westiseast

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61.
by westiseast 8y ago
Very surprised the article doesn’t mention a few things: 1. Some places just have more homework than others . Chinese kids have mountains of homework aged 7, vastly more than British kids. Chinese parents spend much more time either managi
62.
by westiseast 9y ago
I was in Fujian, China, two weeks ago and did a Bing web/image search for ‘gay men’ (unrelated to any of this news). Zero results returned, and a standard note about violent and sexually explicit content being censored. Thought that wa
63.
by westiseast 9y ago
> Yang, who asked that her real name not be used, ... has no privacy-related concerns. “I trust the government,” she says. “Who else can you trust if not them?” Irony obviously not her strong point.
64.
by westiseast 9y ago
It’s a mix of factors. There are protests and issues bubbling up all the time - hundreds or thousands of actions in any given year. It’s a big country with a lot of issues, so that’s not unexpected. But the one thing the CCP is undoubtabl
65.
by westiseast 9y ago
It’s a bad comparison because the actual, legal and historical situations are vastly different. eg. > if the PRC were to allow Taiwan to conduct... Taiwan is de facto an independent country. The only extent to which the PRC can ‘allow’
66.
by westiseast 9y ago
This is the answer I wish I could write :) The only thing I could think to add was that so much of the urban infrastructure is horrendously poor, and it will need to be ripped apart pretty much wholesale within the next 30-50 years. I’m thi
67.
by westiseast 9y ago
The Florida comparison isn’t really apt - indeed a lot of the comparisons/equivalents being drawn in this thread conveniently ignore key elements. * PRC (the CCP) considers Taiwan to be part of the PRC (and part of ‘China’ the country)
68.
by westiseast 9y ago
That’s the crux of the issue now with Facebook though - it’s become so pervasive that people don’t even realize what they’re sharing: * It follows you around the internet via the Share/Like plug-ins so your entire internet browsing pat
69.
by westiseast 9y ago
The most likely explanation that sprang to mind was that there’s a convention in Chinese for (young) people to say ‘n’ meaning ‘lots’. ie: A: Have you been to Disney? B: OMG, only like, n times! (A: 你去过迪斯尼吗？ B: 哎呀我去n次啦) edit: so i’m confirm
70.
by westiseast 9y ago
Absolutely. I think people underestimate how much walking or physical activity they’d need to do to counterbalance the calorie surplus they have on a daily basis. You’d literally need to be fast walking for hours and hours a day. Cars don’t
71.
by westiseast 9y ago
In an ideal world, sources are great, but there’s a bunch of practical problems with the idea that everything, anyone says online should have some sort of attribution: * How do I attach sources for my opinions or logical/moral argume
72.
by westiseast 9y ago
So I've been in trouble on HN (probably rightly so) once before for pointing the finger. With that in mind... The problem is that 'their' only objective is to undermine 'our' goal of having a balanced, honest discus
73.
by westiseast 9y ago
No idea :) I heard some foreign cards can now be linked to WeChat, but I've never had that problem. Otherwise I guess yes, Visa/Mastercard and cash.
74.
by westiseast 9y ago
You’re talking about strict regulation of cross border payments, which isn’t a market that ecommerce and mobile payments really operate in at all. Bank infrastructure has been a minor factor at best in the adoption/explosion of mobile
75.
by westiseast 9y ago
I lived there for ten years ;) But yeah - I think there’s amazing things happening. It’s a bit of a shame that the discussion is regularly framed as ‘who is number one?’ - there’s some straight up great innovation, and there’s a lot of inte
76.
by westiseast 9y ago
The explosion in mobile payments in China vs America/Europe is amazing, but it grates when it’s used as an example of tech advantage (ie. as if Chinese companies were being more innovative or groundbreaking). There’s a lot of cool th
77.
by westiseast 9y ago
Is China influential or a creator in terms of the underlying tech used around the world? Software, coding languages (or contributions), frameworks?
78.
by westiseast 9y ago
> And most people don’t actually care about you Well... yeah. I mean, imagine you had super critical parents who picked on your every mistake as a child. Now you suffer from social anxiety and feel intense shame and fear in public becau
79.
by westiseast 9y ago
It’s mistaken (and somewhat sad!) to take a cynical attitude like that given the implications of the research. The most exciting part of these type of studies is the ability to take depressive people and ‘kick’ them out of the cognitive rut
80.
by westiseast 9y ago
Amway is huge in China. Anytime I got approached in coffee shops it was 50/50 someone wanting to practice English, or an Amway rep.
81.
by westiseast 9y ago
China has its own highly addictive social media.
82.
by westiseast 9y ago
Haha yeah if you enjoy it, then it's worth doing. It's almost something you could do independent of actually learning the language. Have you ever seen those copy books of Tang Poetry? Not sure where you'd buy them, but they&#
83.
by westiseast 9y ago
I think it just wasn't sunk in very well - the kids were both fluent at their level (a 3/5 year old isn't ultra-proficient in any language, but it was their primary form of communication), but they just very quickly dropped i
84.
by westiseast 9y ago
Fantastic - this has been on my mind recently. Moved back from China to the UK with our 3 & 5 year olds whose mother language was Chinese. I’d assumed there would be some kind of struggle getting them adjusted to English - exactly the o
85.
by westiseast 9y ago
The problem is best illustrated with things like road deaths. If you look at road deaths for China, it’s something like 20 per 100k people per year vs maybe 2-3 in the UK. What that means is, statistically China is 8-10 times “worse” than t
86.
by westiseast 9y ago
Maybe we should start letting the exchanges gamble with our bitcoins?
87.
by westiseast 9y ago
Yeah this is the bit nobody seems to realise - the money isn’t outside the US at all. There’s an in-house ‘hedge fund’ managing it all in Delaware. Edit: Reno
88.
by westiseast 9y ago
I was thinking about this - it probably won’t be. It’s just a lot of people will end up feeling sheepish. Recessions tend to bring down economies when they impact on wider economic activity - eg in the Great Depression it was all the loans
89.
by westiseast 9y ago
Check out Mark Kitto’s story for the ‘original’ example of this. To modify the original sentiment, it’s more like ‘any foreign company doing well in China will eventually be forced into a corner by unfair state aid to its competitors’
90.
by westiseast 9y ago
This is just plain wrong: > Alibaba has succeeded in large part because brick-and-mortar retailing is so challenging on the mainland. Roughly a quarter of the world's cities with more than 500,000 people are located in China -- twic

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