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A Ukrainian drone reportedly targeted an oil storage facility in Latvia, resulting in a significant explosion and fire. The KV regime suggests that Russian electronic warfare may have diverted the drone off course, leading to the crash.











The Synthesis Apr 22
The 60-day default approval at NMPA (deemed approved if no objection raised, post-2018 reform) is the operational expression of what you're describing. FDA's median IND review is 30 days, but the prep work behind that submission averages 12-18 months and seven figures. Speed at the hospital is downstream of speed at the regulator, and increasingly downstream of who is willing to bear the prep cost.
China as a System @leonliaoApr 22
Exactly. This is why formal review timelines can be misleading. A 30-day FDA clock tells you very little if getting to the starting line already takes 12–18 months and seven figures. At that point, the real gatekeeper is not the nominal review period. It is the prep burden.
That is also why China’s speed should be understood as a whole-system phenomenon. Faster hospitals are downstream of faster regulators, and faster regulators are downstream of a system that imposes lower entry friction on early clinical experimentation. The question is no longer just who reviews faster on paper. It is who has built a system in which fewer things have to be painfully assembled before innovation can even touch a patient.
Te Time Apr 18
They are also real good at finding organ donors. I think the wait time is two weeks.
Apr 18
The Chinese government crackdown started in 1994 because of the number of people who were going bankrupt from buying all those "holy texts". Then a Falun Gong genius staged an illegal protest in Tiananmen Square and the government decided to just shut the whole cult/scam down. Falun Gong is a business masquerading as a cult (like Scientology) derived from traditional Chinese spiritual and health beliefs (like western yoga) with restrictions on using modern medicine (like Jehovah's Witnesses).
It strictly educates and controls what its followers say and do, and is aim directly at taking down the Communist Party of China, so it happily profits from political arbitrage between China and the West. Falun Gong profits from Western fascination and ignorance of Chinese culture: their Shen Yun is billed as a spectacular Cirque du Soleil-style presentation of Chinese culture that the Communists [supposedly] destroyed.
In reality, it’s a Disneyfied caricature of Chinese culture to indoctrinate audiences about Falun Gong. Falun Gong runs a propaganda campaign that’s far more sophisticated than the Communist Party of China. (Maybe they have help from a foreign agency with long experience in that field?)
China as a System @leonliaoApr 18
That is a much more sensitive category, and I would be careful not to confuse speed with legitimacy. In some areas of healthcare, China’s advantage really does come from stronger system coordination, lower friction, and faster execution. But organ transplantation is different. If wait times are unusually short, the question is no longer just institutional efficiency. It is also about donor sourcing, transparency, and whether the process can be independently verified. In that domain, speed by itself is not a clean signal of system strength.
To be fair, China’s officially reported organ donation and transplant volumes have been rising in recent years. In 2024, the official figures reported 6,744 organ donations and 24,684 transplant surgeries. China has also built out a more complete institutional framework over the past decade. Since 2015, voluntary citizen donation has been designated as the only legal source of organs, with the reform presented as being aligned with WHO principles and still undergoing further refinement. That includes new regulations that took effect in 2024, as well as COTRS, the national organ allocation system.
At the level of system design alone, it is entirely plausible that a national allocation platform, a high concentration of major hospitals, a dense cluster of leading transplant centers, and tighter multidisciplinary integration inside large hospitals could shorten the organizational timeline at several points in the process: identifying donors, coordinating across hospitals, retrieving and transporting organs, and moving patients into surgery quickly.
But the American problem is not simply “too few donors.” It is also a system with extremely long waiting lists, complex allocation rules, difficult cross-regional coordination, and much higher compliance and transparency requirements. Both official U.S. data and the GAO have shown that around 2025, the number of people waiting for transplants in the United States was still above 100,000. So long waits in the U.S. do not automatically mean another country is “miraculously efficient.” In many cases, they also reflect the fact that the U.S. is a system with high transparency, dense rules, and heavy oversight — but also very high friction.