Recent content by Imrahil91

I think you're right. The US has so many brick and mortar stores that Amazon etc replace them, but in China, new developments are built with a shopping mall alongside the online shopping infrastructure. Fun fact: New South China Mall in the southern manufacturing city of Dongguan (previously...

Maybe you've been away for too long? Online shopping is a huge thing in China now. On sites like Taobao and JD I bought everything from imported beer to external hard drives, and had it delivered within a few days to my door by a migrant worker on an electric scooter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-jinping.html It's been in the making for some time, but it now seems to be taken for granted that China's president of anti corruption fame, Xi Jinping, will break his four predecessors' precedent and change the constitution to stay...

And instead bought another cryptocurrency, Bitcoin cash. And maybe some private jets too. And he's not a founder of Bitcoin (as far as we all know). He's a co-founder of the website bitcoin.com, as even the article headline says.

Can you get anything more than a few cents from mining bitcoins with a normal computer now that there are circuits and racks specifically made for that? Mining ethereum, litecoin and other altcoins is most efficiently done with gpus, which can also be used for gaming or deep learning training...

So you think it's a way to control people? Is it then really in the public interest to have a housing market like that? I know both having a mortgage and having children (or other dependents) make people much more risk averse and thus likely to stick in a normal job as an employee. Don't know...

What's the big deal with home ownership anyway? With such a tax deduction, it makes it the rational thing for people who can to take a big mortgage and buy a house. But everyone having mortgages creates a lot of credit and possible systemic risk, especially in times of speculation in the housing...

Ok, thanks for getting my worldview back on track. I'll buy a banned (in China) book full of eye witness accounts of the period, so that I hopefully can have some good counter arguments to this wave of CCP apologists swamping internet forums nowadays. Ironically by illegally bypassing their own...

I learned in school that tens of millions of people died as a result of careless management by the Chinese Communist Party during the Great leap forward, and I thought there was pretty much a consensus about that version of history. So I was quite surprised when a question on Quora about the...

While its economy, science and power projection is leaping forward, the Internet censorship is perhaps the most easy to see sign of China's backwardness in other areas. I agree with this guy, the pain of using the Internet often tops the list of complaints among foreigners in China, because the...

PRC's goal is to create a "Sinosphere" where they can do what they want without being too worried about the US or other powers' actions. The thought of having their exports disturbed if the US navy puts sticks in their machinery is terrifying to the Communist Party, as their legitimacy the last...

When I went to a Christian school, some people said that just living with Jesus in your life and the inner peace and confidence you get with it is reward enough itself, and just waiting for heaven or feeling better than other people because you have the "correct" belief isn't the right path. I...

Ok, but does prohibition actually limit the access to drugs enough? We can clearly see that many lives still are destroyed by drugs even today. I guess the main problem is that prohibition gives a lot of power to ruthless criminals in the drug market. They are using violence and are often...

It seems quite apparent to me that the war on drugs has not only failed to combat the drug problem, but that it actually causes many other serious problems. Such as incarceration of people in the US and powerful criminal organizations, both of which are symptoms of the huge amount of money the...

Just pay the basic income weekly or daily. When the hunger bites he won't starve too long until he can buy food. And perhaps automatically pay Bob's (and the likes of Bob) rent from his basic income so that he won't gamble his way to homelessness. It would probably be a good idea to change...