> I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude
> just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Yeah, the problem is the school administration doesn't believe in it, so they undermine you. For example, if you send a misbehaving kid to the office for discipline, they'll generally be given candy or other treats. Yes, really. Every time. Which means every kid who has ever been sent to the office for bad behavior, is going to misbehave again and again, hoping to achieve similar results.

And you *absolutely* cannot punish them yourself; that would end your teaching career.

No, I'm not making any of this up. My sister is an elementary school teacher.

Honestly, at this point I think their population is closer to three times ours; though it's impossible to be precise at all, because death statistics are as illegal to report in mainland China, as any other politically sensitive thing.

We know for certain that their birth rate has been lower than one-child-per-woman and falling for the last couple of decades (and given their demographics -- most of the population being well past child bearing age for a woman -- this definitely implies that the population of domestically-born Chinese people has been shrinking), and we also know for sure that an abnormally large number of deaths went unreported or grossly under-reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022. (We've got satellite images of the backlog stacked up outside of crematoria for months at a time, and needless to say there's nothing in the official stats to correspond to that.) As for immigrants, expats have been leaving China like rats off a sinking ship for the last half decade or so. Estimates of the current population vary wildly; I've seen figures as low as half a billion, and as high as 1.5 billion; but realistically, I think on the one hand it's clear that there's been a significant decline, and on the other hand it's also clear that China is still significantly more densely populated than America. On the whole, I estimate that their population is about three times ours, give or take. And continuing to decline.

Whether this decline is altogether a bad thing (for China, I mean), is another topic for another day.

I don't know about the count of solar panels, but I don't need to, because it's a side issue.

Fundamentally, the article is abusing purchasing power parity, when talking about the size of the entire economy, to make it sound like China's economy is actually comparable to America's. That's *incredibly* intellectually dishonest. Purchasing power parity GDP is only meaningful, at all, when you're looking at per-capita numbers, because in that context it is a proxy for average standard of living. (Even then, _median_ income, adjusted for purchasing power parity, is a much better proxy than GDP PPP, especially in countries with a stupidly extreme wealth gap, like China.) When you're talking about the total size of an economy, as a proxy for the resources and economic power that it can bring to bear, purchasing power is entirely irrelevant, and bringing it up is absolute proof that the writer either does not understand economics at all, or else is deliberately attempting to deceive the reader. Or both.

The article is absolutely propaganda, and furthermore it's _stupid_ propaganda that no educated person should fall for.

Yes, there are, but it's becoming less common now.

We were *told* back in the early 2000s, when USB was still horribly unreliable, that computers with "legacy" ports (PS/2, RS232 serial, and parallel) were going to be a thing of the past "very soon". At the time, it didn't happen. A couple of large manufacturers released a couple of models each with no legacy ports (e.g., Compaq with its iPaq line, and let me just remark on what an early-2000s product name that is), and then then due to popular demand they introduced variants that did have the legacy ports, and the whole thing blew over and everything went back to normal. A few years later, a lot of models started shipping without parallel ports (presumably because they genuinely are physically large to an annoying extent), and in some cases without serial ports as well, but the PS/2 ports mostly remained, for another next twenty years or so. And then they too started to decline (rather suddenly, since the pandemic, though I think that's probably a coincidence of timing), and at this point it's difficult to buy a new PC that has PS/2 ports, but that's a fairly recent phenomenon, and it's still *possible* to get them (new, I mean), it's just no longer the norm, it and becomes more uncommon with every passing year now. Another MS Windows version or two from now, it may not be possible any longer. Which would be unfortunate, because then it wouldn't be possible to plug an XT keyboard in using an XT-to-PS/2 adapter, either, and that would be a shame, because XT keyboards are awesome. I suppose someone might devise a USB hub that has PS/2 ports, but it would probably require drivers and so would likely not work until the OS is loaded, I expect, which for a keyboard would be an unfortunate limitation. Ah, well. On the plus side, it would be hot-pluggable, so there's that. It did always annoy me that PS/2 wasn't (reliably) hot-pluggable.

Now we're being told that USB A ports are going to be a thing of the past, and I anticipate an even more protracted phase-out period for that, because the port has been in use for so long, and is so convenient, that it has became a rather important de facto standard, to the point where even non-computer-related things often support it (as the most common and standardized source of low-voltage DC power), so you have it on things like desk fans and wall-outlet adapters. I don't see it going away in a short amount of time.

When the family doesn't want anyone talking about the cause of death, it's usually self-inflicted, deliberately.

You can. With a browser plugin called "Short Stop".

Because there are eight billion people on this rock. The words "smart" and "bed" both exist, so of *course* somebody made a "smart bed", and of *course* there were people who bought the silly thing. Presumably there are also internet-connected toothbrushes, can openers, pencils, cutlery, and socks. Why wouldn't there be?

Are these *popular* products that *lots* of people own or want? Well, no, but that's an entirely different question.

> No one who is just getting by is going to do it out of the the kindness
> of their heart for the environment.

Almost no one, in that demographic, yeah. And I think that demographic
(just getting by) is going to include the overwhelming majority of ride-share
drivers, because it doesn't pay well enough to raise someone out of that
demographic, and it's not really a highly regarded "dream" profession that
a person with other means of support would do because they think it's
important (like teaching school or medical work) or just plain love doing
it and don't want to do anything else (like art or music), at least not for
most people.

The price gap between traditionally powered vehicles and electric ones
is narrowing, but it's narrowing fairly gradually, and I don't know that it'll
necessarily be down to zero by 2030 (for the new vehicle market), and
if you want drivers of older used vehicles to all be using electric by 2030,
the deadline for that price gap to narrow to zero is more like 2010, and
that ship has sailed.

With that said, superficially, a $4k subsidy is substantial enough that it
might *sound* like a real windfall to some people, and fear of missing
out on that deal (especially if it's advertised with a prominent and
imminent expiration date) might potentially motivate some people to
try to stretch for it. Dunno.

(Presumably there will be car dealers who will go out of their way to
provide financing that allows people to overextend and buy a more
expensive car than they can really afford, with a loan term so long
they won't be able to afford the maintenance on the car by the time
it's paid off. It's a sleazy practice, but it would neither be new, nor
unique to EVs.)

Yes, but that's a _later_ problem.

The CCP is incredibly good at kicking the can down the road. I mean, most governments do a fair amount of that (not necessarily with regard to stuff in space specifically, only a handful of countries even have stuff in space; but there are other kinds of cans to kick down roads), but China is on another level. Short-term thinking is pretty much their whole modus operandi.

Although, hmm. I might potentially be persuaded to watch Encanto at some point, if the right other people are watching it and invite me to watch it with them. If so, it'll be the first Disney movie I've seen since Shrek.

Eh, you're preaching to the choir. I haven't watched a Hollywood movie made in the last fifteen years. The last one I saw in a theatre was LOTR:ROTK. I've seen a couple of movies more recently than that, but they were old ones.

When the thirty-second trailer looks boring and heavily derivative, it's pretty difficult to imagine that the actual movie could hold my interest for over an hour. Sorry, not interested. Do you know how long it's been since I saw a movie trailer or advertisement, that made me want to watch the movie?

Eh.

Some cultural features are neutral, e.g., what you do about shoes when entering a home. Do you take them off and leave them at the door because shoes are dirty? Do you keep your shoes on because you have guests and you don't want them to have to look at your feet because feet are disgusting? If you do take off the shoes, does it matter how you line them up, and which direction the toes point? This all depends how you were raised; it's neither good nor bad, it's just culture.

But some cultural features are actively good for society. Japanese culture has features that lead to a low crime rate, for instance, and that's a good thing. Many cultures value things like integrity (particularly, keeping your word) and hospitality, and these are good positive values, that are good for society. I think it follows that there can also be cultural features that are bad for society. To avoid offending foreigners, I'll pick on my own society for an example here: in American culture, it's normal for people to deliberately lie to their children about important ontological issues, for entertainment purposes. That's *evil* but almost everyone here does it. (One of the best examples of this phenomenon, is Santa Claus.)

Bringing it back around to the Persian example from the article, my question would be, why is it that humans native to the culture only get this right 80% of the time. AI getting it wrong most of the time doesn't bother me, that's the AI companies' problem, and phooey on them anyway, so what. But if humans native to the culture are missing it 20% of the time, to me, that makes it sound like it must be some kind of esoteric, highly-situational interaction that regular people wouldn't have to deal with on anything resembling a regular basis; but no, we're talking about a basic social interaction that people have to do every day. Something seems off about that. That's a lot of pressure to put on people, to undertake something that difficult, and be expected to get it right all the time, and then catastrophically fail one time out of five. I don't think I'd want to live under that kind of social pressure.

Eh, I kind of hope Hollywood goes all-in on AI generated content, tbh. They haven't produced much that's worth watching any time recently anyway, and if they go under, maybe it'll clear the way for better content creators to rise to prominence, maybe even someone who can figure out how to write a script from scratch, that is NOT the eighty-third sequel to a mediocre nineties action movie, or the twenty-seventh reboot of a superhero franchise.

On the one hand, yes, the job market *is* a bit down right now, and yes, getting a job, especially a decent one, has always been more difficult when you don't have any meaningful work experience yet.

But I don't think it's really significantly worse, at least here in the Midwest, than in past generations. The young people I know, generally have been able to find work that is commensurate with their qualifications, to an extent that is pretty comparable to what I've seen in the past, most of the time. Occasionally, somebody in a previous generation has gotten lucky and had an easier time and gotten snapped up for basically the first real job application they filled out, because the economy was up or whatever (my own experience getting an IT job in 2000 is an excellent example of this), but that has always been the exception rather than the rule. For most of history, getting your first really _good_ job has been difficult, and often required you to work a not-so-fantastic job for a few years first. (Heck, I worked fast food for several years, including a couple of years after getting my degree, before I lucked into that IT job. I've never regretted having that in my background, though I'm certainly pleased it didn't end up being my entire career.)

On the gripping hand, my experience with Gen Z is that in terms of employment opportunities, they aren't really any more entitled, on average, than Millennials were at the same age. Somewhat less so, if anything. If there's an aspect of their attitude that's worse, it's more social than professional and is related to how much they expect other people (especially casual acquaintances, like coworkers) to care about learning and accommodating all their personal idiosyncracies that aren't work-related. But this could be my Gen-X bias coming through: we were taught to only reveal personal stuff to people we're actually close to. We expected our phone numbers to be public knowledge, but we kept our personal feelings private. Gen Z is pretty much the reverse.

Ok, so the specific formats are new, but Windows 98 supported animated wallpaper. No one actually wanted it or used it, but it was supported.