There once were news about Fitbit or Garmin displaying workout records for users near classified military bases, and some workout routes were suspected to be in the playground of the bases.
Banning books is not something new, but I think Florida has some 'unique' criteria when banning certain books. One example I know is Jackson County, FL. once banned 1984 for being "pro-communist". In most places of the world, 1984 is considered anti-totalitarian, and anti-communist in quite a few countries (not China, where people can buy the book without any hassle). I totally get it, but Jackson County seems to be the only place that sees the book to be procommuist.
In China, particularly in Tibet and Qinghai, plague still occasionally occurs, because a wild animal, the Himalayan marmots carry it and people may get plague from them. After the CCP took over Tibet, antibotics were gradually used to cure the plague. Recent years, more people are traveling to Tibet by the newly built highways, and those people from the cities only find the marmots cute and sometimes touch them and get the disease. Local governments put large warning signs along the road to alert people about this, and hospitals and clinics in nearby towns are always prepared to cure some stupid tourists. Still, it is a potential threat, especially for now because now you can drive home in Shanghai with a cute marmot from infected region for only a few days, not knowing what comes home with you.
This reminds me of the so-called "heartless couplet" (无情对) in Chinese. Every pair of words in the couplets are synonymous or anonymous, and yet the meanings of the couplets are completely unrelated, often in a humorous way.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
I would not jump to the conclusion solely based on isotope signatures. A decade or so ago, a prominent Chinese professor Weidong Sun specialized in geochemistry analyzed the ancient bronze artifacts dated back to the Shang dynasty and found isotope signatures pointing to a Mediterranean origin, and he had to answer that. Well there can be several explanations, for example, the Shang people traded with central Asian tribes and got the ores and perhaps the bronze smelting tech too. But Sun, based on some ancient documents on some mythical long travel of the ancestors of the Shang people, concluded that the only reasonable explanation is that the Shang people are offsprings of those tribes, who are offsprings of the Sumerian people.
That's nonsense. Searching for "广告拦截" on Baidu returns hundreds of thousands of webpages and tutorials telling users how to install and turn on ad blockers, and Chinese smartphone brands often boast that their products perform better than competitors in blocking ads. What you are saying seems like a misunderstood version of the fact that some "ads" are whitelisted by default and you can't block them painlessly, mostly from the telecom giants that provide internet access for you.
I still remember when I bought my first sony vaio in about 2004, running on Windows XP in Japanese, I was just appalled to find that a whole family of useless crap softwares pre-installed. There was an app that notifies me when the battery was fully charged with a dolce female sound "Batteri no shuuden wa kanrio shimashita". I tried to reinstall the system with the recovery CD, but all these softwares were also installed.
Years later when I visited in Japan again, I wanted to buy another sony vaio, and asked the people to give me one with clean windows system. They did not have one with clean system, but they showed me that there were only a few harmless pre-installed apps, and they were easy to remove.
It is celebrated by quite a lot of people in China, Korea, and even in Japan. Yes, Japan. For many Japanese people, the Abenomics did not really revive the economy, and their lives haven't really improved. If you understand Japanese, you will find that the comments from ordinary Japanese people commonly refer to his death as 自業自得, which means that he deserved that.
In East Asia, this assassination has another angle. The attacker, Yamagami Tetsuya confessed that his mother is a scam victim of a religious group, and Abe Shinzo had a close relationship with the leader of the group. Yamagami attacked Abe in broad daylight to revenge for his mother. In East Asian culture, this is so dramatic, almost like those legendary assassins in the old tales who fearlessly stood against the kings or emperors to defend their beliefs or families, and yet were gentle enough not to hurt anyone else. In Japanese forums, the heroization of Yamagami has already begun.
I would say it's not an issue about democracy or bureaucracy, it's because the responsibility is diluted. Someone is not happy with this? Great, it is now not because we do not do it, it is because we take every complaint seriously. The dilution of responsibility may appear in different ways. Leave the issue to some dedicated committee, they will work very hard to make sure the project won't start in a millennium, and cost possibly even more than actually building the project. In case people are concerned about the endless delay, all the process is transparent and no one is to blame.
This is not limited to building project. We all remember that when covid started, it took the CDC a long time to acknowledge that masks are effective, and even longer to acknowledge that the disease is airborne (in Oct. 2020). Why? They based their guidelines on "science and evidence". In events like, any delay in the decision leads to many deaths that could have been saved.
Ironically, in current America, only the fanatics are making prompt decisions. Look how fast the red states are passing abortion laws after the RvW overturned.
