sohois
3d ago
I think this is a little charitable to Xi. By obvious comparison, I don't think many would deny that Mao really was a true believer in communism and in rooting out the bourgeoisie and rightists. At the same time, he grew increasingly comfortable in wielding purges against internal enemies and critics and the more he purged the more his circle of enemies and critics grew in his mind. There were a great many long time comrades and allies that ended up targets of Mao's paranoia.
In fairness to Xi, there's no evidence that he is inflicted with the madness that Mao most likely had in his later years, but I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that as he becomes more comfortable wielding purges as a weapon, he would be increasingly inclined to use them for even minor slights and disagreements. He can be both a true believer in anti-corruption and still use that as an excuse to get rid of people that were once close to him. I'd be stunned if most of his inner circle weren't already guilty of corruption in some small ways, given how endemic it was to the CCP for so many years. Especially an elder like Zhang.
sohois
4d ago
If you have read a reasonable amount of webserials then it's hard to imagine you won't enjoy PGtE. I feel like the general consensus is that it's one of the 'big three' alongside Worm and Mother of Learning in terms of quality and popularity
sohois
4d ago
I read the very first English translation by Brewitt Taylor, which was perfectly readable even though it was Wade-Giles romanisation. Per Wikipedia, a 1991 translation by Moss Roberts largely superseded that one as the definitive English localization.
It's a very dense novel with thousands of named characters. Not something I'd recommend to someone that wasn't either a sinophile or familiar with the setting through video games or other media already.
sohois
4d ago
I have to assume a few members are simply looking at who posted it and reacting off of that.
sohois
13d ago
Why would Disney have done that in the 2010s? TV was not a focus and prestige TV in particular was funded by other, more profitable ventures. The Force Awakens probably made more profit than every season of Game of Thrones combined.
sohois
20d ago
This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online
This seems like a strong claim to make without evidence. Extraordinarily popular, really? I'm sure you can find a few people posting such things but it feels like a massive weak man. Certainly I haven't seen such a narrative much at all in places like Reddit and other left wing spaces.
sohois
21d ago
Yes.
The old adage that traditional Chinese food is nothing like Western Chinese food is overblown. You can go into any restaurant in China and order Kung pao chicken, egg fried rice, and stir fried vegetables just like the West.
The difference comes because Western Chinese is mostly just Cantonese restaurants. China is an extremely large country with a long food history and there is a massive amount of regional variation. Discussions about "Chinese food" are the equivalent of talking about European food and then being surprised that not every restaurant in Germany serves pizza and pasta.
sohois
25d ago
Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.
In toll collecting and many other private enterprise positions, that kind of measurement is typically easy thanks to revenue. Tollbooths are simple enough that it probably doesn't work for an average and elite performer, but let's say we're comparing bad to good, one of McNamara's morons against a regular high school graduate. In such a situation, the moron would stick out within a month or less and be fired.
But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care. And the only reason this Gino person was fired wasn't because of bad research, but outright fraud that took decades to unearth.
sohois
1mo ago
I can't speak for continental Europe, but a public communication like that would be easy grounds for gross misconduct in the UK, so wouldn't make much difference
sohois
1mo ago
That there are some exceptions does not disprove the point that China places heavy restrictions on foreign businesses operating there.
sohois
1mo ago
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the Chinese manufacturers appear to be treating the market as very much a cash cow and not at all going for price competition. Their models are like 2-3x the Chinese price for the same cars.
They are putting out sub £10k garbage for £30k prices
sohois
1mo ago
You've already got like a hundred responses, but none point out the obvious:
the problem is that Indians are poor, and there are more than a billion of them. When poor immigrants come to western countries, there is like a 1 in 2 chance that they will be Indian.
There's nothing particularly unique to India that makes them unpleasant that other immigrant nations lack. They are just the most populous by far.
sohois
1mo ago
But none of the positive economic indicators apply to European countries? No shit Scotts article on the US doesn't apply! They haven't had years of strong GDP growth or wage growth
sohois
2mo ago
I notice I am confused by your premise.
First of all I think it's a simplification.
there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works
Are these the two sides? I wouldn't agree. I think you're bunching together a lot of disparate groups. I think the main group you are trying to describe are those who believe a high level of structural, technologically driven unemployment is coming and propose UBI as a way to prevent huge numbers from falling into poverty or rioting.
But when you see arguments in favour of UBI, plenty are more prosaic, liking it from a Friedmanite perspective as the most effective method of welfare.
Between the technological UBI and libertarian UBI enthusiasts lies the most populous group: the midwits. The standard reddit proponent, they are aware of some of the technological arguments, and some of the efficiency arguments, and are smart enough to know that communism is a dead end. Thus they attach to UBI as a way to sound smart while still pushing the type of left wing welfare they favour.
When you talk about left vs right, I think you are mostly seeing arguments from the latter group, and are ending up with a bunch of weakmen. Hence why you are arguing against "affordability", because you're seeing people whose proposals begin and end at confiscating all the money from billionaires worldwide. The reality is that there are costed UBI proposals, both for current welfare or post-AGI welfare.
but let's ignore all that. My second point of confusion is how you imagine this post-AGI economy at all. I'm assuming that we're putting ASI to the side, whether through slow-takeoff or because you believe it impossible, so AI that hits human level but no higher. Is this AI purely limited to the realms of current LLMs? Are you assuming no equivalent leaps in robotic technology? How long do you expect this period to last? What's the actual level of unemployment you are expecting?
I'm trying to imagine something like self-driving cars, level 5 with no requirement for human supervision. So you reduce the work week to a 30/20/10 hour max or whatever. Does it matter if no one ever needs a human driver again?
Is the assumption that AGI largely acts a super performance enhancer but generically, so that every current job can still be done by humans?
I'm not saying that this is an impossible scenario or we couldn't at least theorycraft some way that it works, but it seems like it needs a very specific set of future developments to make sense.
And this for me is the biggest reason why few people talk about work weeks and instead focus on UBI: it's simple.
Whether you have AGI LLMs, or robotics, or ASI; whether you have 25% unemployment, or 50%, or 100%, or even if it's all a big luddite fallacy and there are loads more jobs created, UBI still works as a method of welfare. You don't have to know the future path of the economy or technology to put forward a solution.
sohois
2mo ago
Either that or they offer Korean BBQ and didn't bother taking the option off the delivery menu
sohois
2mo ago
Enjoy is somewhat of a different experience than "the prequels are overall good". I enjoyed the prequels as a child and I expect I could rewatch them with my own children without complaint. They are certainly more interesting films than most of Disney's output. But good films? Nah
sohois
2mo ago
Sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who believes this. There's a group of star wars fans who obviously like any Star wars content and have been suckered by memes and cartoons, but I doubt you'll find many who think the prequels are good movies. People can enjoy many terrible movies
sohois
2mo ago
Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke
Does this post simply pretend that the prequels didn't exist?
By the time of TLJ, the past 5 movies in the Star Wars canon had veered from just about ok to downright garbage (technically there was that cartoon movie as well but I don't think anyone counts that). The series was batting 2 for 7
sohois
2mo ago
Self-study? It's the same as any other language these days, grab your preferred app and go through all the lessons. Duolingo is shit for Chinese and I haven't really used many of the options myself, but I understand that DuChinese and HelloChinese would be good to get started with.
And the other thing about ubiquitous smartphones is that there really is no reason to learn hand writing anymore, because everything can be done with pinyin and copied if you have to write something.
sohois
2mo ago
The BBC are establishment progressives. They do largely adhere to the status quo, except on cultural issues where they are invariably well to the left.
That one of their editors appears to be a bit of Zionist apparently had no impact on their fawning coverage of Hamas talking points, as demonstrated in the reply right below yours. It's a similar argument that Davie and Turness are both Tory appointments with conservative leanings; somehow it didn't prevent the BBC from this blunder, or the hundreds of Gaza blunders, or their "LGBTQ desk" somehow getting veto power over any and all trans related articles.
sohois
2mo ago
I think you're overblowing the women's football stuff massively: you might ask who benefits from the addition of the Ethiopian league or the Romanian second tier or the myriad other tiny leagues you can rock up to as a manager. Adding women's football is largely a matter of expanding their database and I can't imagine it was some big programming challenge. Other than the dumb weight issue, I can't imagine any of their problems were due to women's football compared to the general engine change and their overall incompetence at designing a UI and graphics engine.
As for the why, then yeah I think you're correct:
idealistic projections of future female fanbases
Games like FIFA and FM have pretty much maxed out the male audience, so what better way to please growth hungry execs than promising a whole new female audience to exploit?
At least for FM, it makes sense because of the aforementioned matter of just expanding their database (compared to modelling hundreds of new players and new animations in FIFA, for example)
sohois
2mo ago
As far as I can see, a couple of posters have taken issue with your claims around territorial gains for Russia, with no posters suggesting that Ukraine will turn around and reconquer lost territory.
sohois
2mo ago
Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though? And by serious, I mean people who don't solely read or work for the likes of NYT or BBC. Mottizens or similar. Outside of a hope that sanctions might eventually force Russia to the table, I would be surprised if anyone believed in a Ukraine military victory.
If by "Western Europeans" you're referring more to the governments than the people, I think the answer is less learning from history and rather the same as for every modern crisis: a large number of incompetent and completely bubbled officials, unable to deal with the complexity of modern life
Even before the cultural revolution Mao had strategies to weed out any opposition like his 100 flowers campaign. I'd have to check my books but I'm fairly certain there were quite a few close allies caught in some of his early purges as well.
That being said, you're right that comparisons between Mao and Xi end at both being heads of the CCP. Despite my earlier statement, Xi is not a top down dictator the way Mao was. The current CCP is too large, too complex for it ever to be controlled by the whim of one man. Mao's CCP was large, but it really could be said that everything came down from the top; hence many of the more idiotic decisions. The innumerable technocrats can keep the engine of China running even if Xi was suddenly inflicted with the madness of Nero.
If there is a comparison for Xi, it's the Chinese emperors. Perhaps a one of the Qing, who wielded great empires but we're at a loss for the minutiae of the far reaches. In the first opium war, China was pretty easily beaten by a relatively tiny expeditionary force from Britain simply because the emperor never had a handle on what was happening and his delegated generals ended up in petty squabbles. So this example might reinforce the notion that Xi is trying to purge 'incompetence' rather than 'corruption' or 'opposition'.
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