I'm in the lockdown in Shanghai, feel free to ask me any questions. Things you read on the internet is mostly true (but may be exaggerated):
Life: Yes we can only buy food through WeChat groups to organise wholesale deliveries (2000 eggs, 200 cabbages minimum order) on hiked prices, but it's easier than you might think; No one has died from starvation (yet), but there had been a few cases of death due to not getting medical help in time; The city's resources are stretched - it's a city with 25m population.
Work: I'm still working 12 hour days online (we're a design & project management firm). I get to wake up 10 minutes before a morning meeting and be in my pajamas the whole day.
So on a personal level, life isn't that miserable. But it's definitely a very difficult time to the elderly and the ill.
Will I (or anyone in my shoes) leave China permanently because of this? I guess not, even though I have the means to do it. There are harder problems to solve in life than feeling terrified by a lockdown.
What about poor people or people not on WeChat? I’m inclined to guess that your remote job isn’t representative of many people in the city. The videos of people moaning and screaming from their balconies at night seem… shocking?
Absolutely, I don't represent everyone. I'm sure there are people losing their income because they cannot go to work. The government - which has enforced the lockdown, should definitely do a better job in caring for the individuals who are the most affected, no doubt in that.
I don't think anyone in China is not on WeChat. Life seems to be pretty impossible without it even without covid. Unlike the name implies it's not just a chat app. It's an everything app. A bit like Google's level of ubuquity but even more. Payments, ridesharing, shopping.. I heard you can even do your government business on it.
Anyway this is just what I've read of course. Never visited China and I'm never going to.
Schools are closed, and for good reasons. If I'm the parent I wouldn't want my kids to get COVID. The gospel of online education may be coming true? Jokes aside, it's not as miserable as many people may think.
Limiting the analysis to just the possible impact on children without taking into account the impact on the complex interconnected system that is modern society might not be the best way to analyze this.
Well, unlike the previous poster I do think 2 weeks is not that much. Most lockdowns here in Europe have been longer than that.
The difference is that lockdowns here were a lot less strict. It was still possible to go to the shops for example, and people in critical supply chains (e.g. food, medical) could still work. Precisely to avoid this kind of issue where people are running out of food.
I’ve found it super tough to do online school with a small child. For the under 10 kids they need a lot of supervision and the online school becomes your day job. So if both parents are trapped at home trying to work it’s hell
Do people feel that the lockdown is justified? I saw the start of a paywalled WSJ article saying that there are 130k reported cases and no deaths? I don't believe them on the deaths part but if thats the information from the government how do people justify a lockdown?
A lot of your commentary is about lockdown not being too bad, but what are your thoughts on the rationale for the lockdown when Omicron is relatively less dangerous? Do the people in your social network feel the costs are worth it?
There are definitely lots of complains: the consequences on the economy, not able to travel, etc. On a personal level everyone is affected, but is the lockdown worth it? On a country level I think it's understandable. Shanghai is a city of 25m population and it has one of the best medical system in China, if COVID cannot be contained in Shanghai then it'll be a nightmare to spread to other cities, towns and villages, where basic medical care is still not readily available. Shanghai is also the economic and financial centre of China, locking it down definitely comes at a great cost to the country, so I don't think the government has made this decision lightly. If Omicron is really like a cold/flu then no it's not worth it, but do we know this for sure?
> If Omicron is really like a cold/flu then no it's not worth it, but do we know this for sure?
Well... look at the rest of the world.
I caught Delta when it burned through the American South last September. Omicron overtook Delta in January 2022 in the US, and since then the US has seen ~25m confirmed cases.
If you don't know the effects of Omicron "for sure" with a sample size of 25,000,000 cases... when will you?
FWIW, while Omicron is statistically significantly milder than previous variants, I don't think it's "like a cold/flu". I also don't think it's anywhere near bad enough to justify locking down a city.
When I had Delta, I had about three days where I was miserable and basically useless followed by a week of being very tired and another week or so of feeling like I was recovering from the flu. I'm 38, overweight, a non-smoker, and the only relevant medical condition I have is obstructive sleep apnea.
If I had to characterize my experience in "like the flu" terms, I would say that Delta was about 2-3x as bad as the worst flu I've ever had. There were three mornings where I woke up feeling like I couldn't breathe. That was scary, but a few minutes in a hot shower was sufficient to break it up enough that I didn't feel like I needed medical attention.
About a week after those initial intense symptoms, I was testing negative and had no respiratory issues but was still very tired overall. I called my doctor and asked for an inhaled steroid to speed things along a bit so I could be productive. Other than that, and guaifenesin that I took when my symptoms began, there was no need for medical intervention at all.
Everything I read tells me that Omicron's symptoms are substantially less pronounced than Delta's.
What would you estimate to be the Covid vaccination rates in Shanghai?
In many European and American cities the consensus of many people seems to be that Covid 'is over', likely due to high vaccination rates and those that have recovered.
I don't have the big picture data but all the people I know (locals and expats) have been vaccinated. China and the Western world are taking different approaches to COVID, I don't believe in anything said from either side, there is simply not enough scientific and trustworthy data, only time will tell which approach is better.
I agree. Anecdotally, a friend of mine's workplace which canceled WFH a few months ago has had many people out sick with Covid over the past three weeks (more than the entire previous year), but luckily none have them have needed to be hospitalized.
I have worked in many overseas development projects run by Chinese companies. It's not that the Chinese companies only want to hire their own workers, but the fact that the local workforce do not have the skill/equipment/capital to handle large scale development projects.
Some countries require by law that the Chinese developers have a minimum number of local workers. This mitigates the problem somewhat and hopefully over time the locals will develop the skills to run their own projects.
In the long run, infrastructure investment benefits local communities and opens up more opportunities for the local workforce. It's almost always better to have the infrastructure built than not, earlier than later, and foreign money is a good source of capital for it.
> It's not that the Chinese companies only want to hire their own workers, but the fact that the local workforce do not have the skill/equipment/capital to handle large scale development projects.
I've often thought that but caught myself thinking I was just buying into the narrative - refreshing to hear it might be slightly less cynical than my brain would have me believe (though still undoubtedly to some degree). My assumption being the skillset to build a transnational highway and scalable mining infrastrcuture is different than doing those things at localised levels.
It really depends on what is being called "infrastructure" and how much the local government is extracting from the foreign governments that will benefit (and if those funds are redistributed to the benefit of the people obviously too).
> In the long run, infrastructure investment benefits local communities and opens up more opportunities for the local workforce. It's almost always better to have the infrastructure built than not, earlier than later, and foreign money is a good source of capital for it.
That's only true if the economy develops to a high enough level, fast enough, to afford to maintain the infrastructure being built that isn't actually natural to the present scale of the economy. That's a large assumption and the consequence of being wrong is disastrous for a poor country. Any time you try to force-leap a country forward, there are immense risks if the underlying economy doesn't keep up, and it won't be China that pays for it later on.
If a cartoon character is still in commercial use and being further developed, I'm not sure if it's good practice to turn it into public domain. I don't think there had been corporations/artists that have had the longevity of Disney, and the fact that Disney has continued to invest in and develop the characters over the years makes this somewhat of a special case (compared to other literature characters where the author stops developing them after they are published).
I'm no copyright lawyer nor do I know much about copyright laws, but one should recognise the positive effects of copyright protection, which encourages innovation and investment. Those incremental investments Disney has made should be acknowledged.
But of course, the danger in this argument is that in the future someone can just make tiny face-value 'investments' into their copyright to argue for an extension, that would be detrimental to the whole copyright vs innovation balance.
> If a cartoon character is still in commercial use and being further developed, I'm not sure if it's good practice to turn it into public domain.
Disney doesn't have any issues defending its repackaged public domain products like fairy tales. I don't see why Mickey Mouse would be harder to brand and market than the Disney princesses.
I feel like the distinction between copyright (with term limits, but strong protections) and trademark (with no term limits, but strong weaknesses) should be enough for a company like Disney. Maybe there should be some sort of "franchise copyright" somewhere in between the two, but I've never heard a good specific idea to that.
However, I heard one proposed idea that prolonged copyright extensions (or variable copyright terms, if you'd prefer) might make sense as a corporate property tax that increases over time after the baseline expiration (and better if you reset the baseline to something smaller again).
That would at least trigger bottom line decisions in corporations if keeping something in copyright (and out of the public domain) is worth the annual property taxes on it. Some of that tax could go directly to archival/preservation efforts for those properties in the proper spirit of insuring their legacy for the public domain, eventually. Most of that tax would indirectly go towards discouraging companies from IP "tenements" where rent is collected (subscription/access charges), but innovation/investment diminished a long time ago. (Mickey has new cartoons on YouTube every so often, but how many properties does Disney own that other than maybe a bare conversion to Netflix or soon Disney+ streaming they haven't done anything with in decades?)
Perpetual copyright does the opposite of encouraging innovation. Consider how many of the highest grossing movies are made up of endless sequels and reboots of existing franchises vs how many are new.
I'm sure you're right that it encourages investment, but I don't think that the commoditization of culture makes it more innovative or better (for my subjective definition of better).
Maybe a reasonable approach would be a short default copyright time with the option to renew it every 5-10 years for a big sum of money.
This will prevent copyright squatters on works with high value for public but lesser monetary value, like WWII footage just collecting dust as mentioned in the article.
> cartoon character is still in commercial use and being further developed
I feel this should be restricted to the originator of the work itself.
A property can wait till the primary author is done with the work (inside reasonable intervals..sorry GRR martin), before starting the timer of it entering public domain.
However, works like Batman and Mickey that get tossed between committees and multiple authors, should not be viewed in the same way.
I work in the realm of public art projects and thus have collaborated with a lot of artists, mostly painters and sculpters. I must say the success of any piece of artwork - especially the ones created with the public in mind - is not the work of a single man or woman, but the result of the collaboration of a team of professionals - designers, marketers, financiers, metal bashers, crane operators, all the way down to the assistant who helped review the contracts.
So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured, otherwise there will be no collaboration. Imagine the marketer who helped putting the project on every headline turns around to ask for an extra cut of the success? Not possible, but he/she can certainly charge a higher fee for the next project.
Nowadays artists are much more educated about the value of copyright and we as art consultants/project coordinators help intermediate how deals are structured, so the value of the artist's work is properly recognised and rewarded.
As others have commented, success builds upon success, one must be able to see the bigger picture to be successful in any career pursued.
>So a deal is a deal, if one agrees to the terms of a deal (oral or written), it must be honoured
Sure thing. The deal was for an album cover. Perhaps $1500 in 1970s money is a fair sum for that, even for an iconic album.
Did the deal also include T-shirts, posters, and exclusive prints of the said cover signed by the band's front man?
That's where the contention is. Some people would say yes - work for hire is work for hire. Some people would say no. Pre-1978 copyright law is one side, later versions - on the other.
A deal must be honored - so it was, and then it was not.
Good point. I'm not familiar with the American copyright law, but you're right, nowadays in most countries even if a piece of art is sold to another person, the artist still holds the copyright (the right to make copies) unless copyright transfer is specified in the contract.
But another way to look at this is, if the artwork is commissioned by the company for commercial purpose - much like if someone is commissioned to create a logo for a company - then the copyright is generally transferred to the company.
In the absence of a written contract, one can argue both ways, which I think is why the lawyers didn't think there was a strong case.
There is I think a broader legal/philosophical question here:
Are we to judge the car's ability to avoid the pedestrian on human standards or AI/machine standards?
From the video, it looked like this could be a situation where a human driver cannot avoid the accident (due to poor light, not enough reaction time etc) but a machine should be able to avoid it with it having multiple cameras, IR sight, and much faster processing speed.
What an ingenius way to combine two seemingly 'harmless' datasets to reveal powerful insights! I'm sure there are many other possible/potential ways to combine publicly available data, hmmm...
"What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading."
A while back a friend of mine told me how her (great-?)grandmother in Malta used to do the laundry down the river as a young woman, and her and her friends used to dream about having a magic box that you could just throw the laundry in, press a button, and it'd be done!
Since I swithced to Surface earlier this year I haven't looked back. True, Surface is not as good as Macbook but it does the job and is much lighter to carry around as a full laptop (iPad is not a full laptop). Now with Surface Studio coming out soon it's a real challenger to the iMac. The iPhone is the only remaining reason I want to stay within the Apple ecosystem.
I personally don't buy high end products like the iPhone or Surface. I have used them for work, and pound for pound, I still prefer my Cyanogenmod OnePlus 2 and Chromebook running Debian. I get easily 8+ hours of heavy use out of each (12+ for my chromebook) and I have a far greater level of control over my data. If you look at some of the things coming out of Shenzhen lately they are hitting price points that allow almost everyone to own a relatively high end phone or computer (Remember this is what Microsoft used to be all about, they cut the cost of a PC to a third of what it was before them). That's what innovation looks like to me. Not some feature you will forget about a week after you have the device.
Life: Yes we can only buy food through WeChat groups to organise wholesale deliveries (2000 eggs, 200 cabbages minimum order) on hiked prices, but it's easier than you might think; No one has died from starvation (yet), but there had been a few cases of death due to not getting medical help in time; The city's resources are stretched - it's a city with 25m population.
Work: I'm still working 12 hour days online (we're a design & project management firm). I get to wake up 10 minutes before a morning meeting and be in my pajamas the whole day.
So on a personal level, life isn't that miserable. But it's definitely a very difficult time to the elderly and the ill.
Will I (or anyone in my shoes) leave China permanently because of this? I guess not, even though I have the means to do it. There are harder problems to solve in life than feeling terrified by a lockdown.