I couldn’t find a comprehensive treatment of the broader issue on a quick check- I suspect that the nature of an issue revolving around “what we know vs what we formally know” resists discussion in places like scientific journals. But there’s some overlap with more well-known issues, such as antibiotic development- even though new antibiotics can be patented, the return isn’t enough to stimulate nearly sufficient development (e.g. https://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/news-and-analysis/fea... .)
That's how the Hukou system works, there are two tiers: Farm/Country and Urban, and they want to urbanize farmlands, which will upgrade existing farmland hukou to city ones.
They are not talking about moving farmers into existing cities.
> What they want is urbanization of the less developed areas
Everybody wants that. Can't remember that any country ever got it, in the last century, anyway. That's akin to wanting water to roll uphill.
Argentine will prefer its population to not clutter around Buenos Aires. France will prefer everybody not move to Paris, same for Russia with Moscow. But that's just not what is happening anywhere.
If you're moving to a city, makes total sense to pick a powerful one.
USSR did it to some extent. By forced work assignments after university in bum-fuck nowhere. As well as scarce goods more available in those cities as a bonus.
On top of that, people were not allowed to freely move. You couldn't just move to a city, rent apartment and look for a job. For people in countryside, university and assignment after it was pretty much the only way to move to a city. University courses were highly limited though and far from everybody could get in.
USSR tried to do it to some extent, still Moscow grew from ~1.5mln to 8mln on their watch.
The key was that while theoretically the state wanted it to stop bulging, a huge number of influental state enterprises wanted more workers and wanted them now, and got their way more often than not.
And Russia still deals with millions of people who are spread around evenly across landscape in single-employer towns where there's no longer any jobs. And no economic reason for these towns to have any jobs in the future. Some of these in the far north or Siberia for no apparent reason.
Who said they tried to put a hard cap on Moscow at some lower number? Moscow grew to 8mln precisely because of government policies. Had they no limits, it could have been 2x that.
And yes, that policy is definitely baiting ex-USSR countries in the ass nowadays.
The fun thing with autocrats, they want everybody to be on short leash, on the distance of calling before eyes or local phone call.
So naturally, when they say they want to cap population of main cities - doesn't mean they're ready to delegate anything essential to 2nd tier cities! And they consider many many things essential being control freaks, so that's where you get additional growth.
E.g. in the USSR, the main filmmakers were in Moscow and SPb. Could you relocate them to e.g. Sochi as it happened with Hollywood in the USA? Sure, but would you be able to hold them as tightly? Hence they stay.
They're in a situation where they need to dramatically slow down debt accumulation, which will slow down economic growth a bit faster than otherwise anticipated. It's a whiplash action, going from the growth the last 20 years (in which people were aggressively encouraged to move into the cities) to needing to strictly control that growth and the correlated debt expansion.
Manufacturing stopped net expanding years ago, many of their largest state-corporate manufacturing enterprises are simultaneously loaded to the ceiling with debt and being heavily subsidized to maintain current levels of employment and output.
There is wide discussion about local governments being allowed to go bankrupt, because the debt burdens have gotten so extreme:
"China Central Bank Official Says Bankruptcy May Benefit the Country"
China's goal, in theory, is to transition increasingly to a services economy, to provide the next leg of its growth, as manufacturing can't provide that. Service economies grow far slower than the type of manufacturing fill-in-the-slack / join the WTO boom they saw from ~1992-2015. They can no longer afford to keep accumulating debt as they have been since 2007. S&P is forecasting another ~75% increase in their total debt position in just the next five or so years, which would push them to... ~550%-600% debt to GDP ratio (possibly worse when counting all the shadow debt), or nearly twice that of the US. It's untenable to say the least.
Bottom line: China has to start applying the brakes, and that likely means dramatically slowing the migration into the cities. That migration is unsustainable if China has to slow its debt expansion (which it does).
It takes extraordinary perpetual economic expansion to provide enough jobs for all of those people and pay for the infrastructure demands. China's financial reserves haven't kept pace with either their debt or GDP growth, with about 3/4 of those reserves untouchable. Their ability to continue to finance the wild debts that have gone with the local government & infrastructure splurges, is heavily restricted now (if cities like Shanghai or Beijing want to add millions of more people, it'd require continuing to fund all of that while the overall context gets more shaky).
It's simple. The rest 40M+ ppl in the city are "illegal immigrants". Which means no permanent residency, no health care, no education but only cheap labor.
Beijing is a province in itself with a lot of countryside and satellite cities (chanping, miyun, etc...). It would be weird to include nearby surrounding hebei.
Perhaps they meant Beijing and Tianjin combined + Langfang and Zhangjiakou? That could be around 40 million. Jingjinji (Tiānjīn, Beijing, Hebei) is around 130 million, but that includes all of hebei.
The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions like this. This is very common in SE Asia as well if you look at cities like Manila, Jakarta, etc. It's a tried and failed approach to have "open migration" policies in developing countries and have labor conditions race to the bottom.
To a lesser extend, Beijing + Shanghai has this problem as well. I was in BJ 7 years ago (so my experience may be outdated), but there are parts of the old city that still has Hutongs, which are slum like buildings that have largely been vacated but migrant workers have "illegally" occupied. (I put "illegal" in quotes because human beings aspiring for shelter shouldn't be illegal, anyways, off point)
The root of the problem is migrant workers moving into cities for slave-like labor and are commonly exploited by local residents and employers. They're offered "jobs" that are way below the legal minimum wage and are often paid under the table. They can't say no because their employers have power over them (threat to report to police, etc). In many sense, "illegal" migrant workers are not that different from "illegal" immigrants.
In order to raise the living standards of an entire area, you have to enforce issues like safe labor practice, minimum wage, vacation days, etc. Without heavy hand regulation in a developing countries, these things don't magically come at the kindness of employers. They must be forced. The developed countries all went through this stage much earlier this century (think back on all the activists who died pushing for labor rights in U.S. in early 1900s). When you have a massive population of people who are in dire situations and who don't have anywhere to turn, it's difficult to force employers to raise working standards.
It's a difficult issue. On one hand, it's pretty heavy handed and inhuman to tell a migrant worker they're not allowed to live in a city that's part of their own damn country. On the other hand, we don't want cities to race to the bottom with unsanitary and slum like conditions. What's the balance? I've no idea, but I'm glad Shanghai at least understands this is a problem instead of copying other Asian cities that have failed at this
Fact that Shazam is 18-years-old made me curious, and found the following on Wikipedia:
>> “Initially, in 2002, the service was launched only in the UK and was known as "2580", as the number was the shortcode that customers dialled from their mobile phone to get music recognised. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds. A result was then sent to the user in the form of a text message containing the song title and artist name.”
I remember the first time I Shazamed a song. It was during the flip phone era and it was honestly the most magical thing to me at time. I had always wanted something like this, and here it was at my fingertips.
Around 2000, MIT had a number you could dial (toll-free) and ask a computer about the weather. It would keep track of where and when you were talking about during the conversation, so after asking "will it rain in Boston today" you could ask "how about Thursday" and then "how about Rochester, NY" and it would read you Thursday's forecast for Rochester. A very cool end-to-end demo of conversational tech.
According to Shazam Paper[1] (I can't find publication date), there were nothing fancy, just keypoints extraction on spectrogram. No deep learning with 100 layers or something like that which wouldn't be possible in 2000.
It's pretty obvious what GP meant. The concept of crowd-sourcing small chunks of work as a service is not the same thing as a hoax which involved a single person masquerading as an automaton. Amazon chose a clever name for its service that is memorable and references humans fronted by machines.
Ehh, I have seen references to using a person instead of an algorithm before Amazon released their service. Basically, if your automating human dexterity it's robotics, if your automating the brain it's AI. Sorting vegetables being a useful early example where humans could be thought of as a replaceable black box if you can break down what they are specifically doing. Thus Machine vision and classification where two common tasks because you need to play any game not simply replay a specific one.
The notion of a "mechanical turk" however, and of operations putting a facade on humans doing the work -- to which the parent alluded to ("a big mechanical turk sort of operation") and not specifically Amazon's variety , has been known and used for centuries.
Lol I just recalled that I applied for a job there in 2014 when they had a position open in San Diego. Gmail turned the email I sent with my resume. It always bummed me out that they never contacted me back.
2580 was also the middle digits of the keypad, making it even easier. I made heavy use of the service back in the day.
There was another service around the same time called Any Question Answered. This was before high quality internet on phones, and you could SMS them reasonably complicated questions and (at first) get good replies. Notable successes were their getting me ownership information for a pub, and telling me which local shops had an iPad in store. Service degraded significantly over time.
That's how you see it today. But back in the day people probably thought, wow, look how creatively they are using the incredible capabilities of modern phones.
Dice are not perfect cubes, since there edges and corners are rounded, so it would not make sense to generalize the results of dice as applying to perfect cubes.
Perhaps, but the salient characteristic of dice is that the sides are marked. When you talk about dice becoming ordered, there is a very strong implication that you mean the sequence of facing sides, not the packing factor. If we must be pedantic, then the phrase "rounded cubes"---or even "dice-shaped-cubes"---would be more accurate and relevant than "dice" (which aren't even invariably cubes, but are invariably marked).
This is to help make it easier to spot alterations or flaws which could affect their randomness; shaved corners become very easy to spot, when packing them together it's easy to spot ones with height differences, etc.
Tolerance you’re referencing relates to the distance of one side to another, not the shape of the corners; the dice you linked to have their corners rounded (aka shaved) if you look at the image.
Indeed. I think anyone who has done some work with a milling machine will know firsthand that a freshly cut 90 degree edge that has not yet been rounded over is sharp like a blade.
If casinos actually did use dice that were extremely cubic, the dice would be cutting patrons' fingers and wrecking the felted surface of the craps table.
I may have been wrong in my previous post. Apparently "razor" is one of several styles of dice edge and is intended to prevent excess tumbling, so a craps throw doesn't take too long to come to rest. I'm tempted to buy some new razor dice to see for myself.
I can't find measurements for the radius of curvature on razor dice edges, but I'd be surprised if they're truly as sharp as claimed. Without even considering the liability aspect, it seems inconvenient for a casino to pause the game because someone is bleeding on the table or dice.
I also wasn't able to learn how often the felt of a craps table is changed, though I came across something that said the felt's useful lifetime is prolonged by a foam rubber underlayer.
That's a really deep statement about the nature of existence. A mathematical theorem exists, even if the underlying structure is not represented in reality. We know that spacetime is warped by mass distribution, and is therefore non-Euclidean. However, the Pythagorean theorem is still something that exists, despite applying only to Euclidean space.
In the same way, a Platonic solid could be said to exist, even if it isn't represented in reality.
Beyond that, are you aware of any related notable research, sources, etc. - on the topic you’ve presented for additional reading or action.