I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter.
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but generally people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion.
A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.
Come to Canada, you will be penalized so hard you'll wish the public health care system covered pre-crisis mental health.
The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.
At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.
Because not all societies enshrine individual freedom as their primary value. China has historically valued orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice. This sucks from a Western perspective, but it also means that a great many of the problems the West faces will never manifest in China.
There are very few absolute wrongs in the world and it's not clear that this would be one of them.
> orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice
I don't know, most Chinese people I've met are at least as selfish as the average Westerner, often more (and let's not even begin about the stereotypical "I don't care about anything" 60 year old Chinese tourist). I'm no expert, but while surely many Chinese rulers have emphasized these values, I'm not convinced that the population ever cared much about them.
They're a splendid list of values to drum up, though, if you're the one whose boot indefinitely stamps on your subordinates' collective faces.
I'm not sure how bringing up personal experiences and racial stereotypes contributes to any conversation, especially when it is about the entire population of China (1.4 billion), its culture, and its history.
I highly recommend reading about the mandate of heaven[0]. While not particularly relevant anymore, it is important context to the cultural attitudes of your average Chinese citizen.
> China has historically valued orderliness, collective well-being, and personal sacrifice. This sucks from a Western perspective, but it also means that a great many of the problems the West faces will never manifest in China.
To be fair, there's often a significant contrast between the way someone behaves and the societal values they espouse. In some cases they almost seem to be anti-correlated.
Chinese value personal freedom and do enjoy quite a lot of it, actually.
In fact, I'd say that Chinese society allows more individuality and freedom than e.g. Japanese society.
I am not defending anything. I find the trend of accusing others of defending something simply because they refuse to join the mob quite worrying.
I am just stating simple facts in a dispassionate way.
Considering the distorted way any country (and especially China) is represented in the media and in some comments I read here (including yours, which close to hysterical) the best advice is indeed to withhold strong opinions if you have no direct experience and knowledge.
I don't deny the drastic restrictions in force in China regarding Rights with a capital R, but again in practice they do enjoy as many practical rights as we do in daily life and Chinese society is in fact much less 'oppressive' than, say, Japan.
The way you keep track of my comments and your ad hominem attacks could be construed as bullying and harassment, by the way.
I don't really keep track of your comments, but your username and topic combination sounded familiar, so I checked to see if you were the same personn.
I think topical context with a commenter is relevant, just as my past remarks on China are. If someone wants to construe "refuse to reply to the content of arguments" (as opposed to replying on the basis of where someone lives) as bullying and harassment, so be it.
I don't deny that if you conform in China you have nothing to worry about. It's no warzone. But it is not a friendly country to those who are not conformists or are minorities, and may not toe the Party line.
As an example, the Uyghurs are a sizable group for whom are consistently oppressed by the government. This is not a distortion of any kind. We know about the intense surveillance (more intrusive than normal Chinese citizen surveillance), the "re-education camps", et cetera.
Direct experience can only serve to confirm or deny facts, it does not change them. It's also much harder for direct experience to be of any value without a free press to challenge government narratives.
Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
I thought that at first, too. Then I read that Apple was an outlier in reporting these figures. I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders (of which I am one).
Orders have been cut not once, but twice.
We don't actually know this as a fact. It is pure conjecture.
It is what a bunch of so-called supply chain "analysts" say, but they say it all the time, and are almost always wrong.
I wish I could be wrong as often as these Wall Street types and still keep my job.
The only people who whiff more often than Wall Street supply chain analysts are five-year-old softball players.
> I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders
There's no possibility of any kind that not reporting these numbers will do anything to the quality of the product.
They still are doing all the exact same amount of work to actually gather the numbers, since they internally need to know. They are only skipping the last step of putting that number in the report they give to investors. Nothing changes about how Apple is operating by not reporting that number.
That doesn't automatically mean it was a bad number, either, it could have just been a shift to avoid providing more information than necessary similar to the rest of their industry. But it's not going to do squat for anyone's day job at Apple, either. The people that would actually worry about that number still have that number.
The point is that by not reporting the number, they can let the number slip without pissing off investors. I am not sure how letting that number slip will lead to higher quality though.
My speculation is that Apple believes that people are lengthening their purchase interval on new phones not primarily because of cost but because they don't see the value. So, Apple is focusing on higher cost "1st year" phones which provide more differentiation on value to the old phones.
They also may stop just discounting the phones as they become "2nd year" phones, similar to the setup they have with the iPad and iPad Pros.
This both means more profit per phone to account for the decrease in sales due to lengthening time between phone purchases, and a bit more motivation to update to the next sexy 1st year phone rather than the cheaper models due to explicit feature differentiation.
Apple went on record as making their next environmental push for longer lived devices, now that they hit the 100% renewable energy goal. Given that goal and the performance boost that iOS 12 brought for older devices, lower unit sales are inevitable.
On the plus side, we might get a break from the annual IS APPLE DELIBERATELY MAKING IOS SLOW SO YOU'LL BUY A NEW PHONE??? stories, so it's a trade-off.
Their plan seems to be making it up on services and pushing app subscriptions over 1-time purchases.
> * Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
Yeah, this is interesting. I wonder if higher prices (to increase device ASP) for better devices (breaking the two year upgrade cycle) mean that we have now seen peak iPhone growth. For the first time in years, I have recommended old/used iPhones to multiple people over new phones.
On the other hand, Apple has increasingly emphasized services and complimentary devices in recent years. AirPods, Apple Watch, and Apple Music (to name a few) lock folks into the ecosystem and replace non-Apple alternatives.
> Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.
It's literally the shift every analyst has been clamoring for - revenue from something other than the iPhone. So while that is slowly happening, all anyone seems to look at is the top line iPhone unit number. A number that has become less and less meaningful over time because of the growing range of iPhone models.
Apple's guidance is always conservative, and their guidance next quarter is 89-93B in revenue. If you're keeping score at home, that would be another record quarter.
Yes, totally true. Apple did face a relative drop in the iPhone 6s year (2015) because iPhone 6 demand was so insane. It's possible that this year's results will be soft.
Which is exactly what I was talking about, and it is 100% true that they missed unit sales virtually every quarter this year. They weren't "unattainable numbers." They had beaten those numbers consistently over the years, but now somehow it's "unattainable." Ok. Despite what you think analysts don't pull these numbers out of thin air. They talk to insiders, they talk to suppliers.
Don't let EPS beats fool you, some of that comes from share buybacks or write-offs. Apple is/was buying $100B in shares back. For every share not in float, that raises EPS. Generally analysts account for this, but if a company has been aggressive one quarter on the buy back desk, they could get it wrong.
Apple is a great company, I don't get why people are so in denial that sales are slowing (that doesn't mean they aren't growing.) It's a natural part of the cycle. Get over it, it's something Microsoft went through too. There always reaches a point of market saturation. No need to fan boy over it.
It's not "their" numbers. Apple never provided unit sale guidance. Why is it their problem if analysts were bad at unit number forecasting? They beat EPS and Revenue projections 4 out of 4 quarters.
It strikes me as somewhat ironic that Nature would public this given that they recently tweeted:
> Editorial: The US Department of Health and Human Services proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based on the genitals they are born with. This proposal has no foundation in science and should be abandoned. [1]
That last sentence just absolutely boggles the mind and I'm not entirely sure how this journal retains any semblance of reputation when its editorial board is so clearly willing to put ideology over science.
It doesn't 'boggle' my mind. It would be helpful, I suppose, if you could explain how the last sentence shows they are 'so clearly willing to put ideology over science' - nothing could be less clear to me, although I'm far from expert. Otherwise it will seem like that's precisely what you're doing yourself, which I suspect is why you've been heavily downvoted.
To play devils advocate: I am against establishing such a definition, but I dislike when organizations that are supposed to be inherently unbiased and unopinionated state an opinion, even when it is one that I agree with. I feel like doing so gives potential detractors of said organization (like GP) more ground to criticize them on.
If the purpose of proposed legislation is to eliminate all consideration of exceptions, surely science demonstrating that exceptions exist is the pertinent factor, and not science demonstrating that exceptions are rare.
The last sentence shows that they, Nature, are seriously suggesting that there is something wrong with defining sex based on observable sexual characteristics. This shows they are willing to put ideology over science: the only reason to suggest such a thing is ideology.
> The last sentence shows that they, Nature, are seriously suggesting that there is something wrong with defining sex based on observable sexual characteristics
No. They are suggesting that there is something wrong with defining it based on just one particular observable characteristic.
There are numerous characteristics in humans that come in two forms or varieties, one generally associated with males and one generally with females. Many people end up with some characteristics of the form generally associated with males and with some characteristics generally associated with females.
For example, there is a response in the hypothalamus to the pheromone androstadienone that is different in males and females, and can be recognized on an MRI scan.
Another example is how "male" and "female" brains perform visual and spatial memory tasks, such as imagining how a shape would look when rotated. Males generally are better at this than females, and brain scans show that when doing this task males are using different parts of the brain than females use--male brains approach this task differently than do female brains.
Some people with male genitals have female androstadienone response and female visual and spatial processing, and some people with female genitals have male androstadienone response and male visual and spatial processing. In particular, studies have found that transgender people are often this way, with their brain having the responses of the gender they identify as rather than the gender their genitals suggest.
Are you aware of intersex people? This is why the editors of Nature are correct in saying the proposal has no foundation in science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex How do people with ambiguous traits at birth get categorized according to such a proposal?
"For 99 percent of us, our sex and anatomy dictate our gender; they are essentially the same thing. But for the one percent of the population who are transgender or intersex, their sex and gender don’t align. What has complicated this issue is that some outlets have replaced the word sex with gender when reporting on the memo, particularly when making any references to anatomy."
"But intersex people possess both female and male anatomy, which leads to having a gender identity that may be different from the way they appear to the outside world. To suggest that this group proves that gender is completely unrelated to anatomy, or that a person’s sense of gender in the brain somehow operates in a way that is distinct from the rest of their body, is foolish and erroneous."
Where would you put someone born with male genitals, but who identifies as female, and for whom brain scans show a brain that has female hormone responses and female processing patterns, who undergoes male to female sex reassignment surgery?
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.