About 42% of our survey respondents would have sexual intercourse with a robot. Yet, only 39% believe they could have a romantic relationship with an AI. There is also a large discrepancy between men and women. Men are more open to both the idea of sleeping with a robot (48%) and falling in love with an AI (43% of male respondents).

https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-trends/

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of “cognitive ability” like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life.

Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, soft skills—personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. The larger message of this paper is that soft skills predict success in life, that they causally produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612993/

Amazon has now permanently banned over 600 Chinese brands across 3,000 different seller accounts,

Amazon says that’s the grand tally after five months of its global crackdown, and it’s no longer being shy about why: a spokesperson tells us these 600 brands were banned for knowingly, repeatedly and significantly violating Amazon’s policies, especially the ones around review abuse.

Statement

Amazon works hard to build a great experience in our store so that customers can shop with confidence and sellers have the opportunity to grow their business amid healthy competition. Customers rely on the accuracy and authenticity of product reviews to make informed purchasing decisions and we have clear policies for both reviewers and selling partners that prohibit abuse of our community features. We suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who violate these policies, wherever they are in the world.

We will continue to improve abuse detection and take enforcement action against bad actors, including those that knowingly engage in multiple and repeated policy violations, including review abuse. We are confident that the steps we take are in the best interests of our customers as well as the honest businesses that make up the vast majority of our global selling community.

Of course it has almost nothing with reviews that Amazon suddenly start being so caring for. But it has all to do to throw Chinese brands from all profitable sectors. But instead offer them to sell same product under Amazon own brands where almost all profit will go into Amazon pockets.

Marriage is like a tornado. Initially, there's a lot of blowing and sucking. Eventually, you end up losing your house.

(c) Some unknown guy.

If you don't know where you are going, you have to go there faster.

In order not to increase the number of unhappy people, always hit the same ones.

Why do something the easy way when you can do it the hard way?

(c) les Shadoks

According to the Financial Times, the Chinese authorities have banned alternative financial forecasts sites and other sources. In Shanghai, authorities have arrested 14 suspects of stock manipulation, deleted more than 17,000 Web entries containing "malicious information" and closed more than 8,000 illegal online accounts.

The Chinese authorities attribute the arrests to the fight against stock price manipulation, which is carried out on air, through instant messengers and other channels. In particular, a financial blogger with more than 5 million subscribers, Huang Sheng, was arrested, and his WeChat and Weibo accounts were blocked. Another blogger, Xu Xiaofeng, did not post since July, and blogger Yi Wei's Weibo posts were simply deleted.

It is believed that such measures will silence those whose opinions differ from the official government version. In this case, investors will be deprived of information about the real situation in the economy. An anonymous source also confirmed that China has removed household and company statistics and other data from the public domain.

The source also writes that now there may be only 10 people in the world who know information about the economic plans and decisions of Beijing. These are the President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping, members of the Politburo committee and some key officials.