They are implicitly comparing media sources to non-"media staples", such as your gut or your dreams. There may be "general information sources" better than those.
Seems like Node.js isn't the only language where people notably introduce dependencies.
So, global-yet-Western corporations outsourced manufacturing to to China, some "unfair" trades that have long-term benefits for China happened, and now Chinese companies can now compete against those corporations (at least on Amazon).
I don't see how the West is lost, even after the author claims that if there's a war against China, "You’d need to walk around naked because you have no shirt, pants, socks, or underwear". Global-yet-Western Companies that outsourced manufacturing to China like Nike and Apple seem to be doing very well.
Furthermore, why is the fact that Chinese companies can compete after 30 years (while following the CCP rules) a bad thing? Did globalization go wrong because this wasn't supposed to happen? Was China supposed supposed to just be the world's cheap manufacturing for eternity? If so, a better title for this article would be "How China Was Not Lost".
> if there's a war against China, "You’d need to walk around naked because you have no shirt, pants, socks, or underwear".
I agree that this is hyperbole and a bad example.
I'm not sure how long the author thinks such a war would last, or the aggregate US stockpile of textiles, or the source of cotton inputs into Chinese textile manufacturing, and so on...
Both I'm going to go out on a massive limb here and assume that even a decade-long cold war with China wouldn't result in a single American walking around naked who would have otherwise been clothed.
There are geopolitically significant manufacturing sectors where the west has ceded important ground in the last couple decades. Daily-use textiles isn't one of them.
What was supposed to happen is openness to the West was supposed to move China away from dictatorial government. Approximately nobody cared whether China got rich or stayed poor; the goal was that China become free.
The original goal was to divide and conquer the communist block (taking advantage of the sino-soviet split/wedge).
After the collapse of the USSR western companies and governments saw shiny ($) ($) in their eyes and could not help themselves. They thought giving up some intellectual property rights was worth getting a leg up on their other western competition because they thought they’d be able to fend off completion local to China as they presumed it would adopt western ideas (law, intl conventions, governance, etc.) despite history indicating otherwise.
The commenter you replied to seemed to be comparing 2 situations. That seems normal to me. Comparing things seems to be great way to understand complex issues.
What makes the comment a wrong way to discuss? Is it a bad form of comparison for some reason?
I've never understood why people support the escalating US-China conflict since it's so easy to just keep focusing on win-win collaborations but your comment gave me an insight.
Please let me know if this is wrong, but I think this is the argument:
1. The US is a better leader than China because it is a significantly better place. Notable US problems that cause lots of suffering are significantly less severe than notable Chinese problems.
2. As a result, the US government should put a lot of effort into making sure that China doesn't become too powerful. It is ok for the US to publish articles that are less reliable than those on Iraq WMDs because if China becomes too powerful, the world will be far worse. In particular, China should not become powerful enough to project its values on other countries as much as the US does. China also should not be able to non-democratically reform international, democratically-decided rules such as International Maritime Law.
For most people in the US, it would take heaps of evidence and learning could to even make them doubt that US might not be a significantly better place than China (Note that I'm not arguing that the US is not far better). On the other hand, many people in China doubt that the US is significantly better as China because of how much better they see their life compared to the past. So, they don't understand why people in the US are confident about their conflict against China.
I personally can't buy into this argument though because I lack the confidence in my personal philosophy to know what a "better life" truly is. However, many people in the US have a more stable philosophical foundation and could never be convinced that the US is not a significantly better place than China.
Chinese people don't believe the US system is inferior solely based on improvements in their own country. I think this discredits them. Chinese students study English and America in school, many have come as exchange students, they consume American media - they are comparing things firsthand in a way that Americans mostly refuse to do.
Nice anecdote, I tried to speak more to the point that I think that most US citizens are right to support the US escalating the conflict against China. Their values align with their actions.
Furthermore, people that think they can convince US citizens that they should not escalate the conflict are focusing on a lost cause. This does not mean no discourse should happen, but people should understand that differences in opinions are due to very big differences in values.
I did not look much into why a Chinese citizen would support China escalating the conflict against the US nor have I done much research on how China builds up anti-US sentiment.
> On the other hand, many people in China doubt that the US is significantly better as China because of how much better they see their life compared to the past. So, they don't understand why people in the US are confident about their conflict against China.
Are you refering to military conflict? My guess would be that the Chinese people are very misled about the military prowess of their country. It seems like a weekly occurrence that a PRC military propaganda video is shown to actually use footage of foreign military exercises.
On the other hand, the US military (one might argue government as a whole) seems to be slipping in basic competencies. The navy has had three very public ship navigation errors in four years, and continues to be absolutely clueless about drones. ("UFOs") The air force has a new fighter which is still not functioning at design capabilities, and the withdrawl from Afghanistan was less organized than the 1970s withdrawl from Saigon. At least in the US the failures are public and might inspire change.
1. Hedonism is "fairly correct". In a well-fed and low-violence society, the pleasure/pain axis explains >40% of what every human cares about, especially chronic pleasure/pain.
- 1a. Both the US and China are low-violence and well-fed.
2. Obesity is responsible for a high amount of pain. Furthermore, there are few things in society that don't kill you which are worse that obesity.
- 2a. People don't die that much in societies like China.
3. Modern entertainment is a good painkiller. However, obese people that consume it still experience great amounts of pain throughout the day. Entertainment that distracts people from fixing the chronic pain they feel is a negative to society.
With these assumptions, the US doesn't look like a significantly better place than China. In theory, the freedom enabled by the US allows people to do well on the pain/pleasure axis. In practice, the US enables companies to do things that lead people into greater chronic pain.
Note that I think that Taiwan could be a significantly better place than China by this logic.
Those are definitely good quality of life indicators.
Every country can do better. The US should do better at a lot of things and poverty, inequality, and racism are for sure big drivers of things like childbirth death rate, lack of education and more!
But to OP's comment, there is no way in hell you can convince me or even a significant minority of Americans that China is better on the whole or even on a minor slice.
Lol even life expectancy and health seems like a lot of people here don't care about and are perfectly happy to guzzle cola and sit in front of a tv lmfao.
In terms of do better, China's list is ginormous and some of the things on it - like not building interment and forced 'integration' for millions of their citizens - are so extremely opposite of the values most here hold that it far outweighs any good weights on this 'better than' scale. It feels farcical to say otherwise.
I commented an open ended question in the first place is because these one off comments similar to OP feel to me exactly like what the article shows are active campaigns to interact on social networks like HN. But pointing that out without proof (impossible for me to get) is against HN ethics. I'm guilting of doing it though this is a moral and emotional issue for me.
Plus we americans are pretty self confident and often beligerantly arrogant. Makes it hard to convince people anything beyond american exceptionalism even on obviously nice things. Like that historical pamphlet comparing French lifestyle during the war that was posted here a long time ago. Yes they can value family and well being over working, that's horrible and un american ;) !
The author seems to be say in the article that writing readable code, at least for yourself, is still an important goal. I think they are arguing against why a writer shouldn't be expected to take it further.
For example, should a new grad be able to read your code without help? Should a 5 year old? At some point, you are spending more time writing design docs, refactoring the code, simplifying the tests, and gathering learning resources than you are just writing code that works.
Newer engineers rarely hear about how much they need to learn to read good code, and how much disagreement there is about what good code looks like. As a result it is easy to get into the mindset that "surprising" or "complex" code is bad. Instead, it would be a lot better if engineers are encouraged from the start to see reading code as a challenge. Nobody starts off knowing grep, folder organization conventions, go-to-definition shortcuts, and architectural design patterns needed to understand certain pieces of code.
To improve yourself, you are better off focusing on writing code, but at the organizational level, it's better for the team if people are willing to assume that reading code and writing readable code aren't an easy tasks.
Except that people are too lazy to use exceptions that are checked at compile time.
The main benefit of Go is that the people that defined the
library ecosystem actually decided to handle errors. It's the bare minimum, but it's better than just forgetting that the error exists and not documenting it either.
The language is ... not the best, but the libraries tend to be more robust.
Libraries can almost never handle errors - they can only signal them. And Go libraries are particularly bad at this, because they almost always return error strings, instead of meaningful error types, which means you can't easily handle a subset of errors. Even if you did, Go's errors suffer from the same problems as exceptions in many languages: there is no way to document what errors your function can actually return, just that it returns some error.
What language are you thinking of when saying Go libraries do better at error handling?
doesn’t allow f to declare any checked exceptions. We could catch and wrap everything but that obscures the useful code without any improvement in safety.
I think the larger problem is that everybody expects that they have to get better, and they have to get better quickly. That's why people injure themselves doing pretty much anything requiring physical exertion.
Recovery is important. Maybe it will be better if people see
exercise as a secondary tool for improving their health/recovery rate, rather than the primary tool for becoming more powerful.
I've heard stuff before about the fact that conglomerates like Tencent make it hard for Chinese startups to get money. Is that true and potentially the larger factor?
Given that it's so easy to spend 3+ hours a day on internet entertainment, I find it logical that ad-driven social media is a productivity drain. However, are they simply addressing a symptom of why people get hooked to social media? What's stopping people from watching TV for 5+ hours a day like certain older, retired generations?
In Australia, we call this 'cultural cringe', and also express strong preferences for foreign produced media.
I personally would rather stare at a blank wall than read fiction by local authors- it is always too familiar a setting and doesn't provide the escapism I am looking for.
Is China doing anything so that it's worthwhile for students to learn practical skills rather than focus on getting into a college?
It's harder to get society to value college degrees less, but I don't see much changing unless there are many stable, low/medium-risk business opportunities available to those with degrees from lower-ranked schools.
It feels like they are just addressing a symptom, and not trying to tackle the larger issue...so I'm curious why they would do that
Although a few decades into the industrial society and with the purge of traditional mindsets during the Cultural Revolution, they are not easy to be removed.
The old saying is 万般只有读书高, which basically translates to "Read books and pass your exams and you are going to have a bright future". This reflects the fact that ancient Chinese needed to pass some state exams to be selected as officials. In ancient Chinese (and today still in some parts of China), being "in the bureaucratic system" is the best thing.
Practically skills were looked down (I actually think it was a lot better back in the 50s~80s when people with practical skills were more or less not looked down, but things started to come back in recent decades), Merchants were looked down (but nowadays they enjoy higher status thanks to Capitalism). As a matter of fact, schools that teach practical skills (技校) are looked down and it's a lot easier to get into than the universities.
It's definitely not black and white nowadays (after all we went through a few revolutions in the last century), but the mindset is still there IMHO. It's just buried deep. I'd actually argue that the same mindset can be found in American parents too (Do you want to do X in the future like BoB?)
You are 100% right about just addressing the symptom and that's the what Humphreys do best.
It's not just a mindset that has been passed on but a mindset that is caused by circumstance.
I used to teach in China and one of the things I noticed that doesn't get attention is the impact of the one-child policy on that one child. You had a largely socialist system that turned largely capitalist so you have all these parents nearing the end of their careers without much to show for it (because they grew up in a largely socialist system) and their main shot at a better life is a single child that they expect to support them beyond what the state provides as they age. This is a recipe for a ridiculous amount of pressure parents put on their single child, and that single child is aware that they have the future burden of supporting two parents in the future. It was really enlightening to witness these consequences first hand.
>I used to teach in China and one of the things I noticed that doesn't get attention is the impact of the one-child policy on that one child.
Actually a lot of people noticed because the previous generation usually have a lot of siblings, like 3-4 are not uncommon.
Agree with you on the other points. The one-child policy is controversial but TBH I'm not in the position to shed more light on this policy. Back then people seemed to be really worried about over-population and others.
I'm not sure how this is going to play out. Population estimation seems to be pretty difficult to do it correctly because there are so many variables. But we will see.
Do you mean that Chinese education must involve Western values? For example, is logical reasoning a Western value, and the Chinese government cannot exist if their citizens think logically? Maybe freedom is something that is universally desired by all humans, and the Chinese don't know that.
I'd actually guess that a ban on for-profit tutoring is a larger risk for the CCP. Students spending their time unsupervised could lead to more "unwanted though" than students spending their time memorizing and reasoning around well-vetted facts about how governments work or about the history of Confucianism.
Seems like Node.js isn't the only language where people notably introduce dependencies.