crdb

It's confusing because the terms are different internationally.

The RER B is not a direct train link - it's equivalent to taking the Piccadilly Line from Heathrow, you will take a long time through many stations and share with commuters. Think instead Hong Kong's express train or the Narita Express in Tokyo: a fast, clean, premium service that takes you from airport to city centre core locations in a couple of stops (the Heathrow Express is actually pretty bad for this as it arrives somewhere far from most places of interest which is why they're building CrossRail).

UberX/Pool in most of the world (although this is changing - e.g. license now required in Singapore) means the everyday salaryman who happens to commute by car and decides to pick people up on the way to bump up his end of month. Many people end up doing this full time but usually in between jobs. In some countries it's lucrative enough to become a career.

How nice an X/Pool car is depends on the local market. In Singapore it used to be old, entry level Toyotas but as the rental company business improved it became small SUVs (like the Honda Vezel). In Sydney you get anything from a Subaru WRX to an E-class.

Black in most of the world means "professional driver, new-ish sedan used for professional transport" and that depends again on the price locally. In Ho Chi Minh City it's a local market 8 seater van (like a bare bones Honda Odyssey with leather seats). In Singapore you can get the odd Mercedes E-class. In Hong Kong you get many Teslas, with the rest Audi A6 or larger.

In France, X/Pool now use professional drivers, and the cars are sedans: Renault Laguna, Volvo S60, etc. In that sense, the service is equivalent to Black in the rest of the world.

I agree about insurance and tax, but it really depends how you implement it. In Singapore, the license is very cheap and requires a few hours of training (for safety and to know your obligations). This is a stark contrast to 300k+ EUR/USD medallions.

I'm not talking about politically, but about philosophy or spirit. Compared to the Anglosphere megacities, there is a certain comradeship amongst the French (which you find in other countries, like Japan), a sense of shared fate and community spirit, the idea that this goes before profit and efficiency.

The use of the word communism was deliberately ambiguous and a bit of a pun given the leaning of a sizeable portion of the population in the 20th century. "Commune" means a small town in French, and "commun" can mean "that belongs to all" or "shared".

The French job market is ultra-regulated which makes it relatively rigid with many people left out (and great conditions for the connected). I remember someone interviewing for selling ice-creams - there were 22 finalists! And most graduates will do year-long, low paid internships outside the regulated, cushy full time job system, which like post-docs in US academia can repeat ad infinitum if the economy is bad.

As everywhere else, UberX/Pool allows the marginalised to get an easy job that's a step up from pizza delivery, whilst drastically expanding the market for rides (and I've seen this play in a lot of countries). This is particularly helpful for the numerous people juggling many jobs, and parents (especially single parents) who appreciate the flexibility.

The market was already captured by a single player in France, the worst possible way - in a similar fashion as healthcare in the US. Other markets that have been completely captured by capitalist foreign mega corporations include web search, browsers, social networking, computers, fast food, fashion, real estate supplies, the auto industry (Renault and Peugeot are French only in name at this point)... I guess at least the Rousselet were French?

Perhaps it is time to see things in grey instead of black and white, to avoid labels, to judge companies and actions by their net welfare effect instead of saying "he's not from my team so he's bad" or "she's from my team so she's good" (I'm thinking of you, Democrats in the last election). Almost forgot - reduction in wages? The taxi companies employed many drivers on survival wages (particularly those with difficult immigration situation) and pocketed the difference. Uber's transparency is a net gain for the worker (and the state, which does not get tax-evaded).

UberPop was popular because it allowed people to car pool easily without talking about money, and decongested city centers particularly at rush hour. Enabling widespread, safe car sharing seems to have been perceived as a good thing given the high number of users. I never heard a bad comment about Uber from normal French people (drivers or riders), always from taxi drivers or the news.

The service available in France as UberX is what is known as UberBlack in the rest of the world - a black car and a professional driver (also applies to Pool). Uber in France is effectively a taxi company with an app (which is not a trivial improvement, but that's a separate discussion). This is strange because France is, philosophically, a "communist" country and sharing economy innovation is usually welcome and happily embraced; UberX and UberPool were extremely popular with millions of riders (I believe 7? 10% of the country) before they were made illegal.

How this came about is a textbook case study in government-industrial nepotism, including the family [1] controlling 60% of the taxi companies (edited) literally hiring the head of the French FBI to transfer a couple of months before retirement in the transport ministry, pass anti-Uber legislation, and then retire to a cushy job as the chairman of I think the second or third largest taxi company (owned by the same family). This was exposed in a long article in the Nouvel Obs, a real piece of journalism, which was taken offline about a week after publication (edit - seems to be back! [2]) and before I could take a copy (only the URLs I sent friends remain as testimony of its existence). [1] also claims that the Rousselet family blocked a direct rail link between CDG and central Paris (my Uber on that route last week cost 99 EUR), and has kept the number of taxi licenses "near 1930s levels". edit - [2] claims Paris has 1/5th as many taxis as London or New York, and that no new licenses were given between 1990 and 2002, during which CDG passengers increased almost 50%.

There is an embryonic version of Pool, in the form of Blablacar, an app that arbitrages the very high cost (for French citizen) of SNCF and Air France domestic intercity travel. You post your approximate trip, and riders can ask you to pick them up for a portion of the way. I've travelled 5 hours for 10 EUR this way, and used it frequently between Geneva and Annecy (about 45 minutes, no train link, infrequent buses). Since this app is effectively useless for last minute short trips within a city, it does not compete with taxis, which may explain why it is still around.

[1] Note that the father of the current chairman was the executor of the will of President Francois Mitterrand - https://www.challenges.fr/entreprise/pourquoi-il-est-impossi...

[2] https://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/economie/20150212.OBS2398/de... - on the former security head: "fin 2007, le gouvernement Fillon demande un rapport sur les taxis au préfet Pierre Chassigneux [...] Coïncidence ? Ancien directeur des Renseignements généraux puis directeur de cabinet de François Mitterrand, l’homme est une vieille connaissance d’André Rousselet via le corps préfectoral. Son travail, publié en avril 2008, est si conservateur que la presse le qualifie de "contre-rapport Attali", qui vient, lui, de prôner une véritable libéralisation du métier. Mieux : ce même Pierre Chassigneux devient ensuite… président des Taxis bleus, poste qu’il occupe encore à ce jour !"

Whilst real world events have caused many people to focus on the social ranking aspect of the story, when I watched it, I thought it was more concerned with privilege (and the loss thereof).

The main character actually worsens her fate by acting entitled and being self-centered. Had she maintained her higher status, she both wouldn't have been in situations of pain in the first place, nor found it necessary to make a (here, social) effort to get out of them. In real life, being considerate to people serving you pays off in the short term, and in aggregate makes for a better society to live in (it is generally accepted in Western society that insulting your waiter is really rude and antisocial, for example).

Interestingly, both people with low rankings (brother, truck driver) appear to have bad manners (because they are direct) but are nice people deep down; the point being the rating system is imperfectly implemented or optimising for the wrong thing.

The parallel with the Chinese rating breaks down precisely because the show rating is focused on this shallow idea of visible manners whilst the Chinese system appears to correct fundamentally inconsiderate, widespread behaviour (like stealing a shared bike), just as credit scoring in the West was originally a means of increasing general welfare (by lowering rates for most at the expense of the few who game the system).

The real parallel between the article and Black Mirror is this: the author, who is privileged (he already lives in a considerate society where everybody cooperates and the rule of law is a given) cannot understand the need for Sesame; upon losing that privilege (by moving to China with a blank score) and having to earn it back, he is upset just as the heroine of the episode was ("but I'm an honest guy, why should I pay a deposit to rent a bike?").

Uber owns and runs rental car companies, such as Lion City Rental in Singapore, whose fee structure is designed specifically for the car-less to sign up as drivers (minimum rental duration for discounts to apply, a discount based on Uber rides driven, etc.).

Lion City Rental has grown so fast as to affect the price of the car ownership permit [1]. Anecdotally, about 1 in 20 of my drivers in Singapore owned their cars.

[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/uber-bids-co...

> Money left over could be used to pay dividends to shareholders or to do tech acquisitions or long term investments in Apple projects which would benefit the shareholders in a more direct fashion.

This assumption is incorrect in a world where the US is only about 40% of Apple's revenue and slowly dropping (eyeballing from [1], happy to be corrected). If you are going to be investing to grow your revenue outside the US, it makes no sense to repatriate the cash generated there already.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...

> Many comments ask if non-medical persons would use ultrasound should it become affordable. I think not.

I immediately thought of a non-medical use case.

A pregnancy and birth in Singapore costs $5-20k, so an extra $2k is not that much to be able to see your baby move and grow whenever you like as opposed to having to wait for your monthly appointment (and perhaps post photos on Instagram). It's a bit much for me but I might have bought one for $100.

Some redditors working in US ER departments complained of mothers turning up with "complications" mid-pregnancy because of the mandatory ultrasound that follows, allowing them to see their child, at which point their symptoms mysteriously vanish and they head home smiling.

> I don't expect my surgeon to do surgery in his spare time.

I really like it when my specialist has a prominent public profile.

A recent case: tenure at a major university, had written or was quoted in many good journals and papers, and had a number of impressive accreditations (for example he was also head of his specialty's medical association for the country). This showed dedication and interest as well as some measure of intelligence.

I was accordingly confident he was on top of the latest developments in his field and would be able to deal with complications better than your run of the mill specialist. The care was great throughout.

Similarly, our lawyer has been quoted twice by the Supreme Court in Singapore, has written many articles in the Straits Times, and does great (and visible) pro bono work, all of which I could find off a quick Google for his name. Whilst I hired him based on a recommendation, it was comforting to see this public confirmation of his ability and interest in the field.

> Treat cars as a luxury good

It's subtly different. The core idea is that car ownership has externalities and the implementation of solving these externalities is to limit absolute numbers and let the market decide what use to make of the quota. Luxury ownership is just one of many uses competing. Uber recently pushed prices up a bit [1] as it bought itself a rental fleet for its subsidiary Lion City Rentals; the ROI on these cars is worth more to Uber than what a citizen is prepared to pay to own a car.

A parallel might be real estate. Yes, you could run a warehouse in Wall Street, but even if you get the permits from the local planning association, you'll be outbid by the investment banks. There is even an example of "luxury" Wall Street real estate in the form of 23 Wall Street [2] which was "purposely designed to be only four stories tall" whilst surrounded by skyscrapers.

It is worth noting that the Singapore government actively works to reduce demand for cars, by increasing the quality and extent of public transport, making it accessible to all, and regulating the taxi and delivery industries carefully to enable them to be cheap and easily available. A COE-type scheme introduced in a city without high quality alternatives (such as Sydney or Los Angeles) would cause the immediate fall of the government responsible and a policy reversal from the newly elected replacement.

[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/uber-bids-co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Wall_Street aka the "House of Morgan"

Lee Kuan Yew actually thought, almost a decade ago, that he didn't go far enough:

“I knew that once people in Singapore could have a car, they’d never give it up. So, before it got out of control, I said you need a Certificate Of Entitlement before a car is yours; and the permitted up-tick in number of cars depends on what the road capacity is. That was the first move. So, you bid for it. If you issue more entitlement certificates than is prudent, roads are jammed. Then a younger generation took over and says, well, why not have more cars and we charge them by the usage on the roads instead of just purchase? I told them, okay, okay, have a car, have more cars! But once you’ve got a car, you will never give it up.” [...]

“I was moved on policy-thinking about transit by psychology. They are moved by maximizing road space. Okay, then you would antagonize more motorists. I would rather have less cars and get everybody to use the public transport, but a younger generation thinks this is the way to go and you are in charge, then go for more cars.”

I remember being in LA in the 2000s, and not renting a car (the innocence of growing up in Europe...). I sampled the buses that took 1.5 hours to go from Beverly Hills to Downtown. I paid $200 for a return cab ride from Santa Monica to Hollywood at rush hour.

In comparison, if the MRT has a 30 minute delay in Singapore it is national news [2].

[1] Tom Plate, Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew - https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Lee-Kuan-Yew-Singapore/...

[2] http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/commuters-hi...

You don't. At least we didn't.

Here's the real problem:

1. modern shopping sites are built haphazardly without structure;

2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops.

1. matters because you cannot build a simple crawler. This is because sometimes, the brand is in the title, the description is in the brand, and the gender is in the quantity, which itself is in the photo as a pixellated image...

You must load the entire page and figure out where the attributes are in a smart way. You can do this today with headless chrome, in the old days with Selenium, etc.

... which brings us to 2. A mainstream, regionally-dominating shop, particularly any that adopt the marketplace model (Amazon, Taobao, etc.) may have as many as 20 million products. Given 2., good luck refreshing this price list in a sane time, even if you crack the attribute extraction.

If by some miraculous feat you solve these issues you now have to product match an inventory of billions of listings, most of which are misspelt, missing attributes (brand, etc.), and use photos that even a human could not match by sight. Think how hard it is to find exactly what you want on eBay...

The only way is to get the data directly from the retailers. Assuming they will give it to you, you end up with the same problem of feed poisoning that you have with marketing.

Also Waterloo for that matter. No CGI in 1970.

From Wikipedia [1]:

"To recreate the battlefield authentically, the Soviets bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings. To create the mud, more than six miles of underground irrigation piping was specially laid. [...]

The battle sequences of the film include about 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras and 50 circus stunt riders were used to perform the dangerous horse falls. It has been joked that Sergei Bondarchuk was in command of the seventh-largest army in the world. [...] A selected 2,000 additional men were also taught to load and fire muskets."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(1970_film)

You may enjoy Lee Kuan Yew's biography, The Singapore Story, and to a lesser extent his more recent Conversations with Tom Plate. There is a lot in common between Xi and Lee's thinking and way of doing things.

Reading the BBC and Wikileaks texts, the events fit neatly in the "Singapore experiment with a billion citizen" narrative which the PRC has been doing since Deng Xiao Ping, ethnocentrism excepted.

It is different, and it does wrap up the quest at least. I guess I read it quite a while back and thought of Hyperion and Fall as one book in two parts, and got carried away in my original comment.

I don't know if it is common, certainly the reviews for the following three did not seem as warm as for the first, which was also the only one to win a Hugo. This is why I prefaced it with "if you like literature", because I think it depends on how much fiction you've read before and what you think is still fresh. Hyperion is most definitely fresh, a wild, tightly written run of imagination mixing Chaucer, Dune and Asimov with Heart of Darkness.

The problem with the way he wraps up the story [SPOILERS-ish] is that you feel that he was up against a wall and couldn't find a satisfactory way to connect the dots and picked the easy way out (similar to a deus ex machina - and yes, the Shrike sort of is one, but it limits itself predictably for your enjoyment). There is a certain suspension of disbelief, rules of the story you are willing to accept as it is woven, and through which you pick a direction and a pace, and he breaks them out of desperation.

A less major gripe I had was the stupidity of the "enemy". A worthy opponent would find it easier to manipulate humanity; in other words, a supposedly phenomenal antagonist is weakened to fill plot gaps. For an example of the opposite, watch the chess game between the two sides in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People (the BBC miniseries, not the modern remake which does not come close to Alec Guinness' performance). Karla is ferocious, intelligent, unstoppable, it is life's randomness that in a believable way opens the weakness (very well defended, throughout, but ultimately indefensible) that allows Smiley to get him.

And of course [spoiler!] the Dune series was heading to a similar conclusion as is reached about the crucibles within a couple of books; but the Dune meta-antagonist is much better written at least until the son takes over the writing to wrap up the series, and it is technically more of a very subtle Chekhov's Gun than a deus ex machina, which is why it feels so good as it clicks together (or might have).

Finally, I felt the last books were not as well edited. I think a parallel might be House of Cards where the first season (and perhaps the second) was the frantic work of a fresh team trying something bold and new, and the remaining episodes were the risk-free work of a team with the spotlight of the world on them, unwilling to risk their freshly acquired laurels. Frank and Claire Underwood become another token politician in another token political show with Zeitgeist-dependent in-jokes that will age badly, and the occasional flash of brilliance merely emphasising how much was lost. And perhaps I'm missing the point with House of Cards, perhaps the writers are saying that this is what happens when a narcissist wins the biggest prize and has nowhere else to go, existing only to keep it, but if so it is not said well.

Coming from a reader of the whole series: the second season has much better writing and budget, and the actors have also worked together long enough to gel well. Aside from the casting of a certain Martian girl (someone should introduce the director to some real Marines), I think they avoided major errors and everyone in the house is eagerly awaiting the next season.

A number of the books (Use of Weapons, Surface Detail for example) would make fantastic series by themselves. The grander ones like The Algebraist are begging for a mega budget treatment with a brave, independent minded and intelligent director.

For the books to work, the director and the writer must be able to depict "greater than human" intelligence, thinking a step ahead of the viewer and not hobbling the human heroes to make a weak plot work (since SC are supposed to be the best of humanity). Too simplistic a depiction of the characters is my greatest fear in a Banks adaptation.

Much as I thought American Gods (the series) was badly written in terms of weaving the story together cohesively and of timing (it was fine as a visualisation of the book for people who have read it), many of the characters were well depicted in their full ambiguity and their evolution had the sense of direction otherwise lacking from the series itself.

If you enjoy literature and have not read the Hyperion Cantos yet, I beg you to stick to just the first book.

What Simmons did to conclude the Cantos is on par with Star Wars episodes I-III. Sometimes it is better to preserve the magic by omission.

As for a movie, I do not think doing it justice is possible today. The only adaptations that came close to a suitable spirit were Dune (1984) and Beowulf (2005). It is SF only by name and requires a very strong and independent minded writer and director, both of whom should be relatively well read as well.

> If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell.

Anecdote as counter-example: a previous employer was approached by a vendor which offered a solution developed by "former NASA specialists" (I think it was to manage inventory). The total cost of deploying it was around a million.

We tried hard to stop the executives from going ahead with it, but around $400k had been paid by the time we managed to kill the project when it became clear that a. the vendor did not actually have a product and was using us as the R&D guinea pig, taking advantage of the data from millions of our customers and b. the "NASA" part referred to one of their developers who had briefly interned with a NASA contractor.

So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value" (in the sense of hard revenue in their bank account) without engineering being involved.

> i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year.

Yes and no. Remember Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Rafael, but a lifetime to paint like a child". Being patient enough to acquire the mountains of knowledge, the sound bases achieved by generations before yours, pays great dividends later in life, no matter the field. It's truer for some fields than others, of course.

There are some surprising examples: Mika used to be a classically trained lieder singer, and won a scholarship (if I recall) to the Royal College of Music, which he promptly used to "learn to sing like a pop star" with the results we know today.

Now this is not to say you should do hours of figured bass if you want to be a blues singer (and FWIW, Arnold Schoenberg says in Harmonielehre that he thinks this is a silly way to learn harmony). But there is value in learning common practice harmony and understanding both Beethoven and Richter even if you are going to do blues.

> complaining that creativity isnt present in music just means your hanging with the wrong people

Yes and further, in order to have something interesting to say you must have lived, which is why high school concerts can be so tedious even with very talented students (mine had note-perfect Rachmaninov Paganini variations! what hope have we mere mortals... yet the pianist is now a doctor). Globalisation is also reducing the variance between artists, both because concert halls are standardising star power cross-border, and because people are becoming more alike all over the world. On the demand side, I'd whine about the Instagram generation falling short on the pathos side of things but I'd start sounding like an old man; really variance is the problem, not depth.

The only exception I can think of is of Amy Kobayashi as a tiny child doing Mozart's 26th concerto [1] in a really fresh and interesting manner (this lent truth to something a pianist who had lived through WWII told me, that Mozart could be understood only by children and those on their death beds).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32gsiqbjbk8 - note also the technique, such as the relaxed, freely rotating wrists that Neuhaus says are the hallmark of the best.

Try post-stroke Stephen Kovacevich. He was already a maverick before, the loss of much of his physical ability forced him to review his approach and the result has, at least, forced me to reconsider my view of many pieces I thought I had done and dusted (e.g. Brahms 4th Ballade). Hearing him live was both terrifying and awakening. His Beethoven cycle is unique and changing over time.

I also think that if you can abstract from the visual, Yuja Wang's playing has a ferocity and hunger for life that reminds me of the Russian School at its peak without the tragedy, and the technique to back it. I've not heard it in anybody else of her generation. It is a bit of a shame that her repertoire choices are so conservative, but to be expected given how she is marketed; I am very keen to hear what she will sound like in 40 years.

Stephen Hough has a sensitivity and big picture awareness rare since the death of Richter. Sitting in a 4 hour masterclass on Franck, I learnt a dozen new things, almost as if new dimensions unfolded about the art (I got the same impression from reading Neuhaus' book - ideas clicked into place seeming so obvious ex post, unreachable ex ante).

Finally Zhu Xiao-Mei has had an incredibly full life (from risking her life smuggling a piano and sheet music into Mao's reeducation camps and playing that piano in a meat freezer, to cleaning houses in LA before becoming a Parisian ghost wonder after accidentally playing a friend's piano and getting standing ovations in German concert halls that had greeted her with audible disdain) and it comes through in her playing. As a bonus you can "rediscover" a fair amount of Schumann this way.

For a different take on it from Heinrich Neuhaus who taught Richter, Gilels and Lupu:

"Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-Rubinstein era once told us in class that he never practised scales (and, of course, that was so) . Yet, he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled. He played the scales he encountered in musical compositions in the best possible manner and in this way learned to play ideally "scales as such".

[...] What was Godowsky's method of teaching? As everybody knows, he was reported to be "a wizard of technique" [...]. For this reason numerous young pianists from all over the world flocked to him, mainly in the hope of getting his recipe for attaining "virtuoso technique".

Alas for them! Godowsky hardly ever said a word about technique in the sense in which these youngsters understood it; all his comments during a lesson were aimed exclusively at music, at correcting musical defects in a performance, at achieving maximum logic, accurate hearing, clarity, plasticity, through a scrupulous observance and a broad interpretation of the written score. In his class, he valued above all the real musician and approached with obvious irony those pianists whose fingers were fast and agile while their brains were slow and dull"

(from The Art of Piano Playing)

I wouldn't call it a slippery slope so much as events precipitating the situation. The revolt in 1857 led to the dissolution of the East India Company and a formal takeover of India by the British government [1]. The British Raj lasted almost a century and could have lasted longer had the British Army and economy not been so weakened by WWII.

It will be interesting to see what happens should a country attempt to seize Chinese assets en masse. The PRC is not known for its lack of ability in the Great Game. We are still decades away from the circumstances that allowed for decolonisation movements in the mid-20th century to be successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India_Act_1858

> With modern signals and a good track, high speed trains can deliver good throughput with high comfort.

This exists in France where some countryside TGV stations have become Parisian commute towns.

E.g. Angers-Paris (296km, 1h15 by TGV) - http://www.lepoint.fr/villes/tgv-boulot-saint-laud-25-10-201... (French)

> Yet voter turnout often is quite low. Why?

The idea is that only the knowledgeable vote. If you do not feel confident that you have a good grasp on political issues, your vote dilutes the signal sent by those less ignorant.

Encouraging ignorant voters to vote is often the visible part of the propaganda iceberg, the kind of politics we have increasingly witnessed in most of the Western world in the last two decades and that used to be the preserve of third world dictatorships.

You then see elections via mud-slinging and highly visible non-issues taking on most of the mindshare, and the media is captured by interest groups who need it to hijack a larger percentage of the vote. It is harmful to the fabric of society as all sides of the political debate become vote harvesting machines and the citizenry is radicalised and encouraged not to reason about issues [1] [2].

"A free society gives its citizens the right to vote but that right should come with the responsibility to not abuse that right by voting ignorantly." [3]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1qffh9/vot...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/ - "the research [...] found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. [...] during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights"

[3] https://www.quora.com/Is-this-reason-for-not-voting-valid-or...

This paper is published during an era where the dominant global empire is founded and (mostly) run on principles opposite to ethnocentrism, at least internally.

All of the current POTUS' grandparents were born in Europe, and the previous one's father was Kenyan. The most famous entrepreneur of our generation was born of Syrian parents. The wealthiest self-made woman in America according to Forbes (I did have to Google it), Marian Ilitch, had Macedonian parents.

The best strategy in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is tit-for-tat [1]. The winning groups of today have found ways to cooperate-cooperate systematically, overriding the advantages conferred by the behaviour observed in the paper.

[1] It gets more interesting when both sides know how the other thinks: https://intelligence.org/files/ProgramEquilibrium.pdf

Can't speak for Mobike, since I don't use it, but oBike has a very efficient penalty system. Breaking or stealing a bike results in an effective ban from the app (the cost goes up to $5/minute, then $15/minute) and users are rewarded for reporting badly parked, broken or personally-locked bikes. In several months I've only seen two instances of people using personal locks.

The bike is pretty solid and alright for commuting, but what would be the point? You get the first 5 minutes free, the first 2 rides of the day free for 15 minutes each, the entire weekend free, and you couldn't commute with your stolen bike since locking it anywhere visible would get it reported and removed almost immediately. Might as well put your card into the system and occasionally pay a dollar or two.

I would love to try them, they look really good, with solid tyres, a chain, and a large solar panel to feed the lock. However none of my cards are accepted by Mobike (including the two market leading banks). At least I can install the app, which I couldn't after their Singapore launch ("not available in your region").

oBike is for now the best UX in Singapore. Clean app, mostly works, and they've really started to get a grip on the broken bike problem. A recent Straits Times article claimed that of about 100 bikes reported parked incorrectly by the authorities, the oBike team removed 67 before the half day grace period ended (and got fined for the rest), so they seem to be on top of the illegal parking problem as well.

The main issue with all of them is the spottiness of geolocation in built up areas. To an extent this is no longer a problem as you can find the things everywhere, but back when they were relatively rare it could mean a good 10-15 minutes of walking around looking for the mystery yellow pin. These days I even get a choice of model (my favourite has the shiny mudguards, the 3rd generation? they seem to have the least friction; but the massive 1st gen ones are very comfortable so long as you don't encounter any hills).

Ofos get stolen. There are almost none left in Singapore. All you need to do is remember the PIN, and scratch out the serial.

The "overengineered" Mobikes and oBikes (a competitor with very similar bikes - solar panels for the electronics, GPS lock, etc.) are all that is left in our streets.

If you'd like to explore the ideas further:

Carter's 8 etudes and a fantasy's 7th etude is just the note G (1949) and Ligeti's Musica ricercata's (1951-3) first movement almost only A (the entire work explores having a limited number of notes).

In terms of playing with harmonics, the spectralists (starting with Grisey and Murail in the 1970s) originated the idea formally whilst it is informally explored by many minimalists (the most relevant to this article's piece would be Terry Riley's In C, 1964).

In terms of mammoth piano works, seek out Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum (1930, 4 hours) by John Ogdon.