Since china exports so much and we export so little, rather than send empty shipping containers back to china, we fill it with our garbage and send that back to china to recycle.
China exports goods. We export garbage to china. And it's been going on for decades.
Since china exports so much and we export so little, rather than send empty shipping containers back to china, we fill it with our garbage and send that back to china to recycle.
At one time this was true of the trucking industry, too. Trucks would haul goods to a city, then carry that city's trash back out. It was considered better than running a truck empty.
Then they started doing it with food trucks, and the regulations came.
Historically, a combined effort by corporate and government interests to take away your rights was called fascism. But I guess if it is the far left doing it, it's okay.
Not a single one of those signatories is far left. The overwhelming majority are centre right.
And historically, efforts to curb uncritical airtime for violent and dangerous people have been fairly common (albeit not entirely uncontroversial). Neither Ireland nor the UK were ever far left or fascist but RTÉ and the BBC both heavily restricted interviews with loyalist and republican paramilitaries during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In fairness, people do the same thing with "far right". I've met some people who would likely characterize President Obama as far right.
This particular pathology seems to arise from the idea that "far $TYPE" is inherently de-legitmizing. And once you've de-legitimized someone or some position, you don't actually have to take them seriously, so...
The old definition was about republic vs monarchy. Now everyone keeps using those labels. Conservative? Right wing. Socially conservative? Right wing. Economically conservative. Left wing. Weird!
Authoritative government that's socially conservative; Venezuela. Wait what? Thought they were labelled far left?
Left and right labels are pointless, refer to the parties for what they represent; social conservatives; authoritarian; etc
Of course not. They are going to promote it. They are going to give the pro-war "authoritative sources" preferential treatment.
It's funny how so many of the pro-censorship comments here reference ISIS. These same people would defend the pro-war news companies which has spread false propaganda leading to illegal wars that killed millions of innocents in the past few decades.
If these companies are going to censor "extremism", then they should start with the "authoritative sources".
I rather live with the remote threat of extremism rather than live in a censored world.
Would you rather live in North Korea with no extremism?
You have a greater chance of getting struck by lightning than dying from extremism and yet you'd give up your right to free speech for some remote threat?
That kind of thinking is the cause of north korea and nazi germany. Authoritarians always use remote threats to justify taking your rights away.
Not all mass shootings stem from extremism. Gang violence also falls under the same definition.
Also from the business insider:
"There is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are "shot and/or killed" at "the same general time and location."
Another source suggests that death rate from "Islamic terrorism" in the US is somewhere around 1 in 3,500,000. If you presume other types of extremism are similar, there is still a significant difference from the mass shooting rate.
> Another source suggests that death rate from "Islamic terrorism" in the US is somewhere around 1 in 3,500,000.
Yeah, that can't be right. Or, it can be, if one only takes into account years after 2001, when at least 3000 people were killed, or 1 in 100 000 US residents.
The 1 in 3,500,000 rate is for years 1975 to 2015 and includes the 9/11 attack. Since 2001, the rate is about 6 deaths per year for a total of 100 over 17 years. This gives a post 2001 rate of less than one in 50 million.
edit: I mixed up yearly statistics vs "lifetime likelihood". I'll leave what I wrote for posterity
If the US population is 328,000,000, and each of us has a "1:11,125 odds" of dying in a mass shooting, that would seem to indicate that there are 328m/11,125 = 29,483 "mass shooting deaths" in any given year (I'm happy to accept corrections on my math here, maybe I'm completely missing something). That's patently false, and quite a spurious definition of "mass shooting". My definition of "mass shooting" is an unprovoked attack for terroristic reasons. i.e. NOT a { jealous spouse/drug dealers/gang bangers }. I don't keep an active tally, but I would estimate the number on an "average" year to be about 50, double that during the year we had the vegas shooting. 50/year puts the odds at rougly 1:6,560,000, or about 40x less likely than getting killed by a lightning strike.
Gang violence also falls under the same definition.
Also from the business insider:
"There is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are "shot and/or killed" at "the same general time and location."
I would argue that Singapore is an example of a benevolent dictatorship. The problem with all such, that was already noted by Ancient Greeks, is that you have no guarantees that the next dictator is going to be benevolent.
I don't understand that statement. I believe North Korea is a totalitarian state with concentrated power in few hands and no tolerance for dissidence. Are you saying they allow non-state actors to speak and take action freely to promote extreme ideologies there?
The poster probably means that NK is NK, because of its own extremist ideology. So the only way to really get rid of extremists seems to be to become more extreme than them.
I didn't say it was the only way of getting rid of extremism. I'd even argue that getting rid of extremism by installing a extremist regime makes as much sense as chopping a leg off because you want to get rid of a headache.
It is important to remember, that no nation no matter how great its tales of freedom or historic shame might be is immune against extremism.
North Korea became north korea because of censorship. It is the most censored country in the world. And the point is that there is not "extremism" in north korea because censorship allows only "authoritarianism". That's the world you want to live in?
I agree with you that censorship is extremism and it should be fought against.
Extremism to a Westerner perhaps. Certainly, the ideology behind North Korea would be censored in most of the proposals on this thread, but given that the government of north korea would not and it is the only government with any control over the country of North Korea, I don't understand by what metric you could possibly say it's extremism. Unless you're appealing to divine justice or something, which would be great, but I sincerely doubt it.
When Assange exposed Bush/right, the journalists and leftists loved him and the right hated him. He won a bunch of journalist/humanitarian prizes. Now that Assange exposed Hillary/left, the journalists and leftists hate him.
24/7 anti-assange propaganda by foxnews, cnn, msnbc, nytimes, wapo, etc and you get the current anti-assange sentiment.
Trump hates him, Hillary hates him, the establishment hates him because he exposed corruption. Corrupt people don't like their corruption exposed. Also, the elites want to start wars in venezuela, syria, etc so punishing assange and setting an example and possibly discrediting/getting rid of wikileaks is in their interest. Wouldn't want truth to get in the way of more wars.
Considering how politicized wikipedia ( like most of tech industry has gotten in recent years ), doesn't shock me. Jimmy Wales has pretty much come out and said wikipedia will no longer be user driven but ideology driven. Which is one of the reasons the other co-founder of wikipedia has criticized wales and wikipedia.
Wikipedia is great for most generic topics, but for "sensitive" topics, it's pretty much propaganda. Considering how heavily wikipedia is censored by wikipedia itself, maybe a taste of their own medicine will make them change their position, but I doubt it.
Sadly, as more and more people use the internet, it'll be censored more and more by the elites in china, US, russia, EU, etc. What we are seeing is the internet becoming an overt tool of propaganda rather than a platform of discussion or exchange of ideas. Even worse, it seems like there are tons of support for censorship, especially amongst the young "educated" demographics.
If you are making claims like this, you might want to source it. Like a Jimmy wales interview link, a wikipedia link to a "sensitive" topic that have been politized (that does not prove anything but still show that you've done some research).
Also generalization is bad. You might want to visit a skeptic association and follow a course about human cognitive bias (it is helpfull, but it won't "cure" you from them, just make you more self-aware).
It is a declarative language like SQL. If you come from traditional imperative programming side, it is very difficult for you to get used to. I forgot who said it : "With imperative style, you code the precise steps to get what you want. With declarative style, you describe what you want and you let the language/runtime/OS/etc get it for you."
If you're used to C/C++/Java, then SQL or Prolog seems frustrating, unnatural and non-intuitive. But once you have the eureka moment and realize they are declarative, you appreciate the elegance and power of SQL or Prolog.
"Europe has a special place in the venture because it was the final destination of the original Silk Road."
Is this really true? Wasn't China the final destination of the original silk road. Isn't it why we call it the "silk" road.
My understanding was that the silk road was primarily a loose idea of trade links between the middle east, india and china. Europe was an afterthought.
You could argue Europe is the final destination today since it is china wanting to get access to europe. But in the past, wasn't it the other way around?
But more to the point, Europe ( especially western europe ) is significantly wealthier than China. Why is it that China is investing in poorer european countries and not the wealthy western european countries? They can find money to fund wars all over the world, but can't find money to invest in tech/science in central and eastern european countries?
I suspect that the reason wealthy WE countries aren't investing in EE and the Balkans is that it is in general, a poor investment (due to corruption and brain drain).
The real question should then be - why is China investing in those same countries?
You can actually gain a lot from investing in "poorer" Eastern European countries, like a lot of tech outsourcing occurs there because the intellecutual labour is much cheaper yet the quality of work is comparable to Western European standards.
A lot of products or scientific research can be made at a much cheaper price in East Europe and maybe even at a higher quality. The issue for Western European countries is that they don't need to and likely don't have the huge budget that China has to put into foreign investment. Also although China may seem like it is investing a lot, it's not much in terms of its budget so it seems much more affordable to China.
Also China is also investing in Western Europe as well, they are more or less doing a scattershot approach as can be seen by the German acquisition. Its probably just that Western Europe isn't as receptive and doesn't need as much.
It's not profitable because movement of skilled labor is free across whole EU.
If you've poor countries in EU then a company from rich EU country can easily buy large farmland or ship out dirty/sketchy industries (waste recycling companies who just set waste on fire) to poor countries. This way you can keep pollution away from your shores while buying the beneficail resources (like farmland) at cheap.
Resources go where money is. Now, resources can be either agriculture lands or skilled labor. If you expand the market by adding lots of poor countries to your free trade alliance, you'll notice that the rich countries get way more richer at faster rate than poor countries.
Think about an EU where every country is equally rich and has equally wealthy population.
Then buying large farmland in Romania will be cost as much as in Germany and what happens next? Romanian companies might also end up owning large lands in Germany.
How is that beneficial for rich members of EU to make poor ones richer? You end up losing country over your country's resources to foreign power.
China knows this and that's why they invest in poor countries to create a bigger market on favourable trade terms. Now, these terms don't even need to biased in favour of China if China deals with poor countries as the naturally China being richer will benefit from the effect outlined above.
So China doesn't need to be unfair to win and become rich while extracting resources from poor countries they invest in.
Is it good, bad or evil? Depends on how you think about other players like Sacadinavia and Western Europe. I don't know why we should treat China any different if I am a poor European country.
it's a scattershot approach. the size of china and it's appetite for growth means it invests everywhere, its concentrated wealth and power is being dispersed globally in order to throw as many seeds as possible and water the ones that seek to grow. they're in africa, south america, eurasia, se asia, oceania, western europe, the middle east. it's very similar to what japan and south korea did domestically with miracle recoveries in their respective post war periods - but on a completely global scale. you give everyone a chance, and reinforce the ones who take it with good faith, the bad self-prune themselves and behavior can now be correlated to outcome. never throw good money after bad, and always work out some deal when you get something in return for something.
china needs this to work, or it is facing a real crisis (constitutional, demographic, cultural) in the near future. the middle income trap leads to stagnation and possible revolution unless you can centralize population (it needs 100 tokyos) and largely flatten your wealth distribution before it happens, but avoiding it is preferential to dealing with its effects.
the idea that china is doing this alone is also a fantasy, in reality it's working within the global system of international lending and finance to open as many doors as possible to trade, growth, accelerated development and good outcomes for domestic populations. european and american funds can't get through the door fast enough to get behind chinese at scale manufacturing and development of the undeveloped parts of the world.
i think they will fail, but for largely unmentioned and unrelated reasons to the ones presently discussed. any system like china will risk total collapse around leadership changeover, and it needs more than 20 years to achieve new stability goals and at that moment - when xi dies - it requires a stable partner to secure the hand off, and at the rate of hysteria in america, two decades from now, i can see capricious opportunism on the part of a deflated western elite take over sound judgement and prudent long term thinking. the quiet horror of the thousands of kilometers of abandoned high speed rail like skeletal bones across the world as we enter some new global minimum is vividly in my mind as i think of the most likely outcomes.
That's only for city folk who essentially trap their cats or dogs in their apartments to help with their loneliness. Frankly I think pet ownership in cities should be made illegal because it's harmful to the pets and wild animals.
What a dog is like or a cat is like depends on setting. A dog is far superior to a cat on a farm or out hunting or in nature. You'll notice a lot more "quirks" out in nature with a dog than a cat.
It's why dogs were domesticated long before we domesticated any animal.
The only thing cats have over dogs is their athletic ability. But in terms of human qualities and interactions, dogs pretty much evolved to be with humans. People who think otherwise might have that parasite that cats give to their owners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNZtI7hbvI
Since china exports so much and we export so little, rather than send empty shipping containers back to china, we fill it with our garbage and send that back to china to recycle.
China exports goods. We export garbage to china. And it's been going on for decades.