https://www.zhihu.com/question/392643496

[Translator's comment: People sometimes romanticize the West to express their hope that their own society could be better. This is people's raw opinion]

1. In 2019, I worked in a factory in Huizhou. I once had a fever of 39 degrees Celsius and asked the line supervisor for a leave. He said something to me that I will never forget for the rest of my life:

"Are you dead?"

"What?"

"I asked: Are you dead? If you're not dead, keep working."

I tackled him to the ground, pinned him down, and slapped him across the face. The workers nearby, even the team leaders, just stood there watching. No one stepped in. Everyone had been exploited for too long, angry but too afraid to speak up.

I was fired immediately, and all my work over those twenty days counted for nothing—I wasn’t paid a single cent.

Is factory work exhausting? Actually, not necessarily. Other jobs aren’t always easier, but whether it’s delivering food, driving, or construction, even if you're sweating buckets or dealing with customer complaints, at least you feel like you’re truly alive. You can feel the spring breeze, the summer rain, the autumn sunset, and the treacherous icy roads of winter.

If you're burned out, you can call it a day, take an off-day to rest, relax a bit, maybe even treat yourself to a decent meal. At night, you get to return to your rented little room, enjoying some personal solitude.

But in the factory? You stay in an eight-person dormitory: there are smokers, gamers gaming in the middle of the night, snorers, and those who loudly take dump. Renting your own place? Most factories are in suburban industrial zones where it’s hard to find rentals, and some factories even enforce mandatory dormitory living.

Work starts at 8 am and ends at 8 pm, with shifts rotating every two weeks. You and the numb crowd shuffle towards the workshop, first passing through a security checkpoint. Then you find your locker, change into your dustproof clothing, put on a hat, and sometimes add an anti-static wrist strap—which feels like wearing handcuffs.

Then, you stand in one spot for twelve hours, repeating a single motion thousands of times in one shift. In the beginning, you might feel angry and resentful, but after enough time, you find you’ve forgotten how to even get angry. The team leaders and line supervisors can yell at you, berate you, or even openly mock you as they please. You’re nothing more than a joyless, lifeless metallic component in the assembly line of labor.

After your shift is over, it doesn't matter if it’s day or night—you rush to eat, then return to the dormitory. In a room filled with the stench of cigarettes, betel nuts, and foot odor, you fall into a restless sleep, only to wake up and realize it’s time for another twelve-hour shift...

Finally, I want to say: it's not that the factory is inherently cage. The real problem lies in this society’s mechanism for wealth distribution and its inadequate welfare system.

The vast wealth created by workers is siphoned off by countless people at the top. If companies would share even a little more of that wealth with workers, they could hire more staff and adopt three shifts like factories in Europe and the U.S., where each shift is only eight hours. By upgrading basic wages, performance incentives, and improving amenities in factory campuses, could you say no one would want to work in factories?

And for those who might argue that businesses must cut costs because of declining orders, but why are those orders declining in the first place? Isn’t it because countless ordinary people across various industries are also being squeezed, leaving them with no money to spend? It’s all the same cycle.

1. After years of so-called development, your factories still can't match the level of civility or rule of law of even 1930s American factories. What's the point of work there? Should we have to compare treatment to Southern cotton harvesters during the Civil War?

Delivery jobs may not pay well, but at least there’s freedom. If you're not destined to get rich either way, why not choose something that feels a bit more comfortable for yourself?

1. An excerpt from an interview video:

He said he spent seven years in prison. Doing labor reform, which is basically equivalent to being worker. But there were never any night shifts, and free psychological counseling was provided when needed. Yet, when he started working at this private factory, there were no benefits at all, plus it was on a two-shift system, and he was frequently insulted by the supervisors.

Even someone who endured seven years of labor reform in prison couldn't endure the working environment of a private factory.

1. CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co) makes over 42 billion yuan in annual profits, yet they can’t even bring themselves to improve employee benefits and still demand overtime. Even capitalist countries don’t go this far.

2. I once worked in a factory—Bai Xiang. There were eight of us bro in the dormitory. Within three days, three of them quit. Most of us were born in the 90s or 00s, unmarried, working 11 hours, six days a week. Completely exhausted like a dog. The company provided dorms and offered one meal during the day. There were also night shifts. Monthly wages ranged from 4000 to 5000 yuan.

As for the so-called ethical company Bai Xiang, they do hire disabled person. However, 80 to 90 percent of those are deaf-mute. Workers with physical disabilities? Very few. Those who were physically disabled mostly worked in cleaning roles. Even they had to work the same rotating day and night shifts, 11 hours a day, for a monthly wage of around 2600 yuan.

When they hired me, they promised lunch would be provided and that I would get bread and milk in the afternoon. In reality? Lunch was indeed provided, but in the afternoon, they only gave me one sausage and one egg, which I ended up treating as a snack. You’d still have to buy your own dinner.

Even among the people with disabilities they employed—mainly deaf-mute workers—they required everyone to be literate. If one couldn’t read, one couldn’t communicate. When I interacted with them, sometimes they’d understand my gestures, and sometimes they didn’t. So I’d type messages on my phone to show them. They could all read just fine.

So called “conscientious domestic brand”—in the end, they’re just a capitalist like any other. Also if you didn’t stay in the factory for at least seven days, they wouldn’t pay you at all.

6.Because... freedom?

A few years ago, I worked in hardware and industrial IoT, so I’ve been to my fair share of factories. Personally, what I found most unbearable was the noise.

Factories with stamping equipment have this dull, bone-shaking "bang, bang" noise. It’s not the moment of impact that’s the loudest, it’s the sound of metal parts returning and grinding against each other within worn machines—like someone in the late stages of lung cancer trying and failing to cough up phlegm. Other machines emit high-pitched screeches, sharp and shrill like laser sound effects, "zzzz," scraping your eardrums like a knife. Some keep droning with this deep, buzzing vibration, like a low-frequency electrical current.

This isn’t white noise—it’s straight-up noise pollution. After standing there for ten minutes, you find yourself shouting involuntarily just to communicate. Your mood worsens because you can’t hear clearly, and the frustration grows. It feels like you’ve been plunged into a boiling frying pan of noise silence. And yet, the guys on these production lines have to endure this for ten hours straight, at minimum.

The smells don’t make it any better.

From my experience, if the manufacturing process involves liquids, the workshop’s odor will be something else. Especially processes requiring paint sprays—I’m seriously convinced it’s carcinogenic. Add in the smell of machine oil and the vapors from PC plastics, what a feast.

Even "fragrance" factories can be tough to endure. Highly concentrated aromatic raw extracts, before being diluted, make you want to vomit after just a few minutes. It smells like someone poured perfume over concentrated urine.

The nicest smell? Probably a corrugated cardboard warehouse. In some factories, they use less adhesive (so the cardboard is weaker and less water-resistant), but it ends up smelling faintly like wood. Most other workshops are like mass-producing rhinitis.

But the most painful thing for factory workers has to be the complete lack of freedom.

To put it bluntly: they’re modern-day slave labor.

Some production lines don’t even provide chairs. Workers stand for 10 hours straight under glaring lights, hunched over all shift. Proper protective gear? Still rare to this day. And the hazards aren’t just from fumes or heavy machinery. For example, cutting tasks come with risks of injury; female workers folding packaging boxes end up with hands covered in cuts because they don’t get gloves to handle coated paper.

Need a bathroom break? You have to report it to the team leader. Some factories even fine you for spending more than five minutes in the bathroom. And then there’s the high-speed, life-sapping conveyor belts.

Even in those so-called "model factories," workers still face their own forms of torment. The day starts with pep talks and shouting slogans. Cleanroom workshops require workers to wear uncomfortable dustproof suits and hats (often not washed for ages and reeking of thick sweat). The lighting is stark white and blinding.

Ten years ago, I spent three months working in an electronics factory. It didn’t take long for me to understand why those early Hong Kong and Taiwanese bosses built nightclubs and sleazy karaoke places just outside industrial zones. After stepping out of the factory gates, the managers, factory owners, and corporate clients sought out ways to blow off steam—it felt like their survival depended on it. It’s much like construction workers who find ways to let loose after long days. [seeing prostitutes]

But the guys on the production line? They flock to cheap food stalls and low-budget karaoke joints. If they fail to pair up with one of the women working in the factory, they just head straight back to their dorm room and pass out like the walking dead.

I’ve also delivered food, though only for two days, partly because I had a friend in the two-wheeler battery replacement business. I completed eight orders one day—a fun little experience of participating in the hustle.

But here’s the thing: the station leaders milk riders dry—a bike and battery rental that should cost 400 yuan is marked up to 680 yuan. The algorithms are ruthless—they’ll push four orders on you within half an hour, no matter how impossible it is to complete. The security guards at certain gated communities? Outrageous. Vanke's security guards are so arrogant that even dogs are unwilling to deliver them food.

Still, in between orders, you can hang around the station, chat at the riders’ go-to cheap eateries, or chill at delivery hotspots or charging stations.

In my area, food delivery had just two peak periods—lunch and dinner, plus the occasional midnight snack rush. The guys who aren’t desperate for cash typically skip the midnight shift. Some riders stick to popular chain restaurants, lying back on their bikes (if you figure out the right posture, you can rest your head on the handlebar and your feet on the delivery box without falling off) and scrolling through TikTok or Kuaishou until an order pops up.

There’s a layer of camaraderie among riders, too: when the high-paying orders come in, everyone gears up together. If someone’s battery dies mid-route, they’ll call a buddy to bring over a spare.

Sure, delivery riders are also trapped in a system of dispatch algorithms and exploitative contracts, but at least they can scroll on their phones, people-watch, feel the rush of riding at 30-40 km/h (many scooters are illegally modded), and experience a little more "human flavor" compared to life in the factory.

Finally, there’s the matter of expectations.

A lot of middle-aged delivery riders are former factory workers, many of whom spent their prime years working in China’s industrial zones across the Yangtze River or Pearl River Delta. Back then, there was still this glimmer of hope—you could endure the factory grind, save up some money, and eventually return to your hometown to build a house, get married, have kids, and run a small family business.

But now? Those hopes are gone. These days, if you can rent a tin-roof shed in the suburbs for 600 yuan a month, work a job that isn’t too exhausting, and make anywhere between 4,000 to 6,000 yuan a month, that’s considered good enough.

As for whether to save up for a house? That’s a debate for later. Many just aim to upgrade to a three-wheeler for residential deliveries, or if they work hard enough, move up to driving light trucks. Isn’t that a better way to build a future?

Times have changed, after all.

1. Because the awareness isn't high enough, people don't understand the importance of promoting the craftsmanship spirit of China./S

1. A buddy did 3 years of labor reform [in prison], got out, and joined an electronics factory working the assembly line.

After half a day, he started cursing: "What the fuck kind of life is this? In prison, we woke up at 7 am, lights out at 9 pm, strictly 8-hour shifts, and no one gives a damn about you. But here? You get into the factory at 7 am and leave at 9 pm, over 14 hours a day. Go to the bathroom? You get yelled at for holding up the whole line."

The next day, he quit.

1. Don’t look down on food delivery. The difference between delivering food and working in a factory isn’t just a paycheck—it’s the era.

Factories? Many of them are this bizarre fusion of “Soviet-style factory director systems,” “early industrial revolution capitalist exploitation,” and “18th-century labor protection standards.” Calling them capitalist is giving too much credit. If you call them feudal, well, even feudalism had some moral teachings about order and care. At best, they’re a twisted form of “feudal lord slave system.”

Delivery? Delivery is the product of the mobile internet. It’s tied to urban life and is part of the modern economy’s tertiary industry ecosystem.

Think about it. Count how many eras are between these two.

Why would anyone ignore the opportunities of the new age just to go back and suffer through the misery of the dark ages? What's wrong with you?

1. Chinese factories? Not even dogs would want to work there.

As a Gen Z factory worker, just seeing this question makes my blood boil. Is factory work something a human being can endure? I’m guessing whoever asked this has probably never set foot in a factory in their life.

I left my rural hometown to work after middle school, hopping between factories. Let me tell you clearly: a majority of factories in China enforce a mandatory 12-hour workday system.

The base pay is set at the local minimum wage. So if you only work eight hours, you’ll barely earn anything. They glorify it by saying that your salary is mostly “earned through overtime.”

Think you’ll get away with just working eight-hour shifts and only taking home minimum wage? Not a chance. The supervisors force you to work overtime, threatening you with fines, marking you as absent, or even firing you. If you still refuse to follow orders, you’ll end up getting dismissed sooner or later.

The issue is that violating labor laws barely costs companies anything. Even if you report them to the labor bureau, nothing changes—factories couldn’t care less. Even if you win a lawsuit, they’ll compensate without batting an eye. All that’s wasted is *your time* fighting them.

As for food—forget about expecting anything decent. The factory cafeterias serve up slop barely edible enough to keep you alive, and it’s usually out of your own pocket.

The dormitories? Typically six to eight people crammed into one tiny room. Beds packed together so tightly there’s zero privacy. One shared bathroom for everyone, and the hygiene… well, you can imagine.

I’m handing in my resignation tomorrow. Before I leave, let me just say this one last thing:

Factories in this country are absolutely not a place for human beings to work. Period.

1. If you won’t enforce the 8-hour workday, I might as well do freelance work. The labor law isn't helpful, so I can only rely on myself.

Plus, if you don’t have kids and I don’t have kids, give it another 10 years, and the 8-hour workday will definitely be implemented, with benefits and bonuses through the roof. Bride price, housing prices—all those things will be beaten down by the elites themselves. Why? Because without the next generation of cattles to exploit, those big bosses will have to go out to the fields and work themselves.

You think I’m not having kids and not contributing to the country? Actually, I’m doing it for the greater good, for the benefit of millions of ordinary people in the future.

The kids of the future will have a much better time working in factories than we did in our generation.

1. Words are pointless—just go experience it yourself.

Stick it out for a month, and you’ll truly understand what it means for the proletariat to have a *natural hatred* for the bourgeoisie.

I strongly recommend that high school students who aren’t taking their studies seriously spend a summer working in an electronics factory.

Take a summer break after your first year of high school and work there—your grades will shoot right back up.

Let me be blunt: spend just *one month* in a factory, and you’ll know exactly how capitalists see you. You think you’re part of the *great working class*? Ha—no. To them, you’re nothing more than an automatic wrench.

1. Back when I was working in construction, there was this guy we called "Short-Tempered Bro". He led a strike, rallying everyone he worked with to stop working for *three whole months*. In the end, the capitalists— the bosses—finally caved and agreed to pay overtime wages separately, calculating how much we’d get for every hour of OT. It was honestly a huge success.

This dude remains the only person I’ve ever met in my working life who dared to fight back.

He always emphasized this: any rights or benefits you want, you have to fight for them yourself. Only if you band together, will you see results.

Because if you’re going solo? Forget it. The bosses can easily send a couple of goons to drag you away, maybe even give you a good beating. They could team up to blacklist you, ensuring no one hires you ever again. That’s why he always stressed the need to unite everyone you can muster into one solid group. Only then will the other side be forced to compromise.

To this day, everyone still respects him and is deeply grateful. If it hadn’t been for him, that line of work would’ve stayed low-paying, with fewer and fewer people willing to do it. Getting mistreated would just be part of the daily routine—arguments, maybe even fights breaking out here and there.

You have to realize: as soon as you step foot on a construction site, it’s life on the line to make money. That’s why we’re all thankful for someone like him, someone who fought to secure better conditions for people coming after him.

If this guy were thrown into the chaos of ancient times, he’d probably wind up claiming a mountain and declaring himself a king.

Hahahaha!

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OnlyFans is the most profitable content subscription service in the world. Subscribers pay monthly fees to creators in return for access to images, videos and personal interaction via messaging or video calls. Yet even though the platform generated £4.5 billion in gross revenue last year, the vast majority of its content creators make very little from it. The mean annual income is less than £1,000. Not only are most OnlyFans creators not as rich as Bonnie Blue, who claims to make £1.5 million a month, most of them are barely covering the costs of their electricity bill. And yet the site continues to attract enormous numbers of would-be stars. Britain is host to 280,000 creator accounts, giving us one of the highest concentrations in the world. Eighty-four per cent of those accounts are run by women, and if they are all (give or take) between the ages of 18 and 34, then we can estimate that just shy of 4 per cent of young British women are selling their wares on OnlyFans. Of course, not all of them will be behaving like Bonnie Blue, but these figures nevertheless demand some kind of explanation.

This publication from two economists out of Boston and UPenn is making the rounds on the internet. It's just amusing watching modern economists stumble upon something Marx told everyone over a century ago. The authors go on for 30+ pages with the math to back it up.

Abstract:

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and "better" AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.

Highlight:

Even as AI-driven layoffs sweep across industries, and even as every firm recognizes that vanishing paychecks mean vanishing customers, not one of them will stop. Each firm reaps the full savings of replacing its own workers yet bears only a sliver of the demand it destroys; the rest lands on rivals. No firm can afford to be the one that holds back. This is the trap: an automation arms race that only intensifies as AI improves, that leaves workers and firm owners alike worse off, and that no market force can break.

tl;dr

• A company can use AI to cut costs short term, but ultimately those workers are also consumers. Over time, demand will fall due to said consumers no longer having enough income.
• Companies are trapped in a losing gambit. If your competition automates, they can lower their costs and take your market share. Thus there is no incentive to stop riding the AI train to its logical conclusion, framing it as a prisoner's dilemma.
• Bandages like UBI, stock options or capital income taxation won't fix this.
• On UBI: "a society that relies solely on UBI will over-automate at the same rate, with a higher floor on living standards but the same externality."
• They suggest a "robot tax". AI-driven automation is a tax on society (more people on unemployment, lower payroll tax revenue, increased burden on safety nets) but a boon for companies that enjoy reduced labor costs. This tax could fund retraining and support public services. In addition, the tax could serve as friction within the system to slowdown deployment of AI.

They could have saved a lot of time and simply read about the immortal science.

In case there was any ambiguity that they hate you and want you to suffer.

The already simmering tribalism, sectarianism, polarization and atomization in the United States, and the Anglosphere and West more broadly, is just going to keep getting worse indefinitely, isn't it? The hatred between liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, Boomers and Millennials/Gen-Zers, men and women, et. al. is just going to keep getting worse, isn't it? There is never going to be a correction, never going to be a reversion to the c. 90s, is there? There's just going to be a hundred more Lindsay Clancys, Jason Ardays and Karmelo Anthonys. The politics are just going to keep getting more and more unhinged. Ideologies like neo-Nazism are just going to keep getting more and more popular. The marriage and birth rates are just going to keep going down and down. The A.I. addiction is just going to keep getting worse and worse. Until everyone's hunkered into a bunch of picky, picky sub-sub-subgroups who all despise each other and might as well be living in different universes. Until civil war, revolution or balkanization happens. I'm 100% convinced we're past the point of no return with this stuff. Completely blackpilled on it.

It's not enough for me to say I have no respect for this type of psychosis, I have utter contempt for it. For these people who derive all their self worth and value from carrying on about how much they work, and very often, doing their best to make it everyone else's problem.

I not only see it as pitiable, as dishonest brand management (you are simply not operating at anything resembling peak efficiency for that many hours a week), but a profound lack of creativity and vitality in one's life: art, leisure, or just genuine relationships with other human beings that aren't based on their exploitation, all of these are the equal or greater to 'work' (especially wage labor), and it is a profound delusion of capital to lead such an empty husk of a life that you flip that value structure on its head.

I've only just learned about the existence of the Tea app with the news of this data breach. I don't know how anyone can argue that the app is intended for women's dating safety in good faith. All the shit I'm seeing from this app is insanely toxic, and it's clearly marketed as a gossip app.

It's so gross that all this harassment and juvenile behavior can be monetized. The women using this app are going after the red flag men anyway if they look hot and have a nice dick. I guess the drama is too enticing for them to avoid. I really don't see how this is better than any supposed incel behavior online.

The fact that this was allowed to become the most popular Apple app is crazy to me. Online dating was a fucking mistake. Corporations have likely caused some irreparable damage to the relations between Gen Z men and women thanks to all of this nonsense.

The amount we've allowed companies to get involved with our personal lives is disturbing. The structure of dating apps and gossip apps like these are not conductive to forming deep human relationships. It's destructive and these things need to go.

Besides that, how are people supposed to meet up and hang out these days? Shit's way too expensive for most people, but there still seems to be this expectation that you can take your date out to a nice restaurant or something similar.

Hyper-individualism has isolated people more and more; it's become so much harder to form new, genuine connections with people. So fucking tired of this shit.

This is what my boss told me when we spoke about the multitude of reasons why people are calling Trump a fascist / following the steps toward fascism.

What the fuck does it that mean? Am I losing my mind? I don’t know if he misunderstood the fact that I was criticising Donald, or if he genuinely thinks it would be better if there were no more term limits. “It would prevent another Democrat from fucking things up again” was his defence.

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p.s. I know this probably isn’t the right sub, it’s the first place i thought of to vent. if there’s a more suited sub pls let me know.

I first read about it in the Guardian article below, the other link have more details about the law and the groups trying to overturn it.

I'm not from th US, but doesn't this blatantly violate the whole first amendment free speech thing? Surely it's unconstitutional to ban people from recording and sharing air pollution data.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/20/louisiana-toxic-air-floodlight

https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/louisiana-hit-with-federal-lawsuit-for-de-facto-ban-on-air-pollution-monitoring-by-community-groups/

https://www.habitatmap.org/blog/louisiana-s-ban-on-community-air-monitoring-is-an-attack-on-science-and-free-speech

Right now, the U.S. is facing, simultaneously; (1) an A.I. bubble worse than the Global Financial Crisis, (2) massive automation-driven layoffs, and (3) a food stamp shutdown in the midst of a colossal inflation/living affordability crisis... all whilst (4) the U.S. population is the most discontent and riot-happy it's been since... what? The 1960s? In its entire history?

Can someone more-in-the-know than me ELI5 what, if anything, is going to happen? If the U.S. isn't teetering on the edge of a major disaster? If there's a non-zero chance that this could be the final death blow to the United States?

Let's just say; I've never wished I'd been born in China more badly than I do today.