decibel level exceeding the most annoying leaf blower ever invented). Takes the worker about 2 hours/courtyard.
Fosamax pills for the osteoporosis of your aging women: Merck reports record profits by charging the poor peasants about $10/pill. This curiously conflicts with the Chinese Medicare system’s “maximum daily prescription reimbursement” of about $10/day. Anybody need help with the math? That means, each day, the retired women who want strong bones get to take a 2 hour bus trip to the hospital (2 yuan), wait for the pharmacist to dispense his 1-pill daily limit, pay your copay (10%) — about 7 yuan — then take the 2 hour bus ride back home (another 2 yuan). I’m not even counting the walking time to/from the bus stops.
But the Chinese just can’t grasp the concept of “economies of scale” — except in high rise apartment towers. While I buy my Tylenol in packages of “two bottles of 500″ for $8 at CostCo, here you can’t buy more than a blister-pak of 18 for $5 (total — copay is also 10%). The 4 hour round-trip bus ride can give you enough of a headache to cause you to consume half of your stash by the time you return home.
Bricks for the River Walk: The brick truck arrives yet again — a flatbed truck covered dozens wide and dozens deep in decorative white bricks. In America, the bricks would be on pallets, maybe 4 feet square, and be unloaded by a fork-lift-like crane that is an integral part of the truck. But in China — can you guess? The bricks are unloaded manually, 4 bricks at a time, using a very cleverly designed “pliers” that perfectly grabs 4 bricks and uses their weight to enhance the grabbing power of the tool. Again, 10 minutes if by pallet, 2 hours if by 4-brick grabber — but only if you’ve got a team of two workers doing the grabbing: one stands on the flatbed, and moves 4 bricks to the edge of the bed, and the other stands on the ground, moving 4 bricks to the ground. As before, I think this incredibly inefficient teamwork predates the Communist methods/era by several thousand years of serfdom.
Pork: You know how in America, we go to CostCo and buy 10-20 pounds of refrigerated blister-pak’ed pork loin roast at a time? No such thing in China. Apparently, they have a more “distributed” distribution system: the pigs must be slaughtered each morning — someplace in Guangzhou. Since the air is a kinda cool 82 degrees in the early morning (I’m talking 4 AM here), and the slaughter house lights are mere 4-watt night lights, we can safely imagine two conditions: (a) the slaughterhouse is not air conditioned, let alone refrigerated, and (b) what you can’t see won’t hurt anybody (and I sure as hell don’t want to know anymore on that subject!). The rough-hewn slabs of pork then travel by trucks (non-refrigerated) of various styles to the local meat markets (ie: one section of the Long Dong Market), where the locals, if they queue up say about 7 AM, can get the 1 pork tenderloin of the day (more tender than the best filet mignon I’ve ever had). The local meat markets follow the model you have already seen: a porous wooden board, on which the pork slabs are displayed for purchase after on-demand mini-butchering with a cleaver. No extra charge for embedded wood slivers; refrigeration not an option.
When the pork reaches home, it is further marinated for two+ hours in an open dish on an open counter in front of an open window (do I have to point out: sans refrigeration?) where the ambient coal smoke, nitrogen oxide auto pollutants, and Mother Nature’s contribution from the local herd of insects, plus a dollop of local lead/mercury/PCB tap water, combine to give the pork its yummy flavor.
But, alas, the vegetable market vendors are not so zealous or industrious. Let’s take another round-trip bicycle ride circa 8:30 AM to “buy vegetables.” And how much vegetables do we buy? About a 2-3 day supply! Putz round-eye Jim has been foolishly buying the same things from CostCo in the economy 2-3 _week_ “family size.” Silly Jim. The concept of Birds-Eye frozen cut green beans, or Jolly Green Giant canned asparagus tips is unknown here. They only know two things: (1) the only good veggie is a fresh veggie, and (2) the only good round-eye barbarian is a dead round-eye barbarian. (Except, of course, those of us on the Long Dong Team who can chop-stick their peanuts two at a time.)
Propane Gas: You know how we _exchange_ our empty 25 pound cylinder for a filled cylinder, and rely on the DOT’s regulations to insure that the replacement cylinder has been inspected for safety? Weeeelll, the “DOT concept” can’t really fly in a “cha bu duo” society, so “the gasman cometh — twice.” On his first trip, he gathers as many 50 pound cylinders (yep, about twice as tall, same diameter, as ours) as he can cart away on his — yep, bicycle. Then he returns the next evening with your original, magic-marker-ID’ed cylinder, refilled to the brim with fresh gurgling propane. Maybe, like fresh propane burns hotter than that 2-week-old shit they peddle in the wire cage in front of Safeway? Whose cylinders leak more? I’ll leave that one for the Mythbusters. _I_ take care not to flic my Bic within 50 meters of one.
If you’ve been doing the math, that’s about 1 full day of labor to acquire a 2-3 day supply of pork, vegetables, and Tylenol.
Street Sweeping: You’ve seen the monster American street sweeping machine, right? But I guarantee that you haven’t seen it in China. The pristine streets are all swept manually, using “brooms” (and I use the term very, very loosely) that are the first attempt at exported goods from the Aboriginals of Borneo. There just ain’t no such thing as “welfare” in China: you want a gov’mint check each month? Start sweeping!
“Fair and balanced reporting,” promises Fox — but only I deliver!
The fact that I’m still alive after eating more than 2 month’s of this unrefrigerated, USDA uninspected pork attests to either (1) I’ve got a cast-iron gut, (2) the USDA is part of the conspiracy-of-terror that keeps Americans from noticing which shell houses the pea, or (3) with 1,400,000,000 people in China, nobody really gives a shit if 7 of them die a swift and gruesome death each year from a lack of “food safety standards” — which are unenforceable anyway. Hmmmmmmm… you may very well think #2, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
Nothing, but nothing slows, impedes, or, heaven forbid, stops the construction. During a major performance (“major” means “about 10,000 performers”) earlier this week, (presented for the free enjoyment of a dais of 20 or so officials) where Lizzie got to do her “waist drumming” thing, at the 1-square-block TianHe Sports Center (midtown Guangzhou), they’re building yet another building/stadium/whatever on the grounds. Comes the National Anthem, accompanied by the excruciating BUZZZZZZZZZZZ of a carbide-tipped tile cutter. Since I was recording in “movie mode,” I almost caused an international incident, before realizing: this is the way it is! Keep the cameras rolling!
This morning, rush hour on a 3-lane major road is squeezed down to 1 lane (hahahaha the “bus lane”) while the other two lanes are repaved. They couldn’t wait until 10 AM? — nope! They couldn’t wait until 2 AM? — nope — that shift did the first two miles.
River Walk work? That Komatsu Steam Shovel keeps on ticking well past 10 PM to the blinding illumination of one of those ubiquitous 4-watt night lights. (It says “night light” on the package, doesn’t it? Cha bu duo.)
The Bus System is an incredible marvel of effectiveness and efficiency. Necessity must indeed be the Mother of Invention.
The bicycle skills of the Chinese are absolutely World Class! When you see (I am not exaggerating here — if anything, I’m being conservative) a 6′ wide, 6′ deep, 6′ tall cube of unidentifiable goods magically levitating down the road, amidst bus drivers on a schedule and Chinese drivers in their first sports car ever, you can be sure that, at the front of this cube will appear the front of a Communist era rusty bicycle, driven by a Capitalist era rider.
I stood in awe of the “wine delivery man” bringing 4 full cases of wine to the local hotel: stacked vertically and lashed to the little wire rack over the rear wheel of his bicycle. Have you any idea what kind of toppling torque (or rack-tear-off torque) results from the topmost case of wine if the rider departs from “perfectly vertical” by even 1 degree? Oh, and there ain’t no such thing as 10-speed derailleurs in China. These are all single-speed, one-gear- ratio-fits-all, rusting marvels of plain carbon steel that have never had their chains oiled in the 38 years since the bike was originally manufactured by (awww, come on, finish the sentence for me) the Great Proletarian Revolutionary Bicycle Factory and Commune, #102, Sichuan, LTD.
As we have seen, getting anything else accomplished in China is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.
And now for something completely different…
I have observed that history invariably produces “a man for his time” — of course you can, in retrospect, debate the “merits” of the Caesars, Washingtons, Hitlers, Lenins, FDRs, Maos, and Dengs, but I think you’ll have to grant that they were all “a man for his time.”
So, I want to “pull an Einstein,” who came upon his Special Theory of Relativity by the simple process of taking the “conventional wisdom of his day” and just assuming, for the sake of a thought experiment, the exact opposite of that wisdom. I don’t remember whether it was “time is constant” or “the speed of light differs depending on whether the measurer is moving toward or away from it.” No matter. His epiphany resulted in his comment, “At last I came to see that time/light was suspect.”
So, I think that America is truly fucked-up, perhaps irredeemably. According to history, we _should_ see the emergence of a “man for his time.” But we don’t (at least _I_ don’t).
So let’s pull an Einstein: Either…
1. Things aren’t nearly as fucked up as I think they are. And, hence, there is no present need to spontaneously generate a “man for his time.”
or
2. We have, in some mysterious and remarkable manner, broken the societal/political mechanism that has traditionally generated “men for their times.”
Ya takes yer pick, and ya makes yer 401-K contribution.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled De Nile (it’s that big river in Egypt).
Beta-blockers are a wonderful thing. You can think, but you just can’t give a shit!
I got 4 hours sleep, and now I’m wide awake. 
