Why? The article is about how nations are perceived.
Given the current climate, I’m not surprised that China is perceived as a more positive role than the US.
From my own perspective; They seem to be interested in maintaining stability in international trade, which keeps peace and allows people to keep their jobs.
America is a free market who uses its military to keep shipping and global trade free from interference. We deport some illegal immigrants.
China is a communist country with real life re-education camps. They manipulate markets and steal intellectual property. They’ve been cozied up to authoritarian and oppressive regimes, like Russia, for a long time.
> China is a communist country with real life re-education camps. They manipulate markets and steal intellectual property. They’ve been cozied up to authoritarian and oppressive regimes, like Russia, for a long time.
Yes, definitely agree.
> America is a free market who uses its military to keep shipping and global trade free from interference. We deport some illegal immigrants.
I think everything you said about China applies to America now, just for shorter period of time than for China. America's government officials say things that are indistinguishable from Kremlin propaganda. Directives and tariffs are put in place to directly manipulate markets in other countries. America is now deporting immigrants that were allowed to stay in America to prisons where human rights are violated. America's Secretary of Health is advocating for labor and re-education camps.
With China, I feel like we know how insidious they are and what they do. With America, we have no clue how far it will go.
So out of two evils, currently I expect China to be the lesser one. That really says something.
China is an apartheid state with actual concentration camps. Hundreds of millions of people in forced labor, several hundred million more in deplorable living conditions, the world's largest polluter, and has ambitions of invading their neighbor. They are also the main supporter of Russian occupation of Ukraine while ignoring sanctions to conduct business with Iran supplying them with materials to make drones and bombs.
The average non-party Chinese family lives in a less 60 SQ meters home. Works 60 hours a week, has no assets, and is marketed cigarettes by the government.
People bitching about the US and praising China are ridiculous.
I don't disagree, but like I said to the other responder: All this applies to America now and we don't know how much worse this will get.
> People bitching about the US and praising China are ridiculous.
It's not bitching about the US and praising China. It's "Which one of these do you think is the lesser evil?". Until very recently, most people would pick China. With the current momentum, more people are picking America. Maybe the situation stabilises in America, and people start seeing China as the bigger evil again. Maybe it keeps the current trajectory, then definitely America.
I don't think it's absurd and personally it feels easier to setup an internal CA than some of the alternatives.
In the hackiest of setups, it's a few commands to generate a CA and issue a wildcard certificate for everything. Then a single line in the bootstrap script or documentation for new devices to trust the CA and you're done.
Going a few steps further, setting up something like Hashicorp Vault is not hard and regardless of org size; you need to do secret distribution somehow.
My dad still calls my terminals a "DOS window" and doesn't understand why I don't use GUIs like a normal person. He has his own business. He absolutely cannot just roll out a CA for secure comms with his local printer or whatever. He literally calls me to help with buying a PDF reader
Myself, I'm employed at a small business and we're all as tech savvy as it gets. It took me several days to set it up on secure hardware (smartcard, figuring out compatibility and broken documentation), making sure I understand what all the options do and that it's secure for years to come and whatnot, working out what the procedure for issuing should be, etc. Eventually got it done, handed it over to the higher-up who gets to issue certs, distribute the CA cert to everyone... it's never used. We have a wiki page with TLS and SSH fingerprints
> My dad still calls my terminals a "DOS window" and doesn't understand why I don't use GUIs like a normal person. He has his own business. He absolutely cannot just roll out a CA for secure comms with his local printer or whatever. He literally calls me to help with buying a PDF reader
This is fair. I assumed all small businesses would be tech startups, haha.
The vast majority of companies operate just fine without understanding anything about building codes or vehicle repair etc.
Paying experts (Ed: setting up internal infrastructure) is a perfectly viable option so the only real question is the amount of effort involved not if random people know how to do something.
You’d only need internal certificates if someone had set up internal infrastructure. Expecting that person to do a good job means having working certificates be they internal or external.
We have this, it's not trivial for some small team, and you have to deal with stuff like conda env coming with it's own set of certs so you have to take care of that. It's better then the alternative of fighting with browsers but still it's not without extra complexity
For sure, nothing is without extra complexity. But, to me, it feels like additional complexity for whoever does DevOps (where I think it should be) and takes away complexity from all other users.
You seem to think every business is a tech startup and is staffed with competent engineers.
Perhaps spend some time outside your bubble? I’ve read many of your comments and you just do seem to be caught in your own little world. “Out of touch” is apt and you should probably reflect on that at length.
> You seem to think every business is a tech startup and is staffed with competent engineers.
If we’re talking about businesses hosting services on some intranet and concerned about TLS, then yes, I assume it’s either a tech company or they have at least one competent engineer to host these things. Why else would the question be relevant?
> “Out of touch” is apt and you should probably reflect on that at length.
That’s a very weird personal comment based on a few comments on a website that’s inside a tech savvy bubble. Most people here work in IT, so I talk as if most people here work in IT. If you’re a mechanic at a garage or a lawyer at a law firm, I wouldn’t tell you rolling your own CA is easy and just a few commands.
You know, your perspective is valuable; I often operate as if the context is “all people everywhere”, which is rarely true and is definitely not true here. So I will take the error as mine and thank you for pointing it out :)
Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind.
I was under the impression that residents in many (if not most?) EU countries generally use Visa/Mastercard debit cards for electronic physical and online payments.
There is also Maestro (owned by Mastercard), but most banks have already switched away to Visa/Mastercard.
I know iDeal because I had to implement it for a customer a few years back, but that's the first time I hear about EPI
After looking to see what it is about, I can tell you that even though I have accounts in three of the "Founding Shareholders", I never heard of it, they never pushed it to me and I only saw references to Wero in one of their app, but I had to look closely for it.
So I have doubts regarding you statement about "it should become the standard in the EU"
> Do you think if children were going to be harmed in The USA then maybe the federal government should introduce a ban of that kind of shit federally?
I'm not sure the federal government can. There are powers reserved for states that the federal government can't circumvent. They have supremacy, but the jurisdiction of that supremacy is restricted.
This is a fun article because while it discusses a real issue, it has just enough outdated views to distract people from the main point and focus on those.
Having recently finished studies and still being in contact with teaching assistants today, the problem is big. Attendance going down, participation going down, courses and curriculum simplified. I already noticed a big shift after Covid and I'm glad I missed the ChatGPT era.
Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding. In our efforts to standardise everything and come to objective exams, we've rewarded a culture that just intends to pass with the least amount of effort. Next to that are the burdens of being a student; if I didn't have to work most nights of the week, I'm sure I'd have put more effort into studying.
Lectures were often boring and questions would be answered by referring to pages in a textbook. Maybe with recorded media, we should revisit the use of lectures.
All in all, I don't see how academia can keep the standards high in current society. We'll see how it goes.
Perhaps it has to do with the reason people go to university, and the pressures they're under.
I remember being a poor student burning through my savings. I had no patience for humanities and anything that didn't directly help me get gainful employment.
Years later, I love those things, mostly because I am free to pursue them at my own pace, without worrying about maintaining a high GPA, courting companies that offer internships, building up my portfolio, and learning the things that are actually related to my job. That's on top of working my way through school, trying to make friends in a new city, and pursuing happiness.
I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
Agreed. Having time and a mental health status where one can relax and peacefully read a whole book is a luxury. Having a job where you can apply any knowledge from your studies is a luxury too. Having space in your life to care about knowledge and learning for its own sake is a luxury
I didn't enjoy my studies because it was so stressful and i had to optimise for exams. I had no choice but to cut corners where i could. I was also forced to do many classes that i didnt really care about.
Though i have the feeling i can't begin to imagine the life of these people that are addicted to their phone, they kind of feel like a different species to me
In the university I optimized for exam. The degree was the only thing that mattered. Like you now that I’m older and wealthier I can lean for learning sake at my pleasure and deep dive things I care about.
For me it was extracting the most value for the money, which meant getting the best possible education within the boundaries of the degree. This involved taking graduate courses and substituting them for undergrad to get more of a challenge, taking more math courses both undergrad and graduate (I was a CS major), etc. Yes ultimately I was paying for a piece of paper, but when you're paying $15k/yr I wanted to be damn sure it was money well spent, and to this day I still feel shortchanged.
I felt shortchanged my senior year at my fairly well-regarded university when I was dealing with depression and doing what I saw as the bare minimum academically. I still got straight A’s despite putting in minimal effort.
> I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation, cutting corners to make ends meet and remember their early twenties as more than endless work and drudgery.
This was definitely the case for me.
However, it always left me with the idea of “then why did I study?”. To get a job, of course, but in retrospect a better path might’ve been to work and then study at a later phase in life.
Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.
If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.
Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.
Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.
You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.
I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.
> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding
It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.
For a take-home exam or assignment, I’m sure this is the case.
The hardest course I took at uni had a final oral exam and weekly homework assignment. Your final grade would be the average of all the homework assignments, but the final oral exam decided if you passed (with previous mentioned grade) or failed.
I thought that was a great way to do it, you can cheat your way through the course but in the end you’ll fail the oral exam. However, it was more subjective.
As someone who teaches in humanities many students are really bad at reading and writing, use ai way too much and it hurts them, and rarely pay attention in class.
I’ve sat in other classes which were indeed boring but I don’t think this is the common denominator. Undergrads are just high schoolers with a different title.
The students from our schools foreign branch that come here for a semester or so are leagues beyond local students.
>it has just enough outdated views to distract people
Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's great this guy wrote a textbook, but perhaps he should have authored a series of documentaries.
Perhaps reading dense texts isn't actually the best way to make an impression on a students mind, but that's just all we had up until about 20 years ago.
I think Khan Academy is really great because of the video content.
