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Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

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Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#151

Post by supertrope »

FredPret wrote: post #112

It'd be so cool if all our phones & laptops could have globally-unique addresses and talk to one another directly in a big global mesh. You'd still need cables and satellites to deal with rural areas and to cross oceans, but you couldn't really switch that off. Free speech would go through the roof!

The users would need an incentive to relay others' traffic and run down their batteries faster. Mesh is also extremely slow. Just try using Tor as an example.

BitTorrent offered up the incentive of free downloads of copyrighted media. Bitcoin offered money.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#152

Post by londons_explore »

tmpz22 wrote: post #145
apapapa wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still crazy but more reasonable to shut it down for exams than elections

I wonder if exam season is just a convenient excuse to test the system in case it needs to be deployed for civic unrest.

I wonder how long exam season is... If it's a 3 hour period it's quite different than a 3 month period.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#153

Post by seoulmetro »

standardUser wrote: post #99
devoutsalsa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, so I googled… - “The government grounds aircraft or reroutes flights to keep students from getting distracted during the biggest test of their lives.” - “ On the streets Thursday morning, you could hear more sirens than usual, because anyone running late to the competitive exam can call for a free police escort to rush them straight to the test site.” - “Success is defined narrowly. Get a high score on…

Any test that is so big that it requires shutting down large sections of society is way, way too big. And I mean, WAY too big, like grotesquely so. Just imagining that level of stress stresses me out.

Korean education has fallen down the slippery slope of "perfection". Mainly due to there being not enough jobs at the end of the tunnel as they do not count "real jobs" as labour or creative roles, which make up huge percentages of a happy society's workforce.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#154

Post by jakub_g »

euroderf wrote: post #102

Back in the days before teh interwebz were invented... What if the gov't could shut off political advertising on TV for (say) 48 hours before any national election ? Candidates fall back on print(ed) media and radio. This would cut off many problems (imho). Opportunity missed. And, too late now.

This has been a standard practice in many countries

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#155

Post by user3939382 »

chihuahua wrote: post #148
user3939382 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If the U.S. was the real ruler in Pakistan, I think Pakistan would not have supported the Taliban in Afghanistan the entire time U.S. troops were in Afghanistan. And they would not have been sheltering Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, less than 1 mile from the Pakistan Military Academy.

My guess is there are factions internally

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#156

Post by apapapa »

londons_explore wrote: post #152
tmpz22 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if exam season is just a convenient excuse to test the system in case it needs to be deployed for civic unrest.

I wonder how long exam season is... If it's a 3 hour period it's quite different than a 3 month period.

One of the many issues with censorship

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#157

Post by choilive »

ken47 wrote: post #80
devoutsalsa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, so I googled… - “The government grounds aircraft or reroutes flights to keep students from getting distracted during the biggest test of their lives.” - “ On the streets Thursday morning, you could hear more sirens than usual, because anyone running late to the competitive exam can call for a free police escort to rush them straight to the test site.” - “Success is defined narrowly. Get a high score on…

This test seems to control your trajectory in Korean society to a very high degree, which seems like overkill in my view, because a test can only be so reflective of real-life skills. I have a family member who did very well on the test and got into Seoul National University, which is reputed to be the best university in Korea. According to them, their IQ is "only" 120-130, but they have very good memory, and are abl…

Korea has a long history (along with China) on using tests to determine your place in society. Korea's version of the civil service examinations (known as the gwageo) have been around for like a milleniun, and it was pretty much your only way into the middle and upper class of society. The university entrance exams is just the modern cultural continuation of it.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#158

Post by kranke155 »

lainga wrote: post #51
wozniacki wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt it also true that no democratically elected or coup-installed Prime Minister in Pakistan's history has ever successfully completed a single full term in office, ever since their independence[1]? And if that is true, isn't Pakistan a glorified tin-pot republic, thats democracy only on paper & manages to stay alive at the mercy of the propping-up prowess of U.S. and U.K., to act as a lily pad[2] of sorts in the re…

Funny way to express the $65 billion of FDI that China's put into Pakistan, along with joint development of the JF-17 and 47% of China's arms exports as a whole, isn't it? Or has the near-total cut in US military aid to Pakistan over 2018-2022 been a delayed coup de grace , and should we expect the country to implode at any minute?

Nobody can afford Pakistan to implode I think. The fact they have nuclear weapons is like a giant blackmail file on the entire world.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#159

Post by numpad0 »

standardUser wrote: post #101
jdewerd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized testing does not aim to be a perfect evaluation, it aims to be a good enough evaluation that can be made highly resistant to corruption/bribery relative to its qualitative alternatives.

They could divide it into 5-10 different test, administered over the course of several years. Anything but what they are doing now, which sounds like it was custom designed to encourage drug abuse and suicide.

Isn't SAT tests in US exactly the same as the Korean system?

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#160

Post by DoughnutHole »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #150
lancesells wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happiness index for Korea is 6 Happiness index for US is 6.9 Suicide rate in Korea is 21.2 per 100k Suicide rate in US is 14.5 per 100k Drug death rate in Korea is 0.16 per 100k Drug death rate in US is 18.83 per 100k And I only did the US and Korea because I only know the US. My conclusion is South Koreans feel about the same as Americans but do way less drugs.

Having the same suicide rate as the US is not indicative of a healthy culture, especially in a country without easy access to guns.

It’s not even remotely the same, it’s nearly 50% higher than the US (which isn’t doing that great either).

South Korea has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world.

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