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Friday, December 21, 2018
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Odds and ends
Harmful effects of salt
http://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=31831
Child photographers
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6511669/A-snoozy-puppy-features-RSPCAs-Young-Photographer-Awards.htmlWednesday, December 19, 2018
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Odds and ends
China and artificial intelligence -
Dangers of smart drinks
Smart-phone addiction
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6500021/We-like-smartphones-colleagues.htmlMonday, December 17, 2018
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Odds and ends
Leah
J. Zhang, Senior Engineer at Hospitality Industry
First of
all, to answer your question: Nothing, but perhaps give some diplomatic
pressure to Canada.
The 5G is a
technology plateau, an infrastructure like the nerve system in the human body,
so its importance is unchallenged.
As the CFO
and a board member of Huawei, Meng is obligated to cooperate any required
investigation that is against the corporation. She is not liable for the
corporate’s violation to the American domestic law. This is a common sense of
the business engagement. The US sanction is not legal to target on an employee
whom has its corporate to stand in front of him/her to take responsibility when
things happen. The liability for violating the sanction should be subjected to
the business owner(s) that technically refer to all Huawei stockholders. And
clearly, neither Canada nor US has enough detaining cells for that.
Therefore,
Meng will be released soon, or, because US must make sure it looks good, she
will be bailed out with some conditions. The US legal system will resume her
freedom but try to make it as ugly as possible. China actually doesn’t have to
do anything, as there is nothing it can do to intervene the Canadian and
American domestic laws.
We have a
Chinese saying: 势均，外交即实力；势不均， 实力即外交。 (When a country is balanced to another, the diplomacy
is the power; when a country is overbalanced to another, the power is the
diplomacy)
After all,
we have to admit the fact that the US is still superior to others in this era.
And none could afford to confront it at a full scale.
Now, the
question is, Why? Why her? Why now?
Why her?
Meng is the
daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the boss of Huawei. Ren was/is a
member of CCP, which has some ties with CCP high level administration. and Meng
could be successor of Ren. But giving her a hard time, it can attract
sufficient attention from the core of CCP, and give a big political slap to the
CCP’s face.
Why now?
Meng was
detained on the same day on G20 when Trump gave Xi 90 days to come up with some
real deals. Trump is known as a blackmail style business man, who gives out a
tough deadline to its rivals and threatens his rivals this and that. Just like
how he threatened Canada with a deadline to sign the USMCA, and say if you
don’t sign, I will sign with Mexicans without you, and how he threatened the EU
with a deadline by saying, if you don’t give me a better deal, I will put a
huge tariff on you. Not to mention Japan, Korean, etc… And Xi loves giving
blurry answers to buy more time, and play dumb when he clearly knows what Trump
wants. So Trump is like “OK, you wanna play dumb? I will make sure you fully
comprehend what I meant, and react to that!” Xi’s previous compromise on ZTE,
set up an example to Trump and his administration of how to prevent China from
dodging. Which is to point a gun directly on the head of the Chinese booming
industries. So China will have to be very serious about the upcoming 90 days.
One stone
Three birds
By asking a
foreign country to detaining a foreigner on its behalf. The USA delivered 3
messages to China and the rest of the world:
- Don’t you forget I am the Boss
of the global system, you do what I say, and you’d better leave your pride
at the door when I call you to my office! America First!
- I am and shall always be the
leader in the global ecosystem forever and ever and ever and to infinity.
The US is responsible for innovating the concepts and managing the system;
The European white folks, you are hired to sit in the office to execute my
orders, Asians especially the Chinese shall nail your butts tight along
its production lines, and make sure everything you make is like the words
on the back of an iPhone: “designed in California, assembled in China”;
Arabs just keep pumping your cheap oil per MY demand schedule, and black
people and Latinos just get back to the trees and make my yummy Columbia
coffee! America First! America First! !
- If you don’t follow my
instructions 1 and 2 above, then I can kill your economy/industry at
anytime, and I am capable of kicking you back to the stone age! Because
when I summon my allies to boycott you, they will hump you like Rough
Collies as they already abandoned their pride at the door! America First!
America First!! America First!!!
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So this is
going to sound really silly but hear me out.
The person
responsible for Donald Trump is actually someone I used to watch on television,
someone who I respected a great deal for his levelheaded analysis and complex
understanding on many topics important to Americans; a man who was trying to
give the average man and woman a voice in public affairs of importance. His
name, which some of you will know, is Phil Donahue.
Prior to
Donahue, Americans would sit and watch television as a passive audience. We
listened and sometimes formed opinions but we were not given a public voice, a
platform for our often ignorant ideas. In many ways, this was good. A layman
often knows nothing about the complexity of mathematics, physics, economics,
philosophy, etc., and without some significant time and effort is generally
incapable of grasping them. Consequently, the people provided a public platform
to discuss topics were people who were knowledgeable in their fields and,
because the rest of us were not given the opportunity to talk on those topics
(because we really knew nothing about them), we listened and learned.
Then Donahue
came along and did what seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Having heard
an audience member call out something in contradiction to one of his guests, he
went to the person and gave him (or her, I cannot exactly recall) the
opportunity to publicly disagree. Now, to his great credit, Donahue did not
merely accept what his audience members said, he would artfully point out their
ignorance, or give the guest the opportunity to respond and explain why they
were incorrect. The Donahue show was a civil setting for discourse, at least in
the beginning - and the new technique, which was the beginning of reality
television, improved the ratings. Why? Because Joe Blow finally felt like he
was being given the opportunity that only those with actual knowledge, the
experts, were given before - Joe and Josephine Blow now had a public forum.
They were also given the opportunity for fame.
Suddenly,
anyone could obtain a little fame, with no qualifications or accountability,
for the ignorant things they might say publicly through the medium of
television. Soon, others caught on to the new way of being famous, and the
silly desire to be noticed caused large numbers of people to begin saying
something, anything, no matter how ridiculous, to get their fifteen minutes.
Eventually, Donahue’s audience members were standing up and disagreeing solely
for the purpose of getting noticed, not because they even cared about the
topic. Of course, despite Donahue’s best efforts, there wasn’t time in the
soundbite setting Donahue provided to root out the idiots and explain their
ignorance. Moreover, part of the “fun” (and increased ratings) of the show
became watching Phil run from one person to the next and seeing his expressions
of exasperation at things they might say. Consequently, Joe and Josephine began
receiving just as much voice (and air time) as the experts and without any time
for logical refutation. The average person, having no special understanding or
knowledge, was now heard by the millions watching from home, even more than the
expert guests who actually knew what they were talking about.
Now, most of
the people watching television from home were similarly ignorant to those in
Donahue’s audience. Many had similarly ignorant ideas to the studio audience,
but now they found many others, namely the studio audience, saying what they
already ignorantly believed to be true. Furthermore, the Donahue studio
audience, by being given a voice on television, were couched within the public
setting previously associated with someone having actual credibility; this
emboldened everyone in their ignorance because, as the saying goes, there is
security in numbers. If others agreed with them, regardless of how outrageous
their thinking and logic might be, maybe they were right and all the experts
were wrong.
At this
point, capitalism stepped in. Networks realized that ratings were improved when
people were allowed a forum to speak as authorities about things they knew
nothing about, that more people were likely to watch if the show sounded a lot
like themselves rather than an educational reliable source of information.
Television became a combination of gossip mill and reality circus sideshow, and
the success of the Donahue show became the success of Jerry Springer, and
eventually the success of The Apprentice.
Soon, it was
impossible to discern the experts from the idiots. The idiots weren’t given
enough rope to hang themselves and the experts were not given enough time to do
it for them. All the while, television (and other forms of media) were
shortening the attention span of its viewers - meaning everyone - so not only
were the experts not given enough time to show the folly of the idiots, the
viewers no longer had the attention span needed to listen to the experts even
if they were given the time. Everyone started to tune out when someone talked
for more than thirty seconds, unless the person talking could either make them
laugh or make them angry; the anger could be either at the speaker himself, or
someone the speaker was blaming for something. This is a key point.
It is an
unfortunate fact that most of the population is not taught to think rationally.
Schools, which should be teaching and encouraging logic from kindergarten
forward, are focused on teaching children and adults what to think, not how to
think clearly. Children then are doubly screwed because they are exposed
constantly to media that shortens their attention span so greatly they are
unable to slow down and read or think on their own at all. The media focus has
been on keeping people emotional, not thoughtful. All of this has been
progressing for decades, beginning with Donahue, because it is good for
capitalism.
For example,
people think Hollywood cannot make good movies anymore but it is not true.
Hollywood doesn’t want to make good movies because it is not good for the
bottom line. If there were enough quality movies out there, people would become
good again at discerning what is shit from what is golden. For movie studios it
is better to use a formula that focuses, not on providing an artistic quality
product, but exciting the audience into stupidity; fast action that makes it
impossible to discern plot flaws, outrageous explosions, humor, over the top
statements that would make no sense if anyone had or took the time to actually
pick them apart, and a reasonable amount of sexuality (though sexuality has
decreased in most mainstream movies because with the proliferation of porn,
mainstream media cannot keep up, except with female audiences who do not watch
porn to the same degree - hence Fifty Shades of Grey).
All of this
laid the groundwork for Trump’s approach to success. A good part of the
American population is no longer capable of thinking with any rational depth.
Statements that are obviously ignorant and false are given credence because the
media, in all its forms, has been allowing them to have credence for decades as
a way of generating ratings and money. So Trump merely turned the techniques
used to generate ratings for television and increased movie goers into a
technique for winning in politics.
First, he
doesn’t care about truth anymore than Jerry Springer cared about truth.
Moreover, Trump knows he cannot make anyone laugh so that approach would never
fly. He never laughs or even smiles unless it is fake. He is the least happy
human being I have ever seen. Even Hitler genuinely smiled sometimes. Trump
never does. When he tries to smile, it comes off as a smirk or worse, a clown
face. But he has turned making people angry into a kind of twisted art form. He
has made thoughtful intelligent people, some of them good friends of mine, seem
smallminded by making them angry at people who are most in need of society’s
help. He has made those who have been used and downtrodden by the rich (of
which Trump is one, of course) angry at people who are not the cause of their
suffering (immigrants, minorities, gays and lesbians, women, etc.), angry at
other people who are even more downtrodden by the rich than themselves.
This is
possible because anger and heightened emotions inhibit the ability to think
clearly. Ask yourself how well you can think when you are spitting mad and you
can easily discern how anger makes one easier to manipulate. Moreover, make
everyone angry, one side at the other, and there is no path between them to
bridge the gap and allow both to see the real villains hiding in middle pulling
the anger strings.
Trump has
used the tools haphazardly created from decades of capitalistic avarice, to
create a unique kind of cult. If your family member is absorbed into a
religious cult, you would find that the cult tries to physically keep you away
from the person so you are unable to get them out of the environment that is
blinding them. Trump has used anger to create the walls that normally cults
have to create with physical separation. His base is separated from everyone
else through anger - their anger at everyone else, and everyone else’s anger at
them. If you are on the left and angry as hell at Trump’s base you should know
that you are helping Trump, not hurting him. He knows he needs you to be angry
as hell because your anger is what his base needs to lean against to keep from
toppling over on their own by hearing the irrationality reverberating from the
anger they feel.
Obviously,
Donahue never meant for any of this to happen. He was trying to do something
completely different, but he opened the door, allowing others to rush in and
exploit it for the sake of money having no idea where it would eventually lead
our country. I am sure no one, forty years ago, could have seen how this was
going to unravel with time but hindsight is 20–20, and Donahue was the catalyst
that began it all.
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Saturday, December 15, 2018
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