Re: Three Body Problem

On Sun, 18 Aug 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 8/18/2024 11:19 AM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Sat, 17 Aug 2024 13:42:46 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
 

On 8/17/2024 4:51 AM, D wrote:

  On Fri, 16 Aug 2024, Lynn McGuire wrote:
 

On 8/16/2024 4:55 PM, William Hyde wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 8/16/2024 1:26 PM, BCFD 36 wrote:

Awhile back, The Three Body Problem was mentioned. In that thread,
there was no mention of the current Netflix version. Was this
mentioned somewhere else and I just missed it? Google groups is of
no help any more.
 I have just started the series and I am intrigued, so far. Just two
episodes. My wife is rather "meh" about it, but she said the same
thing about Star Trek 1 which in reality she HATED so I may be
watching it after she goes to bed.
 ----------------
 Dave Scruggs
Senior Software Engineer - Lockheed Martin, et. al (mostly Retired)
Captain - Boulder Creek Fire (Retired)
Board of Directors - Boulder Creek Fire Protection District (What
was I thinking?)

 I did not like the Netflix version, have yet to read the book.  Too
much time spent on the China Cultural Revolution and their violence
against the educated.  Felt like a Children of the Corn mini
series.  I gave up after two episodes.

 I've known several people whose lives were damaged by that event.
And these were the lucky ones, who made it to the west.

 

 One scientist I knew never got over it, especially the abuse suffered
by her mother.  One might have expected her father, an educated man
who had lived in the West and still had children living there to be
as big a target. But he was left alone, she said, because he was a
renowned gerontologist and  the Party leadership was getting older.
  Another distinguished scientist told me he reached the last year of
secondary education only to realize that he'd learned absolutely
nothing owing to the constant meetings and demonstrations.  Ignoring
his teachers, he packed four years of school into one.  Judging by
his subsequent career, he kept up that level of effort for  the next
few decades.
  William Hyde

 One of my Dad's mainland Chinese grad students from OU lived with us
for a couple of years from 1973 to 1974 and worked for my Dad from
1973 to 1995. He came over to the USA in 1966 or 1967 and got a PhD in
Chemical Engineering from OU in 1973.  I heard enough stories from him
about growing on a farm in China, living in a cave, starving all the
time.  If our family did not eat everything at supper then he would
finish everything off.  It took my mother several months break him of
that habit.  But he never got fat.  He never mentioned anything about
the Cultural Revolution but I suspect it was the reason why he left
China.
 He was incredibly smart, he would give me an algorithm and I would
code it up in Fortran 66 for him in a subroutine and give him the card
deck. He was very submissive, he would never look you in the face,
would always look down.  He went back to mainland China in 1995 to
help with his sister's export business.  Sadly, he soon had a heart
attack and passed away.  His sister was kind enough to call my father
and tell us.
 I know several people in the USA who had to leave Iran when they had
their cultural revolution.  Mostly engineers working for USA companies
like Dupont in Iran.  I've gotten a few stories from them, grim, very
grim.  One of my classmates at TAMU disappeared at the midyear of our
junior year in 1980 when the Iranian Embassy in the USA sent him a
letter cutting off his funds and ordering him to come home.  They also
revoked his visa but President Reagan gave all those people green card
status in 1981.  He refused to go home to Iran since he was a nephew
of the Shah, he figured that they would shoot him the minute he
stepped off the plane.
 In other words, the various Cultural Revolutions are a little too real
for me and I do not enjoy reading about or viewing them.
 Lynn
 

 With this historical luggage I can never understand how people in europe
can insist on voting for socialists. Give them enough power and they
tend to repeat themselves. Just look at the socialist UK government now
cracking down on free speech. Very sad.

 Incredibly sad.  And the Democrat candidate here in the USA is talking
freezing food prices and making grocery stores report any changes in
their prices, causing huge paperwork and never ending bureaucracies.

 The presumed Democratic candidate for President (she won't be the
candidate until the convention chooses her) appears to be talking
about artificially raising prices and keeping them raised far longer
than the economic situation requires. And I don't want to see a quote
from 5 years ago on the topic; people's ideas change over time.
 I suspect you have happened on a Putin/Trump Talking Point and have
swallowed it whole. Surely by now you realize that these things are
useful only as projections onto the Dems of what Trump (and so the
Republicans, as long as they do not disavow him and all his works and
all his ways) would like to do. Which is fine in itself -- it's always
helpful to know what the other guys are planning.

>
Please do not lie about me.  This Aug 16, 2024 speech by Kamala Harris on Price Fixing is on CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/business/harris-price-gouging-ban-inflation/index.html
>
"New York CNN  — Food prices have surged by more than 20% under the Biden-Harris administration, leaving many voters eager to stretch their dollars further at the grocery store."
>
"On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has a solution: a federal ban on price gouging across the food industry."
>
Lynn
>

Sorry Paul, it's there black on white. Let me give you an example of what can happen when the government fixes prices. When I was young, the socialist state of sweden I was living in had one phone company. During me BBS intense youth that could lead to phone bills in the 100s of dollars. The socialists were proud of their government monopoly. Oh, and note that in the beginning only the governmetn approved phone was allowed, so no choice for you.
Then along came Jan Stenbeck, a capitalist hero who blew apart the government monopolies on TV and phones. The socialists cried, they fought, they ridiculed, threatened but in the end, the drive of this great man was bigger than socialism, and he managed to start his own private company.
Today, as a result, I pay about 9.50 USD per month for unlimited minutes and unlimited messages and 10 GB of data. This is due to capitalism.
My experience is that only people who have _never_ lived with the evils of socialism are the only ones who are in favour of it. Everyone I know who has experienced swedish socialism (unless they are working for the public sector of course) or even worse, the ones who experienced soviet style socialism, is against it.
It can never work and it will never work, and it has been proven historically to be so, and scientifically as well.
Please, for the love of god, abandon those ideas. They only bring death and destruction in the end, unless you are a socialist and end up on top. But in that case, as Venezuela teaches us, the 99% will starve.