Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "PolyMatter"
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Erm... actually, yes, there are terms and conditions for someone to get these homes, and they vary quite a lot depending on prefecture. Even though the content of the video is mostly right, the intro was pretty misleading.
There are several different programs for people getting abandoned houses in different states of disrepair and legal abandonment.
It of course starts with most of those homes being abandoned sometimes for decades, so they are in such a ruined state that you almost have to rebuild everything in them, if not tear it all down and start from scratch. Some are not as bad, so they won't be given free, but with prices well bellow market.
You will be dealing with government sometimes, or sometimes it's relatives of the former owners. Well, not directly, it's either through some program or a real estate agency.
Some of them require you to not only start reforms as soon as you get them, you are expected to move in with family in a given period of time - you cannot get it for rental, 3rd parties or stuff like AirBnb. I think some allow that, but most of the programs I heard about you can only take the property if you are moving in.
Another good part of those are only granted for Japanese citizens, or foreigners with permanent Japanese Residence visas. Some requires you to have a job locally. Some have age gates, or are only giving to young families with small children. The spectrum is kinda huge.
There are all sorts of different situations there.
That is, if you are talking about all the abandoned houses in Japan... perhaps there is a program that is giving out abandoned houses for free with no strings attached there, but I find this very hard to believe. Real Estate in Japan is notoriously more stringent and selective. It's hard for even foreigners who have been working years in Japan and have no intention of leaving to sometimes rent a place, let alone buy one there, or get one for free. Some property owners explicitly won't sell or rent for foreigners.
But you know, this isn't unique to Japan... I've just watched a video on a similar thing happening in southern Italian towns.
Another thing to note on the video is that while yes, the mixed zoning rule allows for a lot of things in Japanese neighborhoods, it also comes with very strict regulations on what commercial and industrial places can do if they are located in a mixed zone.
Everything from how much noise they can do, how tall buildings can be, what materials can be used, along several other things are tightly controlled.
There is also a kind of a mixed assumption there... it is true that most of the real estate market and absurd rate of new constructions is due to older places getting torn away and new places being built to replace it, but a good portion of those old houses and homes are incredibly well built and sturdy - reason why they are still standing to this day. There are also lots of poorly built houses that came up in the 60s and so, mostly in urban centers, but it isn't the norm, particularly for abandoned homes that tends to be in small villages far away from urban centers.
Take note that these villages in the inaka where lots of these abandoned homes are, are also losing ground in terms of public transportation... if you intend to get something way out in the boonies for free, there are chances you will also need a car to go to bigger cities, and you might not have access to many facilities. There are exceptions of course like the one shown in the video, but most abandoned houses are located in villages that are also getting abandoned, train service might stop at some point, and stuff like hospitals and schools are also going away if it still exists.
It's less aging of Japan and other factors, and just plain urbanization. Kids of families who lived there moved to the city and have no plans to go back.
But in the age of these properties also lies problems that have nothing to do with how well built these places were. Very old traditional homes requires specialized maintenance and service for upgrades and repairs, they are expensive and sometimes very hard to find, and the expertise in it is dying with the older generations. Particularly for a category of homes known as minka houses, several aspects of the architecture, design, materials and a bunch of other stuff is close to artisanal, it doesn't fit mass produced stuff, so repairs and reforms can get super expensive to do.
Like the video said, code is also being constantly updated... so it ends up in a mix of things which often results in it being more profitable for owners to tear an old house down and build a new one in place to live, sell or rent rather than trying to do a full scale reform.
So, it's a huge combination of factors that led to this very unique real estate situation that Japan has. But interestingly enough at least for me, I think the weird way real estate works in Japan is also kind of a factor in a more equal economy that Japan has.
For instance, rent in major urban centers like Tokyo are still pretty expensive for what you get, but nowhere near the discrepancy in prices that you have in countries like US, Australia, Canada and UK. You'll pay half for more space in smaller cities, but it's not some completely absurd discrepancy. Even if you go a bit outside central Tokyo... say an hour away by metro, prices starts becoming pretty reasonable.
But anyways, I'm getting outside the topic here... there are lots of channels on YouTube with people going for these almost free places with several attached terms to them... Tokyo Llama comes to mind. If you are interested, check them out!
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This is too complex a subject to be covered in a single, or even multiple videos... so thanks for shoving as much as possible into one! xD
Questions and balancing out a few things though... I think sanctions at the scale that it was done against Russia coming from western nations against China would pretty much be - MAD - mutual assured destruction.
And I really mean this... it'd be equivalent of a small scale global nuclear war. Not total because that's extinction, but the consequences would be similar to a global war, particularly if sanctions and trade war goes both ways, which it probably would.
First of all, you gotta think about scale. This isn't to diminish the horror that Putin is causing leveraging his military against Ukraine, far from it, but Russia still is a BRICS country - a developing nation with limited effect on global trade.
China and the US are both an order of magnitude or more above the effects that sanctions in either would have.
You know how in several poor countries the sanctions against Russia and it's response has been causing famine and leading to extreme poverty at unprecedented levels? A sanction show off between China and western nations would lead to secondary and tertiary wars by itself, revolution conflicts in several countries, overturning of governments, and an unimaginable spike in extreme poverty and deaths throughout the world.
Because the web of dependency is far stronger than anyone would think.
Australia's case on reshifting exports and international costumers is just a very special and fortunate case, even though I'm sure it also caused a ton of hardship for lots of people involved.
China and US are both on a different level. Both countries export and import so much, they are composed of such large markets and industries, they in summary do so much that is consumed worldwide and consume so much that other countries produce, that reshifting things just would not be feasible. Countries on the US side would lose an extremely substantial part of it's clientele without China, several would also lose it's main source of all types of products, and the same thing would happen to countries that would side with China. Reshifting of several exports and imports wouldn't be feasible due to how large a market both of them are of so many different things. There isn't enough flexibility in the rest of the world to accommodate the change.
And it's such an insane amount of goods and services that reshuffling even the things that could be done, would likely not happen fast enough for a whole ton of things to survive. The world would be thrown centuries back having to focus their efforts on survivability alone. Because what you'd effectively have is a chain reaction of production, research and development of tons of different things being stopped because of a lack of this or that resource, machinery, tech and whatnot.
What you hear about an interruption of goods because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is what? Wheat, fertilizers and gas for the EU, right? There's more, but those are the main ones.
A sanction on China would yes, eliminate most rare earth minerals, but it's far from only that. Heck, that alone becomes only a detail of the overall thing considering we'd have little use for rare earth minerals if everything else stopped.
Honestly, I think the video downplayed the chip problem a bit too much. China might not have the latest tech in chip manufacturing, depending on tech of other nations to produce the latest most highly advanced products available - but that pales in comparison to how much it produces more simple chips and integrated circuits which whole entire categories of products depends on in large volumes. China is the 2nd largest importer as well as the 2nd largest exporter of integrated circuits in the world. The problem will always be on the volume side, and I cannot overstate how important that is. Modernity has been basically fueled by China's unparalleled capability of production and logistics.
And then, obviously, you have to consider that the number one in chip tech worldwide is none other than Hong Kong... in a divided world scenario, I seriously doubt Hong Kong would stay with western countries, even if right now they want to be independent from China. I think sanctions and disputes on that level would force Hong Kong, Taiwan and a few others to stick to China either by force of influence, or by pure force. Ultimately, it wouldn't take much for China to invade those and stop exports to the west, so the west ends up without the most advanced chips, and also without the more cheap common stuff in volumes.
South Korea has the other portion of the global chip manufacturing production, but it can't produce in volumes enough to attend western nations demands, and it's mutually dependent of China for production too.... so in effect, for a long period of time neither would have access to it because both sides would be scrambling to fill in the gaps and adapt to the new reality.
Ok, what else is China among the main global exporters of? Clothing, computers, broadcasting equipment, office machine parts... the list goes on. That's only for industrialized products.
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/chn/
As for commodities, look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_countries_of_agricultural_commodities
See the insanity of it? How many times China appears as the largest producer or at least is among the top 3?
This is of course because China is by far the country with the biggest population in the world, it has almost 1/5th of the global population... so yes, a lot is consumed internally, but a huge portion of that list also goes for export. Imagine the hit that it'd be for countries sanctioning China.
Here's another bit of an eye opener:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China
See the problem? No matter how big the effort, you don't just excise an entire fifth of a system and expect it to continue functioning. That is if we consider only China, and not the countries that would side with them. More likely, the world would be split almost in half.
What we'd really end up with, considering a total trade sanction scenario between China and US, is more like a whole bunch of middleman countries where products from both sides would be passing through directly to the other, just for survival sake. It's just not comparable to what happened with Russia.
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Hmmm... so, this is an argument against some myth of Chinese efficiency (which I personally didn't know existed), but to the point of perfection, arguing that their strategy also has it's own problems...
Which well, I agree with. Though I didn't really heard or believed in any myth of Chinese efficiency... guess I'm too old, efficiency myth for me goes for Germany, Japan and... Switzerland I guess, plus a few other European countries? Which also isn't true anymore I guess.
What China has is like almost a fifth of the world's population, a totalitarian regime, and a leadership that is highly focused in big infrastructure reforms... sometimes over things that should not be overlooked.
Other than that, it's delineating a problem that basically ALL major rail systems have throughout the entire world, including some of the most famous ones, like in Japan. Sometimes for different reasons and scales I guess.
For instance, the matter of profitability, which was translated to efficiency which I don't totally agree with, the problem with urbanization tied to ageing population in Japan has been forcing several sections of railways in Japan to shut down due to lack of demand. Not just that they aren't profitable and in the red for a long time - they've been shutting down, completely.
It's being replaced by smaller buses and taxi/car services, because you get towns reduced to only a few retirement age citizens that already have government support for transportation to hospitals and whatnot, so it just gets more cost effective to close railways and have public service staff drive them around.
But other than the particular case in Japan, it's just a reality of railways to have major hubs with tons of people generating lots of profit, balanced with lines that are always down on the red, have always been, and were built with knowledge that they likely would never be profitable. Because the service is there not only for profit, but as a way to interconnect the country. And it is often subsidized by the government with an understanding of this - it's worth the investment, even when it doesn't generate pure profit, because there are several other tangible advantages in connecting different parts of the country like that.
Between a problem that some countries have, including my own, of endlessly planning, wasting millions to billions of dollars on planning planning, scrapping, starting, stopping, scrapping, returning to drawing board, inaugurating, re-starting, re-planning, stopping, getting trapped into endless corruption and mismanagement investigations, etc etc etc development hell... man, I sure would rather have it done, and if it doesn't work at all even with government subsidies, it gets scrapped once and for all. Keep the stuff that works, eliminate what doesn't, but at least do something.
The city I'm currently living in, the state, together with populous states in my country, a grand country wide interconnect system... it's a running joke everywhere for how long they have been planned, inaugurated, built parts and scrapped, going down the corruption scandal investigation route, being re-announced, re-innaugurated, only to go down the same path over and over and over again. Current city I live in have been on this development hell for well over 4 decades now, a handful of different presidents and governors have cut the tape so to speak on it, it never happens, insane amounts of money disappeared into it. The last time a fuzz was made for it was during the World Cup and Olympics. Guess what? It still didn't happen. And yes, public money was stolen again by corrupt politicians. I don't think I'll see it happening during my lifetime. The entire project could've done like 10x over with the money that disappeared already.
I mean, yes, I am all too aware of all the problems China is having nowadays with major infrastructure reforms and build up... ghost towns and apartment complexes rotting away, expensive roads, railways and whatnot that don't get used, plus of course you have to consider the appalling work conditions that led to all this stuff being built in the first place. The human cost that led to China's meteoric rise cannot be ignored, it's an insane price to pay... which is always good to remind people that most developed nations also paid, just in different periods of time.
In the end, yes, China has it's own problems and it's not immune to several problems big infrastructure have everywhere around the world. I just don't think it diminishes the significance of China's meteoric growth in the past few decades, nor it says that at least in some things, we should be following some examples.
And in matters of efficiency... I'm not sure what the intention was. There's the lack of efficiency of something that gets done but ends up not optimally serving a purpose, due to poor planning, lack of vision, mismanagement or other reasons, potentially getting scrapped or abandoned altogether... and something that never gets done because it's actually a money and time drain, if not a permanent source of money for corrupt politicians.
I personally think there is an inherent benefit in getting things done, even when rushed or poorly thought out. It isn't ideal, and may cost a lot, but it's at least better than doing nothing while still spending money and time on it. The extreme of this is endangering the lives of people so poor the project was done, which does happens at times in China, but I think it's not the particular case of the high speed rail system... it's just that chinese government is putting a lot of faith into it's continued growth and investing a ton into infrastructure projects that would ultimately be necessary if the country kept growing like it was for the past few decades. Just that perhaps it won't, and it'll cost them a lot to maintain all that has already been done.
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Great arguments, particularly the last part.
I'll just add something that perhaps people don't realize much.
It is indeed particularly troubling the recent actions from PCR regarding respect to individual privacy, freedom of speech, and the whole surveillance thing, as well as potential state sponsored cyber attacks, and it is a main reason to worry.
But something people have to understand that this is in no way exclusive to China, including there governmental provisions that forces private companies to handle user data of the government or justice system requires them to.
It becomes a matter of how many powers are involved in requests, and how transparent the government is about it's actions.
I mean, it should be obvious to americans by now, but apparently not many people connect the dots. The Snowden revelations, plus Wikileaks, and several attempts by american politicians to weake or create encryption backdoors - all of these effectivelly partially did what the government and people are so paranoid of PRC doing - mass surveillance on private data, including that of citizens, politicians, military and whatnot from other countries.
The only real difference I see is that one country is declared in it's intentions, and the other does it under the guise of defence or policying, with similar results.
And I don't think many americans actually believe that mass surveillance stopped with Snowden revelations andnother scandals. People just accepted this new reality and decided not to take much further action.
Particularly on apps like Tik Tok, if you think about the scope of the service and what it can potentially harvest regarding private data, you are bound to understand that the harm the app can do with data collected is far lower than what companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft can do. And you know that all of those 4 companies are directly linked to previous cases of leaks, mass data selling, insecure handling of private data, and whatnot.
The damage regarding privacy that american companies have caused to americans, including mishandling of extremely sensitive information, extremely private and personally identifying data, is so extensive that really, private chinese companies don't even need to go as far as being obliged to hand their data to PRC in order for them to fet what they want. From Equifax leaks, to entire hospitals databases getting into the wild, to sensitive military and politicians data getting out, what more do you really need? For mass surveillance, not much. For targetted attacks, there are better, faster, cheaper and more effective ways to get to it.
I mean, when you have young adults and teens managing to attack something like Twitter as an almost free for all thing, really, do you think blocking stuff from entire countries really do much other than a trade war and economic losses for all countries involved? What really needs to be done, and security experts have been saying this for the beter part of the past decade, is that we need to create steps, strategies and put up policies to streghten security.
What is the point of restricting access to foreign software and hardware when internal practices are so poor that anyone can hack systems developed internally?
Huawei is a particularly eggregious example. There is no evidence of foul play, and if anything it'd be far better in the long run to let them operate partially with american or western developed os and software, as long as all os and software are being activelly vetted and secured by local communities, experts and whatnot.
Instead, blocking companies like that, leads to a situation of ultimately restricting choice, creating a wall, and letting systems be developed internally by China for China and other countries, which will happen because China is just too big a market to be left out. When Google and Android loses grip on chinese smartphone market, then you are losing yet another leverage right there, for nothing. The further China isolates itself from western countries, the worse it gets.
Because the people there are going nowhere, China will continue being the most populous country by far and the second largest economy in the world for a very long time, if it doesn't jump to first.
Most of people who thinks these measures are effective probably don't understand China on an even basic level. It's size, it's reach, how dependent of it we all are, how far it's economy reaches globally, how much leverage it has against countries like the US. Better to start getting this fast and in a hurry before you get caught with your pants down.
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Thanks for doing this video, it summarizes pretty well the arguments I'm having to repeatedly write to fight against the biases and misconceptions people have about chinese production.
I would have gone even further, because some of the rancid beliefs people have about China are really pervasive, rooted in racism, and dangerously blind.
It's not value judgement too, I'm not saying it's a good thing China has advanced so much with it's current government, I'm saying it's extremely dangerous to think of China in terms of technology as some 3rd rate country that only copies US and EU stuff. This is very far from the truth. It's been far from the truth for well over a decade now.
For instance, that extraction of rare minerals that is done in China? It is not a simple matter of having concentrated deposits in other parts of the world. It's about the technology and infrastructure China has developed over several years for extraction that is unparalleled.
There are some rare earth mineral mines in the US that basically mine the material, and then send it all to China for processing, because the mining company in the US just does not have the technology for refinement that China has, as well as regulatory barriers and whanot.
And this whole video is also valid for practically all other smartphone brands, because no other country has the output capability, mass production facilities, infrastructure for development and transportation that China has. If there is a concerted effort from electronic companies to start building replacement infrastructure elsewhere, it would still take decades to get anywhere close to what cities like Shenzhen can do right now... not to mention tons and tons of money.
Think of it like this - it isn't just about factories, it's also about the technology that was developed by chinese companies over several years, qualified workers, roads, incredible shipping infrastructure, trade routes, all sorts of politics involved, and after all that managing to attract all significant parties involved in making each tiny component inside of a smartphone which all have their own research and development cycles.
So, when Apple comes out to say they are moving production to some other country, what they really mean is that they are opening a factory or something to do a tiny point in the bible of things needed to put an iPhone together. It's final assembly of some product usually, because that is something that can be profitable if the local market can absorb it. Moving all steps necessary for a full smartphone assembly is outright impossible right now.
Also, about Google, closing doors and moving away software and services is waaaaay simpler than hardware production. But even Google is majorly regretting this, which is why the entire Firefly controversy came about. Because now, you have a country that has almost 5 times the population of the US that is living perfectly well without Google. They already lost that market to chinese companies, and entering the country today would be kinda meaningless. Microsoft launched Bing in China back in 2009, it's still the lowest performing search engine there.
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@bushy9780 I kinda thought about the 50/50 split not on countries, but more along the lines of population... and that's mostly because China already has close to a fifth of the global population already... so if you count in Russia, North Korea, a few other Asian nations plus some middle eastern, and lots of countries in the African continent... well, there you have it. I dunno where India would fall in that equation... neutral perhaps, but that's another huge portion of the world population right there.
In number of allied nations US and EU still have it, and they'd stick together. But in absolute population numbers, I think the split is closer to 50/50, though I'm not sure of implications. Guess I only thought about it that way because I also think a total trade breakdown like that would pretty much redefine lots of lines on the map... the level of destruction and rebuilding would likely unite several nations and also create stronger divisions along continental lines.
Long term, I agree somewhat. Devastation first, survival later. US would localize production and readapt, as would most countries I guess. Well, those that survive.
But on immediate terms, it seems to me China has the upper hand.
See, I think it's too much of an oversimplification to look at Chinese imports as outsourcing for cheap labor and mass manufacturing these days... this used to be true some 3 to 4 decades ago, but these days things are way more complex than that.
Like, the time when it was feasible to bring the jobs back per se, bring back industries, bring back production... that time has passed long ago. Now it'd be more like starting from scratch all over again. At least that's my personal theory and perception...
The way production, industrial processes, commodities extraction, logistics, plus a bunch of other things went over there for several decades now means that those not only stopped happening in the US and other nations, they also stopped being developed as processes themselves. So, it'd take time to get to the point China is today, not only on creating the entire infrastructure and logistics needed to fill the void, but there is also a huge technological gap that most people don't consider.
I read an article sometime ago on... I think it was lithium or some other material mining or extraction was closing doors soon in the US because it cannot compete with the tech of production developed in China. Or it was something about trying to re-open mines that are still useful, but they couldn't because they cannot compete with China. It wasn't only about labor costs and stuff like environmental regulations... it was about the technology and machinery China developed that wasn't available for those mines in the US. Something like that, sorry, couldn't find it.
Mass manufacturing is only a part of that technological gap, though it's the one mentioned most frequently. For basic operations like commodities extraction and automation, China has tech developed for purpose on site that most other countries don't have - because they don't need to produce in volumes and a rhythm that China does. Decades of the crazy rhythm China has on mass production allowed or forced them to adapt and create at unprecedented levels... that will be extremely hard to reproduce anywhere else in the world. Stuff like how Shenzhen (and several other Chinese cities) was built around optimization of industrial processes and logistics.
And then, as China both used extreme protectionist measures to stop foreign countries cultures from entering, created it's own internal systems for several different things, often "stole" western companies technologies to produce their own, and control large portions of industrial productions plus logistics in the entire world... they are just in a better position to cut ties and function independently.
Of course, their own problem would still be huge... because basically, it's a country that grew up as fast as it did and maintains large portions of it's entire economy because of production made for export to US and allied nations, so much so that if it loses it's main clients they just stop having the means to support these large scale infrastructures. Like, what is the use of being the industry of the world if the world is not buying from you anymore? There would be both major scale downs and collapses... just the fact that they already have infrastructure, logistics and production of most of it gives them a leg up.
Super oversimplification of things because these webs of trade are impossible to unravel fully, but China's side would mostly lose demand, while the US side would lose supply, with a whole ton of breakdowns on things that depended on trade between both to function.
But in general, I think there is a large lack of awareness on how influential this mutual trade really is. People tend to only think about immediate products and services available to themselves, not considering all the dependencies that are usually hidden behind.
Getting down to basics alone, we tend to think about the core necessities which we usually can localize - food, energy, raw materials for infrastructure building, transportation, etc. And those are mostly localizable with replacements needed to fill in gaps of commodities that are only available on the other side. It can be done, but you know, devastating effects.
When it starts going just a bit over that though, I think there's a whole lot of things that depends on Chinese imports that people don't realize. Even on basic level it interferes at some level. It's all the components that goes into vehicle production, it's the machinery that is used to build stuff, it's computers and electronics that all of those chains of production rely on everyday, it's component materials and tools mass produced in China that are needed to provide services and do small scale manufacturing... some of it is available locally, or has a history to recover, but cost of production and it not being originally a mass industry means we're basically an order of magnitude behind the curve.
Sorry for long response, I do this because I'm also munching and looking into the topic myself... so I tend to write both as comment and just for myself. xD
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I largely agree that this is a significant problem for any economy, it´s just a bit weird to single it out as a chinese problem...
Afaik, the demographic collapse problem is a problem of most if not all developed nations, and predicted to be or alreeady also a problem for several countries that are currently labeled as developing too. You do have some variation, of course, with US age graph having a bit more leg room there, but its still characteristically bell shapped.
It´s only "still not a problem" in poor countries, because life expectancy is low, birth rates are high, and the age graph looks more like a pyramid. That´s of course, isolating and only look at this single aspect of demographics.
So while yes, it counts as a huge obstacle that China will have to deal with soon enough, as this problem will also affect the US and several other developed nations, it kinda sounds like things will level out throughout.
If what is being put in question is the idea that the next "age" will be about the eastern civilization, looking at that aspect of demographics alone, wouldn´t another way of measuring it be looking at absolute numbers of people and perhaps countries that have better or worse shapped age graphs and average it out?
I think Japan with it´s inverse pyramid will put a pretty big burden on the eastern side of the world, but I´m not entirely sure if it really makes it worse than the western side of the world... there are a whole lot of European countries in similar situations. Perhaps South America plus Africa still gives the west a leg up, but there are a whole lot of developing or poor nations in Asia too....
Another thing about the whole idea is that it sounds a bit like cherry picking... even inside demograhics itself. Sure, China has a more pronounced negative birthrate problem in comparison to the US. Another thing that is also true is that China has a bit over 4x the US population.
That number is so staggering that you start seeing how much of a difference it makes. For instance, proportionately speaking, the US has a far bigger middle class. But because of the difference in population, in absolute numbers the chinese middle class is probably already bigger. Not because China is richer, it still isn´t, but given absolute population numbers, even if the US has a majority of the population above the middle class line, and China doesn´t, it still has more people in absolute numbers.
Also, because of those huge numbers, you have stuff like a slightly lower life expectancy mattering more than it perhaps should.
But I get this is an analysis of specific, perhaps less considered points, in an ultra complex universe of stuff to be considered. Politics, diplomacy, self sufficiency, world standings, technological developments, and a whole ton of other stuff also matters.
Gotta be honest here - sometime ago I´d consider the idea kinda absurd. That is, of world power shifting away from the west to the east.
But lately, I´m just not sure anymore. Pandemics response, effects of lalte stage capitalism, democracies falling to tribalism, this unprecedented rise in populism fueled with science denial and a whole ton of other effects of social networks and tech giant monopolies... it really shook the core structures.
But anyways, not to go out of subject, I think the next episode will be a stronger argument and truly a horrible exclusive chinese reckoning... because the way chinese culture and China as a country structured the whole real estate thing already is and will become an ever growing problem.
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I can't really judge because quite frankly, the school system in my country is shit because it goes on the opposite direction - too lax, too open ended, too weak.
Even though we also do have huge test days, each university has it's own, so what people do here is pick and choose some that makes sense for them to enter, and do a test that can last an afternoon on a day all the way to a few weekends.... for each university intended. It's also meritocratic, but it happens twice a year, and you need to enroll directly at universities you aim for. Some will have like 20 vacancies for hundreds of thousands of people aiming for a position, some have several vacancies and not enough students trying to get in. :P
We have both public and private universities, both ranging from horrible to great. Public tends to be better and thus harder to pass. Schools are almost the opposite... public schools tend to have a ton of problems, private schools tends to be more stable learning environments.... because money and because we had several governments that basically ignored education as a cornerstone of the country.
From experience though, here's what I'll have to say. Military harsh incredibly competitive education tends to foster certain type of people... they are good at some stuff, but horrible in others.
What you are leaving behind when you don't give space for leisure time, communal living and just space to let people do whatever they want is creativity, social skills, and out of the box thinking.
Like... you are making great... robots. :P Ok, great by the book workers.
Those that survive this onslaught and can keep living on without feeling crippled, they'll be great at their jobs, make no mistake. But they'll have a harder time evolving in it, and excelling in it. And the potential for dissatisfaction, cross area thinking, being a multi taskers lowers down.
Because these things demand somethings that harsh societies like that often ignore - learning from mistakes, using skills from other areas to help in yours, seeking help from other types of professionals.
Knowing how to deal with failure, with being a failure, but still striving to get better and thinking of different ways to overcome an obstacle - that's where you usually get genious. Also, people who had the freedom to study in different areas, that also creates new things.
It comes at a high societal cost... for everyone that excels, that gets above the crowd, that uses their creativity to overcome all obstacles, you end up with a throng of permanent failures. Perhaps this will sound a bit controversial, but I think it's the way it generally is.
Which is probably very inconvenient for a country with an idealistic political system - communism, socialism - particularly one with too many people. You don't want free thinkers because those are the ones that starts revolutions, that takes liberties to the point of failure, that gets counter cultural, etc.
But a system that gives room for all kinds of people tends to result in more people who revolutionize entire industries - for bad sometimes yes, but also for good.
It's interesting though, that if you go too much the opposite direction, you end up with similar results.
Poor education leads to people who can't learn anything by themselves. They lack critical reasoning, essencial skills and not knowing what to do, how to do, how to begin. So they'll often follow authority figures, be they qualified or not, to all sorts of dead end lives. There's no empowerment, no focus, no knowledge on how to function in modern societies. So, what you get are not robots, but drooling slow zombies.
In any case, who knows what the better solution is? Education is hard, man... I just think that in general, it's something to be valued and cherished. Countries with poor education are just living in the past, with all the problems the past had. And really, the worst problem of this is that poor education is really incompatible with modern technologies. It was somewhat ok to live without education while information passed through several rounds of verification, gatekeepers, curation and whatnot to be feed to the population.
Nowadays that it's all open and free flowing, without verification, with lots of fake stuff and conspiracy theories flying around, lack of education, lack of critical reasoning clashes with this new information paradigm extremely hard... it can lead to all sorts of very dangerous problems.
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Somehow, I had a sneaky feeling that it might be related to extreme capitalism... which of course it did.
But yeah, very much agreed. The cultural exchange that happens in education interchange programs are invaluable beyond belief, but quite unfortunately intangible too, much like good education in general itself.
It's really hard to grasp how much we owe to such programs for general peace in the world, advancement of science, and better understanding, cooperation and development between nations.
I have personally and presently watched testimonials of lots of people who went on interchange programs, despite not having the opportunity to do it myself.
It goes much beyond just general education. It provides a level of maturity, world knowledge, empathy, a sentiment of working for the betterment of the collective and world, plus stamping out lots of teenage years radical thinking problems that no institution can provide by itself.
Even if the levels of exchange have improved over the years, we still sorely lack it.
I also think both that the US would benefit a lot if it sent more students in interchange programs worldwide, and think that China has benefit much from going pretty hard into it, despite the not so great reasoning behind it.
The current political situation is pretty dire there, but there are good chances this is gonna change with newer generations... specially if it's taken by citizens who have matured their worldview through interchange programs.
My family has hosted an interchange student from Japan. We have a great relationship and this has certainly influence in the family deciding to save the pennies and make so far a couple of trips to Japan. While visiting as a tourist isn't nowhere as valuable as a proper interchange program, it still brought a lot of happiness, fullfillment, information and education to us. While I can't speak for the interchange student herself, I think it was also an extremely valuable experience for her own life too.
It helps orient our own life philosophies, ideals, and sense of moral and ethics by a whole lot. Because you get to experience different perspectives and different ways of living other than that of your own country.
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Sometimes I wonder how much Lego profits from a kids version of FOMO... xD
I understand Lego has super fans, that lots of kids have fun with it, that it stimulates creativity, that it's often used as an educational tool, etc etc all the stuff you hear about from fans.
But at the same time, paradoxically, I really don't see it as something most kids really enjoy. Like really get into. I see it more like a staple. Something most kids go to when they are out of choices, or if they are actively stimulated to go after.
The video itself has the biggest examples spread throughout of what I generally see kids doing with Legos. It's kinda like drawings and paintings. Yes, there are kids that are super into it spending entire afternoons drawing and painting, and it is part of education and a creative process. But again, not all kids gets super into it, they'll mostly do it at some point of their lives because of school activities of parents trying to keep them occupied with something. Draw a father's day card or something. Art class. Etc.
Most of the kids I've seen play with Legos just slap some stuff together, they get tired of it some minutes in, and then they take it to their parents, cousins and whatnot. Hold it, don't mess with it. xD
It's not that I'm trying to belittle Lego or anything like that, I had a few sets when I was a kid and prices weren't batshit crazy where I live, and I also drawed and painted as a kid.
I'm just not entirely sure if I buy the whole spiel about how much it stimulates creativity, how universal it is, how etc etc it is. Sometimes this entire idea feels like a crutch, in a way. It has less to do with how kids see it, and more to do with aiming for the lowest common denominator. Legos are simple, easy, clean, genderless and like a sandbox of sorts, so it became a staple. But from that point on to overstretching it's characteristics, I hesitate to agree.
It also certainly is not the simplest toy. It's extremely far from being the cheapest, most reachable and available too. A stick is a simpler toy.
Particularly where I live, Legos are basically unreachable for the absolute vast majority of kids, because their prices are insane. You can buy a gaming console plus a few games with prices put on the bigger sets.
Partnering with big franchises was a genious move because that's what sells them. So this is probably another dig into the whole spiel.
But I don't wanna rain in any fan's parade... there is nothing inherently wrong with the toy, and out of all options among toys, Lego bricks are certainly on the right side of things.
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You can trust none, that's the answer. You should do whatever measures you feel necessary to protect your private data independent of what service you use.
Because I will say this, the problem with all of those companies is not what they say they will do or what they say they are doing, which you really shouldn't pay much attention to, but on the degree of transparency they all have - which is close to none for all three cases.
The size of these companies also all come with the standard "we'll only start giving a fuck if things affects a sizeable ammount of users". Sometimes not even then. Because that's how corporations operate. If your personal privacy was violated and you got fucked somehow, if you are not part of a larger crowd, you are gonna get ignored and shoved off as a civilian causalty or dispensable costumer.
The CEOs of all three companies have already clearly demonstrated over the years how easy it is for them to position themselves and to say that their companies are defenders or privacy or something ridiculous like that while behind the scenes they were either selling or leaking private user data. All of them. Regardless of business model, regardless of CEO bravado, regardless of motivations. Whichever way you go, the moment you put some blind trust on it is the moment you are fucked.
And no, Apple is not any better than the rest. They might not rely on an advertisement based revenue model, but they screwed up several times with data leaks, bugs, exploits and vulnerabilities to the point of there even existing specific tools and hacker groups selling services to extract data from Apple devices.
It's also always good to note that none of those companies have absolute control over everything they sell in their products, apps and services. The ecossystems are too big for that. So, even if you somehow got brainwashed to believe in the words of this or that CEO, it doesn't matter what their wishes and their mission statements are, they are all still vulnerable in a multitude of points.
The better way anyone worried with private data should go for is one, keeping as much as possible offline, two, doing whatever you can independently to guarantee privacy, three, open source projects. Full transparency, audits made by anyone who wishes to, no proprietary crap to hide flaws and problems, no commercial interests to paint a story one way or another, no marketing speech, no secondary interests. There you go.
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Funny thing is that despite Kpop being huge and dominant worldwide today on the concept... it shouldn't be something surprising for most people, as it's taking a fairly old concept to a next step of sorts.
Jpop groups comes from the 60s, and specifically idol duos and groups are from the 70s and onwards. Another thing people seem to forget about this entire concept is... boy bands.
In terms of an "artificially" created group (at very high costs I might add), Jackson 5 comes immediately to mind... specially after we started learning about how harsh things were in terms of training, schedule and whatnot. Arguably, The Beatles were just that.
Couple of decades later in the 80s all the way up to 2000s we have all these names everyone will know about... New Kids on the Block, Menudos, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Jonas Brothers. Interesting that it was mostly about boy bands, not girl groups.
Obviously, if this isn't about group training, idols, or music made from top down instead of bottom up, terms like popular korean music in Kpop and whatnot goes even further back, with other genres and other types of band compositions.
But I guess Kpop and Jpop idol groups are the ones that took the entire concept to the next level. I'm not personally a huge fan of the concept, but I have no problems with people who do like it, and it's just overall interesting.
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