What evidence do you have that that's going to be the case? I ask because my entire life, I've seen terrible things done by the Republican Party. And regular people get really hurt. For example, the great financial crisis. Yet, a little bit of time passes, and that 30-some-odd percent goes right back to voting for them.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.)
I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something.
But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S.
Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now?
Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.
> I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China
What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.
They’re the most reliable source we’re going to get without being party insiders. There’s still Soviet-style inflation of figures to meet quotas but China has been cracking down on that for the last few decades because they want accurate data for the five year plans. I think it’s more of a problem with outer provinces, less so for the major manufacturing hubs.
Alternative sources to verify are a bit harder to find without knowing the languages (lots of the NRDC and NBS stats are available in English).
Yes, people also compare some of these statistics with export/import data and with data from other countries on the other side of these transactions, and the numbers match.
You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source. But yes, they have energy, no they don't have oil, yes they have lots of agriculture land, no they messed up some of their environment and that will take time to heal, yes they are working on it.
> But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
China wants to be a rich country even if their population stabilizes at only 900 million people or so. Mostly they want to avoid the middle income trap, which would have been a problem regardless of their demographics falling off a cliff. Automation is the best way to get around it, and they have enough tech, production know how and capacity, and smart people to pull that off.
China is going to continue doing what is best for it, and they haven't gone stupid like the USA has. Embracing AI for productive uses rather than just fixating on the slop produced is one place where they are racing past the west.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did.
Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.
> There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Isn't this simply the answer?
That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to?
This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology.
When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...
>Ruthless monopoly building on both Google and Apple side IMHO.
Microsoft spent a lot of money and resources trying to compete and failed.
Android/Apple just started early enough and by 2012 it was too late as most consumers have decided. To enter this market you have to be truly unique or else you are just copying the competitor and why would users switch if they are happy enough?
Is that really a monopoly if you had a third competitor come in and try?
Consumers decided - and Google also decided to ban manufacturers from building phones with another OS or they loose access to Google Play store and Google apps on the lucrative Android phones they also manufacture: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
(the article is from 2013 but was updated in 2018)
So no manufacturer that already builds Android phones will make an alternative OS phone for you - and that's effectively all of the mobile phone manufacturers given Apple makes all of the iOS devices.
No. The touchscreen firmware's source is not distributed[1] for one, and neither is the firmware for the baseband processor. Possibly more aspects.
Although "open" doesn't matter as much as "libre" does. Modifying source code is useless if you can't actually replace the running instance. It has all the same problems as closed source software. Baseband processors are legally required to be tivoized, thus the violation of user freedoms is encoded in law. Quite frankly, I think it's a huge mistake on the part of regulators. If somebody wanted to do undesirable things on cellphone bands, they can simply build their own transciever for it and there's effectively no way to stop that. These regulations aren't a real security measure, not even security through obscurity. Making a transmitter for a certain band is trivial if all you're doing is causing interference. If the malicious actor is doing more than just that, it already requires a strong understanding of RF principles such that they already effectively posses the knowledge to make an appropriate transciever. All regulators effectively do here with Tivoization is protect potential back doors and security vulnerabilities from being mitigated.
Darn well thats a damn shame. The phone compromises so much "nice to have" features to get to the supposed "privacy respecting" label. Its a shame they didn't actually go all the way. Seems like then all we really have in terms of communication devices is the BeTrusted platform (Precursor communication device)
You're not wrong, but it's the only phone in the world running an FSF-endorsed OS that has no blobs. We should celebrate and support that and not demand something impossible.
How do you assess that? I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of is the phone frictionless to use?
This is just an anecdote but I owned every Google Nexus phone they made up to Nexus 5. A series of bugs caused priceless videos to get ruined and I decided to try iPhone after that. I didn't realize just how much I unconsciously hated using the Nexus phone and that contributed to me not actually adopting smartphone software until I got the iPhone. When the phone and the OS were a burden it led to the phone being avoided. I dont know which was better. I appreciate the battery life, camera and general stability but I hate the new addictions to social media it has caused.
I'm making this distinction post-hoc, so I already know how it turned out: they ultimately decided to stop making those smaller devices. I assume that means it wasn't enough sales to be a financially viable product, and to me, selling "enough" would mean that Apple found it profitable to maintain the supply chains and assembly lines for those smaller devices and continued to invest in the product.
Arguing against myself, Apple could be discontinuing the smaller models because they did market research and found that most buyers of smaller, cheaper devices could be converted to buyers of larger, more expensive devices if those smaller devices didn't exist. Auto manufacturers are doing just that, discontinuing or enlarging smaller light trucks in favor of larger models that are subject to less regulation and therefore can be designed and manufactured more cheaply and might offer even more profit.
If Apple has or had that strategy, then my assumptions are flawed because no matter how many mini iPhones they sell, they would still want to get rid of the line as long as most of those customers could be converted to full-size iPhone customers.
Yeah I feel like putting it closer to the SE lifecycle is must be a better decision than fully axing the mini lineup. If we get a mini 13, then a mini 19 or 20? I can live with that.
Ne Zha 2 comes to mind. One of the largest box offices ever and it came out this year. In my opinion: Good attempt but I dont see them supplanting Western media yet.
Look I get how Ne Zha 2 was a big success and showed signs of good production quality, but lets be honest: The movie was boring. I'm sure the mostly Chinese audience that sat with me in the theater enjoyed it but I fell asleep halfway in.
The "east" has more work to do to capture that magic that the western imperial order (Hollywood) has wrought upon the world.
I will continue to watch and observe how things play out.
>I just want to see more great art that really sticks, has ambitions and something to tell, and values my time.
Its out there, there just isn't great curation and in a world of ever increasing content more people just dont ever find it and accept whatever mediocrity they find.
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