Links
3 stars
Inside North Korea’s Forced-Labor Program | New Yorker
Workers sent from the country to Chinese factories describe enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be “killed without a trace.” […]
In all, I identified fifteen seafood-processing plants that together seem to have used more than a thousand North Korean workers since 2017. China officially denies that North Korean laborers are in the country. But their presence is an open secret. “They are easy to distinguish,” a Dandong native wrote in a comment on Bilibili, a video-sharing site. “They all wear uniform clothes, have a leader, and follow orders.” Often, footage of the workers ends up online. In a video from a plant called Dandong Yuanyi Refined Seafoods, a dozen women perform a synchronized dance in front of a mural commemorating Youth Day, a North Korean holiday. The video features a North Korean flag emoji and the caption “Beautiful little women from North Korea in Donggang’s cold-storage facility.” (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Remco Breuker, a North Korea specialist at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, told me, “Hundreds of thousands of North Korean workers have for decades slaved away in China and elsewhere, enriching their leader and his party while facing unconscionable abuse.”
How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"? | Astral Codex Ten
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.
I thought about this while reading A Professor Claimed To Be Native American; Did She Know She Wasn’t? […]
I find this really weird!
Elizabeth Hoover had some specific level of "lived experience" of growing up Native American. She seems to have believed she was Native up until her twenties. She went to pow-wows. She grew up with Native friends, and married a Native man.
Under the consensus definition, this life history should either be enough "lived experience" to count as a Native American, or not. And it seems from the article that - back when they thought she had a Mi'kmaq great-grandmother - everyone agreed her lived experience was enough to count as Native. Nobody said she didn't go to enough pow-wows as a kid, or have enough Native friends, or that if she wasn't born on a reservation it didn't count. They accepted her as a legitimate group member who had returned to the fold.
So why does it matter that, in fact, her great-grandmother had no Mi'kmaq blood?
2 stars
arranging love | the smart set
Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would live among his relatives. A traditional arranged marriage. But he had married my mother because they had “fallen in love.” Why was he telling me this? I remember feeling so sad and disappointed at his words. Had he been regretting his marriage all those years?
In India, in those days and even now, almost all marriages are arranged. Parents select potential mates for their children, taking great care to find someone from within their religious, socioeconomic, and cultural circles, so that there will be little cause for disharmony. Growing up in India, I remember always telling my friends with some pride that my parents instead had a “Love Marriage,” sickeningly enthusiastic that this would put all their parents’ “Arranged Marriages” to shame. All through my teenage years and beyond, I was fascinated by this idea of the love marriage. Seeing someone across a room, maybe even falling in love at first sight. And that is what my parents had done. They became smitten with each other in their College faculty room. And now he was telling me that perhaps he should have had an arranged marriage after all.
I sat with his words. I tried the instant replay button on my middle-aged memory, trying to recall everything my mother had told me about their initial meeting, their courtship, their marriage. I wanted to understand why he said those words to me. And perhaps I would better understand why I fell so easily, instantly, in love with a man named Jeff Sugar.
New technologies, new totalitarians | Noahpinion
People argue all the time about whether China wants to rule the world. But it’s already pretty clear that it wants to rule all the ethnically Chinese people in the world.
That’s something new in the history of totalitarianism. No other empire has made a serious attempt to be the global ruler of all the individuals of one particular race. Hitler would have certainly liked to do this — he certainly tried to get ethnic Germans on his side when he took over neighboring countries — but he lacked the technology and the global economic reach to bend German Americans to his will, so he didn’t even try. Russia tries to harass or even assassinate people who protest against it in foreign lands, but its lack of economic heft and its lower technology level mean that it doesn’t have nearly the reach that China does.
Once again, new technology is the great enabler. It’s through social media and smartphone apps that China can keep track of ethnic Chinese people who criticize the CCP (or who might criticize it someday), no matter where they are in the world. Because of social media and smartphones, dissidents and their descendants can’t just move to a new country and disappear anymore; the world has shrunk, and the Old Country knows where they live.
This is what happens when a wind farm comes to a coal town | NPR
Sheila Wagoner is not a fan of the wind farm overlooking Keyser, West Virginia.
"I really don't care for those windmills," the 71-year-old says. "I guess I wasn't brought up with that kind of society. Like 50 of 'em together? Who likes all that?"
It's not just the visual contrast that Wagoner finds bothersome. She is from one of many families in Keyser — and throughout West Virginia — that relied on the coal industry for generations. Her late father worked as a railway engineer for coal trains that used to run non-stop through Keyser.
Today, those trains are an increasingly rare sight.
Google abandoned "don't be evil" — and Gemini is the result | Silver Bulletin
But times have changed. In Google’s 2023 Annual Report, the terms “unbiased”, “objective” and “accurate” did not appear even once. Nor did the “Don’t Be Evil” motto — it has largely been retired. Google is no longer promising these things — and as Gemini demonstrates, it’s no longer delivering them.
The problems with Gemini aren’t quite the “alignment problems” that AI researchers usually talk about, which concern the extent to which the machines will facilitate human interests rather than pursuing their own goals. Nonetheless, companies and governments exploiting public trust and manipulating AI results to fulfill political objectives is a potentially dystopian scenario in its own right. Google is a $1.7-trillion-market-cap company that has an exceptional amount of influence over our everyday lives, as well as knowledge about the most intimate details of our private behaviors. If it can release a product that’s this misaligned with what its users want — or even what’s good for its shareholders — we are potentially ceding a lot of power to the whims of a small handful of AI engineers and corporate executives. This is something that people across the political spectrum should be concerned about. In Gemini’s case, the biases might run toward being too progressive and “woke”. But there are also many conservative elements in Silicon Valley, and governments like China are in on the AI game, so that won’t necessarily be the case next time around.
Why South Korean women aren't having babies | BBC
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Yejin is cooking lunch for her friends at her apartment, where she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, happily single.
While they eat, one of them pulls up a well-worn meme of a cartoon dinosaur on her phone. "Be careful," the dinosaur says. "Don't let yourself become extinct like us."
The women all laugh.
"It's funny, but it's dark, because we know we could be causing our own extinction," says Yejin, a 30-year-old television producer.
Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year.
Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72.
This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1.
If this trend continues, Korea's population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.
600 Million Hearts of Stone | The Radicalist
If India is anything, it is grand. It is not a place you can visit for a few days or even a few months and come away hoping to understand it. I spent years there and still would not claim to have grasped its wonders. But I did fall madly in love. I have always believed that if you leave a country hating the place, the problem most likely lies with you. In any event, homelessness in Mumbai was not my only negative experience in the country, and reflecting on this, perhaps one of my greatest grievances with my beloved, adopted Mother India is the plight of women in that land.
My grandmother Millie didn’t use the word itself, but she was the first feminist I ever knew. She instilled in me a fiery outrage for the way women are often treated in this world. She herself was a victim of horrific physical and sexual abuse, including at the hands of her own husband, my biological grandfather, whom I have never met because she beat him back one night, packed her things, and took her five children with her. She later married an Italian man named Anthony, or Tony, and he was the only grandpa I ever knew on that side of the family. And that was just fine by me.
Thanks to Millie, if you were to browse my journalistic career, you would notice that the issue of women’s rights is a constant theme. I never go to a country without wondering what life is like for the women who live there. Often I speak to them and if I can, I befriend them and hope they will share with me their stories.
And this brings us to India. […]
This post exploded and in less than 24 hours has received 37 million views. Indian women writers, journalists, and activists shared their own stories. Indian men shared how they do not let their sisters or friends walk alone at night or how they recommend their foreign friends to travel in groups. Foreign women who have been to India shared how they were groped within minutes of landing in the country. Or how they were almost kidnapped. Or worse.
But not everyone appreciated my having raised the issue.
Why Do East Asian Firms Value Drinking? | The Great Gender Divergence
Collective harmony and hierarchy are strongly idealised across East Asia. Communication is thus implicit and indirect. Conflict aversion and emotional suppression make it harder to learn what someone else really thinks. So what’s the solution?
Alcohol reduces people’s inhibitions. This promotes social bonding and information-sharing. As argued in Edward Slingerland’s book “Drunk”, it benefits businesses! But this exact same cognitive shift also elevates risks of sexual abuse. Women may prefer to leave early. By doing so, they miss out on homosocial boozing and schmoozing.
1 star
OpenAI and Elon Musk | OpenAI
More fun than anything else; includes screenshots of e-mails from Elon rather undermining his recent lawsuit:
The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits. We are now sharing what we've learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.
Hex Marks the Spot | Museum of Play
A board game begins with the board. But how is that board divided up? Often the simplest unit of division is a square. Consider the 64 squares of a chess board, or the 92 squares on a Stratego board. In each case, players take control of a square which exists in relation to other spaces around it, especially if they share adjoining borders. The design of these game boards affords or encourages certain types of movement, usually horizontally or vertically (in four directions) or in some cases diagonally in eight directions (as with the bishop in chess).
And yet there exists a problem with this sort of layout in any game that allows freedom of movement, because the connection between these squares is uneven. Although squares share a long border horizontally and vertically, they do not share such a border on the diagonal connections. In a game like chess, where you physically pick up a piece to move it, this is not much of an issue. But as simulation board games began to develop after World War II, this proved more problematic. Many of these games involved sliding pieces (or cardboard tiles that were frustrating to pick up) from square to square, like army units occupying territory. For these situations, hexagonal spaces that provided equal movement in six directions, produced a better solution.
What can be learned from Singaporean health care institutions? | Marginal Revolution
Besides the usual, that is. Max Thilo of the UK has a new and excellent study on this, here is one excerpt from the foreword by Lord Warner:
Second, and critical, the Singaporeans are not fixated on delivering services from acute hospitals – the most expensive part of any healthcare system because of its fixed overheads and expensive maintenance. As this report demonstrates “the reason why Singapore spends so much less on health than other developed countries is its low hospital utilisation.” Instead, Singapore has invested in highly productive polyclinics and low-cost telemedicine. The result is that Singaporeans can visit their GP more often than English patients. In their polyclinics they also improve productivity by separating chronic and acute care.
Fin Moorhouse [Twitter]
Unexpected (and some commenters dissent):
A puzzle:
Imagine you begin a journey in Seattle WA, facing exactly due east. Then start traveling forward, in a straight line along the Earth's surface.
You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country.
What is the first country you hit?