Almost any country which tries full on communism sadly ends up in a similar scenario. See USSR, Mao's China. In Mao's China, it was well apparent that the communal farms weren't working and even the people's daily wrote a story on it. The then high ranking party officials also opposed them. But Mao still got rid of them all and continued, causing several famines.
The USSR at least pushed hard for science, engineering and technology education. Political party type and organization aside, the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, hospitals etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...
Much of the "progress" in the USSR was based on slave labour [1]. And it was not limited to just physical labour. Many intellectual feats were also the product of people working in, what essentially amounts to, a prison [2].
According to this study [0] the gulag deaths were approximately 830,000 from 1934 to 1953. It is important to know however that 70% of the deaths occurred between 1941 and 1944 (included) so they can kinda be attributed to difficulties from War Period. Also, it's important to note that antibiotics didn't become available until after WW2.
To put things into perspective, I have an interesting comparison for you. Using the same source as above for the USSR, and this report [1] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics we can say that Mortality in the gulag in 1953 (236 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) was lower than mortality in US prisons today, both in state prisons (303 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) and federal prisons (252 deaths per 100,000 prisoners).
A close friend's father was one of the persons to return from Gulag. He was one of the few people that buried the rest of the camp, due to him being immune to whatever disease that killed everyone else. Survived, came back and conceived my friend, all thanks to a lucky mutation somewhere.
that atrocities are not the domain of any particular political or economic ideology or system, but rather a danger that we need to fight against actively everywhere, and now.
According to the BJS data sheet linked in grandparent, the leading causes of death in prison for 2016 are:
- Cancer (1,128)
- Heart Disease (1,025)
- All Other Illnesses (525)
- Liver Disease (260)
Cancer and Heart Disease are also the leading causes of death for people not in prison. I don't think this is at all convincing evidence of an "atrocity."
Taken as categories, 44% of people in prison die as a result of illness, 31% as a result of suicide. (both sourced from BJS still) Both avoidable with the right funding, and yes, atrocities. If we're going to have a justice system that lives up to what it claims, a side effect of a prison sentence shouldn't be death.
As far as I understand it they also in many cases virtually held scientists or their families hostage to the outcome. Fail and you or your family gets sent to the gulags. One example is Yuri Gagarin's cosmonaut partner and his getting burned on re-entry due to rushing things to get under a deadline to avoid “consequences”.
Or if not sent to the gulags, sent back to a much lower standard of living. People with the equivalent of masters degrees in electrical engineering, aerospace, structural engineering etc could expect to have a fairly decent apartment, chance to get in the waiting list to acquire a family car, and other "high standard of living" compared to persons working in a manual labor job. Fail at whatever scientific or engineering endeavor your project was working on, and expect to lose your nice apartment and benefits...
They were particularly encouraging of scientific endeavors that contributed to national posterity over other nations and disregarded the rest. Intellectual pursuits in politics and really any criticism of government or social norms could get one easily disappeared.
> the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938.
[...]
Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[1][92] in addition to 136,520 deaths in the Gulag;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million
The Soviet universities also had Marxist agriculture departments that guaranteed year after year of food shortages due to "bad weather". Anyone who disagreed was purged until only Marxists, whom they defined as the only true "intellectuals", remained.
True anti-intellectualism is when you don't allow intellectual debate. It doesn't require emptying the universities entirely. It is sufficient to empty them of anyone who doesn't sufficiently support the mandated opinions. You can then define those politically pure supporters as the "intellectuals" and anyone who doesn't go along with them as, by definition, "anti-intellectual". You then have an anti-intellectual system where intellectual debate has been silenced, but the universities remain open and anyone who disputes their pronouncements is on the outside and is called "anti-intellectual".
Unlike Huawei, TikTok doesn't have critical production dependency on the US (specialized semiconductors). Huawei also won't have been too impacted if just their imports were blocked in the US. TikTok will be hurt without US customers, but they are too big in China that they will easily survive. And will easily compete worldwide against any US company.
The reasons I'd seen for considering a US ban on TikTok were all security related (i.e., various claims to the effect of TikTok collecting data on US citizens for usage by the CCP). Those reasons, if valid, would seem to remain valid even in the face of your points here.
Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.
I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).
True, but if an objective party was reporting on this, I think they would mention that it was in fact a thief taking such precautions, rather than a non-descript local resident.
Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you?
I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils.
As someone who has family in Syria that was bombed by US and their allies but had never been bombed by China, I'd rather China be spying on me. As far as I know, CCP has never attacked any country out of its borders.
If you are in America from Syria and have a dislike for America because of past bombings I would be more concerned with them over China.
As far as never attacked anyone. Of course they have. China is part of that US allies group fighting terrorism in your families homeland. Here is a list for you of all of the conflicts:
Those are almost all internal conflicts within China. The only major foreign wars China has been involved in since the founding of the PRC are the Korean War, the Sino-Indian border conflict, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. It's been more than 40 years since China was involved in a major foreign conflict.
It has border disputes, but it hasn't been involved in any major military conflict since 1979.
Most (probably all) countries in South and East Asia have multiple border disputes. Japan has disputes with China, Russia and South Korea. India has disputes with Pakistan, China and Nepal, and used to have disputes with Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. See a trend? Every major country in the region has or has had disputes with every neighboring country.
I am not in America so your argument is not valid.
As for your link, most of it is about peace keeping missions. The others involve countries that share a border with China. As I said, China has for the most part never attacked countries it didn't share borders with and I don't live in any of these. Even then, they haven't done carpet bombing, used chemical or nuclear weapons against these countries unlike the US.
I think the use of government surveillance is less likely to be used to conduct drone strikes and far more likely to prompt a Tiananmen square esque response to dissent. Thus I would firmly disagree with this sentiment.
I'd very much prefer Chinese spying me over USA, as they have significantly less effect on my life.
For example, if USA found out something about me that they don't like, they might prevent me from visiting USA in the future (which is something I might want to do), or they might force U.S. companies (e.g. PayPal, Google) to close my online accounts. And they might do those things unilaterally as I'm not a U.S. citizen.
On the other hand, I wouldn't care much if China banned me from visiting or from business with their companies.
US has their own camp too, not as bad as Uighur camps perhaps, but on a big scale: the Gaza Strip. It's status has been maintained through US's UN security council veto power for decades.
On a much smaller scale, we're still running Guantanamo.
If you're going to bring up Israel and the area around it, I was just looking at Wikipedia's page on wars involving the PRC, which reminded me (if I ever knew) that Tibet has been annexed to the PRC for just about the same time that modern Israel has been around.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US has not always been the preeminent ally of Israel since its founding. A lot of people seem to just have this vague sense that it's always been the situation. It's something that happened relatively recently.
They don't need anything more than a single Chinese national who they can blackmail to be able to get what they want. A quick meeting to the persons family to make sure they get the message its all it needs.
The CCP has leverage on any Chinese national who still has family in China.
For their handset SoCs, sure. But the real prize appears to be the base station market. As I understand it, Huawei's base stations are critically dependent upon Xilinx FPGAs. With those no longer available to them, Huawei is in a difficult position.
They can make their own FPGAs, true. These FPGAs will not be commercially competitive with Xilinx and Intel, so development costs won't be defrayed by commercial sales. IP laws may effectively prevent their sale in Western markets, anyway. And base stations made with these FPGAs won't be as commercially competitive, either (they'll be larger, more power hungry, produce more heat, etc.).
I don't know enough about 5G or base stations to say with confidence what other alternatives they might have. But I'm sure that they will be sub-optimal, at the very least imposing billions of USD in costs to Huawei/PLA/CPC.
I wouldn't be so sure. 14nm is already competitive with Xilinx FPGAs in terms of efficiency. All Huawei has to do is build ASICs instead, and they should keep or improve their performance. Xilinx is on a mix of 20nm and 16nm, by the way.
The billions of dollars that the Chinese Government will invest in order to compensate for the sanctions might have the unintended side effects of actually making performance of Huawei gear more efficient. The jump from FPGA to ASIC is pretty big as far as efficiency, and being able to have it financed for free to defend against US sanctions is pretty sweet.
They also happen to have stockpiled enough FPGAs to buy time for the transition.
They are not currently using ASICs, so ASICs are presumably not a good fit for the application. Maybe the NRE costs are too excessive given the very small volume, flexibility/updateability is essential, TTM is too long, something else, or some combination of the above. Any way you slice it, being cut off from Xilinx is going to cost Huawei.
Building a competitive ASIC will also be significantly more challenging now that Huawei has been cut off from all the major EDA companies.
Finally, I assume that Xilinx is well into development on future product lines based on newer processes. It would be extremely difficult for Huawei to bootstrap their way to commercially competitive FPGAs.
I don't think a manager should be coding at all, but Unless they did enginnering work in the past, it is hard to see them providing effective management.
If a manager trusts their reports, they can manage those reports effectively, because they are getting accurate data about what their people are doing. That trust (also known as being professional) short circuits the need for the manager to understand the work being done.
> If a manager trusts their reports, they can manage those reports effectively, because they are getting accurate data about what their people are doing. That trust (also known as being professional) short circuits the need for the manager to understand the work being done.
That works in the happy case. But lots of things work in the happy case.
The problems happen when ICs do things that are good for themselves, but not good for the company. One obvious example of this is resume-driven development.
>If a manager trusts their reports, they can manage those reports effectively, because they are getting accurate data about what their people are doing
This statement is nonsense. How does simply trusting your reports guarantee anything, let alone that you're getting accurate data about what your people are doing? How would you be the wiser if you didn't have a fundamental understanding of the work being done?
>That trust (also known as being professional) short circuits the need for the manager to understand the work being done.
Again, nonsense.
Your statement is akin to saying that being a successful basketball coach doesn't require knowledge of basketball, but rather just simply having to trust in your basketball players. Yet show me how many successful basketball coaches are there that never played the game, or was around the game to develop a fundamental understanding of the game.
Or hell, put it this way: if trust short circuits any need for management to have any understanding, then anyone could be a successful manager. I'm sure my dog trusts me and most folk, I guess by your reasoning, he could be the manager of any department in any company!
Yeah, nonsense. You need some fundamental understanding of what you're managing otherwise you're a bad manager, or simply a figure head...
Yes, and there the software managers normally report to non software executives. Engineers reporting to non software managers who are not at a director or VP level is a bad idea.
Ancient China has a very fascinating history. I think the world would be very different if the voyages started under the Prince of Yan would have been allowed to continue. China would have discovered the new world before Europe, and history would be drastically different. They really had impressive boats very early on.
This sounds like a bad idea. It creates more ambiguities in the language, and will require people to remember a lot more. It works in ruby because in ruby you can't assign a function to a variable like
A = len
But you can in python.
It seems python is adding more and more implicit stuff in every new release.
I think the day we can import braces from __future__ might not be far away.
You aren't helping your case by citing the Supermicro article, which was denied by both Amazon and Apple, led to widespread criticism of Bloomberg, and no source came forward.
This is fallacious thinking, if you already have biases that confirm or deny information in accordance with your conclusion. If you continue to apply different standards of proof you will end up with a distorted perception of the world. Maybe not in this subject (but maybe so), though certainly in many more.
i doubt you understand the "fact" you are talking about in person, rather than from some "news".
India is not re-educating anyone, but rules out muslim from citizenship? Not even mention the caste system, which is way worse than the color discrimination in US. When India became the 2nd biggest power in the world, all these will become target
Your arguments lack context. India isn't ruling out Muslims from citizenship. While the CAA is a very bad step forward, and has several problems, it is about what criteria satisfying refugees are available for quick citizenship, and doesn't apply to citizens of the country. India is certainly not running anything close to the camps China is running for Uyighurs.
India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
India has it's own shares of issues, but it's still an order of magnitude better than the Chinese Government.
> Your arguments lack context. India isn't ruling out Muslims from citizenship. While the CAA is a very bad step forward, and has several problems, it is about what criteria satisfying refugees are available for quick citizenship, and doesn't apply to citizens of the country. India is certainly not running anything close to the camps China is running for Uyighurs.
I could argue the same, the so-called reeducation camps only applies to xinjiang province, and for those could only get education from religion maniacs, rather than a normal school. And there were numbers of attack events were caused by it. Keep in mind Uyighurs are not only living in xinjiang, there are uyighurs living in rest parts of China and doing well.
> India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
Aye aye, it took 200 years for the US to have civil rights for all (still problematic), and Inida takes 70+ years still working on the caste problems, when it reaches China, which was founded after India, we are suddenly asking for all equal society. Yes, unwillingly education is bad, but keeping them blank and poor is evil. Learning skills to fit into a society, even it doesn't fit into your propaganda, is not wrong.
> The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
US also has strong anti hate crime law, and is one of countries offers most assistance for anti-discrimination, law doesn't help unless vast majority are educated to do so, and vast majority has economy power to do so.
I think the irony is that someone on HN will jump on this thread saying copyright needs to be abolished, and you didn't lose anything as the user wouldn't have paid for it anyways, with the irony being that a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads(which is far worse than any copyright), or works money by writing paid software.
I think a lot of HN readers write software that is hosted somewhere, so the users never see the code. Thus, copyright provides us no protection. (I suppose the ex-employee could always take the code and start their own competing service, so copyright does have some value.)
> a large majority of HN either earns money via tracking ads
Have you ever seen any numbers on HN users jobs? I’m continually surprised by the diverse roles of domain experts that appear in threads. I guess I’m hoping you’re wrong.
