I only realized it’s NOT an armband after you pointed it out x)

OK, here’s a couple more that are famous and great for touristic reasons of history /culture /good food /great landscape /etc

Xi’an (one of the ancient capitals of China, starting point of the traditional and new Silk Road), Guilin (every single time they show China in cartoon, with giant mountains and winding rivers, they’re basically showing here), Shenzhen (the new hyper modern high tech city), Guangzhou (old English name was Canton, as in Cantonese food), Suzhou and Hangzhou (historically famed for being chill and beautiful, lakes and canals etc), Hainandao (Chinese version of Hawaii), Nanjing (another ancient capital of China, lots of culture), Harbin (lots of Russian architecture here, and a FANTASTIC and huge ice sculpture show every year)

…sounds grim and surreal. Pretty sure I’ve read post-apocalyptic fiction with similar backgrounds :|

There was a period when foreigners, especially English-speaking white foreigners, were treated effusively in China, elevated above all Chinese people and often far above the natural social place these folks had back in their own countries. They got better jobs, better job situations and benefits, and Chinese people in general gave them respect and admiration based on their whiteness and exotic Westerness alone.

Then China opened up to the world at ever increasing pace, Chinese people became more sophisticated, and an entire generation of previously-fêted foreigners lost their elevated place in society. They crashed back to earth and drifted back to the social positions they always would have had based on their personal abilities and talents.

Laowhy and Serpentza lived through the tail part of that shift. The good and easy time they’d had in China soon ended, they were barely making ends meet, and soon had to leave. They became deeply bitter, and attributed that natural change in society to the CPC ruining the good times for everyone, not just themselves. Thereafter they fell in with various anti-China crowds within and without China, and also found just how lucrative anti-China videos are on yt.

So it’s a combination of both a personal sense of being wronged, plus the good grift, that resulted in their channels and stance today. They were always grifters at heart, the change in money merely changed the nature of their content.

At that point of wealth you aren’t thinking about spending money as an individual, or even an individual family (even including hangers on and staff). You are essentially a representative of a power that parallels governments, with worldwide reach, and will think along those lines. You want to implement worldwide policies, dictate the tides of capitalism, play with your own regime change politics, break the barriers of old age, gene manipulation, and get the process started on astro-mining and colonizing Mars.

They wish it’s this easy to keep people. If businesses knew how to monopolize the market forever, they wouldn’t have been so desperate to set up these walls.

I dropped cable for Netflix years ago with a shrug, and as Netflix and all the streaming services are turning into cable I dropped them too and will wait for the next thing. If talking to some large group of faceless masses becomes annoying and spam filled, I’ll keep my resources for other things I can turn my attention to.

It’s weird to me to see these artificial structures treated as though they’re some real solid thing with no alternatives. That’s literally these companies’ PR to make us believe it