jimmydef's comments

I think the main reason alibaba got beat down was because it was moving from "tech" into finance offering unregulated loans and jack ma criticizing regulators did not help at all.

And alibaba was not "deep tech", more like derivative tech. It's just a ecommerce site. It takes a lot of technical expertise to operate that at a large scale for sure, but at the end of the day, it's not the kind of fundamental tech free from sanctions that the chinese government wanted to pivot its tech industry to.

i guess they can randomize the queue order so no one gets aan advantage by being in the queue first.

I've been hearing about this downturn for the past 3 years now. When is it coming?

As someone with severe Asian flush, with an overactive ADH gene (gene that converts of alcohol to acetaldehyde) and 2 defective ALDH2 alleles (gene that breaks down acetaldehyde into harmless byproducts), I wish there is a way to repair these genes using MRNA. I don't feel even the mildest buzz from alcohol but I instantly get a hangover when I drink.

Slow adoption of firearms by the Chinese was less to do with the crossbow than the fact that the Manchus occupied China during a period when firearms was coming of age. The Manchus famously despised gunpowder weapons in favor of the bow and arrow which they held in extremely high regard. After all it was the bow that in part helped them defeat the disintegrating Ming empire which invested heavily in gunpowder weapons like cannons.

In their early years of Western expansion, the firearms units was always staffed by the Han Chinese and were of low status.

I don't think that's the case. My cats knead my head, my chest, my abdomen and my legs, but it doesn't rest on me.

Why didn't the German government massively subsidize Green energy?

How on earth is it right to criticize a government for subsidizing green energy in the face of climate change? The reason why solar panels are so cheap today was because Chinese companies achieved economies of scale due to governmental support. This is a GOOD thing.

European countries were way ahead of the curve 10 years ago in terms of these green technologies but chose to do nothing. Their solar companies could have been world leaders as long as governmental policies supported them too. They would have been wiping others out. How can anyone blame China for investing/subsidizing in green energies? The way I view it, it's their just rewards for at least taking this aspect of green technology seriously while others did next to nothing in terms of subsidies.

One theory is that churros came from the fried Chinese doughstick youtiao.

The habit of eating raw fish in Japan probably developed indigenously but many of the words the Japanese use to describe sushi and raw fish came from China which to the surprise of many has a very strong food culture of eating raw fish and meat up till the Ming dynasty in the 14th century.

Look at what confucius wrote in the book of rites 2500 years ago: 食不厌精，脍不厌细 (you'll not get sick of good food, and you'll not get sick of kuai(raw fish /meat) that is sliced thinly.) or 脍，春用葱，秋用芥 (kuai, eat it with spring onions in spring and jie in autumn. jie is a chinese mustard. )

The chinese probably adopted the habit of eating raw fish in the past from people from southeast asia.

And while sashima is almost certainly developed indigenously in Japan, the predecessor of the modern Sushi in japan (fish preserved in rice) is most likely developed in China.

Food history is so interesting but largley neglected.

Baozi is unlikely to have come from the Ottomans via the Mongols.

The Song dynasty chinese were already eating baozi and writing about it in their books and documents in the early 11th century, before the Ottomans were established or Genghis Khan was born.

And Baozi is just another name for Mantou in ancient China which is a name for the food which is even older stretching back to the Han dynasty over two millenia ago.

There's nothing to contradict as you have not provided any argument to support the claim that these two last humans must produce children.

It depends where you live. If you live in the US, you can sell your house, have 1M, move to a low cost housing part of the country, buy a house for 150k and have 850k leftover for retirement.

I live in Singapore. If I have a 1M house, I can sell it, have 1M. Now I have two choices. I can either choose to be homeless, or I can buy another house for another 1M and be stuck in the same position as I was in in the first place. That 1M is really just "on paper" if you live in a country where housing is equally expensive everywhere.

Nowadays I hear a lot of people commenting about how excellent the quality of Japanese products are. How they have a "craftsmanship" culture where a master will spend his whole life perfecting a craft, etc. Recently read a reddit thread about a Japanese man making whisky in the 19th century. Overall a lot of praises for the Japanese on how they pursue excellence.

Amazing how fast attitudes change. Just a few decades back, Japanese goods and Made in Japan had the same cheap, low quality reputation as Made in China goods today. I even distinctly remembered the same "Japanese people as a culture don't care about quality" comments which is the same as some people nowadays complaining that Chinese people have "chabuduo"(just enough) attitudes. Or the same accusations of no creativity.

Funny how drastically these "deep-rooted" cultural attitudes in Japanese people have changed. Or maybe its not the culture of Japan that has changed but the perceptions others have of it. I reckon the same is for China.

Both the nominal and PPP GDPs of the US as a percentage of the world GDP have been dropping steadily over the past few decades. It used to be near 40% of the world's GDP. Now it's barely 20%. At what percentage point will the world look at the US Dollar and its economy and decide maybe that figure is too low for the dollar to be world reserve currency? 15%? 10% or 5%? And did weaponizing the dollar as a geopolitical stick against its enemies change that threshold? Or does it even matter as long as the US retains military primacy on our planet?

These things are more guesswork and storytelling than anything.

No, Matsu is part of the Fujian province of the Republic of China (RoC), not Taiwan province.

The RoC controls only two provinces of China, Fujian and Taiwan province. The Fujian province is the only province of China where both the Republic of China(ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have split control. This is the byproduct of an unfinished civil war.

Even their identity is different, most people living there don't consider themselves "Taiwanese" but citizens of the Republic of China. They would definitely not consider themselves part of "Taiwan".

And given that the residents of Matsu islands (official name Lienchiang county) have never in its history voted for the DPP, the pro Taiwanese independence party, and have only voted for the KMT party and PFP, two parties who believe ROC IS China , it's unlikely most residents there would view Taiwan as a country in the first place.

In case you claim I'm a Chinese shill (of which I'm not, I'm from Singapore), I would like to point out that even Taiwanese independence advocates in Taiwan also don't think that the Matsu islands, the Kinmen islands, Penghu islands, etc. are part of Taiwan. Many of them would like to abandon these islands to the PRC in the process of gaining taiwanese independence.

Issues of identity in Taiwan is really not that clear cut as many outsiders would like it to be.

HFTs do not create demand. Most of the time, they flatten their positions at the end of the day. As such, their impact on the market is minimal.

And anyone who can claim that HFTs front run trades simply do not understand the basics of what is happening. HFTs simply make money off being the glue in fragmented markets.

> 1. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese

This is because you are probably speaking in mandarin which has deviated a great deal from Middle Chinese ever since the Jurchen Jin conquered northern China.

But if you were to compare it to a more conservative Chinese language like min-nan or some other southern chinese language, the similarities are unmistakable.

examples of pronunciation:

忍者: Ninja (JP), Nin-jia (Minnan), Renzhe(mandarin)

美人： Bi Jin (JP) , Bi Jin (minnan), meiren(mandarin)

簡単: Kantan(JP), Kan Tan (minnan), jiandan (mandarin)

時間: JiKan (JP), Si Kan (minnan), shijian (mandarin)

世界: sekai (JP), Sei Kai (minnan), shijie (mandarin)

速度: sokudo (JP), Sok Do (minnan), shudu (mandarin)

確認: kakunin (JP), Kak Nin or Kak Lin (minnan), queren (mandarin)

区别: ku betsu (JP), ku piat (minnan) , qu bie (mandarian)

人類: jin rui (JP), Jin Lui (minnan), ren lei (mandarin)

and korean: 金 ： Kim (kr), Kim (minnan), Jin (mandarin)

新婦： Sim Pu (kr) , Sim Pu (minnan), Xin fu (mandarin)

學生： hag saeng (kr) , hak seng (minnan), xue sheng (mandarin)

參加：Cham Ga (kr) , Tsham Ka (minnan), Can Jia (mandarin)

Notice how minnan and korean preserves the ending consonants like "t" and "g" sounds while Japanese simulates the ending consonant with a new character. So the character 速 is pronounced Sok but in Japanese is split into So & Ku where ku simulates the ending consonant.

Mandarin just does away with ending consonants completely. Many other changes such as the lack of the "f" and "v" sound in early middle chinese which is preserved in korean and minnan but not in other Chinese languages where many "b" consonants are converted into "f" consonants. Or the lack of ending "m" consonant in mandarin which is still present in minnan and korean.

I've always found it interesting that the Japanese use the character 赤 generically for the colour red but Chinese speakers use the character 紅. When they both refer specifically to different shades and tones of red and speakers of both languages would know the specific meaning of both characters.

I don't think 11% is that worrisome. These are the cases where patients are ill enough to be admitted to the hospital. In the US, admitted patients of the flu have a 10% mortality rate, which is equivalent. We still don't have enough information regarding the virus but my guess is that its way overblown in the media.

"Over 723,000 people, or one in eight Singaporeans, has this name from the Tan state of the Zhou dynasty."

Yeah, this is complete nonsense. The "Tan" surname is basically the hokkien/min-nan pronunciation of the chinese character 陈, which is basically pronounced Chen in mandarin and Chan in cantonese.

It has nothing to do with the surname 譚 which is pronounced Tan in mandarin.

Due to the presence of many chinese language groups in singapore (unlike hk which is predominantly cantonese or mainland china and taiwan which uses mandarin), transliterations of surnames can be tricky. The same surname 王 can be written in many ways in singapore (Ong, Heng, Wang, Wong, etc.)

The fact that your well reasoned comment is downvoted shows how bad the Chinese hysteria has gotten.