Tag: censorship

RoW: Links for 16th October, 2019

Five links about the NBA, China and the United States of America

  1. “Apple removed an app late Wednesday that enabled protesters in Hong Kong to track the police, a day after facing intense criticism from Chinese state media for it, plunging the technology giant deeper into the complicated politics of a country that is fundamental to its business.”
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    The NYT gives us useful background about the topic…
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  2. “But Apple is in a particularly difficult position, due to the company’s success in China: Unlike several other big consumer tech companies, which either do little business in China or none at all, Apple has thrived in China. The country is Apple’s third-biggest market, which generates some $44 billion a year in sales. And Apple’s supply chain, which lets it produce the hundreds of millions of iPhones it sells around the world each year, is deeply embedded in China.”
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    Recode explains the perils of integrating too successfully with China in terms of both backward linkages as well as final sales (that’s a loaded statement, worthy of a deeper analysis!)
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  3. “This morning brings new and exciting news from the land of Apple. It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the back end. This feature appears to be “on” by default in iOS Safari, meaning that millions of users could potentially be affected.”
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    Via John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball (please follow that blog!), a somewhat unsurprising, yet depressing revelation.
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  4. “I am not particularly excited to write this article. My instinct is towards free trade, my affinity for Asia generally and Greater China specifically, my welfare enhanced by staying off China’s radar. And yet, for all that the idea of being a global citizen is an alluring concept and largely my lived experience, I find in situations like this that I am undoubtedly a child of the West. I do believe in the individual, in free speech, and in democracy, no matter how poorly practiced in the United States or elsewhere. And, in situations like this weekend, when values meet money, I worry just how many companies are capable of choosing the former?”
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    Ben Thompson provides useful background and an even more useful overview of the larger picture.
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  5. “Daryl Morey wrote a pro-Hong Kong tweet and had to retract it, and then both the Rockets and the NBA had to eat crow. ESPN — part of the Disney empire I might add — has given only tiny, tiny coverage to the whole episode, even though it is a huge story on non-basketball sites. I’ve been checking the espn/nba site regularly over the last 24 hours, and there is one small link in the upper corner, no featured story at all.”
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    And finally, Tyler Cowen explains how incentives always and everywhere matter.

Links for 16th April, 2019

  1. ““Wow, they really train you over there,” our father said. In the weeks since her release, he had become a champion government booster, missing no opportunity to point out to Lulu how nicely the roads had been paved since she’d left, how grand the malls were that had been built. “There are so many opportunities for young people now,” he said. It was a new tic of his, and it grated. Earlier that day, as we strolled the neighborhood, he’d taken the chance to point out a set of recently upgraded public toilets across the way. “They even installed a little room where the sanitation workers can rest,” he said. “It has heating and everything. You see what good care they take of all the workers now?””
    A tale of what happens if you happen to against the authorities in our big neighbor to the east. Sobering reading.
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  2. “Friends and relatives in other parts of the developed world tell me that many of these services and speed are unique to India. While we were busy cribbing in India, a huge shift happened in the last 10-15 years in services—both public and private—that we’ve failed to notice. A mix of technology, cheap labour and super competitive firms have unleashed this service boom in the private sector. Technology, political will (across parties and governments) and the failure of the human government interface in public services has driven the public service boom. Just on the services metric, India will soon plunge ahead of most of the developed world. Take a moment and reflect on how far we’ve come in just a decade.”
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    Meanwhile, Monika Halan points out how much things have improved here, in India.
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  3. “And it reinforced a change in mind-set that already was bubbling up from Chinese urban planners—one that then got ratified in a startling way. In 2016 the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council, the highest organs of the state, issued a decree: From now on Chinese cities were to preserve farmland and their own heritage; have smaller, unfenced blocks and narrower, pedestrian-friendly streets; develop around public transit; and so on. In 2017 the guidelines were translated into a manual for Chinese planners called Emerald Cities. Calthorpe Associates wrote most of it.”
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    There is much to excerpt from this article about how urbanization is changing, taking root and improving (mostly) the world over. A great bird’s eye view to urbanization in various parts of the world today.
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  4. “A brief description of Lambda School for the uninitiated: A live, fully online school that trains people to become software engineers, data scientists and designers which is free until you get a job. Instead, students pay a percentage of their income each year after they’re employed, the maximum of which is capped at $30k.”
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    Rahul Ramchandani explains what Lambda School is, in case you haven’t heard of it before. Also a good article to learn about Bloom’s 2 sigma problem.
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  5. “But remember: gravity was considered creepy occult pseudoscience by its early enemies. It subjected the earth and the heavens to the same law, which shocked 17th century sensibilities the same way trying to link consciousness and matter would today. It postulated that objects could act on each other through invisible forces at a distance, which was equally outside the contemporaneous Overton Window. Newton’s exceptional genius, his exceptional ability to think outside all relevant boxes, and his exceptionally egregious mistakes are all the same phenomenon (plus or minus a little mercury).”
    In praise of having bad ideas, and how one bad idea (or even a few of ’em), shouldn’t really define a person for you.