421–430 of 686 posts
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This view seems inconsistent. Artificial manipulation is not sustainable in the long term. The ability to continually create conditions that lead to cheap labor is limited and will eventually fail.
On the contrary, it seems that increase of income inequality is a natural trend.
400 years ago? Hardly.
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This view seems inconsistent. Artificial manipulation is not sustainable in the long term. The ability to continually create conditions that lead to cheap labor is limited and will eventually fail.
With AI+capital on the manipulating side I am not sure there are any limits.
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This view seems inconsistent. Artificial manipulation is not sustainable in the long term. The ability to continually create conditions that lead to cheap labor is limited and will eventually fail.
What artificial manipulation?
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Singapore is a complex beast. On the one hand, all the political tools to kick the PAP out exist. Elections are free albeit not entirely fair. That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0]. But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive prais…
> But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?
I suspect China's draconian, desperate attempt to eliminate Covid entirely was largely due to official guilt. They knew that their poorly managed reckless science program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, and they wanted to somehow prove they could wipe the virus out entirely (which they couldn't). Eventually they had to give up. I wonder what happens to people in China who point this…
I am an American expat who just moved from Germany to Indonesia about six months ago. One thing I see is that the comments he makes about China echo my views of the West. Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression (though in the US, we outsource this to the private sector so that we can actively argue that it doesn't exist). What is driving a lot of this in the West is the effor…
Moving from Germany to Indonesia is a wild move! Did you move to Bali or somewhere else? "the West": This term is meaningless to me. Does this include Africa, South America, AUS/NS, Middle East? "Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.
I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say
'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'
Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.
That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.
I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.
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The author has lived there for 20 years, married there, has kids who go to local schools, yet calls himself an expat, and everyone here seems to accept that as an obvious truth. Meanwhile a million+ people coming to the USA on temporary work visas fully intending to go back to their home country (or illegally with no path to citizenship) are obviously immigrants. At some point people have to come to terms that this i…
China does not have a citizenship program. If you are not born Chinese, you will never be Chinese. Everyone who moves to China is an expat. What you call yourself, "immigrant" or "expat" is up to you. For example, plenty of Indians call themselves expats in the US. Other Indians call themselves immigrants. Personally, I'm a fan of the word "alien". God Bless America! :D
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+1, at least anecdotally, at least in T1 cities: I spent a few months in Shanghai for work in 2018 and all of my local colleagues had messed up housing situations of one flavor or another. One guy lived alone in a shoebox but when he had a free weekend, he'd take the train ~2h out to a smaller city where his family lived in a decent house. There were also a lot of complaints about apartment quality even/especially in…
With the folks I was working with it wasn't "messed up" in any way, it just was hardly any more relatively affordable give local wages than most big cities in the US. Some fun/awkward differences though. For instance, I had imagined it would be easy to find a laundromat - I didn't want to pay the hotel prices for cleaning. Ended up almost accidentally offending the people I was asking - "why would we need to go somew…
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The author has lived there for 20 years, married there, has kids who go to local schools, yet calls himself an expat, and everyone here seems to accept that as an obvious truth. Meanwhile a million+ people coming to the USA on temporary work visas fully intending to go back to their home country (or illegally with no path to citizenship) are obviously immigrants. At some point people have to come to terms that this i…
>The author has lived there for 20 years, married there, has kids who go to local schools, yet calls himself an expat, and everyone here seems to accept that as an obvious truth. If they refer to themselves as an expat, why are you questioning this? Do you demand proof when someone refers to themselves as male or female too? I know people living in the US who have been there for 20 years and call themselves expats to…
> At some point, people like you need to stop trying to make everything about racism.
But it is. (Kinda.) If you don't look East-Asian in China, the predominant assumption is that you're an "expat". And statistically this is almost always true -- Chinese nationality is extremely hard to obtain if you're not born with it, and probably 99% of Chinese nationals look East Asian and has East Asian ethnicity.