schuke

From a Leninist bureaucratic perspective, a paper trail is exactly what someone wants as a mid-level official: if something goes wrong a paper trail transfers responsibility to her higher-ups, reducing the chance this person becoming a scapegoat. Especially useful if someone's caught in a intra-party power struggle, in an area dealing with foreign entities where waters are muddier. Trust is very rare in the Leninist party. Not sure if the same logic works in other governments though.

My two cents: I enjoyed reading Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future

I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

The business that Amazon, Facebook, Google have in China is tiny relative to their size. Amazon has a few machine-translated pages that relay their US, UK, DE, JP sites' goods to China. Kindle's shut down. FB & Google sell some ads to local exporters.

No. 1. China's constitution protects free speech. Rendering many 'laws' unconstitutional. This may be too philosophical, so there is 2. Many 'laws' are intentionally vague so their application can be as arbitrary as possible: anything can 'disturb public order' or 'violate social morale'. Who's to decide? Of course it's the Party, not the law. 3. If you look carefully, even those catch-all regulations aren't there in many cases. Chen Yun, one of the Deng Xiaoping-era elders famously argued against making a News Law, saying "When the KMT was in power, we [the Communists] studied their news laws very carefully and exploited loopholes. Now that we're in power, it's better there is no law at all." In China, laws are "made strictly, violated widely, and enforced selectively." This is the real world Constitution.

Hasn't China been preemptively retaliating since 2000? Among FAANG only Apple still works. And FANG is actually the surname of the father of the Great Firewall. (Fang Binxing)

Chinese IT was a wild west at its very inception. Companies with connections with the police framed competitors as early as the 90s IIRC. Android (de-Googled by law) is fraught with malware-ish apps. Luckily we still have Apple but I'm a bit terrified of the prospect that Apple may one day be forced to leave China leaving me only domestic Android.

I went from Apple Watch/Fitbit to Casios and mechanical watches, too. I remember when Microsoft Band first came out their commercial was showing people checking notifications in many scenarios, including with friends and family. I was like, yuck, I absolutely don't want to be distracted in these situations. A truly smart watch should actually do the opposite: block notifications when it can tell you're with family.

Very true. I started down the rabbit hole of Casio, Timex and Seiko after borrowing my wife's 1st-gen Apple Watch for a few days.

Apple Watch was much less than 90% baked on launch IMO. But old-fashioned iterations obviously has work very well for it.

Seems more realistic when the K is put on the other end of the equation?

The book does also say some people with certain gene only need 4 hours of sleep. She could be in this category and is only sleep more.

In China it’s not even a matter of money. People already need VPN for accessing the free internet. Books are invaluable against censorship.

While I agree a business should have something higher and valuable, business is usually so competitive that mere breathing is hard enough. Most die before even mastering that.

I have never driven a Mazda but I watch a lot of car reviews. It seems to me they're the only car manufacturer that gets car interactions right. They actually have a philosophy how human-cars should interact and design everything based on it. Hence everything comes natural and consistent and logical.

I can totally imagine underdeveloped countries where you’ll find a lot of: - Used Chinese EVs which costed around 10-15k USD new. - Used and older upmarket EVs. - Low speed and low range EVs that cost around 1-2k USD new.

There are many factors. Where I live, for example. Most apps are developed for mobile only. When you don’t have a desktop version of many essential applications, it justifies a more expensive phone. When I divide the price by the amount of time I spend on the device, it seems the results are somewhat equal between the laptop and the iPhone.

This brings up scaling up good governance and city planning (essentially politics) VS scaling up an industrial product. Democratic governments are generally much responsive to needs of minorities and disadvantaged people, yet it’s not doing particularly well in changing how cities are built. Non-democracies aren’t gonna do any better if not worse. Wouldn’t it be much easier to improve mobility by autonomous driving and improved car design?

This only works if you live somewhere with a mild climate. Most places of the world it seems won't fall into this category. Summer and winter are hard. With cars where you get to set a temperature before going out, it's not just convenient, it can well be vital for seniors. Not to mention when there's rain, snow or wind. I'm all for cars. They just need to be more efficient. And it's achievable.

If Charger is a name too mundane for the digital world, perhaps Super Charger would up the game a little bit ? Oh wait…

Sounds like they could really use a CVT. ;)

I often think about it too. The car seems to be much more complex than a mechanical watch. The watch can perform very well without regular maintenance but car cannot. And the latter can be very dirty, with all the oil, gasoline, dirt, smell, etc. Cars run on much much more harsh conditions with lots of exposed parts , one of whose failure can lead to the car being useless. Whereas for the watch basically everything is in an enclosure. It can go for decades without the need of opening.

This would be extremely controversial but I remember The Economist mentioned porn for pedophiles as part of the solution (the premise being it's a genetic condition that criminalization doesn't work very well against). AI generation would remove some the moral issues.

It’s also when Apple’s laptop speaker game left the earth. To this day no one even came near Apple.

Soda is neither addictive nor carcinogenic.

When I first started to look into this Berkshire Hathaway company and this Warren Buffett person, of course the first thing I checked out was the website. I was immediately sold. Damn, the world would be a much much better place if all websites are built like this. (And text.npr.org)

From what I read, the way mobile data roaming is designed is basically like a VPN that connects you to your own home provider. Thus if you're roaming in China you don't get the renowned GFW hospitality. That's why some local people use foreign / HongKong sim cards for GFW-less mobile data.

Fast for history, but not for people. Just look at North Korea. They've still got plenty of runway for more audacity. For CCP it's like infinity ahead.

Basic Orwell 101: Eternal war is a prerequisite for totalitarian rule. The war doesn't have to be real but the appearance of war or preparations for war is a must. Look at North Korea. It's almost always on brink of war with the South. China is moving in NK's direction so people feel war is coming. It's not, it's just that China is becoming more totalitarian. The ruling class don't care, don't want and actually cannot fight a war.

The CDC website said Pfizer is 53% effective against infection while the Indian one is 66% against symptomatic delta. So it’s probably still not as good as the mRNA ones.