> Forcing your enemy to invest heavily in such key sectors is pretty stupid. Eventually, one way or another, Chinese will master the state-of-the-art. A few good examples here - LCD industry, weapons.
Not if your enemy has a habit of reverse engineering and copying everything they buy.
I recall that China was has a competition for foreign companies to sell them attack helicopters. They had trials and evaluations, and settled on a South African one. You'd assume they made a big order, right? Wrong. They placed an order for a single copy, which the South African company wisely declined.
I can't seem to find a source for the above story, but I think I read it in Wired maybe 5-10 years ago.
> China isn't some totalitarian dictatorship that some of the west seem to think they are.
You do realize that they're closer to being a dictatorship now than they've been for decades? Xi has purged most of his rivals and has recently abolished term limits for his positions, so he could rule indefinitely.
> I'm still wondering why there should be an economic, political or commercial conflict between China and the rest of the world esp. US. Such conflicts are wasteful with when we all should work together on common goals - space exploration, fighting against diseases, climate change etc.
I know! The US should just resign itself to being a provider or raw materials to the Chinese party-state, so we can focus on China achieving those glorious common goals!
China is rising to fight common perils such as "'Western constitutional democracy'; others included promoting 'universal values' of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation." (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...)
More seriously now: your perspective is embarrassingly naive, and forgets, many, many significant areas of difference between the US and China. China's leadership, now, is committed to am authoritarian, autocratic path. No amount of progress in "space exploration" is worth throwing support behind that kind of government.
> Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)
I'd say so. Esoteric personal definitions for established terms, even if they make a lot of sense to you, don't typically lead to productive discussions. It's probably best not to wade into one, correcting people, unless you actually understand the vocabulary.
> Theology is not present in universities, religious studies is. Theology is taught in special schools, because it fundamentally does not work the same way as other studies
Your comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of what you claim to be talking about. Theology was one of the most prestigious subjects taught in the original medieval universities (many of which are the most prestigious contemporary ones, e.g. Oxford), and continues to be taught in them today.
> Her position was that eyes on the street was the key to safety in urban areas.
I'm sure that's true. However, the unbelievable part was the influence you ascribe to yourself. I do not believe that you, personally, set in motion a chain of events "wherever [you] live" that "lowers crime" and causes "healthier plant life."
> In the years I have lived without a car, my example of walking everywhere has tended to popularize walking wherever I lived. (Yes, even when I was homeless.) After seeing an uptick in walking, you could see visible evidence of improved air quality, such as healthier plant life in the area.
> Crime also went down. In the apartment complex where I gave up my car, the cops stopped staking out the entrance on weekend evenings. In another city, helicopter manhunts and similar police activity trended down.
This is a pretty fantastic, and frankly unbelievable claim.
> R&D doesn't happen in non-profit government corporations either (atleast not largely). Most R&D comes from the manufacturers where the state (or relevant institution) buys the drugs from.
IIRC, the research typically comes from state-funded academics, and the development comes from the manufacturers.
> In general, I don't think I want the government to be in the business of stamping out the best deal that individuals have available.
That's interesting framing. What if the "best deal that individuals have available" is objectively bad for them, exploitative, or one more step down in a "race to the bottom"?
IIRC, The Grapes of Wrath described several "best deal[s] that individuals [had] available."
Or maybe just spend more time with aides trying to grasp the technical issues?
I'm going to send some letters to my Senators and Representative asking them to work closely with the EFF, EPIC, etc. to formulate any regulation on this, rather than Facebook itself.
> Frankly I think the community will hate it but because it’s really hard to move millions of individual communities, Reddit likely won’t lose too many users.
Is that really true? Didn't Reddit get big because Digg made some ill-advised changes and its userbase picked up and moved en masse to Reddit?
> But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need to heavily regulate conversations/posting preemptively based on arbitrary personal worldview on what is 'good' content for the subreddit, instead of coming in to help when there's actual problems and situations where downvoting simply isn't enough.
That seems like a fair description of Metafilter as well, which is a poster child of "moderation that works" in some quarters. At some point the moderation drifted to shepherding the conversation in particular directions, though that may be to appease users who'd cause problems if it went any other way.
I agree. The momentum seems to be focused on Facebook mainly because they played it too fast and loose for too long. But many of the issues that apply to Facebook apply to Google as well, but it just hasn't provided as much reason for this level of scrutiny.
> I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.