You're assuming that the values of the culture you're living in are necessarily better or more ethical than those held by an individual. But even assuming that is true, the inability to voice ones opinions without ostracism doesn't solve disagreement, it just hides it. Whilst there may be a tremendously pleasing and unproductive perceived homogeneity of opinion around you, that facade is pulled with the curtain of the voting booth.
Stainless is nice, it only loses on thermal mass and non-stickness. But if what you want is food, not perfection, it doesn't narrow your options much, and is much easier to maintain.
For whoever this is news to, check out this XinhuaNet[0] article on holding group administrators accountable for things said in their groups. That they're able to view things is implicit in that. Then check out the pushes for Real Name Identification with online services[1] and phone numbers [2]. Check out the social credit system[3], mandatory by 2020[4]. The national face recognition system [5]. Its actually kinda incredible.
I didn't say how much leverage he had. Though whatever privacy focused technology they manage to get away with under the watchful eye of the party is still a win on the freedoms front. End-to-end encrypted imessage, secure enclave, etc. And he still gets to consort with the Chinese to whatever degree he is able to.
So you're saying Tim Cook should throw away whatever leverage he has to change these things in order to appear valorous?
Maybe what Cook has said about freedom is a complete farce. Maybe it isn't. Taking a stand against the Chinese government might win him points on HN, but not with the Chinese government. And at the end of the day, they make the call on whether they'll tear down the wall or close the gates.
Now Beijing is 寸土寸金, which is Chinese for "real estate is really expensive". Yet there's still ghost malls. The herd mentality is real.
That said i enjoy Taobao for how i can get out of town prices inside of Beijing. But that pales in comparison to the sheer amount of stuff you can get on there. Want a chair? Done. Want beta-amylase in a 20kg bag? Done. Want socks? Done. Want a reverse osmosis system? A rotary evaporator? 12kg of chicken wings? Done, done, done.
Reminds me of the problem that uses Graham's number, where the lower bound shifted from 6 to 11 to 13, and the upper bound is a number that exceeds the bounds of up arrow notation.
Looking at the Author, Reviews and the Table of Contents is probably a better heuristic.
That said, for things that aren't books, a marketing department that is complete dogshit might point to an opportunity. Berkshire Hathaway doesn't have great marketing. It doesn't need to.
If you go on Alibaba and find a merchant that has a great prospectus and a broad range of products, that's most likely a reseller. That means they take their share of the pie, and if you try to get something manufactured, you'll be working through a proxy. Better to find their manufacturer instead.
Then someone realizes what you're doing and "plays" your game to play you. If you outsource your brain, don't expect your bodies sanctity to stay intact. How's that for an evil scheme.
Subdivision like that usually happens when you go from a less complex organic system to something more engineered. Compare this to just running programs, to having 27 different VMs running on a baremetal hypervisor. That serves to subdivide complexity to make it more manageable.
I could see your bosses workflow working as long as he has a library of common elements. For graphs I tend to use yED, which is nice. You know how LaTeX has the mantra that you input the data, and it worries about the layout for you? yED is similar, you add nodes, connect them, and then you chose from one of two dozen layouting algorithms, like "hierarchical", "swimlane", or even "family tree".
I like to think of blank pages as mini whiteboards. With a multifunction copier i can print out lined, grid paper or specialty layouts and whip it through the scanner once im done with it keeping a digital copy. 3USD buys me 500 pages, and with a laser printer [250USD], toner refill kit, etc. that comes out to less than a cent a page, or 3 cents if I amortize the printer over 10k pages (assuming it breaks once it hits its one month maximum duty cycle, which is stupid conservative).
That plus a nice fountain pen [Lamy Safari 18.7USD], ink [J. Herbin Perle Noir 7.2USD/30ml], mechanical pencil [Lamy Safari 12USD], pencil leads [Uni Nano Dia 0.9USD/20leads], technical pen [Rotring Isograph 16.3USD], and I've got a nice little setup.
> Selectively enforcing their laws to the detriment
Excerpt relating the Weiquan movement[0]:
"Recently, some judges have started to believe that to be a
judge you just have to strictly apply the law in a case. In fact, this kind of concept is erroneous [...] all the legal formulations have a clear political background and direction [...] We must stamp out the kind of narrow viewpoint that thinks that you can also do court work by having judicial independence."
* Extorting international companies into "joint" ventures
Look at some of these articles on starting a China JV[1]. Man are the caveats. So many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Then look at a list of sectors WFOE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprises) are allowed in. Then check what licenses are required to operate, and whether this precludes entities with majority foreign control, any amount of foreign investment (e.g. Internet Cultural Media License 网络文化证）, etc. Then look at the costs of acquiring such a license. Remember that your Chinese competitors will likely just ignore that until they're large enough to be fined for it. Remember that they'll get a slap on the wrist as long as they play ball, and you'll get deported.
* "Treats" (as an insider told me) every several months.
Look at how China ate up high-speed rail in a couple of years. All 国产 now.
I think trophies for trying shows that the self-esteem movement didn't go far enough.
Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy.
Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy.
And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".