Evolution is a scientific concept, not a religion. I accept that evolution is the most plausible explanation for the diversity of life, but I don't have "faith" that it can miraculously solve any problem or that we need to be "loyal" to natural selection by not intervening.
trials in China are NOT decided by a jury of your peers, but three Government-appointed judges.
Indeed. The judicial system is very different from what most Westerners are familiar with. The Chinese system is not adversarial, with a prosecutor and a defense attorney competing to convince a jury while a neutral judge enforces the rules. In China, the judges are actively involved in the investigation, they will visit the crime scene, directly question witnesses, etc.
And the number of people getting out of arrests without some form of punishment is essentially zero.
Plenty of people are released after arrest. It is only after they go to trial that few are acquitted. But that is not really a fair comparison. Since the judges are actively involved in the pre-trial investigations, anyone likely to be acquitted simply has the charges dropped. Only the "guilty" go to trial, so of course the conviction rate is higher.
Here's the bottom line: An American citizen is FOUR TIMES as likely as a Chinese citizen to be arrested and incarcerated by their government.
It depends what you mean by "overthrow". The KMT government was overthrown in 1949 by Mao. The Maoist government was "overthrown" in 1976 by Deng Xiaoping, and replaced with a reformist government with checks meant to ensure that a one-man personality cult driven dictatorship would not arise again. That system was "overthrown" in 2018 by Xi Jinping, who has succeeded in establishing a one-man dictatorship, and is in the processes of re-establishing a Mao-like personality cult.
In 1989, the protestors failed to take over the government, but they had strong support by some factions within the government. It only became clear that the protests would come to naught when Deng Xiaoping (who was officially retired) put his full support behind Li Peng, the leader of those advocating for repression.
If Xi is overthrown, it will be with the support of people in the government, who are currently keeping a low profile and biding their time. If they perceive weakness, and smell blood in the water, the knives will come out.
Governments don't have "beliefs", but China is mostly tolerant of religion. There are 50 million Chinese muslims, and there are mosques in every major city. There are roughly 30 million Chinese Christians. Religious organizations are only suppressed if they are seen as subversive.
ethics, morality
In my experience, Chinese people are mostly honest and ethical. There are cultural differences. In China "loyalty" is relatively more important than "honestly" compared to America. So, for example, they are more likely to lie or cheat to help a friend. But they see that as the "ethical" thing to do. You don't let your friends down.
freedom, human rights, self-expression?
Mostly, yes. You are free to go where ever you want, including leaving the country. You can do whatever you want. In private, you can say whatever you want. Nobody is going to snitch on you, and nobody would listen to them if they did. The only limitation is publicly challenging the ruling party. That will get you arrested real quick.
Every Chinese government was overthrown by their own citizens.
Not all. The Song and Ming dynasties were overthrown by foreign invaders (the Mongols and Manchus respectively).
The Chinese responded to these invaders by demographically swamping and absorbing them. Today, 85% of Mongols and 99% of Manchus consider themselves Chinese.
The Chinese economy is currently growing at 7% per year. As long as that continues, there is no chance of an uprising. But if there is a hard crash, that could change quickly.
There is an undercurrent of discontent in China, where your social class is printed directly on your ID card, and the 80% in the "wrong" class are often deprived of access to medical care, public schools, housing, and even (during the Great Leap Forward) food. During the GLF, 99% of the 30 million deaths were peasants with "rural" hukous.
The big question is the loyalty of the PLA. During the 1989 protests, the army refused to move against the protesters, and replacement troops from the countryside had to be brought in. These farm boys had less empathy with the protesters who they saw as the spoiled children of the urban elite. There was some justification for this, since the protestors called for "democracy" but never once called for abolishing the hukou system... since it worked for their benefit.
Since 1989, the PLA has dramatically changed. The 1991 American victory in Desert Storm was a shock to the Chinese military, forcing them to realize that massive numbers of soldiers were no match for modern technology. The PLA is much smaller today, much more professional, and the average soldier is more educated. So if protests got out of hand, events would be very different than in 1989.
Disclaimer: I am not Chinese, but I lived in Shanghai for several years, and my spouse is Chinese.
I think this is why they are starting in Phoenix. The roads are in good condition (no freeze-thaw cycle) and the weather is almost never an issue. They already have all the roads mapped out. If your origin or destination is off the pre-mapped roads, they can dispatch a human driven car instead.
I won't bother to look up the original reference(s).
Noted.
And this kind of "modeling" is, er, crude. Among other problems, it sorta oversimplifies the strain field in the surrounding fluid.
How do you have a "strain field" in a liquid?
Typical of would-be physicists.
Considering that you think quoting your sources is beneath you, and you seem to be using terms you don't understand, it is possible that your condescending attitude may be unjustified.
Stop being intentionally obtuse. Various forms of discrimination are illegal in most jurisdictions. Authors of sexually explicit content are not protected from discrimination by private merchants anywhere in the world. Comparing Amazon's (reasonable IMO) policy to Jim Crow and lynching is idiotic and offensive.
Regardless of his intent, he was an idiot to put it in writing. You never write anything, or say anything on an electronic device, that you might have trouble explaining to a jury.
If he wanted to discuss these issues, it should have been a privileged conversation with an attorney in the room.
All the evidence is that it works the opposite way. Society becomes more permissive over time.
There are many, many counterexamples. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq after the US invasion, Victorian Britain, the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. These are all examples of societies becoming less morally tolerant and more repressive.
They just need to agree on a number. It shouldn't take more than a few hours to look at some similar incidents for precedent. Dragging it out just means more money goes to the lawyers.
The family might barely have had time to grieve
Oh give me a break. She was homeless. Neither her daughter nor husband was even willing to let her sleep on their sofa. Do you really think they are so heartbroken that they need weeks to grieve?
It also just makes Uber look pretty shady that they just mumble some apologies and throw a ton of cash at the problem.
Yes it is amazing that Uber was willing to sully their otherwise pristine reputation. It would have been soooo much more ethical to drag the family through months or years of litigation.
If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at al
She works much faster than me, so it would likely be 6 hours instead of 3 if I did it myself. I hate housework, and my time is worth way more than hers. So financially, it makes sense for me to pay her and spend my time on what I am good at and what I enjoy.
By hiring a housecleaner, I am redistributing my income, reducing inequality, and providing her family with a living. Doing your own housework is selfish.
I honestly can't tell if you think it should be higher or lower.
I can't tell either. About $49/person seems reasonable to me, since most people spend $0 on house cleaners.
I pay $120 per month for a housekeeper. She comes once per month, and works for about 3 hours, dusting, vacuuming etc. That is $1440 per year, but there are 4 people in my family, so we are paying $360 each. If for every family like mine there are 8 more than pay $0, that will average out close to $50 per person spent on housekeeping services.
Disclaimer: This is all on the books. I issue my housekeeper a 1099 at the end of the year.
You can check it out of the repository, build it yourself, modify it, etc, etc.
Very few high school students will be able to do any of that. In the real world, Swift is used for the following purposes:
1. Writing apps for Apple devices running MacOS or iOS.
It is not an appropriate choice for a first language taught in a public school. These students should be learning Python or Scratch. Even JavaScript would be more appropriate than Swift, and is used by Khan Academy's programming tutorials.
With real estate people: it's not the boss who buys the property
Indeed. RE agents work AT a brokerage, not FOR a brokerage. The broker they work with is not really their "boss" in any meaningful sense, and more a provider of administrative services. The agents are a source of income for the broker, not the other way around. Agents can easily leave for another brokerage and take their clients with them.
T2V is already good enough for telemarketers. Their problem is not generating the voice, but semantic analysis of the replies.
I get an occasional spam call that I am not 100% sure if it is a human or a robot. So I try to immediately force it off script by asking something like "What color underwear are you wearing?" Sometime the call is disconnected, sometimes it is forwarded to a human, and sometimes the robot tries to get back on script. But best of all, sometimes it is an actual human, who will sometimes hang up, sometimes give a flustered response, and sometimes say something creative like "I'm not wearing any underwear".
you can bet three letter agencies will be wanting to use it to covert all your, and I do mean all of 'YOU', spoken words into data mine able transcripts
I'll take that bet, and win. RTFA, or RTFS, or even RTFH. This is text-to-speech, not speech-to-text.
And will you apply the same standard to human drivers
Yes. If a human driver kills a pedestrian in an avoidable accident, they should have their license revoked until they can demonstrate their competence.
Waymo and Tesla have killed zero pedestrians despite driving far more miles than Uber. Uber's road privileges should be revoked until they can explain what caused this accident, and show that it has been fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believed in Evolution ...
Evolution is a scientific concept, not a religion. I accept that evolution is the most plausible explanation for the diversity of life, but I don't have "faith" that it can miraculously solve any problem or that we need to be "loyal" to natural selection by not intervening.
Does a friend really put you in a position where you feel you need to lie for them?
In China? Yes. Why should impersonal objective truth be more important than loyalty to a friend? You only think it is because of your culture.
trials in China are NOT decided by a jury of your peers, but three Government-appointed judges.
Indeed. The judicial system is very different from what most Westerners are familiar with. The Chinese system is not adversarial, with a prosecutor and a defense attorney competing to convince a jury while a neutral judge enforces the rules. In China, the judges are actively involved in the investigation, they will visit the crime scene, directly question witnesses, etc.
And the number of people getting out of arrests without some form of punishment is essentially zero.
Plenty of people are released after arrest. It is only after they go to trial that few are acquitted. But that is not really a fair comparison. Since the judges are actively involved in the pre-trial investigations, anyone likely to be acquitted simply has the charges dropped. Only the "guilty" go to trial, so of course the conviction rate is higher.
Here's the bottom line: An American citizen is FOUR TIMES as likely as a Chinese citizen to be arrested and incarcerated by their government.
Except that many moral values and philosophical concepts that underpin modern Democracies in the 21st Century DO come from religion originally.
Can you provide any citation for morality originating in religion? Most religions incorporate morality, but that does not imply that they created it.
Troops of monkeys have socially enforced rules that could be considered "morality". As far as we know, monkeys have no religion.
The chance of China being overthrown is 0%.
It depends what you mean by "overthrow". The KMT government was overthrown in 1949 by Mao. The Maoist government was "overthrown" in 1976 by Deng Xiaoping, and replaced with a reformist government with checks meant to ensure that a one-man personality cult driven dictatorship would not arise again. That system was "overthrown" in 2018 by Xi Jinping, who has succeeded in establishing a one-man dictatorship, and is in the processes of re-establishing a Mao-like personality cult.
In 1989, the protestors failed to take over the government, but they had strong support by some factions within the government. It only became clear that the protests would come to naught when Deng Xiaoping (who was officially retired) put his full support behind Li Peng, the leader of those advocating for repression.
If Xi is overthrown, it will be with the support of people in the government, who are currently keeping a low profile and biding their time. If they perceive weakness, and smell blood in the water, the knives will come out.
Does the government of China believe in God
Governments don't have "beliefs", but China is mostly tolerant of religion. There are 50 million Chinese muslims, and there are mosques in every major city. There are roughly 30 million Chinese Christians. Religious organizations are only suppressed if they are seen as subversive.
ethics, morality
In my experience, Chinese people are mostly honest and ethical. There are cultural differences. In China "loyalty" is relatively more important than "honestly" compared to America. So, for example, they are more likely to lie or cheat to help a friend. But they see that as the "ethical" thing to do. You don't let your friends down.
freedom, human rights, self-expression?
Mostly, yes. You are free to go where ever you want, including leaving the country. You can do whatever you want. In private, you can say whatever you want. Nobody is going to snitch on you, and nobody would listen to them if they did. The only limitation is publicly challenging the ruling party. That will get you arrested real quick.
Every Chinese government was overthrown by their own citizens.
Not all. The Song and Ming dynasties were overthrown by foreign invaders (the Mongols and Manchus respectively).
The Chinese responded to these invaders by demographically swamping and absorbing them. Today, 85% of Mongols and 99% of Manchus consider themselves Chinese.
The Chinese economy is currently growing at 7% per year. As long as that continues, there is no chance of an uprising. But if there is a hard crash, that could change quickly.
There is an undercurrent of discontent in China, where your social class is printed directly on your ID card, and the 80% in the "wrong" class are often deprived of access to medical care, public schools, housing, and even (during the Great Leap Forward) food. During the GLF, 99% of the 30 million deaths were peasants with "rural" hukous.
The big question is the loyalty of the PLA. During the 1989 protests, the army refused to move against the protesters, and replacement troops from the countryside had to be brought in. These farm boys had less empathy with the protesters who they saw as the spoiled children of the urban elite. There was some justification for this, since the protestors called for "democracy" but never once called for abolishing the hukou system ... since it worked for their benefit.
Since 1989, the PLA has dramatically changed. The 1991 American victory in Desert Storm was a shock to the Chinese military, forcing them to realize that massive numbers of soldiers were no match for modern technology. The PLA is much smaller today, much more professional, and the average soldier is more educated. So if protests got out of hand, events would be very different than in 1989.
Disclaimer: I am not Chinese, but I lived in Shanghai for several years, and my spouse is Chinese.
I think this is why they are starting in Phoenix. The roads are in good condition (no freeze-thaw cycle) and the weather is almost never an issue. They already have all the roads mapped out. If your origin or destination is off the pre-mapped roads, they can dispatch a human driven car instead.
I won't bother to look up the original reference(s).
Noted.
And this kind of "modeling" is, er, crude. Among other problems, it sorta oversimplifies the strain field in the surrounding fluid.
How do you have a "strain field" in a liquid?
Typical of would-be physicists.
Considering that you think quoting your sources is beneath you, and you seem to be using terms you don't understand, it is possible that your condescending attitude may be unjustified.
Stop being intentionally obtuse. Various forms of discrimination are illegal in most jurisdictions. Authors of sexually explicit content are not protected from discrimination by private merchants anywhere in the world. Comparing Amazon's (reasonable IMO) policy to Jim Crow and lynching is idiotic and offensive.
Regardless of his intent, he was an idiot to put it in writing. You never write anything, or say anything on an electronic device, that you might have trouble explaining to a jury.
If he wanted to discuss these issues, it should have been a privileged conversation with an attorney in the room.
FB needs to hire some adult supervision.
Simple. Just tax the rich.
"Soak the rich" doesn't work at the municipal level. The rich move to the suburbs. You get urban sprawl with Detroit in the center.
Define "protected group".
Protected Group
All the evidence is that it works the opposite way. Society becomes more permissive over time.
There are many, many counterexamples. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq after the US invasion, Victorian Britain, the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. These are all examples of societies becoming less morally tolerant and more repressive.
Perhaps it's time to reinstate the '18 years or older' rule for Internet use.
How do you "reinstate" something that never existed?
Did Sears have practices that put "many thousands of retailers out of business!" ?
Yes. Starting in the 1890s, the Sears catalog and mail order system drove thousands of small dry goods shops out of business.
It's barely been two weeks.
They just need to agree on a number. It shouldn't take more than a few hours to look at some similar incidents for precedent. Dragging it out just means more money goes to the lawyers.
The family might barely have had time to grieve
Oh give me a break. She was homeless. Neither her daughter nor husband was even willing to let her sleep on their sofa. Do you really think they are so heartbroken that they need weeks to grieve?
It also just makes Uber look pretty shady that they just mumble some apologies and throw a ton of cash at the problem.
Yes it is amazing that Uber was willing to sully their otherwise pristine reputation. It would have been soooo much more ethical to drag the family through months or years of litigation.
If it's only 3 hours per month, then I would have to wonder why you would have a cleaner at al
She works much faster than me, so it would likely be 6 hours instead of 3 if I did it myself. I hate housework, and my time is worth way more than hers. So financially, it makes sense for me to pay her and spend my time on what I am good at and what I enjoy.
By hiring a housecleaner, I am redistributing my income, reducing inequality, and providing her family with a living. Doing your own housework is selfish.
I honestly can't tell if you think it should be higher or lower.
I can't tell either. About $49/person seems reasonable to me, since most people spend $0 on house cleaners.
I pay $120 per month for a housekeeper. She comes once per month, and works for about 3 hours, dusting, vacuuming etc. That is $1440 per year, but there are 4 people in my family, so we are paying $360 each. If for every family like mine there are 8 more than pay $0, that will average out close to $50 per person spent on housekeeping services.
Disclaimer: This is all on the books. I issue my housekeeper a 1099 at the end of the year.
You can check it out of the repository, build it yourself, modify it, etc, etc.
Very few high school students will be able to do any of that. In the real world, Swift is used for the following purposes:
1. Writing apps for Apple devices running MacOS or iOS.
It is not an appropriate choice for a first language taught in a public school. These students should be learning Python or Scratch. Even JavaScript would be more appropriate than Swift, and is used by Khan Academy's programming tutorials.
With real estate people: it's not the boss who buys the property
Indeed. RE agents work AT a brokerage, not FOR a brokerage. The broker they work with is not really their "boss" in any meaningful sense, and more a provider of administrative services. The agents are a source of income for the broker, not the other way around. Agents can easily leave for another brokerage and take their clients with them.
This will be very useful, to telemarketers.
T2V is already good enough for telemarketers. Their problem is not generating the voice, but semantic analysis of the replies.
I get an occasional spam call that I am not 100% sure if it is a human or a robot. So I try to immediately force it off script by asking something like "What color underwear are you wearing?" Sometime the call is disconnected, sometimes it is forwarded to a human, and sometimes the robot tries to get back on script. But best of all, sometimes it is an actual human, who will sometimes hang up, sometimes give a flustered response, and sometimes say something creative like "I'm not wearing any underwear".
you can bet three letter agencies will be wanting to use it to covert all your, and I do mean all of 'YOU', spoken words into data mine able transcripts
I'll take that bet, and win. RTFA, or RTFS, or even RTFH. This is text-to-speech, not speech-to-text.
And will you apply the same standard to human drivers
Yes. If a human driver kills a pedestrian in an avoidable accident, they should have their license revoked until they can demonstrate their competence.
Waymo and Tesla have killed zero pedestrians despite driving far more miles than Uber. Uber's road privileges should be revoked until they can explain what caused this accident, and show that it has been fixed.