It's a very old cartoon, one of the first featuring Mickey Mouse goofing around on a small steam-powered boat on an American river.
He starts by pretending to captain the ship, playing with the steering wheel and horns, before he is chased away by the real captain where it is shown he is supposed to be scrubbing the decks. The ship then pulls into a small dock and he picks up Minnie Mouse, who brings a guitar and music on-board with her. A goat promptly eats the music and guitar and Mickey gets the idea to wind the goat's tail like a victrola to play music, and a sort-of musical number commences where Mickey interacts with a menagerie of animals to make sounds that compliment the song. By today's standards, some of the interactions range from amusing, to distasteful and mean-spirited. In the end he is caught again and is thrown into the boat's kitchen to peel potatoes, and throws a potato at an annoying parrot in the window, which is a last minor victory of sorts before the cartoon ends.
Disney themselves cut a scene where Mickey grabs a sow that is feeding its piglets and slaps them away, before prodding at its teats and manipulating it as if it was an accordion. Apparently this was cut not that long after the cartoon aired.
It was interesting but I didn't enjoy watching it a whole lot with today's eyes, I must say.
Anyway, with all that in mind, the joke here is that the video is only the start and end cards, as Steamboat Willie would be quite short without animal abuse. In reality, some might be preserved, but this is a humorous point that there is a lot of it.
There is a lot of learned value here, but I am left with a sense that it isn't worth enduring such a broad spectrum of hardships and indignities for the individual reward. The emotional reward; the sense that you are advancing Chinese society, would also be discomforting, in that I have no love for many of their policies.
One can live comfortably elsewhere without accepting constant compromises at a personal and professional level. I would bet also that, as in Japan, one is always foreign, gaijin, alien, at the end of thr day, and this fact will present as a hard cap on potential.
Maybe it's covered elsewhere in another article, but this is a lot to endure.
Basically this. This is a constantly recurring story if you watch HN long enough. All these amazing free tools and services are liabilities. Use them with caution and have contingencies.
The people who need to be smarter don't trust either the government or experts to do it as they have oppositional defiance, or think it's population control or nanomachines. The people who are already quite smart are suffering from a variety of smartness related conditions which often results in depression. Tough sell.
"Oh thanks, I'm now capable of understanding even deeper existential nightmares. But at least I can memorize pi to 256 digits I guess..."
My brain is already overclocked via ADHD so I'd be worried what it would do to my limited emotional bandwidth. Nobody wants to me married to the smartest asshole alive.
Think they're referring to the people that refused life saving treatment because an orange man (that themselves received the treatment) told them not to get it.
Consider it thoughtfully left empty for your own interpretation, like a color by numbers puzzle. Maybe people who are tested via standardized means and found wanting.
Or maybe it's people who don't really believe in society and government at large, or people who believe in vigilante justice over rule of law. Perhaps people with fixations on self-armament but who never actually use it to fight tyranny when it comes calling. Or people who fixate on wedge issues like restricting access to lifesaving natal operations, or whether the federal or state governments should interfere in who can play in what sports league instead of deferring to the people in charge of the league.
Or maybe not those people. Maybe other people. Who knows! Not I.
The key point was that areas that test poorly for education correlate with low trust of authority.
> Or maybe it's people who don't really believe in society and government at large, or people who believe in vigilante justice over rule of law. Perhaps people with fixations on self-armament but who never actually use it to fight tyranny when it comes calling. Or people who fixate on wedge issues like restricting access to lifesaving natal operations, or whether the federal or state governments should interfere in who can play in what sports league instead of deferring to the people in charge of the league.
Kind of seems like a lot of words to say “fascists are dumb”, which is true but also a really funny thing to arrive at from the starting point of “there is a group of people who need to be smarter”
Honestly, I'm not american or a sociologist and it's not my place to comment on these issues in depth, even if I am disgusted by some of the discourse.
