noirchen

Actually I think it is better to show a random poem. Novels are long, and opening lines can easily trick you to think that you "know" the works. But poems, on the other hand, can be short (and long), with more vivid language in just a few lines.

You can have short poems (The fog comes / on little cat feet./ It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches /and then moves on.) or a passage of long poems (I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix).

It looks that not many talked about the fact that there is a lot Chinese investment in Poland, bringing in manufacturing and management experiences.

There once were news about Fitbit or Garmin displaying workout records for users near classified military bases, and some workout routes were suspected to be in the playground of the bases.

Banning books is not something new, but I think Florida has some 'unique' criteria when banning certain books. One example I know is Jackson County, FL. once banned 1984 for being "pro-communist". In most places of the world, 1984 is considered anti-totalitarian, and anti-communist in quite a few countries (not China, where people can buy the book without any hassle). I totally get it, but Jackson County seems to be the only place that sees the book to be procommuist.

In China, particularly in Tibet and Qinghai, plague still occasionally occurs, because a wild animal, the Himalayan marmots carry it and people may get plague from them. After the CCP took over Tibet, antibotics were gradually used to cure the plague. Recent years, more people are traveling to Tibet by the newly built highways, and those people from the cities only find the marmots cute and sometimes touch them and get the disease. Local governments put large warning signs along the road to alert people about this, and hospitals and clinics in nearby towns are always prepared to cure some stupid tourists. Still, it is a potential threat, especially for now because now you can drive home in Shanghai with a cute marmot from infected region for only a few days, not knowing what comes home with you.

This reminds me of the so-called "heartless couplet" (无情对) in Chinese. Every pair of words in the couplets are synonymous or anonymous, and yet the meanings of the couplets are completely unrelated, often in a humorous way.

AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?

I would not jump to the conclusion solely based on isotope signatures. A decade or so ago, a prominent Chinese professor Weidong Sun specialized in geochemistry analyzed the ancient bronze artifacts dated back to the Shang dynasty and found isotope signatures pointing to a Mediterranean origin, and he had to answer that. Well there can be several explanations, for example, the Shang people traded with central Asian tribes and got the ores and perhaps the bronze smelting tech too. But Sun, based on some ancient documents on some mythical long travel of the ancestors of the Shang people, concluded that the only reasonable explanation is that the Shang people are offsprings of those tribes, who are offsprings of the Sumerian people.

That's nonsense. Searching for "广告拦截" on Baidu returns hundreds of thousands of webpages and tutorials telling users how to install and turn on ad blockers, and Chinese smartphone brands often boast that their products perform better than competitors in blocking ads. What you are saying seems like a misunderstood version of the fact that some "ads" are whitelisted by default and you can't block them painlessly, mostly from the telecom giants that provide internet access for you.

I still remember when I bought my first sony vaio in about 2004, running on Windows XP in Japanese, I was just appalled to find that a whole family of useless crap softwares pre-installed. There was an app that notifies me when the battery was fully charged with a dolce female sound "Batteri no shuuden wa kanrio shimashita". I tried to reinstall the system with the recovery CD, but all these softwares were also installed.

Years later when I visited in Japan again, I wanted to buy another sony vaio, and asked the people to give me one with clean windows system. They did not have one with clean system, but they showed me that there were only a few harmless pre-installed apps, and they were easy to remove.

It is celebrated by quite a lot of people in China, Korea, and even in Japan. Yes, Japan. For many Japanese people, the Abenomics did not really revive the economy, and their lives haven't really improved. If you understand Japanese, you will find that the comments from ordinary Japanese people commonly refer to his death as 自業自得, which means that he deserved that.

In East Asia, this assassination has another angle. The attacker, Yamagami Tetsuya confessed that his mother is a scam victim of a religious group, and Abe Shinzo had a close relationship with the leader of the group. Yamagami attacked Abe in broad daylight to revenge for his mother. In East Asian culture, this is so dramatic, almost like those legendary assassins in the old tales who fearlessly stood against the kings or emperors to defend their beliefs or families, and yet were gentle enough not to hurt anyone else. In Japanese forums, the heroization of Yamagami has already begun.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220709/p2a/00m/0na/00...

I would say it's not an issue about democracy or bureaucracy, it's because the responsibility is diluted. Someone is not happy with this? Great, it is now not because we do not do it, it is because we take every complaint seriously. The dilution of responsibility may appear in different ways. Leave the issue to some dedicated committee, they will work very hard to make sure the project won't start in a millennium, and cost possibly even more than actually building the project. In case people are concerned about the endless delay, all the process is transparent and no one is to blame.

This is not limited to building project. We all remember that when covid started, it took the CDC a long time to acknowledge that masks are effective, and even longer to acknowledge that the disease is airborne (in Oct. 2020). Why? They based their guidelines on "science and evidence". In events like, any delay in the decision leads to many deaths that could have been saved.

Ironically, in current America, only the fanatics are making prompt decisions. Look how fast the red states are passing abortion laws after the RvW overturned.

From the viewpoint of people outside the US, Americans probably believe that gun violence is just a mild condition, and decide to live with it. Just like the covid, sure it kills some people, like 10 in 100000, but for the rest 99990, at least half of them do not think something should be done.

https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%E5%9F%BA%E5%8A%AA%E9%87%8C%E7%BB...

https://www.baidu.com/s?ie=utf-8&f=8&rsv_bp=1&rsv_idx=2&tn=b...

I suspect that this time reuters got tricked to publish this without even a test. You do not need to know Chinese, a search for Keanu Reeves in English on Baidu also works. And this news is being covered A LOT in Chinese social media, to prove a point that so-called reputable media are anti-China fake news.

In the past the big multinational corporations did not give a shit about ethics. IBM happily sold Hitler machines to categorize jews gipsies slavs and gay people. Now programmers 'protest', or more accurately, attack what they conceive as evil, and it suddenly become a thing. Which one is better? Of course neither is good enough, but I certainly think programmers can express their views and values. Sometimes you have to admit that fairytale concepts, such as open source, or the internet that every person can get access to, or globalization, or the end of history, are hitting a hard wall. Maybe none of these thing from the last few decades are everlasting in the time scale of human history. If I have to choose between freedom of speech which proves true for like several hundreds of years and decades old open source, I would not hesitate.

I am not sure whether this is disinformation, but in Feb there was this news

https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/us-official-russian-invasion...

So either Russians are very quick to come up with this whole thing and waving a tube of washing powder in front of the whole world this time, or there is some inconvenient truth fact-checked away all these years.

Some people really need to see what the other parts of the world are thinking. Why would India take a stance in this war? When the border dispute between China and India broke up Russia still signed a huge military contract with India despite China's request. Was China angry? Probably, but they kept on with a good relationship with Russia. Was India angry about Russia's collaboration with China in many ways? Maybe, but you do not switch sides over this. Was Putin worried that two of his most important allies are having a border dispute? Of course, but what silly superpower would try to determine what their allies should do?

I am really interested in India's stance on this. Russia is India's largest source of arms, and even now Russia still has arms worth blns to be delivered to India. The last two years saw some border dispute between India and China, and despite China's request, Russia still managed to sign a huge military contract with India, and India has been ambiguous over the Ukraine war like China. What will India do next if Russia decides to use Chinese transaction system (which is almost certain unless Putin is overthrown)? And if we count in those countries still actively buying Russian weapons, including Algeria, Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey...we probably need some time to see how things will unfold.

Biden said that US is not going to war, but in fact there are many ways to slow down the Russians. You could have a voluntary army from western countries geared with weapons and supplies, like during the Spanish civil war in 1936 or eastern Ukraine since 2014. This will probably not save eastern Ukraine, but better than doing nothing.

Do you watch Taiwanese political talk show? Basically guests from both sides in the shows agree that the next election is going to be important. They do openly expressed their anger over the position of the Biden administration. At least for some people across the straits (maybe we can add some people in Japan and Singapore) they are expecting something big to happen between the end of the winter olympics and the 2024 election.

In Taiwan you see Taiwan is not grim, for the geopolitics people they are predicting big change, but from the outside it appears that Taiwan is doomed. This, if you think about it, is really the biggest problem for the DPP government: ordinary Taiwanese people do not really care if they are reunified, while some learned people are worried, and the US can do nothing. The day after the US fled Afghanistan, high rank government officials told the press that "we are not Afghanistan". Yes, no other countries want to occupy Kabul except for the yankees.

And why would the economics be bad if China finally annex Taiwan? Cash from China has been flowing into Taiwan for 40 years, and the rich in Taiwan knows that all too well. Internationally sanction? Do you think who in the world is in bad need of Chinese products now? Taiwanese cannot even count on their leaders. Legislators and local government leaders have always been able to send someone (or in person) to visit their family graves in China and the Chinese government permits it. In Chinese culture, that speaks more than their public speeches.

I feel it amused that people here are discussing what and how Lithuania and the west can do to 'confront' China, but everyone in east Asia knows that before the next Taiwan election in 2024, China will do something to achieve some sort of reunification, either by forcing the Taiwanese government back to the old One-China promise (which is unlikely because the pro-China KMT lost power long ago) or by toppling the pro-independence DPP government.

And you people are seriously discussing the possibility that Taiwan goes nuclear, but it was in the KMT era after China had the bomb, Taiwan was considering building its own nuclear weapon, only to be quickly removed by the US. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that the US has been selling Taiwan expensive out-of-date weapons, which is only logical if the US doesn't want Taiwan to defend itself. Taiwanese people know that, ever since the 70s when Taiwan was kicked off the UN and the US did nothing!

Do you guys know the real sentiment in Taiwan? They are more like, "F*k the US, they treat us like pawns. F*k the west, they would give us anything but real support! F*k the government, they got us in such a bad position. F*k China, they want to annex us. F*k the 20% Taiwanese, they do business with China, in China, for China!"

Perhaps Biden administration has no reaction because Apple Daily (and its boss) was very active in spreading misinformation about Hunter Biden

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-hongkong-politics-idUKKBN...

I am not sure if the president is in fact happy about the raid. One has to pay the price if good ol' Joe is pissed.

Yes evidence, more evidence, just like the good ol' time that US had evidence from Nayirah, and Powell wielded a tube of wash powder in UN claiming that was WMD.

I do believe that President Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, because with so many evidences, his precedents, including our be-loving Obama, would have bombed the hell out of our designated enemy.

You have to outnumber for security. From the videos in Hong Kong, I noticed that the journalists in shiny PRESS vests were usually WAAAAAY more than the number of police, many of them only holding video-taking cell phones.

Initially Chinese people treated it as flu, then they freaked out finding it to be SARS-like, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore set temperature checks. During the SARS outbreak, Asian countries run totally unprotected for months with only thousands of cases, and actually they were relieved to know that the CFR is much lower. But this time, the virus is much contagious.

Actually many in China suspect that maybe a weak version has been around in SE Asia and China for years (remember that Malay pangolin?).

There are discussions on which Mongolia (Mongolia or Inner Mongolia) is the true descendent of the Golden Horde. Mongolia usually claim that they directly descend from Genghis Khan, but genetic analysis suggest that Inner Mongolians are much closer. Now you can find statues of Genghis Khan in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia...

There is one issue with Uighur people in your statement that if you dig into history, Han Chinese have been living in Xinjiang much longer than the Uighurs. In fact, Chinese people have been in Xinjiang even before the Han dynasty, and incorporated some Buddhism-worshiping minority groups and formed the so-called Han Chinese. You can still see the splendid ancient Buddhism relics in Xinjiang. Uighurs, a Muslim minority, entered the region several centuries later, mainly after the Yuan dyansty. To compare with, there is another Muslim minority, Hui, descending from the Central Asia and Middle East (Persian) immigrants during Tang Dynasty. So if people argue that “ancestral land”, they really need to see that in good ol’ Asia, history is such a bitch that one can easily get lost. But that thousands of years old bitch still haunts you in the night.

Nylonkong are getting more attention with Trump, Brexit, and the protests. When was the last time you read an in-depth news about some under represented region, say, Nigeria? For a country experiencing population boom and worsening internal conflicts, 200 million people there ARE going to fight for fresh water and other resources if the rest of world just sit there and do nothing.

Our leaders are the finest men, and we elect them again and again.

I can read Chinese and it looks to me that both sides are attacking the other side. And most are using simplified Chinese so they are all from the mainland. I'm not surprised because just as Americans have heavily polarized opinions towards Trump, Chinese people, especially the educated, also have a huge divide in their political views. You don't see that in Chinese websites because they know what not to say there, but on GitHub, a foreign website without a high risk of being blocked, both sides just unleash hell on anyone who they do not agree with.