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And not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global...

"India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there’s no evidence the situation has improved."

It's not just reprehensible. It's down right psychopathic.

Sick.

A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant.

Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off:

https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...

Do you think it's an accident China does not screen their export goods for safety? Nobody thought about it somehow for decades?

Organized crime runs all the way through the system in many places, not just China.

Does any country screen their exports for safety? Screening imports I've heard before, but never exports.

How can a random truck stop in Kentucky detect that radiation, but apparently goods passed through Chinese ports (and in fact the supply chain) without setting off anything anywhere?

Think about that for a minute.

Because your random truckspot has way lower throughput than any major port. You absolutely can do a full freeze-and-search on a German Autobahn (and it regularly gets done to check for driving clock records, overloading and insecure fastening of load), but in a port? No way. Only thing that's remotely practical is to check 1 of N containers with a drug dog or an x-ray and that's it.

it takes too much effort to get rid of it. so it gets passed around until someone dumps it, so everyone that handled it can claim that they're not responsible for it.

it happens in kentucky: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/tech/science/environme...

it's just human nature. the act is not much different from throwing a battery into the trash when you should really be recycling it.

lead paint is used in industry, probably in america too. a toy company can simply order it and use it to paint their toys. or they make more than toys or they have that paint from a long time ago so they're going to use it.

it's all about convenience and just doing the job that someone has hired you to do. i think most people can relate to that a little. I'll continue using straws until I can't get them or until they're illegal. And maybe making them illegal is the best option we have if we don't want them in our oceans.

No, if cadmium and lead are turning up in pencil cases, it's probably because they were used in the paints or inks used for decoration.

Cadmium has been used for reds, yellows, and orange pigments since the 1840s. White lead pigments go back to the 4th century BC. Red lead pigments were used in ancient Rome. Yellow lead pigments (lead(II) chromate) were developed in the 1810s.

For the most part these have been phased out due to toxicity, but perhaps in China they are available cheap and in the case of cadmium pigments are really good, strongly colored, durable pigments, if you ignore the toxicity.

America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.

Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them.

It can't be believed until it's experienced.

Is there any place with comparable population density with a substantially better social environment? If so, have you any theories that could explain the difference?

The modern Chinese psyche has been sculpted in large part due to the Cultural Revolution.

People who have grown up in comfort do not fully comprehend the effect of widespread hunger on a large population. Natural selection rewarded those that put their families above everything. The families that did not died. Parents that did not do everything in their power to feed their children watched them starve to death in their hands.

Many things about modern China can be directly linked to this shared national pain.

The absolute, obsessive drive of Chinese parents to have their children study and reach a higher station of life is a direct result of the culture of hustle instilled by their parents and grandparents. Devotion to families, incredible work ethic, creativity and innovation can all be traced back to the skills necessary to survive the Cultural Revolution.

However, many of the problems in modern China can be linked to this phenomenon. Bribery, open piracy, corruption are common in every walk of Chinese life. Chinese people put themselves, and their families, first and they've never had a compelling argument against it. People in the West believe in their institutions in a way that doesn't exist in China.

But, time will change this. There is clear precedent in the West that each successive generation that grows up outside of poverty will be less and less cutthroat compared to the generation prior.

Thanks for your reply. I just quibble with calling that selection "natural".

India, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia - quite literally anywhere else.

Cultural Revolution selected for these traits, survival at any cost.

Now you have a billion people that have no regard whatsoever for lives of others.

Japan

Some say the genocides of Communism and the Cultural Revolution wiped out a lot of the old civilized ways and made the survivors callous.

We shouldn't forget the almost 100 years of Europeans pumping opium into their country.

This hypothesis is falsified by the fact that the Chinese who live in Taiwan and Hong Kong are by and large perfectly civilised people, rather unlike mainland China.

Were they the main opium consumers?

British not European. Europe is a large place on a map.

Japan, Korea. It is like a different world.

Why, I don’t have a clue. Maybe it is the last 200 years in China, civil wars, then Communists and Mao. It is weird because there is not much violent crime at all. You won’t get kidnapped or mugged outside your hotel or anything like that.

Taiwan.

Any city?

State socialism/communism.

Everything is provided, decided, controlled, influenced, reviewed, rethought by and via the state (in some representation, the party, the government, the local government, some group or other, an official, someone with connections, the police, or even just a faceless automated system/website/machine). This reminds people that everything is temporary, effort is futile, etc. This makes people simply not care much about common stuff. (Environment, roads, streets, houses, etc.)

Source, I'm from a post-soviet country, and we're dealing with huge swaths of the population who are still very much thinking like this.

See also:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9eXi3RL8q4 (why everything is falling apart)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E (what about new buildings, quality, maintenance?)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxP2fAqamZQ (about powerlessness, apathy)

This is actually something Hank Paulson comments on in his book "Dealing with China": the Chinese have a huge government, but they actually have something like a half to a third as many government workers per capita. And their comms infrastructure, despite the Huewai bruhaha, is severely lacking in comparison, so those additional people don't stretch as far.

What about their comms infrastructure is lacking? I got full high-speed cellular internet reception even in the deep countryside when I visited there last year.

Don't recall, feel free to read the book.

> America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.

The difference in America is it's not good business practice to hurt your own customers. i.e. reputation matters. You mess up just once, and it takes years for your brand to recover (this includes non-brand brands, like store brands or generics).

In China it seems like there's a never ending supply of new names constantly.

Sometimes the backlash can be catastrophic in China though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Reputation is just as important in China.

For now at least.

and legal system too.

Usually if something is made in America it is a product of very high quality (except for food). This must be a deeper cultural thing and not just regulatory culture.

Nope. It's just regulation.

Nope. Definitely not just regulation. China has regulation in spades but the culture breaks it.

Culture plays a huge role. Source: first hand experience living in China (highly broken culture), Taiwan (pretty mature and functional culture, but with some problems like “the boss knows best even if he doesn’t”), India (seriously broken with the caste system but also a strong sense of propriety) and the US (mixed bag, comparable to Taiwan in a lot of ways).

Culture is shaped by enforcement of regulation. It's the same thing.

Saying they are the same thing is ludicrous.

But if you're saying they shape each other, that I can agree with.

This is real. Try buying the good types of baby formula in Australian supermarkets or pharmacies; you quickly learn the need to have a buffer of several lest your baby goes hungry.

Scalpers go in and get what they can, then sell to China for a massive profit. If they're hit by the "max one per customer" they'll come in again and again until they're kicked out of the store.

I feel bad for parents in China who can't trust the products in their own stores.

And yet Australian dairy farmers constantly complain about low prices and going bankrupt. This has been going on for years. The complaint doesn't add up.

There's more than enough milk powder to go around, people are fighting over the premium ones.

Baby-food powder is probably too small a market for milk producers to matter. (And usually the cost of the milk is not that big of a factor in the final consumer price.)

>fake eggs

I haven't seen any evidence that these were ever sold to the general public. It seems very unlikely to me, because eggs are cheap, and the alleged manufacturing process is labor intensive. If you're willing to take the risk making fakes there are many other more profitable options. See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.c...

https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/

I’ve read these articles as well. However, I don’t think one can infer generalisations about the culture of > 1 billion people by reading a few articles online.

I also don’t think that a ‘culture of dishonesty’ is an actual thing, or at least an appropriate application of the word ‘culture’. More close to reality is that China has a system of incentives which, perverse or otherwise, make ‘dishonesty’ more likely. This operates in Western culture as well, for example the activities of investment banks in the subprime loan crisis.

The distinction is important because it is difficult to change a culture but incentives can change overnight.

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing in the West's industrial past. Being a fast-growing economy and also keeping a strict eye on product purity, has it ever successfully been done before?

Not to say that as an excuse, but it's not at all an uncommon pattern.

I think it's pretty much what we'd expect when markets are allowed to operate unhinged; it doesn't necessarily speak to a point in time in an economy's development—it moreso speaks to the fact that less developed economies are less strictly regulated because they've yet to develop the case law and obituaries on which protective regulations are formed.

With that in mind it's a bit hard to ignore the irony in the regulatory uncoupling that's happening in the US right now. We have learned from our own past and from the aforementioned stories that greed and self interest will always produce externalities that trump a society's well-being; it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good.

> it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good.

while reading your post half way i was thinking to reply saying the exact same thing

this gives me much pause, because it means that even if more and more these deregulation’s hurt society, they would get drowned out by the (increasingly sensational) daily news cycle

Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.

Unsurprisingly given the proximity, Vietnam is just as bad in this respect. It is crazy, anything to make some money.

> It's reprehensible.

You mean something like this - Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910

I have no evidence of this, and I am not proposing it is true...

more like a plot for a novel or something, but

What if a nation that produces almost everything purposely contaminates their products with slow poisons and heavy metals so that the enemy consumer population slowly becomes stupid and ill, and unable to compete effectively on the international stage.