The New York Times: “The Land that Failed to Fail”

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

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Another explanation for the party’s transformation lies in bureaucratic mechanics. Analysts sometimes say that China embraced economic reform while resisting political reform. But in reality, the party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant.

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. China created a unique hybrid, she said, an autocracy with democratic characteristics.

Philip P. Pan

If these measures of economic reforms and increased accountability have indeed contributed to China’s decades-long success, current trends appear to head in the opposite direction. In 2018, the year this article was published, Xi Jinping pushed a change to remove term limits for the presidency from the Chinese constitution, thus allowing himself to potentially become president for life, a consolidation of political power not seen since Chairman Mao. The business environment has experienced a considerable chilling, with state regulators intervening to restrain a competing accumulation of power. The strained relationship with the United States and Western democracies will probably encourage Xi Jinping to more extreme actions, more authoritarian control, entrenching his conviction in the preeminence of the Chinese model.

The Guardian: “The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing”

Perhaps the human silhouette that most embodies the 2010s is that of the thousands of cyclists working for the food delivery service Deliveroo, which was founded in London in 2013 and now operates in dozens of cities across Europe and beyond. The huge insulated containers the riders carry on their backs, like uglier, unprotective snail shells, seem to say: Work is a burden you must accept, however much of your dignity it takes away.

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Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping fit. The massively popular Hunger Games novels and films, about young people being forced to compete to the death with each other by a cruel, middle-aged elite, came out between 2008 and 2015. Intended as dystopian science fiction, they quickly began to seem like more like satire, or even social realism.

The worse things get, writes the American essayist Jia Tolentino, the more a person is compelled to optimise [themselves]. This can be presentational: a carefully maintained Instagram feed (the app was released in 2010). Or it can be physical. Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a tougher world.

Andy Beckett

Ironically, this article was published around the date when the novel coronavirus was first identified in China, a virus that quickly went on to spread around the world and cause the most significant disruption in decades. I am reasonably sure that, in another decade or two, what we perceived as turmoil and disruption in the 2010s will become a fond memory of simpler and happier times. Despite vaccination efforts, the current pandemic will likely continue for at least a year globally, and there is no shortage of other possible pathogens to emerge if proper prevention measures are not implemented. As for climate change, I sometimes think we have barely started taking measures to minimize the damages, and I am increasingly pessimistic that the world can act together to reduce warming.

Vox: “The problem is work”

It was also around this time that the 40-hour workweek became part of American labor law. Previously, workweeks in many jobs were much longer — but even though 40 hours was an improvement, it wasn’t based on what actually made sense for people with families or other responsibilities outside work.

Instead, it was based on the idea that the worker was a man and that the worker had a woman who was doing the reproductive labor in the home full time, Kathi Weeks, a feminist political theorist and the author of the book The Problem with Work, told Vox. This wasn’t true even at the time, of course — not for people of color, and not for most working-class families. But the fiction of a woman at home taking care of kids and other family members was the only way to make the idea of a 40-hour workweek tenable. If every worker was imagined to be doing all of this labor of caring for children and the elderly, Weeks said, policymakers wouldn’t have imagined that 40 hours a week is a reasonable standard of full time.

Untenable as it was, the 40-hour workweek just got longer as time went on. With the advent of technologies like smartphones and email, 9 to 5 became 24/7 — the ideal worker was available “any time, day or night”, Davies said, still with no family obligations or anything to distract from their “single-minded devotion to the employer”. Today, the average American works more hours in a year than the average worker in any other similarly wealthy nation.

And that ideal didn’t change when more women started entering corporate jobs, making families with two working parents more common across the middle class. Workers were still expected to give everything to work and to keep their families largely invisible — which led to high levels of stress, especially among working moms, long before the pandemic began.

Anna North

This issue is possibly not as dire here in Romania or in Europe in general, due to better protections for employees, but it is a widespread issue nonetheless. I have thought about it multiple times since the start of the pandemic, but for me the underlying cause is not ‘work’ per se, but how our society has evolved in recent decades to make us more interconnected and more reliant on support structures around us. Individuals have become increasingly specialized to perform certain tasks, while entrusting the rest to other people and institutions.

Vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge

Vertical tabs in web browsers have always seemed the kind of user interface idea that sounds good in theory, but never quite works out in practice. As most browser features, it started out years ago in Opera, until Opera abandoned its proprietary rendering engine and switched to Chromium. Firefox had several extensions for vertical tab placement, Chrome at some point experimented with a flag to enable them, but they never became a standard part of browser interfaces. Until, at least, Microsoft Edge started working on the concept, and launched a preview of vertical tabs late last year in the Dev channel. The feature has graduated to the Stable version of the browser earlier this month, so it should be currently available to all Edge users.

I have both the Dev and Stable versions installed, and I switched the Dev version to vertical tabs as soon as this was available, but I still browse predominantly in the stable version. I honestly did not expect to find vertical tabs this convenient and usable. Now that they are available in Stable Edge, I have them on most of the time. Having a visible button to switch back is extremely helpful, both to make the feature discoverable to users, and as a ‘safety net’, allowing people to quickly switch back to the familiar horizontal placement if they feel overwhelmed or annoyed by vertical tabs.

Wired UK: “Xiaomi is undercutting the whole tech industry. And it’s working”

Out-clucking the Colonel is all well and good, but Xiaomi’s shifting some serious product, having had greater year-on-year growth than any other top-five global smartphone maker between Q4 2019 and 2020. Diving into specific territories, it climbed to the number one spot in Spain in May 2020, overtaking the established leader, Samsung, and hit number two in Russia, with 23 per cent of the market in Q3 2020.

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In fact, this minimalism could be the common thread in much of Xiaomi’s non-smartphone portfolio that woos us the most. There’s an almost Muji-like, unbranded quality to some of the best Mi products, which, when matched with reliably competitive prices, is compelling for anyone suffering label-fatigue.

There’s plenty Xiaomi is doing right, clearly. However, the path to world domination isn’t guaranteed for any business, not least of all a Chinese one. US-China tensions play a part in its future, given the fact Xiaomi has been put on a US military blacklist, preventing local US investment in the company. This isn’t the crippling blow dealt to Huawei (the entity list Huawei is on results in tougher sanctions than the military blacklist), but it could still damage confidence in the brand.

Basil Kronfli

There is a vague sneering tone underlying this article, beginning with the byline, where the author labels Xiaomi products ‘half-baked tech’. This feels like the typical smugness of people who only buy Apple-branded gadgets. I own a Mi band and have used it constantly for almost three years, so from my experience the product does its job perfectly fine at a decent price.

IEEE Spectrum: “How NASA designed a Helicopter that could fly autonomously on Mars”

Tim Canham: Since Ingenuity is classified as a technology demo, JPL is willing to accept more risk. The main unmanned projects like rovers and deep space explorers are what’s called Class B missions, in which there are many people working on ruggedized hardware and software over many years. With a technology demo, JPL is willing to try new ways of doing things. So we essentially went out and used a lot of off-the-shelf consumer hardware.

There are some avionics components that are very tough and radiation resistant, but much of the technology is commercial grade. The processor board that we used, for instance, is a Snapdragon 801, which is manufactured by Qualcomm. It’s essentially a cell phone class processor, and the board is very small. But ironically, because it’s relatively modern technology, it’s vastly more powerful than the processors that are flying on the rover. We actually have a couple of orders of magnitude more computing power than the rover does, because we need it. Our guidance loops are running at 500 Hz in order to maintain control in the atmosphere that we're flying in. And on top of that, we’re capturing images and analyzing features and tracking them from frame to frame at 30 Hz, and so there’s some pretty serious computing power needed for that. And none of the avionics that NASA is currently flying are anywhere near powerful enough. In some cases we literally ordered parts from SparkFun [Electronics]. Our philosophy was, this is commercial hardware, but we’ll test it, and if it works well, we’ll use it.

Evan Ackerman

Interesting background on NASA’s most recent mission to Mars, particularly the large gap in computing power between the processors installed on the Perseverance rover and on the Ingenuity helicopter. It highlights the fast and steady pace of consumer chip technology, with updates coming yearly, in contrast to the long and laborious process of planning and executing a space mission (Perseverance was announced eight years ago). Hopefully NASA and other space agencies can accelerate this process, or at least combine large and complex missions with smaller and more flexible experiments, such as this first Martian drone.

Telegram Blog: “Voice Chats 2.0: Channels, Millions of Listeners, Recorded Chats, Admin Tools”

Voice Chats first appeared in December, adding a new dimension of live talk to Telegram groups. Starting today, they become available in channels too – and there are no more limits on the number of participants.

This update also brings recordable voice chats, rich lists of participants, raise hand mechanics, invite links for speakers and listeners, voice chat titles, and a way for public figures to join voice chats as their channels.

The Telegram Team

No limits on number of listeners, admins can record audio voice chats and publish them for followers who missed the live event, different invite links for speakers and listeners – Telegram Voice Chats has apparently introduced every feature missing from Clubhouse (and it’s available on Android too)!