Not all costs are monetary. The long term ramifications of our businesses cow-towing to mass-murdering authoritarians is far greater than potential profits.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. You seem to have been doing that a lot, and it's not cool here. Please review the site guidelines and note: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Its important to be civil, and not point out the fact that the CCP have murdered millions of people. That would definitely be an uncivil flamewar comment.
No, it's important to be kind and thoughtful, avoid calling names, post substantively, and do the other things that site guidelines ask. They aren't hard to understand:
He's talking about China, don't be obtuse, America, while being horrendous abroad, is no where near as bad as China would be in Americas position if the treatment of their own subjects is any indication.
Show me evidence of China travelling to other countries and kill millions of people like the United States. As a non-citizen of China, I am not worried about social credit system and any monitoring that happens in China. Every country does have some human rights violations. I am worried about a country that thinks they can travel to any country and bomb civilians when they want to loot their resources.
I have a feeling you're not going to want to admit this, but the current administration is actively reversing that policy. Also look into what China is doing economically in Africa and you might be reminded of pre-Gulf War America in the Middle East.
I live in an African country. I know what China is doing in my country. This is what they are doing -> Investing billions of rands and they never supported an unjust government like US which was sponsoring apartheid government in my country and listed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist for fighting against their favourite government which was oppressing black people in their own country.
I pointed out to you what China is doing economically in an African country that I live in. Also pointed out what US has done recently in my country and continue to do. I wouldn't mind if someone feels I am inferior but leave me alone. I have a problem with a country that acts holy but was sponsoring oppression of people in my country and continues to sponsor oppression of people of many other countries in this day and age. China is the least of my worries.
Firstly, I belong to a minority tribe in SA. That tribe is called Venda. Just over a million people out of around 55 million people. Secondly, no group of people is being oppressed in SA. China isn't interested in regime change or looting of African resources like the West. No record of them sponsoring wars and genocides, for profit.
> I have a problem with a country that acts holy but was sponsoring oppression of people in my country and continues to sponsor oppression of people of many other countries in this day and age.
The ANC have anything but a clean past. Are the Chinese not sponsoring oppression of any people in your country or are they potentially sponsoring the oppression of a minority that you don't belong to? I would dig deeper before making such blanket statements.
Flamewar comments and personal attacks like this will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines and either make kind, thoughtful posts to HN, or no posts to HN.
OK, are you going to post about the many US atrocities as well? Slavery, extermination of the indigenous population, redlining, Jim Crow, exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, etc. Keep in mind this isn't even counting what the USA does abroad.
China is bad, but USA is bad too. Make no mistake.
Everything from that list is from within the last 60 years. While China was murdering between 60 to 100 million of its citizens, America passed the Civil Rights Act.
I don't have too much time to educate you on these things but just to note:
Re: "60 to 100 million of its citizens" is just straight up wrong. There was a Great Famine in China* - Mao did not murder up to 100 million citizens. Are you serious? Your own source says as much.
Re: Social Credit System (SCS) - By pretty much every metric the SCS has not resulted in massive discrimination on the scale of racism and sexism in the United States. However this may change. But for now this is not really relevant in terms of making a comparison.
Funny enough I don't really like China that much (or any large country) for a variety of reasons, but your reasoning is both absurd and factually incorrect. It's literally propaganda. Please educate yourself before making outlandish claims. China murdered 60 to 100 million of its citizens? Jeez - the American education system is an embarrassment.
* Though the famine should not and cannot be compared to murder, anyone who has read the literature probably knows that Mao's overzealous policies during the period probably increased the death toll, but even so that cannot be said to be "murder". Saying such is propaganda and more importantly, wrong.
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Also, to say American passed the Civil Rights Act without mentioning the Civil War is silly. The Civil War killed about 2% of the USA population. So if America was the size of China (which it wasn't), that would be like 12 million people dying, approximately half of the population generally accepted to have died during the 1960 in China (during the Great Famine).
I won't bother comparing Xinjiang to Guantanamo Bay...
Mentioning the Civil War is ridiculous. It was a war that happened 150 years ago, and it resulted in the end of slavery in America. It's not like it was an act of oppression.
And by all accounts the situation in Xinjiang is much worse than Guantanamo Bay. To start, Guantanamo Bay at its peak had under 800 people imprisoned. Xinjiang re-education camps are estimated to hold 1-3 million people. So the scale is massively different. It's hard to know exactly what happens in the camps, but the reports of torture and organ harvesting don't paint a rosy picture.
They do that to teach them English culture and the language, since china is an export economy. They already had a proper education in China before they ever show up. Unless they're at an elite school, the work is relatively easy, so they can focus on language.
It's important to note that America didn't pass the Civil Rights Act, it was forced to pass it by an unjustly subjugated population that had revolutionary potential. As a white settler state, America would have been fine to keep on going with an internal colony as far as it could have--this is literally the major precursor of the civil war.
I believe that stat is only true for Chinese people that are in prisons and have been convicted of crimes. If you count ALL people being held against their will (e.g. including the Xinjiang "Reeducation" camps), China has more than the US.
China is coy about the actual numbers, but US Asst Sec of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs estimates that as many as 3 million people are being held in the reeducation camps (link below). That alone is already more than the total US prison population. Even if you prefer to go with the more conservative estimates (which are mostly around 1-2 million), that's more than the US prison population when combined with the 2 million or so Chinese in traditional prisons.
What about it-ism doesn't get us anywhere. The US is bad but has aspirations, historical, theoretical and actual of recognizing mistakes and doing better. Among many things we recognize today in the us is that it was wrong to imprison Japanese people in the US in ww2, Jim Crow laws were wrong, slavery was wrong and we changed the constitution to deal with it (and fought a war), changed laws against Jim Crow type things.
The us has owned up to a lot of historical mistakes. China? Not so much.
I don't see China saying they can let Tibet go back to the way it was before they invaded. I don't see them agreeing to disagree with Taiwan. I don't see them letting HK go away and be free, when it's clear a significant number of people there want there. And then they have re-education/concentration camps for their Muslim minority. That's a clear attempt a genocide and destruction of their culture. The us did this against native americans to our everlasting shame. At least we have made some attempts to deal with that mistake.
What aboutism is wrong, so it's fine we're losing 4bn because of this issue, not fixing our society, and pretending it's ok just because china's not fixing theirs either.
This is false. Energy, money, time and resources are better used focusing on domestic concerns that can easily be resolved, not foreign matters.
The USA has never owned up to anything without violent protests, and as you say yourself, a war. China will have the same growing pains I'm sure. I won't bother list what USA has done in foreign nations, but suffice it to say it's pretty bad.
The point is that people don't actually care about the bad things, it's just typical anti-China sentiment being fed by major publications.
git commit --fixup 6138D3A
git rebase --autosquash --interactive origin/master
to keep a clean history of cohesive commits. Rarely do I change _everything_ required for an objective in one go, I still like to commit as I work, I just like the finished product to _seem_ like I did it in one go, for future maintainers' sake.
And I rebase to catch up with upstream, I can't stand having intermediate merge commits in my history and rebasing lets you resolve conflicts as they're introduced, instead of an all-at-once at the end.
Wow, I always love when a git/shell elder comes along and shows me something like this. I didn't know about `git -c` before, I'm assuming it's setting per-command config values? I've also not used/seen `!_()` before... I'm assuming it's introducing something like an anonymous function and calling it at the end... but why not just break out the body of the function and execute it directly in the alias? Does it help with error propagation?
git will append all remaining command line arguments to the end of the aliased command. Therefore `!f() { ... }; f` is the usual style for this kind of git alias to get access to the arguments as needed with $1, $2, etc. in the shell function.
If you've never done a side project, I would definitely recommend the experience. That being said, the people I know who always have to have something software and/or business related on the side are stretched thinner than anyone else I know.
I've gotten the most mileage out of the extracurricular pursuits that have the least to do with programming - usually those around art or sports. When I have an interesting idea for a technical side project I pursue it, but when I was in a phase where I felt obligated to do so, it brought more stress than enjoyment.
Something I like to do to minimize this effect is to forward my calls to a dumphone whenever I don't need the smartphone.
My family uses alternative messaging with me while I'm at work and you'd be surprised how people really don't care if you don't text them back until the end of the day.
When I get home, the smartphone goes upstairs where I'll hear it ring if someone calls. At this point, it's a glorified GPS and Spotify/Audible device. The only time I'm actively on it is in between sets at the gym in the morning.
A) This is implied to mean people of working age, so under 20 doesn't count.
B) The 0.01% is not all billionaires, but they are all extremely high-net-worth individuals. These are people that are not only set for life, but with proper money management and tax planning, could carry on for generations without having to do a lick of work.
There are over 500 billionaires. My point being that OP's point comes off as an emotional argument as opposed to a data-based one.
Edit: I now understand the OP meant "100-millionairs". Even so, the math is still off. As of 2015 there were ~5000 100-millionaires and billionaires in the US[1]. That's 0.0015% of the population.
Slow down for a second. You're misreading the language.
By "100 millionaires" he means hundred-millionaires, that is, people who have one hundred million dollars or more. By "100 millionaires and billionaires", "hundred-millionaires as well as billionaires".
> The masked person can look but not be seen—an enormous and liberating power particularly in today’s age of surveillance.
It's only liberating if the masked person acts ethically. As we've seen in Portland, when masked "protesters" commit violence against civilians, it's the antithesis of "liberating". Remember that the anti-mask laws in the US south were enacted to limit the nefarious actions of the Klan.
IMO, HK has gone so far that the masks are a fake sense of security. The police will drag you off, mask and all, and know exactly who you are. Either the HK people have to accept using guerrilla tactics or they will eventually be swallowed by the CCP.
Here in France, at most protests you'd find groups of masked 'protestors' who usually have nothing to do with the protest and are just here for acts of violence against the police and random acts of degradation and looting
PsyOps main job is convincing occupied peoples that the occupier is their friend. One of the ways they do that is by taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. They also actively work to spread (dis)information.
The term public relations was actually an explicit rebranding of the term Propaganda after it started to develop a negative association in the public eye. Look up Edward Bernays, it's a fascinating bit of history that's not really talked about much.
I suspect very few people have any first hand experience with "PSYOP" (MISO now). Its mostly reservists, they were kicked out of SOCOM for a reason (the reservists at least), and Civil Affairs does all the stuff people actually care about anyway.
The real manipulation of a population is being undertaken at levels so far outside that military structure, its almost unrecognizable.
Sounds like one particular viewpoint that, while somewhat relevant, doesn't actually shed much light into this vastly different (both geographically and temporally) situation.
Don't close your mind just because you know of one instance of the thing being discussed; you anchor yourself to a specific point in time.
"Winning hearts and minds" isn't a bad thing on its own - NATO forces are objectively better than islamic extremists like ISIS and the Taliban - but acting like our military is wholly altruistic is naive at best and purposefully disingenuous at worst.
What part of the parent post is movie-like? I may be too cynical, but I don't see a difference between "the same job as brand influencers" and "spread (dis)information"
Because most of their job isn’t spreading disinformation but rather providing good PR for recruitment at home or in the Middle East countering the disinformation campaigns that the likes of ISIS run unless you think that their recruitment operations are not disinformation.
The British army information warfare unit also famously runs the BBC radio relay station in Cyprus providing access to the Middle East and parts of Asia.
"Good PR" is also seen as the lack of bad PR. Like when we drop a bomb on a school and kill a bunch of kids. PsyOps are the ones who pay off the village.
You're going to get downvoted for sharing wrongthink and not screaming "hate!" at Goldstein... I mean Kavanaugh, but you're ultimately right.
The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.