As a Chinese kid, I remember first coming into contact into Chinese philosophy around 11 or 12 and it was basically impenetrable. Comics like these by Tsai Chih Chung (Cai Zhi Zhong) in Chinese helped me "get" some of it:
Probably because most users are blissfully ignorant of the less ethical bits of how Yelp conducts its business.
As long as there isn't a huge discrepancy between the expectation and the services/goods rendered, most people can't tell the difference over something that is largely subjective anyway.
I played Underrail a while back but didn't get too far. I do want to go through it fully at some point. Is it worthwhile? I also heard the developer is working on an expansion pack of some sort.
Speaking of modern Fallout 1/2, this game just came out:
The first Dragon Age is arguably a spiritual successor.
Dragon Age II was largely panned by Bioware fans as it got a lot more action oriented and less RPG/choice driven.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is basically unrecognizable to Baldur's Gate days, as mechanically it's more similar to Mass Effect 2 than old time RPGs. That game was 90% pulp fantasy open world quest completer with decent combat/skill syngergy. But the last 10% uncovered some story bits that really made me go "wow I want to know more".
I learned English by trying to figure out how to navigate menus in Warlords II and Castles II.
I played Baldur's Gate and barely understood the plot. A few years later, I eventually got to Planescape: Torment and actually managed to understand it.
I think you're largely referring to sites that work based on their content, and not their workflow. i.e. site you interact with to consume content.
Most of those sites are "free". People are willing to wait for things that they want to consume and are available for free, up to some limit.
If we're talking about websites that offer some sort of utility -- i.e. it does something for you and you need to interact with it often. Then its responsiveness is likely going to be a much bigger factor.
If gmail loads your inboxes and emails in hundreds of milliseconds but yahoo took several seconds, and a person needs to respond to lots of emails during the day, I'm sure the person would develop a preference for the former if all other things are equal.
I think there's a sense of conclusiveness when "to the ground" is added. Something drops or falls can still be caught, but the author didn't leave that ambiguous.
I think you have a point. It certainly can be interpreted that way -- as a reference to the suicides of his peers. The more I read the his other poems in the original article the more I'm leaning towards the "suicide" take.
But poetry is always more fun to leave things ambiguous. Original words matter -- the hardest parts is to translate poems precisely, and try not to let your interpretation of its meaning overwhelm the original.
Yeah I didn't interpret it as having committed suicide. But his other poems hinted at him falling asleep at the line. So it could be exhaustion. Or, it could be metaphorical -- that a person's spirit fell to the ground and nobody cared.
I really liked that one as well, but I don't like the fact that the translator translated "掉在地上" differently between the first and final lines, which are meant to mirror each other exactly in order to juxtapose the fate of a screw with the fate of a man. Neither were to receive any embellishments. They both simply fell or dropped.
You're absolutely right about the protocol, but protocol does not a complete wireless ecosystem make. You could have a shitty protocol and happy customers, or a great protocol and upset customers.
Also, just because two industries are dominated by oligopolies doesn't mean that consumers in both are suffering the same. One can put the customers' interest slightly ahead of another. It's like having the assumption that authoritarianism automatically means people are suffering. It's just unhealthy and unstable. Every once in a while you can still get benevolent dictators doing something nice ;)
Just from personal experience, I know the cell phone fees in China are a lower % of people's incomes than here. The speeds aren't amazing (but that's probably because I rarely browse any domestic sites while in China). But I've also never had a dropped call or lack of signal until I got waaaaaaaay out in the mountains / rural parts of China, where as here I will still occasionally get my calls dropped or have spotty reception near a well-populated suburb.
Right, your cited sources would actually be a more sound counterpoint than your original comment. Maybe it was just a spur of the moment thing. I guess my point is that if you want to get across the point that Huawei's comments are ironic, then attacking from the angle that there's good reason for AT&T to pull out of the deal and for the US govt to be suspicious would be much more effective.
The Kid A vs Kid B isn't really the situation here as it's the CEO of a company from country A complaining about country B influencing the decisions of a company from country B. That's why injected the bullying older brothers to help with the analogy. If Huawei actually screwed over AT&T in the past and now AT&T pulls out of a deal with Huawei and Huawei complains, then the Kids A/B bullying each other would be an accurate analogy.
Incidentally I've seen the Chinese government basically hype up problems or impropriety of foreign companies (e.g. Apple) in the past in order to bully them in to compliance. I'm not saying that the US government is doing the same thing to Huawei here, but the cynic in me also isn't ruling that angle out either :/
How about we put it this way: Both Chinese and US consumers lose when their respective governments engage in arbitrary protectionism. You can find his comments "ironic" all you want, that doesn't mean his complaint doesn't have any merit.
It's like if Kid A complained about how getting bullied by Kid B's older brother sucks and you're like HA your complaint is laughable and insane because Kid A's brother is a bully, too!
If you presented evidence on why it's reasonable to suspect Huawei for being complicit in espionage in their hardware devices (and why other countries don't seem to be that worried about it), then you'd have a compelling counterpoint.
I think it's cultural and lack of technological awareness
1) People aren't raised with a mind to combat discrimination. Despite recognizing and celebrate some 50+ ethnic groups, the majority of Chinese are Han and look like each other. There are some laws in place to protect against discrimination against certain classes (e.g. Gender/Ethnicity) but they're not strongly enforced. The legal system simply isn't there for individual plaintiffs to succeed against corporations or government.
2) Chinese have culturally accepted authoritarian rulers as "heaven's mandate". As long as people can be fed, clothed, have a roof over their heads and even prosper, then the ruler continues to carry "heaven's mandate", regardless of what Machiavellian means by which the ruler achieves prosperity for the majority. If the government has to read my letters in order to find evil schemers to keep me safe then so be it. But if the government did all these things and the safety/prosperity of significant communities are still constantly at risk, then the ruler has lost the heaven's mandate, and it's time for a revolution to install a new ruler.
3) Chinese people are raised on family, piety, and harmony, not individualism. Many place a sense of family/community acceptance above individual will. I think most are protective of the very private -- maybe on the class of secrets -- what I say to my friends or my own journals as private, but there are very few that even think that the metadata about how they carry out their lives should be considered private. Ultimately I think most people's mindset is that if I went to a restaurant and ordered food and they kept a record that I went there and ordered XYZ off the menu then it's no longer a secret. People haven't really come around to the power of what can be done when enough information has been gathered by simply going about your everyday business.
People don't view privacy the same way we view them in the west. The government is obviously not too keen on passing Privacy Laws that itself has no intention of obeying.
I still attribute the success of Tencent and Alibaba significantly to both the public perception of privacy as well as what I expect to be a tacit compliance with the government on making available the data that they gather.
The Chinese government can find ways to shut down any company pretty much at will. I can't imagine Tencent or Alibaba or Baidu got to where they are today without playing ball with the government.
While not explicitly mentioned (at least from cursory searches), the manga "Koroshiya Ichi" is based on a dense complex very much inspired by Kowloon where it's basically a lawless city where criminals, triads, prostitutes lived amongst the downtrodden and regular people who are just trying to carry on with their lives.
There's no doubt that Jack Ma is smart and hard working. But he and his success is also a product of his environment. I don't have any direct evidence but no companies in China achieves the kind of success Tencent or Alibaba does without some sort of government officials silently nodding their heads behind them.
That means they're likely complicit in any information gathering the government wants to perform on its citizens as a precondition to their continued operations. The Chinese government is probably all too happy to see these "monopolies" that are effectively playing ball with the government, since the more users that adopt their platform, the more data they have on their citizens.
And this is not even touching on how they can exert themselves on these Chinese internet companies to shape the conversations that are happening online.