Forums > Living in Kunming > What is up with these nighttime AQI readings?
Trucks rumbling around the streets, kicking up dust and spewing diesel into the air...
Trucks rumbling around the streets, kicking up dust and spewing diesel into the air...
I aren't sure what gun control, the EU or mandatory voting have to do with dancing grannies. Suggest we stay ON TOPIC.
Ha haaa Otto, awesome!
@Alex
I suggest you actually do some research on how Monsanto strong armed Indian farmers with Bt cotton before making those claims. Having seen it on the front lines, you would be surprised just how determined they can be. A whole area of Maharashtra became known as the "suicide belt" due to the pressures directly applied by Monsanto. It was truly shocking, yet strangely not surprising. I was working with people who would try to help Indian farmers with training and development, often they would come to work in tears hearing another one of their farmer friends had committed suicide due to huge debt. The cause was almost always linked to Monsanto induced debt.
What do you do if you have land, need to plant crops and when attempting to procure seeds are told the only seeds available are Monsanto's. But don't worry, they are higher yield (lies), require less water (lies) and repel pests (only if you put twice as much Round up on them as you would normally... Oh that Round up is made by Monsanto too). And all this for the special bargain of only twice what you paid for last years seed! And if you are somehow able to get hold of other seed, you can't sell it here as our cotton mill is sponsored by... Monsanto. And we don't accept non Monsanto cotton sorry.
I purposefully did not state whether GMO is overall bad or overall good - it is neither in terms of the affects it could have on a whole range of systems (food/economic/social). The reason is because you have to treat each GMO individually, assess it individually and examine its affects.
Unfortunately the main organisations that are involved in producing GMO's on a mass scale though are the very companies that show absolutely zero ethics. And THAT should scare you. Because eventually you may be subject to the very ethical missteps that so many others have suffered under. Why? Because you eat food.
There are clear reasons why the companies do not wish their GMO crops to be investigated by scientists outside their control. And this again should scare you. These go beyond the threat of industrial espionage.
So yes, you cannot paint it in broad brush strokes, but as I stated, I believe that we should be precautionary about their introduction i.e. the precautionary principle should apply. That means we need to thoroughly investigate each and every crop before they are planted on a mass scale, have decade long experiments with multi generational crops analysing the soil/inputs/outputs/cross breeding etc etc. Then the research needs to be made public, needs to be independently analysed and if found to be better by enhancing the crop, reducing inputs and enhancing the human and environmental systems, it can be prototyped somewhere in a real world environment before full scale introduction.
Do you think Monsanto does any of this? Clearly they do not, which is why many countries have GMO moratoriums, they just do not know what effect GMO's will have on their systems due to a lack of information, hence they disallow them, hence people start thinking simplistically "GMO bad".
The countries who are approached to implement GMO crops often have little to no legal framework for them to be tested/trialled/released under. And with little information provided by the companies who apply (except of course glowing endorsements), they are right to be suspicious and to enact moratoriums.
No results found.
So fast, so convenient. One star off for opening before the train station stop is connected!
Wow, just wow. Possibly the best Chinese food I have had in Kunming. And in one of the nicest, traditional courtyard style restaurant I have been in. A woman dressed in traditional qi pao playing a gu zheng just adds to it.
We had okra, mushroom soup, dried beef and chou dofu. All top notch with the bill coming in at just over 250 kuai. But we could have fed 3 people for that so not too bad at about 80-90 kuai each. Not the cheapest but for the quality, it's damn good.
If you have people visiting and want to take them to a traditional Chinese style restaurant with Yunnan style food, or want a romantic night out with a gal, you can't go wrong here. Close to Green Lake (down a little alley) for a romantic walk... Just perfect.
Pretty good place for getting all your documents translated and/or notarised. Note that there are a number of notaries in the building which you can find by going up the stairs (the elevators are impossible). But you have to find the stairs to do so... go in the door, head over to the right, go up the big wide stairs which head up a floor, turn right then right again into the elevator area and right again into the stairwells. Whew!
One point off for the elevators never being available and having to hike 7-9 flights of stairs (not good if you have to go 3-4 times a day like I often did!)
This does not stop at the Jinanya hotel at Da Shang Hui as the flyers state (and is on the images tab here). They need to have another stop in the same area or else they are missing out on covering a big chunk of the city.
You can take another bus, the 919C, I believe, if you are nearby Da Shang Hui, which leaves from the bus station on HeHong Lu, nearby the Qianxing road intersection. This bus goes every hour and is white, found at the western end of the station. It is operated by a different company and takes about 1 hour 10 minutes to get to the airport due to a large number of stops especially near the airport.
Great bus though if you can catch it!
Friendly people, even got to the talk to the vice consulate, who told me she had done a stint in Malaysia's Siberian Consulate!
English is spoken by some of the Chinese girls working at the desk who are pleasant to deal with. I assume they do Visa's as well but I wasn't here for a visa, this time!
Laos extradites drug suspects to Yunnan
发布者So I was just driving East a few months ago from Colorado into Kansas, with my 3 buddies who were all smoking their perfectly legal joints. Police stopped me just before I crossed the border on a minor traffic infringement and saw my friends smoking their joints. He asked if I was smoking, as the driver, and tested me with a breathalyser which showed I was well under the limit. So he didn't care, gave me a ticket for my broken tail light, which I told him I would fix when I got to the next town. Coming up to the border my friends all chucked their joints out the window because we knew it was illegal in the Kansas. Little did we know though that Lisa had spilled some leaf when she was rolling her joint!
Crossed over the border into Kansas, drove around the next town looking for a auto shop. But a cop pulled me over AGAIN for my broken tail light. I got out of the car to try and explain I just got a ticket and he smells pot, pulls out his gun, slams me to the ground, arrests me and my friends, searches my car and finds a tiny piece of leaf on the floor.
Anyway, I am writing this after my last meal while the priest delivers my last rights, just before I am led off to be strapped down for my lethal injection. My friends have all been executed already which makes me pretty upset when I think about it. They killed Billy, Lisa and Ken for something that is legal only 300m away! I wonder why the line between state sponsored killing and simple drug control has become so indiscriminate? I keep telling them that I wasn't under the influence and wasn't even smoking anything, but the THC drug test showed trace amounts in my system because my friends were in the same car and I guess I inhaled when I shouldn't have. Oh well, I guess I deserve this, I have to accept that I am a hardened criminal that has to be got rid of. I am the same level as serial killers, murderers, war criminals and child rapist/killers.
I heard this idea came from China! I hope whoever suggested it is happy.
Record-setting turn-out at South Asia Expo
发布者We went on Saturday. It was totally packed out! The new subway stop helped a lot with this I am sure, it seemed like most attendees were using it.
The sellers love to see a foreigner because heaps of them speak English, especially those from Pakistan/Sri Lanka/India. If you are from a cricket playing nation, you get bombarded with players names etc when talking to them!
Kunming police now permitted to carry sidearms
发布者Clearly a lack of training. Armed police all over the world are taught to only fire in situations where the public is not in danger from stray bullets.
It looks like my comment above is coming to pass...
Kunming police now permitted to carry sidearms
发布者But you feel safer right yuantongsi?
Having an armed gang of untrained idiots running around the streets vs the occasional threat of terrorist activity (which incidentally is likely to still happen, it might just not involve as many civilian deaths... or may involve more as a result).
One thing I do know - if you are around any criminal activity (i.e. you see someone doing something illegal, a car chase or the police trying to catch a pick pocket etc) don't hang around. Run like hell the other way or lay flat, I can just imagine some young police try-hard yanking out his pistol and spraying the suspect and anyone else around them with as many bullets as he can. Then boasting to his mates later in the station about the great work he is doing and not receiving any sort of punishment for killing/maiming civilians. The civilian deaths will be written off as "accidental discharge" no doubt.
Yunnan dam structurally unsound, repairs in limbo
发布者The more damns they have on a river, the more potential for catastrophic failure. You can imagine what would happen if a dam in the upper reaches of a river experiences catastrophic failure, the resulting surge of water to the next dam will likely cause that one to collapse creating a massive domino effect with an unparalleled level of cascading destruction. And the Jinsha river is set to have 11 damns on it, with another 11 on an upper reach of the river, the TongTian, extending into Tibet.
To hear they are building dams that cannot even handle the amount of water that occurs in the first year causing a potential collapse is mind boggling. What happens when they get a particularly bad rainfall year and/or and earthquake? Utter devastation awaits...