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I arrived in China 2001.

I experienced the harshest and largest lockdown in all of history: Wuhan, January 23rd, 2020. A real lockdown, not the cosplay bullshit you experienced outside of China. (Yes, this is me saying you’ve never fucking set foot in the country.)

The rest you’re just flat-out lying about. Sorry, Sparky. Did pet killings happen? Yes. They were not the mass shit that the press you’re so obviously reciting acts like they were. Did some doors get welded? Yes. But nowhere near you and, again, nowhere near in the masses the press you’re basing your lies on made it seem like. The local salaries are garbage iff you’re a fuckwit sitting in the west applying western prices to Chinese salaries. (Which, naturally, you are, good little fuckwit liar that you are.) And you’ve changed your tune from 14 hours to 12 hours really fucking quickly there, Sparky, not to mention using the proper slang only after I gave it to you.

So yeah, you’re just a west-dwelling fuckwit lying about being here. Go toddle off in your China Watcher corners and play with the rest of the intellectual children you belong with. There’s a good boy.

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High resolution video is nicer to watch when:

1. The content is worthy of it. (So, you know, not some talking head sitting at a desk like your average Youtuber.)
2. You have so much free bandwidth that spending an order of magnitude more to get a marginal visible increase in quality is worth it to you.

480p hits a decent balance for me in most cases. It makes the people in the video recognizable (like, say, the presenter in a news/comedy/pop science/whatever vlog), and most text in such a video will be readable. Sometimes when there’s a lot of diagrams or when the pictures need clarity I’ll boost it to 720p, but using up over double the bandwidth is just not worth it most times. I have more important things to do with that bandwidth.

For a movie with a lot of rich detail, etc, 1080p is even nicer. It might even be worth the five times the bandwidth to get to it. But here’s where diminishing returns starts to kick in. 1080p is five times the bandwidth, but only a bit over twice the linear resolution. It had better be a really important doubling of resolution.

4K streaming? That’s laughable. Yes it’s over 4 times as high in linear resolution, but it’s over TWENTY times as high in bandwidth. I could literally watch 20 simultaneous 480p streams (or 4 simultaneous 1080p streams at a paltry 2× improvement in linear resolution) for a single 4K stream.

And that’s just bandwidth. Processing costs are on a similar order of magnitude. I have a computer at home that outpowers all the supercomputers that were on the planet put together when I was a child. Playing a single 4K movie sucks up most of its processing power. Again, I have better things to spend my CPU time (and/or electricity bill) on than watching some presenter’s pimples on screen in fine detail.

Ditto. I even have an add-in that forces it to 480 unless I explicitly select something else. I like to use my bandwidth for more important things than counting pimples on an “influencer’s” forehead.