vajaya · HackerTrans

Adam Neuman is bound to be canonised in our capitalist society. When his grand grandchildren donate to Harvard and waltz in high class ballrooms, nobody knows or cares about how their ancestor made that wealth and even for those who do, the story would have already been glamorised.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

Indeed academics do not need to live in a place to study it, but they need to live there to feel it.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

I watched an episode of last week tonight in which John Oliver covers issues of private prisons. Basically it's inmates being exploited by extremely low paid labor and various unreasonable charges for necessities. But I don't see how government run prisons can solve or mitigate the problems.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

I guess it's because first world middle/upper-middle class are the most anxious of all social strata, because they have to constantly struggle with maintaining their social standings and that their children would not fall down, which is extremely hard, mostly because in first world middle/upper middle class kids have to compete with all other children in the same or lesser social standings and they usually don't have competitive edge. If u.s. society is a caste system, where upper middle class kids don't have to compete with middle class kids, and middle class kids don't have to compete with middle lower class people, where each class has its cultural/religious/socioeconomic/political moat to keep lower class people from getting in, people in general would not feel that level of anxiousness.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

Data messaging is a legitimate and well established study and practice

vajaya

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you are right. probably China has always been under reporting their growth rate as the hide your strength strategy. It's inexplicable that China's GDP from construction is smaller than that of U.S., given that China is undergoing an infrastructure build up at a scale that human race has never seen.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

Not at all. first, real estate is the essential part of a grand urbanisation plan along with other infrastructure developments. second, concrete and steel buildings definitely last longer than plaster and wood built ones in U.S.. It's just U.S. people spend a lot of time maintaining their house...I think it's not economically sensible. The time spent on house maintenance and repair could be more valuable in productive activities.

vajaya

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China collapse has been predicted by china expert for at least 2 decades. I don't understand why people can still be this delusional at this moment.

vajaya

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I think all business has to know what they are selling. Google and Facebook know it very well. They sell ads. All their business endeavours hence are to sell more ads.

On the other hand, newspapers seems to not know that they are selling.

If it's content or information, then they don't create enough unique and valuable content that enough people are willing to pay enough amount.

If it's content distribution or platform for opinions or civil discourses, they are almost anachronistic.

If it's ads, they simply don't have enough eyeballs.

vajaya

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I don't have their unit economy data, but I'm still (stubbornly) skeptical of the profitability of bike sharing. One reason is the market depth, in the sense that most of the time it's just young, educated and often bourgeois people in metropolis, which is a tiny proportion of people, who ride bike for purposes other than recreational.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

I wonder why bike sharing is still a thing in business world. Hasn't this business venture been proved to be a fiasco in China, where user base is larger in magnitude, operation cost is residual and virtually no regulation friction, compared to the u.s.? Why do lyft, uber and others think it is viable(profitable) in the u.s.?

Another thing beyond me is although the business model/development of this kind seems to be bound to fail, why they are still chased by enormous amount of capital.

My cynical suspicion is these so call tech start ups are just instrument of a grand new ponzi scheme in which a bunch of investors use borrowed money(from banks, insurance company and the likes) to set up a start up and increase the value of it(manufacture hype to justify the inflation along the way) and the sell to public, which is mainly pension funds, 401k, government backed institutions and so one, that is, ordinary folks.

I hope someone would correct me and shed some light on this matter.

vajaya

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there's physical limit as what algorithms and tricks can do. Their numbers are incredible though.

vajaya

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that's why I said it seems...because I'm not aware of any academia discourse or civil societal movement from china focusing on this kind of thought policing in its extreme. based on what I experienced, It SEEMS to me Chinese people are quite content and obsessed with their economic well-being.

Historically it's the middle class people who demand a share of power and who initiate all sorts of social reform and progression to protect their wealth and social status. Chinese middle class is very large now(in both absolute and relative terms) and arguably more wealthy than their western counterpart, however, the expected calling for more freedom, democracy, and human rights simply does not exist.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

should we ban wechat? probably yes. it's a quintessential threat to privacy, freedom, and democracy practice. but are we able to? not at all. All big corporates and even some in government are on their side. China is where money is to make and ruling is to learn.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

I'm rather skeptical of this news and perhaps just some typical PR effort by singapore government.

Remember Singapore has a notorious education system of sending children in different tracks at an age as early as 8. That is, in your 3rd year in primary school, you'll sit an exam that would probably determine your life trajectory.

If you do well, you'll be enrolled in better programs, better school and would go to college. If you don't, you'll be wrapped up and sent to classes with little resources and guidance and often times incompetent teachers, and what's more, you would not be qualified to sit an college entrance exam, which means, the best you can achieve is Polytechnic schools. In singapore's caste system, a Polytechnic student is at the very bottom.

The intention and justification of this system is that people are born with different levels of intelligence. To allow all people to have a college education is not merely a waste of resources, but also not useful and meaningful for those who are just average.

How do people cope with this system, well, rich people can either hire tutors or have mother work as full time educator(often in case when the mother is highly educated). Their children would win out in that race at age of 8 and would continue to win and would go to the same several elite high schools, which ends in a situation where the transportation minister has never taken public transportation ever in his/her life.

vajaya

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or can you? you have your credit card information surrendered.

vajaya

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I regret taking their test with 200 bucks now. It used to be novel and years back, the concept of a totalitarian society with surveillance, database, social credit was still very remote

vajaya

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basically Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to talk anything cultural, political, spiritual, religious, etc. If you wanna talk fashion, food, travel, music, and the likes, that's absolutely fine. and it seems Chinese people are perfectly content with it. I heard that wechat is transparent to Chinese authority. Last year, a dozens of college students who are Marxist activists and advocate for workers' right in Shenzhen(yes, that techy wonderland so much applauded on HN) were arrested and disappeared since. Some say the authority can watch their every move via wechat.

vajaya

7 anni fadiscuss

Clearly many traditionally established regional monopolies/oligopolies not being probed into is not a matter of resource scarcity. Can we argue in this logic that if some companies are not punished by existing applicable laws/regulations for so long a time, that means those set of laws/regulations are acutally juridically invalid and thus can't be applied to other entities as well.

vajaya

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I don't see anything wrong with this monetization move. Chrome users don't pay Google for the use, so Google has no obligation whatsoever to make unpaid users as happy as their paid customers. And Goolge has(could) not set any barriers for competitors to come out with superior products. If enough people switch because their dislike, Google will adjust. It's market dynamics

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