> In order for device manufacturers to get the Play Store on their phone, they have to give in to Google's demands to add the Google search box on the home screen of the phones.
What's wrong with this? The Play Store is subsidized by search revenue, it makes sense to tie them together.
There's nothing wrong with having a geographic bias in skepticism, Nigeria is not a historical source of innovation.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, if anything it elevates this boy's achievements even more and puts his talents in the realm of once-in-a-thousand-generations.
"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you.
We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.)
Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.
Ok... back in reality, lots of people are unemployed or underemployed, our markets aren't that free, and again, capital is not the best way to decide whether someone is worth keeping alive (e.g. with universal healthcare).
To your example, a life of complacency is fine. (Edit: I guess you were commenting about someone else, but I still wanted to make the point.)
It is for domestic consumption, and much like Japan it is generally being held domestically. They are indebting themselves to themselves tremendously and (as is in the case of Japan) it's not necessarily a bad thing.
The story looks similar too, which is why the CPC is shifting to encouraging demographic growth (including strongly incentivizing young professionals to form families.)
Using per person GDP when discussing China is a cruel joke. Like most usages of per person GDP in any country, it glosses over regional disparities and (more importantly) economic equality measures like Gini coefficient.
Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.
==Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.==
So does the US [1]:
The top 1 percent of earners in America now take home about 20 percent of the country’s pretax national income, compared with less than 12 percent in 1978, according to the research the economists published at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Over the same time in China, the top 1 percent doubled their share of income, rising from about 6 percent to 12 percent.
Gini implicitly assumes a flat distribution is desirable. Ask North Korea and Cuba how that works out.
PPP GDP per capita is okay, but the PPP portion is rife with assumptions, some untenable. For instance, you really really don't want to live in a heavy industrial area in China, the air is like soup -- sometimes it pegs the AQI needle at 999. US hasn't ever had air that bad, even before the Clean Air Act.
But the scale of China population is so that if they double their GDP per capita, they will have an upper and middle class population bigger than most if not all individual countries in the world (EDIT: except India).
At least China's Gini coefficient is going in the correct direction. The US's Gini has been getting worse all while we still have third-world conditions festering for far too long.
China’s official GINI coefficient doesn’t include grey income (e.g. that official making 10k RMB/month yet driving a black Audi A9). Well, they stopped reporting it in the early part of this decade when it started getting really bad.
There are always reporting problems, especially tracking the wealth of the extreme rich. Estimates of hidden income and wealth are in the trillions. Gini in both China and the US are likely worse in actuality. But when you're in the middle of the process of converting your economy from rural to modern then it's much easier to swing the Gini change in the more equal direction.
But because it's a different situation and harder to change in the US, doesn't mean we shouldn't be strongly aware of the implications of its worsening in the US.
They stopped reporting their gini coefficient number altogether. There are no numbers after 2012.
I lived in a Chinese first tier city for 10 years. Income inequality was much more obvious there than I ever saw in the states (even in the boonies of Mississippi). A lot of that was related to china’s caste/hukou system that basically denies social services to migrant workers.
Yes, the USA has first world income inequality problems. But China has third world ones.
The joke goes: the USA has so many homeless people, they are just everywhere! China has no homeless people, because the police beat them pretty harshly so they are either dead or really good at hiding.
How does one reconcile this with jaded cynicism of "regulations for thee but not for me"?
Furthermore, does this regulation target the hardware products themselves, the software performing the recognition, the biometric data itself, the transfer of this biometric data, aggregate ("anonymized") biometric data, the processing of biometric data? There is a lot to talk about here.
I’m fine with Microsoft’s motives being hurting rivals with regulation, if it gives me more privacy rights. In fact that’s great, because their coffers are much larger than the eff or whoever else could take up this lobbying effort.
There is a big difference between collecting telemetry (data about the product you're using) for improving the product internally and collecting private data for reselling to the highest bidder.
Here's the thing; Microsoft is a large corporation with lots of assets to protect. This kind of sketchy technology can easily be (is already?) a race to the bottom in terms of privacy and morality, and a big company has more to lose.
Incidentally, big companies also have economies of scale in complying with regulation.
So they can be all for facial recognition tech AND benefit from the regulation of it.
First, I recognize we're painting with a broad brush here. I wouldn't call it supremacism. But too often I find "progressives" see themselves a moral high ground. Often dismissing nuanced conversation for a "winner" due to morals.
I don't care for discussing actual policies since I'm no law expert. I do like drilling down into first principles with "either side" and seeing what their ideal treatment of individuals in situations would be. It's just... difficult to discuss such things without being seen as insensitive or even prejudicial.
This being said, this article has nothing to do with technology :). And subscribing to view the full article... gross.
> But too often I find "progressives" see themselves a moral high ground. Often dismissing nuanced conversation for a "winner" due to morals.
This isn't a trait specific to progressives alone, given how often conservatives insist their views are morally superior because they represent the will of God or the founding fathers.
See: every argument about abortion or gun control ever.
Absolutely. It's a thing among most ideologies. But I see the term "progressive" itself as positioned where opposing views aren't progressing society. Which is a sort of moral high ground. But, that's looking too far into it I'm sure. Not what most would intend and is a matter of perspective.
>Why even make an argument if you don’t believe it is the “moral high ground”?
Everyone, at the very least, believes their arguments to be correct (unless they're doing some Devil's Advocate/false-flagging/Socratic thing,) but the problem with believing one view to be morally superior is the tendency to then believe other views are immoral, and therefore invalid, rather than see those views as being held from alternate moral perspectives.
Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, believe with absolute and unshakeable conviction that theirs is the moral high ground.
> Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, believe with absolute and unshakeable conviction that theirs is the moral high ground.
I know people who preface an explanation of their support for pro-choice policy with something like "I would never have an abortion myself, but..." That's the opposite of "absolute and unshakeable conviction that theirs is the moral high ground." Most of the time it's the words of someone who recognizes a compromise needs to be made.
