Public Address | Cafe | Cracker: Weapons of Mass Production

Kumara Republic

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 01:16:20 +1300

That was a bit of an eye-opener for anyone who might have thought Auckland was a reasonable sized city!

Tim Shadbolt was on Morning Report ripping into the Govt for leaving the regions to rot, in context of the Bluff Smelter vs Meridian Energy issue. He also raised a thought-provoking…

Vince McLeod

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:30:20 +1300

I do wonder what impact 3D printing will have on places like this. It appears that a lot of manufacturing jobs simply won't exist in a decade's time.

martinb

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:23:35 +1300

I remember being there near the train station at New Years when the railroads were delayed by snow. That was a bit of an eye-opener for anyone who might have thought Auckland was a reasonable sized city!

Damian Christie

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 08:24:08 +1300

Just a little thing for the author, but if you are going to include the 'greater city area' in the population then you need to do that for every other mega city in the world.

Yeah I appreciate that. I spent a bit of time trying to work out accurately…

Chris Waugh

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:07:06 +1300

it’s like something from Simcity or one of those other build your own city games.

Yeah, it does seem to happen that fast. Just a couple of hundred metres north of where I'm sitting there was a market a year and a half ago. Now it's yet another real estate…

Chris Waugh

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:50:15 +1300

Similar vein – politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china

Ah yes, did see that. Kitto makes some very good points, but I find he overstates his case somewhat. That article struck me as being unnecessarily bitter, in other words. Having said that, I do intend to get my own family out of China in the…

Rich of Observationz

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:43:35 +1300

See also Milton Keynes/Stevenage/Basingstoke (or Christchurch, for that matter).

I grew up partly in Basingstoke, and it's amazing how you can get from green fields to a really boring suburban wasteland with lots of roundabouts in the time it takes a kid to reach teenageness. Although all those building sites…

Graham Dunster

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:28:59 +1300

Yamis

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:59:46 +1300

Fascinating article. The type of growth that has gone on in China and other parts of the region is astonishing. Mind blowing by comparison to our type of growth speeds which sees us fretting about Auckland reaching 2 million in 20 years and where are we going to put them…

Yamis

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:51:56 +1300

Just a little thing for the author, but if you are going to include the 'greater city area' in the population then you need to do that for every other mega city in the world.

Including the population of greater Seoul for example would bump it's number up to 24…

Chris Waugh

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:40:50 +1300

Oh, the staring still happens. Not so much in the big cities, although there is a certain subset of Beijingers who have a lazy "another foreigner" stare, but certainly even in the suburban and rural regions of Beijing and, of course, the smaller cities obvious foreigners are enough of a…

Rich of Observationz

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:30:31 +1300

I hope they weren't implementing "Public Address Auctions"

Sacha

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:23:54 +1300

Thanks to Sacha for the heads-up.

Welcome.

I recommend us all using the 'Report' link that shows up when you point to the bottom left corner of any comment. Otherwise might take a while before Russell happens to read about it.

Russell Brown

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:10:31 +1300

Am I the only one who’s been given godlike powers to close threads and make posts sticky? Russell?

Not just you! Thanks to Sacha for the heads-up. There was a site upgrade last night and a little permissions problem as a result. Thanks for your restraint :-)

Hilary Stace

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:03:46 +1300

One other impression from that trip, which probably never happens to tourists now, is that experience of being stared at as fascinating aliens. In one city (Loyang?) when we got off our tour bus huge crowds gathered to stare at the strange people alighting. Not friendly or unfriendly, just stares…

Hilary Stace

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:57:16 +1300

Thanks Chris. I should have checked correct spellings and tones (after all I try and be careful with macrons). This was when places were known to NZers as Canton, Peking etc. There were two of us young ones on the NZ-China Society tour bringing the average age down to about…

Sacha

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:55:55 +1300

meanwhile I ain't pushing nothin'

wise

Ian Dalziel

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:52:53 +1300

Flypaper...
...godlike powers to close threads and make posts sticky?
as it's the web, surely the threads should be sticky?

But yeah? what's the lowdown on these jargonised buttons
what esoteric new infomanagement function do they fulfil?

more complexity for everyday life?
or
will they free me up (like the…

Kyle Matthews

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:17:59 +1300

Am I the only one who's been given godlike powers to close threads and make posts sticky? Russell?

Chris Waugh

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 23:34:40 +1300

Guangzhou was the first Chinese city I visited on a memorable trip in April/May 1976.

Wow, Hilary, that trip must've been amazing. I was too busy being a newborn baby about that time to visit China. The changes I've seen since I was first blown away by the sheer size…

artig

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:42:41 +1300

Thanks Damian. That's the one.

Hilary Stace

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:27:16 +1300

Guangzhou was the first Chinese city I visited on a memorable trip in April/May 1976. It was usually called Canton then by New Zealanders and many of the local NZ Chinese had family links to the region. I remember heat and humidity as I had never experienced before, also crowds…

Rob Stowell

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:04:03 +1300

Great article! Always wanted to go to China…. and with Damian (and Chris W!) I almost feel like I have :)

Lilith __

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:22:44 +1300

Yeah, fascinating, Damien. And, notwithstanding what Ian says, without any celebrity nipple.

Chris Waugh

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:04:02 +1300

Those days [of sweatshops] are far gone.

Or moved inland, perhaps, as recent reports of unrest at Foxconn plants in Taiyuan and Zhengzhou may suggest.

Question for the lawyers: Does New Zealand have an equivalent of the US's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? If not, is one in the works?

I…

Damian Christie

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:59:19 +1300

@Artig – Yes, there was a documentary of sorts, that would be my show 'Hindsight', and an episode around the history of the concept of Buy Kiwi Made:

http://tvnz.co.nz/hindsight/s3-ep13-video-4942885

@Ben – thanks!

BenWilson

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:10:56 +1300

Great story, Damien. Thanks for that. Amazing country.

Kumara Republic

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:18:19 +1300

And like modern China, Vietnam has become Communist in name only.

Ian Dalziel

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:05:58 +1300

spinning, spinning, spinning...
in regards to the last photo,
are there topless women in Guangzhou, too?
[ ; – )

artig

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:28:00 +1300

Those 3 kiwis in Guangzhou sound familiar. Was there a documentary on TV some months ago where they were interviewed?

Geoff Lealand

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:40:34 +1300

A very interesting article. One consequence of the hard labour of parents and grandparents supporting the one child family, is that it can result in a double whammy: such children sometimes are horribly spoilt and self-centred (the ‘little emperor’ syndrome), and simultaneously have very expectations placed on them, to succeed…

Idiot Savant

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:19:29 +1300

However I couldn’t help thinking that the guy whose job it was to test-fire a volley from each massive fluorescent green foam pellet gun didn’t realise he had the best job on the whole conveyor belt.

As the proud owner of a pair of those foam pellet guns, I can…

Public Address

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:19:29 +1300

Discussion from blog post.