But it's a lot of work to drum up that much foreign business when you pour lead and melamine into all your products. It's a lot cheaper to rent white dudes and tote them around at your conferences, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, press conferences, etc.

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"Hey, that guy looks like a CTO!"

If you don't have any conferences or ceremonies coming up, you can just put them in the window, like mannequins.

Unfortunately, white women don't usually get to be pretend-CEOs, because women can't be businesspeople, that's silly. Women do get called on to pose as exotic foreign girlfriends though.

"Why don't you come over tonight? Cheryl is making the exotic dish of her people, chicken-fried steak."

I wish we could bring this over to America and I could have someone stay on hold with Comcast customer service for me, but it's not going to happen. In China, people are dirt cheap. One of my VFX co-workers told me that on movie sets in China, they commonly use people instead of C-stands to hold lights and reflectors because hiring a person is a lot cheaper than renting a C-stand.

Kaye Lites

To be fair, this one sells for $165.

When China made the historical epic Hero in 2002, instead of hiring a small team of foreign VFX artists to create the massive armies, Lord of the Rings Style, for most scenes they just hired what appears to be about a million Chinese extras.

The director of this movie also directed the Olympics opening ceremonies, if any of this looks familiar.

Anyway, I realize unemployment is nuts right now in the U.S. but I still don't think you're going to convince anyone to hang out at the DMV for $3 an hour.

Despite the government's heavy-handedness in other areas of private life, I guess they can't get everyone to report to a poo-depository when it's time to drop a deuce, so that means somebody has got to go around to all the outhouses and public toilets and pick it all up.

You would think college grads wouldn't be jumping eagerly at the opportunity to join the brown patrol, but you would be wrong. In an internationally reported story, one sanitation company's ad for 5 shit-scooper positions brought in 391 applications from desperate graduates unable to find any other jobs. It's funny what stories catch the international media's attention, because another city had 2500 applications for 10 positions the previous year.

Want China Times

One of the 5 lucky job seekers.

It could be worse. They could be a funeral director. Chinese people are so superstitious about death that some buildings don't have 4th floors (because "4" sounds like "die") and you can't give people clocks as presents because it looks like you are counting the seconds til their death. Really. So people who work in funeral parlors don't even want to tell their parents.

"No, I swear, Dad, I'm a prostitute!"

But somehow a funeral parlor job fair attracted 5000 college graduates. Hey, times are tough and there's only so many poo-collecting jobs.

Fortunately for everyone, there should be more waste collector openings soon enough, as China has decided that poo is not enough (when is it ever?) and is looking to go after pee soon.

But this isn't just some penny-ante game cheating, this is well-organized $3 billion industry employing up to 400,000 people worldwide, an estimated 80% of which live in China.

How do you get this wonderful job where you get to play games all day but don't get to explore or fight or do anything except one repetitive task all day, and get beaten if you don't meet your quota? Well, one way is to get arrested. Some prisoners are forced to break rocks, some prisoners are forced to gold farm. Let no one say China doesn't diversify its prison labor.

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They can't ALL be assigned to build scale models of London Bridge.

There was a big uproar a couple of years ago when all the gaming blogs were reporting that China was banning gold farming, but that turned out to be a silly misunderstanding. Why would you ban a multibillion dollar industry that takes money from foreigners? That's as preposterous as China banning piracy.

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China's bread and butter.

The government finally decided to take a hand in this leading up to the Beijing Olympics (the same thing that prompted the standing-in-line training) and launched a huge campaign to teach people that spitting in public is gross.

So someone's job was to find people who were spitting and write them a ticket. The only problem was that apparently spit monitors get as much respect as meter maids and people who were caught spitting would always counter with the uncounterable "No I didn't" argument, which somehow prevented the monitor from writing them up. I wouldn't think this would be a problem in an authoritarian state, but China is full of surprises.

Like anus hospitals.

So they put together the Spit Van, a sort of high-tech spit monitoring nexus connected to outside cameras that capture people's despicable spit crimes. Once the guy in the van spots a spitter, he sends a guy out to apprehend the blackguard. If he denies it, he is brought back to the van and shown his vile act, caught on tape for posterity, at which point I assume he breaks down and kills himself. Or pays a $2.50 US fine.

When that article was written, they were planning to expand the equipment to include devices capable of satellite communication. Overkill? Well, ask yourself this. Did any athletes get spit on during the Olympics? I'd say the Spit Van Crew has done its job then.

The Beijing News gives a hint of why all the old people, saying "Streets and alleyways are dotted by the red armbands and strangers would be immediately surrounded by questioning grandpas and grandmas when they walk into a neighborhood."

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Intimidating.

Old people "volunteers" are a lot less threatening as government representatives than official police or government employees in smart uniforms, and Chinese culture is all about respecting the elderly, so they're in a position to ask you what you're up to, tell you that you shouldn't be somewhere, or... tell you to have an abortion.

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...wait, that actually is really disturbing.

That's right, part of enforcing the one-child policy involves making sure women have abortions should they get pregnant a second time. And the cops can't watch every lady in China, so old women volunteers are in a perfect position to monitor ladies in their work unit or neighborhood and badger them into an abortion in an authoritative but grandmotherly kind of way.

And what are they going to do when all the old ladies die off? Well, some young ladies are being trained for state-sponsored meddling pretty well at Nanjing University, where they get their own red armbands and are responsible for going around and making sure couples aren't getting too affectionate in public.

You know, that's actually something we should bring over here.