Suixuan

标签：future

  • On Civil Servants

    Culture & Public Commentary

    On Civil Servants

    I’d promised two current-affairs commentaries plus two book reviews every week, but my habitual procrastination put me off for a whole week. Starting today, I’m officially kicking into gear. The commentaries and reviews may be very short in length; their main purpose is to keep me in writing shape. The long-parked conference travelogue will also be produced sometime in the next few days. Today is the day of the national civil service exam. I hear that this year’s number of applicants has fallen to the lowest level in five years. Perhaps that is because civil service pay has declined; perhaps it is because young people nowadays are increasingly opinionated; or…

    cultureChinafreedomeducation
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  • Bitcoin: The Nature of Money

    Bitcoin: The Nature of Money

    Bitcoin: The Nature of Money
    Web3 & Bitcoin

    Bitcoin: The Nature of Money

    Recently Bitcoin has risen and fallen wildly, and a great deal of discussion has sprung up as well. Of course there are those who strongly support it and those who predict its doom; in any case, this peculiar electronic currency has officially entered public view. In fact, I heard about this thing a few years ago, and at the time I also thought about joining the ranks of the “miners.” Unfortunately I was still too wary of trouble to pursue it in depth. More crucially, my insights in media philosophy were not yet mature enough then, so I failed to seize the opportunity. And these past few days, gritting my…

    mediaWeb3valuepolitics
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  • The History of Work

    AI & the Future of Technology

    The History of Work

    Richard Donkin: The History of Work, translated by Xie Zhongwei, Electronic Industry Press, 2011. Generally speaking, a title like “The History of XX” is always interesting, especially when that “XX” looks all the more dull and ordinary; its history is often all the more interesting. For history tells us that anything we have long taken for granted and found unremarkable has its own origins and development; by tracing history we can let our imagination unfold: is it necessary? Is it inevitable? In what other forms might it still take place? Recently, I happened upon this The History of Work, and felt it was quite good. Along with Technical Elements, Electronic…

    book readingtechnologynotesfaith
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  • “The Kingly Way” — The Road to the Supreme Good

    Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese

    “The Kingly Way” — The Road to the Supreme Good

    You can read this article as a continuation of this earlier one: Freedom vs. Equality—I Am a Right-Wing Socialist In that essay I expressed a certain resistance to “equality”: equality in the sense of a condition for freedom, or equality as the rules that must be observed for the game of competition to unfold—those senses of equality I certainly support. But equality for equality’s sake, taking equality as a principle, is not something I agree with. So if one does not champion equality, must one necessarily tolerate “inequality”? Not necessarily. One reason for opposing “equality” is that it is an overly abstract concept; in fact, equality always requires a standard…

    philosophyChinafreedomautobiography
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  • Some Thoughts on the Future of Energy

    AI & the Future of Technology

    Some Thoughts on the Future of Energy

      Today the science-technology-philosophy group discussed energy issues. I’ve jotted down some thoughts here. The present energy system cannot possibly be sustained forever; within a few decades major adjustments will have to be made, and this is beyond dispute. But how exactly to adjust it, and how to anticipate and act, remain questions to be explored. The usual modern Western mode of imagining things is Christian + classical mechanics. By the Christian mode of imagining, I mean a messianic complex: the belief that human beings will eventually be saved, that our fallenness and incompetence do not really matter, and that there will always be some savior who comes to save…

    philosophytechnologyHeideggerpolitics
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  • [Repost] The CCP’s First Time Writing “Ecological Civilization” into a Party Congress Political Report

    Life & Notes

    [Repost] The CCP’s First Time Writing “Ecological Civilization” into a Party Congress Political Report

    http://news.qq.com/a/20071016/001869.htm Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, October 15 (Reporters Cheng Zhiliang, Gu Ruizhen, Wang Pan) — In the process of comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, China has proposed building an “ecological civilization,” and for the first time has written this concept into a political report of the Party Congress. When Hu Jintao delivered his report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on behalf of the Sixteenth Central Committee on the 15th, he put forward new requirements for realizing the goal of comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society; among them was to “build an ecological civilization and basically form an industrial structure, growth pattern, and consumption model that conserve energy and resources…

    everyday lifeChinafuturestars
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