The problem with recovery rates is that they different by orders of magnitude across different borrowers and credit products (for example car loans are around 70%, industrials are a bit loweer at 40%-50%, and high yield credit cards are single digits) so if you have a random sample of credit products in a portfolio it will approximate 40%. What generally happens is that the bank will sell it off to a specialist distressed investor long before the bankruptcy event so 40% is both wrong and not a horrible number to go by.
And they still don't have clean tap water. Like anywhere. Even tier 1 cities. Outside of a few routes The high speed trains are less convient than airports (but due to subsidies much cheaper). Quality of construction is horrible and by local standards house prices are extremely high. Basic Healthcare is pretty good but many procedures (i.e. hospitalization) are out of reach for the majority of the population. White collar Fraud is rampant (my friend had his bank account frozen because his name sounds like someone else). Their top tier apps are often crashing (seriously Chinese people have all sorts of tricks to force reboot an app) and overall not up to western standards.
China is great but it is still a middle income country like Thailand or Malaysia. It's sheer size means that there will be pockets of innovation in a sea of what is overall suboar by western standards. There is definitely things that the west can learn from china (like the value of hard work and getting things done) and some of their tech (like batteries ) is leading edge but we have to put things in perspective. Every civilization will have it's advantages and disadvantages. There is no superior system. For the west (especially Europe) we need to embrace change. That is something that the Chinese truly lead the world.
I think people are putting far too much of an ideological lens on this ruling. As a "matter of law" this seems like the right decision. The supreme court is not a board of dictators making societal decisions based on their flavor of the day. Their job is too see if the ruling is consistent with all other laws we have and the normal function of a modern society. Pushing the envelope one way or another is not their job even if they end up doing that. At the end of the day the (elected) state governments have decided to create a policy that reflects what their constituents want. The supreme court job is not to question the logic of that. They did not run for office or win elections. They just need to make sure that what being done is reasonable and not violating any existing laws. As a tech guy I think these laws are stupid but this case was not the right hill to die on. What needs to happen is that these laws get enacted, costs and unintended consequences happen and THOSE parties sue on the supreme court on that basis
This would be all correct if we didn’t have one particular set of laws above the others – the constitution. And it is unclear if rights guaranteed by constitution (freedom of speech in this case) aren’t infringed by this particular law. There is no such thing here as “if they passed a law let it be”. It can be true if they passed the constitution amendment but they obviously didn’t.
Now we can talk about real issue here - how correct the trade off the court is taking between freedom of speech infringement and this law. And as you can see in original post - author there thinks this trade off was taken wrongly by the court. I, personally, think the same.
A similar thing happened to our condo. Fannie and Freddie wouldn't touch it despite no obvious outstanding issues. We didn't have a problem finding lenders who would give us a non conforming loan.
I guess “high censorship” is subjective, but you can’t protest without a police permit, media organizations are licensed by the government, certain foreign media have been effectively banned when when they made statements the government didn’t like, you can’t put on a play without script approval by the government, all movies are presented by the government, and libel laws have been used to bankrupt political opponents, forcing them out of government.
> Singapore is not a high censorship/low freedom society
Singapore constrains freedom quite substantially.
Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.
Deeper Analysis of Political Rights and Civil Liberties:
this literally a perfect example. your idea of NK is based mostly on reporting that is biased, propaganda, etc. and here you are mocking people who doubt any of that. lol. im not saying NK is secretly good but i think you would discover a lot of things that you didnt know. especially regarding how things got the way they are.
actually, no I wouldn't, because when a Westerner goes to NK, he or she is strictly controlled as to what they can see. In particular, no citizen will talk unguardedly to you because of their intense fear of the police.
If you think that's not true, why don't you tell us about your trip there (you did take one, didn't you?)
what a fool you are. take for example the markets. the markets in NK are a thriving fixture of everyday life. they are also completely illegal. people cross the border into china frequently. there is a huge underground in NK but people who only consume american propaganda only learn about the NK police. there is more to the picture.
You still haven't told us whether you've been there or not.
As for the Western picture of it: it comes largely from NK citizens who've escaped. Call it "propaganda" if you like, but if it were false then there would be a net inflow of people who are as hip to reality as you think you are. Is there?
South Koreans would be trying to move IN if you were correct; after all, they're closer than anyone and they speak the language.
There are lots of authors and journalists who either go there, or interview people who escaped. I think we learn a lot more from them than we would by taking a heavily curated tour of pre-screened sites.
i read that book a couple years ago. the broad strokes tend to be accurate but obviously people understand north korea as much as they understand italy based on Italian tropes.
They probably got tipped off by something else that triggered a deeper investigation. It is not economical to do x-ray spectrometry on every single machine part leaving HK.
There are several paths to discovery here, none perfect, but is a swiss cheese hole method for tripping suspicion.
\0 Social tipoff - did somebody snitch in advance?
\1 Behavioural - is the sender a regular dealer in machine goods | compressors | etc .. a financial accountant suddenly transfering compressors is a behavoural spike.
\2 Consistencey WRT thousands of items per day ... does this load weigh the same as other loads on a pallet with the same Bill of Loading?
\3 Actual Tomography - it's easier than many might think to calculate a rough volume at speed via either X-Ray and|or paired oblique laser scans .. combine that with conveyer weight sensor and you have a density ... see \2.
All these things raise flags .. depending on the number and types of flags per hour, things may or may not get a closer look.
It's not economical to have a person walk up to every package with an XRF gun, but it feels like it ought to be possible to do this in bulk. Maybe use high intensity XRay to quickly capture an overview image / tomograph of each container and then follow up with lower intensity on areas of interest to tease out the spectrum. Is the best way to capture X-Ray spectra still to choke down intensity to the single-photon regime, watch the size of each scintillation event in the detector, and assemble a histogram? In any case, the best way can't be worse than the old way, and the old way is probably viable as a second automatic step in a two step process.
Come to think of it, airport luggage inspection happens at high throughput. Surely they could scale that up from suitcases to containers?
Of course, "physically possible" doesn't mean "politically possible given the budgets involved" which in turn doesn't mean "has actually happened." I'm mostly fishing here to see if anybody knows things about high-throughput X-Ray screening.
When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark during World War II, Niels Bohr and George de Hevesy dissolved Max von Laue's and James Franck's Nobel Prize medals (entrusted to Bohr for safekeeping) in aqua regia. After the war, Hevesy found the flask of dissolved gold undisturbed, and precipitated the gold for the medals to be recast.
Sure, but would it still be enough to make converting, transporting, and converting it back to purer gold economically viable?
I mean by that logic you could also have a couple of mules wear expensive jewelry or watches or the like; if it's convincing enough that someone wears a $500K watch as personal effect then they wouldn't be flagged for inspection.
In theory anyway, I don't know how these things work in reality. I wonder if someone's financial status is pulled up at passport control.
I don't believe it's uncommon for rich people to travel coach though.
