oh, let's see why a person could become slightly riled ...other than the fact that you called me a liar, no real reason ... with all your great knowledge of the Internet you are so stewpid as to claim someone is a liar based on an email address in google WHICH YOU DIDN'T EVEN CHECK. Oh yeah, then you decided that becasue of the times I post at, I MUST be living in California and LYING about China ... sure, no one's liable to get upset by claims like that, what the heck, we all like to be called liars.
How about if we turn the tables, Bob ? how about if I said everything YOU have talked about here is a pack of lies ? *I* can come up with proof that I live in Huzhou. What do we have from YOU except a bunch of worthless bytes ?
Are you running away now because it's going to become painfully obvious very quickly that you are full of bear squat ?
I tried to email you a private note to exactly that email address ( snipped-for-privacy@pacbell.net) and it got returned by the mailer daemon. This is the message I received:
The following addresses had delivery problems:
Permanent Failure:
553_5.3.0_..._Addressee_unknown,_relay=[204.127.202.64] Delivery last attempted at Fri, 23 Jan 2004 17:02:05 -0000
Nope..I moved it to Martha's Vineyard so I could mingle with the rest of the hoi poi.
Gunner
"As physicists now know, there is some nonzero probability that any object will, through quantum effects, tunnel from the workbench in your shop to Floyds Knobs, Indiana (unless your shop is already in Indiana, in which case the object will tunnel to Trotters, North Dakota). The smaller mass of the object, the higher the probability. Therefore, disassembled parts, particularly small ones, of machines disappear much faster than assembled machines." Greg Dermer: rec.crafts.metalworking
Hamei, obviously what we have here is a failure at understanding.
And also quite obviously the failure is almost certainly my fault. As I initiated the communication, and obviously did a poor job at conveying my thoughts.
Unfortunately I have a habit of "thinking out loud", even on a keyboard. Am a touch typist, do not edit things I type, and simply type the thoughts that come to me as they come to me.
As a net result, unfortunately, my posts tend to be too long, as they often contain my thoughts and musings which often bore people, confuse them as to my meanings, and contain the trivia of a wandering mind still forming it's own thoughts and conclusions which are sometimes not even arrived at as yet.
So, I'll try to be clear.
First, Hamei, if I intended to call you a liar ... you'd be under no doubts of it. I'd have said you were a liar, straight out if that was the conclusion I'd come to. It is my way.
Even if in person, if I think a man is a liar, he'll know, because I won't say it behind his back, it'll be to his face. Whether he likes it or not. I do not ever bad mouth a person behind his or her back.
I did not call you a liar.
I was thinking aloud about the questions in my mind concerning whether or not you were actually in China.
If you do not know, Hamei, a great deal of what people claim and say on the internet tends to be rubbish, fantasy, and wannabe type stuff.
Thus it is my habit of never presuming that anything I read on the net is the truth. Almost an automatic reflex for me to question, compare one thing said against another, ask myself "Do these things match?", does what is said match up with some other verifiable source, etc?
No offense intended to you, Hamei. I do this almost always.
If I offended you, it was unintentionally, for which I apologize.
I don't apologize, nor retract anything else of what I said.
I asked about your apparent Pacbell connection. No, I did not ping it nor did I send you email. And I explained why. I tend to avoid sending any uninvited/unsolicited email to anyone, except businesses. As to whether or not you had an Chinese ISP in addition to the Pacbell thing, was of no particular interest to me. What I was interested in was the original question, which I've tried to clarify too many times now and both you and Sperho at first seemed to be sidestepping.
I was wondering 1) If you were really in China, and 2) if so how were you managing to use a Pacbell ISP? That was my question.
Simply having a Chinese server show up in the routing would tell me nothing about whether or not you were actually in China, Hamei.
I am much too old, and have been around too much to make any assumptions based simply on that. I have myself played that trick more than a few times.
And if you actually read and followed a link in one of my previous posts discussing the fact that China does in fact filter, block, and monitor internet traffic. You'd have read how Ben Edelman and Jonathan Zittrain, researchers at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, did exactly that. Going in thru backdoors in China to make it appear that their access to the net was originating in China, so they could test out exactly what sort of things were being blocked.
formatting link
I posted the link to that report in a previous post. I do note you have seemingly refused to address the matter. Or perhaps were in a hurry, and eager to ridicule me and simply over looked it.
FWIW, even having read that article, Hamei, I did not presume it to be truth as I almost never presume any single source to be automatically correct or truthful. Not that I make a presumption that someone is necessarily lying. But people make errors, rash presumptions and assumptions, form conclusions on partial sets of facts, and so forth. So I checked further.
As I mentioned in a previous post, all one has to do is a Google search on China+censorship and one finds a LOT of other, independent sources verifying the same thing. Nor are they all American, so it's not some US conspiracy to mislead people.
Am I still seeing black helicopters and wearing a tin foil hat, Hamei?
Perhaps I am. But that would surprise me as I am not much given to seeing things which are not there. And when seeing black helicopters ... or ghosts ... it'd be my tendency not to run and hide but rather to attempt to chase either down and investigate it,
As noted above, Hamei. If my intention had been to call you a liar, I'd have said that flat out. In a post, or face to face.
It was not my intention.
That's why I explained what caused to me have some doubts, to "suspend" belief without thinking you were either truthful or lying since I did not have enough evidence to decide one way or the other, and then to ask you.
If I'd been convinced you were a liar, Hamei, I'd have simply dismissed your posts altogether unless I'd had reason to call you on a lie. And I did not. Don't know you, ain't never gonna meet you, if you'd been lying would have made no difference to me as you'd not been using a lie to harm anyone, etc.
I read people's posts, in which they are undoubtedly lying all the time. 99% or better of the time it's simply not worth the time to bother calling them on it. To what purpose? I have to have a reason to even bother.
In your case, I couldn't make up my mind, so I asked. Because I was interested in the Pacbell link thing. Not in Hamei, not in his discussions with friends, or his arguments with others, not in his brags, stories, and so forth. Nothing against you Hamei, I simply don't know you and don't follow the group where you hang around. Someone crossposted a post.
I was interested in the Pacbell thing.
You answered that, with a reasonable answer. And I have no reason to disbelieve it. It fits, it's reasonable.
Add, that in your previous seemingly angry response to me you gave me a further clue.
I was not impressed about the naming of places and prices. Anyone could look up such things, it's not as if they're secrets, and some of the names were familiar to me.
But you did say one, minor thing which convinced me you are most likely truthful about being in China. Or if not, you've likely spent significant time around the Chinese.
Just as anyone could easily look up city names and places, typical prices of transportation and so forth. So can they easily look up a few Chinese words and phrases. However, there would be things about any language a person would not easily know or pick up on unless they'd actually been around the people speaking the language. In your post you used "dui bu dui" in the same context as one who is Chinese, or at least has spent significant time around them.
So my "suspension of belief", my unwillingness to either believe or disbelieve, has changed. I have no particular reason to doubt you any longer.
And I apologize for bothering you and upsetting you.
I think David Smith would do well to read your material carefully, and try to learn from your approach. I've now read all three articles on China, and the contrast between your interesting, thoughtful writing, and Smith's frothing at the mouth, is overwhelming. His lies don't go down too well, either.
What sort of responses did you get from the politicians? I'd love to read some of that material, or at least some sort of summary... Your questions take some answering -- in fact, they're of a nature where the lack of a response would be telling, in its own right. :-)
I wasn't questioning that he is in China. I don't want to check him out, I just wanted to send him a private note, and it bounced back. I asked him a bunch of personal questions, that did not seem appropriate for the news group.
He wrote me back with an alternate email address. So I tried to send the note again. See, if we are luckier this time.
I should mind my own business here, but this part I found mildly amusing :
A long long time ago, in a Universe far far away, Ed had some of the same common misconceptions we see others spouting cf China, machining, Milton Friedman,and so on.
Then Ed decided to do a series of articles about the situation .... when Ed gets into his job he does it right : we'll all have to admit that, I think. Over the progress of three articles, mention of Milton went down drastically but the big buildup was coming ... the culmination was to be Ed's discussions with the People in Power, the People Who Know, the people at Commerce who were gonna Take Action.
Then a period of prolonged silence.
Then Ed's quiet announcement that he no longer worked for a magazine that depended upon manufacturing ad revenues for its existence.
Possibly my inductive reasoning is as faulty as Bob G's, but .... I got the impression that Ed did not find Our Leadership to be especially reassuring in re the future of manufacturing in the US, at least as far as small to midsized shops go. And I haven't heard Ed quote Uncle Miltie once over the past six months :-)
Tom, thank you for your gracious comments. For the sake of fairness, I had an extraordinary amount of time to research and write each of my articles -- several entire months in which I had no other responsibilities but to write each one -- while David had about 3 days to write his. No kidding.
David is a fine journalist who came from Business Week. He had to rely on Congressman Phil English for the content of that piece, and there's a problem right there. There's nothing basically wrong with English, but he's a man in a vise, a conservative Republican who has to support free trade as a Party issue, but who has in his district perhaps the biggest collection of small metalworking shops in the US that are being beaten senseless by low-wage competition. When you get squeezed that way, it's like a tomato being squeezed in an arbor press: some funny-smelling stuff comes squirting out the sides.
That's just the way it goes sometimes in writing and editing trade publications on a deadline. We just try to suck it up and move on.
As for the response, I was just starting on that when I got laid off. Business is still desperate among manufacturing trade magazines in the US. I hope they'll pick it up at Machining and get those responses.
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