Yeah, and who knows, soon might even manage to get to the moon, something we already did in 1969. But now better and cheaper (with tech made 50+ years after the last mission, it would a challenge not to do it better and cheaper - but is it half a century worth of better and cheaper? Considering the dreams then was a moon base and mission to mars coming in the next decades, something that never came to be).
The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle that government spending can accelerate technological progress in particular fields by raining money on those fields. The progress puts it way ahead of what could be expected and occurs to the detriment of sectors from which the money was taken.
We now have a good understanding of just how far ahead we pushed ourselves beyond what market forces were going to pursue: 50-60 years, which is pretty cool.
> The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle that government spending can accelerate technological progress in particular fields by raining money on those fields.
Actually, that might be electronics and computers. The basis for Silicon Valley was created during WWII - by unrestrained debt-based government spending.
Of course, maybe trying to rank the developments by industry or sector makes no sense, sooo much was influenced by what happened in that period. Agriculture too, if what I read and remember correctly a lot of WWII chemical industry was reused for things like fertilizer, but I don't have a good (i.e. direct and good quality scientific study instead of some blog post or pop book) source for that.
I dislike this separation of "government" vs. "business". I remember an MIT biology course (genetics) where the professor explained Gregor Mendel (the guy with the beans) a bit more - his circumstances. That man wasn't some random person who purely by chance happened to be interested in biology and inheritance. Turns out he was part of a far wider effort of church, state and industry to produce economic progress. Historically, even looking at how England became a world power, there never was such a separation. Government always acted as an extension of economic interests in combination with the merchants, later with the capitalists.
The policy is targeting ONLINE games. Companies like Tencent will simply double down shipping those shitty games with loot boxes and microtransactions oversea to your kids. Meanwhile in China offline singleplayer games may see a boom.
This is meaningless. Taiwanese can still access job posting sites or be contacted by recruiters from Mainland China. There's no language barrier and they can simply buy a flight ticket to Shanghai and start working wherever they want with full Chinese citizenship.
The brain drain is serious and I don't see how it can be solved unless Taiwan can offer competitive salaries against first-tier cities in the mainland, 10% of Taiwanese population is now living and working in the mainland.
Saying Taiwan isn't part of China isn't right, but neither is saying it is part of China. Similar the term mainland while maybe not liked by all Taiwan wouldn't necessary be that wrong either on technical terms.
Because things are complicate ...
Both Taiwan and China are "China".
Basically China/CCP claims the Taiwanese government are rebels, and the Taiwanese land belongs to China.
But Taiwan is also claiming that the CCP and co. are rebels and the Chinese/CCP land belongs to them.
I.e. both claim to "be" China.
So the reason Taiwan is called Taiwan and not China is because it's mainly limited to the island of Taiwan.
But this also means that using e.g. China/Mainland and China/Taiwan isn't wrong either.
In the end from a Taiwan historic point of few China/Mainland is the mainland they have lost.
I myself found it annoying that many western countries don't officially recognize Taiwan.
Until I learned about that fact, which explains a lot of things.
The relevant part is that Taiwan officially kinda sees themself as part of the historic/demographic/non CCP defined China, but NOT as part of the "political" China controlled by the CCP.
Naturally due to years separation both have developed in different directions and from a external point of few both China and Taiwan are separate countries with separate governments, land, politics etc.
Anyway I'm not a China/Taiwan expert, I hope I got things more or less right.
I guess the main takeaway is that the relationship between Taiwan and China is much more complicated than many people from the other side of the world believe it is.
I personally thought for a long time it basically "just" Taiwan is a country split of from china which aims to be independent from China and go it's own way but is suppressed by China but also somewhat protected by external forces mainly the US. Well I was wrong and things are more complicated than that.
We were not educated enough about this particular history in China but when I grew up I read a bit to know most of it. But I'm shocked it wasn't well known internationally.
I find the same situation in Ireland complicated as well after living there for 6 years. Before it was simply a naive 'why didn't NI unite with the republic of Ireland / why UK split Ireland up'. And being related to Britain and most events were in the press and it's english, there are still many people have no clue what happened. No wonder there could be so much misunderstanding and needless emotional arguments.
I can't speak for other countries or even the current education system but when I went to school in Germany history (and political) class was filled up with European History/Politics and Germanies past to a degree that most Asian countries only where covered in context of European history (e.g. Opium-Wars where covered, but e.g. Taiwan or the Indian-China relationship was hardly covered at all).
But things have changed a bit since I went to school, but just a bit. And somewhat it also depends on the teacher.
PS:
If you want to know the conflict around UK and Ireland was covered. And was covered more deeply then the Opium-Wars, to some degree because it also was used as basis for topic in english classes. But it was also a time in school from which I don't remember much, because being a teen in puberty annoyed by english and in turn not caring about the UK at all. So I have no idea if the coverage was "good" or "bad".
Similar experience to yours. European history didn't constitute a majority of the history lessons in my old days but one can understand that (there is a lot!).
I'm certain the quality of education back then in China weren't up to scratch for sure but for the curious you can always get books if you have an interesting topic. I find books even superior media over history education because like you said younger me simply wasn't interested enough in class :)
I also can recommend Extra Credits (on YouTube), it's imperfect and simplified, but it still tries to be reasonable accurate for the kind of information source it is. At least it's much more concerned about accuracy then many modern (TV) documentation are. They also tend to have episode where they go through mistakes they accidentally had done in previous episodes..
EDIT: You to be clear they haven't done a episode about Taiwan (I think), but about other things I hadn't (or had) known about.
As I understand it Taiwan no longer makes any territorial claims on the mainland (Taiwan still claims ownership of nearby islets). Ball is in the CCP's court to invade before 2049, the centennial of the "peoples revolution". There is a strong symbolic desire to do so on the part of many in the CCP, but there is a smaller competing clique whose preference is to have a peaceful reunification (loaded term since many would say China was at no point really unified with formosa in recent centuries).
I think they used "mainland" here, so that it is differentiated from something like Hong Kong. And in this case, that differentiation actually matters and helps the context.
Tl;dr: the parent comment didn't use "mainland" to imply that Taiwan is a part of China. They used it to say "contacted by recruiters from Mainland China [as opposed to recruiters from HK]"
Taiwan is an island in a country formally known as "Republic of China". So yes, it is China. The mainland is occupied by communist rebels, but it also belongs to the Republic of China. Happy to help!
The uptick started at mid-Dec. There is a tiny bump in early October, however, if you hover over it, the bump shows posts about comparing economic activity to the 2003 SARS period, not related to the disease.
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Can I just add that seasonal influenza varies widely from year to year? [0]
It just so happens that this year was a moderately bad year in the US. I don't know about China. But, they'd have to exclude differences from a bad flu season to have any chance of proving their point rigorously.
I have done more research about the 6 hospitals, my initial claim of "6 small hospitals" is wrong, they at least include the biggest two, Wuhan Union and Tongji.
The claim "far away from the wet market" still holds, these hospitals are not in the Jiangan District, and 5 of them are on the other side of the Yangtze River.
You mean SARS-CoV2, that's the virus. How would they be able to detect it? Would they even know what they were looking for? Would CoV2 trigger the same tests as SARS1 (for non-PCR tests)?
Hospitals are obligated to report to the CDC once they discover pneumonia caused by an unknown virus that can transmit from human to human. SARS or COVID is just a name scientists gave to the sequenced virus.
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