User Comments - Grambers

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

Are you including your purchase of a BMW in the range of interesting phenomena that can be explained by evolutionary psychology!?:)

Posted on: Fast Cars and Shallow Women

Just back from two weeks in China where I discovered that one of the girls I used to lodge with now works as car model of the kind depicted above (part-time, of course!). We discussed 'weisuo nan' at length:)

Posted on: Homeschooling

哎...no time for an extensive reply today, but I can't resist saying a word or two on this.

Firstly, I can think of no worse way to run a society than to insist that everyone educate themselves, or at least pay for their own education, regardless of circumstance. Isn't the flaw in this masterplan pretty self-evident? It means, simply, that every inequality that exists in society now is entrenched forever more - or until the revolution, at least. Those at the bottom have no means of educating themselves and are destined to remain marginalised and exploited (for labour, if they're lucky) by those whose mummies and daddies paid for their schooling.

Every taxpayer SHOULD pay for the education of everyone else for the rest of their lives - I can see no problem whatsoever with this idea. Alongside health provision, education is surely the main reason for governments to exist. Only a government can pool resources, plan and strategise. Leave it to the private sector and you end up in a very bad place indeed.

You world view seems to, um, how can I put it, owe something to the radical fringe of right wing American politics. Governments are not evil. Governments are necessary. Yes, governments get bloated. Yes, there needs to be mechanisms to restrain the natural and inevitable avarice of government as a whole, and its individual members (for reference, see China). However, you can't simply dismiss any effort at public provision as doomed and perverse.

There's my two pennies!:) Nice bantering with you.

Posted on: A Detained Package

I always thought (and my dictionary is confiming) that 申报 means to 'declare' (as in 'to declare something officially/to an authority). The definition given in the vocab section suggests a slightly different meaning. It's possible its been mistakenly translated, but I'm not 100%. Can you double check for me?

Posted on: A Detained Package

Thanks Jiaojie.

Posted on: A Detained Package

Thanks. QW (or perhaps Chinesepod generally) should really do a shanzhai-style ad campaign: "Wanna receive an international package, there's a QW for that; wanna bribe your local Party boss, there's a QW for that; wanna sleaze on that sexy girl standing over there at the bar, there's an QW for that".

The new(ish) slack bass, 1990s sitcom-style QW intro music might be argued to be a bit Shanzhai itself. Moot point, perhaps.

Posted on: A Detained Package

Thanks. Jiao it is then.

Posted on: A Detained Package

Nicely put. But 'fun' being in the middle? Surely only if you regard losing your mind as 'fun'. Or apoplexy as 'fun'? Or rice wine banquets as 'fun' (actually, these can be fun, albeit hazardous to both physical and mental health).

"On time and under budget doesn't happen if nobody knows what the hell is really going on" - I could not agree more. But yet organisational skills do appear to be present in China (think 3,000 unblinking automatons banging their drums at the 2008 Opening Ceremony). It's just that nobody seems to really care what the hell is going on unless a pot-bellied man with black hair dye is standing menacingly over one's shoulder.

Posted on: Homeschooling

"there are no mulligans in childhood"

Wise words, and very adroitly put (particularly for the golfing audience). But surely it is folly to believe you have a hope in hell of producing precisely the child you desire. Much mischief (er...to put it mildly) has arisen from those who have tried to take a totalitarian approach to child-rearing in an effort to ensure only good stimuli and eliminate all negative stimuli.

That's the vague stuff. In terms of specifics, yes, America's public school system is generally regarded as being one of the worst in the developed world (though it should be noted that its universities are regarded as the best. The gloriously annoying Niall Ferguson riffed on this subject in one of his BBC Reith Lectures this year.) So the answer - send your kids to private school, if you are rich enough. But you need to be rich. And therein lies the problem. US is one of the least equal societies on earth with few possibilities for genuine social mobility (I know many Americans will rail against this notion, as it challenges the entire philosophy on which the nation was founded, but facts are facts, alas). A divergence between public and private schools is one of great drivers of his entrenched inequality, surely?

Posted on: A Detained Package

Do you 交 or 付 房租? Why?