Showing posts with label YouTube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YouTube. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2022
Sunday, January 16, 2022
Thursday, January 06, 2022
Wednesday, January 05, 2022
Saturday, January 01, 2022
Thursday, December 09, 2021
YouTube: December 9
China bids farewell to Indian envoy with hopes for easing in border tensions As Vikram Misri prepares to leave his Beijing posting, both sides agreed there was a ‘silver lining’ for bilateral ties ....... Chinese foreign minister warns against the two countries exhausting each other, as India takes first delivery of Russian missiles ...... Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned against “mutual exhaustion” with neighbouring India and agreed there was a “silver lining” in bilateral ties, despite the arrival of India’s first delivery of long-range missiles from Russia.
China is proud of its own democracy, and wants no part of the flawed US model China’s whole-process democracy seeks to meet people’s wish for a better life, and the country’s achievements speak for themselves ....... The US ‘democracy’ summits are a farce, given their lack of appreciation of national conditions elsewhere and respect for other people’s choices ...... The story of modern China attests to the Communist Party’s commitment to democracy and shows China to be deserving of the name of a people’s democracy. ........ From the days of “bean voting” in Yanan, where Chinese people voted with beans in place of paper ballots to ensure the illiterate had a vote, to the enactment of the first constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 1954, to the recent introduction of the important concept of “whole process democracy”, China’s socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics has gradually taken shape. ........... China’s whole-process democracy has pragmatic practices that effectively protect people’s extensive democratic rights, which are exercised through a combination of elections, consultations, decision-making, management and oversight. .......... it is people-oriented and welcomes widespread participation. China’s democracy is not the kind that wakes up at the time of voting then goes back to being dormant afterwards. People have the full right to know, express their views, and supervise government performance. ......... In China, all the 2.62 million deputies in the five levels of people’s congresses, from the National People’s Congress down to provinces, cities, counties and townships, are elected by the people. The 33 ethnic minorities with very small populations, including the Jinuo and Lhoba, all have their own delegates to the NPC. Chinese people are deeply engaged in state affairs, especially local-level governance. .......... Since 2012, the public has been invited to comment on 187 draft laws, and about 3 million opinions and suggestions collected from 1.1 million submissions. .......
the Civil Code that came into effect this year. To draft the code, the NPC solicited opinions online 10 times. A total of 1.02 million opinions from 425,000 people were received, and many of them adopted.
......... China eradicated absolute poverty in a historic achievement, becoming a moderately prosperous society. ........ has created more than 10 million new jobs each year for 15 years running, a number equivalent to the population of a mid-sized country. .........about 90 per cent of senior officials and civil servants in party and government offices come from households of average income.
........ whole-process democracy values sound governance and produces encouraging results. Under the party’s leadership, China’s democratic politics saw healthy development and its governance capacity has steadily improved, a sign of China’s institutional advantages. ......... Trust in government is high in China. In a survey conducted in the early days of the pandemic, a US public relations firm found that Chinese people’s trust in their government reached 95 per cent, a rise of 5 percentage points from a similar survey a year ago. China topped the world in this survey of 11 countries. .........Democracy is not the prerogative of a few nations, but a common value for all of humanity. It takes diverse forms, and no country could monopolise the definition and jurisdiction of democracy. China will not impose its own democratic model on others, nor will it accept the lecturing of some self-appointed judges.
...... To our dismay, the United States, with its interventionist arrogance, has shut its eyes to its problems at home and its own flaws in democracy and human rights, and remained obsessed with selling its model of democracy to the rest of the world. ........ Most recently, the US has even gone so far as to weaponise democracy by organising two so-called “summits for democracy”. The motive behind its move is clear – to revive the Cold War mentality, incite division and confrontation, and protect its hegemony. These so-called “democracy” summits are a farce. They will produce nothing but a standing joke for the world. ...................Liu Guangyuan is Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Thursday, December 02, 2021
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
YouTube: November 30
Parag Agrawal: India celebrates new Twitter CEO Mr Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and rose through the ranks to become the firm's chief technology officer. ...... Mr Dorsey wrote, "Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He's curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware and humble. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep." ....... "I joined this company 10 years ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees. While it was a decade ago, those days feel like yesterday to me." ...... A graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mr Agrawal has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
This tweet by the incoming Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has been doing the rounds. The quotation marks stood out for me, so I did a little factcheck. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/UPGCNHtiID
— Divya Karthikeyan (@divya_krthk) November 29, 2021
@paraga Congrats on your new role.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) December 1, 2021
#ThankYouJack pic.twitter.com/zDwtHXltg3
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) November 30, 2021
November 30
Omicron Is Coming. The U.S. Must Act Now. Omicron, which early indicators suggest could be more transmissible than even Delta and more likely to cause breakthrough infections, may arrive in the United States soon if it’s not here already. .........
Vaccine manufacturers should also immediately begin developing vaccines specifically for Omicron.
....... This means finally getting the sort of mass testing program that the United States has avoided and which has been part of successful responses to Covid in other countries. ..........Travel bans can remain in place too long because they become more a matter of political signaling than public health.
........Perhaps the best example of responding intelligently to an early warning is Taiwan.
......... Taiwan quashed the initial spread and has effectively contained the crisis for almost two years. ......... Mr. Biden’s ban has similar problems — it won’t even start until Monday, as if the virus takes the weekend off. That’s pandemic theatrics, not public health. ......... The callous mistreatment of South Africa by big pharmaceutical companies continued into this pandemic. Moderna, for example, ran some of its vaccine trials in South Africa but did not donate any to the country or even to Covax, the global vaccine alliance, until much later. .......... Decades of such policies have contributed to high levels of medical mistrust in South Africa, including vaccine hesitancy. Only 35 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated despite sufficient supplies. ........... BioNTech/Pfizer has already said it could have vaccines targeting this variant in as little as three months. .......... preventing breakthrough infections and blocking progression to severe disease involve different parts of the immune system ............All vaccines are still designed to protect against the original virus that emerged in Wuhan, even though that version is rarely found at this point.
WHO: Omicron poses 'very high' risk
Doctor Who Saw Omicron Early Says Symptoms Different to Delta People infected by omicron in South Africa are showing very different symptoms to those suffering from the delta strain, said the doctor who alerted government scientists to the possibility of a new variant. ........ Patients who contracted it complain of fatigue, head and body aches and occasional sore throats and coughs ......... Delta infections, by comparison, caused elevated pulse rates, resulted in low oxygen levels and a loss of smell and taste ..........
while omicron appeared to be more transmissible, cases appeared to very mild. ......... Still, they do appear to be evading vaccines
. .............. “There have been a number, a significantly large number, of breakthroughs, people who are fully vaccinated being infected” ...... “Those so far have been mild.”
Monday, November 29, 2021
Sunday, November 21, 2021
YouTube: November 21 (2)
Evolution Tells Us We Might Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations—not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself—were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. ......... The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number—there are as many planets as stars, maybe more—suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there’s no evidence of it. ............
Remarkably, Australia’s entire evolutionary history, with mammals diversifying after the dinosaur extinction, parallels other continents.
............ Eyes evolved not just in vertebrates, but in arthropods, octopi, worms, and jellyfish. Vertebrates, arthropods, octopi, and worms independently invented jaws. Legs evolved convergently in the arthropods, octopi, and four kinds of fish (tetrapods, frogfish, skates, mudskippers). ........ Complex animals evolved once in life’s history, suggesting they’re improbable. ........ Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land. The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once. Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. There are marsupial wolves and moles, but no marsupial humans. .......... All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once. ......... Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth’s formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they’re exceedingly improbable. ...........our evolution wasn’t like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again
........ Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations—the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons, and intelligence itself—each with a 10 percent chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million. .......... So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1 percent of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible universe.Saturday, November 20, 2021
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)