setsubyou

That Chinese people like it doesn’t make it less true and calling it propaganda won’t fix your problem.

You have two options if you want to improve the situation:

• start a company that makes cheap AC units that are compatible with a market where most people rent and can’t install a device permanently, and then manufacture them in Europe instead of partnering with Midea like most existing brands do
• lobby for a right to AC. This could push people toward split devices, where the market is less reliant on China

If you’re planning for the future at all then I believe the answer is yes. When the average temperature rises by 1-2 degrees that doesn’t really mean it’s 1-2 degrees hotter year round. It means the extremes become more extreme.

I read an article the other day about Eurostar upgrading the spec for trains they ordered to requiring the AC to work up to 55 degrees. That is exactly the kind of planning we need to do. We can’t afford to say “I can deal with hot summers as they are now and therefore we don’t need AC”.

Where I live we regularly get near 40 in spring and summer now, and while that’s a lot more than what we used to see during my childhood in the 80ies and 90ies, it’s temperatures that can be made survivable with other means. But even so, and even though AC is an option, people die. Germany had 5100 deaths from heat this June. That’s nearly twice the yearly number from recent years. It’s not going to get better.

I read it and I think you’re confusing reality you don’t like with propaganda.

First off, it’s factual that air conditioners manufactured in Europe are generally split devices that need drilling (which anyone who rents can’t do, not just people who live in historic buildings who the article focuses on), and they also require installation by a certified expert (limits what brand you can actually buy at your location).

It’s also factual that people are buying more of them. I want to say I’ve never seen as many windows covered in plastic with a hose sticking out as this summer, and that all my neighbors are either talking about getting AC or smug about already having AC (I live in a building built less than 10 years ago and many of us have split devices), but it’s actually a well-documented trend in the last few years, not just now.

It’s also factual that Midea’s reported sales are surging and it’s factual that they have a large market share in Europe, nearly 30% here in Germany. That this brand appears often is due to them having a market share this large in the residential segment. Gree is larger worldwide but e.g. in Germany only has less than 5% in the residential segment.

What I’m getting at is that it’s true that there is a lot of advertising right now for their portable split device, but that they’re one of the biggest names in Europe in the residential market is not a new development at all. There is no sudden push from China.

Outside their share of the market, for portable devices it’s mostly Chinese manufactured devices too. Probably because those need to be cheap.

For split devices, the big names that are not Chinese are Japanese (Daikin and Mitsubishi). For some reason these Japanese brands are the big ones to go to if you want manufactured in Europe. I remember when we got our current AC there was a German brand we could have gotten, but they manufacture in China… in “partnership” with Midea. We went with Daikin, although it wasn’t for this reason.

So this is the reality. The worldwide market leader is Chinese (Gree). The market in countries like Germany is dominated by Chinese manufactured devices on the lower end (mostly Midea) and other countries only play a role on the higher end, but even then it’s >70% Asian.

Europe simply is not prepared to deal with rising temperatures by itself, and it follows that for every heat wave in the future, we can expect more articles about Chinese AC manufacturers growing their businesses in Europe. It’s certainly convenient for China, but it’s also just the reality we have.

It’s a BBC article written by a Singaporean, how do you make the jump to Chinese propaganda?

There are smart glasses without camera that can do translation. So there are some options.

Anrufen um eine kostenlose Waschmaschine anzubieten ist halt auch maximal bescheuert. Cold call der praktisch das Stereotyp für Betrug ist. Ich kriege nie Betrugsanrufe und würde wahrscheinlich ran gehen, aber wenn mir jemand von der Caritas eine kostenlose Waschmaschine anbietet dann lege ich garantiert sofort wieder auf.

Tariffs won’t help because while they’re losing across the board, the most important market for VW, and also the one with the most drastic losses, is not Germany but China. They bet a lot on expansion into China and once reached ~20% market share there, but that has since dropped to half. For BEV specifically it’s abysmal, so the outlook is also bad: BEV has rapidly risen to nearly 60% of the Chinese retail market but VW’s share is in the low single digits.

I don’t know about dumb. First off, she lives in Switzerland with her wife and children, so she can mess with German politics as much as she wants and it won’t affect her private life that much. Might have to finally start paying taxes there though if she has to flee Germany.

Secondly, she lived in China for years, speaks Chinese fluently and probably is more popular on Chinese social media than in Germany. So there is another option why she might be interested in breaking Germany other than just stupidity.

We can put it in a new EU state. A second Netherlands. Let’s call it Overseas Nether Regions or something like that.

One thing that sometimes trips people up with 常用漢字 is that it’s not just a list of kanji, it also includes readings. For example, 人参 are both 常用 but the second character is only listed with readings サン (as in 参加) and まい-る (参る). The ジン in にんじん is not on the list.

The situation in the US is a bit different though because the US has been doing this for over a hundred years and only turned around “recently” (in my lifetime, in particular via NALA in 1990 for native American languages). The US famously went as far as kidnapping native American children, and the path to any kind of protection has been a long struggle that people still remember. Non-native languages also were systematically eradicated (e.g. famously German after WWII).

At the same time the Civil Rights Act requiring equal access is still interpreted to mean that everybody needs to learn English, state laws still require grading within an English based framework, etc. As a result Americans who grew up in the US can generally speak English, and most people probably consider that a good thing too because in theory it means young Americans are not blocked from climbing the social ladder on grounds of their language.

In contrast, China has 20-30% of Chinese born in China who can’t speak standard Mandarin. There are large differences between more urban and more rural areas. For example, in Shanghai virtually everybody speaks Mandarin and nowadays it has more speakers there than Shanghainese has. But e.g. in Kashgar in the Uyghur AR, around 50% can’t speak Mandarin at all.

In the US you basically have to go to Puerto Rico (which is less integrated than a Chinese AR, e.g. with no voting rights in US elections) to get anything close to that, and even there English is mandatory in schools. Otherwise, Hawaii is the only actual state with two official languages, but Hawaii has very high English proficiency regardless. The same goes for other areas where some other language than English is dominant - the US has areas with >90% Spanish as a first language outside Puerto Rico too, but people there generally also speak English.

So basically if we’re judging these laws by US standards we’re looking at it a bit differently than it looks from a Chinese POV because the US has previously already put significant effort in suppressing languages other than English, which we still remember, and as a result there also is no problem of children of minorities not speaking English and thereby not being able to work and live in most of the US. For the US it would be a regression, but for China it’s also progress in terms of integration and equal rights.

I think not understanding what they're committing is more dangerous than before

This kind of reasoning applies to every new tool. 20 years ago I was saying the same thing about work from co-workers who started programming on Java and didn’t understand what their beloved HashMap actually does under the hood.

Eventually we adapt to either the new tools or to the new dangers, the ones who don’t just become fossils.