They are much more comfortable to drive. Electric cars kind og just floats where fossil fuel cars struggles at first. If you have charging at home or at work you never need to go to a gas station, you always simply get in to the car (not turning on the enginge) and go where you want. I think those are the biggest two, but I guess it is one of those things you need to try to understand. There are tons more benefits though, like they are less noisy, the lack of a big engine makes the interior of the car more flexible design wise, the acceleration increases the fun factor even at low speeds, easier repairs, they just feel more modern.
His just circles the problem i think. It is a symptom of programmers not taking responsibillity for their own code. To cover your ass in the best possible way you have to write as little code as possible and that is what happens when a person sees a function that sor of doeas what they want. For some reason we think this is deduplicating code and it is good. But at least I have never been taught this in scool or by anyone in my work. We should treat it for what it is: an antipattern used by programmers to avoid taking responisbility. Another side to this coin is some times the «enablers» who create unneccesary abstractions. These are people who play at being livrary designers when they sre supposed to be developing applications as fast and safely as possible. The people who creates complex tools and unneccessary integrations inside the application code they write. Now, we are all risk averse and enablers to different degrees and at different times. To counteract these antipatterns i think it is important that we teach a few things: that functions/method should have a single purpose, if ou have a boolean argument and a if you should refactor. Rabbit theory of code. And at a higher level: always keep the focus on the business requirement and do codt brnefit analysis (light wieght in our head). And take time to learn the domain and tools you are working with. This also requires experience. But if we focus more on teaching people to learn sbout these things i think it may improve things
I agree to most of the things the author said (except for America being the center of the world and a moral lighthouse for everyone of course). But what I think will get overlooked by most people is the beginning where he notes that the chinese he has met in his daily life are very nice people. Do not forget that they are the same as you. It sounds obvious but I think most people don’t realize how similar we all are. Probably every deeper concern you have had a chinese and russian and american person have also had. No they do not live worried lives where they think that if they break an arm they will be bankrupt. No they are not afraid every day of government agents knocking on their door to drag their father away. The risk of each one is larger in one country than the other. But day to day people think about the same things. Every country have their introverts and extroverts, engineering types and warm hearted caring types and the discussions that one does not exclude the other. Superficially chinese cut in line because if you dont cut you get cut and i am sure you would do the same if the situation was the same for you. Unless you are the quiet introverted type, which is also the case in China. Dont forget that this person talks about governments. You should dislike Xi for what he does to the chinese people, not for what effects you fear he may have on USA (the government, not the people).
How can you still hold this belief after reading articles like this?
> It sounds obvious but I think most people don’t realize how similar we all are.
That's more sensible.
Indeed, if any person from country <x> was raised in country <y>, they are going to be generally like others born in country <y>, but only if they were raised there. This is what constitutes culture, and all groups of people on the planet do not all share the same culture, as the author pointed out.
> How can you still hold this belief after reading articles like this?
I'll push back on this. Spending time in China helped me look at myself and break down what was universally human and what was learned culture. For example, the story about the missionary giving a talk at the local English Corner about "the meaning of life"
> He said he knew what people would say having lived in China for sometime but even so was stunned at how deeply and rigidly held the belief that making money was the entire meaning of life. There was no value system. There was no exogenously held right or wrong, only whether you made money.
Yes, people espouse that. Even to themselves.
But spend some time with them and find out what makes them happy and sad, and what they want to make money for, and it's the same as a westerner (and I suspect the same as any mentally healthy human on the planet): having basic autonomy in your life, developing as a person, quality time with friends and family, helping each other, a chance to raise children peacefully and otherwise contribute to society. Those are the things people genuinely want.
I think people universally find obsession with wealth to be unsatisfying, but it's sometimes only after a learning experience. They may try it for a while, but they realize it's a socialized value, not an intrinsic one.
To overgeneralize, China as a whole is still at an earlier stage of learning about wealth than the US or Europe or Japan or Korea. But they are in the process of learning the lessons of wealth and will, I believe, get there faster than we did, simply because everything is changing faster there than it did here.
Edit: And we in the West are not done learning either!
> How can you still hold this belief after reading articles like this?
I think neolefty answered it very well. I guess i forgot to mention i also have lived in china and have a chinese wife, wich has taught me the same. Reading articles and watching the news teaches you very little about humans compared to actually talking to them, in my opinion.
I have sent back dishes multiple times in China and gotten a new one with no problem and waiters are generally very nice (and not just to foreigners in tourist places). I guess waiters are different everywhere, restaurants are different and individual preferences are different.
are you sure those were real Chinese restaurants, not tourist trap restaurants? I was under the impression, from a local of China, that you could under No condition at all, request a dish be replaced. One chinese restaurant (a traditional one where the wait staff speak chinese) in the US wouldn't even do that.
I think in Scandinavia it is different because we actually have laws saying you cannot force people to work the extreme amounts of overtime that they do in USA or in China. So older devs could be using the time they have more efficiently. My experience is also that older devs are very sought after. It could also have something to do with the shortage of developers here though.
Some countries have free (and good) education alternatives. Some countries also have student loans as a public service. Education is probably one of the most important things to preserve a democratic state, so you would think it is in the public interest.
Just imagine the sheer difference in size, there are millions every year finishing their higher education in china, chinese cities are bigger than scandinavian countries. When you have this many people labor is cheaper and you have more employees in the big companies. The way og managing people in scandinavia simply cannot happen there. It is like the only thing that can manage such big companies are policies and the chain of command. So for example i imagine if you told your managers to tell their sub-managers to hire senior staff all you would get is higher salaries because people get to where they are not based on merit but because how good they are at politics. So then the only rational choice would be to get naive young people who will believe what the boss say without questioning and cost less.
There are plenty of big companies outside of China that are both big and don't follow military practices for management. You scale big companies like you scale anything: you break down the problem into smaller subproblems and solve those.
You make it sound like only way to scale is by having a dictatorship and a strong chain of command. Historically the more power the peons had, as long as they didn't completely disregard the chain of command, the stronger the organization was.
Also, despite China having 1 billion people, you don't need 1 billion employees to turn a profit. Even the biggest Chinese companies, outside of state owned ones (which have different, more social, objectives) aren't much bigger than other big companies worldwide.
I’m I the only one who get fomo by using my smartphone? Consider all the experiences and face to face conversations you miss by looking at others on social media or when you are playing candy crush.
I had this game with my friends where you are supposed to guess who you are (name on a note on your forehead). I wrote Bill Gates on a note, thinking that would be easy, and none of them knew who he was before i explained it. They are not stupid people and all of them have higher education. Just none of them in a technical field, also not americans.
In contrast, the Chinese high school students I met who signed up for free low-quality English lessons did know who Bill Gates was, though they didn't know the name "Microsoft".
The point, I think, was that CIA is biased, not that they came to these results. You cannot really trust their research, since they analyze their «enemies». It is like when a skin care company cites that «9 out of 10 said this is the best skin cream (in a survey of 30 people)»
The CIA has also had a lot of high profile failures and appear to be a hotbed if groupthink derived from their current political masters.
They are a great example of an organization hiring the best and brightest, only to be dimmed by org and political structures.
This is not a recent thing. I believe they blew up a Russian refinery with a sweet exploit in he 80s. But other than that, I’m not sure why anyone would see them other than a bumbling comedy of politics.
> The CIA is interested in leakers because it uses them to get information from foreign intelligence agencies.
To be fair, that is also a reason why they would have a motive to spread misinformation about what they believe motivates leakers, since information about their beliefs on that matter give target nations clues to both actual vulnerabilities and CIAs likely means of attempting to exploit them.
I would agree with you that it's quite extraordinary. :)
Joking aside. I think the difference lies in how easily an adversary can refute the information. You can just call up a library or an embassy to verify most claims in the world factbook. How would you get access to a wide selection of leakers?
