Or it could be that Chinese audiences & tastes aren't so big on watching cheering crowds.
I am rather sceptical of this being evidence of censorship. Maybe, I could be swayed if it can be shown this is a clear break from tradition of showing crowds that started since the recent protests in china.
I was curious about this as well. Reality TV for example is edited very differently between the US and elsewhere to suit local tastes. Do we know whether or not crowd shots were usually shown in China pre-covid?
Moreover, you're still doing it—I took a quick look through your recent history and saw several posts that were breaking the site guidelines.
If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? Posts like this are seriously not ok on this site.
In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly).
I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.
No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention.
To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).
Strongly disagree with shifting the blame from "we" to "they".
To mentally distance ourselves is a cop-out as we are all willing participant (if not actively enabling the problem) so it is incredibly important that people don't compartmentalise away these type of issues.
We are seeing a shock to a system we have all contributed to and handsomely benefited from. Of course, some people are more to blame than others, however in many case the root causes are boring small decisions that are good for the individuals but have negative long term consequence for everyone. i.e. Whether "poor" or "rich", very few people are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective good. ("Tyranny of small decisions").
He's probably referring to Marx's Historical determinism. Marx claimed that there were stages of the development of labour and capital that would inevitably happen based on the forces that govern both. For most people, I would say, even those who study Marx, these ideas have been dismissed, or proven wrong by the failure of the 'working class' to seize the means of production in most countries where such attempts took place.
However, his predictions are only a part of a very rich body of work that still provides productive economic analysis.
One might also argue that the real thing didn't happen yet though. Just because a lot of people attach a label to themselves and then other people come and use that label to do PR against them doesn't mean it was correct in the first place.
That said, I also don't believe in it. From what I'm seeing around me, people usually grab small short term advantages over other people even if they suffer long term consequences together after the "success". Also people really love to give power over themselves to other people. Until these two misconceptions are overcome there can't be any real attempt at communism.
>From what I'm seeing around me, people usually grab small short term advantages over other people even if they suffer long term consequences together
I would argue this is a symptom of capitalism, not an inherent property of human nature. We live in a system that requires us to compete to sell our labour in order to survive. This leads us to think of everything in terms of competition.
This is why so many people in creative jobs (including software development) end up feeling like they can't do their work efficiently because their manager won't let them. Because the employer-employee relationship is based on exchange, it is fundamentally antagonistic.
Precisely. This whole recent STEM discussion comes back to the demonization of the Liberal Arts.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics all makes money as a multiplier for the capitalist class. So all of them are highly praised. However, those pesky things like philosophy and art are "worthless" - as in they don't make the owners money.
Marx's works also talk about turning universities into training centers too. Eventually, the cost of education would be the point that either the rich (capitalists) would attend, or regular people would attend to learn how to work in the above (STEM) categories.
This one is well known and profusely commented, I'm sure you can google it: Marx considered industrial workers the ones with more class awareness and predicted that Socialism will ignite in the UK first.
On the contrary, it succeeded in big old agrarian countries like Russia and China.
Also predicted that worker class solidarity will make for an idilic proletary dictatorship, no need for democratic checks and balances that only decadent burgeois countries need.
