Maybe the hint is right there in your comment. Nearly all the people deploying these nodes aren't engineers in the slightest despite having someone given them such a title.
I'd suggest keeping it in USD or other hard currency. Bitcoin provides no advantages in obtaining/transacting hard currency relative to other currencies, nor any stability while holding it. Either way you are going to a black market, and you are paying real, unaffordable conversion rates compared to transacting in (worthless) hyperinflationary currency.
The bitcoin guy is not going to accept 1 Zimbabwe dollar to 1 USD any more than your black market dealer who has USD. The real currency conversion rate is the problem, not the act of obtaining actual hard currency.
yes, there are a lot of fungible ways to transfer hard currency over the internet... once you acquire it.
again: acquiring it is the hard part, because nobody wants to trade a zimbabwe dollar for a USD.
Bitcoin does nothing to help your zimbabwe dollars be less worthless than they are in USD, therefore they don't help the currency conversion process at all.
Intelligence chiefs have testified in front of congress that Iran was following through with it's end of the deal. The US then unilaterally decided to tear up the treaty and put in economic sanctions based on nothing. It's almost as if they want Iran to build nuclear weapons. It's also putting pressure on Europe to pull out of banking and business ties that were built after the embargoes were ended.
Most deals of this nature are going to have a sunset clause, this doesn't seem to be a big deal. Before 15 years is up, there's just a new negotiation.
No, most deals have a withdrawal clause, where either party can end the deal.
They don't normally have a set end date.
A set end date basically means Iran plans to restart activities on that date without any kind of sanction. There's a reason this deal was so heavily criticized.
You didn't address this idea that nuclear power does not require Iran to enrich uranium. The deal seems faulty if they can still enrich uranium, regardless if they were following it or not.
Iranian media announced and then the IAEA confirmed Iran had breached the limit on uranium they were allowed to store.
>The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iran’s nuclear program under the deal, confirmed in Vienna that Tehran had breached the limit.
I can never understand how people are complaining about this stuff. You willingly and knowingly sign a contract with the terms stated right there. Whose fault is that? The Chinese?
If you signed a contract handing over your large profitable company in exchange for some magic beans who exactly is the bad person here?
Don't sign the contract if you don't agree to the conditions. The real people to blame for IP transfer don't seem to cop a single mention by most.
> I can never understand how people are complaining about this stuff. You willingly and knowingly sign a contract with the terms stated right there. Whose fault is that? The Chinese?
Have you ever done business with/in China? Contracts are treated like toilet paper, and most of the stuff OP is talking about probably may not have been written there in the first place.
It's definitely possible that the tech transfer provisions were there in clear black ink, and so the founders knew exactly what they were signing up for.
It's also possible that the condition was "we will invest on condition that we nominate the COO", and the COO then proceeds to filter all research/designs/etc back to the sister company. It's also possible that the contract says funding injections will be provided at milestone X, and up until that point the investor is saying "sure, no problem", then at the 11th hour the investor threatens to withhold it until you give them copies of all your research.
Having worked there and experienced all of this first hand, I think it's unlikely that it's as simple as you imagine.
Given the Western way of doing business, it does come as a shock when China spins up a complete clone of your business with government money, including IP and R&D. It's malicious intent. They have no motivation to see the business succeed.
It's not like it's spelled out in the contract: "we will use free loans from the Chinese govt to take your tech, undercut your markets and put you out of business. We have no intentions of letting your business thrive and survive."
We're getting smarter about it but this is way of doing business is very foreign to the West. The West sees investors as capital assets and not active market players. When Peter Thiel invests in a company he is not looking to spin up his own competing clone. He wants the business to succeed. Not so in China, who has a vested interest in running US businesses into the ground.
Should other countries cede sovereignty and do exactly what others dictate to them? The West needs be smarter about how to compete and deal with the global landscape rather than crying about it incessantly and childishly trying to divert blame. Nothing illegal happened in the examples above, Western CEO's willingly handed over their property knowing full well what happens. And they did it to profit.
India flagrantly walks all over IP too. They have a massive export business stealing new pharmaceuticals and selling generics to the world. This is the reality of the world.
Either get smarter at how to manage this stuff or give up. The US is hardly in a position to suddenly want an international arbiter deciding who is playing fair or not given the history of torn up treaties and general aversion to international governance.
It's not a game of baseball, countries are free to make their own rules and decide whether they respect yours or not.
As a Westerner I fully agree with this. US seems to have this conceit that China, India and other emerging economies will play by the post-WW2 global trade rules we set up, if we just continue to nudge and pressure them in that direction. But it's been obvious for a while now their intent is to play by their own rules. US whinging about something so blatantly obvious, unsurprising and foreseeable is pretty lame.
I mean, it is, just not in those words. What we're talking about here is a vulnerability in the contract, in the software-security sense. Everyone should be reading contracts the same way they read source code during a security audit: under the assumption that all parties involved have malicious intent and are trying to destroy one-another 100% of the time. So when a contract says "we can do X", it must be read as "we can do X to make us succeed at your expense." Just like when code says "this module can do X", it must be read as "an attacker having gained control of this module can do X to succeed at your expense."
Here's the problem - there's usually a stipulation of good faith. A Chinaman investing money in your company with the intent to clone it like that is not in good faith, and would be so adjudicated by any American court of competent jurisdiction. Even if, however, your contract is technically enforceable in American court, it's not easy to go get some one from China to punish.
In America, you're very much expected to be a "right guy" when dealing with others. Regardless of what the piece of paper says, you will (deservedly) gain a bad reputation is you exhibit bad behavior, and become a person with whom no one wishes to transact. Word will get around. I think this system of doing things is highly effective, contracts aside. Interestingly enough, this is strongest in the South, followed by the Midwest, and only occurs to a lesser degree on the coasts. I sill haven't figured out why.
China has a very different perspective. Her business culture involves things like committing embarrassing acts in each other's company, a sort of mutually assured destruction. For better or for worse, when these two cultures mix, American businessmen end up the suckers.
Americans have significanlty more patents than other nations in history. I'd view it as a random consequence and an action taken by the handful of criminals all nations have.
It’s a culture difference: in China, it’s the victims fault for letting the perpetrator take advantage of them, while in the west it’s the perpetrator’s fault even if the process was completely legal.
Buzzfeednews does ok sometimes but I'd have to disagree with this. Even as a staunch privacy advocate facial recognition could do wonderful things to benefit society, is not the real problem overzealous governments and wideranging police powers lauded over innocent citizens?
Maybe there really needs to be a discussion about how intrusive we are going to allow them to be and the dangers that poses. It's a silly kneejerk response to say "we should only allow human beings to stare at cctv cameras, not an algorithm"
The cat's out the bag, the technology isn't the problem, tech is amoral, it's the people using it we need to solve.
> is not the real problem overzealous governments and wideranging police intelligence agency powers lauded over innocent citizens?
Yes, they're the real problem. That doesn't mean it's futile to take away a powerful tool for them to use.
> tech is amoral
Tech is not amoral. It doesn't exist in a vacuum -- it has a context of who created it and what human actions it facilitates.
For example, ransomware is amoral. Sure, the tools used to build it are neutral, but that's true of anything if you zoom out far enough (e.g. steel is amoral, but CIA drones aren't).
> it's the people using it we need to solve
You can't "solve" people. There will always be selfish, stupid, and shortsighted people in the world. All you can do is make sure that they don't have concentrated, unilateral power over others.
Technology gives people that kind of power, and we can at least make sure that law enforcement in liberal countries doesn't misuse it.
> The threat that facial recognition poses to human society and basic liberty far outweighs any potential benefits. It’s on a very short list of technologies — like nuclear and biological weapons — that are simply too dangerous to exist, and that we would have chosen not to develop had we had the foresight.
Guns are also amoral but still manage to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I think the reality is, this technology will be used against the public in negative ways. It's easier to get something banned than it is to change the nature of people.
I don't know where I stand on this to be honest. You are right that the real issue is "overzealous governments and wideranging police powers lauded over innocent citizens" but I don't know what the fix is.
The fix is laws that limit the power of governments/police. If governments are not willing to pass these laws, they probably won't be willing to pass laws preventing them using facial recognition to spy on citizens either.
You can simply equip those people with a tracker. Then it also works if they leave the stadium. Put them in their shoes and you dont need their cooperation either.
If they dont have any just put the persons picture on the stadium screens.
But my point would still stand even if I couldn't provide an example either. The burden of proving that a technology has no significant benefits should fall on the people trying to ban it.
There are countless things that our brains can do that are illegal to do with computers because our brains are so bad at it. Recording a phone call without notifying is illegal even though our brains remember it. Posting someone else's nudes without consent is illegal even though you can describe them from memory legally.
My eyes can't instantly recognise hundreds of strangers on the street and sync that data up with the global adtech database.
It's the same in Japan, homes aren't made to last, you're only expected to get a few decades out of them. My Japanese friends in Sydney always found it bemusing that I lived in a 100+ year old house. It was hard for them to fathom doing that, even with renovations. The newer the better.
Their population growth is lower than most of the West, some argue it even contracted last year. Why is everyone on this site so wildly misinformed about the largest country on Earth? Is this a US thing?
It is normal for Americans to think that other countries don't matter. That's why they're missing the point that China is already the richest country in the world and it is growing at double the pace of the US.
One-child policy is long gone though. A two-child policy exists perhaps for some. The article does an excellent job summing up the demographic hurdles they face.
I personally think any country that can economically prosper without resorting to unsustainable population growth or environmental damage should be congratulated on the world stage.
China is managing to do one of those things.
Technological advancement should be the focus of developed nations wanting to thrive without taking the easy gdp heroin hit of over-populating, which is essentially unaccounted future debt heaped upon younger generations.
Would you like to provide some evidence to the contrary for that or just a general "It's probably not true"?
You could say the same about Western government debt that's creatively accounted, unemployment rates which avoid underemployment/participation and inflation which desperately needs to remain low to keep bond rates from bankrupting public balance sheets.
Here are a couple western think tanks who evaluated recent Chinese economic stats - CSIS in particular comprehensively reverse engineered Chinese GDP reporting from ground up- and concluded China is (1 trillion USD) larger than official numbers purports to be.
Whole "Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak” Sun Tzu thing.
My own government in Australia has the official unemployment rate which is contradicted every time with independent analysis by a well-known multinational firm. Not fractions of a percent either, full percentage points difference.
Argue about pennies all you want. China are eating up more and more of world GDP. In 1998 they produced 3% of the worlds total output. Choose whatever source you want to see where it is now.
Either people can wake up to it or continue consuming media pleasantries that make them feel better.
The Fed has been talking about U6 since before Yellen took the chair. The Fed's entire dovish stance on interest rates was publicly predicated on low labor force participation being unaccounted-for slack.
The unemployment rate vs labor force participation has been a part of Presidential debates since 2012, and also figured in the 2010 Congressional elections.
If you want to know more about how U.S. government debt is accounted for, the various Federal Reserve websites are informative, if a bit dry.
The China growth rate is probably not far from the truth, but there is not much public data published to back it up. It's reasonable to be skeptical. I think there's reason to believe that their actual growth rate is higher in some years and lower in others, as an artifact of the difficulty in getting accurate numbers.
I'm curious about your comparison of China to the United States. It seems like a whataboutism argument, which isn't really to the point of the topic.
That's part of the problem. Journalists avoid a deep dive into the nitty gritty that might muddy the narrative. Of course economists discuss this and are more aware of it than any other group. But how stats are presented (marketed?) on the outside should be of concern to anyone caring about their own democratic system where this stuff sways millions of votes.
> seems like a whataboutism argument
It's tiring to see this said here. Quite sure it's not tolerated much lately as a singular/only response either. It is ingrained human nature to compare others, particularly those with similar traits. To shut down discussion with a single word is incredibly disingenuous and unhelpful to modern discourse.
Give me 10 mins and I can tell you 100 things the US does far better than China. I really doubt the same claims of whataboutism would be made in the opposite direction.
Don't let nationalism cloud your judgement friend. It's a big wide diverse world with a bunch of viewpoints.
Fair enough, it's a term that is only accurate if the arguer is employing deception. You were not. You genuinely didn't know about labor participation being a large part of the public discourse for the past 9 years.
Oh I think you may be right. They might have been understating their GDP. I remember few yrs ago Bloomberg wrote a piece explaining why the Chinese bureaucrats have incentives to under-report.
"China’s national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since
local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an
incentive to skew local statistics. China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the
data provided by local governments to calculate GDP at the national level. The adjustments
made by the NBS average 5% of GDP since the mid-2000s. On the production side, the
discrepancy between local and aggregate GDP is entirely driven by the gap between local and
national estimates of industrial output. On the expenditure side, the gap is in investment.
Local statistics increasingly misrepresent the true numbers after 2008, but there was no
corresponding change in the adjustment made by the NBS. Using publicly available data, we
provide revised estimates of local and national GDP by re-estimating output of industrial,
construction, wholesale and retail firms using data on value-added taxes. We also use several
local economic indicators that are less likely to be manipulated by local governments to
estimate local and aggregate GDP. The estimates also suggest that the adjustments by the
NBS were insufficient after 2008. Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP
growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in
2016 is 7 percentage points lower."
Take a look around "中國 GDP 灌水", lead to this latest research claim that China's GDP has been misrepresent after 2008.
CITE: Relative to the official numbers, we estimate that GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower and the investment and savings rate in 2016 is 7 percentage points lower.
I'm well aware of the history, thanks for the link. We are in a comment section of an article on this latest print and I was responding to a comment which says it doesn't trust the official figures.
Provided evidence to the contrary.
Do you think this GDP number is wrong and if so by how much?
Maybe the hint is right there in your comment. Nearly all the people deploying these nodes aren't engineers in the slightest despite having someone given them such a title.