This to me is the correct answer. A lot of times in war it's not about logic or reason, it's about emotion and feeling. Throughout Chinese history, a leader is only "legitimate" or dare I say, have the Mandate from Heaven, when they have unified the country under one banner. It is a stain on their authority that there is "rouge" state outside the CCP's control. They will do anything to unify their country for national pride.
Jesus, you realize people just mistype things sometimes? It really annoys me when people feel like they have to come in and correct others this way, it's so condescending.
Personally, I'm grateful to be corrected on a casual and anonymous forum if it saves me from making the same mistake on a formal document, condescension notwithstanding. My response to grammar cops is either, "Thank you!" if it was due to my ignorance, or "Oops, damned autocorrect/typo/ brain fart," if a lack of attention was at fault.
Sometimes, we know just the word we want. And we know how to spell it. But we fat-finger it. Or our fingers trip. Or our brains just get the finger-tapping order a bit off.
None of these things requires an education in using the incorrect word. “Irregardless”? Give ‘em what for! Their/there/they’re? A nice reminder. Swapped a couple letters is a plausible explanation? A simple correct spelling followed with a * would suffice.
There have been many periods of Chinese history with multiple competing dynasties, including transition periods. The Later Jin, for example, who became the Qing, took three generations to defeat the Ming dynasty; and they had been around since before the Song dynasty.
THe lands and territories also wax and waned throughout the centuries. A map of the territories controlled by the Qing at its peak is vastly different than that of the Tang or that of the Han dynasty.
This is more like the game of weiqi than it is the game of chess. The endgame isn't necessarily a decisive action with a win condition, but more of an accumulation.
I’m not sure I agree, Xi already proofed that he’s a great political mind by his actions with in the inner politics of his own party.
I think he’ll treat the war with Taiwan rationally as the political tool that it can be.
When the set of constraints and what he has to gain will be in his favor he may do it.
I’m not an expert but I honestly can’t not see him risk what he built for so many years for that amount of potential destabilization.
This is an interesting theory. Under this line of political thinking, it’s just as important that the U.S. project that they would come to help if the aim is political stability or maintaining the status quo.
Yes, communist nations especially need to protect the narrative that their way is the best way. Having the Taiwanese sitting off shore thriving outside of party control is embarrassing.
On a daily basis here on HN, capitalists and libertarians and others with the SV mindset work hard to protect the narrative that their way is the best way.
I'm so happy to live in the US, a country without ceaseless propaganda about how our way of life is the best and our democracy is the best and our freedom is the only way and there is no alternative to unfettered capitalism.
The entire justification for Musk's DOGE & MAGA is that the status quo in the USA is not good and needs to be torn down.
From my observation, the West suffers from the opposite of Chinese or Indian nationalism, in excessive self-flagellation to the point of self-destructiveness. Critical Theory, Identity Politics, Woke, Anti-Woke, Postmodernism (both left & right), etc would be immediately crushed in those nationalist societies, they are very much a unique artifact of the Western order.
It's really a result of the US being so heterogeneous. One side's status quo is the other side's in-progress radical reinvention. The pendulum is always on the move. You have to take the average position on a longer time scale to figure out where the country stands.
I mean on one hand we can do better but on the other, last I checked there's not been a time where citizens were hauled off to prison in the US for disparaging capitalism. Closest we came was the red scare in the 50s and that was tame in comparison to what Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Castro and Ho Chi Minh and (do I need to keep going?) put their subjects through.
On the other hand, historically speaking, the various dynasties of China had been able tightly control markets when it was one of the jewels of the Silk Roads.
I prefer a free market myself, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there isn't a narrative being pushed by people who profit off of free markets or capitalism.
I'm curious, if you're interviewing at a company, what's the best way to figure out of the lead/team has this balance? What kind of questions could you ask without sounding like you're trying to be lazy?
What works better than it should: just take a good look at the people you are talking to.
Basically, do they look like they are chronically sleep deprived zombies? Are their eyes bloodshot? Hair kinda greasy? Movements shaky? Do they stare off into space? Reaction times slowed down? Essentially, do they look like a harried medical resident?
If it's just one person, maybe they are having a bad day, getting sick, or that's just their style. If it's everyone - you know the answer.
Why does this work better than it should? Because once you start down the path of sacrificing long term health for short term gains, there's nothing stopping you (or the management doing the pushing) from escalating further. The difference between normal and zombieland is quite stark.
Note that this is not a good heuristic when talking to managers of said team. They tend to always look fit and polished and well rested. Only the rank and file tend to look this sad.
Yes, exactly. Government orgs also need IT, developers, etc. I get to end my day at the same time every day and while major changes make for a week or so of a ton more work responding, there aren’t sprints to deliver important PR-sensitive releases. My off time is my own.
FWIW, I saw Tim Cook in Pac Heights a few months back just walking around. There were two "guys" in plain clothes in front and behind him on that Saturday morning. I was able to say "hello" and he was nice. I imagine there are probably others monitoring his security that I couldn't see also.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.
The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.
In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.
We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.
We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.
A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.
The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
This is fundamentally different. Arthur Anderson was an auditing firm and did accounting. Their selling point was to be the "source of truth" for their client's books. What's that confidence is lost, then no one would hire them for their work. McKinsey, as a management consultancy, doesn't have to be a "source of truth" and offers perspective, which can be neither right or wrong. Management makes decisions on if they want to take McKinsey's advice or not.
I used to work for Twitch and built the Custom Live notifications for streamers. It was a relatively straightforward change where we just changed the payload of what the streamers wanted the iOS, Android, email notifications to show. There were some behind-the-scenes work where there is actually a language/curse word check and decisions on if we needed to translate the copy to the receivers local language.
The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours watched.
While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.
That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).
Huh, citation? :) I'm not saying you're wrong, but as a GCP engineer I have never seen us (well, my org) implementing something because of "AWS or Azure has it".
Memory's a little fuzzy, but I'd put IAM and workspaces in that category.
IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model.
ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.
I have been interviewed multiple times by GCP product managers seeking to understand how my team used specific AWS services that Google lacked at the time to learn how to implement Google's competing service.
I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)
Online disk resizing was the one I tracked as it slowly trickled through alpha/beta. To be fair, pretty much every virtualization product had online resizing before GCE, so it could have been a matter of prioritization.
Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.
IAM rollout was a chore (and introduced a whole layer of abstraction that users who didn't need fine-grained resource management now needed to be aware of / care about) and workspaces interacted with the existing billing infra in a messy fashion, if memory serves. On the plus side, that was years ago and AFAICT Cloud learned the relevant lessons from those stumbles.
