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: Vyoos news
China mega-city

Listen up, Dubai, with your tall toy tower and pretty island residential developments, when it comes to really big, you have a way to go to catch up to China.

The world's biggest economy (yes, America, get used to it) has just announced an infrastructure scheme which dwarfs anything in history.


They plan to spend more than US$1 trillion creating a mega-city of more than 40 million people. They will do it by connecting a series of existing cities in the Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen, currently China's third and fourth-largest cities.

In all, eight existing cities, ranging in population from just under two million to almost 12 million, will become a mega-city with a population of more than 40 million, all linked by super-modern road, public transport and telecommunications infrastructure.

Try an exercise of this size anywhere else, such as those problematic countries where residents get a vote and like to have a say in planning issues, and such a project would get bogged down for centuries in committee hearings.

The Chinese, however, are planning to have the whole thing finished within six years.

As an interesting aside, literally, the mega-city will border both China's reclaimed territories, Hong Kong (with its estimated 7 million people) and Macau, and will have superfast train links to them.

The planners have only one problem - they haven't decided yet what to call the world's largest city. We respectively suggest that much of the world has heard of the Pearl River and its fertile delta. Pearl River City sounds good to us.

telegraph.co.uk


shanghai skyscrapers
Shanghai (including an artist's impression of the Shanghai Tower, right, which is still under construction) is just a village of 20 million compared to the new Pearl River mega-city.






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: Vyoos news
japan teenager
He's a male teenager - of COURSE he's thinking about sex.


VYOOS EDITORIAL: A COMMITTEE STRIKES AGAIN
A government study has found that one-third of Japanese males aged 16 to 19 are not interested in sex, almost exactly double the number not interested in sex in 2008.

Please note that word "government" in the above paragraph.

We have three questions for the Japanese government officials in charge of this survey:

Are you sure you polled males?

Are you sure they were aged 16 to 19?

Are you sure the subject in question was sex?

Were you ever a teenage boy?

Okay, that's four questions. However, the answer to the fourth question in my own case is yes, and I went to an all boys' school, and I can report with a high degree of conviction that the percentage of all boys I knew in the 16 to 19 age group who were not interested in sex was approximately zero.

Probably less.

Either Japan is a very different place than I thought, or Japanese government committees are very similar to their western counterparts.


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China's committee work-around

December 22nd 2010 02:05
: Vyoos news
committee meeting
'I have a question: what are we talking about?'

Chinese authorities have announced a ban on the use of foreign words in the media and state press. The ban, they say, addresses a need to end an erosion of the purity of Chinese language.

The ban, I say, proves that Chinese committees produce the same brain-dead nonsense as their counterparts in the rest of the world.

In practice, the Chinese decision will work. Neither privatised nor state-owned media will have any concerns about following the edict, because they won't have to change anything to comply. English words do not make it into written Chinese, in the way they make it into written Italian or Norwegian, for example, because Chinese publishing systems are not set up to handle alphabet-based characters. Further, although many mainland Chinese these days might understand some English words popularised through the internet (mainstream English words such as thanx, LOL and porn), few would recognise their written form.

The Chinese decision works in principle, as well, in the same way that xenophobic, politically self-serving propaganda works. The authorities pronounce it; the workers ignore it.

For this reason we can see that, while committee meetings in China are just as full of hot air and devoid of common sense as committee meetings anywhere else, the trappings of totalitarianism remain sufficiently evident that foolish edicts can be treated as such. This makes Chinese committee decisions much less dangerous than elsewhere, a fact which has enormous benefits for the economy, for due process and for individual freedom.

This capacity to take the decisions of committees out of real-time processes lifts the efficiency rating across all Chinese sectors well above anything seen in more backward and underprivileged countries, such as the United States, where people still live in hope of committees producing something useful.

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Slap in the face for Indian progress

November 29th 2010 07:08
: Vyoos news
new delhi metro

Progress from a Third Word Economy to a First World Economy is about social change as much as economic change. The population needs to be educated in fiscal responsibility, company managers need to be trained in ethical work practices, and women need to taught correct procedures when men don't follow rules.

[ Click here to read more ]
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For travellers, the magic number is 8

August 23rd 2010 04:13
aeroplane cabin

It is a fact of modern life that every person on board any given aeroplane paid a different price for their ticket.

[ Click here to read more ]
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You must not kiss in public

June 11th 2010 04:06
kissing

As Iran’s police are being issued with wheelbarrow-loads of women’s robes, and instructed to go forth and hunt down and cover any woman wearing devil’s clothing, also known as jeans, and as a Saudi court sentences a young man to four months in prison and 90 lashes, considered a fair punishment for the crime of kissing his girlfriend in a shopping mall, Sri Lanka has decided that it too wants membership of the International Organisation of Killjoy Fundamentalists.

[ Click here to read more ]
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message in a bottle

Sitting snugly in a traditional bottle, a message of friendship has travelled about 11,000 kilometres, from Henan in China to a beach off Victoria, Australia.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Exposing India's fake holy men

March 24th 2010 11:09
Sanal Edamaruku
Sanal Edamaruku

Pandit Surender Sharma is a tantric guru in India, a holy man with a large following, many of whom have heard of him through his claims that he can kill a man through mystic powers.

[ Click here to read more ]
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orient express

The old Orient Express had many incarnations but is associated mostly with the journey from Paris to Istanbul. The time the journey took varied, but it was at all times the stuff of legend, luxury and romance. It was mentioned in the literary works of Bram Stoker, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, George McDonald Fraser and Ian Fleming.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Today's news: Google smacks China

January 13th 2010 01:42
google china
Google has accused China of hacking into Gmail accounts, and has threatened to walk out of China as a consequence.

Google has just issued a statement saying it has uncovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China". The email accounts targeted were those of human rights activists


[ Click here to read more ]
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China's birthday party

September 29th 2009 23:13
china propaganda poster
The art of propaganda. Translation: 'Make art and propaganda one integrated part of the revolutionary mechanism. Use it as a powerful weapon to organise people, educate people, strike the enemy and eliminate the enemy!'

We would like to wish China's Communist Party a happy birthday. But we won't.

[ Click here to read more ]
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wedding dress kovacs
Hannah Kovacs in her $18 wedding dress

In 1991, just before moving overseas to live, I decided to consolidate all my addresses and phone numbers in a new contact book. This item, basically a few blank sheets of paper stuck together with glue, cost me just under A$10. A similar item in an Australian newsagent today will cost a fraction of the price.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Plough girls

July 27th 2009 07:59
indian farmer

No way I would ask my daughter to do this, but then I'm not a farmer in India experiencing drought. Still, it seems a bit extreme.

[ Click here to read more ]
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The bar mat and the big mouth

May 19th 2009 21:58
Annice Smoel, a 36-year-old mother of four girls from Melbourne, Australia, has been arrested while on holiday in Thailand and faces a maximum five-year gaol sentence. The crime for which she will be tried: stealing a bar mat.

Mrs Smoel was arrested on May 2 and is now on bail awaiting trial. Her passport has been confiscated


[ Click here to read more ]
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