Is it migrants that refuse to learn the local language, or locals who refuse to learn the migrants' languages? I don't see that either group is in a position to demand what the other group learns or how they conduct their private activities. If you want to be part of their community then learn their language. If you prefer to isolate yourself with your fellow locals, then do that. Both ways are OK and you have nothing to complain about.
The native Maoris were pressured into learning the immigrant's English language 100+ years ago. Perhaps you would be happier if that never happened?
It's ironic that you're in Singapore, an openly multi-lingual country. Which groups are using the "wrong" language there?
> Is it migrants that refuse to learn the local language, or locals who refuse to learn the migrants' languages?
Why would locals have to learn the migrants' languages, unless they wanted to deal with them or there was money in it?
When people move to a country, they can either assimilate into the country or try to take over the country.
Since that's how most of the new world was settled, if you live here and want things to stay sort of the way they are, you want immigrants to assimilate and learn your language.
If they don't want to learn your language, immigrants should go places where the language they speak is used.
Locals don't have to learn immigrants' languages. They also don't have to integrate with them. But they can. If you value integrating and sharing a language, then you personally should go to the trouble of doing that, not complain that somebody else isn't doing what you want.
Expecting things to stay the way they are isn't compatible with economic growth. If you want a stagnant place, you should find one which has such restrictions written into its laws or bylaws so you can have more confidence that it'll stay how it is. What else don't you want to change? Young people looking at their smartphones all day instead of having conversations with you? No new slang words? Where are the boundaries of what you expect other people are obliged to do for the benefit of your feeling of familiarity?
My comment was about things staying the way they were, not only immigration. China is unrecognizably different now because of growth. What if you didn't like high rise apartments spoiling your ocean view? Sorry, it's changed. What if you didn't like having no young people working on your farm and looking after you when you're old? Sorry, it's changed. What if you didn't like not knowing your neighbors because there are too many of them? Oh, and people in cities have even largely changed their dialect to be able to communicate with Chinese from other areas. Somebody who prefers to keep their same way of life wouldn't get on well there.
> My comment was about things staying the way they were, not only immigration.
No, your comment was originally why people who live a certain place don't learn the language of the migrants, not the other way around.
This has nothing to do with the point of the original comment, which is about immigrants failing to assimilate. If you move to another country, you should expect to become familiar with both the language and the social mores, and use the social mores in interactions with the people who were already there before you, or get treated poorly by the people who were already there.
> not complain that somebody else isn't doing what you want.
No, you're saying that other people are wasting your time by not learning effective ways to communicate. They shouldn't expect you to do anything you've expressed no interest in doing.
> Expecting things to stay the way they are isn't compatible with economic growth
Your points are incoherent and make no sense. Economic growth was huge in the years after WWII, and remained stable for a long time without massive changes. And then you segue into cultural change from economic growth? Give me a break.
If you are an immigrant, you're making a change in your environment because you didn't like the way things were in the place you were moving from. Not learning the language or the customs in the place you're moving to is expecting things to stay the way they are far more than people who stay put in one place.
Basically, if you move, you probably have a good reason for moving. Don't try to transplant the way things were in the place you were to the place you're moving to.
If you go to any Asian or middle eastern country. You must follow their rules and their way of life. But the west is like. Oh no come into our country, do what ever you want, we have a fake freedom for you to enjoy.
Do you have specific examples? Besides laws, I can't think of any. What are the consequences for not following their way of life? Isolation from their social group? Hasn't that already happened to isolated Asians and Indians in New Zealand?
> Is it migrants that refuse to learn the local language, or locals who refuse to learn the migrants' languages?
Good point. In my 2 years in NZ, no one invited me to a BBQ, because I am eastern European. I mostly hang out with asian colleagues.
At work though it's kind of cool to have such a multicultural teams (unless you are manager - those positions are still mostly kiwi (I guess more of an age thing, than nepotism)). I guess it's what USA was a century ago.
If you bought a car that turned out to be stolen, you might wake up one day to find it's gone because the police recovered it for the owner. It's similar here - buyers looking for a bargain that might be illegal are part of the problem of IP theft. They can seek recourse through the seller they got it from, and if that doesn't work, they shouldn't have trusted a dodgy overseas black market seller with their money.
However, you're talking about an independent third party with authority doing this - the police. About theft of a physical object.
Why should a vendor be able to stop you from using a thing you bought because it looks like one of theirs? No support, sure. Disavow the item, sure. Post warnings on the device as an inbuilt part of the system, sure. But destroy your item? No.
If someone is fraudulently selling cars badged as Fords, Ford itself should not be able to repossess those vehicles. And if Ford thinks that you have stolen their car, they themselves should still not be the ones who repossess it - that's what the police are for. Vigilantism is a bad thing and has all kinds of unexpected failure modes.
Stealing back your car can certainly cause problems if done privately by the owner. But here it's the product itself that already came with a bricking mechanism built in and activated it itself. The buyer trusted the seller not to provide a self-bricking phone, and got ripped off. It's never going to affect an innocent phone. It's also no physical items being taken or damaged. No baby is going to be trapped in it, etc.
Actually, there's a very analogous thing for cars - LoJack. Is that wrong too?
It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?
>It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?
It wouldn't be OK if the developers intentionally affected copies that most users would explicitly believe were not counterfeit (for example, if all Steam copies did this because the game developer had an exclusive agreement with EA/Origin).
The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing they were counterfeit. They were advertised as brand new and came in a shrinkwrapped box.
The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing the phone was fake and probably contained physical and software backdoors.
Crypto devices should brick themselves if they discover they've been tampered with.
It's a clear case of seller fraud and if you use a good marketplace (ie not the one starting with E) you can get a refund through the platform. And maybe get information to use in suing the seller.
> It's also no physical items being taken or damaged
So if I scramble the firmware on your phone and brick it, you don't consider that damaged?
> LoJack
... works in tandem with police, hardly 'very analagous'.
> It happens with copy protection on software.
The user should have been warned that applying the update would brick the detected non-original phone. It shouldn't have just silently fucked the user over. It's bad ethics and also bad PR. Fucking over a user acting in good faith is poor form ethically.
The analogy would work if IP "theft" was anything like actual theft, ie, if the company actually lost anything that could be recovered by "repossessing" the software.
A closer analogy - and still not exactly, since the owner would still have actually lost the car - would be if the police came and burned it down just so that you couldn't use it.
They company surely did lose something. Customers who wanted to buy their product ended up buying an illegal competitor's product instead. There might even be some customers who go back and buy a genuine phone now that they can't use their fake one.
They're enforcing their copyright. Why not? The police can also confiscate computers with pirated software on them. They even do that sometimes. It doesn't return the money to the IP owners but it's still a way to deter theft.
It sounds like a good idea to me. Even if it doesn't recover their lost sales, it should prevent future black market copies since customers will know to avoid unofficial sellers.
You can't assume that someone who bought a $200 phone would buy the exact same phone for $300 if the $200 option was unavailable (I don't know the exact prices but the Ars article said that there were price differences of up to $100).
Going even further, the analogy is still a little bit flawed, because the people buying the phones have reason to believe the phone was NOT stolen (it came brand new, sealed in a box).
It'd be like if you bought a brand new car from a dealership, then two weeks later the police came to your house, told you it was stolen and burnt it down.
> ... has access to your browsing history, your search history, your entire internet history ...
That's a bit over the top. They'll only have access to data that you already knew lots of people have access to anyway. Not HTTPS sites where they'll only have the domain name. So they won't have your Google search history but will for Bing which bizarrely defaults to HTTP.
Good guess but you're wrong. They also get meta data like size of page loads Wich is more than enough to find out what Wikipedia entry you are looking at [there's a paper].
Perhaps if a bike is unused for a long time, or repeatedly gets returned immediately after borrowing it, they assume it's broken and pull it out for servicing. Not having docks, they wouldn't need to put the replacement bikes back at the same location or time and that could be done in cheaper batches.
It does't matter how poor the poorest people are. They'll always be extremely poor. The important change is that their numbers are falling. If your job is to work with the poorest people, you won't see the ones who never became poor in the first place due to global improvements in quality of life.
That's sort of backwards. Over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively, democracy has spread to more people, child mortality has fallen, literacy and education have risen [1], and rate of war deaths has fallen [2]. Maybe the direct death-and-suffering problems have now mostly been solved and that causes us to look to more intangible problems like human rights, freedom of speech and inequality. It's a common misconception that the world is getting worse but it's actually getting better.
Maybe the great lengths they went to against Manning and Snowden were because they released massively more data than anyone in history? People selling secrets to the soviets were dealt with just as harshly despite releasing far less information.
>over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively
This appears to be false[1], at least in the US.
Moreover, most statistics positing a reduction in poverty can be misleading because the massive growth in population is ignored by nature of percentages.
While there may be more people living above the poverty line than ever before, there are also more people living below it than ever before, about 3,000,000,000 people.
There are roughly as many people living in poverty today as the total world population in 1960.
There's not much to trust anyway. If you're using it for geoblocking, you probably don't care that some company knows you're watching some movie. HTTPS websites are still safe if the app isn't somehow hacking the browser. Non encrypted traffic was never hidden from much anyway. My ISP even injects ads into HTTP websites.
It might not be because they're republicans. It might be because their constituents are the beneficiaries of the local coal industry. The politicians are just doing what their voters want. They're puppets of the people who live there and want to keep their jobs at the expense of everyone else.
As much as I considerably support the transition toward renewables - I agree: this is fundamentally the job of state and local politicians. They can actively attempt to shape the conversation on a local level - but they are "hired" as a representative of the people and the people's will. It's the people, on a local level, that must be convinced that change is necessary.
It's not forbidden, it just has a ~10% tariff (fine). $10 per MWh compared to the current price of $120 per MWh. If solar or wind ends up actually cheaper than coal, it'll probably be by more than that 10% so it'll still be economical to use them.
Furthermore, the fine doesn't apply to exported electricity, which is most of it:
"Wyoming sends two-thirds of the electricity it generates to nearby states" [1]
The wholesale price a new American wind farm gets for its output in a region with good resources is maybe $30-$40/MWh. (Or $40-$50 if the wind farm lasts 25 years and collects the federal Production Tax Credit for its first 10 years.) The extra $10 in taxes makes a bigger difference at the wholesale level.
