Wow I never heard of this. This is horrifying.
Here is where I got up to before paywall:
“Here’s what I think.” Graham shifted in his chair. “I think maybe the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct from natural causes. Maybe they were… murdered.”
I’m not sure what to think about this. It’s like a fan fiction or parody of CSI (maybe from the TV show? Idk never seen it) investigating the dinosaurs. It seemed like a parody. It has some jokes in it I think. I wonder if the rest of the article continues as a story or it has a point?
This was interesting. I think the answer to the article’s title question is: both.
Yeah it’s like they softened the language around evidence and the conclusion. I guess they began to sense that the issue was less clear cut and wanted to not look stupid? They want to tread the line and look like they weren’t wrong about the issue, whatever it turned out to be. Secretly editing past articles I think is really bad and gaslight-y.
I don’t know where the debate ended up about where covid-19 came from but I remember the idea that it might’ve come from a lab was put down a lot and it was claimed to be refuted when I thought it wasn’t. It seemed the idea became more popular with time? People I knew were really touchy about the topic, like a lot of topics during covid. I felt I couldn’t talk about certain issues.
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Were they perhaps concerned about the safety of using someone else’s finger pricker or something? I’m assuming it’s not a fresh non-sterile pricker each time. Though that sounds weird now I say it.
What’s a “drug charge under the school” ? Like it goes on your record that you did something bad related to drugs? That seems wrong and misleading.
He seems so gross and annoying. Also, wtf was that comment about how women used to be babies around 0:25.
Why?
I think they’re individual, single-use, sterile prickers. You can search Amazon and see they sell a bunch of 100 packs. And you can buy this stuff off Amazon without having a prescription.
I thought maybe if it was just intended for use by one person, the needle in the device might need to be replaced less frequently, perhaps daily. But it seemed like i was missing something. I could’ve just looked that up. I just thought I’d mention what I noticed I was assuming.
~yeah. i’ve worked with quite a few younger girls at my work and idk i feel on the whole the stuff they’ve shared about what they deal with is way worse than what i, and most guys i grew up with, experienced.
like my best friend had/has some issues from his parents and stuff, but i don’t think he’s ever dealt with being called a slut by his mom for just wanting to wear jeans.
huh, that is kinda outside my experience and not what i would expect in the US. reading that i wonder if the mom is an immigrant from some other culture. that would make more sense to me.
hmm. she is. I’m bengali (from Bangladesh) though I was born in America. Most of my childhood friends are kids whos parents are also immigrants from Bangladesh.
While I do think its because she’s from Bangladesh (plus Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim too) I have heard stories of daughters who get slut shamed by their mothers in the U.S. too. Though I don’t know if its for something as simple as wearing jeans in the U.S. afaik that happens to girls when they wear some more sexualized/attractive clothing.
(I’m practising commenting on things.)
Did this ever get made?
Is it so bad that there is a show where people compete to get donations for their cause? It’s not like this is the only way that these activists can fund their causes, like, its not like there is a law meaning the only way for activists to get funding is through a potentially degrading TV show. I think trying to fund a cause as an activist off tv is probably similar where one implicitly competes with others for funds.
She says at the end “we’re living in hell”. I don’t agree with that.
I looked it up and the show never aired because of backlash.
I’d like to know why that happened. I’m guessing a lot/all of power production and distribution in China is under government control. Was the power being directed by the govt to some preferred uses? Or was just not enough being produced? I think China stopped importing much coal from Australia around this time (supposedly because of Australia asking questions about the origins of covid-19), so maybe it’s related to that.
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It’s often hard to find out why current events happen. So now think about how hard a job historians have!
I don’t think that guessing China fits some libertarian economic stereotypes/concepts is an effective way to know about a very complex country.
There are many ways to get charity funding that are less demeaning and performative than a reality TV show.
You’re looking at it from the point of view of the people seeking funding. But consider it from the point of view of the people giving the funding: why are they giving funding in this way? They’re using their money to get people to jump through hoops for their amusement, not to try to improve the world. And then consider why the TV audience wants to watch that. A ton of people in the audience also think its amusing watching the do-gooders jump through hoops instead of being horrified at the pointless cruelty of the hosts.
Yeah true lol. Perhaps wondering what their electricity/power markets are actually like, and looking that up, is better. I could’ve started there.
I read on this wiki page for China’s electricity sector:
In April 1996, an Electric Power Law was implemented, a major event in China’s electric power industry. The law set out to promote the development of the electric power industry, to protect the legal rights of investors, managers, and consumers, and to regulate the generation, distribution, and consumption.[citation needed]
Before 1994, electricity supply was managed by electric power bureaus of the provincial governments. Now utilities are managed by corporations outside of the government administration structure.
Okay so it sounds like the production/distribution of power is not directly under the control of the government. Separate corporations manage the utilities.
I found an article from the time of these shortages:
Here are some quotes:
China says electricity generated from coal will be fully liberalised and industrial and commercial users will buy power at market prices
The electricity pricing reforms are Beijing’s latest attempt to tackle recent electricity shortages that have crippled industrial output
So this implies that prior to the shortages coal-electricity was not fully liberalised, and (at least some?) industrial/commercial users didn’t have to buy power at market prices.
Without knowing the details, freeing up the market seems an appropriate response to shortages.
Under the reform, industrial and commercial users will buy electricity at market prices and a direct power purchasing scheme that keeps costs artificially low for big users will be abolished, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said.
In addition, the state planner said all electricity produced by coal-fired power will be sold via the market, up from 70 per cent. It gave no indication when either of the changes would take effect.
The direct power purchasing scheme sounds like price-controlled power for industry. If the price of coal got too high (which could be caused in part by them stopping importing Australian coal, and using higher cost alternatives) then that would cause shortages as coal-electricity producers decreased or stopped production altogether. The coal-electricity producers are independent from the government so it makes sense that they could decrease or stop production. (Like if they were government owned, the government could price fix coal instead of power and keep the plants running, but move the shortage along to the coal industry(?))
Previously, 70 percent of the coal-electricity was sold in markets.
Abolishing the direct power purchasing scheme is a major change to China’s electricity pricing mechanism. The programme allows local governments to force power generators into selling electricity to commercial users at prices cheaper than the fixed on-grid and retail prices set by the central government.
Ok yeah so it is a price-control scheme. It sounds like there are other price controls on power too.
It sounds very plausible that price controls in power could create shortages, especially when China’s electricity is roughly 57%** coal generated, and it was during a time when global coal prices increased a lot (from 2021-2022 the price of coal more than doubled, going from ~$80/T to ~$170/T. It more doubled again to around ~$350/T for most of 2022.). From what I understand of economics, removing price controls and freeing up the markets is the correct direction to go to solve the problem.
** edit: I wrote 62 not 57. source: Coal power in China - Wikipedia
I don’t think so. I take it you’re trying to apply economic theory, but real situations are more complex than the situations analyzed by that kind of theory and correctly applying that theory, even when the theory is correct, can be quite complex.
In general, if you compare two things that are not a free market, and you find one is more similar to a free market in a few ways, that does not mean it’s better, even if free markets are ideal.
Given not having a free market in some respects, trying to make the market more free in a few specific ways can get a good or bad outcome. It doesn’t just automatically work.
Issues with partial similarity (to a free market or to anything else) connect to issues with similarity and patterns in epistemology (it comes up e.g. when discussion induction).
It also connects with the issue of local optima: making something more like a free market in one way is a local optima type improvement: looked at as a single thing it looks good (assuming that free markets are good). But that doesn’t mean that change is actually good in the big picture of the full, overall current situation.
Under the reform, industrial and commercial users will buy electricity at market prices and a direct power purchasing scheme that keeps costs artificially low for big users will be abolished, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said.
That sounds more capitalist than the US in some ways. I’ve heard that US AI data centers are sometimes getting deals where they pay low electric rates and residents living in the area have their household electric rates raised.
Steps in directions are not decisive or complete solutions. Sometimes they help; sometimes they’re neutral; sometimes they make things worse. It really depends.
One way to think of them is as compromise solutions since the steps just go partially in a direction not all the way.
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Yeah I was. It seemed familiar and like I might know of some relevant ideas. It’s not so complex as to not be worthwhile trying in general though, right? It’s just that it requires more knowledge, research, etc, which I don’t have? Or do you think economic theory is a bit too simple to handle real things in general?
Okay. I get what you’re saying: even assuming free markets are ideal and good, simply tending towards free markets doesn’t guarantee you better outcomes. It could go either way. (correct?) I don’t necessarily understand why this is. Is it an issue with how markets work in particular? Their complex relationship with lots of other things? Or is it a more general problem with this approach?
Yeah I can glimpse that. Like one system could be more similar to idea free markets in some ways, but could also include some feature that is really decisive and important and screws with everything (like, idk, having a terrible legal system (?)).
Yeah I can see how it’s related to that. I commented on what I thought seemed like on the path to improvement. But when we consider improving something, we should be concerned with the most effective improvements we can make, right? Like if we have a problem, what is the most effective single thing to improve? It might not be freeing up the market in this situation.
I think part of what I was trying to express with my comment was that I liked the pro-capitalist, or pro-austrian economics mindset that it seemed to contain. In austrian econ theory stuff, there are numerous examples from economic history where policies double down on things like shortages and exacerbate them, so I was surprised to see China approaching the problem in a capitalist way, where places like the US have often not.
Economic theory is useful in real world analysis.
The issue has nothing to do with markets in particular.
Consider 2 old cars, A and B, and a new car, C. Car A doesn’t run.
Brainstorm ways you could make car A more similar to car C.