Back in 1987 these guys wrote, "Freeze this moment a little bit longer. Make each sensation a little bit stronger. Experience slips away..."
Today I heard these "guys" playing it on Youtube as I watched my phone in my bed trying to work up the courage and the purpose (besides a cup of coffee) to get out of it. Is it okay to call them all guys any more? I know Jeff Probst had to stop doing it on Survivor. "Come on in guys!" showed insufficient sensitivity to the female survivors. Evidently.
There's also a line in the song that says, "I let my skin get too thin."
I don't miss the constant pressure of having to worry about what I say like I did when I was teaching. You never know how something you say will affect those listening. How shall I say this carefully... I've been to Patpong and Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, Walking Street in Pattaya, Geylang in Singapore, 588 in Seoul, and Kabukicho in Tokyo and it looked like a lot of the girls there were on their way to the gym to work out. No? Still doesn't get Shane Gillis off the hook?
I had my first Sunday of the NFL season off this week too so I watched as much football as I could and I found myself getting cheer shy. Yup, I may have come up with that right here right now. Cheer shy. Go ahead and use it. It's yours. It's that feeling we get when the team we're voting for makes a great play; scores a touchdown; catches a long pass; sacks the QB; and we WANT to jump out of our seats and cheer... but there might be a flag.
How many times have goals in the NHL been scored then 5 minutes later after a lengthy review to find a skate lace on the wrong side of the blue line, crease, or the fucking TRAPEZOID, called back? What are the fans to do then? Take back our erroneous cheers? Exchange negative high fives? Maybe LOW fives to erase the high ones?
Muppets don't get wrinkles but they do die. The drummer and lyricist who most likely wrote the words to "Time Stand Still" where those lines come from, could have better explained what I am hoping to convey in this post today. But, like experience, he slipped away. I suspect sooner than he would have if he hadn't learned what that song and this post so insufficiently describe.
I think as people get older, and not necessarily but sometimes wiser, myself included, they give less of a shit about the past or future and tend to try to make more of the present. This may at least partially be because we don't know how many more "presents" we will get. "Like some pilgrim who learns to transcend; learns to live as if each step was the end."
There's a little book that I think a lot of people would really dig if it were just written as a poem with no author and no religious affiliation. It opens with a man called the teacher or the preacher making a very Taoist statement. Everything is hevel. It's word that means vapour, breath, mist. Basically everything is meaningless. This teacher is speaking from experience having had a wealth of it, having accrued riches, achievements, power, wisdom, and knowledge he says it all slipped through his fingers and amounted to nothing. Pleasure, success, money, accomplishments, he's had them all and determined that the greatest king is no greater than the lowest beast because everything is hevel. For everything there is a season and we are all just dust in the wind. No matter what you love, no amount of it will satisfy you. We are all just chasing the wind. The only hope offered in this little book is joy. The teacher says that there is no rhyme or reason in this world as to our individual fates save the certainty of death, so we had best eat, drink, and be merry; forget the past or the future - find as much joy as you can in what you have right now.
When I think of my own life I believe that more than anything what I sought was justice. I believed that surely justice was at the heart of our world and exposing those who profited through injustice was all one needed to do to end it. I realize now what an idiot I was. Not in the modern sense of having a deficiency in knowledge or intelligence. In fact I would consider myself above average in both. I am a Dostoevskian Idiot. A prince Myshkin. While I'm not sure yet to what extent I should have participated in the hypocrisy of life, I realize I should have just said, "Fuck it," and found my joy where I could. I was just chasing the wind. No matter what we find in our hearts to chase, we'll never catch it. The key is taking joy in the humiliation of defeat. And then we die.
I think this might be a nugget of wisdom that comes with age, i.e. proximity to death. Maybe it's what causes wrinkles, sickness, and hastens death. The little book, if you haven't guessed, was Ecclesiastes. At one point in his ravings the teacher comments that death is actually preferable to life. Maybe his purpose for writing it was to ease its certainty somewhat. Maybe there will come a time in my life when I can't find enough joy in living to make the alternative preferable. I haven't reached that point but I can feel it getting closer with every one of the simple pleasures of life becoming less pleasurable.
Eating and drinking used to make me merry - now I have to watch out for cholesterol, sugar, alcohol, caffeine... Sports was the greatest hobby in my life - now I'm too old to play them and I get pissed off every time I watch them... I loved joking, comedy, humour - but now everything funny seems to offend someone... world events/politics/news - it's just professional wrestling... love - it's for the young and foolish... People - sometimes I could do without them... I'm running out of things from which to derive joy! It's all becoming hevel. Is this what happens when we get old?
However, when I "pass an evening with a drink and a friend" I wish the moment could last a little bit longer and the sensation could be a little bit stronger. That's the stuff that makes life joyful enough to get outta bed in the morning.
Sometimes when people get disenchanted with the capitalist system and its inherent unsustainability, you'll hear someone say something like, "Before too long they'll be charging us for the air we breathe!" I've said before, a few times in these pages, that with the absolute screwing we line up to get from our various (but not various enough) telecom providers, the air is already being sold to us. Twice now, once last December in Sokcho and once yesterday I have felt like I may have forgotten to pay my air bill.
Those were my last two colds. While in Sokcho working for the scam school there I lived in the dorms. One night, the second or maybe third night of a cold, I woke up in my bed unable to breathe. I felt like one of the three companies in Korea that control the air, SK Telecom, KT, or LG, had found me delinquent in payment and shut off my air. I jumped out of bed to get upright, tried to concentrate on breathing while at the same time as suppressing the panic of suffocation, and take a very small breath which I used to cough. That cough got some of the crud that was blocking my lungs out so I could take a bigger breath. Then another cough and soon I was breathing again. During the coughing there was a period of dizziness and I saw a few stars but I didn't pass out. If I had, I would have fallen to the floor where I would have been in a lying down position and could conceivably have died.
The reason I immediately jumped out of bed, and the reason I say I could have died in a lying down position is reflux. GERD, excessive stomach acid, whatever. I've had it virtually my whole life. Burping in the trunk of a car while sneaking into a drive-in movie and stinking out the whole vehicle. An amusing anecdote courtesy of my gastrointestinal weakness. In my university days my girlfriend used to lay with her head on my stomach (my ripped 6-pack abs) and listen to all the action going on inside. Even in my tip top physical shape I had stomach issues. Over the years they've gotten worse but I'd say that I fit into the pattern that is pretty widespread: stomach acid problems have been on the rise. In the 70's, 80's, and 90's GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease) went up by half in western nations. I was just a part of that half. From the 90's to 2021 it doubled again and today there are over a billion people who suffer from GERD. Considered rare 35 years ago it's now the most common upper gastrointestinal disorder. Why?
Well the reason I brought up my super conditioning in the previous paragraph is the belief some people have that it's caused by obesity. The increase in obesity and the pressure it puts on the stomach causing acids to back up through the esophagus is impossible to discount, but it's not the only reason. Other changes in lifestyle have contributed as much. Our love of highly processed food, carbonated beverages, alcohol, late night eating, larger portion sizes, and some other factors come into play. As do modern chronic stress levels. There's even a bacteria, a good bacteria, that modern hygiene and antibiotics have killed. The H. Pylori bacteria used to damage the stomach's ability to produce acid. We inadvertently sanitized it out of our lives and replaced it with increased stomach acid.
It doesn't sound like too complicated a problem to solve, does it? Re-introduce H. Pylori, inhibit the proton-pump from pumping so much acid into our stomachs, regulate the overprocessing in the food and beverage industries... Oh now hold on there! They're just trying to make a buck. To regulate them would be unfair, wouldn't it?
Well, as you might expect, if you track the increase in GERD and its parallel rise in obesity, guess what else has risen right along side of them. Overprocessing. I don't think people realize exactly what this can mean. Using industrial fats, refined grains and sugars, genetically modified frankenfoods isn't the only thing we mean when talking about overprocessing. It's a bit more devious than that. One example is what is called "vanishing caloric density," which helps food break down faster so more of it can bypass fullness cues our bodies give us. That's right, food companies are making us eat more. So that accounts for a bit of the extra obesity... and stomach acid... and GERD. It also directly parallels the rise in type 2 diabetes.
Add to this the dramatic cultural changes like most women now working, inflation so bad that even WITH double income it's hard for families to make ends meet, brilliant consumerism technique advancement to make us NEED the latest Iphone or whatever, and the bazillion other things that add to general stress levels and, if any or all of them were contagious, you'd have a virtual pandemic in gut health/weight/diabetes. But they're only socially contagious so we can't call it that.
As tough as it is to tackle this problem by fighting the food and beverage industries, there is another massive industry that, by no coincidence, is profiting from all of this: Big Pharma. Why is it so tough for the medical industry to make a pill that regulates stomach acid? Is there a really great proton pump inhibitor out there? Oh there are dozens of pills that lower it for a while and there are some that need to be taken permanently, but I have yet to find a pill that works for me. I believe there is, and probably has been for a long time, a pill that can work for anyone. But I doubt it's on the market. The reason it's suppressed is probably because it's dirt cheap. In fact if you made dirt into a pill it might lower stomach acid. This stomach acid thing with all its drugs and procedures to treat it can get expensive. There's a great bit a comedian does about the endoscopy. He says that's when the doctors put you to sleep and they put a tube with a camera on it down your throat and look around your internal organs to see if they can find $3,000 in there.
How many of us have successfully gotten a doctor to prescribe a "prazole" or a proton pump prohibitor without having to go through one of these first? Every time I bring up my reflux to a doctor he/she immediately jumps right to the endoscopy. Those machines don't just pay for themselves! What they're searching for is polyps, blood, ulcers none of which I have or I would have died from them by now. My reflux is not short-term. But you can't reason with the doctors. They think they know your body better than you and they have to play with their expensive toys. I looked it up and there's nothing they can find that will make them say, "Well it's a good thing we did that endoscopy! Now we KNOW we can't give you a PPI (proton pump inhibitor)." But you have to pay the ferryman.
So you get one and the doctor says there's nothing, being sure to add that there COULD HAVE been. Then what do they do? They prescribe a pill. A PPI. Usually people go through several before they find the one that's right for them. I'm on omaprazole now but I stopped taking it cuz it just makes me shit. I wouldn't even believe it WAS omaprazole if not for the other symptom, a symptom a lot of proton pump inhibitors have, it's called RAHS but it's nothing to cheer about. It's rebound acid hypersecretion. That is... when you take these pills, you gotta keep taking them cuz if you stop - bam - even more stomach acid. So you have to take these little things forever. That too can get expensive. But nothing compared to the alternative.
I've already mentioned the link between GERD and diabetes but did you know that everything the pancreas produces is burned off by stomach acid? All the digestive enzymes and insulin just get burned up. When food doesn't get digested properly the body doesn't get the nutrients it craves so guess what it does - it makes you crave more. The previously mentioned "fullness cues" are not just given when the stomach is full. They also depend on sufficient nutrients.
I don't know if Big Pharma is quite this evil... YES they are... but treatment for type 2 diabetes is expensive and it just never ends. I've been undergoing it for about 6 years and in all that time only one of my doctors gave me a pill that stimulates insulin production in my own pancreas. HOW THE FUCK is that possible? And as yet exactly ZERO of them have mentioned this connection between GERD and diabetes even though I told them all about it. Most ignored it while others said I'd need to talk to another doctor who without exception wanted to snake the 3 thousand dollar tube down my throat.
I just need a good GERD drug. I can almost guarantee there's one out there for me. Until I can find that elusive, unicorn doctor that can just fucking prescribe me what I need, things like the following are going to continue to happen to me:
I woke up feeling like shit Oct. 8 but went to work anyway. I had worked security at the Oct. 4 Sarnia card show where the Polish hall was crowded to capacity (300) for hours and pretty full the rest of the time. I was there walking around amongst all the people from 8:30 to 5 and probably caught something from one or more of them. I had been dreading my next cold for a while. In fact just Sept. 27 when I called my brother Jeff on his birthday we were complaining about doctors who don't listen and I told him about the time I nearly died in Korea. I told him already I'd been told by my family doctor, three of his proxy docs (he's never there in person), and my diabetes doctor that I'd need to make an appointment with a doctor to get him/her to make an appointment with a doctor who will give me an endoscopy and THEN (and only then) we can talk about my GERD. I told one of my family doctor's proxy docs about 4 months ago that I need to do that and he said he'll get it arranged. Later on my next visit to my family doc, who again wasn't there, I told a different proxy doc, who said the same thing. On my most recent visit I told yet another proxy doc the whole story of Korea and almost dying there and she said we'll get an appointment set up. That was over a month ago. Still nothing. They keep sending me to Life Labs on the guise that they need to give blood work to a prospective gastrointestinal doc and I keep going but I don't know what becomes of these bloodwork reports. Or all the blood! They take a LOT!
Anyway, I said to Jeff that if I get a cold and can't breathe I may have to just die or go to the hospital cuz the doctors around here are treating my more fashionable problem - the diabetes, but they don't seem interested in the MUCH more serious and life-threatening problem I have. It was just shortly before that cold in Korea last year that I basically gave up trying to sleep lying down. I just wake up, cough, go back to sleep, wake up, cough, go back to sleep, about 30 times a night. It's not good quality sleep to say the least. In fact, when I first got back from Korea I visited Jeff and he told me that when I was sleeping on his couch I was making "muppet noises." That's what he called it. When my airway gets blocked by what my stomach pushes up into it, it makes musical noises in various keys all night.
Anyway anyway, I wasn't sleeping or laying down, I was walking to work Oct. 8 and coughing, wheezing, and making those noises. Luckily it was a vessel shift where I don't have to walk the full patrols, just up and down the dock checking the moorings and such. But I still did a good 12,000 steps during the shift. Normally it's 25,000. I had bought a bottle of Buckley's and it was keeping me from coughing too much, but I had sneezed, blown my nose, and coughed up buckets full of clear liquidy crud during the shift. I knew I wasn't bringing up the good stuff. I wanted thicker, yellow or green stuff and got none. A few times I was talking to people from the ship or to my cross-shift and couldn't get the air out to talk. Many times I tried to unclog my nose or spit and couldn't produce enough air to get the projectile where it was desired. Instead it just ran down my face or nose. Two hours before the end of my shift in my personal record book I wrote "Can hardly breathe." Then when I was relieved at 7 PM Jessica, my relief, was saying that she had the same thing and had trouble breathing.
I had decided to stop by a drug store on the way home and get some kind of expectorant like Mucinex so I could cough up the lumpy crud. I didn't even make it to the drug store. I got to Centennial Park, only a few steps off the Cargill property and was having such a hard time breathing I actually saw a few stars. I thought again of passing out and being in a non-upright position unconscious. It would be the death of me. So I panicked and dialed 9-1-1. As the operator talked to me I was reminded of Malcolm In The Middle. "911 What is your problem?"
That's honestly how I was talking! The ambulance was taking a while and 3 times I had to talk to the operator and RE-describe where I was. "I'm at... Centennial... Park. At... the... sign." "So you're at the intersection there on front street." "No... I'm on... Ex... mouth... Street." I saw the ambulance turn onto Exmouth down the street, then turn OFF Exmouth and go down another street. I called her back after going to the parking lot abutting the park. "I'm in... the Sar... nia... chiroprac... tical par... king lot." Anyway they finally found me and it was two young girls. By the time they got there I noticed I had started breathing a bit better. Probably because I'd stopped walking. But I figured maybe I could get something in an inhaler to clear my lungs like asthmatics use and MAYBE if I'm super lucky I can get a doctor at the hospital to give me something for my GERD.
After untucking my uniform, shaving my chest like the 40-year-old virgin, hooking up monitor cables, clamping something to my finger, testing my blood pressure, testing my oxygen, getting my health card and a list of meds, and asking loads of questions, we drove to the hospital. The EMT's were actually good. They figured it was a chest infection, old pneumonia, or reflux complications. They also had me inhale albuterol from an inhaler. It was really slow and made talking difficult but it may have helped. Throughout the whole ambulance ride I sounded like a set of bagpipes but by the time I got to the hospital I was breathing better.
When I got there I HAD to go into a wheelchair. Rules. They checked me in by asking the same questions the girls had already asked. I was doing another 4 hits of albuterol. Might as well get it while I can. Still wheezing and droning though. Then they sent me into a room close to Emerg where I was put on an almost flat table (heavily reclined) and a lady put a bunch more of those stickers on me to which they attach the wires. I think it was an EEG. It was fast. Then I got wheeled to a room. Then I finally met my doctor. I'll call him Dirk Clutter MD. He had some kind of accent I couldn't place. I probably could have figured it out if we talked but all he said was take off the shirt, pants can stay on, put on the gown, we're going to give you a chest x-ray. Then he disappeared. A little while later another lady came in. She was a Filipina I'm pretty sure. She took several vials of blood. Then another lady took me for chest x-rays. I waited quite a while for the doctor to come back. I was all ready to tell him my medical history like I had done with the EMT gals.
I reckon the whole procedure didn't even take two hours. When the doc finally came to the room to talk to me he said, "It's just a virus so we won't need antibiotics. The virus is pushing your lungs together and restricting your air. Here's a script for more albuterol." The pushing lungs together was almost verbatim what I had told the EMT's when they (unlike Dirk Clutter) asked me to describe my symptoms. So I think he talked to them rather than to me.
I said, "Well I've had hundreds of colds, only one was anything like this and that was in Korea last December. That's when my reflux started getting really bad. I can't even sleep lying down any more. The cold complicated by reflux caused the respiratory issues. Are you saying this has nothing to do with my reflux?"
He said, "Nope. They are completely unrelated." Then he started inching his way out of the room. I was saying that I was hoping maybe he'd prescribe a proton pump inhibitor like (and I was looking it up on my phone) ... he was out of the room before I could say, "Prevacid." As he walked down the hall in a voice that was trailing off in volume he said without turning back to look at me, "You'll have to arrange with your family doctor to see a specialist and get an endoscopyyyyyyyy..."
Okay. Well. I sat on the edge of the bed in the "room" which was just one of a few made with curtains in a bigger room. Now what? Do I go somewhere to get this albuterol? Does this hospital have a pharmacy? Can I put my clothes back on? Which way to the exit? What hospital am I even IN? (Cuz remember I was brought to the hospital in an ambulance so I didn't see where we were driving.) I got dressed and went out into the hall looking as confused as I could and an orderly or hospital employee of some sort asked if I needed help. She told me I'd have to find a pharmacy to get the prescription filled but it was 9:30 or 10 PM so that was out. She also directed me to the nearest exit. It took a quick Google Map search but I figured out that I was luckily at the hospital close to my apartment. However, the walk home from that hospital was longer than the walk that had triggered my suffocation. I decided to start walking and if the breathing got too laboured I'd call a cab. Luckily I made it home without passing out on the side of the road.
Hampton et. al. (1975) and Peterson et. al. (1992) are classic evaluations that show medical history alone accounts for 76-83% of final diagnoses. Exams, labs, imaging tests, bloodwork, etc. account for only 9-13% of competent medical diagnoses. In the first paper a physical exam was useful in only 7 out of 80 patients (11.4%) and by getting the patients' medical history alone doctors were able to offer proper diagnoses. It wouldn't have taken me more than a few minutes to offer Dr. Dirk some information that could have improved his diagnosis and helped me considerably more, but he was not interested. He seemed in a hurry. This is the same fast food, assembly line medical treatment I have received from every doctor I've seen here except for Shetty my diabetes doc. I'll be visiting him in 10 days and you can bet I'll tell him this tale. With a bit of luck, he might be able to give me what the vaunted Canadian medical system is too abysmal to manage.
At this point in my life I have still not completely ruled out working in China again. Luckily for me I think China and its ESL racket have effectively ruled me out. I think it is mostly because of my age but for all I know it could have something to do with their social credit system. There is a GLARING weakness to this system and I have fallen victim to it in every country I've lived with the possible exception of Japan. I didn't live there long enough.
Take a look at my recent posts and experiences right here in Canada. Also, while watching the above video I thought of some of my experiences in Korea. China may believe they are way ahead of other countries in their social credit technology but in my opinion they are simply the only country that is comfortable sharing it with its citizens. And when you look at the stunning nonchalance with which Lulu, the videographer's wife, took the news that facial reading technology had been widely set up with HER face, without her permission, you see how The Party has efficiently socialized citizens of China. In common non-Party reasoning a person's face belongs to that person. No company has the right to use it in thousands of ID systems around the country despite how convenient it may be to get water from a vending machine by only scanning your face. This is not Shi Jin Ping thought. It's the sort of thinking that can cost you social credit points.
But is China the only country that does this? I doubt it. Let's go to the beginning. When the uni prof is interviewed he states that China wondered how there could be more fraud in China than the west and found that it was because of credit rating. If you have read my two posts about credit rating and how thoroughly corrupted it is in Canada you will know the giant flaw in the social credit system, but let's hold off on that for the moment. Credit ratings are generally accepted and a more and more accessible and widely used indicator of honesty in Canada. They used to be accessible only to certain organizations like banks or institutes where people can borrow money, but now any Joe Blow who wants to rent you a room in his basement can pull out his phone and get a sort of Canadian social credit score, can't he? You ask the average Canadian and they will give you a similar reaction to Lulu and say that this keeps people more honest in Canada. Does it? Does the social credit system in China keep people more honest like they assure you it does in the video?
NO.
The glaring flaw was illustrated quite clearly in my recent attempt to clear my credit rating here in Canada. You can read about it in the posts Give Me a Little Credit Will You? and Give Me a Little Credit Won't You? A major company like Telus, one of the Triumvirate of Evil, along with Bell and Roger's that hold an illegal but allowed monopoly on telecom in Canada can easily exploit and manipulate credit ratings and make life difficult for anyone they want. They are not questioned by credit rating companies and credit rating companies are not questioned by anyone either. What I'm saying is there is no regulation and despite the history of disaster in Canada when things become de-regulated, this is the direction we're told our people want to go. And... again... this will lead to disaster.
But back to China. Rather than making their country more honest and/or reducing fraud, all they will find the social credit system will do is move it upward in class and without much exposure to Shi Jin Ping thought, it would be a very difficult task to convince me that this is not and intentional part of the whole social credit system of China.
Go to the part in the video when the uni prof does a credit check on Lulu's phone and tells her that she could stay in certain hotels without paying certain fees AND she could have an easier time with immigration in countries like Argentina, Latvia, and... CANADA! This instantly made me think of all the trouble I had at immigration offices in both China and Korea when I stayed there. It was as if the opposite of what Lulu had done to get an easier time at immigration offices had been done by me. But what could that have been? Telecom again. I bought 6 months of phone/internet from Hanaro Telecom when I worked in Mokpo at Mokpo National University. The lady at the Hanaro office said other teachers had done it for 6 months, she promised that there would be no locking me into longer term contracts like a year or two years, that it was month-to-month and I could cancel when I left. She lied. It was her JOB to lie. And when I tried to protest, she looked me right in the eye and denied saying any of this. Then she had a nice meal and slept soundly I presume.
Even though Hanaro is now out of business; even though they were found to be defrauding customers; even though there was a well-publicized class action lawsuit against them for sharing sensitive information of 6-7 million customers; even though they were also sued for price fixing; they just merged with SK Telecom making the Korean telecom monopoly more effective. I probably could have gotten in on that class action lawsuit and participated in suing Hanaro ffs! But even though the company is clearly and thoroughly corrupt, I try to get internet from any of the Triumvirate of Evil in Korea (KT, LG, or SKT) and they refuse because I didn't pay Hanaro for 6 months of service in Mokpo when I was no longer living in Mokpo 18 years ago or whatever it was. I am pretty sure my consistent trouble with immigrations were the result of being flagged too and the Hanaro incident no doubt factored into that. Am I saying Korea has a social credit system of its own? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. If you had been in Korea right when the pandemic started you should probably think so too. But even in Korea people can see things happen that should cause them grave concern over rights and freedom violations but they shrug them off like Lulu.
There was a guy found to have Covid 19 in Korea. A gay guy. A foreign guy if I remember correctly. Within hours EVERY person in Korea who had been in the same establishments as him was contacted by phone and given a message to immediately get tested. They HAVE a social credit system in Korea. They just don't tell the citizens about it so that they'll THINK they have more rights and freedoms than the citizens of China.
Then there was China. They have 4 big banks but it doesn't seem like it. ICBC, the world's largest bank, is the one everyone uses. The others are mostly industrial. Again a monopoly so again they get away with whatever the frig they want. I've blogged about it before - they have the only cash machines in the world that are set up to make you leave your card in them. You get your cash before you get your card back. You actually have to press more buttons to get your card back after you have the cash. If you don't, the machine eats your card, your bank account gets FROZEN, and you can't get your card back unless you go to the bank and basically start a new account all over again. This too is by design. It gives the bank an excuse to find out what you're up to and for foreigners it's more important in case you're transferring too much money out of China or other suspicious activity. Most people have this happen to them at least once if they stay in China awhile. It happened to me five times I think? For this I was probably flagged and paid extra attention to.
What about Canada? We definitely THINK we have more rights and freedoms than the folks in China, but do we? I STILL get ads for the X Files on my phone because when I was visiting my brother Jeff in March, half a year ago, we watched a few episodes of it. Don't kid yourself, nothing you do in Canada is private either. Don't forget what I found out and blogged about only a few months ago: I was flagged for not using my social insurance number. FLAGGED. I was told as much by the worker at the office where they flagged me. What happens when you're flagged? Government websites don't work. They don't tell you, "Hey this is your government. Why aren't you using your SIN?" They just make your life a lot more frustrating. I'm not convinced my troubles with immigration overseas didn't also have something to do with that as well. We are monitored just like the Chinese. And if we're playing the game, we get rewards. If we're not borrowing money, building credit, paying taxes, making ourselves easier to monitor, we get punished.
Big companies will exploit and manipulate people, innocent and honest people, by using the social credit system of China to punish people for not giving their companies enough money. They are already doing it. It is literally impossible to get a bank account without a phone in China. So there are two companies (most likely ICBC and China Mobile (about a billion customers)) who you have almost no choice but to use. Woe unto you and your social credit score if you miss a cell payment or get an insufficient funds charge. It is still possible to live a life without a car loan, house loan, credit card, line of credit, or things like these but you have to be weird to do it. Wonkda in Korea. Basically antisocial in North America. But what's to stop the credit and loan companies who are absolutely notorious for cheating customers... from cheating their customers MORE? Once they have to protection of unimpeachable honesty gifted by the social credit system, why wouldn't they just create bullshit charges for people who they feel aren't being good enough customers? The folks will pay or their social credit scores will be affected. The companies cannot be questioned because they are controlled by unregulated bodies - in China the CPP, everywhere else unregulated private entities - so they will either get your money or kill your score. Pretty sweet for THEM and pretty sucky for US the little guys.
The video about China is tagged as a "dystopian reality." It's just a reality. Life is already dehumanized, fearful, and wretched for everyone but the super rich. Dystopian. It just becomes more so every day. How long before people hack this system and if I'm one of them I can just punch a few numbers into my phone and affect someone else's credit score? Someone I like or someone I want to cause problems for. Is it already possible? I think it is. And that is scary. If someone doesn't like you because you slept with his wife, or you parked in his favourite spot, or you are a foreigner, all he needs is fingerprint or face and he can make it look like you crossed the street on a red light. I'm sure it can be a helluva lot worse than that too! I don't think there's much futuristic about this, I think it's widespread already, it's just not hidden in China. And all the talk about making life more harmonious and honest is pure nonsense. This is nothing more than another way to enrich the already rich and impoverish the already poor. And a communist country is bragging about it! Shame on China... and the rest of the world.
