Tencent loses $20B in value after China attacks myopia with gaming curbs
channelnewsasia.com
channelnewsasia.com
https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120
So gaming restrictions may indirectly help the problem, but only if it results in more time spent outdoors in bright light.
Too little time outside: myopia and lack of vit D. Too much time: skin cancer
No exercise: bad. A little bit more exercise than usual: oh everything hurts now
I would suspect that it's because they've evolved to take the stress, since we live on a planet that orbits a reasonably bright sun.
The outdoors on a sunny day is an order of magnitude brighter than even a well lit office or a computer screen.
Your comparison is unfair unless you think the working class have it easy in developing countries.
Our organs generally do not take "breaks", with the primary exception being our brain. Hearts don't take power-naps, skin doesn't... I dunno, stop being skin? Your digestive system may seemingly reverse course at times, but it essentially never stops. Why is it such a common belief that [organ X] obviously needs to take a break and that'll fix things?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Even with fasting it's not like it (or the bacteria in your gut) stops, it just changes for a bit.
Nutrition "science" is currently most-accurately applied with scare-quotes intact. Much can be learned and life can be improved by available information, but practically nothing is proven concisely. Broadly I agree with you - light fasting appears mostly beneficial from what I've seen - but under no circumstances can you accurately claim it is proven, and even "tangentially beneficial" / "being proven" is overwhelmingly up for debate.
And tbh I'm not sure how molting jives with sexual selection. Maybe? But how in the world do you prove that's relevant in humans?
1. If it isn't a serious problem for you, don't fix it. You were initially meant to be a hunter-gatherer, not an office employee. Your eyes' resting focus point is about 6 meters away (~20ft, this is where "20/20 sight" comes from). If you need to spend the entire day looking at something that is 1 meter away, it's normal and expected for your eyes to readjust.
2. Don't blame it on yourself. It's mostly genes. Some people can spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer, and still see like hawks. For others, reading a book 30 minutes a day can be enough to cause severe nearsightedness.
The current myopia near-crisis in China is clearly a sociological one, the gaokao is every Chinese teen’s only and foremost task，and they live their lives in drab & carmped concrete forests，don’t have idyllic backyards and weekend outings.
Teens are required to sit in cramped classrooms (we don't change room every course) more than 10 hours a day 6 days or more a week,the already meager physical and art classes (1 class a week each at best) were routinely canceled, to do the countless exam preparation and simulation, to get them to become the ultimate exam-taking machines, the higher score the students get in the gaokao, the more famous their school, teachers, principal will be，and yeah more money.
Beware Americans, this is what happens in China where there are no affirmative action or anything, pure meritocratic admissions.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Maotanchang+Middle+School
This is also why I alwayes laugh it off at Chinese's high GRE or IELTS scores,or wharever high scores and statistics, as a fellow Chinese I just know all too well how they got it and it certainly doesn't represent their real level.
People in China aren't allowed to move to cities freely especially back then, there are hukous to bind you to your birthplace, back then there were even police in Shenzhen dedicated to rounding up migrant workers (so called "blindly-moving migrants") and sending them back.
What I want to say is that you likely went to some major cities and observed people there, without realizing that those people are entitled to live there, meaning good chunk of them are well-educated and that education was a privilege you need to fight for, that means dedicated learning.
If myopia in China is genetic, then there is a big contradiction: in a generation of teens, those early drop-outs who went to factories and those who were putter around in schools rarely were myopic, yet those who are good academically and skinny had a high rate of myopia.
I mean no offense, I was born in a Warsaw Pact country.
The thing is, myopia is simply caused by eye fatigue, few may be somehow congenital or hereditary, and it might be slightly comminicable through behavior patterns; "Some people can spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer, and still see like hawks" , some people stare at screens nonstop, some look away constantly.
Do you mean blame as in moral responsibility or as in causality? It's a crucial difference that people miss too often.
Of course, suffering guilt over a thing like this is not very productive. But correcting your behaviour, like letting your eyes rest, is still a good idea.
He has refused to come debate a scientist and markets a "secret" method for fixing eyes.
In short, I am all for natural eyesight fixes, but this guy is a fraud.
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All of that is irrelevant to the point that the scientific knowledge is public, cited and requires no payment. If you are someone motivated to improve your vision, you get to decide whether you will believe what you can see with your own eyes. You can also find a vision therapist via covd.org, which can easily cost a few thousand dollars in the US.
Edit: Your reply is as deep as the nesting goes, so I am just replying here. I will look into your link, but you really have done nothing to substantiate your claims.
Here is a different site which independently reached similar conclusions: https://gettingstronger.org/2016/03/faq-for-vision-improveme...
Edit: you are essentially asking for an explanation of behavioral opthalmology in an Internet comment. Any COVD professional will happily answer your questions for a fee. The Endmyopia site tries to communicate some of those principle in layman language, and it has required dozens or hundreds of blog posts and answers to reader questions. The link above provides a condensed explanation.
If wearing glasses works for someone, they are unlikely to seek out alternatives. The people who seek alternatives are motivated because glasses are not meeting their use cases, e.g. myopia has steadily worsened. That motivation then justifies their effort to learn the principles used by vision therapists, or the budget to pay a vision therapist for structured vision therapy that lasts months to years.
+ I was suffering from increasing myopia and astigmatism yearly.
+ It turns out my power was all wrong, it was wrong by 2 dipoters !!
+ Why ?
+ It turns out if you spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer, you start suffering from 'pseudo myopia', a temporary state where your ciliary muscles cannot relax, its quite harmless and normally reverses within 1 week of no screen time, but if you go to an optician - unless they correct for it they will give a wrong power !! which acts as a negative feedback to increase your power !! :(
+ The solution is quite simple and that is to check your power under dilation (3 days of blurryness ). I managed to fix all my headache and eye pain once I got the correct power but I am quite pissed about the whole thing.
+ I apply 0.01 atropine before sleeping to force relax my ciliary muscles since I cannot quit coding.
+ Sunlight is key but only when you are young, as you get older and see more opticians, wrong power can do more harm than lack of sunlight.
+ Atropine works even without sunlight, it the best control mechanism we have in 2018 (outside of taking up a non screen job or working outdoor )
The reason why more opticians do not do this is because its inconvenient for the patient, I beg to differ since my ability to see things is worth a lot more than 3 days of paycheck.
I saw a lot of different optician / doctors for it, but finally an optician / doctor researcher with a Phd fixed it for me.
https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-336/cyclopentolate-ophtha...
The strongest dilation is 1% Atropine that wears out in 14 days, but gives you the most correct power.
Milder dilation lasts for 3-4 days, but is about 70% correct, so you could just do some maths to extrapolate (even though its not not ideal).
Weakest dilation lasts for hours but the lowest accuracy of the three options.
Anyway next time ask for 3 days dilation just to be extra sure and take 2 days off.
I couldn't get hands on it at first, so what I did was buy 1% atropine (easier to get) and used a syringe to dilute it using normal tear drops.
Somebody told me its not a good idea but I had no other options :(
I was fortunate enough to have somebody traveling to Asia, to get me 2 years of supply.
In Asia too its not easy to get your hands on it, I finally figured out that its easily and cheaply found if you ask around the pediatric department.
1) Look around in your country, pediatric eye doctors.
2) See if you find somebody traveling to Singapore, Honk Kong or Beijing.
3) If you really cannot get your hands on it (try ebay or something ) I will see if I can help.
But really talk to a doctor first, its just what I know and I have no medical training.
It's convinced me that my nearsightedness has come about due to the nights I spent reading books by the light of the streetlight outside my bedroom or a torch when I was a kid (after I was supposed to have gone to bed).
So IMO, what you really want to do is to avoid sitting in a dark room with a bright screen glaring in your face or straining to watch long movies and binge watching TV on your tiny 6 inch phone screen or read books without the aid of at least a lamp next to you. In general, use common sense and don't take things to the extreme. Anything that accelerates fatiguing the eyes should be avoided. That's not to say don't sit in front of a screen all day; that's pretty much all I do, but in a well lit room and with regular breaks my eyes never experience fatigue. Also, as someone else posted, having the right prescription for your glasses is also important.
And the following anecdote-laden discussion of “nun uh, not me” and “me too” is just so uninteresting.
I don't think that environmental factors have as much of an effect as people think. Genetics and luck play the biggest part.
Indigenous populations (of most colonised countries) tend to have far lower rates of nearsightedness compared to Caucasians, despite living in the same environment. I think that maybe myopia was much more disadvantageous in Indigenous environments with an emphasis on hunting and traveling across wilderness than it was in Europe, with all its cities and roads. The ability to spot animals and landmarks from a long distance is much more important in areas with large open spaces, like the American Plains or Australia's interior, than it is in more densely forested and populated areas like Europe.
That wasn't the case 20 years ago.
I mean...doesn't that seem....unlikely to you that genetics in Korea changed that much in 20 years?
There's a lot of pretty established research (not pop theories) about short-sightedness, which has already been referenced in this thread.
>while the older generation of the Inuit in Canada had nearly no cases of near-sightedness, between 10 and 25 percent of the next generation was myopic
Of course, when your eyes have fully developed you want to avoid the bright light to prevent cataracts. It's hard to win in biology.
Obviously this can correlate with both screen time, reading, and washing the dishes.
* when I went to write this reply I realized that I don’t recall actually reading a paper on it, so it’s quite possible that it’s just another “everyone knows”-type fallacy
I suspect pragmatism will win in the end though. There's enormous demand for video games and it's simply not practical to completely ban them a la actual chemical drugs. To do so would also be ceding what is likely a trillion dollar market to South Korea... which would be totally insane.
[1] https://index.qz.com/1024281/honor-of-kings-called-a-drug-in...
[2] http://www.ejinsight.com/20180608-tencent-walking-a-fine-lin...
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-chinas-multinational-...
I had LASIK 13 years ago and haven't looked back. Will we see a wave of LASIK surgery in Chinese communities in the near future?
In America we would bristle at the thought of our government asserting control in how our time is spent. It's clear China has done investigation into the health effects of video game addiction has on their people, and this is the first step in correcting it. They are simply being careful to control the perception as they impose limits.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/10/commentary/j...
The most logical one to do for me seems to be the near-focus, far-focus shifting. If it's a traditional muscle issue, then that should train it. (Though it seems that science can't decide whether muscles relax or contract to focus, and if they relax, it seems training them might make things worse).
I have tried keeping up 10 minutes of training a day for a while, and I didn't notice consistent improvement, but noticed great variance day-to-day.
It seems to me that there has never been any real research into fixing eyes naturally - it takes 2-3 years to learn to do a one-arm chin up. It seems like fixing your eyes might take a similar level of effort, yet research was never done on that scale.
Seems like this kind of therapy is quite controversial though, with not much scientific consensus it actually helps.
It's a buying opportunity. Gaming is a big source of Tencent revenue, but expect "online-to-offline" transactions growth to skyrocket. Everything from food delivery to ride sharing to movie tickets to doctor's office visits. To autonomous experiences mediated by AI that can barely be conceived of yet.
They're worth trillions of dollars, but I've never played any of their games?
Tencent basically originated as an instant messenger with gaming integration so it's no surprise that they have large stakes in the gaming industry. It also helps that they're a huge company that dwarfs every gaming company in existence.
Here, let me help:
Seriously, go spend 15 minutes on wikipedia.
More to the point, it seems to be little more than a gateway company, selectively permitting the operation of a limited selection of pre-approved properties to operate within the confines of a planned ecosystem that is slightly more advanced than an artificial monopoly.
That companies acquired by this shell entity have continues to produce games after being acquired, should not be regarded as the shell company creating games itself.
Seriously, this is Hacker News; most commenters here have at least some understanding of the nature of corporations. If you don't understand how companies work, at this ultra-fundamental level, and you think "how is it possible that this 'gaming company' can be worth half a trillion US dollars, but I've never heard of them", and it doesn't immediately occur to you that they're probably not really making the games themselves, and yet you're still curious enough to post the comment that quantitative posted, then you would be very much benefited by going and reading the entire Tencent article, top to bottom, and now you'd know something useful about how the world works.
I agree with you that Tencent appears to be primarily an investment-oriented holding conglomorate. I might even say that:
Tencent Holdings Limited (Chinese: 腾讯控股有限公司; pinyin: Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī) is a Chinese multinational investment holding conglomerate founded in 1998, whose subsidiaries specialise in various Internet-related services and products, entertainment, artificial intelligence and technology both in China and globally.[3]