I just thought the guy who added it was high at the time, we are about to get "High" Sierra from them. I can't think of how many times the subway "artist" baked my sandwich while totally baked, most recently after I was out in the sun too long and my skin was totally baked.
The two things are part of the same problem, and you're engaging in mental gymnastics to avoid realizing that. This is exercise for your moral flexibility, but really not a moral exercise.
Not the same. Fat people will be in hollywood, their roles will probably not be starring in most cases (except wherein the main role calls for a fat actor). However, there may be fat people in the movies, either because the role called for it, or because the fat person was most qualified for the job and his condition isn't a drawback. When he or she shows up, does it really need to be holding a bucket of chicken? When a black actor shows up, would anyone today dare have him eating watermelon? At the same point do we still need the juvenile humor that these things are used for a cheap laugh? That's the part I would be upset about.
The fact that starring roles rarely feature fat people is a stretch and just some pathetic whining. I do not think it will put butts in seats as readily as scarlett johansen. She's pretty, she's thin, I could watch her all day but if I did so in the park the police would take me away. I really do not want to see rosie o'donnell, not because I hate her for being fat, or a lesbian, or a woman, or at all, but she's overweight and past her prime and I would prefer to stare at Scarlett Johansen for two hours if I'm going to be staring at anyone. The same goes for men, I'm not ashamed to admit that a good looking, fit actor is more entertaining than "average guy", and no, I cannot explain the success of Seth Rogan.
It's one thing to rail against pejorative roles, it's a totally different thing to rail against the universe for not behaving as I'd wish. I could see your point if this was disenfranchising a group of people and there was no solution. But, they could lose weight, it is totally possible. I've done it more than once, but at the end of the day I don't really want to live that life. I'd rather die younger and fat, than die older eating quinoa, this is a choice, and there are consequences.
...to see fat people. I'm a fat person, I get the problem. I still think the psychological issue lies with the person experiencing it. But I want to see stupid skinny, fit actresses and skinny muscle-bound actors. I can see fat people anywhere.
The same is true for beauty, Hollywood focuses on actors who are many steps beyond average in appearance (granted, with makeup, cosmetic surgery and trickery in evidence). That's what we want to see. Ugly people are everywhere, for entertainment we want a nearly magical level of beauty.
I don't really want to see it change, and I suspect I will pay less money if it changed. The only thing I would like to see is that what fat people are in the show aren't always the pathetic, helpless comic-relief with a bucket of fried chicken that they often appear as. In addition to being wrong, it also sets a dangerous viewpoint on exactly how much one has to eat to get fat (simply more than you can burn) or exactly what exercise is important for (cardiac health...you won't lose weight just exercising in most cases)... it's just propagating a stupid stereotype that has relatively little basis in reality. It's the blackface of the modern era.
Definitely I am afraid to leave my home due to all the tvshow pirates out there. I feel like every other person on the street is just waiting to walk up to me and watch GoT on their phones illegally. One day someone actually BUMPED INTO ME because he was too busy watching pirated tv shows on his phone! The world isn't safe.
The trick is to find a balance where you treat them shitty enough to make the left happy but not so shitty they go somewhere more tolerant.
Fortunately corporations are EXCELLENT at application of these principles to their workforce. The secret is doing everything possible to make sure there is nowhere else to go.
My idea is worth twice as much as Tubeless Plumbing, I call it Sanitation. I won't go in to the scientific and engineering principles behind it, but it's based on the same wildly successful technologies made popular by the Roman Empire.
When it comes to riots between otherwise obsolete and ignored bigots and counter protestors, and the ensuing mayhem, I think it's important to remember one phrase: Do not feed the trolls.
The best thing that ever happened to racist red-necks is Charlottesville. They reminded the world that they still exist, and while they cannot hold a job or participate in civilized society (and evidently are quite bitter about it), they demonstrate that they manage to eke out an existence on the fringes. That in turn will give some young red necklet hope for his future. Don't be a part of that. Ignore them, move on and leave them behind. Most of them will never change, but the young and mutable can weigh the life they will have to lead as a professionally oppressed white man against just living a life, and I have a feeling make better choices for themselves, mostly.
The question is what will all these independent streaming companies do when it becomes clear we're not going to pay monthly fees for 10 different companies each of which has one or two shows we care about and 99% junk.
I've never met anyone in any age group who wants voice or video for most of their consumption. There are exceptions: how-to videos are usually more helpful than how-to directions, and voice is nice when you want to hear how something is pronounced. But you would have to be brain dead to want to favor those, as they cannot be searched, can't be digested at work and you can't skip around in them to find the little bit you need without having to take in the large amounts of bullshit, fluff, marketing and distraction.
This sounds like astroturfing, burn everyone associated with it.
No, any GoT fan worth their salt would sell a kidney to get their hands on GRRMs unwritten books, notes and outlines so they can lord it over the TV watching "normals" who get the entirety of their GoT knowledge from 1 hour fixes on the show.
Simply getting the TV show ahead of time wouldn't really fan the flame of self-righteousness.
Can we please stop referring to anything related to "social" or the humanities in general, as "science". It's something, it's not science.
Guy is probably a douchebag (this term will make it in to the social science literature eventually), but he is probably smart enough to stay away from a hippie drum circle masquerading as science.
More things that have nothing to do with politics, being politicized because it's easy. I vote for liberal candidates but I'm generally not in favor of all this diversity bullshit, or even characterizing engineering as a collaborative, cooperative or customer focused endeavor. Yes, those things are sometimes involved, but far, far less than just about any other field. It very much is, and should be, a place to focus on technology, science and "things" and people's feelings can be shown the door when they do not align with the focus, and it's on them to reconcile that.
It's not clear to me that this has anything at all to do with gender, race, politics or the state of the nation (this or any other). The fact that people continue to conflate all this is irritating. If someone wants to enact an affirmative action program to push women into underrepresented fields when they are not able to succeed on their own, so be it, we do not live in a vacuum and honestly having some dorks on the team helps to keep things real. However, the nature of the job will always be the nature of the job, and if indeed it is this lack of focus on people, cooperation, collaboration or other nonsense that is keeping them from succeeding, we should not expect anything will change. I do not think this is the case, this all sounds like bullshit, and if there is anything "holding women back" it's more cultural and social than some secret all boys-club, and possibly having some affirmative action may correct this over time.
It's the "non practicing entity" part that suggests they are a troll. If you're not practicing, you're not spending much money, and you don't really deserve a patent.
More likely VCs do not respond to women's business plans or sales pitches, for whatever reason, real or perceived. We're talking about VCs, most of what they see, hear and act on is some degree of fantasy or another. Even successful investments morph over time from the pitch to the reality.
To get their money you have to appeal to some part of their lizard brain that makes them want to part with their cash, a combination of rationalization and vision. It's very likely that as they are mostly men, other men are able to identify with them and close the deal, whereas women are not.
I don't know what you do about that, and particularly wherein this is private money, there's nothing in the US that can (or imo should be) legally done about it. A lot of how the world is is based on personalities of rich people. Short of changing that, it is what it is.
Much like Google I don't think they get it, and immediately want to commoditize it such that it becomes junk quickly after it gets adopted. Even the XBox, Microsoft's one good entry into Hardware has suffered from atrophy to the point where most people I know would prefer a ps3/4, even with its relative warts wrt online issues.
I guess when I read that microsoft is doing hardware, I have real doubts. These days i don't even trust their software.
There's no particular reason to play politics on this.
When you get FCC certification, you are certifying to the government that your product meets their requirements for EM emissions and reception (intentional or otherwise). This isn't new, it's been around since before, I would guess, everyone reading this was born. By allowing customers to go monkey with those settings you can no longer give any such certification. It makes some sense for the FCC to stop this, and honestly I wondered how long before they did since most people doing this are dramatically boosting the transmission levels on their routers.
Now it may be that you think that the burden is on the government to find and stop people who are breaking the rules individually, rather than putting the burden on manufacturers, and I agree with the point in principle, but in practice the entire point of the FCC is to ensure the airwaves are shared and we don't end up with broadcast power wars. I do not know of many people who after making changes to their radio settings, also go put their router in a testing chamber and ensure that it is still compliant, not only at 5GHz (for example), but that harmonics are not leaking out at other frequencies that they did not intend (in some cases also due to lazy electronics design). Those labs cost some bucks, so unless you happen to have access to one, and your boss happens to look the other way when you use it for personal use rather than billing a customer, its hard to do. Hunting down each and every person who is breaking the rules is very expensive, and I think we can all agree we don't want to pay more in taxes for this. Therefore putting the burden on mfg's is a cheap solution that solves their problem. I'm not sure why we would want to fight the FCC on this.
The fact that manufacturers are ALSO locking out the non-radio facing firmware is an entirely different issue that the FCC is not responsible for. That part needs to be fought, but hopefully some manufacturer will see some money in doing it right. Shipping WiFi firmware is so universally awful that almost anything else is better.
Intel is just in the "value" stage of Wall St. domination, it's unclear they could fix themselves even if it was clear someone there acknowledged a problem. It's all about how to sell off bits and pieces of them, or buy things that appear undervalued.
They do however have a lot of money and market share, so they will continue to be a boat-anchor for the foreseeable future.
It's ok, when I got FUDed with "comcast wants to help self-driving cars" I suddenly decided I'm not so sure I want a self-driving car anymore. If it works as well as my cable modem, I'm pretty sure I will crash 3-4 times a day, and a technician will hover over my corpse saying "you should have used our modem".
Some jobs are necessarily collaborative, but a lot of jobs are collaborative because people are lazy. I find this is true in a lot of hardware and software jobs that are being labelled as 'inherently collaborative' in companies I have worked for that are on the long fail-boat to nowhere.
The best places I have worked have done exactly the same jobs without collaboration and there really wasn't any need: you go to the docs (in the old days on a disk somewhere, today on a webserver). Everyone implements according to the docs, if it is suspected they are wrong, or if the implementation they beget is not optimum, or does not meet spec for the product then you call a meeting where no one actually has to physically co-exist (often we could not anyway). Issue is debated, if the conclusion isn't obvious then someone makes a judgement call and we move on.
It doesn't work everywhere, I have no idea what the "brocoder" lifestyle at places like facebook and whatever are, or whether they are like they are by necessity, choice or insanity. But occasionally this tries to leak on to the kinds of work I'm involved in, and insanity ensues until someone can amputate the infection.
Being picked up by the cops is usually less dangerous than being mugged, in this case it doesn't appear he was harmed and the circumstances in the article are dubious. Provided you haven't actually committed a crime. If you have, even one not related to why you got picked up, you will probably have some problems.
Muggings have been on the decline as the popularity of credit cards has replaced the need to carry any significant amount of cash. If someone mugs me they're going to get some plastic which I will report stolen, a shit-ton of disloyalty cards and maybe $40. Unless they inordinately value a free small drink with their next sandwich at Quiznos, the cost/benefit of this operation is pretty low. Given that this is a general trend, the entire operation is less popular in favor of other forms of theft that are easier to pull off.
Should people start carrying cash again, muggings will rise. If you're that one guy that walks around with a bunch of cash, and feels safe, you're able to do so because most people choose not to. That said, I speak as someone who lived most of his life in NYC, knew many people who were mugged, held at knife/gun point and sometimes beaten in the process. There were also the ATM rapes, bonus points for being a woman with cash. I do like the anonymity cash provides, and it would be nice to find a replacement, but credit/debit cards move the crime from meatspace to cyberspace, and at least in my personal experience little financial risk to me, provided I watch my statements carefully.
Then the number should be closer to 100% of anyone who has posted anything online in a place where comments can be left. Certainly 100% if you include meatspace interaction.
When it comes to "being harassed online" I think of more dangerous harassment, including swatting, doxing, and otherwise taking the stream of trolling offline and into meatspace somehow. Name calling is the last resort of the weak mind precisely because grown-ups ought to be able to just ignore it without it troubling their psyche, it is therefore a futile gesture. That people really believe they are being harassed by this suggests we're doing something wrong.
you should realize you are in the minority and not exactly qualified to comment on the state of "in-person meat-space" relationships
Evidently not, or this thread wouldn't exist. I only ever have to do this with work acquaintances, the one aspect of my life where I absolutely must meet the social bar to eat. If I could excise that, I would do so, and actually would have nothing to offer this thread. But, as it happens it is a problem I have to deal with and this is how I deal with it. It works fine, and if any hostility is engendered it hasn't yet bit me. Feel free to conduct a statistical study.
Any Chinese person I know would scoff at that threat, only Americans are so dedicated to law and order. Breaking the law is a way of life in many places (and in some places in the US, ask any NYer).
Yes, it's still illegal and if they decide to come after you, you are totally in trouble, and this is a horrible oppressive regime we really ought to hate and stop doing business with. But the reason the regime stays in power, and the reason it has managed to become successful in spite of itself, is because it is impotent and corrupt in all the right places. If their government were to ever fix that, and effectively police itself, I imagine the people would revolt in mere days and they wouldn't need the "free" world to tell them anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I just thought the guy who added it was high at the time, we are about to get "High" Sierra from them. I can't think of how many times the subway "artist" baked my sandwich while totally baked, most recently after I was out in the sun too long and my skin was totally baked.
The two things are part of the same problem, and you're engaging in mental gymnastics to avoid realizing that. This is exercise for your moral flexibility, but really not a moral exercise.
Not the same. Fat people will be in hollywood, their roles will probably not be starring in most cases (except wherein the main role calls for a fat actor). However, there may be fat people in the movies, either because the role called for it, or because the fat person was most qualified for the job and his condition isn't a drawback. When he or she shows up, does it really need to be holding a bucket of chicken? When a black actor shows up, would anyone today dare have him eating watermelon? At the same point do we still need the juvenile humor that these things are used for a cheap laugh? That's the part I would be upset about.
The fact that starring roles rarely feature fat people is a stretch and just some pathetic whining. I do not think it will put butts in seats as readily as scarlett johansen. She's pretty, she's thin, I could watch her all day but if I did so in the park the police would take me away. I really do not want to see rosie o'donnell, not because I hate her for being fat, or a lesbian, or a woman, or at all, but she's overweight and past her prime and I would prefer to stare at Scarlett Johansen for two hours if I'm going to be staring at anyone. The same goes for men, I'm not ashamed to admit that a good looking, fit actor is more entertaining than "average guy", and no, I cannot explain the success of Seth Rogan.
It's one thing to rail against pejorative roles, it's a totally different thing to rail against the universe for not behaving as I'd wish. I could see your point if this was disenfranchising a group of people and there was no solution. But, they could lose weight, it is totally possible. I've done it more than once, but at the end of the day I don't really want to live that life. I'd rather die younger and fat, than die older eating quinoa, this is a choice, and there are consequences.
...to see fat people. I'm a fat person, I get the problem. I still think the psychological issue lies with the person experiencing it. But I want to see stupid skinny, fit actresses and skinny muscle-bound actors. I can see fat people anywhere.
The same is true for beauty, Hollywood focuses on actors who are many steps beyond average in appearance (granted, with makeup, cosmetic surgery and trickery in evidence). That's what we want to see. Ugly people are everywhere, for entertainment we want a nearly magical level of beauty.
I don't really want to see it change, and I suspect I will pay less money if it changed. The only thing I would like to see is that what fat people are in the show aren't always the pathetic, helpless comic-relief with a bucket of fried chicken that they often appear as. In addition to being wrong, it also sets a dangerous viewpoint on exactly how much one has to eat to get fat (simply more than you can burn) or exactly what exercise is important for (cardiac health...you won't lose weight just exercising in most cases)... it's just propagating a stupid stereotype that has relatively little basis in reality. It's the blackface of the modern era.
Definitely I am afraid to leave my home due to all the tvshow pirates out there. I feel like every other person on the street is just waiting to walk up to me and watch GoT on their phones illegally. One day someone actually BUMPED INTO ME because he was too busy watching pirated tv shows on his phone! The world isn't safe.
The trick is to find a balance where you treat them shitty enough to make the left happy but not so shitty they go somewhere more tolerant.
Fortunately corporations are EXCELLENT at application of these principles to their workforce. The secret is doing everything possible to make sure there is nowhere else to go.
My idea is worth twice as much as Tubeless Plumbing, I call it Sanitation. I won't go in to the scientific and engineering principles behind it, but it's based on the same wildly successful technologies made popular by the Roman Empire.
Rome. You have to pay me billions at least.
When it comes to riots between otherwise obsolete and ignored bigots and counter protestors, and the ensuing mayhem, I think it's important to remember one phrase: Do not feed the trolls.
The best thing that ever happened to racist red-necks is Charlottesville. They reminded the world that they still exist, and while they cannot hold a job or participate in civilized society (and evidently are quite bitter about it), they demonstrate that they manage to eke out an existence on the fringes. That in turn will give some young red necklet hope for his future. Don't be a part of that. Ignore them, move on and leave them behind. Most of them will never change, but the young and mutable can weigh the life they will have to lead as a professionally oppressed white man against just living a life, and I have a feeling make better choices for themselves, mostly.
Do not feed the trolls.
What with all the porn, crystal meth, tv and politics we have to get through.
The question is what will all these independent streaming companies do when it becomes clear we're not going to pay monthly fees for 10 different companies each of which has one or two shows we care about and 99% junk.
I've never met anyone in any age group who wants voice or video for most of their consumption. There are exceptions: how-to videos are usually more helpful than how-to directions, and voice is nice when you want to hear how something is pronounced. But you would have to be brain dead to want to favor those, as they cannot be searched, can't be digested at work and you can't skip around in them to find the little bit you need without having to take in the large amounts of bullshit, fluff, marketing and distraction.
This sounds like astroturfing, burn everyone associated with it.
No, any GoT fan worth their salt would sell a kidney to get their hands on GRRMs unwritten books, notes and outlines so they can lord it over the TV watching "normals" who get the entirety of their GoT knowledge from 1 hour fixes on the show.
Simply getting the TV show ahead of time wouldn't really fan the flame of self-righteousness.
Can we please stop referring to anything related to "social" or the humanities in general, as "science". It's something, it's not science.
Guy is probably a douchebag (this term will make it in to the social science literature eventually), but he is probably smart enough to stay away from a hippie drum circle masquerading as science.
More things that have nothing to do with politics, being politicized because it's easy. I vote for liberal candidates but I'm generally not in favor of all this diversity bullshit, or even characterizing engineering as a collaborative, cooperative or customer focused endeavor. Yes, those things are sometimes involved, but far, far less than just about any other field. It very much is, and should be, a place to focus on technology, science and "things" and people's feelings can be shown the door when they do not align with the focus, and it's on them to reconcile that.
It's not clear to me that this has anything at all to do with gender, race, politics or the state of the nation (this or any other). The fact that people continue to conflate all this is irritating. If someone wants to enact an affirmative action program to push women into underrepresented fields when they are not able to succeed on their own, so be it, we do not live in a vacuum and honestly having some dorks on the team helps to keep things real. However, the nature of the job will always be the nature of the job, and if indeed it is this lack of focus on people, cooperation, collaboration or other nonsense that is keeping them from succeeding, we should not expect anything will change. I do not think this is the case, this all sounds like bullshit, and if there is anything "holding women back" it's more cultural and social than some secret all boys-club, and possibly having some affirmative action may correct this over time.
You lost me at "push notifications". "App loading screens" sounds like "Ads I don't want".
Pass.
It's the "non practicing entity" part that suggests they are a troll. If you're not practicing, you're not spending much money, and you don't really deserve a patent.
More likely VCs do not respond to women's business plans or sales pitches, for whatever reason, real or perceived. We're talking about VCs, most of what they see, hear and act on is some degree of fantasy or another. Even successful investments morph over time from the pitch to the reality.
To get their money you have to appeal to some part of their lizard brain that makes them want to part with their cash, a combination of rationalization and vision. It's very likely that as they are mostly men, other men are able to identify with them and close the deal, whereas women are not.
I don't know what you do about that, and particularly wherein this is private money, there's nothing in the US that can (or imo should be) legally done about it. A lot of how the world is is based on personalities of rich people. Short of changing that, it is what it is.
Much like Google I don't think they get it, and immediately want to commoditize it such that it becomes junk quickly after it gets adopted. Even the XBox, Microsoft's one good entry into Hardware has suffered from atrophy to the point where most people I know would prefer a ps3/4, even with its relative warts wrt online issues.
I guess when I read that microsoft is doing hardware, I have real doubts. These days i don't even trust their software.
There's no particular reason to play politics on this.
When you get FCC certification, you are certifying to the government that your product meets their requirements for EM emissions and reception (intentional or otherwise). This isn't new, it's been around since before, I would guess, everyone reading this was born. By allowing customers to go monkey with those settings you can no longer give any such certification. It makes some sense for the FCC to stop this, and honestly I wondered how long before they did since most people doing this are dramatically boosting the transmission levels on their routers.
Now it may be that you think that the burden is on the government to find and stop people who are breaking the rules individually, rather than putting the burden on manufacturers, and I agree with the point in principle, but in practice the entire point of the FCC is to ensure the airwaves are shared and we don't end up with broadcast power wars. I do not know of many people who after making changes to their radio settings, also go put their router in a testing chamber and ensure that it is still compliant, not only at 5GHz (for example), but that harmonics are not leaking out at other frequencies that they did not intend (in some cases also due to lazy electronics design). Those labs cost some bucks, so unless you happen to have access to one, and your boss happens to look the other way when you use it for personal use rather than billing a customer, its hard to do. Hunting down each and every person who is breaking the rules is very expensive, and I think we can all agree we don't want to pay more in taxes for this. Therefore putting the burden on mfg's is a cheap solution that solves their problem. I'm not sure why we would want to fight the FCC on this.
The fact that manufacturers are ALSO locking out the non-radio facing firmware is an entirely different issue that the FCC is not responsible for. That part needs to be fought, but hopefully some manufacturer will see some money in doing it right. Shipping WiFi firmware is so universally awful that almost anything else is better.
Intel is just in the "value" stage of Wall St. domination, it's unclear they could fix themselves even if it was clear someone there acknowledged a problem. It's all about how to sell off bits and pieces of them, or buy things that appear undervalued.
They do however have a lot of money and market share, so they will continue to be a boat-anchor for the foreseeable future.
It's ok, when I got FUDed with "comcast wants to help self-driving cars" I suddenly decided I'm not so sure I want a self-driving car anymore. If it works as well as my cable modem, I'm pretty sure I will crash 3-4 times a day, and a technician will hover over my corpse saying "you should have used our modem".
Some jobs are necessarily collaborative, but a lot of jobs are collaborative because people are lazy. I find this is true in a lot of hardware and software jobs that are being labelled as 'inherently collaborative' in companies I have worked for that are on the long fail-boat to nowhere.
The best places I have worked have done exactly the same jobs without collaboration and there really wasn't any need: you go to the docs (in the old days on a disk somewhere, today on a webserver). Everyone implements according to the docs, if it is suspected they are wrong, or if the implementation they beget is not optimum, or does not meet spec for the product then you call a meeting where no one actually has to physically co-exist (often we could not anyway). Issue is debated, if the conclusion isn't obvious then someone makes a judgement call and we move on.
It doesn't work everywhere, I have no idea what the "brocoder" lifestyle at places like facebook and whatever are, or whether they are like they are by necessity, choice or insanity. But occasionally this tries to leak on to the kinds of work I'm involved in, and insanity ensues until someone can amputate the infection.
Being picked up by the cops is usually less dangerous than being mugged, in this case it doesn't appear he was harmed and the circumstances in the article are dubious. Provided you haven't actually committed a crime. If you have, even one not related to why you got picked up, you will probably have some problems.
Muggings have been on the decline as the popularity of credit cards has replaced the need to carry any significant amount of cash. If someone mugs me they're going to get some plastic which I will report stolen, a shit-ton of disloyalty cards and maybe $40. Unless they inordinately value a free small drink with their next sandwich at Quiznos, the cost/benefit of this operation is pretty low. Given that this is a general trend, the entire operation is less popular in favor of other forms of theft that are easier to pull off.
Should people start carrying cash again, muggings will rise. If you're that one guy that walks around with a bunch of cash, and feels safe, you're able to do so because most people choose not to. That said, I speak as someone who lived most of his life in NYC, knew many people who were mugged, held at knife/gun point and sometimes beaten in the process. There were also the ATM rapes, bonus points for being a woman with cash. I do like the anonymity cash provides, and it would be nice to find a replacement, but credit/debit cards move the crime from meatspace to cyberspace, and at least in my personal experience little financial risk to me, provided I watch my statements carefully.
Then the number should be closer to 100% of anyone who has posted anything online in a place where comments can be left. Certainly 100% if you include meatspace interaction.
When it comes to "being harassed online" I think of more dangerous harassment, including swatting, doxing, and otherwise taking the stream of trolling offline and into meatspace somehow. Name calling is the last resort of the weak mind precisely because grown-ups ought to be able to just ignore it without it troubling their psyche, it is therefore a futile gesture. That people really believe they are being harassed by this suggests we're doing something wrong.
you should realize you are in the minority and not exactly qualified to comment on the state of "in-person meat-space" relationships
Evidently not, or this thread wouldn't exist. I only ever have to do this with work acquaintances, the one aspect of my life where I absolutely must meet the social bar to eat. If I could excise that, I would do so, and actually would have nothing to offer this thread. But, as it happens it is a problem I have to deal with and this is how I deal with it. It works fine, and if any hostility is engendered it hasn't yet bit me. Feel free to conduct a statistical study.
Any Chinese person I know would scoff at that threat, only Americans are so dedicated to law and order. Breaking the law is a way of life in many places (and in some places in the US, ask any NYer).
Yes, it's still illegal and if they decide to come after you, you are totally in trouble, and this is a horrible oppressive regime we really ought to hate and stop doing business with. But the reason the regime stays in power, and the reason it has managed to become successful in spite of itself, is because it is impotent and corrupt in all the right places. If their government were to ever fix that, and effectively police itself, I imagine the people would revolt in mere days and they wouldn't need the "free" world to tell them anything.