eddieplan9

You cannot be further away from truth if you think the Chinese higher education nowadays follows the communist bloc model. I did my undergraduate at one of the best universities in China, and to comment on your point:

> 1. Doctoral level studies are SUPER TOUGH

It's common knowledge that in China, graduate school admission follows government policy mandates. Government says we need more top-tier talent, and this is translated to having more PhDs, and then to admitting more people into doctoral programs. It's not uncommon to have one professor advising 20+ PhD students at the same time. The students often are just cheap labor at university labs, and sometimes even work as free childcare for the professors. I am not kidding.

The schools then set an explicit bar for graduation: publish N papers in SCI-indexed journals. Imagine if your company has a rule that says you need to close N tickets with M upvotes to claim your paycheck. Guess what will happen.

> 3. Lion share of people are totally fine with 2 year technical school programs.

Only those who score below the national cutoff score in the National College Entrance Exam go to technical programs. It's not by choice! There is a reason there are a lot of for-profit "private universities" in China these days: because you can pay to get into a private university and avoid technical school programs.

People want to avoid technical school programs so much that the most lucrative part of running a high school is actually prepping high school graduates who "failed" the NCEE for retaking the exam next year.

> 4. Plentiful supply of tech school talents feed the industry, and keep educated labour cheap.

The strength of manufacturing has nothing to do with tech school talent. It's simply because there a lot of people in China (4x the US population), and generally the Chinese workers have great work ethics thanks to whatever is leftover of traditional Chinese culture. The society is fairly ordered, and kids all follow the sanctioned path. No backpacking-in-Europe-for-a-year. No opioid crisis. Everybody is laser focused on career advancement and making money, and everybody has a sense of urgency.

> 5. This allows university level studies to be what they were supposed to be originally: academic research, and not doing degree milling.

Talk to anyone who graduated from a Chinese university. Seriously, anyone.

> 6. The industry and academia are don't go very far apart despite there being an iron wall in between academic and practical tertiary education.

This is quite true, because it's rare for academic folks to work on fundamental research. In the current incentive setup, doing hard fundamental research is just stupid. You need to get to that N publications quick!

It's happening already. Verizon just announced $50 unlimited home internet: https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/11/verizon-5g-home/

> Priced at $50 for people who already have Verizon wireless and $70 for those who don't, it's promising speeds of "around 300 Mbps" up to 1 Gbps, with no data caps.

It's the sad state of affair in "trusted" App Stores. Little Snitch is the first app I install on every machine. I look forward to a day when network access becomes a permission a sandbox app asks for.

Right. How come we don't learn anything from the same policy that resulted in failures such as ARPANET and GPS.

By the same logic, you would also jail the parents, teachers and employers of a murders, because they also "supported" the criminal.

If your 401k invested in VW - which is very likely - are you also supporting its criminal activity?

Not trying to detract from the criticism of cost of living, but the source of survey is interesting:

> This study was completed among a random sample of registered voters who responded to an email invitation to complete the survey.

Also, 58% of the respondents have been in the bay area for over 20 years. 75% of the respondents have been in the area for more than 10 years. Yet 71% of the respondents do not have children living in the household. So the majority of the respondents are not young newcomers to the area.

I suspect there is an overweight of people ready to retire and move out of the area. I have a neighbor who's just ready to do that. With more baby boomers retiring, I am not surprised to see more retirees looking to move out of the bay area in the sample population.

1. I have. My main point is that the survey is about how people feel about their finance, not actual financial reality as in "one-third cannot afford food, shelter, and healthcare". The survey itself actually says

> roughly one-third of individuals have difficulty making ends meet and approximately one out of five sometimes have difficulty paying for basic needs like food, housing, and medical care.

So even taking it at face value, the ratio is 1/5 instead of 1/3? And also

> while financial circumstances are highly correlated with financial well-being scores, individuals with quite different experiences can arrive at the same score

This further indicates the survey is about people's perception about personal finance, not objective financial reality.

2. IMHO, the author's point is not really "US spends a lot on healthcare as a country", but that US is a "rich" country but people are "poor" because they have little dispensable income after paying for healthcare etc. Comparing total insurance premium against household income is a faulty way to support that point. I agree US spends a lot on healthcare, but it's not bad enough to justify labeling US people as "poor".

Take this piece with a huge grain of salt because it misquotes to exaggerate.

The second statement - "A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare" - is based on a CFPB survey [1] that scores "how people in the U.S. feel about their financial well-being". The survey finds that a third of Americans, experience "running out, or worrying about running out, of food, not being able to afford medical treatment or a place to live, or having utilities turned off". It's not hard to find enough people who are worrying about not being to afford medical treatment.

The third statement - "Healthcare for a family now costs $28k " - is a misquote. The original report [2] states that "the cost of healthcare for a typical American family of four covered by an average employer-sponsored preferred provider organization (PPO) plan is $28,166". The same report lists that employee contribution is $7,674, and employee out-of-pocket is $4,704. If you want to include the full premium as "cost", then you also need to adjust the median household income to include employee contribution and all sorts of non-wage benefits.

[1] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/201709_cfpb_fi...

[2] http://us.milliman.com/uploadedFiles/insight/Periodicals/mmi...

sales != revenue.

with the 30% commission, it would be at most $6B. From http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/google-earnings/i...:

> Alphabet posted nearly $15 billion in sales for the year from Google's "other revenues," which include cloud services and hardware products, like the Pixel phones and Google Home smart speakers.

This.

Also those payment apps are like PayPal in the sense it provides very little fraud detection and protection. You are petty much on your own. They process almost no chargebacks, for example.

The Chinese consumers have vastly different expectations when it comes to money because the lack of protection throughout history. To them, it looks very unsafe to just swipe a card without a PIN, and chargeback is an alien concept.

Steve Jobs famously called Starbucks to order 4,000 lattes during the original iPhone launch.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4063272/meet-starbucks-bar...

> If I can pass that task to an assistant, my life would be much easier.

You can. It's called Magic (https://getmagic.com)

The demos look as exciting as any chatbot demos we saw before, and I think it will fail in practice just like how chatbots fail. With the exception of very few verticals in controlled settings, most real world tasks are way more dynamic and fluid than what we can comfortable code in some state machine. The article pointed it out, too

> One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.

The question is after you limit it to "closed domains" narrow enough, where it can still be practically useful. It might help with certain functions in enterprise settings. It will definitely work for spammers because they can work with even 1% success rate.

I know the rhetoric is appealing, but as a Chinese national myself, I have not seen a single STEM person who has left the US for China because of immigration reasons. On the contrary there are plenty of them that have gone to China after securing a US green card.

If competing with China for talent is the goal, easeness of doing business and more early stage VC funding - a la “back to 2015” - can help, but it’s not clear those are the right things to do.

I don’t think the article is about bikes piling up the in the street. It’s more about oversupply and the distorted operating cost of bike sharing in China.

From a friend of mine working in this space: it’s cheaper for these companies to keep dumping new bikes onto the street rather than finding and repairing the misplaced and broken ones.

So imagine you live in a dorm with someone who never washes his mugs and leaves them everywhere because he gets free mugs from some mug oversupply place.

> This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it's also because of loose business and environmental regulations, especially in red states, which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.

Come on. Chinese government does not give a shit about "offshore costly and harmful business practices". The price of pork in China is 3 times of that in the US not because the Chinese government has some stringent environmental protection scheme regarding hog farms. It's because corn is extremely cheap in the US. And yes, China is now also importing cheap corn to raise hogs domestically: https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/china-buys-up-t...

And if you read Chinese: http://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/cyxw/2016-04-07/doc-ifxr...

Please stop spreading rumors and speculations. The graphic is an illustration and does not necessarily place the car in the actual lane. It clearly contradicts with the police chief’s statement that the victim walks right into traffic from center medium. It even contradicts with the left arrow pointing to the impact location in the same picture.

I am deeply disgusted by false equivalency used in many posts this thread. Whatever you think the West is doing is not even close to this. The Chinese government owns and runs more than 50% of the economy and 100% of the industries they deem essential. They can not only cut your off completely from planes and trains, but also your electricity, driver license, internet, telephone, banks, ability to get any travel document, ability to stay at any hotel, etc. Let that sink for a bit, before you claim that Google or even NSA can do something similar.

I am a Chinese expat, but I don't have a National ID. I have a Chinese passport, but I cannot even buy train tickets online (yet i can ride the train) with it and I cannot open a bank account in my own country. Things will get worse with 'social credit' as another barrier because I won't have a credit history with them.

[edit] removed claim that Chinese expat won't be able to fly in China without National ID because some say the viral news is a rumor. Honestly i cannot tell any more.

Please do not try to rationalize a completely bullshit way of governing by citing there is no better way. It's an insult to the people victimized by this. I am a Chinese expat, and their stupid policy now says I cannot fly in China because I only have a passport and not a National ID.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake. You are right. I edited my comment.

To be fair, if the point is to compare profit, then we also need to consider that a traditional worker making minimum wage also needs to commute to work. The average commute of a worker is 30 miles round trip [1]. The cost of that will eat into their earning as well and cannot be deducted from their taxes.

[1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...

It's important to not use the IRS Mileage Rate to calculate real cost. (The linked study does not.) The IRS rate is designed for the worst case scenario for the purpose of tax filing (coz you don't want to penalize someone who has to drive a F-150 in a high-gas-price state in a year where gas price spikes to $5/gallon). Even if we don't consider the fact that the cost of vehicle depreciation, maintenance and insurance is an "almost-fixed" or marginal cost because you are going to own the vehicle and pay for the insurance any way, and let's be generous about estimating the cost here:

At IRS rate of $0.54 a mile, let's say we buy a Prius (which is the most popular car used for ridesharing), for $23,000, and drive it for 100,000 miles and throw it away.

At IRS rate, that's a cost of $54,000.

Gas cost is about $8,000 (50MPG [1], $4/gallon). Insurance $1500 x 5 years ($1200 base insurance + $300 extra for rideshare add-on [2]). That still leaves us $15,500 (28.7% of estimated cost) to cover repair deductible etc. That's almost enough to buy another Prius.

Edits: I mistakenly said the study used IRS Mileage Rate. It does not.

[1] http://mikes-review.com/does-a-toyota-prius-really-get-50-mi...

[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/best-ridesharing-i...

For those interested in a deeper dive to just deep learning, "Tensorflow and deep learning - without a PhD" is really good, and covers a lot of material in a single 2hr talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq2nnJ4g6N0

Many sites hosted outside of China that Chinese expats frequent (like http://mitbbs.com) have also been flooded with pro-amendment messages.

Google Translate of the site: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&...

This is like criticizing cracking down on bank robbing by saying that now the criminals are going to rob restaurants instead.

For those who don't know what 50 cents refers to: they are internet commentators employed by the Chinese government for (dis)information campaigns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

DDoS the whole infrastructure. They have done that to GitHub before by hijacking traffic to Baidu. With millions of phones in the US under their control it’s fairly easy to overwhelm any website (Mercedes comes to mind in recent news) they don’t like or even cripple the whole national wireless network.

Also even if you are not of direct interest to China, what about your friends and colleagues? They can use you as a tool to get to those that you have direct communication with.

They do not. Cost of meals is counted in "gross booking". Revenue or sales does not include the part paid to driver or restaurants.

I do the old-school thing of buying shows by episode on iTunes for this particular reason (even if the shows are available for "free" in Netflix or Amazon). My kid gets one new episode per week, and she only watches from the iTunes library, which is a self-throttle because it gets boring after a while because it's the same set of episodes. She also learns more from every show and can remember the name of species and their habitats etc way better because she has watched most shows dozens of times after some time.

I had a crack on my windshield for years, and two cracks on my house windows. I did not fix them not because I cannot afford it but because they did not bother me that much and it took time to find a contractor to do the work.

And you should be glad that the governing system is still working, because Equifax is still facing mountains of troubles with the judiciary system and hundreds of class-action lawsuits: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/09...