Please be noted the following video is ONLY a joke, but NOT a tutorial to teach you how to smoke on planes. The behaviour shows in the following video may be against with relevant regulations and laws in the realistic world, and the person who breaks those regulations and laws may be punished.
Please keep in mind – smoking kills!!!
From Financial Times – Chinese, by Tom Mitchell (the FT’s deputy news editor)
Posted on April 25, 2011
Original Title: Truckers’ strike alerts Beijing to dangers of high inflation
A man throws a rock at a non-strike truck - REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Carworkers in southern Guangdong province warned the world last year it could not take cheap Chinese labour for granted any more by successfully agitating for higher wages in a series of industrial actions. Shanghai truckers reinforced that message with a strike of their own last week.
The Chinese government is always wary of workers who possess the wherewithal to organise independent industrial action outside the auspices of the country’s only sanctioned union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions. But Shanghai’s truckers undoubtedly frighten Beijing more.
The adage in western democracies that “all politics is local” has a parallel in authoritarian China, where almost all social unrest is local too. Dozens if not hundreds of small-scale protests, typically labour or land-related, flare every day.
For all the attention they commanded, the Guangdong strikes were in keeping with this pattern. Each concerned pay and conditions on the factory floor and they were resolved on the factory floor. The ire was directed at management, most notably at factories run by Honda and other Japanese carmakers.
Shanghai’s truckers latched on to something larger that, from the Chinese government’s perspective, made their strike potentially more dangerous. They were more explicit about their impatience with inflation in the form of the rising port fees and fuel costs that are eroding their ability to make a living. As one trucker told the FT: “This truck is all I have to support my wife and kid.”
Police is on duty during a truck driver strike at a seaport in Shanghai
Port fees can be blamed on port operators, even if they are state-owned, and at the weekend the Shanghai Transport and Port Authority announced a reduction or cancellation of various charges. In doing so the authority did not mention the strikes, saying only that the fee cuts were aimed at “easing rising inflation and cost pressures on transport companies”. It also lowered the monthly fee taxi drivers must pay for their vehicle, in a canny effort to prevent the port protests on the city’s outskirts from spreading into Shanghai proper.
If only Beijing could fix inflation as readily as it fixes fees. Interest rate increases and other measures aimed at reining in price rises have thus far failed to have their intended effect, with inflation hitting a 32-month high of 5.4 per cent last month. As Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, put it recently, the government is discovering that inflation is a tiger that “once set free is very difficult to put back in its cage”.
The government will have gotten off lightly should this weekend’s fee reductions prove enough to send Shanghai’s truckers home, especially if they disperse before drivers in other cities cotton on to their example. As with last year’s Honda strikes, censors have imposed a strict media blackout to prevent exactly that.
Shanghai has the largest container terminal on the world
While the authorities can do little to prevent vertical explosions of local discontent – think of thousands of little volcanoes erupting all over the country – they are ruthless when it comes to eradicating any horizontal linkages that might give rise to larger co-ordinated movements. Hence the brutality they unleashed on the highly networked Falungong cult a decade ago, and more recently their over-reaction to the anonymous internet pleas for “jasmine” protests inspired by this year’s Arab spring.
As for the truckers’ concern about the rising price of diesel, increasing China’s already generous fuel subsidy would be too costly and humiliating a concession for such a localised disturbance. Beijing sets fuel prices and has raised them twice already this year.
Yet Chinese truckers still pay just $1.05 per litre of diesel fuel – 35.1 per cent below the international market price – and the government fears the financial consequences of this year’s oil price surge. Minggao Shen, a China equity analyst at Citibank, has estimated that $150 a barrel oil would cost the government $66bn annually in subsidies.
But even if Shanghai’s truckers fade away quietly this time, they have already proved that one of the government’s worst fears was not misplaced – inflation can and will continue to inspire protests and social unrest. Another long, hot summer is just beginning on the Chinese mainland.
From Financial Times – Chinese, by Tom Mitchell (the FT’s deputy news editor)
Posted on April 25, 2011
Original Title: Truckers’ strike alerts Beijing to dangers of high inflation
From: webbeta.org
Published on August 11, 2009
Internet browsers on phones make browsing experience faster and save data consuming in the way of compressing data by a server. Most of the foreign phone browsers (to Chinese users) have their own server overseas, which can be used as a tool to break the GFW – the Great Firewall – a “special designed” Internet censorship system implemented by the Chinese government. However, please be noted that GFW is not the only wall in the Internet society. You may break through the GFW, but you may be stopped by another wall. Followings are the five of those mobile browsers that at least can break through the GFW:
which can be recognised as the earliest breaking tool? Who knows! But many Chinese users use this browser for breaking through the GFW. No worries on privacy matters due to its Socket socket encrypted proxies. There are also high speed and stable servers, and high competences on webpage parsing, even with the capability of video playing. Opera mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 have been released. They are much faster, stabler and more worth to use. In addition, Opera mini mod, another version of Opera mini browser modified by a Russian offers more functions like file management, FTP management and file download, etc. Download Opera browser here or download Opera mini mod here (in Russian or use Google Translate)
has been claimed as the most functional mobile browser since the first release till now. It is compatible to run Flash videos and js in webpages. And the most important is that this application also offer a server for data transfer. Install this application here
UCWEB is one of the popular mobile browsers in China mainland. Even though, an English version of UCWEB, which has servers outside the country, has also been released. Therefore, people in China can enjoy the Internet without a wall in between. The application has a clear interface, no advertisements bother you and it’s faster than its Chinese version. WebBeta has a strong recommendation on this application. Download it here
is a mobile browser like UCWEB, but very popular in India. Download
is a browser application written by Java. It displays the most PC-like webpages to some of other mobile browsers like Opera and UCWEB. It seems like saving more data consumption in comparison with SkyFire. The server is located at Northern American, which means you may use it for breaking through the Great FireWall. Download it here
From webbeta.org
Published on August 11, 2009
The purpose of this post is to help the people in China mainland to visit those censored websites which should not be censored (obviously there are different views on which kind of websites should be censored), but please pay attention on the legal matters when you do so.
Remember that you may also use VPN on your iPhone. Under Settings – General – Network – VPN, and set up your VPN connection specifications. You may connect VPN thereafter when you want to break through GFW.
Many universities use VPN for students or staff to read literatures remotely. There is also some free VPN providers, such as HotspotShield. Of course, if you need higher data throughput, shorter response time, faster speed and more stability, you have to choose those profit-making VPN providers.
Another good thing of VPN is that you can also use it on your computer to break through the GFW.
From BNET, by Geoffrey James, on February 2, 2011
Many executives wrongly believe that selling to businesses is the same as selling to consumers. As a result, they employ strategies that have worked in consumer-oriented businesses, like brand marketing, advertising, value pricing, and so forth.
This concept turns up in comments whenever I write about the uselessness of branding in B2B markets. Inevitably, somebody writes “what about Coke?” as if that had some relevance to the discussion. I suspect that the belief that “selling is selling” comes from MBA programs that love consumer marketing case studies.
The truth is that B2B selling is not only different from B2C selling, it’s massively more difficult, for the following eight reasons:
None of this would be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that executive who don’t “get it” make it more difficult for sales professionals to get their job done. Selling B2B is vastly more sophisticated than anything that goes on the world of B2C. As such, it needs more support, more training, and more of the RIGHT kind of marketing, specifically lead generation.
I rediscovered my old AOL e-mail account this week and was taken down e-memory lane as the famous “You’ve Got Mail!” message boomed from the PC speaker as I signed in. After years of neglect and only spam in my inbox, it was like a voice from beyond the grave – and with the same old US accent they never localised for the UK with a British voice proclaiming: “Post Is Here!”
I had logged in because I was taking the pulse of e-mail in general. Its obituary has been written repeatedly by the media over the past 10 years – strangled by spam in 2003, smothered by social networks in 2007 and razed by real-time communication such as Google Wave in 2009, before predictions of being finished off by Facebook Messages this year.
Spam is still a problem but more contained. Social networks give us peripheral vision of what our friends are up to but there is still a need for the e-mail equivalent of direct eye-contact. Wave, now cast adrift by Google, showed it was cool to see someone live-typing to you character by character, but it was never going to be the best way to organise your life. Facebook Messages looks promising for communicating with friends in new ways, but not for business use.
E-mail services have fought back by absorbing all these new features. From my Gmail inbox page, I can reply to e-mail, check voicemail, send texts and instant messages, call phones and videoconference through a Google Chat widget, tweet, update my Facebook page and catch up on Google’s own social network, Buzz.
The inbox has become the Grand Central Station for knowledge workers, we were told at a Silicon Valley conference I attended recently, called Inbox Love. E-mail was very much alive, the speakers concluded, but its users were in a parlous state thanks to information overload – “You’ve Got Mail!” now invokes feelings of dread.
For me, the e-mail offerings of internet service providers and the e-mail clients that many companies still rely on are the dead men walking. Such desktop programs – including Eudora, Lotus Notes, Outlook and Thunderbird – seem outmoded now that we want to check our e-mail all the time from all manner of devices.
It is webmail services – led by Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail – that allow us quick access to e-mail, stored remotely in the internet “cloud”, from any computer’s browser as well as providing fast, richly featured versions for smartphones and tablets.
After moving over the years from AOL and Hotmail to Yahoo Mail and now Gmail, I keep things simple – settling on one service and inbox and setting it up to import mail from previous addresses automatically.
I abandoned my company’s Lotus Notes in 2008 by autoforwarding my FT.com e-mails to Gmail, quickly reducing an inbox with 10,000 messages to a few hundred by filtering and filing e-mails away under Gmail’s labels system. The fast search and unlimited storage meant I could confidently archive thousands of e-mails because I could find them again quickly.
Gmail is constantly being updated with features developed in Google Labs, such as being able to undo sending an e-mail. Google says the service is growing rapidly and, certainly, its rivals have been prompted into more wholesale revamps – for instance, AOL has a Project Phoenix plan under way to improve its offering.
Hotmail has been transformed in the past year, with a much more attractive interface and deeper integration with other Microsoft products. Photos and Office documents can be uploaded to its SkyDrive “cloud” storage and linked to, shared and viewed in a pane in the inbox without cluttering it up with a big file attachment. Active Views e-mails, introduced in December, allows users to interact within an e-mail – for example, you can watch a video from Hulu or search for a hotel room within an e-mail from the travel service Orbitz.
Yahoo Mail released a beta version last October that it claims is twice as fast as the existing version. It has also opened its inbox for third parties to add services – for example, users can choose YouSendIt to send e-mails with attachments of up to 100Mb in size. I also like OtherInbox, a third-party service that automatically sorts low-priority e-mails into folders to reduce the size of your inbox.
OtherInbox also plugs into Gmail, which has a couple of other plug-ins that I especially like, including TaskForce, which converts and groups e-mails into tasks, and Rapportive, which is similar to Xobni in Outlook. Rapportive adds a panel to an e-mail to show a picture of the person who has e-mailed and includes some biographical details and the latest social networking activity, all helping to put a face and much more to a name.
Faces and people are what Facebook knows all about. Its Messages section became a more fully fledged e-mail service in November. The inbox is automatically confined to the people you know and communicate with. A list of names topped by the latest communication has no subject lines, just the top line of the message added. All interactions, from e-mails to texts and instant messaging, are included in one long thread with each person, and photos and videos can be attached.
It is a pleasant experience – viewing individual histories of pure conversations with just people you know.
That, if my spam-cluttered memory serves me right, is what we liked so much about e-mail before life became more complicated.
From “Financial Times” by Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
This logo is designed by Jingchao Lu. / 本网标识是由山东济南的鹿竞超在2004年为寇同飞友情设计。
Copyright © 2010-2026 Tongfei Kou's Blog