They say events in Japan often foretell the future of a highly developed and urbanized society, could be parallel to the old "Japanese people are not having much sex" news in the past, we're just catching up.
You just linked to an article that debunks the myth that Japanese are less sexually active than other people. TL;DR: the study that started it all, claiming that 40% of Japanese are virgins, was limited to people who have never married and this obviously skews the sample greatly.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/14/record-number-... (Record number of young people in Japan rejecting marriage, survey shows; Rise in people aged 18-34 who don’t intend to marry has consequences for Japan’s low birth rate and depopulation concerns)
Regarding economics, the economist Paul Krugman was the first to say it, in an essay in 1994, when he suggested that the slowdown in Japan might reveal what was going to happen to all other advanced nations. It was an idea he then developed over several years, in a series of essays, and then finally when his predictions came true, he came out with a book on the subject:
> last stop before the planet Mars: In Japan, the world’s most technologically sophisticated society, the future has already happened, says Peter Popham
Or there are technological advances in artificial wombs and children are grown in incubators so that women are no longer as involved in pregnancy/child-bearing.
We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
Humans make abysmally bad batteries or power generators. That was always the dumbest part of The Matrix. The original idea for that was that we were the computers for the Matrix simulation instead, which made at least marginally more sense.
The original idea was never anything other than batteries.
That rumor of producers changing it to batteries started because Neil Gaiman thought the battery thing was dumb so when he was hired to do a promotional wrote Matrix short story he changed it to the humans being used for computer processing.
I don't see why you're linking artificial wombs with the matrix. In a matrix like scenario, I see no reason why the machines would even bother with artificial wombs, when the real ones already work right now (no R&D required) and are already pretty efficient.
We’d be better utilized as CPU and memory storage. Maybe generate brain structure, biology state with (re)generative biology like Michael Levin is up to at Tufts[0].
There’s tons of alternative research paths going untouched that leverage information theory to hack “reality” directly rather than hack on synthetic computers and software within an enclosed time-space vacuum constrained by known hardware limitations.
Metaverses running on synthetic machines seems way more prosaic than a metaverse in my own head I might be able to switch on off with a pill.
Once the machines take over they'd probably prefer to work with yeast as their bio battery of choice. No need to spend compute on a simulation, the yeast would be happy as clams living in a big vat with all nutrient needs met.
Well, that's not terrifying in the least bit. Imagine knowing that you were born to a machine and not to a woman who you can call mother. On second thought, its not just terrifying, it is immeasurable sadness for most, and probably psychosis for some.
The biggest downside which appears to be cited by people who discover later that their birth parents weren't the people who brought them up is an uncertainty about why they exist - but for a person who can be told (once they're old enough to understand) the exact circumstances which brought them about that is resolved.
We already have surrogacy, which is when one human volunteers use of their womb to carry somebody else's child (that is, egg comes from person A, sperm from person B, A+B = new human life => fertilised egg is implanted in person C, the surrogate). I know two kids who were born this way, they have loving parents, the eldest will be aware that something is a bit unusual - any other mummies she knows who had a second kid the baby was obviously inside them, whereas her baby sister was inside this other nice lady who just showed up for a few weeks and she's been told that's how it worked for her too - but obviously the tricky details aren't going to be worth explaining to a pre-schooler once they're satisfied with any immediate questions (e.g. is this new baby my sister? Yes. Does the nice lady mean I get extra birthday presents? No)
An artificial womb potentially makes surrogacy an option for larger numbers of people. Some people find pregnancy pretty good really, and their main reason to stop after one or two is economics or practicalities, so this innovation changes nothing for them - but others don't want to risk a second pregnancy after discovering how badly their body reacted the first time, so such technology (if cheap enough) would mean they could have a second or third child.
This also changes the calculus for government intervention. Hiring women to be impregnated is a much more difficult proposition than hiring nursery or orphanage staff. An artificial womb would mean only the second is needed.
It would certainly be a shock to some but most kids have no idea where they came from until they learn about the reproductive system. Their first instinct is that a bird dropped them out of the sky. So closing the gap between X and Y wouldnt be too crazy.
Now the social pressures of being a “machine baby” vs “natural womb baby” would be a different thing.
Not even talking about lack of hormones during natural pregnacy we have zero idea about because this was not researched in humqns and how it would impact a human child post mortem.
It should be noted that Zhang was a math prodigy when he was young, around 13 years old, however because of the Cultural Revolution in China, school education was stopped for a decade and his parents were purged and he was sent down to the countryside so he could not study at school but was forced to work in the fields and factories as re-education. It was only a decade later that he managed to get into university because universities re-opened after the Cultural Revolution, by then he was 23 already when he started his bachelors' degree.
Note that, universities could accept people who did not attend school if they passed their university entry exams because so many people were unable to attend schools because they were all closed and teachers purged during the Cultural Revolution.
I would say he "matured" later mainly because he did not have the right opportunities because he could not go to high school and after his university graduation, had no good opportunities because many good professors were purged during the Cultural Revolution so he fled to the US for a better life.
And I quote from the above source which is from a 2015 New Yorker interview with Zhang:
'I asked Zhang, “Are you very smart?” and he said, “Maybe, a little.” He was born in Shanghai in 1955. His mother was a secretary in a government office, and his father was a college professor...As a small boy, he began “trying to know everything in mathematics,” he said. “I became very thirsty for math.”...The [Cultural] revolution had closed the schools. He spent most of his time reading math books that he ordered from a bookstore for less than a dollar.'
As well:
'...when he was fifteen he was sent with his mother to the countryside...where they grew vegetables. His father was sent to a farm in another part of the country. If Zhang was seen reading books on the farm, he was told to stop...After a few years, he returned to Beijing, where he got a job in a factory making locks. He began studying to take the entrance exam for Peking University, China’s most respected school: “I spent several months to learn all the high-school physics and chemistry, and several to learn history. It was a little hurried.” He was admitted when he was twenty-three.'
The professional math world is full of smart but delusionally ambitious people who do things like focus all their energy on the Jacobian conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis. Most crash out never finishing their doctorates (because these problems are too hard and working on them does not provide what it takes to survive professionally). Zhang is an example of such a person. What is very unusual about him is not that he continued to work on such things anyway, rather that he eventually found some measure of success. What I infer from his story is that he is tremendously stubborn and genuinely oblivious to ordinary material feedback. Evidently he has some talent too, but that's not the unusual part of his story.
Said another way - I've known quite a few people like him to a point - with the difference that none of the others ever produced good mathematics, much less solved a major problem.
He had a talk three days ago, explaining his thesis where he remarked:
“When the paper was posted online just a few days ago, many people who don’t focus on mathematics didn’t understand it, thinking that it was the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture solved, and some even thought that it proved the Riemann Hypothesis is wrong. Actually, I don’t have this ability. I only partially solve the Riemann hypothesis within a certain range. If I say I overturned Riemann Hypothesis, few people would believe it.”[1]
Maybe he loves what he's doing and that's the root of being stubborn and "genuinely oblivious to ordinary material feedback". Although love or passion can be overrated or too general to describe his attitude toward problem-solving, I think people can't be just stubborn, there's a drive that holds them to a higher standard.
> people who do things like focus all their energy on the Jacobian conjecture ... Most crash out never finishing their doctorates (because these problems are too hard and working on them does not provide what it takes to survive professionally).
In Zhang's case, I believe his doctoral thesis actually proved the Jacobian conjecture... but his thesis was relying on an incorrect result given by his advisor's own paper (presumably at the guidance of his advisor).
Putin won't stop though, the war with the Georgians in 2008, 2014 Ukraine invasion and now this Ukraine war. Is it really peace when one side calls for peace?
Don't forget WW2, when Nazi Germany under Hitler annexed Czechslovakia in 1938, invaded and split up Poland in 1939 and all the Great Powers did not do anything due to either appeasement or isolationism. We need to learn from history, expansionist dictators do not stop and conceding to them only leads to further war and likely world war.
You just explained it, imagine if one of your competitors (Tesla) now knows how much you spend on Twitter, its like a strategy game but now they know your advertising budget. Also they want to see the boundaries between Tesla and Twitter, are you funding your competitors by just spending money on Twitter?
Just a note:
The money-laundering system this criminal is part of is called a 地下钱庄 in Chinese or "underground banks" (https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/intel/advisories-avis/bank-...), originally started in the 1980s in Mainland China when free-market reforms brought non-regulated "banks" (more just a group of people calling themselves a bank) and informal "loan" companies/loan sharks, they were soon co-opted by corrupt officials to bring money out of the country and since about 2018 any Chinese citizen who wishes to bring money for big purchases like real estate investment outside of China uses a form of underground banking since China puts an annual limit of $50,000 USD on money that can be taken out of the country (https://nhglobalpartners.com/moving-money-in-and-out-china-r...).
Technically speaking, if you want to exceed the limit, you can send in an application form to explain and hopefully get approved to take out more money than that $50,000 limit but the original intent of this law was to restrict money flowing out of China and it is very hard to get approved beyond the limit.
It can be simpler than that even without banks. My own Chinese family “launders” money using similar mirror transactions, but a bit simpler. They often have cash coming from US restaurants and rentals, and they want to send that cash to their family in China, sometimes to invest into Chinese businesses. So first they find a Chinese person in Los Angeles (let’s call him Mr X Lee) who wants to receive cash from his family in China (let’s call them Lee family). My family gives Mr X the cash, at the same time asking his Lee family in China to give the same amount of cash to my relatives in China.
How can this still survive the constant crackdowns from Xi? The reason I ask is because I have relatives trying to move money out, and it seems near impossible now except for the allowable yearly amount, which is low.
If you’re willing to pay there are always ways to move value out. For example, buy $1M worth of t-shirts inside China. Sell for a 5% loss outside of China but say you sold at a 20% loss. Now you have money outside of China. You had to pay a decent fee and have a partner outside of China to do it but hey, that’s what gangs are for.
Ever wonder why both Chinese investors and the Saudi sovereign fund were prepared to pay huge premiums in valuations when investing in companies, even though it was apparent it was likely they'd make a loss?
This is it. If you have $100M inside China, can take a 30% loss but end up with $70M in the US that isn't a bad deal.
> Ever wonder why both Chinese investors and the Saudi sovereign fund were prepared to pay huge premiums in valuations when investing in companies, even though it was apparent it was likely they'd make a loss?
This is totally unrelated. If you’ve got money outside the country you’ve already won, the point is that Chinese people can’t freely participate in foreign funds.
For example, many funds (sequoia, light speed, etc) maintain separate independent China funds to which the Chinese are restricted. It should be obvious to say, but a Chinese person cannot easily get wealth out of the country using a Chinese investment fund.
> If you have $100M inside China, can take a 30% loss but end up with $70M in the US that isn't a bad deal.
That’s not what GP is describing. GP is describing fraud wherein you lie about your losses (take 5% loss, report 20% loss). Everything you claim you earned goes back to China, but the gap between reported losses and true losses stays outside the country.
Note that you still want to be investing in a somewhat successful business for this scheme, to minimize loss of capital.
What challenges are there in moving that kind of money around? I imagine if you're that rich you have a private banker that deals with any AML reporting that has to be done on $100M
Because despite what crypto MLM shills claim their “market caps” are, there’s no way to turn any amount of Bitcoin into serious amounts of money like hundreds of millions of actual dollars. Any attempt to liquidate that sort of dollar value out of crypto will quickly show what a sham the whole pyramid scheme of inflated value is.
Tether volumes on Tron and Ethereum would suggest that perhaps you may be incorrect. Probably not hundreds of millions of dollars at once if you aren't working with legitimate OTC desks who can handle that size but even if you work with the more sketchy p2p types it is possible to do 7-8 figure transactions.
China had more than 50% of Bitcoin's hashing rate. Most of it probably was to launder CNY out of the country. I suspect there is still some underground mining despite the clampdown. The days of large scale mining seems to be over, though.
With the massive trade surplus that China runs, why is it concerned about people taking currency out of the country? Is it purely a question of control of the population?
Not only taking currency out of the country, the same limit applies to bringing money into the country. The control is over foreign exchange. If you have a valid reason, buying a house abroad, going to study, go traveling, you can exchange foreign exchange beyond the $50k limit.
I'd say it has something to do with the policy placed when the country needed dollars in 70s and 80s, and no one is taking the risk of removing it. China doesn't want to free foreign exchange on Chinese Yuan, mainly because it has shielded its financial institutes from western hedgefunds attacks. The Chinese financial institutes are new, and not as sophisticated as the western counterparts, IMO, this has been something working well for China, and I would hope it can continue to serve this purpose.
The property market is way over-priced during the fast and furious two-decades quest to blow a credit tsunami.
Now that the credit tsunami looks to inexorablly ebb under its own weight, a looming population implosion, the party will have to prevent a collective cashing-out from the speculators they once rolled out the red carpet for. esp. in the form of offshore currency.
By trapping them in, to keep people from panic dumping.
The policy is pretty old at this point and there is no momentum behind changing it. It also helps curtail "hot money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_money) flows which can cause banking crises. Obviously there's the control thing you mentioned to keep elites in check.
Arguably more an expansion of the original idea than a pivot, but Twitch used to be justin.tv which was just a single 24-hour livestream of Justin Kan, they later expanded it to allow other people to broadcast as well and then noticed their gaming channels was doing really well and rebranded as Twitch to solely focus on gaming.
From Justin.tv (the streaming service) to Twitch (the gaming-focused streaming service) was definitely more change in strategy (focusing on what was organically working best), but the original change really was a pivot from content creation (which happened to need the ability to stream) to providing others with that ability to stream as a service.
Discord itself says this in their welcome messages but they used to be a game development studio that tried to develop an mobile MOBA game called Fates Forever back in 2014. However they found VOIP software to be pretty problematic and pivoted to develop VOIP software for gamers. Now they're a very popular chat client.
Between Discord and Slack, I think something SaaS companies need to consider is looking at play and how to genuinely integrate play / fun into how they develop product. Both of these huge companies spawned out of video games and I think we are going to see more spawn this way.
I think play, especially at work, isn't discussed or considered enough and can form a strong core of a good product ("focus on the fun rather than the money") [0]. If a product evokes good feelings, especially if it is being used in an otherwise drab 'setting' ("I need to talk to other people"), people will gravitate towards it over others that don't.
I can't think of a person who is overjoyed to use, say, Microsoft Teams but you will almost certainly find people who love Slack or Discord to the point of pushing their leads to use them.
Nope they are hiring more, I'm working at an enterprise-level Saas so not sure how representative but it seems if your company has revenue and needs to grow, it's still hiring.
Also I still get plenty of LinkedIn messages from recruiters all the time from all kinds of companies from small to unicorns to big tech.
His blog: https://program-think.blogspot.com/
His github: https://github.com/programthink
The data he collected on China's princelings among the CCP: https://github.com/programthink/zhao/tree/master/data