And I love how the far left are somehow heroes, while on the other side of the coin, the far right are somehow crazies. From the middle, you both look the same. Something to think about.
Way to not tell the whole story. The Chinese were arrogant and insisted that they didn't need anything the British could trade with. This is the same arrogance that started China down the road to 150 years of tragedy. They insisted on cash payment for everything, and the foreigners could go fuck themselves because they weren't racially equal to the Chinese. The product the British ended up with was opium, but could have been anything that they had a surplus of. To pretend that the Chinese gave a single shit about their commoners - LOL. They didn't, any more than today's rulers give a shit about their people. The Chinese didn't make it illegal because they were caring and sharing, they made it illegal because they thought they didn't need anything from the outside world and thought Chinese products were inherently superior because they were Chinese.
And then the war started, and China discovered real fast that it wasn't up to modern standards. Fun fact: the British didn't even want Hong Kong, they wanted Zhoushan (at the time, an important port south of Shanghai). The negotiator screwed up and got a barren island instead of a busy city, and today Zhoushan is a small town that never went anywhere.
Nope! The Reichstag fire was set by a crazy Dutchman. Read William Shirer, he walks through the still smoking building with Goering and Goebbels and watches them talk to Hitler about it.
Now, both kinds of socialists (national and communist) definitely took full advantage of the incident afterwards. But the Reichstag fire was not a fabrication.
"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."
-- George Bernard Shaw, communist
"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."
-- George Bernard Shaw, communist
It seems you're implying that that is the default method of doing things, which it is not. If it were, it would not be exceptional and would not be worthy of attention. Look at places like Brazil or Venezuela where there are constant videos of police doing what they do in those countries, and nobody cares. And yet, in America, whenever it happens it is front-page news and the footage is endlessly replayed on the 24-hour media.
Here's a project: ask actual African people what they think about African-Americans. Then, ask them how they would behave if the situations were reversed.
I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded.
You should be. That is entirely out of character for Microsoft. In fact, devoting more resources to a problem just makes it worse, see the book "The Mythical Man-Month" where this is discussed at length. This book was written in the 1960s! So this has been with us for a long time.
I have a bottom-of-the-line ordinary rice cooker. It makes rice just as good as yours. If I want to specify the time I want the rice to be ready, I just start it 20 minutes before that time. I do this by pressing a single button.
Are you trying to justify the counter space spent for a specialty device, or are you retroactively trying to justify spending way too much on import tax for a tchotchke? Because those are two different things.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton