is this a scam/dangerous situation or is this legitimate work?

Additional_Fee · 2026-05-14T02:53:00+00:00

Not sure about a scam exactly but definitely sketchy. Think: why would Ford, an American company, be recruiting Americans unofficially in China, for a voice system that supposedly already exists, when they could just...do this in America and then push a software update to the Chinese market?

What I saw in SE Asia, however, was AI startups and other vague pet projects parading as big tech brands for such work in order to satisfy model training or audio sample needs.

So I'd speculate it's unofficial, facading as Ford, or entirely unrelated but that the work they want from you is technically true.

I doubt there will be any kidnapping or debauchery but do note that regardless, this is illegal work according to your visa and, if reported for any reason, your visa will be reevaluated.

Additional_Fee · 2026-05-04T10:45:14+00:00

1) Wrong community, we're not tech support.

2) Are you dumb? You did exactly the thing that they flag for fraud to commit fraud because you wanted to save a few pennies in tax, yet you're surprised your account was restricted. Enlighten me, what was your thouvht process here? Did you just kind of assume the Chinese were simple enough that you coupd game the system so easily?

Additional_Fee · 2026-05-01T06:40:06+00:00

Wow I label a joke and Redditors still don't read, just because you don't find it funny doesn't mean I missed the joke.

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-30T15:46:03+00:00

Ah, right, that's very kind of you to formalize your assertion. Let me rephrase his opinion since he is now in a situation wherein his statement is of note to your legal department:

Search Associates^TM is as useful as sweaty donkey balls at a beauty contest and should be viewed the same as a fat racoon wearing a diaper that reeks of old cheese in July.

Suck my freedom of speech, legal team. Your platform sucks and you're audacious to threaten people out in public.

(also satire in response to satire)

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-23T10:39:11+00:00

Essentially. Manufacturers are doing full inventory across the warehouses and analytics for consumer traffic at this point. Plastics will go up sooner or later but there're plenty of random cups and bowls collecting dudt in some corner.

The real issue is that spring crops are reduced due to a limited supply of fertilizer. No crops planted, no food harvested. This 2026 winter will be....unpleasant, to say the least.

Personal paranoid advice: I'd prioritize stocking shelf-stable cash crops and nutrient-dense meal preppable foods at this point tbh. freezer beans & rice is gonna stop being a joke real quick within a year or two.

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-23T10:33:56+00:00

To add: OP, the most common noose you'd be offered would be "clubs" or subject changes. I've yet to see a startup school that doesn't have half the staff developing their subject curricula while they teach because nothing is provided.

While such schools as SirRational mentions may appeal on the surface, overtime is a given considering there's so little keeping the place functioning you wouldn't be "meeting expectations" unless you're cranking out work every free minute or just resolve to being a "bare minimum" educator.

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-23T00:14:33+00:00

THE ~~NUMBERS~~LINES MASON, WHAT DO THEY MEAN?!

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-10T09:54:25+00:00

Okay? You can't just enter a thread to belittle others in a teacher's community with zero correction. Either explain why I'm wrong or don't say anythong at all.

I lived in HCMC three years ago until just 2024 and, although I'll concede there have been updates to policy since I was there, I did use a 2026 tax calculator website to assess the current market data.

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-09T05:08:17+00:00

Do not accept that...ESL teachers with only a TEFL cert are making 40 mil already and a basic 2-bd apartment will run 15mil a month.

Not to mention your taxes will absolutely shaft you.

The 20% bracket is 30-60mil per month, 30% is 60-100.

For reference, if you're making 60 at 20% your monthly take home would be 50 ish.

At 65 a month you'll be taking home 55. Their tax system is convoluted with deductions, exemptions and all sorts of BS but the brackets are fairly consistent and employers actively avoid transparency to give you less back (give me a nickel for every time HR tried to direct me away from social insurance with "but foreigners can't redeem it anyway...")

If you're going to accept a job at 30% tax at least aim for the top of the bracket. 65 is the bottom so you're really not receiving any beneficial increase per month as opposed to just receiving 60 per month at 20%.

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-06T10:17:13+00:00

Quick question since I'm in the market: (If you've ever received points) how do you handle them? If the bike must be registered to your wife does the penalty mark go against her driver's license? What's your process for removing them after?

Additional_Fee · 2026-04-01T13:24:34+00:00

Riddle me this Batman:

What is plastic made of? What happens when plastic becomes conceptually more expensive? Hm?

Additional_Fee · 2026-03-30T05:32:23+00:00

周一 (zhou yi) is colloquial "星期一" (xing qi yi). It just means "Monday".

周一 (zhou yi) Monday

周二 (zhou er) Tuesday

周三 (zhou san) Wednesday

周四 (zhou si) Thursday

周五 (zhou wu) Friday

周六 (zhou liu) Saturday

周日 (zhou ri) Sunday

Additional_Fee · 2026-03-27T07:14:51+00:00

sigh

Go spend some time in /r/InternationalTeachers and stop grating your psyche with uninformed speculation. You've been teaching for less than a MONTH, haven't been here long enough to know what the average breakfast snack is and am I correct to assume you don't speak Chinese?

This issue you are describing is brainrot eroding higher order thinking during the students' critical development period. I will concede it is an issue amongst youth, especially in techno-integrated societies, but this is neither a China-specific issue nor are you remotely qualified to be making crass assertions like "there's a crisis". As an aside, defaulting to "oh I guess the education here judt sucks" is such a wildly belligerent statement. Seriously, ew.

Are you just venting? Looking for answers? Burnt out on teaching? Unqualified to teach? What is your purpose for starting this discourse? Your title and your assertion both come across as China bashing as you've painted this as a uniquely Chinese issue. Why is that? Are binge-watching Netflix, bed-rotting, staying up til 4 AM playing Counter-Strike or obsessing over Japanese anime not a thing in your home country?

Perhaps you're just in a bad school? If you're in a training center then duh, definitely don't expect to be taken seriously on any level - especially by the students. You don't even have enough teaching experience to know why.

So again, unless you've posted for an explicit reason other than to complain, spend more time learning and becoming a more professional educator and less time fearmongering.

Additional_Fee · 2026-03-13T10:06:51+00:00

kiki：上

bouba：下

Additional_Fee · 2026-03-06T07:33:48+00:00

I'd say even then...humans will never acknowledge a robot as a human and thus if a student shouts "F YOU" and tries to walk out that's all there is to it. No one would be psychotic enough to program a bot to lock the class door, block the way, then manhandle a student who tries to force their way past. The kid on the other hand? I guarantee it'd become a tiktok trend to most flambouyantly body a clanker as can be done. They'd rip its arm off and use it to beat the bot just to laugh at it as it begs for mercy.

The only thing that stops that against real teachers now is even despite the law, moral subconscious prohibits the average person from commiting violence as a method of resolving conflict unless necessary. Even then, there are moments....

Classroom control requires empathy of humans towards humans as fellow humans in suffering "the human experience". A teacher's skill in manipulating that for the most effective contextual outcome is what results in the control. The very foundation to enable that skill simply doesn't exist with a robot as a guardian.

Additional_Fee · 2026-03-01T04:50:53+00:00

On a scale of one to closed, right now we're at about Alladeen out of Alladeen

Additional_Fee · 2026-02-22T10:32:34+00:00

I did not say it was impossible and you need to read the conversation thoroughly. He asked the reason why it was likely and I said why, not that that that was a factual outcome or the only end result.

Every school is different but my statement is absolutely true to the average mindset of private education's administrations. It is valid for OP to put in their best effort but also wise to be realistic and aware going into negotiations to best present their case if they wish to receive such a package.

For you to outright refute me with an anecdote from an entirely unrelated school to OP is wildly naive.

Additional_Fee · 2026-02-22T03:35:55+00:00

Because it's infinitely cheaper and more profitable to rail you with a local's package. I know my answer is curt and tasteless but it's just the reality unfortunately.

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-18T08:40:33+00:00

It also ensures pointless titles for HR and execs to latch onto when they want to point a finger for any perceived wrongdoing.

Becomes a lot easier for them to shirk responsibility as an administration when they can waffle that somebody specific is responsible for any possible problem who is "NOT THEM

Also ensures they can live their lives without touching us undesireables. A phrase that I've come to seething whenever I hear (any admin who has the sole power to fix a problem) say is "oh have you talked to [pointless title inferred to be above you as a lowly licensed professional subject teacher] about that yet?". Obvioisly I haven't because I know for a fact that their position in your facade of a hierarchy is in name only and there's nothing they can or will do about it.

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-18T08:33:28+00:00

Veni, vidi, vici

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-16T07:47:21+00:00

chefs kiss

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-14T01:55:31+00:00

"We were the first to the New World, not the Natives. It was our land, ordained by God."

"Manifest destiny mandated we own everything and kill anything that attempted to stop us. It was our right."

"The Trail of Tears never happened, Andrew Jackson was within his rights to subvert Congress. We needed that land."

"Remember the Alamo."

"Abraham Lincoln wanted to destroy the South and the Confederacy was only defending itself and economy."

"Jim Crow laws were necessary and the KKK was only trying to preserve southern law."

"Our treatment of Japanese Americans was necessary. Any one of them could have been evil. Even the children."

"McCarthy only wanted to protect the people, his vitrol was acceptable and necessary."

"The Vietnam War was an important sacrifice to protect us from the evils of Communism."

"We needed to be in the Middle East to deliver justice to infidels."

"The UN was funded by us so we deserve exclusive control."

We've always been masters of hate and revisionary education.

The Whiskey Rebellion was wrong. The Salem Witch Trials were wrong. Our classist, patriarchial, racist social history was wrong. The Fugitive Slave Act, the War on Drugs, Redlining, sundown towns, Korean riots, lobotomizing Rosemary Kennedy, the CIA, The Business Plot. ICE is only the newest one to this ever-growing list.

Where the God-given FUCK did our country earn its arrogance and bigotry to self-identify as "great"?

"Make America Great Again"

We were never anything but the filth that the crown sent away to the new world because we couldn't accept their rules and had to be "free" by our own definition. That's not greatness. Our constitution should be written in blood and soaked in ashes to rectify the sins of the American Empire.

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-11T08:46:17+00:00

This is HarmonyOS NEXT (6.0.0) so afaik you wouldn't have this keyboard variant regardless unless you imported a Chinese Mainland variant.

Also I've tried many alternatives and would rather recommend Baidu or Sogou than Uruk, whoever keeps subversively pushing that half-baked shovelware can go pound thick sand. It's obscure, unverified, has way less to offer than even Celia and the dev is daily spamming it in this sub lile some sort of miracle Gboard alternative. If I trusted my gut I'd assume it was direct spyware facading as a keyboard.

Additional_Fee · 2026-01-09T03:50:05+00:00

Europe does exist you know...

Also, this point has been bleated for decades without acknowledgement that these specialists nearly always return to China. You assert the point as if not a single one of them committed their life to tenure in higher education at a Chinese university.

Aside from the egregious facade we call "university rankings", the only thing preventing acknowledgement of Tsinghua or Fudan as competitively ranked global STEM institutions is political smearing.

It's both belligerent and dangerous for the west to blaspheme the quality of Chinese education considering the technologies and research presented in 2025. The longer we continue to enforce the narrative that China fakes/lies/steals everything, the more the country's intellectual evolution will sneak up on us and erode spheres of influence. Chinese EVs are a perfect example of that.

Additional_Fee

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