Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 10:50:35 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, jcwells@u.washington.edu, jmb@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: fpawlak@execpc.com, drifter@stratos.net, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tiananmen square (was: Does it's true?) Message-ID: <19980629105035.E897@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199806290109.TAA22736@softweyr.com>; from Wes Peters on Sun, Jun 28, 1998 at 07:09:30PM -0600 References: <19980629091624.M28872@freebie.lemis.com> <199806290109.TAA22736@softweyr.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday, 28 June 1998 at 19:09:30 -0600, Wes Peters wrote: > My hidden microphone recorded Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) saying: > >> 3. Russia is in turmoil. The government is no longer in control, and >> crime is rife. >> >> On the whole, if I had the choice of living only in one of the four >> locations above, I'd choose Beijing. > > Not if you had to live in a mud house with no facilities, The bad accommodation in Beijing is more likely to be a decrepit appartment block with inadequate facilities. > and work at a job the state assigned to you, You may note that the State is trying not to assign jobs any more. > only to find that the police killed your wife for commiting the > heinous crime of having a second child. How often does that happen? I've never heard of it. Even if it does, it's not the norm. I'd guess (based only on my own patchy observation of news media) that it's about as likely to happen as getting shot on the highway in the US. In any case, I was talking about *me*. I have been offered jobs both in Beijing and in large US cities (though not in India or Russia), and I have a fair idea of what my living conditions would have been like. Note that I turned them all down. That's not a fair comparison, of course, since I would be living better than most people, but I'd expect that to hold true wherever I lived. The real question to ask (and one for which I have no obvious answer) is: who lives a happier life, the slum-dwellers in the US, in India, in China or in Russia? I certainly don't see any particular reason to decide for the US or against China, especially after you remove the problem of overpopulation (against which the Chinese Government, unlike the Indian Government, is doing something). > Let's not forget where the criminals in China are - the government > itself. I think that claim needs a little justification. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980629105035.E897>