No, you ALL don't get it. We can discuss things here in China, in Chinese, on public blogs and in public forums. BUT we will get flamed by the "wu mao" (roughtly translated to "50 centers") who are paid to find blog posts like that and flame them out of existence, sort of a denial of opinion attack by just doing a rush limbaugh/ glen beck thing where they argue that you are totally wrong/ bad/ retarded/ but not in those words in the Chinese equivalent of that degree of badness. When it gets actually translated literally it doesn't sound "so bad", but it is. And they swarm your blog comment section and hack your site and generally make you want to quit. But they are NOT the government, just evil minions of the powers that be.
Now, that should sound more familiar to you in the US (it calls to mind SJN Vaughn's columns which can pretty much be considered flamebait for microsoft fanboys) and there is a similarity. But it is analogous, not reflective. Just as most Americans care little about most issues discussed on slashdot, most Chinese could give a rat's ass about the issues that Americans think should be important to them. Shit like freedom, they have the freedom to go to a hospital for almost free and stay until they are healthy. They have the freedom to go to a dentist in that hospital for almost free dental care as well (they don't because the idea of dental care is still just catching on; I am getting a root canal right now at an expensive (20 times the cost at the chinese hospital) Japanese dental franchise for a total cost of 700 dollars US: two canals, post, xrays, multiple visits, antibiotics, and the lookalike crown) My first root canal was total Chinese: 10 us dollars, but no novocain. I am a wuss in my dotage.
Anyway, you can't judge China by western standards, as I tell my students, if they think they can understand the US from TV shows and movies they are crazy. Sit down at your TV and imagine your world was what you are watching on TV: crazy or what. They have the freedom to watch Sex and the city and the freedom to not understand it.
I love crying in the wilderness almost as much as crying in my beer
Asia is mostly SP2 since it is the most pirated version, fully hacked, ghosted and ready to use. We are a linux family so when my daughter bought a Wii that had been hacked to run cracked games she bricked the box by updating it.
She was shocked, what do you mean you can't update it?
While the guy in the store was shocked:" don't you know never to update anything?"
this as good a description as you can give to the situation here without actually explaining it. The problem is that without being here you can't understand it, and if you are here it is not comprehensible as well. Living here we just go along without understanding, and so we glide through the confusion. You guys and girls want understanding when there is no real understanding that has any value.
Back in 2001/2 I was working in Yunnan province in SW China. At that time the official stance by the government was that there was AIDS only in Ruili country, Yunnan: nowhere else in China. I was doing some part time stuff for Save the Children UK with their AIDS project in Ruili. They were there because they knew (we all knew) that AIDS was all over China and we were allowed to run this "pilot" program that helped the people in that county (one of the poorest in China, on the border with Burma, with a very poor part of Burma. Ruili is the point of entry for heroin coming from Burma and headed for Hong Kong and the international market.) The situation in Ruili was brutal. The government would sweep into a village and give everyone a blood test. 3 months later the "headman" of the village would be given a list of names. The headman would call a village meeting and read out the list of names: those were the people with AIDS. They, and their families immediately became dead to the village. They no longer existed and they had no rights to village schools or other resources.
So, i was preparing a training seminar for the staff at the county AIDS family support center, the only one in the entire country. There were 8 office workers. mostly being paid a few dollars a month. I showed up in Ruili that afternoon, the border with Burma was on our right as we drove down from the county airport and Burma was in sight for the drive. That night I turned off the phone (it was the first time i had had an on/off switch on the hotel phone. I found out why when 5 minutes in the room the phone rang with a gentleman offering his wife's services for very cheap and she is.... blah, blah... wives, daughters sisters, all for sale. the calls came one after another, i switched off the phone)so I missed the call from the director in Kunming, the capitol city of Yunnan province.
The next morning I showed up at the venue for the seminar and while I was getting set up I was told by hotel staff that the room had been changed. No problem. It was much bigger and nicer, OK! As I got ready the room started to fill up, and up and up. Was I in the wrong place? The director swept in with the news. The government had just announced that there was AIDS in Henan province and all over central China because of blood contamination and now the hospitals could begin giving service and support to AIDS victims. my seminar was the only/ first thing that they could do to begin on this, it became a day-long seminar for health professionals from all over China who had just appeared out of nowhere. They knew they had an AIDS problem, they had known it for a while, but none of them could do anything about it until the central government could find an excuse to admit the problem without discussing drug use, gays in China or any other social issues that "don't exist" in China.
That was almost ten years ago now, Here on the east coast of China the kids still don't use condoms, the amount of AIDS and other STDs is scary. A friend told me that at the public universities 50% or more of the girls turn tricks to make extra money to supplement the stipend from mom and dad. I'm married and fulfilled so it is only a sad commentary for me, but even though there are condoms for sale (not to mention "exciter rings with batteries" and dildos as well as lubricant) at the local convenience stores ("xiao dian") this society is still incredibly repressed and suppressed and all other kinds of pressed. They fear freedom because they know in themselves that they will personally explode if given freedom. Their reality is full of fear, a fear that controls them on every possible level. your ideas of freedom don't fit here, don't make sense here, can't work here without bloodshed.
yeah, a geeky quibble: In heating (and i guess therefore cooling) system design "hot water" is water just below boiling, thus 200F to 210F. Warm water is 180 to 200F. This is neither, so to call is hot or even warm is a gross exaggeration.
(True story: when I built my own heating system some time ago i ran into this confusion because the engineers and spec sheets kept talking about "warm water heating" which sounded to me like bathing temperature. Totally wrong, and it took a while before I ferreted out the information that brought understanding.)
Why all this matters: I'm in China, I clicked on the blogspot link at the top of the parent post and..... it's blocked, of course, all blogspot and most addresses that include the term "blog" are blocked. We need Google here, we need them as in your face as possible-- that doesn't mean over the top so that they get themselves blocked as well-- that means to maintain a high profile in their opposition to censorship.
The worries that I hear about Google having too much personal info seem, well, when the police show up at my door every three months to make sure that I am still living in the apartment that I am registered in, how does that compare to google "knowing too much about me?"
well i own 3 e-readers with e-ink and actually seldom read books any other way. I find that reading on an LED/LCD/ backlit screen of any kind is really uncomfortable for the kind of reading that I do. (relaxed pleasure reading where i like to carry the "book" with me various places through my day). I really am surprised by the iPad success, but i live in China and we lack two things here (no, not the iPad) the constant barrage of unpaid media hype about Apple products together with the Apple zealots who constantly harp about how cool their shit is. What we have are cautious consumers that would rather buy an iphoney for the look if the look is desired than pay stupid money for stuff that we can get from other sources for a lot less money. Lastly, back in the day i used an iMac, it was a great piece of hardware. It really kept value for much longer than a generic PC because of the tight integration between hardware and software. It seems like Apple has been drinking the kool-aid now though. They are all about becoming disposable tech, expensive disposable tech. I just don't see it in my life or my future.
from your viewpoint this seems like an easy and wonderful conclusion. From here, well, think about what the article summary said: Some of the suicides were possibly "copycat suicides" because of the large compensation packages for bereaved family. Now, think about the Honda workers down in Guang Zhou who are on a walkout (no strikes allowed here) for a raise. Now, they have seen that for the relatively cost of a few suicides they can get the raise they are desperate for. Yes, I am saying that it is highly likely that this will inspire a rash of suicides among the grossly underpaid Chinese workforce. Think, minimum wage is 750 RMB (110 US) here outside of Shanghai. Oh, silly me, that is per month. It is not even close to living wage, much less something you could take into a marriage negotiation. Double that is a good factory job, still not enough to buy an apartment (and thereby become a legal resident of the city where you are working) or a car or anything that is considered success here. But another 20%? maybe things become more possible then, at least to consider getting married to someone who makes what you do. See the result, if i commit suicide i can help all my friends, if i don't we all suffer and fail. what would you do?
As a loyal UVA alumni I hope Mr Jefferson would find the stupidity of the Texas attempt to sideline him amusing. In truth by attempting top pull off a stupid stunt like this they only succeed in making the opposition stronger and more aware/ attentive to this kind of idiocy. My dear, departed mom struggled with school boards and text book issues in Mr Jefferson's home state of Virginia for many years as a lobbyist for the PTA and found the battles that raged over school texts quite frustrating. The problem is that Texas ( and California and New York) have so many schools and insist on publishers providing for their wants at the exclusion of anyone else's interests. Thus, the rest of the country has to choose which of these school system's textbooks they will choose. The publishers will not provide more than those three. So, I think Mr Jefferson would agree that this should provide a needed impetus to revolt against the textbook hegemony of those three states. This could lead to a system where individual states or even school systems can provide etexts that are suitable to their wants and needs. If Texas wants the world to know that they deliberately provide substandard education to their children then so be it, but it shouldn't mean that the choices of other school systems are reduced.
I wish I had my old addition and subtraction decks from when I programmed an ENIAC back in '69 ( a present from Princeton to my high school), now that was real programming, none of that namby-pamby assembler stuff I did in the late 70's (for fun with a trash 80) my ex-wife was the COBOL programmer, but she hits retirement in two years. Yup, the old days, now, where did i leave my glasses?
OK, i will try to keep this sane. The problem is, in part, money. The schools are horribly UNDERFUNDED. That is a simple fact. The amount of your tax dollars, your paycheck your everything that goes into public education is a fraction of what it was when you went to school and an even smaller fraction of when I went to school. The idea that taking money away from schools will increase their efficiency, make them leaner and meaner is BS. Here in China EVERY classroom has multimedia, a computer, a projector a TV and LAN to 4MB internet. Every school has a website that passes daily pertinent information to parents. For $1.40 a month I get between 4 and 8 SMS messages from my son's teachers telling me his homework, his accomplishments during the day and any other information that the teacher deems useful for the parents. The teachers are highly trained, many with Master's degrees and teach about 14-16 class hours a week. They have art, music, PE, calligraphy and after school programs for more enhancement. And it is paid for mostly by the government, although I, as a foreigner pay the real cost for my son. That real cost is roughly equal to slightly more than a 1 year salary on minimum wage, which is to say about 35% of an average individual's income. Run the numbers, they are outspending us and out producing us and you are worried about your stinking tax dollars being siphoned into somebodies pockets???? you are robbing my children and grandchildren with your greed for your pocket today. Sorry to get so cranky, but really, this money thing makes me crazy. Like what are you going to do with all your saved tax pennies? Build a school? I doubt it .
China is schizophrenic. On the one hand they have a significant portion of the brightest and most highly skilled people in the world. On the other hand they have a significant portion of the world's lamo loosers. It's just a numbers thing. Where the schizo stuff really takes off though is that in IT, the guys that run the machines, that physically touch and type and admin stuff are grossly underpaid. They all have admin passwords and complete freedom to do what ever they think they are supposed to on the system. What this means in China is that the systems are a constant botched-up mess, crashing, failing, I mean, getting my email from the university in-house mail server is entirely hit and miss, with dropped attachments or gratuitous fail messages that include addresses for colleagues gone months ago. The last, frightening fact. One of the drones who was starting to show a spark of synaptic activity realized that he could go to work for Chine mobile and make almost twice the pay as a help-desk drone. No-brainer of course, but then I asked him what he had been getting paid at our university: 750RMB per month which is about $115. A month, for the guys who have physical access and the responsibility to run the system. They make mistakes???? big duh.
Sorry, but i agree. As ubuntu becomes ubiquitous it will become a target, as well as catching stray bullets from app malwares like this one. I hated the constant fuss with windows insecurity, one reason i left it (but not the main one) but i still carry that paranoia with me. Yes I have a firewalled router, file server and home network. Yes, i do run antivirus weekly and have never found a virus except in my virtualbox copy of windows. still, i know that there are sick puppies in the world and i backup weekly in two externals because bad shit does happen, frequently and most often when you least expect and can least afford it.
I got my novice in 1964, when i was 9 years old, for about three months I was the youngest ham in the world, or so I was told by the hoary oldsters that helped me through. I worked on my general, but frankly i wasn't enough of a geek to figure out radio theory when i was ten, call me lame if you will. BUT, i still know the code and could, theoretically CQ on a key (one of the old up and downers, not one of the sexy "new" --1964 new that is-- sideshooters. I did build my own receiver and transmitter and strung a 10 meter antenna between a tree and the house. You don't even know what old school is nowadays kiddies.
This is a difficult question for many of us. my wife bought one of the very first iMacs back in '98. a tray-loader: therefore from the first few weeks of production. It was fantastic, faster than higher specced PC's, malware free, sexy design, etc. We still have it as an artwork on a table. But, how did they do it? By controlling the hardware tightly they were able to speed it up and keep it zippy. By keeping that hardware lean and mean the Apps also didn't have to consider any more than a limited set of hardware possibilities. Adware, helpware, garbageware and other bogware didn't exist because nobody cared about Apple yet. When my Dell laptop died after 5 years that iMac kept going. It still would work today if the CD drive hadn't died the second time (irreplaceable this time). Tight and controlled construction, designed for a limited set of hardware allows a finer range of possibilities. Linux has these capabilities as well, tuning kernels for hardware so that there is less bloat, tuning conf files so that the apps are suited to the needs and wants of the user. Apple decided that the Apple user was a S Jobs clone who would want what he said to give. They sheeped along to the music. Linux gives you the right and the responsibility to do the same, even better than following Steve's lead you go your own way. But, like most people, we don't vote with our fingers and hack our stuff, we accept the default world we have been given. So Steve is a success and we, who have the power, fail to make use of it.
As an occasionally published ghost writer (the name I use above should make it clear my business model: "Nobodie helped me write this, it is all my own words!") I can tell you that only the very top 1 or 2 % of writers make anything like real money for their work. Most of the work is done by drones (like me) who get paid by the word and have to fight for every penny. The actual writing work for most books is covered by something like a nickel of the price of the book. The vast majority of the money spent used to be on distribution and advertising costs. Since distribution is leaving the scene as a cost for e books and advertising costs are still not very great (since much of that is moving to on-line advertising as well) the actual cost of the books is not even a third of the price. So where does all that money go? I am guessing, just guessing, that it is being used to prop up the old model which was already starting to fail before the advent of the e-book. In other words the e book is keeping the old model of business, which had proven to be a failure in the modern world, alive and kicking. It is a pity, since the publishers need to completely overhaul their business models and jump into the future. Someone will figure out how to make it work and make a fortune from it. I thought that Google might do it, but hoped not. I would like to see some new player on the scene, maybe they are there already just getting their feet under them.
i've solved both the weight and the size problem by using a Foxit eSlick reader. It is lighter than most paperbacks and fits in my khaki packets (but not my jeans pockets) just fine. The only complaint YOU might have would be that it just reads books in multiple formats and ONLY costs a couple hundred dollars. No on-line, no bells and whistles, it just reads ebooks nicely and with e-ink.
and a tablet is just a laptop with a screen as the keyboard. When I first married my second wife and took responsibility for her two daughters the first year we were together I read to the family from my laptop every night for an hour. We all got in to bed (there was no heat in the house, we were in China, south of the Yangtze where there is no central heating) with the laptop and i read the Wizard of Oz stories from project gutenberg and other age appropriate stories to them. That is how they learned English actually since their first language was Dutch and they never formally learned English. It would have been nicer to have a tablet, but that was 10 years ago and we were living out of two suitcases apiece back then.
Well, yes and no. The Chinese people, for the most part, understand the reality of the current situation. They know they are censored and controlled and treated like children. They accept it because it has always been this way and (most importantly) because revolution or any rapid and radical change (whatever you choose to name it) would be so horrible that no one really wants to think about it. An explosive upwelling, caused by major economic downturn would be so disruptive and destructive that the total cost would be... I just can't imagine what a bloodbath it would be. Think French revolution kind of bloodbath but with a million times the population. This is what the Chinese people recognize as the cost of instability, so they are willing to accept whatever their government says they must have to maintain stability. Now, I know, and maybe you do as well that the government course is also about enriching the top 1 percent of fat greasy men who pull the strings. They are also the ones who will be gone when the whole thing melts down, but for now they are holding it all together. I see posts below that talk about fear, the fear here is real and it is not really people afraid of the government, it is people afraid of the absence of government as well as government afraid of people out of their control.
OK, I'm here, in Suzhou about half an hour from Shanghai. What is the feeling here? 1) Here in Suzhou it is blase', this is a business city, people here only care about money and have no interest in anything besides that. 2) But, I have lived in other parts of China where people are genuinely interested in freedom and rights and have less focus on money. 3) As well, my wife is an artist and within the art community (which is a very powerful force in Chinese society) there is tremendous interest in internet freedom and in building positive status in the west. Artists know that their standing is referent to other social functions. 4) As you all should have known if you spent the time to think, there is no one true answer, no one true response from the (1.2 or 4 billion) Chinese people. Just as westerners seem to think that all Chinese are hard working over-achievers (they aren't at all, they are mostly a bunch of lazy seat warmers taking up cube space) it is easy to let cultural stereotype built from media versions of reality affect and shape how you think about these highly diverse people. No, they are not western, they are not what you think they are as well, I live here and I am constantly amazed at what they do know about (even though it is "blocked") and what they actually think about things.
Flashcards only work for character recognition, which generally only has value in the short term. The real difficulty for western learners is writing and while you foolishly think the grammar is "simple" you don't have even the ghost of a clue about the syntax (word order) which is where the meaning on the sentence level is hidden. Any language is a coherent whole that interacts between the parts, there is no one single simple trick that will solve the learning riddle. The sad/ interesting thing is that Chinese people are not especially good at teaching their own language. My son, (7 years old and going to a Chinese elementary school here in mainland China) is finding it rather easy to master through simple acquisition desire: he wants it, he uses it and so he master's it. Embarrassingly for the other students and parents in the school he is #3 in the class. (Oh neither parent is anywhere close to fluent in Chinese and we use him when we really need help) If your son has the opportunity to use his new language skills daily, for accomplishing things that he wants then he might be able to build good skills. But without that no matter the method he will lose whatever he gains fairly quickly. If his teacher can arrange for a time in the class where students must interact and share information in the class through both speaking/ listening and writing/reading then this approach can help, but believe me this field (of 2nd or foreign language learning) is full of ideas that are not yet ready to be successful methods. How do I know? It's my job.
If Google leaves it will hurt China because the vast majority of research work 9both scientific and casual) is done with Google. The Chinese alternative (called Baidu) is just a shopping channel with pretensions. This is not to say that Google makes buckets of money in China, they don't. Most people use Baidu on a daily basis and only turn to Google when they think they actually need a "real" search engine. I do not think that Google will suffer immediate harm from pulling out of China, but the problem for them is not the "immediacy" of the harm, the problem is thelong term effects.
So first long-term problem is that Baidu will try to rip off Google algos for their own use. That is probably already happening anyway, but if Google is not here then they will move quickly and shamelessly. Don't tell me that they don't have them because they do, ready to go. Second is Bing, MS is just hoping that Google pulls out because it leaves the field more open for them. Let me make this really clear, check the figures if you like: MS whored Windows XP to Chinese pirates for a strategic gain. Nowadays China is an MS shop, lock stock and barrel. I include internet servers as well because if you would like to run the numbers down you will see that the servers here are mostly MS machines.
Why is that so, well for the same reason except a little more. MS programs allow Chinese server companies to buy copies of windows server 2008 for pennies on the dollar. server 2003 is practically free (literally at pirate prices, and training is supported by MS at prices you could not imagine (how about 125 dollars for a 6 month sysadmin training course with certification?) Windows 7.... well we laugh about it here because you can buy a complete version of ultimate-- not a pirate but a real MS copy with all the trimmings-- for (drumroll please) $72 US dollars. From the MS store. And what do you think Chinese companies pay to install W7 on their machines... maybe $72 dollars as well. See what's going on?
So, if Google pulls out they will pay a big price for it, make no mistake. It will feed their competition, and with Google vs. MS heating up MS will see it as a way to really hammer Google. I would hate to see them leave, but it may be inevitable however. At the current time Google is difficult, spotty, often so slow as to be unusable (5-6 minutes to load my iGoogle start page in swiftfox). It is not the simple good vs evil equation that it might appear to be if you are sitting in your comfy fireside chair in the west. It will suck over here if the big G pulls out, but since we already don't have blogspot, facebook, wordpress, myspace, youtube and twitter then losing Google would just be another kick in the face .
The latest generation of Koreans are envious and imitative of Japanese culture. Japan is no longer an enemy for Asians of the modern world. Japan is also a source for ideas, products to be copied and reverse engineered today for the parents of the gen whatever crowd that I teach. This is also true here in China where the older generation watches the sorriest war movies you can imagine (we are talking production, script, everything, i mean pitiful excuses for motion pictures) with total involvement and the current gen is online checking out Japanese porno and TV shows. So, both ideas can be exemplified if one chooses, but the reality is that in the near future there will be no war memory. Nanjing, comfort women, all that will be about the same as Genghis Khan for this generation. I speak from teaching university level students of both cultures here in China where they are divided by culture and language but still coexist fairly happily as long as the money keeps flowing.
Another worry is that, as with the "gifted and talented programs" in the past that teachers would often recommend each other's children for these programs. My daughter, who was sweet, bright, hard-working and compliant in class, was chosen for a g&t program. My son who was brilliant but cranky, geeky, pushy, challenging and too often correct was not. The daughter is sitting on an MBA while the son dropped out when he was 16 and lives with the Mennonites in a quiet accepting community where he can be himself. What is wrong with a system that does this?
Ah HMMM,
Grammar is spelling, and very little else. The little else is actually called "Syntax", not grammar. While not a grammar nazi, i am a grammarian with the degrees in linguistics to prove it. If you would like to go historical instead of hysterical we could talk about the very first book of English "grammer" (which would have been acceptable spelling at that time) which was in 1613 and was written by Ben Jonsen, the playwright. It was about 73 pages as I recall and was more than half devoted to...... (drumroll please) spelling rules for English. So, consider yourself chastised and corrected, carefully place the duncehat on your cranium and sit in the corner.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you ALL don't get it. We can discuss things here in China, in Chinese, on public blogs and in public forums. BUT we will get flamed by the "wu mao" (roughtly translated to "50 centers") who are paid to find blog posts like that and flame them out of existence, sort of a denial of opinion attack by just doing a rush limbaugh/ glen beck thing where they argue that you are totally wrong/ bad/ retarded/ but not in those words in the Chinese equivalent of that degree of badness. When it gets actually translated literally it doesn't sound "so bad", but it is. And they swarm your blog comment section and hack your site and generally make you want to quit. But they are NOT the government, just evil minions of the powers that be.
Now, that should sound more familiar to you in the US (it calls to mind SJN Vaughn's columns which can pretty much be considered flamebait for microsoft fanboys) and there is a similarity. But it is analogous, not reflective. Just as most Americans care little about most issues discussed on slashdot, most Chinese could give a rat's ass about the issues that Americans think should be important to them. Shit like freedom, they have the freedom to go to a hospital for almost free and stay until they are healthy. They have the freedom to go to a dentist in that hospital for almost free dental care as well (they don't because the idea of dental care is still just catching on; I am getting a root canal right now at an expensive (20 times the cost at the chinese hospital) Japanese dental franchise for a total cost of 700 dollars US: two canals, post, xrays, multiple visits, antibiotics, and the lookalike crown) My first root canal was total Chinese: 10 us dollars, but no novocain. I am a wuss in my dotage.
Anyway, you can't judge China by western standards, as I tell my students, if they think they can understand the US from TV shows and movies they are crazy. Sit down at your TV and imagine your world was what you are watching on TV: crazy or what. They have the freedom to watch Sex and the city and the freedom to not understand it.
I love crying in the wilderness almost as much as crying in my beer
Asia is mostly SP2 since it is the most pirated version, fully hacked, ghosted and ready to use. We are a linux family so when my daughter bought a Wii that had been hacked to run cracked games she bricked the box by updating it.
She was shocked, what do you mean you can't update it?
While the guy in the store was shocked:" don't you know never to update anything?"
this as good a description as you can give to the situation here without actually explaining it. The problem is that without being here you can't understand it, and if you are here it is not comprehensible as well. Living here we just go along without understanding, and so we glide through the confusion. You guys and girls want understanding when there is no real understanding that has any value.
Back in 2001/2 I was working in Yunnan province in SW China. At that time the official stance by the government was that there was AIDS only in Ruili country, Yunnan: nowhere else in China. I was doing some part time stuff for Save the Children UK with their AIDS project in Ruili. They were there because they knew (we all knew) that AIDS was all over China and we were allowed to run this "pilot" program that helped the people in that county (one of the poorest in China, on the border with Burma, with a very poor part of Burma. Ruili is the point of entry for heroin coming from Burma and headed for Hong Kong and the international market.) The situation in Ruili was brutal. The government would sweep into a village and give everyone a blood test. 3 months later the "headman" of the village would be given a list of names. The headman would call a village meeting and read out the list of names: those were the people with AIDS. They, and their families immediately became dead to the village. They no longer existed and they had no rights to village schools or other resources.
So, i was preparing a training seminar for the staff at the county AIDS family support center, the only one in the entire country. There were 8 office workers. mostly being paid a few dollars a month. I showed up in Ruili that afternoon, the border with Burma was on our right as we drove down from the county airport and Burma was in sight for the drive. That night I turned off the phone (it was the first time i had had an on/off switch on the hotel phone. I found out why when 5 minutes in the room the phone rang with a gentleman offering his wife's services for very cheap and she is .... blah, blah... wives, daughters sisters, all for sale. the calls came one after another, i switched off the phone)so I missed the call from the director in Kunming, the capitol city of Yunnan province.
The next morning I showed up at the venue for the seminar and while I was getting set up I was told by hotel staff that the room had been changed. No problem. It was much bigger and nicer, OK! As I got ready the room started to fill up, and up and up. Was I in the wrong place? The director swept in with the news. The government had just announced that there was AIDS in Henan province and all over central China because of blood contamination and now the hospitals could begin giving service and support to AIDS victims. my seminar was the only/ first thing that they could do to begin on this, it became a day-long seminar for health professionals from all over China who had just appeared out of nowhere. They knew they had an AIDS problem, they had known it for a while, but none of them could do anything about it until the central government could find an excuse to admit the problem without discussing drug use, gays in China or any other social issues that "don't exist" in China.
That was almost ten years ago now, Here on the east coast of China the kids still don't use condoms, the amount of AIDS and other STDs is scary. A friend told me that at the public universities 50% or more of the girls turn tricks to make extra money to supplement the stipend from mom and dad. I'm married and fulfilled so it is only a sad commentary for me, but even though there are condoms for sale (not to mention "exciter rings with batteries" and dildos as well as lubricant) at the local convenience stores ("xiao dian") this society is still incredibly repressed and suppressed and all other kinds of pressed. They fear freedom because they know in themselves that they will personally explode if given freedom. Their reality is full of fear, a fear that controls them on every possible level. your ideas of freedom don't fit here, don't make sense here, can't work here without bloodshed.
sorry about that i've been here too long i guess.
yeah, a geeky quibble: In heating (and i guess therefore cooling) system design "hot water" is water just below boiling, thus 200F to 210F. Warm water is 180 to 200F. This is neither, so to call is hot or even warm is a gross exaggeration. (True story: when I built my own heating system some time ago i ran into this confusion because the engineers and spec sheets kept talking about "warm water heating" which sounded to me like bathing temperature. Totally wrong, and it took a while before I ferreted out the information that brought understanding.)
Why all this matters: I'm in China, I clicked on the blogspot link at the top of the parent post and..... it's blocked, of course, all blogspot and most addresses that include the term "blog" are blocked. We need Google here, we need them as in your face as possible-- that doesn't mean over the top so that they get themselves blocked as well-- that means to maintain a high profile in their opposition to censorship. The worries that I hear about Google having too much personal info seem, well, when the police show up at my door every three months to make sure that I am still living in the apartment that I am registered in, how does that compare to google "knowing too much about me?"
well i own 3 e-readers with e-ink and actually seldom read books any other way. I find that reading on an LED/LCD/ backlit screen of any kind is really uncomfortable for the kind of reading that I do. (relaxed pleasure reading where i like to carry the "book" with me various places through my day). I really am surprised by the iPad success, but i live in China and we lack two things here (no, not the iPad) the constant barrage of unpaid media hype about Apple products together with the Apple zealots who constantly harp about how cool their shit is. What we have are cautious consumers that would rather buy an iphoney for the look if the look is desired than pay stupid money for stuff that we can get from other sources for a lot less money. Lastly, back in the day i used an iMac, it was a great piece of hardware. It really kept value for much longer than a generic PC because of the tight integration between hardware and software. It seems like Apple has been drinking the kool-aid now though. They are all about becoming disposable tech, expensive disposable tech. I just don't see it in my life or my future.
from your viewpoint this seems like an easy and wonderful conclusion. From here, well, think about what the article summary said: Some of the suicides were possibly "copycat suicides" because of the large compensation packages for bereaved family. Now, think about the Honda workers down in Guang Zhou who are on a walkout (no strikes allowed here) for a raise. Now, they have seen that for the relatively cost of a few suicides they can get the raise they are desperate for. Yes, I am saying that it is highly likely that this will inspire a rash of suicides among the grossly underpaid Chinese workforce. Think, minimum wage is 750 RMB (110 US) here outside of Shanghai. Oh, silly me, that is per month. It is not even close to living wage, much less something you could take into a marriage negotiation. Double that is a good factory job, still not enough to buy an apartment (and thereby become a legal resident of the city where you are working) or a car or anything that is considered success here. But another 20%? maybe things become more possible then, at least to consider getting married to someone who makes what you do. See the result, if i commit suicide i can help all my friends, if i don't we all suffer and fail. what would you do?
As a loyal UVA alumni I hope Mr Jefferson would find the stupidity of the Texas attempt to sideline him amusing. In truth by attempting top pull off a stupid stunt like this they only succeed in making the opposition stronger and more aware/ attentive to this kind of idiocy. My dear, departed mom struggled with school boards and text book issues in Mr Jefferson's home state of Virginia for many years as a lobbyist for the PTA and found the battles that raged over school texts quite frustrating. The problem is that Texas ( and California and New York) have so many schools and insist on publishers providing for their wants at the exclusion of anyone else's interests. Thus, the rest of the country has to choose which of these school system's textbooks they will choose. The publishers will not provide more than those three. So, I think Mr Jefferson would agree that this should provide a needed impetus to revolt against the textbook hegemony of those three states. This could lead to a system where individual states or even school systems can provide etexts that are suitable to their wants and needs. If Texas wants the world to know that they deliberately provide substandard education to their children then so be it, but it shouldn't mean that the choices of other school systems are reduced.
I wish I had my old addition and subtraction decks from when I programmed an ENIAC back in '69 ( a present from Princeton to my high school), now that was real programming, none of that namby-pamby assembler stuff I did in the late 70's (for fun with a trash 80) my ex-wife was the COBOL programmer, but she hits retirement in two years. Yup, the old days, now, where did i leave my glasses?
OK, i will try to keep this sane. The problem is, in part, money. The schools are horribly UNDERFUNDED. That is a simple fact. The amount of your tax dollars, your paycheck your everything that goes into public education is a fraction of what it was when you went to school and an even smaller fraction of when I went to school. The idea that taking money away from schools will increase their efficiency, make them leaner and meaner is BS. Here in China EVERY classroom has multimedia, a computer, a projector a TV and LAN to 4MB internet. Every school has a website that passes daily pertinent information to parents. For $1.40 a month I get between 4 and 8 SMS messages from my son's teachers telling me his homework, his accomplishments during the day and any other information that the teacher deems useful for the parents. The teachers are highly trained, many with Master's degrees and teach about 14-16 class hours a week. They have art, music, PE, calligraphy and after school programs for more enhancement. And it is paid for mostly by the government, although I, as a foreigner pay the real cost for my son. That real cost is roughly equal to slightly more than a 1 year salary on minimum wage, which is to say about 35% of an average individual's income. Run the numbers, they are outspending us and out producing us and you are worried about your stinking tax dollars being siphoned into somebodies pockets???? you are robbing my children and grandchildren with your greed for your pocket today. Sorry to get so cranky, but really, this money thing makes me crazy. Like what are you going to do with all your saved tax pennies? Build a school? I doubt it .
China is schizophrenic. On the one hand they have a significant portion of the brightest and most highly skilled people in the world. On the other hand they have a significant portion of the world's lamo loosers. It's just a numbers thing. Where the schizo stuff really takes off though is that in IT, the guys that run the machines, that physically touch and type and admin stuff are grossly underpaid. They all have admin passwords and complete freedom to do what ever they think they are supposed to on the system. What this means in China is that the systems are a constant botched-up mess, crashing, failing, I mean, getting my email from the university in-house mail server is entirely hit and miss, with dropped attachments or gratuitous fail messages that include addresses for colleagues gone months ago. The last, frightening fact. One of the drones who was starting to show a spark of synaptic activity realized that he could go to work for Chine mobile and make almost twice the pay as a help-desk drone. No-brainer of course, but then I asked him what he had been getting paid at our university: 750RMB per month which is about $115. A month, for the guys who have physical access and the responsibility to run the system. They make mistakes???? big duh.
Sorry, but i agree. As ubuntu becomes ubiquitous it will become a target, as well as catching stray bullets from app malwares like this one. I hated the constant fuss with windows insecurity, one reason i left it (but not the main one) but i still carry that paranoia with me. Yes I have a firewalled router, file server and home network. Yes, i do run antivirus weekly and have never found a virus except in my virtualbox copy of windows. still, i know that there are sick puppies in the world and i backup weekly in two externals because bad shit does happen, frequently and most often when you least expect and can least afford it.
I got my novice in 1964, when i was 9 years old, for about three months I was the youngest ham in the world, or so I was told by the hoary oldsters that helped me through. I worked on my general, but frankly i wasn't enough of a geek to figure out radio theory when i was ten, call me lame if you will. BUT, i still know the code and could, theoretically CQ on a key (one of the old up and downers, not one of the sexy "new" --1964 new that is-- sideshooters. I did build my own receiver and transmitter and strung a 10 meter antenna between a tree and the house. You don't even know what old school is nowadays kiddies.
This is a difficult question for many of us. my wife bought one of the very first iMacs back in '98. a tray-loader: therefore from the first few weeks of production. It was fantastic, faster than higher specced PC's, malware free, sexy design, etc. We still have it as an artwork on a table. But, how did they do it? By controlling the hardware tightly they were able to speed it up and keep it zippy. By keeping that hardware lean and mean the Apps also didn't have to consider any more than a limited set of hardware possibilities. Adware, helpware, garbageware and other bogware didn't exist because nobody cared about Apple yet. When my Dell laptop died after 5 years that iMac kept going. It still would work today if the CD drive hadn't died the second time (irreplaceable this time). Tight and controlled construction, designed for a limited set of hardware allows a finer range of possibilities. Linux has these capabilities as well, tuning kernels for hardware so that there is less bloat, tuning conf files so that the apps are suited to the needs and wants of the user. Apple decided that the Apple user was a S Jobs clone who would want what he said to give. They sheeped along to the music. Linux gives you the right and the responsibility to do the same, even better than following Steve's lead you go your own way. But, like most people, we don't vote with our fingers and hack our stuff, we accept the default world we have been given. So Steve is a success and we, who have the power, fail to make use of it.
As an occasionally published ghost writer (the name I use above should make it clear my business model: "Nobodie helped me write this, it is all my own words!") I can tell you that only the very top 1 or 2 % of writers make anything like real money for their work. Most of the work is done by drones (like me) who get paid by the word and have to fight for every penny. The actual writing work for most books is covered by something like a nickel of the price of the book. The vast majority of the money spent used to be on distribution and advertising costs. Since distribution is leaving the scene as a cost for e books and advertising costs are still not very great (since much of that is moving to on-line advertising as well) the actual cost of the books is not even a third of the price. So where does all that money go? I am guessing, just guessing, that it is being used to prop up the old model which was already starting to fail before the advent of the e-book. In other words the e book is keeping the old model of business, which had proven to be a failure in the modern world, alive and kicking. It is a pity, since the publishers need to completely overhaul their business models and jump into the future. Someone will figure out how to make it work and make a fortune from it. I thought that Google might do it, but hoped not. I would like to see some new player on the scene, maybe they are there already just getting their feet under them.
i've solved both the weight and the size problem by using a Foxit eSlick reader. It is lighter than most paperbacks and fits in my khaki packets (but not my jeans pockets) just fine. The only complaint YOU might have would be that it just reads books in multiple formats and ONLY costs a couple hundred dollars. No on-line, no bells and whistles, it just reads ebooks nicely and with e-ink.
and a tablet is just a laptop with a screen as the keyboard. When I first married my second wife and took responsibility for her two daughters the first year we were together I read to the family from my laptop every night for an hour. We all got in to bed (there was no heat in the house, we were in China, south of the Yangtze where there is no central heating) with the laptop and i read the Wizard of Oz stories from project gutenberg and other age appropriate stories to them. That is how they learned English actually since their first language was Dutch and they never formally learned English. It would have been nicer to have a tablet, but that was 10 years ago and we were living out of two suitcases apiece back then.
Well, yes and no. The Chinese people, for the most part, understand the reality of the current situation. They know they are censored and controlled and treated like children. They accept it because it has always been this way and (most importantly) because revolution or any rapid and radical change (whatever you choose to name it) would be so horrible that no one really wants to think about it. An explosive upwelling, caused by major economic downturn would be so disruptive and destructive that the total cost would be ... I just can't imagine what a bloodbath it would be. Think French revolution kind of bloodbath but with a million times the population. This is what the Chinese people recognize as the cost of instability, so they are willing to accept whatever their government says they must have to maintain stability. Now, I know, and maybe you do as well that the government course is also about enriching the top 1 percent of fat greasy men who pull the strings. They are also the ones who will be gone when the whole thing melts down, but for now they are holding it all together. I see posts below that talk about fear, the fear here is real and it is not really people afraid of the government, it is people afraid of the absence of government as well as government afraid of people out of their control.
OK, I'm here, in Suzhou about half an hour from Shanghai. What is the feeling here? 1) Here in Suzhou it is blase', this is a business city, people here only care about money and have no interest in anything besides that. 2) But, I have lived in other parts of China where people are genuinely interested in freedom and rights and have less focus on money. 3) As well, my wife is an artist and within the art community (which is a very powerful force in Chinese society) there is tremendous interest in internet freedom and in building positive status in the west. Artists know that their standing is referent to other social functions. 4) As you all should have known if you spent the time to think, there is no one true answer, no one true response from the (1.2 or 4 billion) Chinese people. Just as westerners seem to think that all Chinese are hard working over-achievers (they aren't at all, they are mostly a bunch of lazy seat warmers taking up cube space) it is easy to let cultural stereotype built from media versions of reality affect and shape how you think about these highly diverse people. No, they are not western, they are not what you think they are as well, I live here and I am constantly amazed at what they do know about (even though it is "blocked") and what they actually think about things.
Flashcards only work for character recognition, which generally only has value in the short term. The real difficulty for western learners is writing and while you foolishly think the grammar is "simple" you don't have even the ghost of a clue about the syntax (word order) which is where the meaning on the sentence level is hidden. Any language is a coherent whole that interacts between the parts, there is no one single simple trick that will solve the learning riddle. The sad/ interesting thing is that Chinese people are not especially good at teaching their own language. My son, (7 years old and going to a Chinese elementary school here in mainland China) is finding it rather easy to master through simple acquisition desire: he wants it, he uses it and so he master's it. Embarrassingly for the other students and parents in the school he is #3 in the class. (Oh neither parent is anywhere close to fluent in Chinese and we use him when we really need help) If your son has the opportunity to use his new language skills daily, for accomplishing things that he wants then he might be able to build good skills. But without that no matter the method he will lose whatever he gains fairly quickly. If his teacher can arrange for a time in the class where students must interact and share information in the class through both speaking/ listening and writing/reading then this approach can help, but believe me this field (of 2nd or foreign language learning) is full of ideas that are not yet ready to be successful methods. How do I know? It's my job.
If Google leaves it will hurt China because the vast majority of research work 9both scientific and casual) is done with Google. The Chinese alternative (called Baidu) is just a shopping channel with pretensions. This is not to say that Google makes buckets of money in China, they don't. Most people use Baidu on a daily basis and only turn to Google when they think they actually need a "real" search engine. I do not think that Google will suffer immediate harm from pulling out of China, but the problem for them is not the "immediacy" of the harm, the problem is thelong term effects. So first long-term problem is that Baidu will try to rip off Google algos for their own use. That is probably already happening anyway, but if Google is not here then they will move quickly and shamelessly. Don't tell me that they don't have them because they do, ready to go. Second is Bing, MS is just hoping that Google pulls out because it leaves the field more open for them. Let me make this really clear, check the figures if you like: MS whored Windows XP to Chinese pirates for a strategic gain. Nowadays China is an MS shop, lock stock and barrel. I include internet servers as well because if you would like to run the numbers down you will see that the servers here are mostly MS machines. Why is that so, well for the same reason except a little more. MS programs allow Chinese server companies to buy copies of windows server 2008 for pennies on the dollar. server 2003 is practically free (literally at pirate prices, and training is supported by MS at prices you could not imagine (how about 125 dollars for a 6 month sysadmin training course with certification?) Windows 7.... well we laugh about it here because you can buy a complete version of ultimate-- not a pirate but a real MS copy with all the trimmings-- for (drumroll please) $72 US dollars. From the MS store. And what do you think Chinese companies pay to install W7 on their machines... maybe $72 dollars as well. See what's going on? So, if Google pulls out they will pay a big price for it, make no mistake. It will feed their competition, and with Google vs. MS heating up MS will see it as a way to really hammer Google. I would hate to see them leave, but it may be inevitable however. At the current time Google is difficult, spotty, often so slow as to be unusable (5-6 minutes to load my iGoogle start page in swiftfox). It is not the simple good vs evil equation that it might appear to be if you are sitting in your comfy fireside chair in the west. It will suck over here if the big G pulls out, but since we already don't have blogspot, facebook, wordpress, myspace, youtube and twitter then losing Google would just be another kick in the face .
The latest generation of Koreans are envious and imitative of Japanese culture. Japan is no longer an enemy for Asians of the modern world. Japan is also a source for ideas, products to be copied and reverse engineered today for the parents of the gen whatever crowd that I teach. This is also true here in China where the older generation watches the sorriest war movies you can imagine (we are talking production, script, everything, i mean pitiful excuses for motion pictures) with total involvement and the current gen is online checking out Japanese porno and TV shows. So, both ideas can be exemplified if one chooses, but the reality is that in the near future there will be no war memory. Nanjing, comfort women, all that will be about the same as Genghis Khan for this generation. I speak from teaching university level students of both cultures here in China where they are divided by culture and language but still coexist fairly happily as long as the money keeps flowing.
Another worry is that, as with the "gifted and talented programs" in the past that teachers would often recommend each other's children for these programs. My daughter, who was sweet, bright, hard-working and compliant in class, was chosen for a g&t program. My son who was brilliant but cranky, geeky, pushy, challenging and too often correct was not. The daughter is sitting on an MBA while the son dropped out when he was 16 and lives with the Mennonites in a quiet accepting community where he can be himself. What is wrong with a system that does this?
Ah HMMM, Grammar is spelling, and very little else. The little else is actually called "Syntax", not grammar. While not a grammar nazi, i am a grammarian with the degrees in linguistics to prove it. If you would like to go historical instead of hysterical we could talk about the very first book of English "grammer" (which would have been acceptable spelling at that time) which was in 1613 and was written by Ben Jonsen, the playwright. It was about 73 pages as I recall and was more than half devoted to ...... (drumroll please) spelling rules for English. So, consider yourself chastised and corrected, carefully place the duncehat on your cranium and sit in the corner.