Haaaaaaappy Chinese New Year! This is the year of the dragon , so be sure to get out there and fly around breathing fireballs to your heart’s content. Maybe even stockpile a big ol’ mound of gold and then just sit on it in a cave. Man, I would totally do that. This is a video of the China Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe performing the Thousand-Arm Guan Yin . It’s extra impressive because all the performers in the troupe are deaf. You? You can hear just fine but you dance like you’re drowning. Hit the jump for two worthwhile videos.

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Happy Chinese New Year!: The 1,000-Arm Dance

This is a timelapse of a 30-story, state of the art hotel being built in China in a meager 15-days. Wow. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t stay there. Get it? I don’t have the money for a hotel! I’ll sleep in the rental. Constructed in Dongting Lake in Hunan province, the hotel is 170,000 square feet and can withstand a 9.0 earthquake reports Treehugger. According to the International Business Times, the prefabricated modules were put together in a factory and then placed on steel structures at the construction site. The Chinese company behind the speedy design and building is Broad Group, a firm which previously built the 15-story Ark Hotel in Changsha, China, in just six days. Meh, I built a 30-story LEGO tower in a single weekend once. “And what happened to it?” WTF do you think happened — it collapsed before I was finished. Then I used the pieces to make a relatively anatomically correct LEGO woman. “Why?” I dunno, but if she tries to tell you that baby is mine she’s lying! Hit the jump for the video, but feel free to skip around. WTF do I care? I don’t. About anything . I’m battling depression. :/

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Timelapse Of 30-Story Building Built In 15 Days

Guangdong, the Chinese province in the Pearl River Delta where practically everything you’ve bought in the past ten years was made, is about to see a minimum wage increase effective Jan 1, with some workers seeing increases as high as 20 percent. Guangdong has experienced high inflation. The wage increases, combined with weak western currencies, suggests that prices for virtually every consumer good in the west will rise significantly in the new year. The experts quoted in this Global Post article say that while other cheap labor markets exist in places like Bangladesh, they lack the scale and infrastructure of south China and are unlikely to provide a substitute. For decades, Guangdong province and Chinas Pearl River Delta have been at the heart of Chinas economic rise. And while larger manufacturers and state-owned companies have contributed greatly to the boom, smaller and medium-sized private firms have also helped propel China to become the worlds second-largest economy. As wages, raw material costs and other costs rise, those smaller businesses say theyre being cut out of the mix. Lau said at the current rate, he expects 30 percent of factories in Guangdong to reduce production or close down this year, in the wake of a minimum wage increase last year. Another 18-20 percent pay rise would decimate the industry. But Crothall is less than sympathetic, noting that although Chinas inflation rate has slowed somewhat, Chinas workers still need more to get by. Bye-bye cheap, Chinese labor ( via Digg )

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Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory

Guangdong, the Chinese province in the Pearl River Delta where practically everything you’ve bought in the past ten years was made, is about to see a minimum wage increase effective Jan 1, with some workers seeing increases as high as 20 percent. Guangdong has experienced high inflation. The wage increases, combined with weak western currencies, suggests that prices for virtually every consumer good in the west will rise significantly in the new year. The experts quoted in this Global Post article say that while other cheap labor markets exist in places like Bangladesh, they lack the scale and infrastructure of south China and are unlikely to provide a substitute. For decades, Guangdong province and Chinas Pearl River Delta have been at the heart of Chinas economic rise. And while larger manufacturers and state-owned companies have contributed greatly to the boom, smaller and medium-sized private firms have also helped propel China to become the worlds second-largest economy. As wages, raw material costs and other costs rise, those smaller businesses say theyre being cut out of the mix. Lau said at the current rate, he expects 30 percent of factories in Guangdong to reduce production or close down this year, in the wake of a minimum wage increase last year. Another 18-20 percent pay rise would decimate the industry. But Crothall is less than sympathetic, noting that although Chinas inflation rate has slowed somewhat, Chinas workers still need more to get by. Bye-bye cheap, Chinese labor ( via Digg )

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Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory

Guangdong, the Chinese province in the Pearl River Delta where practically everything you’ve bought in the past ten years was made, is about to see a minimum wage increase effective Jan 1, with some workers seeing increases as high as 20 percent. Guangdong has experienced high inflation. The wage increases, combined with weak western currencies, suggests that prices for virtually every consumer good in the west will rise significantly in the new year. The experts quoted in this Global Post article say that while other cheap labor markets exist in places like Bangladesh, they lack the scale and infrastructure of south China and are unlikely to provide a substitute. For decades, Guangdong province and Chinas Pearl River Delta have been at the heart of Chinas economic rise. And while larger manufacturers and state-owned companies have contributed greatly to the boom, smaller and medium-sized private firms have also helped propel China to become the worlds second-largest economy. As wages, raw material costs and other costs rise, those smaller businesses say theyre being cut out of the mix. Lau said at the current rate, he expects 30 percent of factories in Guangdong to reduce production or close down this year, in the wake of a minimum wage increase last year. Another 18-20 percent pay rise would decimate the industry. But Crothall is less than sympathetic, noting that although Chinas inflation rate has slowed somewhat, Chinas workers still need more to get by. Bye-bye cheap, Chinese labor ( via Digg )

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Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory

China is considering temporarily capturing an asteroid in earth’s orbit and then mining it for all it’s valuable metals. Me? I say we invent hoverboards first, THEN start mining asteroids. That way, when the asteroid does wind up destroying earth , we can at least all die happy. …seem fairly optimistic that they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough (a change in velocity of only about 1,300 feet-per-second or so) to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon. The orbit would be unstable, and eventually (after a few years) the asteroid would head back out into space from whence it came, but it would stick there long enough for us to poke around on it. While the Chinese are likely going to start small (the prime candidate right now is a 30-foot-wide rock), they’re thinking bigger. Much bigger. Like, over a mile bigger, since a metallic asteroid that size would be worth an absolutely staggering amount of money. Now, were something to get screwed up and that mile-wide metallic asteroid hit Earth instead, we’d be looking at something like a 24-mile-wide crater and a fireball so large that trees 200 miles away would spontaneously burst into flames… There’s speculation that mining an asteroid a mile-wide could be worth something to the tune of 25-trillion dollars. That’s a 25 followed by like *Wikipedia’s ‘trillion’, gets confused* a LOT of 0’s afterward. And you know what else has a lot of zeros following them? The Kardashians on Twitter. DAMMIT TWEENS. Chinese want to capture an asteroid into Earth’s orbit [dvice] Thanks to Pescada, who’s played Asteroids at the arcade before and can tell you it’s not as easy as it looks.

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China: Let’s Trap An Asteroid In Earth’s Orbit And Mine It. GW: Don’t And Say We Did?

Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer best known for making Apple’s iPhones and iPads (but who also manufactures electronics for Acer, Amazon, Asus, Intel, Cisco, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft and Sony), plans to “hire” over a million robots in the next three years to replace the humans currently handling the “menial tasks”. MENIAL TASKS?! I’ll show you a menial task! *picking marshmallows out of Lucky Charms one by one* First reported in Chinese newswire Xinhua, Foxconn chairman, founder, and CEO Terry Gou apparently announced at a “workers’ dance party” on Friday that the robots will replace some of the routine tasks currently performed by humans, like spraying, welding, and assembling. Gou also said Foxconn already has 10,000 robots and that the number will increase to 300,000 next year and one million in three years. But according to the Financial Times, Gou’s message didn’t come out right. Although the implication was that robots would soon replace workers at the company, apparently Gou meant to communicate that the robots would relieve workers of menial tasks–in the past, Foxconn employees had complained of being treated like robots. A MILLION robots. Can you even imagine that? I can’t. Or, more specifically, I don’t want to. *begins sketching out sabotage plan on the back of a napkin* Also, WTF is a “workers’ dance party”? Because that sounds like a pretty shitty morale booster sweet political party. Dammit, I want a president who can breakdance! Report: Foxconn to Replace Humans With 1 Million Robots? [pcmag] and Picture Thanks to Bear and david, who [reference something really clever from Vonnegut's 'Player Piano' so everyone thinks you're smart].

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Foxconn (Electronics Manufacturer) To Hire A Million Robots Over The Next Three Years

Pissed Japan stole back the honor of housing the world’s fastest supercomputer , China answered back this Thursday (apples to oranges style) by opening the world’s longest sea-bridge, at a staggering 26.4 miles. That…sounds like a terrible f***ing place to run out of gas . The Jiaozhou Bay bridge in China took more than four years to build. It links China’s eastern port city of Qingdao to Huangdao island. “The earthquake- and typhoon-proof bridge … is designed to withstand the impact of a 300,000-ton vessel,” Guinness said. About 81 million cubic feet of concrete was reportedly used — enough to fill 3,800 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Well thank God they converted millions of cubic feet to Olympic-sized swimming pools, amirite?! Because otherwise all that concrete would hard to imagine. A marathon span: China opens world’s longest bridge over water [msnbc] Thanks to bb, who knows I get all sweaty-palmed and like to close my eyes whenever driving across bridges.

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China Claims World’s Longest Ocean Bridge

So apparently Chinese prisoners are being used by prison bosses and guards as free labor to mine the shit out of World of Warcraft gold and other virtual commodities and aren’t even allowed to level up their characters . Now that’s harsh. “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [470-570] (~$770-935) a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.” It is estimated that 80% of all gold farmers are in China and with the largest internet population in the world there are thought to be 100,000 full-time gold farmers in the country. Prison farming aside, there’s over a hundred-thousand full-time Warcraft gold farmers in China?! That’s f***in’ nuts! I can’t even imagine numbers that high. Or, okay, anything past the hundreds. “Not even 1,000?” Whoa whoa whoa — cool it with all the zeros, homey! China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work [guardian] Thanks to AverageGeekGirl, who collects gold the old fashioned way: chasing leprechauns.

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I Want The Gold — Gimme The Gold: Chinese Prisoners Forced To Farm Warcraft Gold

Burberry, a company best known for f***ing plaid (houndstooth FTW), recently held a runway show in Beijing featuring holographic models. Which, fun fact: eat just as much as real ones . DAMMIT JEM, YOU TELL THAT BAND OF YOURS TO POUND SOME CHEESE-FRIES, STAT! Admittedly, the holograms do look pretty impressive, they’re just a little ridiculous to see all dressed up because holograms don’t actually care if they’re butt-ass naked, just as long as they’re shiny and people think they’re from the future they don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuuu. Hit the jump for 35-seconds of holographic modeling set to ‘You Don’t Own Me’.

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Burberry’s Holographic Runway Models