The greatest feat that Mao achieved was to take the land that had been tightly gripped by generations upon generations of owners and to shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again. People naturally want to work the land, but you end up with suboptimal inertia because owners just end up letting it sit fallow if it doesn't immediately return. It's how you turn a billion serfs into a billion entrepreneurs.
We're already way past the point where a creative cocktail of 10 different progressive taxation schemes could feasibly fix the root of the problem, and you feel this especially if you were born after the year 2000. You're more likely to see results if you pick up a red scarf than if you pass a higher wealth tax, sales tax, land tax, consumption tax, estate tax...
The famine is unrelated to the land distribution but also the farm land distribution didn't last. They changed course and put the land into collectives and it is still in collectives today so the famine cannot be blamed on collectives.
My understanding is the famine was essentially the middle managers of these collectives over stating yields and being too afraid to admit their lies. To maintain the lie, they shipped off food while the farmers starved.
> They changed course and put the land into collectives and it is still in collectives today so the famine cannot be blamed on collectives.
Painting it as if Mao era collectives are the same as the state quotas that exist today is highly misleading. The HRS was 1979:
"The household responsibility system replaced collective farming." [1]
Broadly speaking, the collectives can and should be blamed for the famine, just as in the Ukraine. Getting into the weeds on the specific mechanisms is fine, but using it to undermine the broader lesson is apologetics.
Famine along the yellow river and yangtze river has been happening for thousands of years across all dynasties, its specifically what land distribution was meant to fix, and since 1960s there hasn't been a famine since. My parents and grandparents lived through it and left cities to work in countryside fields during the cultural revolution. You tell me how the famine fits in and I'll let you know if you're accurate or not.
I think not. Your framing thus far is so wildly inaccurate that I believe this is a propaganda account, and hesitate to engage further. But in case any not familiar with the history read this in passing, I will leave a reference to an actually reputable source:
"Mao’s violent collectivization and forced labour campaigns during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) led to as many as 45 million deaths in what is widely regarded as the worst famine in human history." [1]
those who advocate for land value tax are usually advocating for single/minimal types of taxes (and, in fact, against sales and income taxes) rather than a cocktail of them. "Single Tax" predominantly refers to a single land value tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax
My point is that a single land value tax would have the same effect as piecemeal improvements to current tax portfolio - none of it would fix the inertia already priced and baked into the system.
> A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous."
> To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area."
Let's not glamourize the Mao's land reforms. It required the killing of 1-2 million people. Even then, the collectivization was a massive failure - not only did the peasantry not get to enjoy the benefits of land reform, a further 15 million people would die from the resulting famine.
The deep irony is that Taiwan was actually able to do the same reform but with much better outcomes, with much less loss of life or political violence.
Taiwan did not have anywhere near the land distribution occur under CKS/CCK, nor the same veracity of landlord clique ownership. And, you're further wrong in that a big part of white terror was specifically due to 外省人 owners of factories and farms, from land stolen from the aborigines. The white terror wasn't by any means less violent and senseless than cultural revolution.
You can move your alipay card into apple wallet and have it as the default payment method, so do you don't even have to swipe or turn on your phone, it will even work in low-power/off mode.
Thats interesting, but it seems most subway systems are still QR code based? Anyways, I’ll try to see if I can get that to work next time I go to China.
I much prefer convenient over fast, being able to just tap my phone's uploaded IC card/alipay without having to open it up or switch cards is maybe 200ms slower, but I don't have to think or change what I'm doing. Plus with alipay it will just autodeduct so I don't ever have to think about that as well, though Apple wallet Suica makes it easy to reload too.
JRE required Suica to be instantly accessible so there's a setting in Apple Wallet to set a card to a default quick transit use card(forgot the exact name). If configured as such, just poking the gate antenna with earpiece end of an iPhone instantly completes the transaction just as fast as a real card does.
(yes, the antenna is in the top FaceID/Dynamic Island area, Osaifu Keitai spec requires a □つ icon wherever antenna is located, which Apple managed to completely ignore)
FWIW on Android, Google Wallet tells me "Transit Cards: These cards never require verification", and indeed I can just wave my phone at the terminal without unlocking it.
Express Mode originally launched as Express Transit with only support for Suica, Beijing and Shanghai cards. It was then renamed to Express Mode when support for the other modes was added.
I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.
I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.
Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.
China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.
The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.
You can't really have this both ways. Closing Hormuz and blowing up Iranian export facilities has been massively decarbonizing. Chinese solar exports are massively up because countries have had to find new energy sources.
Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.
These are pretty famous mushrooms in China. Right now Yunnan mushroom hot pot is all the rage, basically in every city in the country. It's also led to lots of tourists in Yunnan wandering around foraging for wild mushrooms. The problem is that there's hundreds of different types of mushrooms with varying levels of toxicity, and unless you grew up in the area and know what you're doing it's easy to get mixed up. There's plenty of videos on chinese social media of people giggling in hospital beds geeked out their gourds pointing at little people.
I tried to find the psilocybin ones with friends once, just kids (well we were 15) with a few books about mushrooms from the library haha. We grabbed anything that "kinda looked like them", then put them all on the kitchen counter, tried to divide them into piles of the same things and find out what is what... but things just became less clear instead of obvious.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
Yep. I used to go foraging for mushrooms with my family in Russia as a kid, but I absolutely wouldn't do that here without an actual local expert who'd been doing it for years.
Yes but in which jurisdiction could you publish it?
We roughly know what the hot topics are for the current models, but actually testing and ranking would break said censorship and thus would be hammered into the ground through cointelpro methods by all parties.
It would be nice to have a hypothetical small country where the internal censorship would be non aligned and insignificant enough that it wouldn't take away from the overall findings. But it doesn't exist.
I want some science based authority on the moon where only 3-sigma IQ international academics have ultimate authority.
Oh wait Asimov did that right? I guess it didn't go so well either.
More important there are some things censored that are true. And some things censored that are false. How do we even get to a good model of the truthiness/nonsense adjustment indicator?
You could publish this in the US easily. 145 IQ peeps get tons of stuff wrong, btw, and in many domains my experience is the ‘wrongness’ can intensify as you move up into higher sigma domains.
China actually started piloting the "industry Phd" in 2025, and took inspiration from Japan, Germany, and UK where some programs do industry experience as part of Phd training. A lot of the Chinese programs are in agriculture, engineering, and biotech. China's Ministry of Education actually published the "suggestion for experimentation" (loose translation) in 2023, and it trickled out from there as each province level government and university system started designing their own systems.
Wouldn’t be the first time the US took inspiration regarding the PhD from the leading advanced manufacturing power of the day, nor from Germany for that matter.
We're already way past the point where a creative cocktail of 10 different progressive taxation schemes could feasibly fix the root of the problem, and you feel this especially if you were born after the year 2000. You're more likely to see results if you pick up a red scarf than if you pass a higher wealth tax, sales tax, land tax, consumption tax, estate tax...
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