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Congratulations citizen! You have been awarded with a 600 FICO score for promulgating sinophobic nonsense. If you also prove that China is the Big Evil, you can get an additional 250 FICO score.
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I don’t think you see the irony in using the dead trope of “Social Credits” when an actual credit score exists in FICO and can be used to deny you housing, loans (and therefore access to education), jobs, and more. And if you think it’s just financial transactions, try looking at what companies like LexisNexis have on you that it coalesces into things like “RiskView”, or how much of a profile skip tracing agencies have on everyone. Then you have the profiles built on you by several government domestic (and foreign) surveillance agencies. And you have the profiles built on you by several big tech companies. Just because there’s not a single, unified, government-sponsored surveillance and consumer rating agency doesn’t mean the tangible effects of such disparate systems aren’t identical to what you claim happens in China (i.e., denial of services and access). It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 different entities controlling parts of the system if the end result is identical.
They’re obviously not fascist, and you’d know that if you were being honest about it and bothered educating yourself both on what fascism is, and on the realities of the PRC.
Also, it’s not “state capitalism”. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. They’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.
Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:
- Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
- If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
- Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.
Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.
So in theory they could exist anywhere in the universe somewhat close to a star, if the relevant particles in our atmosphere are around that star? That’s what I meant about the density distribution: are they spherically distributed around (all) stars, or are they only present in very specific situations?
These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.
I thought they had a small selection of possible decay products. Not particularly relevant to me at the moment, though.
As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.
I mistyped the mean lifetime, it’s actually 2.2 microseconds. That’s three orders of magnitude different, but from a (non-relativistic) view it would still only travel about 66 centimeters. I’m missing too much information to try to solve the length contraction equation (I don’t know its length, or its velocity) for the observed length. I’m curious here because they’re able to travel on the order of roughly 50 meters into the Earth, and from what I can find they disappear there due to absorption from the many atoms they pass through on that path. So that leads me to a question: If there is not relatively dense earth to get in the way and attenuate the muon, such as if it were produced by a gas cloud beside a star, how far would it realistically be able to travel? Since the muons on Earth “die” from absorption rather than lasting long enough to decay via weak force, they would, in open space, surely be able to travel far enough without enough collisions such that they do end up “dying” by decay.
Thanks for the reply, I am curious here about something that I don’t have enough knowledge to answer for myself.