Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 310 posts

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#111

Post by Retric »

pm90 wrote: post #106
Retric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 is kind of meaningless when they are the #1 largest country by population and most countries are tiny by comparison. It’s like comparing the value of houses when one has as much land as Texas and you include that in the ‘house’ price. In nominal terms they are 72 per person adjust for PPP and they are #79 which which not bad. It’s the next 30 years when things get interesting. http://statisticstimes.com/economy/co…

Wait, so it’s a bad thing that they have more people? How does it make them any less powerful? PPP is metric, good for comparing certain things. I wouldn’t think that, for the purposes of determining which is the greater power, less population would be more beneficial as long as the total economic output is greater.

I don’t think total ‘power’ is a useful metric for comparing countries leadership. An incompetent farmer with 10x the land will likely grow more food than a competent one. That says little about who you should seek advice from.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#112

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

wozniacki wrote: post #98
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a modern, 1st world mindset, Yours was a valuable testimony. Let me just comment on one aspect of the mindset bit. Class, as you noted, still very much exists, but modern day aristocrats don't expose themselves to snipers as they did two or three centuries ago. Instead we get celebrities and players and self-made rich critters out there to catch the limelight and flak. And family, the key base to aristocratic wealt…

Instead we get celebrities and players and self-made rich critters out there to catch the limelight and flak. And family, the key base to aristocratic wealth and power, is played down as unnecessary, because a meritocratic system needs no more than individual prowess to succeed. Terrific observation! Although I think I get what you mean by this I'd love for you to expand on it. I'm sure you have dwelled as I have and…

If you look at XIX century sources, you'll see there were groups whose idea of fostering human progress was to terrorize the ruling class, mostly by piecemeal killing of its members with guns and bombs.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#113

Post by late2part »

spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

What an incredibly well written comment. Thank you!

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#114

Post by late2part »

adrianN wrote: post #61
mrb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a practical thought experiment that might help you: picture yourself many years from now, on your deathbed; would you have more regrets of having gone down path A or B?

That is not very practical, as you don't know how the future will turn out. If they start a startup and succeed they'll likely be happy about that decision. It's very hard to figure out expected outcomes for actions, and it's not very productive to think about worst-case (or best-case) outcomes.

I don’t look back on decisions I’ve made and evaluate them based on outcome. I evaluate them based on the experience and my decision making.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#116

Post by jmcgough »

nathanyukai wrote: post #82
fivecents wrote: post #66

I can't help but think... wouldn't the average Chinese be much better off if the current Taiwanese gov. still ruled China? I mean, look at Taiwan... it has nothing (no land, no diplomatic ties, etc). Yet it has a lot (decent economy for avg. joe, democracy, etc). Compare this to the current PRC: - cultural revolution wiped out most of the smart people - centries of wrong economic policy (until pretty recent radical c…

The problem is: governing an island with 20 million people is very different from governing 1.3 billion people. I mean , Beijing alone have 20 million population. PRC did lots of bad things yes, but I believe all countries have organ-trafficking, corruption, 'wrong' economic policies.

Organ trafficking in the US is essentially unheard of. Stuff like that only happens if the government turns a blind eye to it (or encourages it, like with falun gong).

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#117

Post by k__ »

spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

Same here in Germany.

My grandparents were born end of the 1930s. They grew up in the second world war and lived through the rebuild. The mother side in the west the father side in the east, so they even lived through socialism.

Their views on life were so removed from what I encountered in the world...

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#118

Post by nabla9 »

spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

What you both describe is large cultural division between survival values and self-expression values between two generations.

In quickly developing countries some people already live modern life but their parents come from very traditional valued society. What in the west is cultural division between grandparents and grandchildren can be division between parents and children.

Political scientist Ronald Inglehart (known for Inglehart-index and Inglehart–Welzel cultural map used in the World Values Survey) noticed the same difference between post-war generations and their parents. His book 'The Silent Revolution' (1977) was the first attempt to map these differences between generations and cultures.

I noticed similar cultural division after Soviet Union collapsed in 1992 and I made friends with Russians of my age who moved to Finland, I realized that they shared the same values as my parents (and I have old parents).

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#120

Post by ptaipale »

spyckie2 wrote: post #95
sametmax wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your testimony reminds me of a kid I met in Mali. The guy was our guide, and he spoke 6 languages, including 4 local dialects, french and english. He had a cellphone and knew how to drive a 4x4. He drove us to the desert, in a place at the north of Bamako known as the Dogon's country. There, he asked us if we were ok to take a detour by his parents village, and we agreed. His parents were living with no electricity,…

When Asian parents says, don't get a literature degree, become a doctor, they have a good reason to say it. It's not necessarily this bad in terms of standard of living (the above description would be subsistence levels, maybe less than 200$ a year), but the median household income in China is about $12-15k US a year compared to $56k in the US. And it's not that in China everything is cheaper so 12-15k goes a long wa…

Related: Rich Kids Study English

"New data shows that students whose parents make less money pursue more “useful” subjects, such as math or physics."

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college...

Post reply on HN