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Agree with the sibling: committing fraud by intentionally not honoring a contract is not morally or logically the same as duplicating a piece of media under copyright. That is not to say that copyright violations are harmless (the scale and intent matter), but details can't be ignored.

A material difference between fraud and copyright violations as categories is the presence of lost profit. With fraud one has lost the time value of their work, but with media piracy there is some research (funded by the EU of all things) that it doesn't trade off with sales and may even help some sales.


> Complaints for years, yet decided to stop recording data... That's sketchy as hell.

The motivation could also be practical. Studies are canceled for a variety of reasons unrelated to the conclusion: flawed design, poor data collection process, data doesn't generalize, data isn't specific enough, study has run out of budget, something significant changed in the middle of the study, etc.


> something significant changed in the middle of the study

"Oh shit! They're right. Our agents are bullies and thugs stealing from the citizens. Better stop looking"


You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an entire country?


No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.

The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.

PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.


> It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.


As a Canadian, the US already controls Canada in almost every way. We get US media, technology, gas, trade, etc. If the US wanted Canada to do something, they wouldn't have to use subtle techniques to do it, they could just demand it.


I don't think the US tries to control Canada like a vassal. It's an unfair portrayal of their common history. Canada is basically the parts of British interest in North America that that revolutionary war failed to reach or aquire in post war negotiations. Benedict Arnold, following Washingtons plan, was defeated in Quebec after all. The US influences Canada more than Canada influences the US because its population is 10x. If the situation were reversed and Canada had all the northern states of the US their relationship would be the same.


Canada is a member of Five Eyes so they might as well be the US as far as data control and intelligence goes.


> Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X.

The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.

These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.


> No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing

The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.


> We know these don't reflect real productivity

Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis.

Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity.

Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.


> Even then it’s hard to assess how severe the harms are for microplastics yet. Part of the reason is they’re clearly not overtly dangerous.

This is a contradiction.


How so? Something can be unknown impact but known to not be overtly dangerous. Cyanide is overtly dangerous. You ingest it then you die. That’s overt. Some things take decades of research to identify their danger because their method of action is subtle and confounded that isn’t contradictory.


I like the idea but I don't like the scoring. There's only two possibilities, so simply making a large number of guesses within the time limit is going to get you a high score. I want to see the ratio of correct to incorrect.


Unlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:

> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.

Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.

> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.

"We're just asking questions", etc.


Archaeology does not take place in a vacuum. It has always been a product of political human beings. Archaeologists are keenly aware of this. Mussolini excavated Pompeii with bulldozers to reveal the past greatness of Italy on a schedule compatible with his ambitions. British archaeologists conducted digs around the globe through the lens of empire. Natives in the Americas, to this day, hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors. Most archaeologists strive to tell the truth, but truth is often a matter of perspective.

It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.


> hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors.

Or more likely: because they have, far too often, proved the natives wrong and also shown that the people the natives called ancestors weren't... or, if they were, they were also the ancestors of those terrible people from the Evil Enemy Tribe that Nobody Likes.

Natives have political agendas, too.


Part of recognizing the full and equal humanity of indigenous peoples is to accept that they're just as greedy, deceitful, and chauvinistic as the rest of us.


What a fabulous comment. I'd upvote it twice if I could. These kind of issues of cultural identity over time are one of the topics in Frank Herbert's Dune series.


Their political history also included a lot of slavery.


Slavery was and is depressingly common -- and has very little to do with skin colour. Sad that so many "educated" Americans think otherwise :(

"Can we get enslave those guys over there? Is the cost/benefit analysis in our favour, at least for the short term? And there are no (incredibly strong!) social taboos against it? Then let's go ahead and do it!"

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.


Yep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient. Similarly, Stonehenge in the UK was also partially reconstructed in the 20th century.

Sensoji temple in Tokyo was also rebuilt to its original design in the 1950s.

The giant stone Buddhas of Afganistan could do with reconstructing IMHO as well.


> Yep. They also did partial reconstuction work of the great wall in modern times and passed it off as ancient.

Do you have a source for "and passed it off as ancient"?


Not off the top of my head, but a lot of the misleading is done through omission, for which there is no source obviously. The stretch near Beijing gets a lot of tourists and by default they're led to believe they're walking on an ancient wonder. I think it's not made clear enough any of it was rebuilt in modern times, let alone which bits were. But also many historical buildings have been rebuilt multiple times over a long period of history.

With Sensoji, which pieces of wood represent the temple? It's a sort of ship of Theseus situation in any case.

Modern history is still history, and also forms part of the story to be told.


The difference is when the Brits collected, it is not to prove Brits were there and we are all Brits. Also china is 1/5 of humanity. It is of different scale when it goes rogue.

One day Soviet Union or Russia will remember the if china can claim Mongolian empire theirs and it reached Moscow …

But if chinese really studied its own history, its history are full of expansion then totally collapse. Anything went into the core land collapsed in it no doubt. But the core is not stable. There is no political solution to solve an empire which abhor difference and only use exam to do social cohesion and inclusion.


Don't expect them to unravel the mystery of the tocharians.


> truth is often a matter of perspective.

This is nonsense. Truth is patently objective. Narratives fail to get at truth, but that doesn't change the nature of truth.


Exactly, the Yuezhi is about as Chinese as the Japanese are, both first entering into the historical records in official Chinese dynastic history during the Han Dynasty.


> The correlation does not mean the microplastics are the thing causing IBD. It probably means they are exasperating it for various reasons.

It doesn't even necessarily mean that microplastics are contributing to the harm. It could be that existing disease impairs the body's ability to eliminate microplastics.

Regardless, following the precautionary principle, we should treat them as a foreign toxin until the evidence suggests otherwise.


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