> the stats for China are simply stated as “read and write”
One could argue that being able to read and write in Chinese is quite an accomplishment. For alphabet-based writing systems, kids as young as 6 y.o. can read pretty much any word they know, and write many of them. Not for Chinese.
> We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?
A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.
I'm perfectly happy with a teacher making 60k provided that they're teaching my kid well. I'm not happy with giving them a raise if they're not, and "their lives could be easier so we should do it anyway" is not a compelling argument. In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
What if underperforming teachers were fired and replaced with high-performing teachers? This is really what needs to happen, but...
It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.
> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.
As someone who spent their formative years primarily interacting with teachers I think I can say that I do. Most teachers underperform, so even if you have a hard time, just assuming that one is not a good one will have you right more often than not.
The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.
I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.
> The most common reason is that they were intentionally destabilizing their country and/or governments
The most common cited reason, you probably wanted to say.
Compare: "the most common reason for content removal in Chinese internet is dissemination of fake news" vs "the most common cited reason for content removal in Chinese internet is dissemination of fake news"
I personally don't feel the desire to visit other countries. If it's not somewhere I'd want to live, it's not somewhere I really care enough about to see. I care more about experiences and knowledge, both of which can be had where I live.
It helps that my state is also comparable in size to larger European countries. And has a pretty dynamic environment. Very mountainous and foresty in the north, planey in the east, red desert to the south, and tan desert to the west. Blazing hot in the summer, and well below freezing in the winter. I still haven't seen the majority of just this state.
Being rather varied in nature, the U.S. is still just one country. It is culturally more diverse than some places, but that's still mostly one culture, one way of living, one way of thinking about things. Since you can't leave, you're confined to it and have no way to experience other cultures.
I guess that does not bother you, but what are your thoughts on this anyway?
The US is a big and varied place. One could certainly spend an entire lifetime here and not feel left out of much. And I say this as someone with a meager but existent share of international travel under my belt.
> What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.
If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which is non-negligible.
So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of... shareholder interests?
Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
> Make sure this version breaks after 10 days (so user doesn't suspect) and inserts garbage into whatever it produces after this time.
"That software of yours? Yeah, I tried it once and it was garbage, couldn't even save its own output properly. Now you want me to buy it for... wait, how much?"
There are also other games, one whose name eludes me, that deliberately couldn't be completed if it detected it was cracked (and effectively acted as a demo by doing so).
Heard about the first one, but not about FADE, thanks for the link.
If anything, this demonstrates how unpopular this idea is. Of dozens games released and cracked every year, after 40 years of PC gaming, how many tried this strategy? A handful? Also, I now checked some of these games at my favorite torrent tracker, and yes, they are there, they are cracked, and there are no complaints about these defense systems in comments.
And these are games. I wonder if anyone has ever tried that with more useful software, and if they had any success with this strategy.
edit: I now realize I might have met this "in the wild". In my case the game was "The Legend of Kyrandia", and my cracked version could not be completed indeed.
All this trick achieved was making that kid who was me frustrated and unhappy. The game did not explain what was wrong, and there were exactly zero ways I could get a legal copy in Russia in 1999 anyway.
I got a better cracked copy later though. Nice game, do recommend.
Could you point me to AAA-battery powered noise cancelling headphones? No bluetooth necessary.
I have a pair from 2014, and I love that as long as I have some spare batteries, I'm never stuck with headphones which I can't use because of low charge, and that I don't have to charge yet another device. That pair has no bluetooth, so power usage is low: one AAA battery for 30-40 hours of use.
When these are dead, I won't find a replacement, because manufacturer does not want me to use the same device for eight years. They want me to have the integrated battery dead in a couple of years and buy a new pair.
And I miss the form factor of the iPhone 5. Does that mean Apple should be forced to make devices of that size indefinitely? I don’t think so.
You’re demanding that the government force people to make things that they no longer want to make, usually because the product is no longer profitable. Someone has to pay for the workers and factories needed to produce these products. Better it be you than the >99% of taxpayers who don’t want battery-powered wired headphones.
> I've been poor and tired a long time ago. I know what it is like.
How many times have they turned off your water?
"When someone is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m trying to determine how poor exactly they were, there’s one evergreen question I ask that has never failed to give me a good idea of what kind of situation I’m dealing with. That question is: “How many times have they turned off your water?”."
Please forgive me my curiosity. The linked article was somewhat eye-opening for me on who is poor and who isn't, and I now keep asking this question too. So, how many?
The issue is not how many times my water has been turned off. The question is what has led the water to be turned off at someone's house that has had their water turned off.
At some point, sure, there is nothing you can do. If someone has had polio and is in one of those polio breathing machines (https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/av7qWyq_700b.jpg), then yes, there's nothing anyone can do there, for sure. Or if someone runs out into a busy street and gets run over and killed because they didn't look, nobody can bring them back to life.
But if you put aside those examples, I need to know what they did, and where they are, and what they are capable of doing. Based on that information, I could advise them on what to do so that it doesn't happen in the future.
Unfortunately, as I have learned the hard way, I could share this info with people on how to prevent it from happening in the future, but only 1 person out of 10,000 will actually want to change their life and do things a new way. That's the hard cold facts. A person who gets their water turned off over and over is doing the same exact things that get their water turned off over and over. If I had 100% control of their money, and could force their arms and legs to do what I want them to do, it wouldn't happen.
I mean, I looked on indeed.com and there is a job that pays $35/hour to answer phones, do light filing, front desk receptionist. That's $70K per year. I could go to that person, help them fill out a resume, send it to the company, tell them how to dress and role play with them on how to interview, but 9,999 times out of 10,000, we'll do all that work and they won't show up to the interview. And have some kind of excuse, of which I know what most of the excuses would be.
> But if you put aside those examples, I need to know what they did, and where they are, and what they are capable of doing.
Interestingly enough, the article I linked in my previous comment[0], and another one by the same person[1], have answers to your questions. Also, that particular person managed to get out of poverty eventually, and wrote a follow-up post on that[2].
So that's the guy who was /really/ poor, and struggled for a while. He has some insight on what it is like and why it is so hard to get out. I guess he'd be infuriated by this patronizing "hey, that's easy, why don't you just...", even though he does not write it out loud.
Let's have more compassion to those who are less lucky than us, fellow stranger, shall we?
As far as I understand, in the US Uber is a dude with a car and a drivers license, who installs an app on their phone and starts driving people around. In European countries I know Uber is just another way to call a taxi.
Big difference. I'd say it's not too wrong to say that the "dude with a car who installed an app" model is mostly outlawed.
Indeed, in their defense, thet have bowed down to some regulators and are run like a business now in places. After being strong armed and forgetting to pay taxes, but props for that, fair enough and honorable. Just that its subsidised by pirating maneuvers in other places.
Sometimes, Americans and american businesses do not understand the social leaning eu countries, the people have worked hard for generations to keep people like uber(yes , people, we know behind companies are people) at bay and they know why. People want to be able to live off of one full time jons salary, no matter the sacrifice.
They also want to their neigbors to have the same privilege, they dont want their neighbors to rob them.
And if it does not work, then the social system shall serve as a fallback.
Nothing to do with lack of work morals, it is a different mind set.
One could argue that being able to read and write in Chinese is quite an accomplishment. For alphabet-based writing systems, kids as young as 6 y.o. can read pretty much any word they know, and write many of them. Not for Chinese.