20 OCT 2018 by ideonexus

 The Problem with American Politicians Being Lawyers

The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or naA tional level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to thrive within it. One problem we have today, though, is that so many American pobliticians don't seem to have a clue about the flat world. As venture capitalist John Doerr once remarked to me, "You talk to the leadership in China, andid they are all the engineers, and they g...
Folksonomies: politics science legalism
Folksonomies: politics science legalism
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08 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
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23 JUL 2014 by ideonexus

 Chinese Books Lack an Index

Yet even if some technological fix were to be devised to solve the problem of character entry, the non-alphabetic nature of the writing system still results in other serious and long-standing “invisible” problems. For example, the inclusion of a standard index to books, manuals and reference materials is made orders of magnitude more difficult by the Chinese writing system. The result is that to this day, the vast majority of non-fiction books published in China do not have an index, or a...
Folksonomies: writing chinese sinology
Folksonomies: writing chinese sinology
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29 MAY 2014 by ideonexus

 Sages VS Astrologers

Someone asked whether a sage could make divination. [Yang Hsiung] replied that a sage could certainly make divination about Heaven and Earth. If that is so, continued the questioner, what is the difference between the sage and the astrologer (shih)l [Yang Hsiung] replied, 'The astrologer foretells what the effects of heavenly phenomena will be on man; the sage foretells what the effects of man's actions will be on the heavens'.
Folksonomies: history perspective
Folksonomies: history perspective
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Fa Yen (Model Discourses) ca 5 AD. Transi J Needham Science and Civilization in China 1956

Yang Hsiung 51 bc-ad 18

02 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 China Must Reject "Great Power Chauvinism"

Things develop ceaselessly. It is only forty-five years since the Revolution of 19II, but the face of China has completely changed. In another forty-five years, that is, in the year 2001, or the beginning of the 21st century, China will have undergone an even greater change. She will have become a powerful socialist industrial country. And that is as it should be. China is a land with an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres and a population of 600 million people, and she ought to have made a g...
Folksonomies: communism government power
Folksonomies: communism government power
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Cautionary words from Mao.

02 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 Patriotism VS Nationalism

Can a Communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but must be. The specific content of patriotism is determined by historical conditions. There is the "patriotism" of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler, and there is our patriotism. Communists must resolutely oppose the "patriotism" of the Japanese aggressors and of Hitler. The Communists of Japan and Germany are defeatists with regard to the wars being waged by their countries. To b...
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Mao appears to be arguing for balance and for the rejection of certain kinds of patriotism that hurt the homeland, as what he sees in Germany and Japan of the time.

14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 Automation Comes to China

The key question isn’t “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time. Even if there are new demands for people to perform new tasks in support of what we perceive as automation, we might apply antihuman values that define the new roles as not being “genuine work.” Maybe people will be expected to “share” instead. So the right question is “How many jobs might be lost to automation if we think about automation the wron...
Folksonomies: todo futurism automation
Folksonomies: todo futurism automation
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Would China, a centrally-planned society, replace its factory workers with robots and put a huge portion of the population out of work? Tagging this with a "todo" so I can follow up on it in the future and see if China does go down the automation route.

11 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 How China and the West May Compliment One Another

The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception of the ends of life. It is these two that one must hope to see gradually uniting. Lao-Tze describes the operation of Tao as "production without possession, action without self-assertion, development without domination." I think one could derive from these words a conception of the ends of life as reflective Chinese see them, and it must be admitted that...
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The West has science, which is the essence of rationality, while China has the ethics, an outlook on life that cherishes knowledge and happiness over material gains.

18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus

 Chinese Cultural Innovations Turned to Ritual

When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years a^ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered traces of some higher branches of science that h had been lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer exist...
Folksonomies: culture innovation ritual
Folksonomies: culture innovation ritual
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An account of the amazing art and inventions found in China, but how these had turned into unquestioned rituals--performed exactly over and over again through the ages without alteration or innovation. The culture had stagnated.

31 MAY 2012 by ideonexus

 Ancient Description of Layers in Mountains

Where there is cinnabar above, yellow gold will be found below. Where there is lodestone above, copper and gold be found below. Where there is calamine above, lead, tin, and red copper will be found below. Where there is haematite above, iron will be found below. Thus it can be seen that mountains are full of riches.
Folksonomies: geology
Folksonomies: geology
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From China, that "mountains are full of riches."