forkLding

Club Penguin was sold to Disney for 350 million, it didn't die in the sense that money ran out

Below are in Chinese:

His blog: https://program-think.blogspot.com/

His github: https://github.com/programthink

The data he collected on China's princelings among the CCP: https://github.com/programthink/zhao/tree/master/data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/japans-fate-could-be...

They say events in Japan often foretell the future of a highly developed and urbanized society, could be parallel to the old "Japanese people are not having much sex" news in the past, we're just catching up.

https://thediplomat.com/2019/04/lets-talk-about-no-sex-a-clo...

Or there are technological advances in artificial wombs and children are grown in incubators so that women are no longer as involved in pregnancy/child-bearing.

We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.

It should be noted that Zhang was a math prodigy when he was young, around 13 years old, however because of the Cultural Revolution in China, school education was stopped for a decade and his parents were purged and he was sent down to the countryside so he could not study at school but was forced to work in the fields and factories as re-education. It was only a decade later that he managed to get into university because universities re-opened after the Cultural Revolution, by then he was 23 already when he started his bachelors' degree.

Note that, universities could accept people who did not attend school if they passed their university entry exams because so many people were unable to attend schools because they were all closed and teachers purged during the Cultural Revolution.

I would say he "matured" later mainly because he did not have the right opportunities because he could not go to high school and after his university graduation, had no good opportunities because many good professors were purged during the Cultural Revolution so he fled to the US for a better life.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty

And I quote from the above source which is from a 2015 New Yorker interview with Zhang:

'I asked Zhang, “Are you very smart?” and he said, “Maybe, a little.” He was born in Shanghai in 1955. His mother was a secretary in a government office, and his father was a college professor...As a small boy, he began “trying to know everything in mathematics,” he said. “I became very thirsty for math.”...The [Cultural] revolution had closed the schools. He spent most of his time reading math books that he ordered from a bookstore for less than a dollar.'

As well:

'...when he was fifteen he was sent with his mother to the countryside...where they grew vegetables. His father was sent to a farm in another part of the country. If Zhang was seen reading books on the farm, he was told to stop...After a few years, he returned to Beijing, where he got a job in a factory making locks. He began studying to take the entrance exam for Peking University, China’s most respected school: “I spent several months to learn all the high-school physics and chemistry, and several to learn history. It was a little hurried.” He was admitted when he was twenty-three.'

Putin won't stop though, the war with the Georgians in 2008, 2014 Ukraine invasion and now this Ukraine war. Is it really peace when one side calls for peace?

Don't forget WW2, when Nazi Germany under Hitler annexed Czechslovakia in 1938, invaded and split up Poland in 1939 and all the Great Powers did not do anything due to either appeasement or isolationism. We need to learn from history, expansionist dictators do not stop and conceding to them only leads to further war and likely world war.

You just explained it, imagine if one of your competitors (Tesla) now knows how much you spend on Twitter, its like a strategy game but now they know your advertising budget. Also they want to see the boundaries between Tesla and Twitter, are you funding your competitors by just spending money on Twitter?

Just a note: The money-laundering system this criminal is part of is called a 地下钱庄 in Chinese or "underground banks" (https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/intel/advisories-avis/bank-...), originally started in the 1980s in Mainland China when free-market reforms brought non-regulated "banks" (more just a group of people calling themselves a bank) and informal "loan" companies/loan sharks, they were soon co-opted by corrupt officials to bring money out of the country and since about 2018 any Chinese citizen who wishes to bring money for big purchases like real estate investment outside of China uses a form of underground banking since China puts an annual limit of $50,000 USD on money that can be taken out of the country (https://nhglobalpartners.com/moving-money-in-and-out-china-r...).

Technically speaking, if you want to exceed the limit, you can send in an application form to explain and hopefully get approved to take out more money than that $50,000 limit but the original intent of this law was to restrict money flowing out of China and it is very hard to get approved beyond the limit.

Arguably more an expansion of the original idea than a pivot, but Twitch used to be justin.tv which was just a single 24-hour livestream of Justin Kan, they later expanded it to allow other people to broadcast as well and then noticed their gaming channels was doing really well and rebranded as Twitch to solely focus on gaming.

Discord itself says this in their welcome messages but they used to be a game development studio that tried to develop an mobile MOBA game called Fates Forever back in 2014. However they found VOIP software to be pretty problematic and pivoted to develop VOIP software for gamers. Now they're a very popular chat client.

https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Discord#:~:text=Advertisemen....

Nope they are hiring more, I'm working at an enterprise-level Saas so not sure how representative but it seems if your company has revenue and needs to grow, it's still hiring.

Also I still get plenty of LinkedIn messages from recruiters all the time from all kinds of companies from small to unicorns to big tech.

The Chinese call this "running" (there is a Chinese character that is worded the same as run in pinyin and is used to term as escaping/leaving from China), something that has been increasing with the iron fist of the CCP coming crashing down a lot more often, especially what has happened with Shanghai.

Ah so something like Chinese Gaokao? where you spend 3 years of your life preparing for one exam? Or am I reading what you wrote wrong?

What if you put in strict identity verification and the uploader is identified but still decided to upload a NSFW or disturbing image?

The news of this women is being rapidly censored and angrily discussed within Chinese circles like on Wechat, this is another twitter post on it: https://twitter.com/manyapan/status/1487463235930501124

Here is an updated BBC article on this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60344484

This seems to be a human trafficking case in which the mother was trafficked, raped to have 8 children and abused for 20+ years. She was found by local vloggers being chained up in a shed, not wearing much in 0 degrees celsius weather and basically eating leftovers. Her teeth are mostly gone. There is a huge social uproar in China with the local Xuzhou government desperately trying to cover it up or putting out smokescreens as in the worst part they seem to have tolerated this or at least committed a 20-year span of negligence. The local Xuzhou government weibo has changed their public statement 4 times, each time showing conflicting details and a cover-up stance.

Chinese people who have went to the village to support this woman and to learn more have been blocked by local police and are being held.

I'm posting here in hopes that Western media, international womens' rights and anti-trafficking organizations pick this up as it is almost not broadcast on Western news yet it is such big "news" in Chinese social media and weirdly the Daily Mail was the only place that had most of the updated info as reported within Chinese social media videos.

默认就是支持

I think the hot take is that although these are best practices, not many companies actually do them.

"And the world's second largest economy now faces food uncertainties due to factors such as its deteriorating relations with the U.S. and Australia, which could drastically alter the import environment. In fact, this could be what is prodding China to boost its calorie reserves." and "Less than 20% of the world's population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe's maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine." - TLDR for the whole article, also seems like lately parts of the world including China is experiencing food uncertainties:

https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/rising-uncertainties-from-covi...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/15/floods-coronavirus-create-mo...

Coming from a private school where many of my friends went to Ivy Leagues, a lot of them took SAT Prep, which honestly does not teach much except for how to practice for SAT so that you get a high score, also its a bit of an unfair advantage as you're basically paying for classes while others don't have the same opportunities or time.

Mandarin or this kind of standardized written Chinese was formalized by a National Commission and chosen during the Republic of China era, this is the document from 1932 now digitally stored in the archives of Taiwan, see: https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCCULIB-9900012902...

Even without the CCP, Mandarin would have become the national dialect and dominated Chinese speech, etc. The CCP merely continued on the work because it was so useful and the easiest route to go as there had been so much work done and a system put in place by the previous regime.

EDIT: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/d/987/fi...

^this link loaded better, its the same document, seems to be from Georgia Tech.

For non-Chinese readers, the document says that the dialect from Beiping (aka Beijing) should be adopted as the standard and then lists rules on pronunciation, how to pronunce using a Latin-based script, etc.

I was born to an expat family in neighbouring Bahrain, it was a similar experience. Overall, I would say it is worth it if you are poorer or looking to make money. It's a place where you can grow rich but later on your family leaves for a better place.

Zhang Gaoli is retired but censorship rules means that all news of this is pretty much censored in China

Sebastian Thrun founded Udacity. Udemy was founded by other people.

I just bought 300 dollars worth of courses couple days ago on Udemy, I've used all these companies and I have to say Udemy is better than them. There is definitely a market based on teaching quality difference and the teaching tools provided.

I find it hits the chicken and egg problem though. If you are starting out, most people end up on your business website/blog using keyword searches from Google or other search engines. Otherwise it is pretty hard from the get-go as a relatively unknown individual or company to generate content and hope it gets found.

It is the same situation in China, or should I hazard by saying the entire world?

Probably Chan or Zen Buddhism, the word Chan 禅 means meditation. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation for Chan. Although they all belong to Mahayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism has meditation practices, the more modern formats that the Western world has exposure from is likely Zen Buddhism.

I know, I've developed with timezone logic for international settings, I've even dealt with international tax logic which is far worse. However timezones, although they are geographical, are also social and political constructs, hence why all of China is under one timezone (China Standard Time) even though it spans 5 geographical time zones. Daylight savings time is also a political invention (there is no such thing as a 23-hr day existing, yet it exists in Daylight Savings Time, which again makes coding assumptions weird if you really need precise timezone logic which I ended up needing, take that with the fact that only certain countries implement DST and you will have a great time coding for international times). I'm suggesting removing the political timezones (those times were added for productivity and workers or legacy reasons, but really we no longer work on farms and factories all the time now) from timezone logic and go by geographical timezones so we don't have to estimate timezones and time by grabbing your current city and then comparing it a list of cities and then figure out the timezone that way.

I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.

War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare

War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...