Hongkong was taken away from China with cannons and drugs.
Handing it back was the right thing to do legally (for the new territories), morally, and historically.
It's sad to see people effectively praising European imperialism in 2019, reminds me of the old "civilising the natives" antics.
Edit since I'm being prevented from relying to comments:
There is no regression. Those protesters were charged under a colonial-era law.
Hongkong did not even have the Legislative Council under the British, which was created it as a 'gift' to the Chinese.
From the popular vote, it seems to me that the "pro-Beijing" camp has a majority, so that's what "the people want"...
Let's be realistic and put things in perspective, shall we.
Edit 2:
To the person who replied:
> Meanwhile, during those 100 years, a new, distinct, non Chinese culture developed. Hong Kong people speak a different language than mainland, have different food, culture references and desires.
HK's culture is as Chinese as can be. In fact it is more traditional Chinese than the mainland. They speak Chinese
(Cantonese is 'Chinese', it's the language spoken in Guangdong province hence why it is spoken in HK, 'Canton' is how Guangzhou used to be called...), they eat Chinese.
It would be good to know a minimum about a topic before commenting.
I guess I'll be honest here as I spent way too long trying to come up with a response as your comment rattled a part of me, the part that gets a touch emotional when walking across the square where the shadow of the Goddess of Democracy once graced. Where those same stones were later soaked in the blood of men and women who only sought to voice their displeasure in the actions of their leaders.
I saw the umbrella movement as an early action to show that there will be resistance from those who do not feel that ruling party has their interest at heart. When those who lead and championed this movement were removed from the territories and sent to the mainland to be punished, it signaled that PRC was not going to change its tactics and resistance to gilded tyranny would have to charge on.
Now I have heard the arguments that you have parroted here, but this is the first time where I have someone effectively call my desire for my close friends to maintain their Democracy as a form of white supremacy. I'm sure you'll tell me that June 4th was just an uneventful day in that square and it was the West that unjustly agitated the student population.
Meanwhile, during those 100 years, a new, distinct, non Chinese culture developed.
Hong Kong people speak a different language than mainland, have different food, culture references and desires.
Jordan was created in 1921.
Israel was created in 1948.
Most people agree that these countries have distinct cultures, and are younger than Hong Kong.
Unsure why you'd assume it would be (it's not) any different for Hong Kong, but would like to hear why.
Hong Kong speak cantonense, there are many more Cantonese speakers in Guangdong and the rest of China than Hong Kong. The food is very similar to the surrounding provinces as well, though with some variation...maybe?
HK culture, movies and pop music, has been hugely influential on the mainland, so I guess there is that.
There are perhaps good arguments for HK to be its own country, but distinct language and food isn’t one of them.
To this poster, and the above edit - I live and work in HK, and was in Hong Kong during the protests.
There are incredibly distinct Hong Kong foods. You'll never find yuanyang (tea coffee mix) in mainland,like you'll not find Rua Jia Mu (Chinese snack burger) in Hong Kong.
Obviously HKers have Cantonese roots. I wasn't arguing who was more traditional, I was pointing out that HKers consider themselves Hong Kongese, not Chinese.
The OP alludes that HK was kept under the yolk of British rule, and is eager to shed its shackles to return to the mainland. This is simply not the case.
I can assure you there are incredibly distinct foods, languages and cultures everywhere in China.
People from different provinces consider themselves "people from that particular province". I guess the difference is that they also consider themselves Chinese.
> The OP alludes that HK was kept under the yolk [sic] of British rule, and is eager to shed its shackles to return to the mainland. This is simply not the case.
China is a vast place, of course there are local dishes. But no-one would seriously even suggest that HK's food isn't Chinese food, or that their culture isn't Chinese.
> The OP alludes that HK was kept under the yolk of British rule, and is eager to shed its shackles to return to the mainland. This is simply not the case.
I cannot find any such allusion in this thread. It is true, though that the situation wasn't better under the British, and it was perhaps worse (no LegCo).
If Cantonese is really Chinese, why they the mainlander want to destroy it even in canton. They cannot practically read the “chinese” newspaper here or Taiwan as it is quite different. We do not eat dog and cat.
I think sentiment many hker is not really want to be chinese under the communist rule. Not even the establishment camp looking at the recent law enactment issue.
Back to the fundamental. Humanity with a sense of liberty would not sacrifice human and let them fall into the regime that have social credit system, no freedom to access internet, no freedom to worship both Jesus and be Muslim.
I think the suggestion is that some comments give the impression that the "natives" would be much better off under Western rule than under their own people's.
I can understand that this may pass off as supporting European imperialism, and even perhaps racism.
We can hope that China becomes democratic but that is an issue for the Chinese people.
I thought HK spoke Cantonese? At least, until the PRC enforces Mandarin. It's a tactic with a long history - replace a people's language with your own.
Correct. Cantonese and English are official languages.
Outside of commerce and the central districts, it's definitely Cantonese with a smattering of English - which is quite nice.
Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point and you'll see that it is not really realistic.
Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.
There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.
Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons.
(wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)
The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.
> Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons
It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.
These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:
5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.
2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.
The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.
In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.
This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.
> It does because it is a relatively industrialized country.
No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.
You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...
No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.
Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accidents" by Perrow in the 80s. The reasons he identified why complex systems fail will always be with us. Especially the notion that it is more often than not the organizations and not the technology which enables major accidents.
3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage).
Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...
You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.
> the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I was alluding to the lively debate about how the selling price for electricity is set, and how it should vary depending on market conditions.
I see no reason to lock-in minimum pricing for any kind of electricity generation many decades in advance. Why is that necessary for new nuclear plants?
In other words: do we need to guarantee a minimum market price 30 years in advance in order to make it look like building a nuclear plant makes economic sense?
I would think that they'd run it closer to 100% and do all the maintenance during a scheduled outage...at least that's how I understand they do the maintenance planning/scheduling at Palo Verde.
That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.
Also:
> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer
Regarding your comment on wood fired plants: To me it seems that you imply that that is not renewable, which I do not understand. If you regrow the trees that you've burned (cleanly) down then your net impact will be zero, right?
"Unlimited vacation" is just a gimmick that originated in the US.
Since there are no legal right to anything over there they can advertise "unlimited vacation" but the reality can be quite different because (1) approval is obviously still required, and (2) there is obviously a pressure not to be seem as being a slacker.
In Europe you have 20-25 days mandated by law and people do use them because companies tend to force them for fear of getting into trouble for flaunting employment law.
Like most things in engineering, you can move the tradeoffs around to optimize for different use cases.
The "one true source" approach allows you to avoid writing logic to keep data in sync between your customer records and Stripe's systems. It also implicitly pushes you to think about how to store enough data in Stripe that the Stripe dashboards become your interactive way of managing and viewing customers. Those are both big enough wins that I do think it's the right approach to take for lots of folks who are just spinning up charging for a product, and for relatively simple recurring revenue use cases.
If you need to use multiple payment processors, or you need to have a complex view of your customer and lifecycle, then it's not the right approach.
Yea. Customer and billing isn't something good to hand over to another system you don't control. As a payment processor and API though, Stripe is great
The whole article is all about how this layman's intuition about the licensing situation in this case is not how you'd think.
> These images are in the public domain. No one is required to pay Getty and/or Getty US a penny to copy and use them. And Getty has no right to sell copyright licenses for them, as it has done and is doing.
> The first sentence is true, the second, not so much.
What do you know that the author doesn't? Is there a particular test case that settled it?
There doesn't need to be a test case, because it's written in the law. A license is defined as a "transfer of rights", you can't transfer rights that you don't have.
The author (what's his authority, by the way?) agrees, though:
> Well, it can't sell "copyright licenses," as that is a misrepresentation over the rights that Getty Images has -- but if it wants to try to get people to pay for stuff that is otherwise available for free, that's Getty's prerogative.
His point is that he does not think that Getty was selling licences. However Getty's past behaviour (and I'm sure their own website since I'm sure that the T&C and the licence are attached to any sale) suggests that this is exactly what they were doing:
> The first one was brought by photographer Carol Highsmith, who sued Getty after Getty had sent a demand letter to her over her own images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress to be put into the public domain.
And yes, knowingly selling licences for rights you do not have is against the law. If you think it's not then I'm happy to sell you a licence to fish in the River Dee...
The allegation is that they licensed public domain images, which is something obviously unlawful (and likely criminal if done knowingly) since they do not own the rights of a public domain image by definition.
If it is indeed work to find and catalogue those images then they are allowed to charge for access to that catalogue. But a public domain image cannot be licensed.
Upholding copyrights in court seems the basis of the rule of Law, and quite far from the situation in China and Russia.
Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
The difference is the ability of the government to pass arbitrary laws. There are (currently, in the West) two opposing views: natural law (laws are the refinement of what already is a natural part of human aspirations), and consensus law (law is what social consensus agrees upon). There’s also authoritarian law, but that is dictatorship.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
The concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration.
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
Handing it back was the right thing to do legally (for the new territories), morally, and historically.
It's sad to see people effectively praising European imperialism in 2019, reminds me of the old "civilising the natives" antics.
Edit since I'm being prevented from relying to comments:
There is no regression. Those protesters were charged under a colonial-era law.
Hongkong did not even have the Legislative Council under the British, which was created it as a 'gift' to the Chinese.
From the popular vote, it seems to me that the "pro-Beijing" camp has a majority, so that's what "the people want"...
Let's be realistic and put things in perspective, shall we.
Edit 2:
To the person who replied:
> Meanwhile, during those 100 years, a new, distinct, non Chinese culture developed. Hong Kong people speak a different language than mainland, have different food, culture references and desires.
HK's culture is as Chinese as can be. In fact it is more traditional Chinese than the mainland. They speak Chinese (Cantonese is 'Chinese', it's the language spoken in Guangdong province hence why it is spoken in HK, 'Canton' is how Guangzhou used to be called...), they eat Chinese. It would be good to know a minimum about a topic before commenting.