buxiebuxing

福布斯杂志唱衰中国经济：www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1228/economy-ponzi-debt-peking-china-bubble.html
有点像Gordon Chang 在2001年的说法。我呢，肯定不够清楚了，看Victor Shih和Michael Pettis已经看了一段时间了，使得我也觉得中国的泡沫迹象蛮厉害，但是，有泡沫，一定要破裂吗？说不定可以继续10年，而十年后谁也说不清会发生什么事。所以我不敢预测中国什么时候会发生经济危机，但是媒体往往喜欢把经济危机与政治危机联在一块，这个想法我要考虑一下。
其实，到现在为止，中国普通人的收入还没有达到什么客观的水平，所以经济放缓的话，不是说富有的人要变穷，而是说，没有更多的岗位，农民进城没事干。这种局面会导致政治上的动荡吗？难以想象，因为就算社会不稳定，有骚乱现象，还有谁能代替共产党呢？而且，经济手段还是有的，可以通过农产品价格的改革上调让农民留在农村，虽然城镇人口还是得应付，农村人口大概可以搞稳定了，避免进程的人潮，所以城乡秩序可以把握。对党来说，危险的不是人家没钱，而是人家有钱有闲开始质疑你党的政权。

So, Cormac McCarthy gets rave reviews, and for The Road no less than his westerns. Alan Warner, a novelist I enjoy very much, loves it. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4 But I just read it, and I found it unsatisfying.

First, the good: clearly McCarthy can write. His vocabulary is enormous and inventively applied; when he pares down, you feel it. Plus, he does generate some sympathy for his characters. I was drawn in to the man's life, and I did enjoy his love for the boy.

But there are so many problems. First, the lack of names. It's a McCarthy standard, and in other books I can accept that it might work to create an everyman. But here the father is not just an everyman, he is the allman, the totality of humanity. The other "people" in the book are almost all monsters, or rendered inhuman in some other way. But as I didn't believe the mythos, the lack of name simply became irritating after a while. When at the end, the father dies, and the son "knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again." This just calls attention to the literary trope of namelessness. McCarthy seems to have forgotten that the universal is found in the specific: giving the man more of a name and an identity would make him more representative of humanity as a whole, not less.

Second, the setting. Literary critics seem to find the post-apocalyptic setting very exciting, but to SF readers it's kind of old hat. So I'm looking for somthing interesting in it. McCarthy chooses not to detail what the apocalypse was, but that's OK. My question is: how did the apocalypse kill every living thing on the planet, without killing all the humans? Apparently all the birds, fish and mammals are gone, and the plants are no longer fruitful. The trees seem to be dead. What about the bacteria? And how did those people survive?
Next, given that people have survived, why has society disintegrated so totally? What is McCarthy trying to say when he posits that 12 years after the apocalypse, the survivors are almost without exception cannibal rapists? Women seem to be being farmed for infant flesh. Why would that happen? I don't get how you can expect to be taken seriously if you can't explain what's going on in people's heads, and McCarthy completely fails to do that. He just posits a zombie horde. Fine - but if you're going to have a zombie horde, have a zombie horde. Don't pretend that those are real people.

And finally, the characters. As I've said, they do draw you in through the writing, and their love is well drawn. But McCarthy gives us so little of either of them. My favourite part of the book is when finally the boy shows some development. After a hard moral choice, the boy is crying:
"The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didnt answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.""
But this is the only line in the book where we're allowed close to them. The man has memories of childhood, but they are so abstract that we can't invest in them. The boy plays with a toy truck, but we're not allowed to see how he plays.

Two comparisons that come up in many reviews are Lord of the Flies and Samuel Beckett. Both of these point up the deficiencies in McCarthy's book. In Lord of the Flies, Golding takes great care to lay out every step of the path into savagery. It's a work of psychology and political insight. There's none of that in The Road. McCarthy creates a zombie holocaust, doesn't care to tell us how it happened. For me, a reader in China, this is particularly frustrating. Just 50 years ago, in the great famine of the Great Leap Forward, China experienced relatively widespread cannibalism. I would love to read a book, fiction or nonfiction, which tackled that subject. But The Road doesn't tackle it. It merely presents horrific scenes that I feel I've seen before - is the cannibal harvest of The Road much different to the implanting of eggs in Aliens? Or the twisted family of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yet both those films used the eating of humans to much greater effect.

Beckett often does dump characters in bizarre, unexplained contexts; but then he has his characters react to their situation, and to each other, with the full range of human emotion. Beckett's characters are funny, pathetic, brave, pedantic, inspired, confused... rounded. McCarthy's man and boy are ciphers. They love; they fear; but they don't seem to play, get bored, get frustrated, revel, plan, wonder, offend, or take action. Throughout the book, the characters are very much passive victims of fortune, just doing what necessity dictates. This would be fine if they were just the tools through which the author explored an interesting world. But the world of The Road is not interesting, nor is McCarthy interested in it.

The Road felt to me more like an experiment than a novel. McCarthy seemed to be saying, how much can I take out of the novel, and still succeed? Take away names, character, background, hope; take away complex plot; take away motivation; take away women. Take away punctuation. Leave two emotions (despair and love) and beautiful writing, and have you still got a novel? The answer is yes, The Road is a novel. And many people seem to think it's a good one. But I can't read it without feeling that these formal experiments have been done before, and that in this day and age, we want more from our novelists, not less.

1) They are often asked as intuitive questions, but they're not intuitive at all.
2) They look like utilitarianism tests, but they're not.
3) They involve artificially restricted choices.
4) They involve perfect knowledge of the future.

What I think I'm trying to say is, they're made to look simple, though they're not; but the complexity they bring in is a kind of unreal faux-complexity, with none of the features that make real world decisions so hard: uncertainty about future outcomes, uncertainty about motives, they capacity to think and rethink ones choices, etc. etc.

人工智能，每几年一次有一波热风，最近又一次有几个人再说，我们很快就能够产生人工智能。至于这点我要表示两个看法。
第一个是，人工智能不是什么？
人工智能不应该是解题技巧。很多人还是把象棋电脑当作人工智能的基础，但我不同意。其实，下棋的电脑没有智能。它只是一种懂得解题的系统，在下棋过程它没有真正的下一盘，而是一个接一个的解决象棋考题。

Really interesting paper treating ideas as products to be traded - but smart enough to admit the other human factors that go into the creation and exchange of ideas.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm
What I really like is that they recognise that science is a successful system of production and exchange of knowledge. They are interested in the idea that a market system might have some virtues, but they're not out to claim that the free model of science is wrong. There is a limited comparison drawn with the very monetized/commercialized market in patents.

They also note the problem of buying ideas:
"One of the distinctive properties of information is that potential buyers may not be able to anticipate precisely how they might use a particular idea or new technology once it is acquired. Consequently, buyers may be extremely averse to negotiating contracts (particularly contracts in which they are in an informational disadvantaged position)..."

By definition, you don't know what you're getting.

My Dad sent me his old economics textbook from the 1960s. It's by a guy called Boulding. Here's how he derives the supply curve.

"...suppose we consider the situation of a single wheat merchant... He has in his possession, or at his command, a certain sum of money - let us say $10,000. The problem is how much wheat he will sell (i.e. turn into money) or how much he will buy (i.e., how much money will he turn into wheat)? Now a number of things may affect his decisions as to how much wheat to buy and sell. The weather, the crop reports, even his own state of health... At very high prices he would probably be willing to sell a large quantity; at lower prices he would probably wish to sell less; at a still lower price he would probably wish neither to buy nor to sell, being satisfied with his present stock; at yet lower prices he would be willing to buy..."
Emphases in bold are mine.

What does this sound like? Stock trading. Probably wheat futures trading as well, I don't know. What does it not sound anything like? Modern production of consumer goods. When would a shoe maker (like Nike, say) be satisfied with its stock? To Nike, the shoes have zero value. Nike makes them for the express purpose of selling; if they don't sell, the company fails. And as for "willing to buy" - did you ever hear of a biscuit maker buying biscuits back from consumers because prices were low? This doesn't happen.

What the man's describing here is a traders market. A little market inside the larger economy where people with no interest in goods congregate to exchange them in order to achieve greater efficiency. When I say "no interest in goods", I mean that the wheat trader's X thousand tonnes of wheat are of no use to him personally. They are only a repository of value. And in the example here, the trader is selling to others like him. No-one in the model wants this wheat. Some people in the model are connected to consumers who do want to actually bake/eat the wheat, with varying degrees of desire, and these demands, external to the market, affect how traders act in the market. But to the traders themselves, the wheat is nothing more than a tool.

The consumer market (70% of the US economy) is not like that. In the consumer market, one side of the equation actually wants to consume the product. They're not interested in holding stocks of it. The other side, the producers/vendors, have grown up specifically to service that consumer market. They are also not interested in holding stocks.

Perhaps many goods just aren't scarce?

In an economy like the USA, there is no lack of food, clothing or colour TVs, to take three examples. You can argue that demand for these things might be unlimited (because they can all be used as stored value - a form of money), but in terms of consumption, the USA is pretty saturated. Hence there's very little malnutrition, lots of obesity. Hence the necessity for the fashion industry to sell more/more expensive clothes. Hence the development of ever-more-useless adjustments to TVs (who the fuck needs a high-definition 50-inch TV?). The USA wouldn't consume more basic foodstuffs, basic clothing or basic TVs even if it could.

Here's a little example on scarcity from that renowned expert Wikipedia.
"With nearly all goods, a trade-off occurs when decisions are made about production. The graph shows the economic anomaly that occurs with artificially scarce products. Because leather boots consume resources, a trade-off is noticed between running shoes and boots; i.e. in order to produce more boots one has to produce fewer running shoes because of limited resources."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

This is just gibber. In the USA, there is no such trade off. If you want to produce more boots, you produce more boots. You could argue that this is because of externalities - the USA imports more boot materials, meaning causing scarcity in other countries. But I'm not convinced that's true. The world is very good at making shoes these days. Plus, the nation state is a very common unit of economic analysis. If you're saying that we have to consider the entire global economy in every calculation now, then it's just going to be too hard.

Now, by this analysis, there's probably relatively few things that are genuinely scarce. Diamonds, maybe, but they're just repositories of value. Maybe land; I don't think housing is scarce.

Not sure what implications this has yet...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/15/work-mothers-gender-motherhood

工作妈妈怎么让那么多人大惊小怪？工作妈妈这话题像化脓的疮口，因为痒一直抓，因为抓一直不会好。就这两周来，有两个工作妈妈提笔诉苦，在报纸里描绘自己的痛苦和作妈妈与作雇主或者员工的冲突。两个妈妈的故事和两难处竟写得令人同情，引起数百的人根贴，甚至成为头条新闻。

但照理，现在并不是该悲叹的时候，反而是妈妈的喜庆时代。我是十四年前生第一个孩子的，那时候以来的社会变化非常了不起。我刚进入社会时，很少有三十岁以上的女人做白领，而且做白领的一般没有小孩。生老大之后，没过16周我就回来上班了，而现在的女人可以休息一年，回来了也可以兼职或者轮班工作。因为这一系列变革，新一代的母亲可以享受各种各样的工作机会，同时也可以陪伴孩子的成长过程。尽管众多媒体爱唱反调，现在的女人的确能双得。

怎么有这么好的结果呢？我有时候想起90年代的讨论英国产假问题的记者会，当时英国是整个欧洲的落后的产假政策。保守党完全不懂老百姓的需求，工党刚上任时也犹豫不决。Harriet Harman （工党副主席）率先主张产假政策改革，而2003年，在Patricia Hewitt （当时英国工业贸易大臣）的主导下，政府规定要求灵活工时的员工权利。一年内，已经有将近一百万个女人实行了这个新权利。从此，兼职工作人数越来越多。

上述改革为什么重要呢？因为它代表30年来最突出的社会发展——母亲们纷纷就业，已经深入人心。工业化的社会模式包括男女分工：男人上班，女人管家。这个旧的工业化模式对谁都没有好处，大概从来一直都是错误的。工党的主要政绩之一正是让社会顺利接受共同工作共同养子的新模式，重视女人生子的社会贡献。当然，工党应该坚持进一步推动社会发展，但它已经成功地形成连保守党都认同的新共识，甚至保守党提出两个家长共享的产假等新措施。还有很长的路要走。

那为什么一直有人唱反调？Alexandra Shulman 写了一篇有耐人寻味的文章www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1226157/Vogue-editor-Alexandra-Shulman-asks-boss-hire-woman.html，说她担心女权革命已经过头了，重复 Alan Sugar 的说法www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/apr/23/worklifebalance.discriminationatwork，既女人现在有权要求产假、兼职工作等导致公司受不了，开始不愿意召聘女人。也不是Shulman 一个人，别人提出了相同意见，说特别是在经济低迷的时候，给工作妈妈这么多权利成本太高。

之前，类似的说法也有。流水线的工作人员上厕所的权利曾经遭遇同样的反对。（人的生理需求好像不符合员工效率高的理想！）从更现实的角度来讲，90年代有非常多的研究证明了在产假后让女人恢复工作对公司有很大的好处，因为她有很有价值的工作经验，不用再次培养一个新手等等原因。我可以向你保证，这个问题已经研究透了，不必再提老谬论。欧而发生的大问题是有的，在任何制度下总有漏洞、不公平的问题。但设定一个国家的政策，不能看个案，要看整体。

Shulman 的文章中，有一句令人遗憾，她说配儿子玩的两天是「偷来的时间」，我想偷什么偷？谁偷谁的时间？但这篇文章的含义更是，在以男人为主的公共事务中，寻求自己的发展空间的女人往往被自疑困扰。

但我还没讲到点子。为什么我同事 Gaby Hinsliff 有关作妈妈与工作的冲突的文章 www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/01/gaby-hinsliff-quits-working-motherhood 登上报纸封面？文章很长，续文还在社论叶上，妈妈与小孩的照片很票量，但是这话题已经很不新鲜。一个妈妈发现“双得”不可，因而放弃工作事业（想一下，如果是另一个选择怎么样。。。）为什么我们那么爱看这样子的故事，这种母爱战胜一切的情节？

我提出两个答案，两个都涉及到我们的心理弱点。工作妈妈这话题动到人心深处的情感。每个人都珍惜妈妈对我们的无私无条件的爱，无论是自己的亲身经验还是一个借来的美梦。工业化的进程让妈妈变成「管家的天使」，她的角色是在无情无义的世界中建造一个有爱的安全港。妈妈该具备的美德正是市常经济所排除的耐心、温柔、爱心等等。如果女人也要去上班奋斗，谁能够扮演妈妈的角色？最近，护士要有学士学位同样触动神经，学了那么多护士们会不会变太理性，没有爱心了？

是一个美痤学者Sylvia Ann Hewlett 指出现代的工作要求
I offer two suggestions, and both are about our anxieties. This is a subject that prompts a visceral tug. We all cherish memories or dreams of unconditional self-sacrificial maternal love. Industrialisation idealised the mother as the "angel of the hearth" who was expected to create the "haven in a heartless world". She was required to show the qualities made redundant in a competitive market economy – to be patient, gentle and loving. But if women go out to work, who will be motherly? The coverage of nurses requiring degrees stirs the same anxiety: will they be "too clever to care"?
Very perceptively, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, a US academic, pointed out that the workplace encourages exactly the opposite skill set – exacting, controlling, task-oriented, goal-focused – to that needed in family life. Girls were once brought up to be mothers and homemakers, but no longer; we need the stories of motherhood as a profound, life-changing shock, telling us that all the emotional kit is still there buried under the career-orientated carapace.
My second suggestion is that we have a nagging anxiety that the social and cultural mechanisms to create a family and raise a secure child are disintegrating. There is no affirmation for the kind of self-sacrifice – at the cost to personal ambition and fulfilment – the long-term commitment and sense of duty required in family life. And since all this has been regarded as primarily a woman's responsibility – it was her job to maintain of all the relationships required in family life, whether it's the husband, child or elderly aunt – the focus zeros in on motherhood. The statistics are horrific: one in five of children are now born into a household with no father in the UK. Two out of three children will see their parents divorce, and half of those warring couples turn to the courts to resolve bitter legal wrangles. This is a disaster.
I wrote above that my generation of women now has it all. If that sounded smug, it is anything but; there are plenty of messy compromises along the way, whether of unfulfilled ambition or occasionally complaining children. And I also concede we defined "it" too narrowly. Stable families and lasting relationships badly need also to be part of the equation. Pressing on with the continued change of working patterns to share care could play a part in achieving that.
But take heart: the revolution in the expectations of what it is to be a mother and father rolls magnificently on. We are pulling down two centuries of stultifying gender identities. Every time I see a dad pushing a buggy, children hanging on to the handlebars, biscuit crumbs down his coat, pockets stuffed with toys, there is silent applause in my head. I never had fathering like that, I'm glad my children and many of their contemporaries do: the labour of nurture is too life-enhancing and transformational to be the reserve of women.

刚看完了超好看的法国电影
www.youku.com/playlist_show/id_3373157.html
电影里，一个法国老师向初三学生教一年的语文课，学生一般不听话，往往跟老师顶嘴，不作作业，写作和语言能力有限。很多场面都是老师在教课的过程中回答问题，解释法语语法，虽然听起来很无聊，但看电影时我迷住了，一看到头，比任何动作片更扣人心弦。

From the comments in CIF:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/12/rupert-murdoch-fox-obama

"It's impossible for Obama to be racist, because to be racist, you must have power over those people towards which you're racist, and Obama....oh, wait, he's the president of the US, isn't he? Well, never mind that."

Absolute genius.

奥巴马不可能种族主义者，因为种族主义者必定是占社会优势的，而奥巴马呢。。。啊，等等，他是美国总统吧？哦，当我没说吧！

I become more and more convinced that economists are bamboozled by their own use of the word "scarce". I asked my Dad about the supply curve, and he gave the answer I'd intuited: opportunity costs stop suppliers entering the market at any given price, so increase the price and you get more suppliers and more supply. But this doesn't seem to make any sense in a world of mechanized reproduction. There are literally zero opportunity costs to increasing the quantity of widgets or biscuits produced.

However, widgets and biscuits don't make up the entire economy, so I ought to think about some other categories. 1) housing - a rather unique kind of product because it's both product and investment. 2) services - personal services require extra human time, so there may be real opportunity costs involved in providing more of a particular service. 3) financial products - not sure how these work at all, so worth thinking through.

I thought about housing last night.

The traditional model says that increased demand leads to increased business volumes and increased price. I predict no increase in price.

Over the medium term, the traditional model seems to be right. Say a bunch of people move to an area, increasing the demand for housing. Houses can't be built immediately, so there is a relative shortage. People start to be willing to pay a premium for precedence in buying, so prices go up a bit. Prices going up means that more people are willing to sell, so trading volume increases. Textbook.

Now, my next step would be to say, under these circumstances, developers will build, and thus in the long term the price will return to its natural level. However, I haven't worked out the effects of investment-buying. One thing that should be discounted, I think, is the recent housing bubble. A bubble is a bubble is a bubble - it's not part of classical microeconomic theory, so I shouldn't get worried about how it fits in. But I don't know if there are other effects, which make housing work differently because it involves rational investment, aside from speculation.

So I guess I should think about financial products next, because they're pure investment.

What exactly is this optimal distribution that markets are supposed to approach?

There's something duplicitous about the phrase "scarce resources". In developed countries in the 21st century, resources aren't scarce. Calling them scarce resources makes it sound like the scarceness is a property of the resource. It's not. It's a property of the way we distribute resources.

One textbook calls the market equilibrium efficient, defined as "maximize the gains from trade". Which is to say, it's utilitarian. Across the population, the level of perceived value obtained by all parties is maximized by trade patterns at the market equilibrium.

What's the problem with this? 1) It doesn't produce a fair distribution. Markets could easily produce a system in which poor people got nothing (no food, for example). 2) Some goods, like justice, aren't divisible. 3) The actual value of some goods, like medical treatment, may be unrelated to the perceived good.

Two thoughts.

1) Medicine doesn't fit the market model because success in medicine is measured by indices other than consumer satisfaction. There's death rates, health outcomes, life expectancies, cure rates, etc., etc. Markets ensure that resources are directed toward those places where capital experiences the most demand for them. However, achieving low death rates, positive health outcomes, etc., requires that resources are directed towards those places where health circumstances demand them. Because of the lack of medical knowledge among all who are not doctors, there is no necessary equivalence between the demands of capital and the demands of health circumstances.

2) This led me to think about markets in general. The claim is that markets bring about the most efficient, or optimal, allocation of resources. Which is all very well, but what does efficient/optimal mean in this context? By what standard do we judge optimality?
One standard is that resources are used to their full extent - so companies don't buy equipment that then stands idle, for example. Market forces certainly can press companies towards this sort of optimality. But this is a production side/supply side optimality. With health care, we have a whole other set of standards on the demand side. And there are no market forces that press towards these kinds of optimality.

Just quickly: recent episode of Lie To Me. Faced with a friend from the past, the hero feels obliged to undertake a dangerous assignment.

So how does the past affect the present?

I can see how it might have an effect via various mediators. The principle of justice, for example, requires that we redress past wrongs, and maybe reward past rights. Human relationships are built up through past events, and affect our actions in the present.

But can the past have a direct effect?

It's hard to see how, because moral judgments must be made in the here-and-now. Everything we use in forming moral judgments must be filtered through our present set of moral concepts and interpreted. The past is the same: we interpret it, assign it moral significance, so it only enters our moral calculations through the mediator of concepts like justice, relationships, etc.

But there is one other way in which the past might affect current moral judgments, and that's to affect the way in which judgments are made. So, moral education would affect us. But the moral concepts of whole societies can also be affected. The Holocaust has left most western nations with a particular horror of racism, and with a very negative view of eugenics. Neither of these are easy to fully explain from first principles: Why is racism worse than sexism? Isn't eugenics a force for good, improving the quality of human life?

There's more to be got from this, but no time now...

Gotta post on this because it's so cool, but it's very deep, and I don't have the knowledge to do it well.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett
www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/docs/Reply%20in%20Language%202009.pdf
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/10/daniel-everett-amazon

Dan Everett, the only linguistically qualified speaker in the world, says that Piraha is not as complex as other human languages. If true, this would destroy Chomsky's claim that the most important features of language are innate.

More later.

online.wsj.com/article/SB125452110732160485.html
哈，还差很多。不过满族人挽救自己的语言肯定是好事，毕竟中国清朝是人类现代历史的重要环节，而且语言多样化本身也很重要。所以祝他们好运，希望可以让满语复活。
当然，Jeremiah看到这报道要说两句：granitestudio.org/2009/10/07/wsj-on-manchu-language-and-identity/
Jeremiah说：「The comment section on the accompanying article is also exhibit A for why I can’t be bothered with comments anymore 你要了解我为什么再也不想让人跟贴我的博克，你就看一眼报道的跟贴。」

所以我去看一下跟贴，结果，都是中国愤青指责记者污辱中国。可能我应该早就想到，但我看第一遍真的没发现报道有什么可挑替的。看第二遍特意找，就是有一些不符合共产党的历史观的说法。

「Generations of persecution have all but eliminated the Manchus' language. 因为几代人以来有不断的迫害，所以满语已经基本消失了。」
这句话看起来有点过头，但想来想去应该是对的。迫害肯定是有的。有可能他忽略了年轻人学普通话的需求，但实际上，学普通话是这二十年来才有用，60年代70年代学中文干嘛？那时候中国还穷，并不像现在。所以这个年轻人向往大国语言的效应大概不是一个重要因素。

「Over the past two years they [ethnic minorities] have been at the center of bloody riots that claimed hundreds of lives. 最近两年，少数民族打砸抢事件导致数百人死亡。」
事实，计歪干什么。

「Chinese society is struggling to overcome growing ethnic rifts. 中国社会面临难以克服的民族对立。」
这算是总结吧。大概对。

「For decades, China's authoritarian policies kept a lid on ethnic expression. 几十年来，中国的少数民族在表现自己的民族和文化受僵硬政策的限制。」
肯定对，因为中央一向强调团结，不容许任何民族过度地表现其独有的特征，说其与人不同。

「But because many of China's 55 minority groups still feel marginalized, expressions of anger and violence are on the rise. 因为55个少数民族中，有很多民族感觉自己被排斥，所以有越来越多的愤怒和暴力现象。」
这个many不好证明，中国众多少数民族中有多少个心里不满意，我不清楚。

「Much of the identification can be traced to the Communists' policies. Soon after the party took power in 1949, it adopted minority programs imported from the Soviets. The population was divided into ethnic groups...Even the Chinese majority got their own label, "Han." 少数民族的身份大概是共产党政策形成的。1949年执政不久后，共产党引用苏联的少数民族政策。中国人口被划分成一个一个族群。连普通中国人大众也被扣上族别，叫做"汉族"。」
对，有一个人根贴计较这点，无知。民族、汉族等概念完全是政治产物。

「Officially, Beijing encourages minorities to learn languages and offers schooling, broadcasts and publications in minority languages. In practice, these offerings are minimal. 中央政府的官方立场是，支持少数民族学习自己的语言，提供少数民族母语教育、广播节目、书籍等等。不过，这些政策的落实还是有非常大的缺口。」
事实。

「His family fearfully changed its ethnic registration from Manchu to Han. "People born after 1950 don't speak it," he says. "It was politically dangerous." 他长辈怕歧视，把自己的民族由满族改成汉族。“1950年后的那一代不会讲满语。那时候讲满语可以被指责政治错误。」
没有了解过满族在人民共和国早期的历史，不过这个说法可以相信。

唉！这个愤青问题，这个不容忍任何批评的态度，不哟再说了吧，这个问题大家都了解。

不过，说到这个民族问题，我还不得不说一下我对「中华民族」这个大政治词语的看法。最近这个词的用法让我感到不安，觉得是中央越来越不愿意考虑少数民族的观点。我看了胡锦涛十一的讲话，里面有这些说法：

「具有５０００多年文明历史的中华民族 The Chinese nation, a civilisation 5000 years old」
问题是，中华民族应该包括所有的少数民族在内。但大部份的少数民族没有这么长的历史。这个"5000年"说法专指中国的主流历史，夏商周等，把这个说法扣在维族、藏族、蒙古族等人头上忽略了少数民族的独特历史和来源，把少数民族进一步"同化"了。

「祖国完全统一这一中华民族的共同心愿 The complete unification of the motherland, which is the common wish of the entire Chinese nation」
真的吗？我实在难以想象，维族藏族人很向往台湾的归来。又是把中央（汉族）政府的想法套在别人头上。

「实现中华民族伟大复兴 bring about the glorious revival of the Chinese nation」
傣族在想，我们需要复兴吗？好像已经好好的，泰国总算比中国富一些。俄罗斯组在想，从来没有衰过复什么兴？彝族在想，整个历史过程都是唐宋明清在镇压我们，什么时候崛起过？没有崛起，没有衰落，怎么可能复兴？

我觉得中华民族是个贪婪的说法。领导人想要通过刺激民族意识而吸引台湾人的看好，海外华裔人的支持，但同时他要保持国内民族团结，问题是，一个词儿作不了那么多。所以有这个矛盾，在国内，中华民族是个多样化的，包容性的通称，而在国外他专指汉族。不然，达赖喇嘛不就是中华民族的领袖吗？整个乌兹别克斯坦不就是中华民族吗？

反正我难以支持民族这说法，又不科学，只能惹起对立。

援引我哥的书。

反：
「First we need to ask what makes killing an innocent adult human being wrong. The answer is that killing him deprives him of a valuable future, one in which he will have valuable self-conscious experiences. Unlike the view, often invoked by opponents of abortion, that all human life is sacred, this argument allows that some killings, such as voluntary euthanasia, are not wrong (because the person who chooses euthanasia is not being involuntarily deprived of anything); and nor does it invoke a religious commitment which non-religious people do not share. It also allows us to think that killing some animals - dolphins, whales, the higher primates - who may have self-consciousness, is wrong. But if that is what is wrong with killing, then abortion seems to be wrong, because abortion deprives someone - the foetus - of a valuable self-conscious future.
首先，我们要问清楚，为什么杀死无辜的大人属于不道德行为？答案是，通过杀死人，你剥夺了他的未来生活权，本来他未来还可以享受宝贵的自觉生活经验。反对人工流产的人往往提及人命神圣，按照我这个论点则可以容许像自愿安乐死等故意杀人行为（因为主动选择安乐死意味着没有被强性剥夺生命），并且不需要无神论者无法接受的信仰。这个想法也让我们连想到，杀死海豚、鲸鱼、高等灵长类等可能有自觉特征的动物也是罪恶。但是，如果杀人的不对在于剥夺未来生活的话，那么人工流产好像也是一种罪行，因为人工流产剥夺了胎儿的宝贵自觉的未来生活。」

正：
「Imagine that there is a world famous violinist, who is suffering from a rare and fatal blood disease. You are the only person who can save him, because your blood is the only match for his. The only way you can save him is by having your kidney attached to his by a tube for nine months. Suppose you wake up one morning, having had sex with someone the previous night, and find that you are hooked up to the violinist, and this was somehow caused by you having sex. The tube is very long, flexible, and unintrusive, so for the first few months you can go about your normal life, with only moderate inconvenience, but as the months pass it will shorten and become less flexible, making the inconvenience ever greater until the last few weeks when you will just be longing for it to be removed. The violinist will be unconscious throughout the period, so he will not intrude on your privacy. It will merely be increasingly inconvenient and increasingly painful. Detaching the tube now will be relatively painless for you, but it will get more painful as time goes on, and after nine months it will be very painful, but will only involve a tiny risk of serious illness or death.
Do you have a right to detach yourself from the violinist? I think it is obvious that you do. It would be very nice of you not to detach yourself, and we should give you credit for that. But you are not obliged to remain hooked up - you have a right to detach. This situation is exactly analogous with abortion: the act of sexual intercourse causes another being to be dependent on your body for its life for nine months. If you have the right to detach yourself from the violinist, you have the right to detach yourself from the foetus, to prevent them from using your body for their own survival.
假如有一个世界闻名的小提琴手，患上了罕见的致命性血病。因为全世界只有你一个人与他血型相同，所以只有你才能治好他。唯一的治疗方法是，用管道将你和他的肾脏连到一起，而且要坚持九个月才行。有一天你发生性生活后第二天，你醒过来发现你已经与小提琴手连起来了，这是因为发生了性生活。管道长又软，不影响正常生活，至少是开头几个月。但时间越久，管道越缩短，越硬化，给你的生活带来越多的不便，直到最后几个星期时间，你很烦，除了切掉它什么也不想。整个九个月期间，小提琴手都昏迷，不会侵犯你隐私权。只是越来越不方便，也有疼痛。如果是现在把管道拔掉，就不会痛，但拖后的话，把管道拔掉这手术变得越来越痛苦。在治疗九个月完成后，把管道拔掉肯定很痛，但重大疾病或死亡的概率很低。
你有权利把小提琴手的管道拔掉吗？我觉得答案毫无疑问是肯定的。不拔管的话，那你就是好人，应该赞赏。但你没有保持连管这样子的义务，你有拔管的权利。这个假设与人工流产相同。因为发生了性行为，另外一个人在接下来九个月内完全依靠你的肉体来维持生命。如果你有权利隔绝连接小提琴手的管道的话，你同样也有权利隔绝与胎儿的连接，不让他们为了自己的生存而利用你的身体。」

这两种论点都有好处。
第一个大概是我不吃肉的原因。高等动物（包括人类）有未来过幸福生活的可能，因此不应该杀死它们。不过，还是有一个小问题，既胎儿的身份。说一个人未来可以过好日子，但是那个过好日子的人与小胎儿是同一个活体吗？理论上，任何一个东西未来可以变成自觉的动物。我吃鸡蛋，因为虽然鸡蛋未来会长成有生命的鸡，但目前它还是无活力的物质。连生菜吃下去消化掉，每个原子被吸受到身体内可以变成大脑的一部份。所以，未来可能变成一个自觉生命不够；必须现在已经是个自觉生命。胎儿什么时候符合这个条件？那要靠医学来解决。

第二个论点属于哲学传说类，这种故事总是要小心。小提琴手的故事有很多问题：怎么跟小提棋手连起来？怎么知道只有你一个人才能救他？这种故事的意义在于刺激人家的道德本能，但我经常感觉无法想像故事里描述的离谱状况，因此，我的本能没有任何反应。说小提琴手的故事，我无法想像通过性生活会陷入一种医学治疗过程。而且我觉得作者的本能不是因为故事里的任何情节而有反应，而是一个故事外的细节。医学论理规则说，在进行任何治疗过程之前，各方都必须知情同意。故事里的人明明没有事前同意，因此，这个治疗过程不行。但我是从医疗论理的角度说他不行，而怀孕并不是医学治疗法，所以这个故事没有离怀孕这事太远，它的结论不成立。

我有一个故事：假如你发生空中灾难，落到孤岛上，只有你和一个小孩两个人幸存。岛屿上的生活很艰苦，

[to be continued]

「」

People are brilliant. They come up with brilliant ideas all the time. And now we have the internet, we could preserve and cross-reference those ideas and make them available to everyone.
Just as Wikipedia preserves a very large lump of current human knowledge, Ideabank would aim to contain a very large store of all the brilliant concepts people have randomly come up with, and make them available for anyone to exploit and develop. Concepts would be included based on the following criteria:
1) The idea is genuinely new. It may have been thought of before, but it is not widely applied.
2) The idea is genuinely feasible. It's not random gibber, some ideological bumf or a physical impossibility.
3) The author is happy to put it in the public domain.

Oops!
I'm way too slow on this one. Exists already.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_bank
www.globalideasbank.org/site/home/
www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26mgmt.html

The ideas market in the NYT article is truly cool, and explains something I hadn't understood in this story:
lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

For a market to work, you need consumers who know what they're buying.
Consultancy in general is a service in which the customer doesn't know what they're buying. (Guides to using consultants all talk about taking steps to make explicit what services the consultant will provide before entering into a contract.)
Medicine is a knowledge service provided to ignorant consumers par excellence. In medical cases, consumers not only do not understand the different services their doctor can provide, they don't even know what their demand (i.e. disease) is.
That's why medicine is uniquely ill-suited to market solutions. The aim is *not* a distribution of resources that matches demand (which markets create). The aim is a distribution of resources which maximizes health (or, to be more precise, maximizes effective treatment of health conditions).
The other reason markets aren't very suitable for health care is that failure is unacceptable, and failure is the primary mechanism through which markets produce efficiency, by weeding out the inefficient.

[to be expanded]

Steve Keen 提出有关经济危机的来源的看法。www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/10/04/debtwatch-no-39-october-2009-in-the-dark-on-cause-and-effect/

这个问题通常被看作二元选择：是中国的存款者的错，还是美国消费者的错？Keen觉得没那么简单，他说：

「the action in a credit-driven economy begins with the lender: lending creates the money...
如果经济体的基础是信用，那所有的经济现象可以追溯到贷方的行为：贷款就是创造钱」

他的意思是，美国的金融体系不仅是金融危机的首恶，它又是导致经济不平衡的主要因素。这个说法我觉得比责怪美国消费者好理解一些，美国消费者那么多，如果是消费者的错，你还得说清楚他们怎么突然不约而同地开始过度消费。银行等金融机构的同步行动则好解释：因为银行与银行都是竞争对手，所以任何银行开始进一步大胆地放款，其他银行怕落到别人后面，不敢保持保守的运营模式，结果大家一起升温。

Keen能得出这个结论是因为他一直强调贷款对经济行为的重要影响。Pettis等人声称中国的储蓄资金投资到美国去，美国消费者才有大量的钱可花。「The textbook argues that savings must occur first before investment can occur 按照经济学课本里的基本理论，要先积蓄才能投资。」但Keen指出，信用体系的本意旨在把这个逻辑关系颠倒，因为有信用，所以不必先积蓄，可以先消费再积蓄。很有洞察力，一下子让Pettis的假说显得很幼稚。

另外，

青黄不接

「」