Try a cursory Google search. It's not only well documented, but there have been several publicized court cases that cities in Nevada have lost and had to pay SF restitution for bussing their mentally unwell homeless over.
This is a total misunderstanding of freedom of speech and the first amendment.
Freedom of speech does not mean you are free to say anything to anyone and never face consequences for your choices. The concept of freedom is to be free from the government officially and legally restricting your right to publicly address your grievances.
China's citizens do not have this freedom. Just because taxi drivers are not afraid to express themselves in the privacy of their cab to other citizens does not mean they wouldn't fear for their livelihood to say the same thing on a stage where it would actually make a difference.
True freedom of speech is this:
In America, anyone can stand in the middle of a public square and shout whatever they want about the government and the police will do nothing. Other people are then allowed to also shout and demonstrate that that person is an idiot, or maybe right, but the government never gets involved.
In China, any demonstration like this is swiftly punished by authorities. On an exchange trip I went on about ~10 years ago an American college student decided it was good idea to shout "Free Tibet!" over and over in the middle of Tiananmen square. An unmarked white van appeared in < 5 minutes and he was gone. He was unharmed but that evening he was on the first flight back to America.
People may hate you and retaliate against you in America for what you say, but they cannot and will never arrest you.
>People may hate you and retaliate against you in America for what you say, but they cannot and will never arrest you.
Edward Snowden is in exile because of the things he had to say about America. The publishers of his book are being sued to ensure he is financially crippled and unable to support himself.
Sure, the charge is something other than speaking but the effect is the same. I'm sure in China people who are arrested for speaking out are not charged with the crime of "free speech" either but are instead charged with some other crime. The effect is similar.
I'm still happy to live in the USA over China but I still think that we can do better on this front.
> Edward Snowden is in exile because of the things he had to say about America
This is a false comparison. Edward Snowden is in exile for revealing state secrets. That’s different from freedom of speech. He is not targeted because of what he said, but revealing state secrets. It’s distinct from freedom of speech.
Thanks for the perspective, I will openly admit that my understanding of freedom of speech is lacking/different than others' understanding.
I think what's interesting is the idea behind. Either your example or my example of freedom of speech is purely political, which we must recognize.
Let's take a step back and consider a company. The management sets up an orderly system (or so they think). If the company is progressing well, everyone is working towards a common goal, would there be a need to have people standing up to voice their opinions to influence others which they can't even claim righteousness to? Sure it's freedom, but I'm sure less would need it. When the company goes downhill however, and people want to uprise and cause a change, this is where having this freedom appears to be a necessity.
I think inherently there is a discussion hidden here somewhere between order and chaos. And with everything being a spectrum, we must recognize that the level of "freedom" people will need, and people should have will also need to vary depending on the current state of existence.
To many of those in China who do not wish to practice in politics, especially since the Communist has produced an unprecedented growth in the last decade, little are finding a need for such a level of "freedom". Sure this system will not be perpetual functional. When the economic growth slows or when China becomes a super power level entity, global clashes causes ideology shifts and needs, China may need to continually seek a structural shift in its own pace.
What's being preached often in the western world however, is a utilization of a "lack of freedom of speech" as a weaponry towards an uprising China that will threaten US's dominance. There is nothing wrong with that, it's only a bit hypocritical that's all, but thus is politics.
I think what's important is that, if HK must feel like they will need the fight, then I respect the fight and wishes them best on achieving what they can. Though I do at the same time wish for a peaceful resolution versus a degraded society after an endless fight to achieve a perceived ideal ideology. I have friends in HK and I definitely wish for them to prosper.
> To many of those in China who do not wish to practice in politics, especially since the Communist has produced an unprecedented growth in the last decade
The Communists certainly take credit for that growth, but did they cause it?
> What's being preached often in the western world however, is a utilization of a "lack of freedom of speech" as a weaponry towards an uprising China that will threaten US's dominance. There is nothing wrong with that, it's only a bit hypocritical that's all, but thus is politics.
That's a misreading. Free speech and the suppression of civil rights are genuine and very important moral issues in the western world. It's not some hypocritical political "weapon" deployed to maintain "dominance."
I think we would do well to explain to our Chinese friends what we mean by the communist party taking credit for the economic success of China. For one, the latest and most pronounced grown spurt of the last ~20 years coincides with the admission of China to the wto, under the support of the USA, with the explicit understanding that china would liberalize it's economy and in general, play fairly. Seeing this exchange as a zero sum game has benefited china even more in the short term at the detriment of others, although Western naivete has been changing.
Go! and Go are two different languages. Read the last section of the wikipedia page for Go! listed above for their objections against Google for picking that name.
Some of the companies that do upgrading include Vertimass, Gevo, Swedish Biofuels, for example, and there are some methods that are not under patent protection that anyone can use. Basically a catalyst that dehydrates the alcohols and oligomerizes them into longer carbon chains. No other products than a combustible fuel.
I would say yes. Pursue physics only because you love it. Unless you want to go into Defense the job prospects are terrible. However, learning physics teaches you how to learn anything and how to do it fast. This turns out to be an invaluable skill for programming, so physicists make great programmers. You just have to earn it on top of all the physics.
Well, the job prospects are "terrible" if you're committing yourself to stay in physics and be a physicist in both title and profession.
The thing is, most people that get advanced degrees in physics don't stick around in the field and don't follow the traditional path. The article is correct to point out that physics departments would do better if they accept that reality and accommodate for it explicitly. Some schools already do that with the "engineering physics" degree.
Physics is a great preparation for general purpose problem-solving, IMHO.
In my own case, I do wish that I had a smoother transition out of physics, however. Spent a lot of time in my career not knowing where I fit in. Not that it's a totally bad thing, finding "a job" was never a problem, but self-actualization is harder when you're dealing with not knowing where you belong.
>The thing is, most people that get advanced degrees in physics don't stick around in the field and don't follow the traditional path.
The point isn't that if you get a degree in physics, that you're doomed. Pretty much everyone I know who got a degree in physics is doing well. The point is, they are pretty much at a disadvantage (at least initially) in getting those jobs. Whichever non-physics job you find physicists going into, it'll be easier to get those jobs with a different degree.
The only exception I can think of is quantitative finance in the 2000's, where they seemed to prefer physicists and mathematicians above all us (including finance degree holders).
I agree that physics is a great preparation to problem solving. I've heard this in industry as well. Yet I've consistently found that even those who make such statements are more likely to hire those with engineering degrees.
Versatility is one of the main things offered by a physics degree. It might not be the most preferred degree in a given area you're likely to move into, but it's probably at least acceptable.
I think engineering degrees demonstrate an ability to torture oneself with boring and routine concepts. A skill which is apparently more valuable in the working world.
I mentioned in another thread, if you can get good at something that other people hate, you won't be unemployed. Although, it might take longer to find a job if it's not a fungible skill.
But the secret is, it's not torture. For most people, it's prohibitively difficult to reach the expert level in something that we're not inclined to enjoy.
Yes. Potentially far, far worse. And people have absolutely died from using fire retardant delivered from air tankers.
These planes have to fly extremely close to the ground to deliver their payload (which is spread over an area far too large to be effective in this case anyway btw) and too often the plane can lose control, whether from sudden unweighting or the turbulence from the fire and crash. This can kill everyone on board and usually starts a new fire to boot.
There isn't really an "inside of". There is no other universe that our universe is expanding into. The universe itself just "is", it is made of space-time and that metric is expanding and accelerating. Why it exists is philosophy. Maybe it was made just for us to exist in. Maybe it doesn't give a shit about us and we're simply hydrogen left to own devices long enough to futilely question its own existence.
When we talk about the universe we're rarely talking about what do not know yet, but rather what is possible to know.
Whether there is another universe "outside" of ours is not just something we don't know. It's something we cannot know but it's also something that cannot matter. The observable universe is, by definition, the total encompassment of everything that can possibly ever matter to us in even the strictest mathematical sense.
There is no edge. It defies the normal way of thinking but every point in the universe is also the center of the universe. The Big Bang happened at every point and space-time is expanding at every point.
Well, not really. The distance we can see out is measured in time and we can very nearly see the Big Bang. We can observe the Universe's Recombination event and it is in every direction we look as the Cosmic Microwave Background. This happened everywhere in existence.
If there is an edge to the Universe it is in the fourth dimension when the Universe was a singularity.
Here's an article about Las Vegas's "Greyhound Therapy": https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Homeless-patients-bus...