“Pacific Time” means “whatever the civil time is in the Pacific Time Zone, accounting for daylight saving time”. So that would be 23:04 (UTC-7) as of writing.
If today’s date were instead 30 December, “Pacific Time” would be 22:04 (UTC-8) in Washington, Oregon, and California, while it would be 23:04 (UTC-7) in British Columbia and Yukon. Both would be called “Pacific Time” despite not being the same time, and both being on standard time.
The name causes confusion. Let me give you this example. What time UTC would “17:00 PT” be?
That question depends now not only on what time of year it is, but also where. “Pacific Time” now no longer uniquely identifies a single timekeeping scheme.
British Columbia basically did a similar thing by declaring permanent daylight savings time because, according to the premier, they’re no longer going to wait for the US to move as well before moving themselves.
Except now the situation is objectively worse than it was before, because BC is geographically in the UTC-8 zone, but permanent Pacific Daylight Time is the same as permanent Mountain Standard Time (UTC-7). Except they don’t call it Mountain Standard Time in BC, they stubbornly continue to insist they’re in the UTC-8 zone. Except they don’t call it “Pacific Daylight Time” either, they call it just “Pacific Time”. No “Daylight”. Despite the fact that their standard time is what the rest of North America calls Mountain Time.
They had four good choices, and chose none of them:
Decent idea, rubbish execution.
Driving a motorcycle at double the speed limit is far more dangerous than driving a car at normal speeds. That’s why driving a car at those speeds will also get you a driving ban.
I can say that I personally like prediction markets. They’re a fun way to waste $20 with your friends. But I don’t like the negative societal effects that they cause from the behaviour they encourage. And they most certainly are a form of gambling.
Court rulings can only do so much. There needs to be national legislation on this.
The risk is bourne by the public in three ways:
You can suggest things to your local Party members, that get brought up in local meetings. Then eventually these might make their way into the ear of some higher-level officials with the power to make it happen.
Or, you call a hotline and complain about something. A bureaucrat then gets working on it. The national hotline is 12345 to complain about things that aren’t working.
Or you post on social media and eventually, if the post becomes popular, Party officials see it and take action.
In China, they still of course describe it in broad strokes as political power belonging to the people. But when one presses deeper into it, it becomes apparent that unlike in Western liberal democracies where people can exercise that power through elections, Chinese people can’t. So they instead say things like, “Well, we have people’s democracy here, it works differently”.
Here’s a video I found which was on top of the Baidu Baike (百度百科) article on 民主: https://baike.baidu.com/video?collectionId=0&from=lemma&fromIndex=0&fromModule=lemma_top&fromPage=lemmaTop&isSensitive=0&lemmaId=291141&nid=15108339075742377209
It discusses the differences between Western electoral democracy and Chinese democracy, and the perceived shortcomings of the former.
I found his explanation of democracy in China to be reflective of fairly typical views of how people think China is a democratic country. And he uses the term 人民民主 (“people’s democracy”, to any non-Chinese reading this) to describe it. His examples are a farmer suggesting a welfare policy that is adopted by the Party and a food delivery driver calling the 12345 complaint hotline to get signposts replaced. To a Western viewer these are nonsensical examples of democracy; they’re basic examples of the government responding to people’s demands for public services. But apparently because Chinese democracy works this way, that makes it the “most effective, most genuine, most functional” form of “socialist democracy”.
Getting a bit off-topic, but I also wanted to take the time here to talk about the mandate of heaven (天命), an old concept of Chinese political philosophy. I think it’s a good precursor to the modern Chinese understanding of democracy and the legitimacy of governments.
The mandate of heaven is a concept that was invented to explain why imperial dynasties rise and fall. It essentially states that a dynasty has divine favour and a mandate to rule if it rules in a manner that is fair and just, and benefits the people. When a dynasty becomes corrupt and unjust in its rule, the mandate of heaven will be withdrawn and the people will revolt against it, and a new dynasty will rise up and replace it.
The concept is inherently steeped in traditional Chinese religious practices and beliefs which mostly are no longer relevant today. But I think that the mandate of heaven is nothing more than a religious way of spelling out the concept of popular sovereignty. When a dynasty rules for the benefit of the people, it enjoys the mandate from heaven. In modern political thought, we understand that a government instead derives from the people directly. But other than that, it’s the same thing.
The Communist Party claimed its mandate during the Chinese Civil War when it overthrew the old dynasty (Chiang Kai-Shek) and established a new one (Mao Zedong). And as long as it continues to enjoy popular support, it has that mandate to rule. I do note that notwithstanding all of this text, both men would have found it insulting to be referred to as the leaders of a dynasty. But what was then called a dynasty is now called a republic. The fact that the post of chief of state, be it emperor, president, or general secretary, is no longer hereditary, has no bearing on the fundamental nature of it.
Chinese people know what Westerners call democracy. And they know it’s not exactly the same as what they call “民主”. But they don’t have a word for it. Just like English doesn’t really have a word to describe what Chinese people call “民主”. I think it’s unfair to translate that term as “democracy”, as someone who speaks both Standard Mandarin Chinese and English, though neither are technically my native tongue.
If I were to coin a new term to describe it, the best I could do is “benevolent government”. But then people just accuse me of Orientalism.
And I do mean it when I say that Chinese people truly believe (whether that is a product of propaganda or not is a topic of a different discussion) that their system is superior to Western liberal democracy. For what it’s worth, I don’t agree. Living in a country that practices Western democracy doesn’t prevent people from voting in a government that does what they want, as the Communist Party reportedly does. But it does give you a choice in the event that it goes sour. And the Chinese people, as it currently stands, are kind of just relying on the Party to keep doing things that are good and popular. That’s not guaranteed to always be the case, and they can’t really do anything about it if it stops being that way.
民主 comes from Classical Chinese, where it originally meant “ruler” (of a people). It was repurposed I believe in the late Qing or early republican era to mean “democracy”.
民 means “people”, i.e. the population, the public. 主 means “host”, “owner”, or “master”. So while 民主 originally combined those to mean one who was the master of the people, it now is interpreted to mean the state of affairs where the people are the masters.
There is a related term, 民權, “popular sovereignty”, and also sometimes is translated to “democracy”, but it has a subtly different meaning than 民主. It comes from 民 (“people”, as before) and 權 (“power”, “right”, “authority”). Wiktionary doesn’t have the etymology, but I’m guessing it’s possibly a calque of Ancient Greek δημοκρατία (δῆμος, “people” + κράτος, “power”), possibly through one of the many European language words for democracy which derive from that, done during the late Imperial era, which is when many modern Chinese political terms were coined.
I’m Chinese. There is a difference between what Chinese people call democracy and what traditional Western political philosophy calls democracy.
In China, democracy (民主) means government which works for the benefit of the people.
As it is defined in Western political philosophy, democracy means that the people can control the composition and decisions of their government.
This means that a benevolent dictatorship which furthers the interest of the people qualifies as democratic under the Chinese definition, even though it obviously wouldn’t in the Western definition. Conversely, a government which works only for the upper class and a select elite isn’t democratic under the Chinese definition, but it could be under the Western one as long as it had free and fair elections.
Nowhere is this clash in definitions more apparent than in Hong Kong. For one, the city has had a taste of democracy in the Western sense through the limited elections it had during British colonial rule. On the other hand, China doesn’t see free and fair elections as particularly necessary to achieve its vision of democracy. The government is democratic as long as it does what the people want, in the view of Chinese political thought. Of course, the Western-educated Hongkongers would beg to differ.
This is just a sidenote, but the Communist Party is extremely popular in China. I believe that even if they opened the elections to people of any party and then contested them under a 100% fair electoral system with no voter suppression, nor use of security forces to intimidate opposition, I think the Communists would still win in a landslide if elections were held next month.
There are plenty of people filing individual cases as well alleging liability under product liability law.
The sheer volume of those cases could possibly cause major financial issues for the company even if each one costs only a relatively small amount.
The short, general summary of these cases is that under US consumer protection law, the maker of a product is strictly liable for injuries and damages caused by the defective design of that product. An example in ordinary circumstances is that a farmer who uses an herbicide that contains a toxic chemical, and then later develops cancer as a result of exposure to that chemical, can claim compensation from the manufacturer under product liability law. This is what drove the chemical company Monsanto (maker of Roundup) into bankruptcy facing billions in product liability claims.
So a teenager who uses Facebook and then develops mental disorders as a result of that use, has a personal injury claim against Meta.
Even if each individual case is only worth around $20,000 to $50,000, Facebook has hundreds of millions of users in the US, of which possibly hundreds of thousands of people could have a valid claim under this legal theory. And many people could claim a great deal more in compensation. If a person uses Facebook, becomes addicted, gets depression as a result, and then commits suicide, that is potentially a wrongful death claim worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Ambulance chasers to the rescue!
It’s about 2% of their annual net revenue per year for ten years. Hardly much of a punishment.
I’m not a big fan of Steve Bannon, but I think what he said about political power is among the truest things ever said about modern politics. These big corporations, they’re not so tough. The big law firms? They’re not so tough. But the state can be tough. They’re all gutless cowards at the end of the day that would crumble if even a fraction of the power available was displayed. If one truly takes power and exercises it, that would become apparent. Trying to play nice gets you nothing but lip service and pocket change.
Voters are dumb, welcome to democracy. But this should mean it will not be hard to win over their votes.
Well, at least we can agree on that lol. I hate Luckin Coffee
Never been to Luckin Coffee I see
Also there is no such thing as karma on Lemmy
The places I’ve been to either allow you to pay cash at the counter or they have a machine that accepts cash.
Because UTC-7 and UTC-8 are also wrong. The label “Pacific Time” means, in the United States and Mexico, the civil time standard that observes standard time at UTC-8 and daylight saving time at UTC-7. You cannot call this standard merely “UTC-8” because then it’s wrong half of the year.
It is important to note that by calling year-round UTC-7 “Pacific Time”, British Columbia and Yukon are the ones stepping out of the programme to do something idiosyncratic. The rest of the Pacific Time Zone (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, and Baja California) has a greater population than the entirety of Canada. There are approximately 56 million residents of the non-Canadian portion of the Pacific Time Zone, where standard time is UTC-8, compared to 5 million in the Canadian portion, which is UTC-7.