nimrod0

You are being way too charitable. The five demands materialized out of one demand ("don't rush the bill") after Carrie Lam made a concession to suspend the bill. Middle-of-the-road concessions are not what the protestors are looking for now, if they ever were. Indeed they have indicated a strategy to use this moment to extract the maximal concession. That's a fairly extremist position that is probably unwise, and leads to all sorts of problems like having to buttress their own weak power position with borrowed foreign leverage.

The PRC leadership is not stupid, either. They see the suspension of the bill as test of whether this whole thing was about the bill or something else. As suspected, it was about something else. Given that, no concession the PRC is willing to make will be enough. This is bigger than HK now and frankly out of HK'ers hands as to how it evolves next.

Two possibilities present themselves.

Either the protestors don't know any history, or have learned such a skewed version of history that they internalize the perspective of the 19th century British victors in an ultimately self-defeating way, or;

They know very well the potency of the symbolism and are deliberately declaring themselves aligned with the Western camp out of political expediency, and elevating the conflict to the level of a battle of spheres of influence.

Neither possibility will be looked upon kindly by mainland Chinese firmly rooted in their own historical and political understanding, because it is against their interest.

It's a sign that the Chrome team is too large and should be assigned more meaningful work.

A much saner behavior is to hide the URL entirely until focused, not to show a secretly mangled version.

Yes, why not drop URL's altogether then? Why display such "technical" things for the plebes?

I wouldn't take the parent's statement as one of moral equivalency. I see it as a reminder to notice similar trends within and not rely so much on exceptionalism or the existing milieu to carry you through without effort, forever. Even Chinese society was at one point perfectly free, even if you have to go back two thousand years.

I understand the impulse to distinguish the two but there simply isn't as much distinction as you perhaps would like to believe. An apartment or a job aren't strictly financial, and while credit bureaus construct your scores out of mainly financial transactions at the moment, they have started out as much more, as I've mentioned, and they've always been looking for other non-financial but correlating variables from your life activities; can't find the link right now, but there was recently an internal whitepaper on such an algorithm using non-financial data.

And again, the US government does care about dissent and goes to great lengths to build files on what it considers potentially subversive forces that are essentially political dissidents. The same controlling impulses are there. And since the scaffolding is all there, the only things safeguarding against a dystopia are, firstly, the clear-headed and astute attention against various soft forms of social control, secondly the maintenance of decentralization as a virtue, and lastly the robust exercise of checks and balances that are nominally provided institutionally, and not, as your answer seems to imply, the intricacies of how certain scores are constructed.

Everybody is somebody's terrorist. The US doesn't have a great track record on this. I mean MLK was tracked by the FBI.

If you have a "bad" US credit score you can't get an apartment, a job, a post-paid mobile plan, or any number of things nowadays that ask for your SSN. That's why identity theft can trash a person's life. Same with ad profiles built around your activities and movements. You think that's not being sold around commercially and the intelligence community hasn't obtained a copy? The scaffolding is all there.

The Big Three credit bureaus started exactly as a social credit system. They'd send snoops to keep tabs on you and collect gossip from your friends.

Correct. In the US, subway stations and buses, elevators, convenience stores etc. have video cameras. Electronic tolling gantries have been used to track vehicles. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash.

It's always interesting to see a reference to a different society as a pedagogical tool to learn about something you might not like. The key step though is to see your own life from an outside perspective, i.e. introspection, which is a very lacking skill indeed.

It should be pointed out that, with or without AI, the cultural impulses are the same. This is an issue of authoritarianism, not of AI. If it should be feared more universally then the fear should be the authoritarian streak within all of us.

But the political winds are blowing toward drug liberalization on the basis of libertarianism. That's what I am referring to.

There were horrible problems that derailed progress, it's pointless to deny them. On the other hand, some of the suffering came externally, like sanctions and embargoes designed to make life miserable and induce the country to fail/the regime to collapse. Also military threats that depleted meager resources and made normal investment impossible.

What can be said is that, given this set of very difficult challenges, whether self-induced or not, the outcome, such as it is, is a commendable one.

The Western media doesn't know how to portray China, or any foreign country. Everything is a caricature and taken as a mere curiosity or monstrosity. It remains at the stage of minstrelsy and Indian dress-up. If you read serious news from abroad, you'll see this.

You're giving the wrong impression. Let's parse this a bit. China is "crazier" in that it's different in a way that's hard to explain in Western discourse. In order to analogize for the reader, quite inadequately really, the portrayal becomes "exaggerated" and "incomprehensible". To the extent that what's different and unusual is generally perceived as "negative" -- because if they were positive you'd be doing that in your society -- the portrayal of China tends to be negative. Both views are valid.

No they are not.

First of all, are we talking about manufacturing or trafficking? Because fentanyl is legal medicine, used by hospitals. It isn't illegal to manufacture, use, or export when complying with controlled substance laws. What's there to prosecute?

There were some shady outfits that sold to individuals online and those should have been shut down if it was so easy to establish a link, but usually it goes through many hands long after it exits China. Like guns and "Made in China" goods, it's a supply-chain phenomenon that the source manufacturer happens to be in China. Doesn't mean China controls the whole trade. Obviously if the sale is in China for illicit uses there is a lot more big brother tracking and when found out the draconian drug regime there applies. You're reading non-existent things into sensationalist news stories.

Last year, China went along with the DEA to ban the manufacturing of some synthetic variants in illicit use, so they're helping if anything. They didn't have to even talk to the DEA when it's the DEA's job to crack down on drugs on the home turf where the real problem is.

What Americans never learned (or have forgotten) is that drugs affect a whole society, not just the individual.

The Opium Wars began when the Chinese confiscated the British drug contraband (but property to the British) and lit a bonfire with them, as the opium trade was illegal. There is no comparison.

No, it's not. You're doing random pattern matching. Chemical engineering has been outsourced to China and factories there are making/exporting whatever people want to import, including industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The supply chain has been moved around with globalization, that is all. There is no political motivation behind it, much less political control.

Way before Napoleon, during the Zhou Dynasty of China, Confucius was already teaching his minister-aspiring students about the role of music in governing, owing to it being a device to actualize harmonious behavior among the vassals and the people as practiced for a thousand years then and codified in the lost Book of Harmony.

https://ctext.org/liji/yue-ji/ens

Paper describing the Agora network: https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf

Before anyone claims they know wtf they are talking about, answer the following real technical questions -- I haven't seen a single one who has (including the so-called "Trail of Bits"):

1. Can Ryzenfall and Fallout be exploited without code signed by AMD?

2. Can Masterkey be exploited even after disabling the PSP in the BIOS which AMD has allowed since January?

No one person is making the choice, that's the problem. The decision is distributed over many people and each step is only a tiny bit "rapacious" on average (meaning some steps may even be conserving), but over all, the collective decision is to kill 100k orangutans for tastier Nütella.

Secondly, it's not about difficulty in valuing something that's hard to see; our markets do plenty of that and are very good at it. It's that there is no value placed on orangutans. Even if you get to see one every day, that may affect your personal decisions but it has no effect collectively because orangutans, like anything else that exists freely in nature such as unclaimed resources, are priced close to $0 in the markets. Only if someone "owned" all the orangutans, for example, then you can talk about value.

"A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak."

Actually, 'lakphak' is not entirely distinct, and likely related to 'tea,' at least the 'lak' part. The STEDT project has a number of reconstructions across Sino-Tibetan for etyma variously meaning leaf, flat object, and tea: http://stedt.berkeley.edu/~stedt-cgi/rootcanal.pl/etymon/786

See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16134698

The first character associated with a 'bitter herb' that later became specific to tea, 荼 (rlya), is probably a cousin of this 'lak' in modern Burmese.

In modern usage you're right, 茶 is used as 'beverage'.

When the character was created (appears in Erya under 'plants', so a very early character), it referred to one of a number of 'bitter herbs,' and linguists think it might have sounded like 'rlya'.

The character is composed of the top part, 艹 (classically written as 艸), meaning 'herbaceous plant' and the bottom part, 余, which supplied the pronunciation 'lya'.

There are two modern characters that come out of this, 茶 (cha) and 荼 (tu); the first one is used for tea/beverage, the second one has been borrowed a lot for its sound but at least one of its meanings is still 'bitter plant'.

They got the brains and patents (if applicable).