Once you are already in prison it's hard to say whether you are forced to do it or not. It's not like you have a lot of employers and professions to choose from. And if the incentives include things like easier to get parole then refusing to participate would mean more time served. It'd be pretty hard to prove some labor is not "forced" in a prison setting.
This is a way over simplistic view. It's not a CIV game where someone decides what "China/Han" should do for all these thousands of years. People's minds change, sometimes the people themselves change, accidents happen. You don't have to find some hidden "truth" that goes back 3000 years to explain what China today does.
For US it will. People in the US seldom think about just how powerful their media environment and general influence is. Like women have been sexually harassed since forever in China, and it's the #MeToo movement that led to a lot of the victim to stand up and people to support them.
She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan and call the thing sky goose instead, but most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
The mere existence of Wu is an outlier in China (and possibly in rest of the world). As anyone that closely follows Chinese politics know, the CCP is not keen on outspoken/unique people. Rappers has been banned for rapping about money and women (!); women have been arrested for promoting awareness of sexual harassment. I think Wu is simply trying (and failing) to make herself not more controversial than already is.
I just couldn't understand why he thinks the container should be made of hard metal. Sure maybe the current equipment like dry suit + full face mask has limitations. But shouldn't the natural path be building on top of that? Why is a hard long object that can't bend to fit through some narrow gaps, don't have power and don't use the power of the human it contains, and much heavier, be their go to solution?
I'm a bit surprised nobody has mentioned the fraud[1]. The reason electric bus becomes so popular in China recently is mainly because of government subsidies. Well that's the intended consequence and most people are OK with it.
What's problematic is that the subsidy is a fix amount for certain kind of vehicle. And it turns out bus is more efficient in terms of subsidy/cost ratio. And since the subsidy is a fixed amount, bus maker can cut a lot of corners and make a bare minimum of a bus which may cost even less than the subsidy. Now they can dump these buses to a local government basically free and bribe the operators to drive the buses once a while to receive the subsidy[2].
I mean I'm all for green buses. But if electric buses out-sale electric cars a lot, you have to wonder why. And one obvious reason is buses are mostly bought in large quantities by entities not very concerned about cost/profitability, ie local governments. So it is much easier for bus related fraud than cars facing mostly individual consumers.
The usual. WaPo/NYTimes both did several stories like this. But keep in mind that one result of suppression of free speech is the lack of clear sources. So anecdotal is sometimes the best we got.
I think 'do not disturb' has an option for only allow people from your contacts? and there are crowdsourced blacklist apps for scammer/harassment phone numbers.
When it's hard to draw the line from outside, prosecutors mostly try to prove their cases from the inside communications. If you email your coworker: "Guess what I found ... AMD can go bankrupt over this ..." and then short the stock it should be fine. But if you write "Let's put together an action plan to drive the AMD price down" then you would be in trouble. The FX scandal is an perfect example of this. It's true you can explain your action in perfectly legitimate reasons but you can't also call your self "The Cartel" in group chats.
By the time you are born it's already getting better. Yes it's dirt poor compared to now but is already on the trend of improving. So the stress level would be very different than the "suddenly become poor" people.
Another point is back in those days the majority of population are poor, which means the social structure are build around poor people. Food, cloths, education, haircut, all of them targeted poor people. You don't need to live in the corner of the city and go great length to find products suited for you.
So i think in both places cooking has become more of a hobby/status signaling thing.
In China there's something similar to blue apron in late 90s or early 2000s. But it kinda die out because it's offered more on the convenience side instead of healthy side.
Baking stuff becomes quite popular in recent years, because it's a western thing, and it's time consuming, good for share with friends in itself or as photos:good showoff material. Whereas the old method of finding whatever is fresh today at wet market and do a quick stir-fry becomes more and more reserved for older genration, and thus is not a fancy thing todo. Pressure cooking also is something you do when you don't have time and worry about fuel bill, not sexy.
Preprepared food is looked down upon in both us and china , it seems. In US i think people feel empowering by the idea of feeding your family in a healthy way without a stay at home mom; in China a stayed at home mom just recently becomes a thing to brag about, and cooking seems to be a important tool to do it.
It's pretty weird when you consider how food trends go. In China, back in the 90s, my parents use a pressure cooker and a wok for everything. And it's the norm as for most families I know both parent work and they have to come home at 5:30 and put food on the table at 6:30, with no easy option like frozen pizza. Now with supermarkets and food delivery you don't need to cook if you don't want to, and if you do choose to cook it becomes much more fancy(and western) with more time consuming steps.
If there're a lot of these objects entering and leaving solar system every year, and suppose some day in the near future we can keep track of them all, can we use them for us to send out larger probes? We see a rock coming near us, and send out a probe to its path. And before the collision the probe create a buffer object at the rear end so that it wouldn't be totally destroyed. After that the probe can free ride for a while at a high speed and re-ignite when it decides to go a separate path.
I've read the research about Stuyvesant, and several other articles with similar theme. The data and reasoning seems quite convincing. It's just I can't reconcile it with my personal experience.
All these studies seems to suggest it doesn't matter much where you go to school, everything is already decided. But I know I've learned things in school, things that I can't expect to learn quite systematically should I just teach myself. And I also know there are schools that don't teach much, where teachers are exhausted for just maintaining order and keep violence to an acceptable level. It seems pretty obvious that I wouldn't learn much in this kind of environment. Maybe I can still get to a similar level as I am today but it be would much much harder.
The success of AliPay and WeChat Pay is mostly the result of a good banking infrastructure. Even before these services popping up, you already can transfer money from any bank to another bank instantly and with no fee (or a small fee, depending on the bank and your account type). PBoC has been pushing banks to make interbank transfer efficiently and cheaply for years. The new mobile payment systems just use the already built infrastructure and replaced the ugly out of date bank webpages with cute looking apps and also greatly relaxed security so you don't have to keep the 2fa usb key with you anymore.