It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).
There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.
> Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).
The causality you gloss over seems to be more important than the causality you'd like us to focus on. The ships came first.
> and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner:
It still does. I have one going through my house too. The problem is nobody else knows or cares about those meridians. It's quite fortunate the US didn't invent its own, what with its zeal for being different. We're quite lucky to still have just the one.
In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.
Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.
"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."
We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.
I just got nerd sniped by the room map in the movie, it is a minor 30 second scene where the clerk shows the guests a map of the hotel so they can pick their room.
The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.
However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".
Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"
In an alternate reality, the prime meridian could have been chosen to pass through Florence, making 180° and the edges of the world map pass cleanly through the Bering Strait.
Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.
The prime meridian being the least skewed area of the equal earth and Robinson projections, with their bulgy nature, actually serves to make them both offer somewhat inconvenient depictions of places like Alaska and New Zealand and Japan.
Mercator is far more globally evenhanded in that regard, being a cylindrical projection.
Well, I'm sure people wish Africa wasn't so smack dab in the center, haha. But, you can't ignore it without making Europe also peripheral, not unless you exchange longitude for latitude and vice versa.
And fun fact, Ghana is the country closest to point where the prime meridian intersects the equator.
> One step is to stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims. Britain’s Employment Rights Act and Renters’ Rights Act open avenues of legal challenge for workers and tenants. Not only are they misguided, but ministers put little thought into how they would burden the courts.
Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?
> Rather than just handling locals’ objections, a new Ai-driven planning system could decide for itself whether a housing development meets a zoning code. Rather than processing benefits claims, it could devise personalised welfare interventions.
And this sounds like it's going to work just grrrreat.
> Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?
Yes, both of these pieces of legislation are extremely badly designed feel-good nonsense, which I personally hope will be shown to be so by an avalanche of claims automated by AI.
The employment rights legislation we have at the moment literally abolishes the market for labour - the final decision as to if your salary is "fair" is made by a judge.
>The employment rights legislation we have at the moment literally abolishes the market for labour - the final decision as to if your salary is "fair" is made by a judge.
Can you explain this? I can't find anything on this from a quick google. Employment rights act seems to say very little about salary beyond the minimum wage.
Ah, I see, an argument that there was gender discrimination in pay for 'equal value' jobs despite the actual job being different. I agree this decision seems like a bit of a strange reach, but it's far from saying it abolishes the market for labor entirely.
(Also, this is more part of the Equality Act, a piece of legislation that is in pretty dire need of redrafting for a bunch of other reasons, as opposed to the Employment Rights Act)
That has nothing to with the recent legislation referred to in the article. The principle (which I disagree with BTW) has been part of equality law for decades.
The reality is that curtailment of abusive zero hours contracts provided by the employment rights legislation was direly needed and renters desperately needed protection against landlords who would habitually jack up rents and kick you out.
These are probably the only two good bits of legislation done in the last few years.
The renters rights act has led to buy to let landlords selling up all over leading to a decline in property prices. It's hardly feel good - it means first time buyers can get on the property ladder easier and renters cant be kicked out as easily.
The UK rental rights don't really have rent controls as they're normally conceived: the two limits are rent can only go up once a year and that it must be roughly in line with similar properties in the market or area, i.e. explicitly rents follow the market.
The renters rights act is already seemingly leading to distortion in the market - it's not really the price controls as per se but the inability to do things when the tenant is in place.
Some landlords believe that because it brutally eats into their profits and because it's a band aid which addresses the cost of housing without magically fixing supply shortages that it ought to be scrapped with extreme prejudice.
"Sure, it would be a tragedy if I tossed the nurse out of her apartment but has anybody considered the plight of the junior investment banker looking for a place to rent who could pay me more?"
>People not being able to be evicted from their homes arbitrarily is a bad thing?
There's a counterparty to that transaction, and presumably has some reason to want to cancel it, so they're being harmed in some way. Even if you don't have sympathy for landlords though, there's still the second order effects where all landlords discriminate against tenants more, because they know that getting rid of bad tenants is going to be a pain. It's similar to the employment situation in Europe. Making workers harder to fire might sound like a great idea, but it also makes employers more reluctant to hire, especially if they can't easily get rid of them afterwards.
Does “The final decision is made by a judge” mean “workers rights can ultimately be arbitrated by a judge when escalated”, or “judges arbitrate all workers rights complaints”? If the former, i believe that’s reasonable; if the latter, thats nuts - and I might not balk at a statement like yours (“abolishes…”).
Yes the economist is arguing that. Most of the rights of this sort were granted under the assumption that most people eligible for the rights would not be able to actually get them. If they can get them, that will be extremely inconvenient for politicians who will have to deal with a large deficit, by either cutting back rights or raising taxes on the wealthy, both of which are career suicide for a politician.
The article is suggesting that there was an assumed dynamic in designing these mechanisms for petitions and claims - that there is a threshold of cost (time and effort, mostly) that the petitioner is willing to pay for petitioning the government, and that this cost is, at least to some extent, minimizing frivolous or "lets try it even if it's a long shot" claims.
When the cost of such claims goes to zero, that assumed dynamic will no longer work.
> Is the Economist seriously suggesting we should roll back workers and renters rights because AI makes it too easy for the average Joe to actually get those rights?
I don't know about the Economist nor about the UK, but in the USA most programs that could benefit the poor are specifically designed to have very onerous processes to qualify and requalify with the intention of discouraging people from applying and to reduce success rate in obtaining the benefit they are on paper qualified to receive.
It's kind of easy to abuse too. I think if you want benefits for life you just claim clinical depression which can't really be disproved. Welfare has exceeded income tax for a while https://fullfact.org/economy/income-tax-versus-welfare-spend... I think we may be a test case for UBI when everyone stops working.
A lot of "rights" were created with the assumption that they would be used sparingly and would never have been enacted if everyone was going to use them. You just don't have a working civilization if everyone is collecting disability, renters don't pay rent, and nothing can be built.
No : rights were put in place because poor people struggled to get them ; the governments then placed hurdle to "control" expenses. On garanteeing housing, the only thing that works to get people out of the streets is state controlled housing. But maybe getting things built is more important ?
The problem then doesn't have to do with AI specifically, it requires human intervention and vetting. If the problem is "someone submitted an AI-written request that got rubberstamped", the problem is the stamp, not the AI.
Interesting, your observation on societal structures changing is very close to mine regarding laws: A lot of "laws" were created with the assumption that they would be applied as warranted by circumstances, and I think universal AI surveillance and perfect enforcement of laws will be a huge problem in the coming age.
It's not a binary. If you expect to receive 90 meritorious complaints and 10 bad ones, a review procedure with no false negatives and 10% false positives will give you the wrong outcome 1% of the time. You might be OK with that depending on the cost of a false positive. But if the rise of AI means you get 100 meritorious complaints and 100 bad ones, and you apply the same process, now your processing costs have doubled and your error rate has quintupled.
But if it requires human vetting, and AI massively increases the volume of requests, then it also massively increases the effort to properly vet those requests.
There's neither a right nor a "right" for everyone to collect disability, to not pay rent, and to stop anyone from building.
The British state is being flooded with requests for things that people are actually entitled to, but enough administrative hurdles were intentionally placed in the way of to make sure that no one would get.
I think that's basically true, but the barriers exist because the state can't realistically afford a 100% take-up rate. Adding friction means people who don't really need say the extra £100 a month often won't bother with the hassle, while people who genuinely need it are more likely to decide it's worth the effort.
Obviously that's a very messed up and broken system. I'm not defending it at all.
The state absolutely can afford a 100% take up rate. It chooses not to for ideological reasons.
The usual reality with these kinds of payments is that the downstream social costs of not paying them - the strain on emergency services, increased crime and vagrancy, and other negative economic multipliers - are much higher than the nominal sticker cost.
But the UK and US particularly run on the moral assumption that the weak and poor must be punished for being weak and poor, because you can't be weak and poor without also being immoral. It's an entirely reactive and emotional mindset.
This isn't exaggeration. This is exactly the attitude you see in regular editorials and articles from the far-right press.
Someone has to get the big stick, and it's either the disabled, the poor, immigrants, or small groups who don't fit in in other ways.
You also don't have a civilisation if the extremely rich ignore climate catastrophe, sidestep democracy, and enclose so much of the economy that financial freedom becomes a distant dream for most of the population.
Renters and the disabled are not the problem here.
I think of the legal system in the US. It's easy to find statements about how the entire legal system would collapse if people stopped taking plea bargains because nothing is actually funded or operated in a way that actually guarantees the right to trial in any practical way.
Supposedly, there is a right to a speedy trial, and supposedly, if it is violated, they have to let you go without a trial. Don't know if it is really tested often.
We would run out of room in jails, hastily contract out construction for rapid expansion, and then people would die en masse in the shoddy camps the contractors deliver.
Of course they are, The Economist is to the City of London (the unaccountable pseudo-local authority that is effectively a lobbying group for banks) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. How dare the little people demand the same privileges the feudal aristocracy expect, as do the oligarchs assimilated with them?
Yup, the old ones are so much better it's not even funny. Crystal clear at times where you are and where you're going.
The new LCD ones loop ads and random garbage half the time. The other half of the time they often show just the next station, not the whole line with its interchanges etc.
Some decades ago they changed all the train and metro clocks from analog round clocks with arms to digital number clocks… its such a downgrade, before you could read the time from any end of the platform, now you need to get up pretty close. Maybe i need glasses as well… ahh age! (Also is it just me or have most clocks in public space disappeared?)
Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.
Price is not the only characteristic of a product (hence the mention of "strategic constellation").
In a "free market" would you recommend on USA to rely only on a Chinese manufactured essential product for its military (or the reverse, or Europe on Russia, or etc.)?
I am not against great private offers (be it rockets/cloud/etc.). But there should also be some "local" capability for some strategic products, so that if the private providers encounter issues (crazy CEO, tariffs, export regulations, etc.) you are not left without any of that capability.
They are right now, but if Japan can do it, and China can do it so can Europe and by the way, so can Australia, New Zealand and Canada they have the abilities they just have to have the will and if they haven’t learned anything recently, they better develop the will. Once again congratulations.
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
The fact is that no one cares about reusability. Expendable rockets are cheap enough for governments and commercial entities alike, even for constellation launches. Starlink architecture only makes sense as a justification for the F9 launch cadence, and even then the actual satellites are managed as trains.
China and Japan have done it. You may not like the fact they have done it once or twice, they know how to do it from a technical standpoint and that’s only gonna grow in the future particularly China don’t act obtuse.
I'm hopeful that SpaceX's success will lead to European companies following in their footsteps and providing some more affordable alternatives to Ariane's current wildly-expensive rockets.
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
Let's not also forget that NASDAQ changed the rules right before listing SpaceX... resulting in forced index fund procurement of sinking equity. Not sure how 'public policy' that is (arguably separate), but in reality global prime market listing rules are pretty high-significance effectively Federal or even international monetary policy. Well done Elon! Can't fault you for execution!
Yeah, this was pretty scum from my understanding. I think there are many things to criticize Elon about:
- Lack of free speech on X when it was a core part of messaging.
- DOGE / Data theft / corruption
- Election meddling
- narcissism
Just to name a few. I think telling the truth is important, which is why I have really been disappointed in Elon. It just irks me when we acknowledge a jr engineer is in "tech" and an "engineer". But we rewrite history to say Elon is a "non-technical business guy". People should admit it was an amazing immigrant story. A nerdy kid who was bullied all the time in apartheid south africa fled domestic abuse to Canada, eventually landing in the US with a scholarship to UPENN. He started 2 software companies that were amazingly successful and then went to give back via a passion for space, green energy and sustainable transportation. Then, because of various external and internal factors, he gradually became a serious villain hated by millions who embraced him. We don't have to invent some weird backstory that some relatively small stake in his estranged and abusive father had in a mine is the cornerstone of his success. If only I too was born in apartheid south africa to a wealthy but extremely fucked up family, I would be the richest person in America.
I guess it makes me mad because people don't value real success and overvalue fake success. We should want smart people to build companies and be successful. It is harder than it was in the past, but we can acknowledge that the American dream can still be possible, and should be celebrated. It doesn't matter that Taylor Swift's family were relatively well off. Sidenote: he was a wealth management advisor but people don't know what that is so they think he was Jamie Dimon. She still has an amazing story and we can acknowledge that. Yes, there was some privilege and luck, but she is extraordinary.
Tl;dr I guess I just wish we could be more honest and less likely to follow bullshit narratives. People are complex, you can acknowledge skill, hard work and the truth which will ultimately make valid criticisms go further because having a good honest reputation and dealing in good faith are important
Yes. Obviously, I wasn't implying he never benefitted from the government. It is just a wild retelling that he started a rocket company, solar company and car company to make huge amounts of money. Also, he was largely estranged from his abusive father since he emigrated to Canada at 17. I am sure he received help and money from his mother at points, but this idea he is some trust fund kid like Donald Trump. People really believe they would be as successful as him if they grew up being abused in an upper class family in apartheid South Africa. It doesn't make him a good person, and there is so much to criticism about him, that I think it actually detracts from legitimate criticism.
It's not good to take info as a personal attack.[0]
The most subsidized companies in human history by how long they've been around. it's worse than the actual military industrial complex (though both his major companies are heavily tied to the MIC as well)
I didn't flag your original comment. You're clearly very deep into identity-protective cognition and unable to discuss logically. You are taking criticism of a company very personally and getting emotional about it.
I looked through the link again and couldn't find a single one that is a contract and not a subsidy. Most of them look like this:
> Nevada has offered Tesla, an electric car producer, a subsidy package worth estimated $1.3 billion over several years. The package includes 100 percent abatements of sales taxes ($725 million saving over 20 years), real and personal property taxes ($332 million over 10 years), and modified business taxes ($27 million over 10 years). In addition, the subsidy package includes transferable tax credits: a tax credit of $12,500 per job for up to 6,000 jobs ($75 million saving for the company); a tax credit of 5 percent of the first $1 billion investment ($50 million); and a tax credit of 2.8 percent of the next $2.5 billion investment ($70 million). In addition, Tesla will receive cheaper electricity rates for eight years, which will save the company an estimated $8 million. Nevada will spend $43 million to buy the right of way for USA Parkway for the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, where the Tesla facility will be located (the amount is not included in the total). The state will also change its laws to allow Tesla to sell its cars directly to consumers, rather than through car dealers. Jobs are projected full-time permanent jobs at the facility. Investment is total projected investment (the company has committed to invest $5 billion within first 3 to 5 years and another $5 billion during the following 10 years). However, to receive the subsidies, Tesla must invest $3.5 billion.
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
If I drive my German-made VW sedan on American roads - how many people consider it an American car, and wonder if Germany has a real car industry or not?
That's 22k people with third level domains like first.last.name. There are close to 100,000 second level last.name registrations, which are not going anywhere.
I've had a .name domain forever and I had no idea first.last.name was even a thing, meaning that it was possible to register this without owning last.name.
That said, my domain is simply unusual.name, and everybody in my family has email addresses in the form first@unusual.name. So this is a no-op for me, and I gather www.unusual.name will also continue to work, since I own the 2nd level outright.
I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.
This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?
I feel that I more trust some corpo (Google, etc) that one particular person.
I don't imagine setup where you can effictevely guarantee them full privacy.
Some people in my family use it as their main address, others don't, it's entirely their call.
But yes, ultimately I control the domain and could be nefarious if I wanted to. But there's a certain baseline level of trust as a family, I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.
I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.
This is only a safe bet until it isn't. If she starts asking about your life insurance and hiding her phone from your view, you will know it isn't a safe bet anymore.
There's a document explaining how it all works, and I have Google's Inactive Account Manager setup to transfer credentials to my trusted contacts if I go permanently offline.
> This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?
I believe this is a very common setup: the "computer wizard" kid of the family manages the computers for the whole family. Not just emails, they have access to the whole computer (and have to fix when it breaks).
I manage the email accounts for the others in my household because it's free for them and I'm happy to do it. Plus, they trust me more than they trust a random tech company. Maybe that is not a universal thing among all families or parts of the world.
The implication, that one should make a plan for that, is a valid reminder not enough of us probably do.
But it hardly needs to be difficult. If you're running dovecot and postfix on a server somewhere then yes, family is screwed. But it's simple to use either some mail forwarding service that you pay for with a credit card, or something like fastmail (etc). Leave 2 pages of instructions for how to log into and renew the domain (print the QR code used for the 2fa enrollment!) and how to log in and pay for whatever the underlying services are. Place in a binder and label "Family.Name Email Management" and put it with your other important documents.
But more seriously, my domain and VPS is on auto-pay, so it doesn't just shut off the day I die. My survivors will have plenty of time to back up their emails and do whatever they want with them afterward.
Plus, the password for my computers and keychain is in a safe-deposit box if they feel like handing it over to a trusted tech-savvy friend of the family to shut down properly.
It was deemphasized pretty early because people didn't understand it.
It made sense to us because our starting point was an email service letting people share lastname.sometld, but we never got close to as many registrants on .name as we had users on the webmail service (we had a couple of million accounts on that when it was sold to one of Marc Cubans companies for a relative pittance in the aftmath of the dot com bubble bursting)
It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other.
Ayurvedic medicine is a similar idea from the indian subcontinent. Foods have different medicinal properties like hot/cold, heavy/light, etc and those foods interact with your body type (which itself is a confluence of three factors called dosha that everyone has but in varying ratios) in order to produce certain effects.
This is one of the things that makes the contemporary Chinese treatment of TCM as credible so jarring to me. Many people seem to regard it as some unique inheritance of their culture, but in fact it closely resembles many other pre-scientific medical traditions, including in the "West".
For me, pseudoscience is like comparative religions: historicizing it and situating it in a context alongside comparable traditions tends to deflate its persuasiveness. (Maybe some of that is down to temperament; I'm sure some people study comparative religions and are impressed by the patterns among them as though they suggest more universal or "deeper" truths.)
I think your contemporary "Western" bias is what is jarring you. In fact, the prevalence of these traditional medicine practices gives them credence in my mind.
Most people probably don't have my same view, but I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups. But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better. Maybe it's just placebo or a coincidence, but if it works it doesn't matter.
Similarly, contemporary western medicine has all sorts of blind spots, is vulnerable to lobbying/agendas/money, and doesn't offer much in the way of a holistic guide towards the feeling that your diet is aligning with your health goals.
This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
> But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better.
There's also long histories of people following folk medicine advice and being hurt by it. And in the case of TCM, the history isn't really that long; TCM as we know it is synthetic and modern, stitched together from various different and often contradictory or mutually exclusive folk medicine traditions. It reminds me of Enlightenment-era philosophers who tried to "rescue" belief in God by retreating to "natural religion"— they were of course accused of atheism!
> This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
Sure, you can espouse a kind of enlightened "separate magisteria" view of science and religion's roles in society. But the flip side of that is something like "religion (or folk medicine, in this case) can't and shouldn't provide factual claims about the world". And that's more or less totally divorced from actual practice of those things.
Of course I agree about the weaknesses of contemporary medicine and even of "actually existing science", so-to-speak.
But what you're describing here ("Any given doctrine isn't factual", "I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups") isn't really "credence" in the usual sense so much as affinity, interest, or a kind of "outsider's respect".
Any medical remedy not too dangerous, expensive, or inconvenient is worth trying even if the evidence to support it is weak. Folk medicine traditions are useful sources from which to do reverse pharmacology or other research.
But there are third-rate TCM "journals" churning out (sometimes deliberately) ill-designed papers. TCM isn't merely an operational framework and it doesn't limit itself to operational or practical guidance. It's chock full of extremely dubious ontological claims. (Mainstream actually-existing-science isn't free of dubious ontological claims about invisible entities either, but these are of a different class.) That's not just a different practice, that's industrialized counterfeit science.
Humans, it turns out, are capable of developing a lot of useful tools and practices even with no methodologies or bad methodologies. That's true, and the fact of it is kind of surprising and fun. But the world didn't outgrow pre-scientific folk medicine traditions like that of the four humors by mere accident or happenstance. And when you are familiar with a couple of such folk medicine traditions, TCM doesn't look like part of an alternate modernity so much as yet another outmoded pre-scientific tradition.
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