We had a chance to eat at Tojo's while we were in Vancouver and heard the story from Chef Tojo himself. Very nice dude, and the food was pretty good as well!

I feel like news reports of invasive species usually end up with the invaders becoming endemic. Nice to see a successful eradication for once!

Yes, but it also demonstrates how difficult complete eradication of invasive species actually is. In this case, there was only a single location, and eradication still took decades and large amounts of money. Now imagine if there had been colonies at several different locations.

Most invasive species are only noticed when they are much more established and complete eradication is no longer an effective strategy.

And it just takes another crate from a country where they exist to have to start over again...

It's actually fascinating to me that any individual with a grudge against England could singlehandedly make termites endemic, spreading them to a few hundred sites with basically 0 chance of being caught, but nobody ever bothers.

(same with zebra mussels, asian carp, etc etc in the US)

I visited Flinders Island in South Australia a few months ago. It's fairly isolated but they have a mouse/rat/cat population they are working to eradicate at great expense. Mice supposedly last arrived in the tent bags of visiting campers. Which of course made me wonder if that could happen again quite easily with mice stowed aboard an another visiting boat, etc.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned which jumped out to me about the first theory is how would they have inflated the bag with breathable air in the first place? Were air pumps around back then?

I imagine you could have two bags, one big one, connected to a smaller one and squeeze air from the bigger into the smaller (many ways)... but sheepskin isn't going to hold a lot of pressure and would just bust (not sure but not as good as a soccer ball) and given it's "hotdog" shaped and not spherical, it's probably not more than 2 - 4 psi.

I believe App Store updates a day later, so we're likely not seeing the results of any mass rating bombs.

It can also take a while for a rating to go through. Once you tap the allotted stars you'd like to rate an app, you need to wait until you see the "Your feedback was submitted" modal to appear.

Not exactly a day later but the ratings tend to come with 6 to 12 hours delay. Sometimes more.

Also, there's this strange thing that some of the ratings disappear and come back later or not.

Ah that makes sense. I wasn't aware of that.

App Store also allows you to reset the ratings when you launch an update

Historically the US trade relationship with China was based on a principal that doing so would encourage the adoption of democracy there. Seeing as how that hasn't happened, this kind of rhetoric could just be an attempt to course correct (maybe overly so).

I'm sure the upcoming elections also play a part in this. The article briefly mentions that as well.

Encouraging the adoption of democracy is never a true goal to any geopolitical decision. It's only used to deflect criticism from naysayers. The US has used the same justification to bomb nations and install fascist dictators. "You oppose going to war with Iraq? So you hate democracy then?"

In China's case, "spreading democracy" just meant "remove from Soviet sphere." We broadly used the same term at the same time to open trade with China and fight the Vietnam War.

the sino-soviet split happened long before we started off shoring to china

I didn't mention off shoring? Not sure what your point is.

Exporting our broken form of governing, which is rife with corruption, mismanagement, unresponsive to the majority of the population, and defaults to redirecting money from the poorest to the richest, is the goal of western monopoly capital.

Basically "Our broken system allowed capital to rob 400 million people, let's utilize it in robbing 1.4 billion Chinese people next..."

Any idea that the American and European elite are pushing this for "benevolent purposes" flies in the face of a few centuries of well documented western history.

I'd invite you to look at https://ourworldindata.org/, and in particular the effects of capitalist and democratic reforms on the health, wealth and happiness of nations.

Every claim you make here has no basis in fact. And is mostly just symptomatic of a partisan political disagreement in a western democracy.

For sure, it's much easier to sell any decision if you package it in terms of values and ideals that your population is willing to embrace. It's as true for the US as it is any other country in the world.

I'm not sure it's fair to place the blame solely on the CCP. A lot of the less desirable behavior stemmed from scarcity of resources, especially when the country was poor.

Can't comment too much on corruption as I don't have much experience there, but I have noticed things like lining up and littering get better as the standard of living has improved over the years.