As I'm sure many of you know, China is a place of remarkably fast-paced progress and development. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the place was close to a barren wasteland a few decades ago. Double digit growth, toppling Japan for #2 GDP in the world, blah blah blah.
The truly important story here is that thanks to their disregard for reality, China can pull off the impossible. You know the old Douglas Adam adage about throwing yourself at the ground and missing? Think along those lines. If you don't know something can't happen, then who says it won't?
Case in point:
Yes that's right, nearly a full terabyte of storage on one simple USB drive, for the low price of maybe 15 dollars or so, I don't know.
For those of you who don't know, currently the more or less largest possible USB drive that can be acquired in America is (as far as I can tell) around 32GB. So, an 880GB is quite the feat.
This lovely little item can be found in any of Shanghai's fake markets, where they sell things like Luis Vuiton or Pradda, and brass knuckles.
The fake markets are numerous, with at least three major ones that I know of and have visited, and at various times the government attempts to shut them down, but they always just relocate. This doesn't include the truly underground fake shops that are invitation only; even these that exist out in the open have secret compartments and the like, such that a truly inquisitive customer will be led to a room behind the walls with superior quality fake goods (sometimes they're technically real, just snatched from the factories and sold far below the brand price).
People from Japan and Korea are apparently the biggest customers for those sorts of grey market goods, but I've heard stories of Westerners who travel the world looking for the best impossible deal.
No one I know of, so far, though, has purchased the 880GB USB drive from heaven.
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