The USG always works to make capitalism work for the consensus of the biggest companies (in this case, all of Google's pissed off rivals). Just work from that perspective and it will always make sense. I am always shocked when I see a decision at the federal level that does anything for anyone that isn't a bigco.
This is the most concerning factor - Facbook reach is tremendous across it's media platform and most people still do not associate WhatsApp or Instagram as Facebook properties, even though they literally updated the apps to say "By Facebook" on them.
I do not know how to rate the governance or ethics of either company (FB/Alphabet.)
He is a ranking officer in the Chinese military accused of destroying a hard drive after being interviewed by agents. Suspicious considering the CCP is actively seeding U.S. universities with clandestine military scientists via the Thousand Talents plan [1].
> Guan had access at UCLA to a "graphics processing unit," a piece of technology with potential military applications
A GPU. Very dangerous. Very suspicious.
The Thousand Talents Program is just a talent recruitment program. Tons of countries have analogous programs. Canada calls theirs the "Canada Excellence Research Chairs" program. The UK calls theirs the "Rutherford Fund." The Chinese program has nothing to do with "seeding US universities." It's mostly about encouraging Chinese scientists to return to China, to reverse the brain drain.
The guy is a PhD graduate of a military academy, of course he would be an officer. Graduates of military academies all over the world hold officer ranks.
China has been remarkably successful in developing domestic industries. 25 years ago you didn't see decent Chinese papers in international journals, now you encounter them all the time. Good for them! It would be good if the US also supported its domestic research, but Americans just won't get advanced degrees in the sciences because it's too hard and the pay is too lousy.
And China has been remarkably successful in stealing intellectual property and sensitive state information under the guise of "education". Ranking officers of foreign military governments does not exonerate his actions especially when he was caught hiding and destroying data.
"Instead of creating a model based on our interpretation of a troll or bot, we used Twitter rules as a guide when selecting Twitter accounts to train our model. We searched for accounts that were repeatedly violating Twitter rules and we trained our model to identify accounts similar to the accounts we identified as “trollbots.”"
Remember Stanford physics professor Shoucheng Zhang?
"The close timing of Zhang’s death with the USTR report’s release — as well as the same-day arrest of the CFO of Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications company now under fire for sanctions fraud — has fueled doubt within Chinese media that the scientist’s death occurred of his own accord."
If they're highering engineers at "20% above Facebook compensation", it really doesn't make sense. In china they could higher roughly 15 top engineers for the price of 1 engineer in the bay area (in China there's an even bigger surplus of engineering talent).
Makes perfect sense. Poaching FB's (or any competition for that matter) employees potentially makes them easier to compete with and increases the cost for FB to compete.
"Fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage in 25% of Thais who died of suicidal hanging were related with older ages and incomplete hanging but not related with location of the knot."
"Altogether, we identified the following types of laryngohyoid fractures in 129 of 178 cases (72.5%): isolated fracture(s) to the thyroid cartilage in 60 cases (33.7%), combined thyrohyoid fractures in 41 cases (23.0%), isolated fracture(s) to the hyoid bone in 28 cases (15.7%), and no fractures to the cricoid cartilage or the cervical vertebrae."
"There were a total of 40 cases of suicidal hanging with an age range of 17–74 years (average = 35 years; M:F = 33:7). Fractures of neck structures were identified in 19 cases (47.5%) and were more common in older victims and males. Nine victims had only thyroid cartilage fractures (22.5%), four victims had only fractures of the hyoid bone (10%), and six victims had fractures of both the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage (15%)."
