I'm not sure if he is trying to tell some version of this joke, but here it goes:
(for context, dad jokes are often categorized as "cold jokes" here in China/Taiwan, since often its humor is not appreciated by the audience and thus making the vibe "cold")
So a polar bear become bored one day and had nothing to do. So he started to pull off his own hair. One, two, three. One by one the hairs were pulled off. After a while, the polar bear suddenly said: It's pretty cold out here!
Once you are already in prison it's hard to say whether you are forced to do it or not. It's not like you have a lot of employers and professions to choose from. And if the incentives include things like easier to get parole then refusing to participate would mean more time served. It'd be pretty hard to prove some labor is not "forced" in a prison setting.
> And if the incentives include things like easier to get parole then refusing to participate would mean more time served.
So what? That's just serving the original sentence. That doesn't sound forced to me. Is it forced labor when someone chooses to take a community service option instead of being locked up?
I don't pretend to be unaware of that. I think it's a separate problem.
Like, okay, we say that anyone improperly imprisoned is being forced into labor.
What about everyone else? The argument above was that it clearly is forced labor, even when your sentence is completely valid. I disagree with that.
> US citizens are not uniquely criminal, but US incarceration rate is by far highest in the world. You don't get there justly.
It's a mix of things. Even if you fixed all the bias in the system, you could still have a high incarceration rate with harsh but not inherently unjust laws.
Nobody has a legitimate reason to want a high incarceration rate.
The only reason to have a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the whole world is, specifically, because you want to have your underclass ready to hand for slave labor. Or, generally, to repress them.
If you are relying on threat of incarceration to discourage criminal behavior, having the highest such rate in the world is reliable evidence that your method is failing to achieve that aim. Other countries are demonstrating better methods you could learn from. If you wanted to, that is.
I never said anything about wanting a high incarceration rate.
There can be other reasons for harsh laws. Don't be so weirdly absolute. If a country does something wrong that doesn't mean it necessarily has the one specific motivation you're mad at and no other.
Also this has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, which wasn't about the US specifically.
To restate it, just to be very clear: 1. find someone that was legitimately sentenced to a fair duration of prison 2. offering them the ability to labor to reduce their sentence is not forced labor
Or, as we actually do, just assume they were legitimately sentenced to what we just assume is a fair duration.
Letting somebody innocent out "early", even if we extracted undue labor from them, could be a net good. But the incentives are all in the wrong direction, and we see the effects writ large all around us. Making fine points about a theoretical situation of justice and legitimacy is a harmful distraction in present circumstances, where we demonstrably don't have those.
The violent gun murder rate in the US is 5x what it is European countries. Those are stats based on deaths, not criminal prosecutions.
The number of 'high speed chases' etc. is considerably higher.
In some 'high crime / poverty' areas of the US, the amount of crime again is multiples of those of other nations.
Moreover, the US has the right to put people in prison for crimes in a different manner than say Sweden, who might only have someone in jail for 4 years for murder.
China is putting Uyghurs in jail for their ethnicity, not for any crimes committed, so the issue is moot.
The people convicted of crimes in the US are not inherently worse people than their counterparts in other countries. We have more crime because we have chosen to have more crime, blamed them, and incarcerated them because we have chosen to have that. In other countries people have made better choices, with a better outcome.
This is a way over simplistic view. It's not a CIV game where someone decides what "China/Han" should do for all these thousands of years. People's minds change, sometimes the people themselves change, accidents happen. You don't have to find some hidden "truth" that goes back 3000 years to explain what China today does.
This same over simplistic view is used to explain why Russia expanded so aggressively to the west and east, and holds its client states so tightly.
There is a nice grassy plain from Poland all the way through to the Caucasus (with the Urals as a somewhat permeable barrier). Armies on the move love grassy plains.
If your objective is to protect Moscow, you need to control that grassy plain.
Edit: ref: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall.
"Geography is destiny" can be a useful lens through which to view global politics.
Pripyat Marshes are not a big stretch of the North European Plain. You can move massive armies through the northern route along the Baltic coast, or the southern route through Ukraine.
They're not really a big obstacle, given the two land invasions that came from the West in the 20th century.
Last I checked, the Germans crushed the Russians in WW1 while treating that front as a defensive action while the real war was fought on the Western front.
The Polish invasion in 1920 was pretty effective too until it wasn't, same for Napoleon, etc. Point being its a big corridor for large troop movements.
Came for a similar sentiment: China is a billion people with a billion wishes. There are many clusters that conspire to achieve many different things, often opposites
For US it will. People in the US seldom think about just how powerful their media environment and general influence is. Like women have been sexually harassed since forever in China, and it's the #MeToo movement that led to a lot of the victim to stand up and people to support them.
She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan and call the thing sky goose instead, but most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
>She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan
I've never heard of or seen this character until today.
>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.
"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.
There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.
There might be slightly positive causal correlations between health and creativity (probably not too strong though because there are lots of mentally deranged successful artists), and, more plausibly, between tolerance and creativity, but that's not enough profundity. It does not give you that "kick" of information gain you get from the profound sentences. It abuses a poetic/proverbial form to only state weak to non-existent causal associations and henceforth it is bullshit.
The mere existence of Wu is an outlier in China (and possibly in rest of the world). As anyone that closely follows Chinese politics know, the CCP is not keen on outspoken/unique people. Rappers has been banned for rapping about money and women (!); women have been arrested for promoting awareness of sexual harassment. I think Wu is simply trying (and failing) to make herself not more controversial than already is.
I just couldn't understand why he thinks the container should be made of hard metal. Sure maybe the current equipment like dry suit + full face mask has limitations. But shouldn't the natural path be building on top of that? Why is a hard long object that can't bend to fit through some narrow gaps, don't have power and don't use the power of the human it contains, and much heavier, be their go to solution?
Remember he didn't have the luxury of time here. He'd have surely designed something better if he had the chance to design, manufacture, and test it from the ground-up, but I doubt there was enough time to do such a thing. He probably tried to do the best with whatever he had at the time, on the off chance it'd still be useful. So he took the pre-designed parts of his Falcon rocket that could be useful and tried to use those.
This is another reason why people like me are skeptic about that whole "submarine" thing. Taking "pre-designed parts of his Falcon rocket" is ... also a bit ridiculous.
If I were do design a rescue capsule getting a stainless steel pipe and welding a flange to it or anything would be the least of my worries. You can get stuff like that off-the-shelf with same-day delivery.
But surely a submarine made from Falcon parts makes for a nice myth or headline.
I'm a bit surprised nobody has mentioned the fraud[1]. The reason electric bus becomes so popular in China recently is mainly because of government subsidies. Well that's the intended consequence and most people are OK with it.
What's problematic is that the subsidy is a fix amount for certain kind of vehicle. And it turns out bus is more efficient in terms of subsidy/cost ratio. And since the subsidy is a fixed amount, bus maker can cut a lot of corners and make a bare minimum of a bus which may cost even less than the subsidy. Now they can dump these buses to a local government basically free and bribe the operators to drive the buses once a while to receive the subsidy[2].
I mean I'm all for green buses. But if electric buses out-sale electric cars a lot, you have to wonder why. And one obvious reason is buses are mostly bought in large quantities by entities not very concerned about cost/profitability, ie local governments. So it is much easier for bus related fraud than cars facing mostly individual consumers.
