Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams.
Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption.
Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers.
That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.
Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate?
Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?
Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.
Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.
I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.
I do reside (a lot of the time), in GuangZhou, and whilst there is certainly people who are like that, I know a lot who aren't. (Much like any other country).
So I have a counter proof that your generalisation is too broad, hence why I asked for you to clarify.
My take is, (having travelled a fair amount within china). That China is very different depending on which region you are in (much like the US is). So alarm bells ring, when I see people making broad statements such as "Chinese are all corrupt".
You are essentially saying that some weird twist of the CCP causes corruption in the society, else how do you explain Taiwan, and HK? Is that what you are meaning to say? That is an interesting thesis.
You've read the linked article, wherein readers are informed that more than two thousand people (not a tiny number given that only 800 students were sitting for the exam at the school in question -- so think parents and family members) rioted outside an examinations hall demanding that children be allowed to cheat on a test and the local government's response was to agree that enforcement of anti-cheating measures had been too strict.
Are you going to ask me to Google up images of thousands of dead pigs clogging a major river after being dumped there by farmers? Photos of walls of buildings damaged during the 2013 Sichuan earthquake showing that they contain quite a lot of styrofoam beneath a thin layer of cement? Reports of intentional (rather than accidental) food contamination and tampering? The gutter oil rackets -- one of which was busted operating in HK late in 2012? You can find all of that information for yourself.
As for HK, off the top of my head, besides the gutter oil operation there (similar to some of those in the PRC proper) ... Both CE candidates had illegal structures in/on their homes but one managed to squeak through the Beijing-run coronation process before his was discovered, the development secretary resigned last year as a result of a corruption investigation, the head of the city's urban renewal authority resigned recently after being targeted for investigation, the head of security at the airport (a former high-ranking police officer) is being investigated for corruption, etc.
How could you really have lived in Guangzhou for any significant length of time and be so in the dark?
You seem to believe this kind of corruption doesn't exist elsewhere in the world, and that P.R China is somehow unique in it's corruption. I don't agree with this. I'd say the recent wealth in china means you have very rich, and very poor very close to each other and thus corruption is more visible. But the "chinese" are not any different to any other people. Spend some time in India, there is just as much corruption there (if not more?). Spend some time in the U.S discover how corrupt they are... it's no different the world over, just the visibility changes
All those cases you raise, are indeed bad, but are you saying they are the majority?
The cheating example isn't a show of corruption, it's a show of fairness. If this generation of students sitting the gaokou are all cheating, forcing a tiny subset of them to not be allowed to cheat, is disadvantaging. You seem to understand china fairly well, if it were my child, I'd be angry (even if they weren't cheating), as it is clearly setting that group at a disadvantage. Perhaps if the government did it either ubiquitously or (probably better) at random each year, then the issue of cheating would go away. But to "trial" it in one area, is wrong.
> How could you really have lived in Guangzhou for any significant length of time and be so in the dark?
Perhaps I am just more optimistic about where things are at.
If you had been made aware, in advance, that there was a fine, then sure, you should be fined for being tardy.
Are you pattern-matching on "VC", "lateness", "fine", and your own negative feelings regarding having been late to a VC meeting?
Your reaction to this story (VC firm trying to show that it values potential investment targets' time) is like someone worrying that, since a pizzeria has a policy of not charging customers for a pizza if it's delivered late, you're going to have to provide the delivery person with a free sandwich if you don't get to the door quickly enough after he rings the bell.
The idea that it's all about the monetary penalty to get the "right" behavior is not just the wrong incentive, as the research shows, but also reinforcing negative stereotypes of VCs.
I don't think you really understood the research. The research was talking about the difference between social and market norms, not directly about what is the appropriate cost for lateness.
It was social norms that kept the parents picking up the kids on time consistently. Adding a small cost switched the parents from social norms mode to market norms mode. Instead of the parents thinking "oh no, I better hurry now, because it's wrong to be late" as was the case when lateness was free, it became a "is it worth $3 to be 10 minutes late?" calculation.
Replacing social norms with a poorly chosen market rate is dangerous and can potentially backfire. Essentially, there is a discontinuity in people's behavior between a cost of $0, where you benefit from social norms, and a cost of epsilon, where the social norms go out the window. If you actually charge people the cost they are inflicting on you for lateness, then it's again a different story.
Correct, so we would be replacing "let's be on time for meetings with our business partners because we respect them" social norms, with "is it worth $50 to be 5 minutes late for this meeting with a company we invested in?" for ... a venture capitalist. People who have, er, lots of money. That's why they're in the room.
I'm not clear what you thought I misunderstood here.
People tend to be polite, especially when it comes to expressing thanks for a gift.
One way to gauge the recipients' true enthusiasm would be to look at how many of them have followed your lead.
If you've been doing this for three years, how many home-made gifts did you receive in return in the second and third years? If you're counting this as the third year, how many such gifts did you receive last year?
My wife and I have been doing it for several years now, and over that time we've been getting increasingly many home-made gifts from people who know how to make things.
But I don't really expect the majority to follow suit, because most the people I know simply don't know how to make things. To them canning is a black art, and a batch of toffee involves hours in front of the stove and only comes out successfully a third of the time. Ironically, many members of this cross-section of my family have actually ramped up their gifts to us in an apparent attempt to "keep up."
I'm not sure it would really be so great if all of them followed suit, anyway. The end result would just be that everyone ends up with twelve pounds of baked goods and confections to decide between eating (gluttonous) and throwing away (wasteful). We only do it because we know we can't convince everyone to cut us out of their gift-giving list entirely. Giving homemade food and baked goods is just a way to accomplish the mandatory reciprocation in a way that makes us feel a bit more comfortable with the whole affair. What I really do want is for the gift-giving tradition to go away, or at least be scaled way back. Wasteful overconsumption might involve more or less wasteful materials, but less wasteful is still a far cry from not wasteful.
Instead of discouraging people from showing their care/regard for you (which, with a generous helping of social obligation, is what gift-giving is about), why not try to find ways to help gift givers give useful/desirable gifts?
Children have wishlists (adults too nowadays -- e.g. Amazon), people 'register' for weddings, etc.
I've no desire to discourage people from showing their care or regard for me. But I would strongly for them to do it directly, by engaging in activites that center on care and regard for each other. Spending time together, perhaps.
Material goods are a poor proxy for that in my case, because they have the effect of actually reducing my quality of life. I've already got a cluttered house and more possessions than I know what to do with. It's actually pretty hard for me to think of objects that I genuinely want - so hard that when people give me gift cards, they generally go unused. I've got more than enough stuff, I'm actively working on having less stuff, and so I'd rather let it go to waste than acquire an object I don't want and will just go unused until I eventually discard it during the next round of decluttering.
So in any case I feel bad - either because of guilt over not appreciating an object that I simply can't because it brings me negative utility, or guilt over the money or effort people put into trying to give me an object that brings me negative utility, or for actively involving myself in the acquisition of an object that brings me negative utility, or for the sense of being wasteful that comes with the inevitable disposal of an object that brings me negative utility. And I would greatly prefer for people to show they care in a way that doesn't make me feel bad. I just wish I could understand why in this one situation I'm generally considered to be a bad person for wanting my loved ones to not make me feel bad. Isn't it supposed to be a time of year when we're supposed to gather together and try to make each other feel good?
Sadly the ritual just isn't really structured in a way that makes it workable for folks like us. The material gifts are inextricably placed at the core of the social construct, to the extent that there's really no way to extract them for the sake of respecting the feelings someone who doesn't desire a material gift. So inextricably that we can't just not give an object to someone who would rather not take part in the exchange of objects because we care about them and understand that would make them happier. Instead we have to make them out to be some sort of Scrooge.
Actually, no. If you give someone a delicious homemade chutney and that inspires them, they could gift you the following year with a marmalade or cherry confit or something else.
Your reply suggests that you may be giving homemade gifts and getting retail-purchased gifts in return.
I actually agree with what you're doing but doubt that many recipients truly appreciate your gifts, which are likely pretty neat.
It has a "privacy button" that stops it from taking photos for a few minutes and records other information along with the images (like temperature, for example). Also, all of the images and data are stored locally on the device.
Another lifelogging camera, with better specs, about to hit the market (Nov 2012 according to the register/buy page) is Autographer, from the Oxford Metrics Group:
The main reason Stallman isn't mainstream is not his physical appearance, but his refusal to compromise with potential allies on even minor details. Not to mention a truckload of NIH on the part of the FSF, although you could argue this is another side of the same coin.
If I look at the sky and it's blue and I tell you that it's blue but you're convinced that it's yellow, should I compromise and agree henceforth to tell people that the sky is green or some shade of yellow?
If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.
(I used to think this didn't matter, either. Turns out that I'm far more pleasant to be around if I don't have a beard. So I haven't had one in 20 years).
Welcome to the world of effective interpersonal interaction. We're primates, get used to it :-)
No. Well dressed and much more groomed people has warned about obvious threat in similar areas, and has also been equally ignored.
Its the problem of the frog and the slowly heating pot. The changes a just slow enough that one can get used to the abuse. It will get worse. There is a ton of stuff companies could be doing to increase revenue by abusing their customers. When companies can view sold units as "theirs" to control, there is little limit.
Car manufacturers really are the next area where I expect to see some heavy changes really soon. Insurance companies really want data, and the manufactures can easy supply it like how fast someone drives, and where they go. In Sweden, this already almost happen in the form of an "voluntary" app. Driving in privacy mode will soon include a heavty cost depending on which insurance company you buy from. On the monopolistic side, there is nothing really stopping car manufacturers to put DRM into the gas tank, so to only "approved" gas sellers (those that pay the car manufacture) that has the right to sell gas. DRM is already in place for parts, so its not that a big step.
The U.S. has pretty decent laws surrounding car parts. The manufacturers are adding custom data to their vehicles, but the whole right to repair battle was already fought back in the 90s, the independents won (with odb ii coming out of it).
The article heralds soy as having an uber-low glycemic index ... but doesn't note that soy appears to function as an endocrine disruptor in humans, something of concern for everyone but especially for children/infants.
Indeed. AFAICT from the linked post, there's no proof (e.g. visual sighting of a whale at any of the locations from which the sounds have emanated) that the source of the sounds is even a whale at all.
Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption.
Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers.
That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.