If I end up in the massive email history of one of the most vile men in US history, please flush me down the toilet assuming I haven't already heavily invested in the Remington retirement plan
Then be careful to never do anything that is interesting enough or important enough that it will become newsworthy, or write any books or articles on interesting or important topics, or even posting helpful things on social media.
There are a lot of people in Epstein's email history who are there because the above kinds of things caught his interest, and he wanted to discuss or recommend them to others.
Same for me with buproprion. Night and day difference. Made me wonder how different my life would be if I had been diagnosed appropriately when I was a kid.
I think the line is the same as vapes/cigarettes. It's less about the product itself and more how its advertised and marketed. Internal memos from Meta are pretty damning in that they know they're actively harming kids and not adjusting their product for harm reduction. I imagine TikTok has the same problem, prompting them to settle out early.
We in the US have been so propagandized against China that even relatively progressive people that are completely against the Trump admin think China is an authoritarian hellscape. And while China is obviously not a utopia, I'd be hard pressed to find a metric there that hasn't surpassed our own.
China has no free speech and will start flexing its imperial muscle more now that the US is climbing down from the world stage.
China is alright if you keep your head down and you're not of the wrong ethnicity, locked up in a work camp and not allowed to have kids, or too openly gay or trans and so on.
The history of civilization over the past 5,000 years proves that China has never been an empire of foreign aggression. On the contrary, look at the 300-year-old modern history of the United States. Take off the tinted glasses of racism and savor it for yourself!
China has literally has been an empire most of it's history. It's like the 3rd biggest country on the planet. Just Tibet itself is huge and was absorbed into China not so long ago.
US is regressing on trans rights, abortion, etc. Free speech is under threat with the president “attacking” media institutions. You have daylight murder by federal agents followed by propaganda campaigns to blame the victims themselves or on the Democratic Party to create more political friction.
No one is saying China is perfect in these threads, we’re just saying the US isn’t necessarily better. Two countries can be shitty simultaneously.
Two countries can be shitty but the US hasn’t yet put a million of its citizens in jail because of ethnicity. Maybe going there in the future. That won’t white wash what China is.
It would not be higher in total if you included the estimated number of Uyghurs detained in internment camps. Even considering that, there are a couple other factors that don't make the numbers you presented mean much.
One factor is that the U.S. is the 3rd largest by population and will always skew higher in total prisoners than many other countries.
The other factor which explains the relatively high incarceration rate within the country's population is the investment into policing and reporting. We can take a city like Shanghai for example. They had a population size of around ~24m+ in ~2018-2019 [1] but only had 50k cops [2] (I couldn't find citable numbers for today but the data isn't too outdated). New York City, in comparison, has a current current population size of around ~8m [3] with 33k cops [4].
The 2 countries bigger than the U.S., India and China, also historically have had less investment in law enforcement, especially in rural areas [5][6].
The point was that the US touts itself as a free country while having many perverse incentives and mechanisms oppressing part of its citizenry. There's a veneer on top of it of individual freedoms compared to a state like China but in reality it can be as brutal against its population as any totalitarian state, it's just that the power to subjugate and oppress isn't centralised and is more diffused through its institutions across history.
It's not too far in history that the US was deploying the National Guard to fire live ammo against protesters, American police has military-grade equipment deployed against their citizens, I think it makes it even harder that the oppressive power isn't centralised since to uproot this there are countless battles to be won for any change to happen. It's institutionalised, any big institution is really hard to change.
US is quickly heading the direction of China, but China is much much further along the path of authoritarian hellscape: no free speech at all, no freedom of the press, all social media is heavily censored, and the GFW allows government control of the Internet (yes, I know, VPNs exist, but they can be shut down and aren't even on the radar of the vast majority of the population.) All this was already the case in 2017 when I left China and it's even more controlled now (COVID only increased government controls). You don't see this as a foreigner, but as a Chinese you absolutely do. Trust me when I say it's still, even with the current wanna-be dictator and his white supremist minions, much worse than the US in terms of freedoms.
On the other hand, China doesn't suffer from the US' current bone-headed anti-Science and "climate change is a hoax" nonsense, and have a much clearer understanding of where they need to continue investing in order to become the world leader economically and even politically, which Trump in his stupidity is handing them on a silver platter. So in that sense they are far ahead.
China is also of course much smarter when it comes to foreign policy, though Trump has set such a low bar that even a monkey could do better.
I'd rather not live in either country, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the US and it's not even close.
I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.
(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
And lets not forget that its only 22% of the total amount of people who live here. A large minority of potential voters are disenfranchised and do not vote. The government isnt just without a mandate it is extremely unpopular.
China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
Geely is Volvo's parent company but Volvo still designs and manufactures its cars. Geely gets to benefit from Volvo technology for its own Chinese brands.
Just like Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover but it doesn't mean India is "pumping out world-class cars".
I left China in 2017 so my info is a little dated but unless there was a _giant_ leap in quality I wouldn't trust a Chinese car any more than I trust other Chinese products (products made to spec in China is a different matter altogether). And when I was there anyone in China who could afford a foreign brand wasn't buying Chinese brands either.
It's not that Chinese are incapable of making great products, but cutting corners and crappy customer service is deeply embedded into their business culture. Things are changing but there's still a long way to go.
> It's the manufacturer's principal's bid and proposed criteria that are key.
Agreed. And Chinese brands are, on the whole, more concerned with cost than quality. Things are made to look shiny on the outside with a great "spec list", but are crap on the inside.
Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.
> It’s just objective fact that BYD along with Tesla are world class cars
World class propaganda maybe. Cars definitely not.
I'll give China the Volvo brand. I can see the quality difference at any car show. I remember seeing some other nice looking Chinese cars but BYD (and Tesla for that matter) are objectively awful.
They’re still world class cars as they sell well everywhere in the world. The quality compared to some other smaller brands are not really important criteria in that context.
The true problem is that it happens no matter who is in charge. It's like that old phrase about weapons that are invented are going to be used at some point. The same thing has turned out to be true for intelligence tools. And the worst part is that the tools have become so capable, that malicious intent isn't even required anymore for privacy to be infringed.
From everything we are seeing, the tools are not actually that capable. Their main function is not their stated function of spying/knowing a lot about people. Their main function is to dehumanize people.
When you use a computer to tell you who to target, it makes it easy for your brain to never consider that person as a human being at all. They are a target. An object.
Their stated capabilities are lies, marketing, and a smokescreen for their true purpose.
This is Lavender v2, and I’m sure others could name additional predecessors. Systems rife with errors but the validity isn’t the point; the system is.
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