pimmen

The extradition treaty subjecting people to some mainland laws is a step in that direction.

The protest was about the prospect of losing those rights, starting with being subject to mainland laws through extradition. The protest has then expanded to being against the CCP undermining ”one country, two systems” in general, an example of which would be Gui Minhai who’s serving time for a book he published in Hong Kong.

So, I would say the analogy is still apt. The CCP control is being implemented which is what the protesters are against.

A better anaology would be if the US implemented extreme Sharia law, how cavalier would people who don't want to live like that be?

Hong Kong didn't choose the CCP who didn't even exist yet when the lease was signed. They sure as hell didn't choose to lose their rights to a fair trial and freedom of expression either. So, if you do a thought experiment about protests against the government, keep in mind that the government in question commits some of the worst human rights abuses today.

Kent State happened almost 50 years ago, and for the recent years people are outraged when protestors get shot to death by US police. There's even movements dedicated to fighting the fact that some groups of people get shot more often than others in the US.

I think this kind of what-about-ism by comparing to the US contributes absolutely nothing to the current discussion around police violence in Hong Kong. Unless it's used as an analogy to actually make sense of the situation ("the police are doing what they're doing at Kent State, can we learn something from that which would be applicable in this situation?") it only distracts from the topic at hand rather than actually discussing the morals and context of what's happening in Hong Kong, which is what this link is about.

That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".

That artificial trachea transplant is well known in Sweden since the lead of the project who carries the bulk of the blame for the research fraud, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, used the Karolinska Institute as his base and the scandal resulted in KI replacing the board and the president because of how they supported him in spite of evidence. Since KI is involved in awarding the Nobel Prize in medicine we were very worried in Sweden if this was evidence of a culture that would compromise that process as well.

If she would've had that on her resume over here, sheesh, that would not have looked good. Especially if she claimed that her work saved a patient's life.

I wonder how often public library keyboards are cleaned, or the ones in university computer labs. When I was in college pulling all nighters in the computer lab I regularly saw the lab being cleaned, but I can't remember ever seeing the keyboards getting dusted off, let alone wiped off with disinfectants.

Go to two or three libraries in different corners of town, get what you want from the keyboards, and you should have quite the collection of DNA.

Second volunteering. I moved to a completely different city with no friends and I felt purpose and community the moment I started doing volunteer work, everything a lonely person could ask for!

In Sweden we have a history of a very strict rent control (which will probably be scrapped for newly built homes, because of current politics) while also handing a lot of power to the local governments to regulate housing.

There are a lot of reasons Sweden has absurd real estate prices (the Gothenburg area in Sweden, which is the seat of moderately famous Volvo, has real estate prices close to the Seattle area which is the seat of Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft while the median incomes are not even remotely similar), and why the bulk of the price hike happened during the last decade, but a big one that's often overlooked is that local governments don't want rentals. Because of rent control they are mostly inhabited by low income earners, who pay less tax. Rent control is set by the national government agencies, who of course don't care where you live, they want everyone to have a decent home without being gouged.

Not saying that rent control is necessarily a bad thing, but if implemented on a national level they give local governments less tools to get rid of poor people. In the end, they'll find a way, and that might create even more problems.

SPARQL is not as easy to read.

I can show SQL or Cypher to some of my product managers who have experience with Excel, and they actually sort of get it. That’s not the case with SPARQL.

Yeah, that’s what I basically meant since they are supposed to represent the owners. I’ll fix the post.

> Equifax cannot afford to pay $125 to each member of the potential class.

That’s not the victims’ problem. Even if Equifax has to be completely liquidated to cover the compensation, the government should fight to make an example of such a terrible company and give the victims some sense of justice. Hopefully the board and the executives would rethink their lives and careers, maybe even change.

If not a lot of people are run through Equifax, their customers are going to ask themselves why they’re paying them.

That could at the very least give the customers leverage to negotiate the rates down, which would also hurt Equifax’s revenue stream.

Maybe not jail time but I would really want the board to be personally responsible for what they did. Or, if they can argue that they made sure their corporation had a good security culture, the executives who broke the company regulations need to be personally responsible.

Seriously, someone needs to be rehabilitated from this before they can be sent back into society. After someone gets out of jail from grand theft auto they need to understand that what they did was wrong and treating people like that hurts them. I’m not saying the executives need jail time and emotional trauma, but at least some sort of therapy where they’re confronted with the fact that doing this stuff with a hundred million people is not nice and has consequences. They should fundamentally rethink their lives and what brought them to do such a careless thing with people’s data, just like a convicted felon.

Edit: made it clearer that I meant the decision makers, not all owners.

Yeah, I agree with that. Basically we want to use a and b as incentives for them to take every measure available not to fail like this ever again. And as incentives for everyone else in the business.

They made the conscious decision to monetize personal data belonging to more than a hundred million people. That means they should take every measure available to make sure something that sensitive is not released.

If this was the US Airforce who lost an armed nuclear ICBM the commanding officer who was ok with this ”whoopsie” would have to explain him or herself to quite a few officials.

I don't think it works. I'm Swedish and knew about Australia's history, but since China still has a kidnapped Swede in custody right now for publishing a book in Hong Kong, I'm more afraid of China than Australia.

So if they learnt their lesson, why do they block information about it?

So that’s why the CCP blocked all versions of Wikipedia in conjunction with the 30 year anniversary? Because they didn’t want to bother people with shame?

In Germany people have a completely different perspective on the Holocaust. It was horrible and a source of great national shame, but still, never forget. Blocking Wikipedia on Holocaust remembrance day would not happen in Germany.

> Tiananmen is the exception in the history of Chinese protests

Is the Hundred Flowers Campaign also an exception? And the millions of people who were killed during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution? Or the millions of people who have been brainwashed for religious reasons in Xinjiang? Or the thousands of journalists, authors and publishers who have been jailed, sometimes "disappeared", for texts critical of the CCP just during the last two decades?

Would you accept a Special Council investigation leading to indictments and sentences, or a joint investigation by the US intelligence community, as a good enough source?

Dynamic systems are hard, but it is important that people are at least aware of them.

For example, market balances. They will probably not last either, habits and technology and become catalysts for change in the market. This I think people can grok, and on a very abstract level, the same happens in ecological systems where species and environments change and upsets the previous order.

That sounds really awful. I wish you well and hope you keep your head up. You never know if it could turn around.

A union protects the workers from exploitation. Their work is just as much proactive as it is reactive.

I mean, just imagine an investor asking a company if their workers are so bad that they need an HR department.

Same thing in Sweden. The unions are super strong here, which is one of the reasons there is no legal minimum wage in Sweden. It's not perceived as necessary by the public, political parties or the unions. The unions have more than enough power to negotiate and enforce good, liveable wages anyway.

Yeah, I can imagine being from the mainland in Hong Kong while the people are actively protesting mainland influence feels uncomfortable. I live on the other side of the world and can't begin to understand that aspect of the protests.

I have a colleague from China and she's on the side of the protesters after having lived in Sweden for many years. She's Christian though so her family has some stories of being oppressed, especially during the Cultural Revolution. She told me that if she was in Hong Kong she hopes that she has the courage to join the protests.

However, she has a friend who moved to Hong Kong who's firmly pro-Beijing. Her friend even organizes counter protests and marches in support of the police. Both are statisticans. My colleague works as a data scientist in my team, her friend works as a quant in Hong Kong.

It's fascinating how two people can come to such different opinions on this. As a Swede this looks so clear cut to me.

It depends, where is this hypothetical person living? I live in the middle of a city, the store close to me serves the thousands of people living in my square kilometer. Because of scale, the truck that transports new goods to the store has a low carbon emission per customer.

I have friends who live way out of town. If they have a store it serves maybe twenty people. Instead of dividing the truck’s emissions by thousands of people you just divide it by twenty.

The oppressed minorities in China have to use VPNs, and China has shown repeatedly that they do not limit cyber attacks to their own territories. In Sweden a very small, local newspaper argued that Taiwan should be recognized as a proper country in the WHO. China made a formal request to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the journalist and publisher should be condemned (I work for the publisher), and that the ministry should publish a "correction" in said newspaper. We refused and the ministry also refused. The newspaper's site has been DDOS:ed sporadically for months now after that and this attack shows no signs of stopping. I believe in coincidences, but I don't believe this is a coincidence.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

It might be a bit of a cliche but it really is profound and is actually more useful than I first thought. Especially "show strength at your weakest, show weakness at your strongest" is something that I've used during negotations and presentations. It sounds like common sense when you read it, because you've seen a lot of this stuff work out ahead of reading it, but it's only once you read it that it becomes abstract and defined enough for me to apply it.