Digibesity can harm, and kill you - Stuck in Beijing since 1980

Deadly crisis

Digibesity can harm but it is also a killer.
See earlier post: https://www.beijing1980.com/2017/04/04/digibesity-the-new-social-plague/

Looking at the impact of the automobile on U.S. society, some disturbing figures.
Every nine days 1,000 people in the USA are killed in automobile accidents (2016 figures). That is 40,000 deaths in one year. While enormous progress was made to make driving less dangerous, statistics show that in the past two years vehicle deaths started climbing again, and this by 14%.
The only plausible cause is texting, calling, watching and posting on their phones while driving. Examples abound.
Forget about those Muslim extremists in the USA: cars and guns are the big killers.
Even Belgian police warns for the smombies: the smartphone zombies. A research in six European capitals found that 17% of the pedestrians have a dangerous habit walking around and looking at their screens. The Dutch are the most careful, the Swede the most careless.

Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs With Smartphones?

By Matt Richtel – 13 March 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/health/teenagers-drugs-smartphones.html
The new drug: smartphones?!
Extract

Amid an opioid epidemic, the rise of deadly synthetic drugs and the widening legalization of marijuana, a curious bright spot has emerged in the youth drug culture: American teenagers are growing less likely to try or regularly use drugs, including alcohol.
With minor fits and starts, the trend has been building for a decade, with no clear understanding as to why. Some experts theorize that falling cigarette-smoking rates are cutting into a key gateway to drugs, or that antidrug education campaigns, long a largely failed enterprise, have finally taken hold.
But researchers are starting to ponder an intriguing question: Are teenagers using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones?

Chinese are for sure extreme users

Figures for 2016 indicate over 695 million Chinese accessed the Internet through their smartphone. WeChat had 768 million daily users. Waifi, sorry, Wi-Fi is everywhere.
Addiction has become a serious problem, as explained in China Daily:
“Screen Fiends”, 1 March 2017
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2017-03/01/content_28397025.htm

It is the opium for the Chinese. A new prison.
OK, I admit I am also addicted to WeChat and often take a pic of the food. Must be a contagious disease. Or we can try the “Phone Stacking Game”.
The worst I have seen, close to my home, is a young girl driving a Porsche at an intersection, going through the red light while turning left, her TWO hands and upper body outside and taking a picture with her phone of a shopping center. How she did it without crashing into something I really don’t know. Maybe her sexy legs are helping with the steering.