Future Trump rally: "And I hear Anthropic monkeyed with their dishonest chatbot Claude. They turned it Democrat! They trained it to say we lost the election against Sleepy Joe!"
Not really. China only seems good because there is a war in Europe and the US is shooting themself in the foot. They're polluting and strip mining their country, suppressing wages and funneling the profit into companies all while increasing surveillance and decreasing freedom of opinion. Oh but they put down a few solar panels and then paid for people to write articles about it.
the few solar panels in question are a united kingdom worth of green energy each year, about a royal navy worth of marine tonnage every two and they lifted more people out of poverty over the span of two generations than most of the rest of the world combined. Shenzhen produces about 70% of the entire world's consumer drones, now the primary weapon on both sides of the largest military conflict in the world. Xiaomi, a company founded in 2010 15 years ago decided to make electric cars in 2021 and is now successfully selling them.
As Adam Tooze has pointed out it's the single most transformative place in the world, if you're not trying to learn from it you're choosing to ignore the most important place in the 21st century for ideological reasons
> Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty
This is fallacious as every economy that started at extreme poverty lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.
Unless we invent a time machine and do an A|B test we can't really attribute the success to policy when _any_ policy would have clearly lifted out a bunch of people out of poverty (basically almost impossible to not go up from extreme deficit). The closest we can do is look at similar scenarios like Taiwan which also lifted a bunch of people from poverty while retaining more human rights.
But only half as much per dollar, so the lower pollution per capita is just poverty, which is likely to decline over the next few decades as it has been (assuming we have decades left).
They're also speedrunning a world class power distribution system and deploying a massive amount of renewable power amoung a whole mess of other infrastructure. They've got the ability to focus an entire nation into achieving technical goals and they're rapidly improving quality of life in average while maintaining an industrial base that the US can only remember fondly. They might not meet western standards for individual freedoms and rule of law, but they're undoubtedly a rising world power.
I used to pretend China wasn't absolutely smashing the USA, but it looks like it is. They basically make everything modern civilization relies on, that's an insane amount of leverage over the rest of the world. That combined with renewables and nuclear and their diminishing need for foreign oil because of that is pretty incredible.
This doesn't make much sense. Since the late 19th century, every country that got rich also heavily polluted the environment, though increasingly less over time. As it stands, fossil fuel demand in China has plateaued. The "wage suppression" thing also doesn't track; their citizens got much, much richer since Nixon's visit, despite being on average poorer than Westerners. Their GDP per capita is low because there's like a billion of them in the country.
The only thing to say is that it's still authoritarian. Once that gets a hold of a country, it's very difficult to shed off. Interestingly, both South Korea and Singapore shifted away from being dictatorships and were not ideologically socialist. Countries taken over by Communists remain authoritarian. The true believers will never give that up.
Agree with much of this. However: plenty of Central/Eastern European countries seem like they have pretty definitively shaken off communism in favor of pretty standard European style capitalism/social democracy.
I’m so glad I’m not going insane. I don’t see any examples on that site that I agree are ‘one word’. Sure they’re singular concepts but so what? Are we going to have singular words to describe all adjective noun pairs now?
I do see your point on that one, but phrases have an origin.
Of course is like an abbreviation of something like ‘in the natural course of things’. Which has become more like just ‘yes’ over time. In the usage of ‘yes’ it’s easier to argue it could be one word.
Words also have origins and evolving meanings. Why should the preservation of the space be especially significant and load bearing? Why should "milkshake" be a word but "ice cream" isn't? Milkshakes were, after all, literally just milk shaken with ice. They had no resemblance to what we now call a milkshake, so at the time there would have been no particularly good reason to omit the space. Other than it just happened that way for milk shake, but didn't for icecream.
Yeah this is the story I tell myself to make me feel better. I may well have even more regret! Or thought I was an investment genius and invested loads more and then sold it at a bad time.
Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict about because of the potential for damage.
I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.
> the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year
I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.
My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much.
1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design.
Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts. It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month, depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of doing business.
The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent.
Unfortunately it doesn't in practice. Meta's total revenue since 2018 when GDPR came into force is just shy of $1T. Even with all the smaller fines combined, the total amount of GDPR related fines is in the range of $3B. It's a rounding error.
There isn't a trend of increasing fines, nor has any fine even reached the cap, let alone applied multiple times for the recurring violations. Even more with the current US administration's foreign policy towards the EU.
While GDPR as a law is fine, with the exception of enforcement limitations, enforcement so far has been a complete joke.
Maximum GDPR fine is 4% of global revenue in the previous year. If a company has 30% profit margin then they can, in theory, treat is as a cost of doing business, indefinitely.
It's 4% per fine. Each violation is a fine and Meta owns multiple companies that can be fined. But 4% of global revenue already can't be treated as just a cost of doing business. Their shareholders would murder them.
Agreed, this sort of thing should at minimum be considered gross negligence at this point, but because regular consumers who buy these products rarely see and almost never understand these news articles it doesn't really impact sales so the company doesn't care.
If this discovery was guaranteed to result in meaningful fines companies would get their act together pretty quickly. 7000 counts of negligent exposure of private data (camera/mic feeds) should in a just world be millions of dollars in fines at the least and arguably criminal charges for management.
Exactly. If GDPR fines can be so high, then something like this that is pretty much intentionally leaking personal data should be in the same ballpark.
His successor is https://languagetransfer.org, which is just a labour of love by a genius polyglot and language teacher.
So much so, in fact, that the owners of the Michel Thomas IP tried to sue him for stealing the methodology. The EFF, back when they actually did anything, shredded them.
I _loved_ Language Transfer when learning Greek. I haven't used it in many years, but at the time remember that I went from just being able to say "Hi" and "How are you" and "Good" to speaking full sentences with my boyfriend at the time in one day. And when visiting Greece later that year I could get by with strangers in everyday interactions easily. It was a mind-blowing learning experience, as someone who is not highly gifted in languages, and I donated to the LT creator.
Now I am learning Swedish. It has been taking me _way_ too long and unfortunately LT doesn't have a Swedish course. Looking at one of these documentaries about Michel Thomas it does indeed look like exactly that kind of approach! And I see he has a Swedish course. I'm excited to give it a try!
I have listened to many hours of the German course but the dynamic between the two students is distracting. They essentially play 'the genius' and 'the grouch'. The good one remembers everything. The bad one snorts and grumbles at every question. The acting is so forced that it completely breaks the immersion.
But I don’t think it is acting. He just only did one take. Usually someone is better then a the other. That’s what I understood from the documentary anyway. He just did the tapes because he was old and someone bugged him enough.
ChatGPT gave a reasonable looking answer to my prompt "Summarize what is special about how Michel Thomas teaches Language".
Maybe just another case of a highly intelligent person coming up with an "obvious" solution that is great: yet is not quite so obvious to others. He clearly was talented - but also he avoided explaining the rationale behind his method for years.
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