Not everyone can feasibly do this, you need to speak mandarin + read/write chinese, legally be able to work, and have some way to deal with the gfw. Also tap water may not be drinkable but thats more of a nuisance since you can filter/boil it.

Also idk what the article is talking about with flying delivery drones and self driving cars in shenzhen, if you order meituan delivery its probably gonna be delivered by a gig worker on a scooter cuz thats all young people can get employed as these days. Delivery is insanely cheap and can’t possibly pay much, but also cost of living is relatively low, but still shenzhen is on the expensive end as far as living in china goes.

Finally paying for everything via alipay/wechat and visiting everywhere with biometrics is yet another convenience/privacy tradeoff. Visit china on a 10 year tourist visa, everywhere you go by train, every tourist attraction or national park you visit, every digital payment, is all linked to your passport. Equivalent for chinese citizens would be the national id card/number. China more or less skipped the credit card adoption phase afaik. Not that places won’t take cash but it’s less common especially in cities.

China is not a magical land where everything is perfect and futuristic. It’s a big country with a lot of people in many, many big cities that operates on totally different cultural systems. It is affordable from the perspective of a tourist who earns USD/Euro etc.

Source: I spent a month there in 2025

I thought the vegas “loop” was a pathetic and useless project that transports basically no one at speeds of 15 mph, but thanks to this article I now know that it is also a scourge on the environment of planet earth due to the pollutants added during its construction! Which I suppose doesn’t put it too far off most of the things in the las vegas strip. But it’s seriously pathetic, they dig 1 tunnel from point A to point B and have a driver drive a tesla to transport people from A to B and B to A. The tunnel is only wide enough for traffic in one direction BTW so if people are waiting on either side, they have to wait for the 1 car to finish its trip.

I mean… it doesn’t have to be, though my experience is only from fflogs and not like a speedrun leaderboard or anything professional.

Getting rank1 means that you were the best in the world, by some metric, for some amount of time, under certain conditions and support factors. You can feel proud of it in a normal way without making it your entire identity.

Also i’m good friends with pretty much everyone who could conceivably compete for the top placements and none of us would be heartbroken to see that a new record had been achieved. I think this is a pretty common dynamic, at least in competitive fields where there is an objective measure of success (rather than something adversarial).

I did not need to see that deer picture. Lmao

There was a really great and pretty detailed article on the possibility of a cascadia subduction zone earthquake by the New Yorker back in 2015. Archive link to the 2015 article if you havent read that