howlingfantods

Having grown up and worked in the US and lived in China for the past 10 years, I think you're overreaching with your characterization of corporate culture.

China, like the USA, has a wide range of companies that span the spectrum of efficiency. Try to get some customer service at China Telecom and you'll see the bottom-tier of efficiency that resembles, or is even worse, than trying to get your cable fixed with Comcast.

I've been drawing digitally for around 15 years, starting with the original Wacom tablets. For drawing, my iPad Pro (2018) with the Pencil 2 feels like magic. In my experience, its latency is much better than the Cintiq or the Surface. It feels so much like drawing on paper, especially with a matte screen cover. Every time I use it to draw, I feel like I'm living in the future. No piece of technology has impressed me to this degree.

That being said, outside of digital art, it's pretty clunky. The lack of a mouse pointer and proper multitasking makes it less than ideal for business uses.

But when I'm drawing on it though, man, I feel like Tom Cruise in Minority Report

The rights to the book Million Dollar Whale, which describes this story, has already been picked up.

"Some home builders are so desperate to attract interest they are offering agents the chance to win Louis Vuitton handbags or Super Bowl tickets with round-trip airfare, if their clients buy a home."

That seems like a serious conflict of interests.

That struck me less like "subscription economy, wink wink, here's a hot chick and all the associated connotations of women and payment" - and more like "it's the subscription economy! everything is great! here's a happy person to represent the future potential"

Services might be better, but I suspect that budget conscious consumers would also spend less on services, compared to customers willing to spend $1200 on an iPhone XS. I imagine their FP&A team has done pretty thorough analysis that the extra sales from fewer products at higher margins will offset the incremental increase in revenue from more (potentially lower value) services subscribers.

That should be 85.4 billion. Seems like a misprint.

The average sales priced for an iPhone increased nearly 30% from $618 to $793. Services now account for 16% of revenue. Apple is gradually shifting from a device maker to an ecosystem company that consumers pay a premium initial fee to enter and pay an additional recurring free to use.

Why is this article, which was the top ranked link on my list when I commented, no longer even in the top 200? What was the rationale for the mods (or algorithm) to censor this?

Given enough time, everyone dies and everything is meaningless. It's easy to be a nihilist until you watch your own child starve to death.

1) We're not doing much with all this supposed influence we're getting from the sales of weapons.

2) If they can easily switch to Russian or Chinese weapons, that implies we're not getting that much influence by selling them weapons.

3) If the US is not willing to exercise its influence (point 1) or is not really getting that much actual influence (point 2), it seems like we're just profiteering off a proxy war.

This is what I do too. In the iOS version, you can directly open epubs. It's great

I'm sure they'll be able to overtake Baidu. Baidu's search product is terrible. The results are almost always unusable. The only times I find them useful is when it links to a quora-equivalent website where someone has asked your exact query.

Time for a Kafkaesque story:

Initially, when I applied for a bank account under the name of "Jack Middle Chen," they listed my name as "Jackmiddlechen." Just one name, like Cher. Chinese names don't have spaces so it made sense, but this of course made it impossible for me to pay online, where they require family and surnames separately.

So I went back and asked them to differentiate between my first, middle and last names, so they added spaces, without changing the order. So my name became "Jack Middle Chen," where "Jack" was my last name and "Middle Chen" was my first name.

So I went back and asked them to change the order, because it's obviously wrong. So they changed my name to "Chen Middle Jack." Where Chen is now my correct family name, but my new first name is now "Middle Jack."

So I went back and asked them to change my first name to "Jack" because "Middle" is my middle name. But of course, Chinese don't have middle names so they don't have a field for that. So my first name then became "Jack Middle." Which is fine.

The issue is that my names now all had spaces. Chinese names don't have spaces, as mentioned, so to separate my alpha numeric names, they literally had to insert the space character into my name. So when I try to shop online, my name doesn't match because my official registered name has several space character somewhere in there, encoded in a weird way.

So at this point, I go back and try to clarify what my name actually is in their records. I tell them just to make it look exactly like my passport. So now my name is "JACK MIDDLE CHEN," all caps. I still have no idea what my first name and last name is but I've given up shopping online with this card, and since it matches my passport exactly, I can use it at the bank, which is good enough for me.

*Name altered for anonymity

It's the same logistics as an American thinking twice before naming their baby with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's a foreign language that will probably not play well with domestic systems.

Every time I enter China, I have to go to a separate special terminal at customs because their regular systems don't have my Chinese character in their character set.

Even worse is if you try to apply for a bank account in China as a foreigner. Their systems are designed for 2-4 character logogram names, so if you are using a 15-30 character alpha numeric name, then good luck. My English name attached to my bank account has gone through a half dozen permutations over the years, with spaces, without spaces, in the wrong order, etc. I've given up trying to fix it and now am content with a name that is not quite my name, but is close enough to pass passport checks when I go to the bank.

I went to a predominately White/Asian high school in a wealthy, high-performing school district where the criteria for entrance was having the money to live in that district. I subsequently attended Harvard as an Asian male and I felt that my experience was richer for having a wide diversity of classmates. Personally, I am on the side of affirmative action, but I know there are many valid opinions on this matter, depending on people's different value systems and experiences.

I haven't touched a physical credit card in 2 years. Mobile payments is the future

Can you cite these reports and indications? How does economic rebalancing affect their ability to impose tariffs? How does wanting to invest in American companies influence China’s decision on tariffs, especially since the new tariffs restrict Chinese companies from investing in American companies. Why doesn’t China have sufficient reserves? Don’t they have the highest foreign exchange reserves of any country in the world?

Seems like it’s more of a story about savvy government policy leading to the rise of a robust domestic industry.

Perhaps irrelevant to Wodehouse (who writes farce), but I'm a big fan of 'frivolous, empty, and perfectly delightful' popular sci-fi and fantasy novels, especially if they go multiple books! Sometimes you want an escape from the human condition. Good examples include Mistborn, Farseer, Belgariad (especially), the Martian, Ready Player One (although this was a bit shallow, even for me).

If anyone has other recommendations, would be much obliged.

I think one of the points OP was trying to make is if you have the capability to swap out enough paper ballots to materially affect an election, you would also have the ability to fake or distort a blockchain implementation...

Anecdotally, I grew up in the Chinese countryside, spelunking through mud at the local pond to catch frogs for dinner and bathing maybe twice a week. It was only when I moved to the US, land of hand sanitizers and abundant soap, that I suddenly developed a mild allergy to pollen.

it's only "effectively the same" when you're comparing between different years at the same company. it's absolutely not the same when you're comparing different companies.

It's hard to fault the blue collar worker, who had dutifully voted Labour for decades, only to see Labour's neoliberalism collapse their local economies. This was basically a vote against the status quo.

I think before people blame the voters for being misinformed or illogical, it's useful to question why our current economic and political system would push people towards fear, nationalism and xenophobia. Wealth inequality is probabaly a big part.

It seems like there's a large possibility that this will be the beginning of the dismantling of the UK. Scotland is likely to have a second independence referendum and Sinn Fein is calling for a referendum for Northern Ireland to unify with Ireland. London seceding, however, seems unlikely.

I would guess it's mostly students and such, a population with a disproportionate effect on online social trends and deep gaps of real life knowledge.

I have: Xiaomi speakers, plugs, air purifier, water quality tester, water purifier, router, backpack, portable charger, fitness tracker, lightbulb, etc.

They all work very well, and are exceptional quality, considering their price.

You should try watching the Thai life insurance commercials

Out of curiosity, have you ever checked out the paintings of Xu Beihong? He's famous for painting very expressive horses.

https://cn.bing.com/images/search?q=%e5%be%90%e6%82%b2%e9%b8...