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  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 04:43am

    Re: Re:

    "I wonder who in this comment section would be willing to give up their 'keyboard freedoms' and go live in China for the rest of their life." Ironically the answer would be "most of the people screaming 'China Bad!' the loudest". After all, the average chinese person doesn't need to worry about pensions, healthcare, education, public transportation, water quality, jobs, or mass shootings. Something high in the wish list of the Trump cult. Like it or not China today stands out as the model of general prosperity the US was the example of in 1950. That bit of history the US alt-right keeps yearning for is today lived by around 90% of China. And hey, it even comes with an autocratic bureaucracy running everything and a serious bias towards foreigners and those who spit on the national flag. If we take the christmas list of the alt-right and check off all the bullet points what we get is, in fact, China...save for the minor hitch of skin color...

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 04:33am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Need anyone to tell you that if you don't understand this "science" thing - or biology - you probably shouldn't comment on it? Or are you telling us that research performed in every medical laboratory worldwide was what caused Covid? Gosh. I guess we need to find who released the 1918 flu and the black plague next... I guess fluorite-mediated mind control courtesy of the USSR is no longer valid so the next conspiracy theory is China Gaves Us Plague. Where do the gay frogs fit into all of this?

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 04:29am

    Re: Re: Re: Friday deep thoughts

    "One of the reasons Tim more recently complained about U.S. manufacturing was a blatantly stupid reason." Yeah, Apple being finicky about using only proprietary is a special brand of stupid. But it's not the reason as to why Apple relies on chinese manufacturing. Like it or not the US doesn't have the labor pool or industrial infrastructure to accommodate manufacturing at scale - that's more or less all China now. "Instead of just using regular screws that you could get any factory in the U.S. to make..." That's the point though. Cook is not alone in these requirements. If you've got a product requiring a high degree of mechanical or electronics skill you go to China, because the US doesn't have the labor pool to manufacture it at scale.

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 02:58am

    Re: Re: Re: Friday deep thoughts

    "Cheap labor with Chinese manufacturing..." As I said, Chinese manufacturing isn't cheap it's about on par with what you could expect to be charged for a US equivalent - if the US had that option. The west rid itself of their factories, their pool of skilled factory engineers, and anything even resembling vocational schooling during the last decades. For us to even get to where we could compete with China in that regard today we'd have to do what they started doing fifty years ago; Rebuild an entire industry from scratch, eating a loss for thirty or forty years running. Only then will we have a large pool of skilled labor dedicated to factory on-the-fly manufacturing. And no western president will ever do that. So China's advantage is carved in stone until the point where they start consistently doing stupid shit and drop the ball badly enough the market drops to a point where there'll be a gap for western industries to insert themselves. It started with greed but today it's about convenience - not owning the labor, not owning the factories, not owning the supply chain - the most desirable company structure in the west of today is a company which has no fixed assets and consists primarily of management, marketing, legal and finance ONLY.

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 12:27am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Friday deep thoughts

    "Chinese Nationalism has also done a very good job of making every Chinese person a censor. You want to teach Chinese students, don't insult the CCP (and we consider any insult an insult to the entire Chinese population that harms us, and all previous generations). " Face is a particular part of chinese culture to a point we in the west have trouble understanding. The individual chinese has perceived, for millennia, that the individual is only where they are because of their parents, ancestors, good government, clan or sect. In some respect they're right about that. It doesn't help that for the most part the current generation would be right about that - China went from being a developing country with rampant poverty and crumbling 18th century industry and infrastructure, to being a modern metropolitan nation where roughly half of 1,4 billion people were shunted from paupers into middle class over barely two generations. Meanwhile a bunch of westerners whose countries are literally collapsing around their ears keep telling Johnny Chinaman that "they're doing it wrong". "This gets more crazy when you see internet sites get filled with spam of people "harmed" by a picture of Pooh, taken out of context, because a publisher printed a children's book in China." Yeah, the overreaction gets real. Part of this may be that the west is generally portrayed, in China, as a festering hotbed of anti-sino sentiment and general racism. Can't honestly say that's that wrong either. As a result, aside from the assumed pro-china astroturfers there's always going to be a big bunch of people with the same fortress mentality hair-trigger outrage reaction as certain Israeli or colored people who've become - for good reason - hypersensitized to criticism. This is amplified by the fact that whatever you do in Huaxia, nixing the Son of Heaven has always been a blow to national pride. And Xi may not formally be appointed emperor - he's just ruler for life - but there's very little difference.

  • On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 08:26am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Would you like to try again?

    "That the people most loudly against these measures are people who work directly in close proximity to the public in roles that are supposed to be protecting them (police, firefighters) or in roles that already require a wide range of vaccinations to be employed in the first place (military, nursing) just boggles the mind." And then the talking point by GOP morons is "this is nazism! Herp Derp!". I'm sure every jew in the US is just thrilled to see the gottverdammte endlösung compared to employers forcing their employees not to be walking health hazards. There is no salvaging that nation. Full idiocracy is a matter of when, not if.

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 08:21am

    Re: Re:

    "If I were an evil moron dictator, I'd create a bioweapon that killed all of my foreign enemies so that I could just walk into their territories and take over..." Fixed That For You. Long-term China loses massively on Covid. To whit it's suppressed their biggest markets and depressed their economy.
    Secondly, the british empire stands out as the last time anyone was dumb enough to stretch a hegemony across the world. Even the US neocons weren't that daft. The only thing such an action caters to is to someone like Trump who doesn't realize that taking something and holding it are two different things. As for the question on where Corona came from? Well, it's Sars-CoV-2, a variant of the Sars-CoV-1 virus which was already warned about and extensively studied a few years back. We more or less know where they come from and how recombination between species spurs the generation of new viruses. Occam's Razor suggests the origin is a Chinese wet market which would do for a facultative zoonose the same which Chinese ecological smallholdings do for the annual Flu variants. Covid and shit like Covid is exactly why the CDC and its equivalents in every nation has entire departments dedicated to setting up ironclad rules on animal husbandry and agriculture. Because a farm run the wrong way is a virus incubator.

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 08:10am

    Re:

    Yeah, that. Origin does matter. If I state some criticism visavi Israel it will likely come off completely different than if the one saying it is some guy waving a swastika or Odal banner.

  • On the post: Massachusetts College Decides Criticizing The Chinese Government Is Hate Speech, Suspends Conservative Student Group

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 08:01am

    Re: Friday deep thoughts

    "Would you rather:" False equivalence. I'd advise googling Tim Cook's statements on why Apple keeps building their iDevices in China before moving on with this. Manufacturing in China isn't cheap. Not any longer. It's just that over the last fifty years or so the US has lost all the necessary skillsets needed to own a manufacturing complex at scale and long abandoned any vocational training leading to it. In China if you need something built you snap your fingers and you find a dozen factories staffed by skilled engineers with twenty years of experience in designing and building electronics or clothes on the fly. Cook lamented that you could fill football stadiums with skilled chinese tool-and-die engineers but in the US you'd be hard pressed to fill a small conference room. As a result, he said, a US-made iPhone would cost upwards of 30k USD per unit for years - because you'd have to buy all the infrastructure from scratch and teach the staff from the ground up. So it isn't a question of electronics costing 25-100% more in being built at home - it's a question that they can no longer be built in the US at all. Not until you train a whole new generation of people to man factories which may or may never be opened. "If we bring most manufacturing back to the US, from communist China..." And that's the second flawed assumption; China may call themselves that as much as they like but they are not and never have been communist. If anything their current state of government most closely resembles their last 2500 years of governance - a bureaucratic oligarchy backing a figurehead. If China had been communist you'd notice it - because they would be like the USSR instead of as is, a nation containing more millionaires and billionaires than you can shake a stick at. "Why do we continue to allow China to manufacture most of our goods when we know that they obviously don't have our best interest at heart?" This is a long story but essentially...China decided, back in the 50's, that they would become the manufacturing center of the world. So they pushed for that, encouraged the establishment of industries and factories, heavily subsidized entrepreneurs willing to set up export businesses...and then started flooding the market worldwide. First with cheap plastic crap, but then gradually with ever increasing quality product. Today their products are the world standard. US industry reacted and moved it's manufacturing offshore, finding that they could save a lot of money doing so. This escalated during the 80's and 90's after Reagan removed any semblance of government regulation from corporations.
    Today that saving no longer exists but it would cost all of them a bankruptcy to bring those jobs home, and so they continue using China as their supply chain. Bluntly put this happened because China made a plan for where they wanted to be fifty years in the future and stuck to the course while the US couldn't be arsed to plan beyond the next four years. And it remains this way because no sitting president in the US is willing to tank the economy at home for thirty years just to rebuild US industry. "We do it because we 'luv dat Money'!!! Greed will corrupt any political system." You think the chinese aren't greedy tho? I don't think there's much of a difference between a US CEO or a Chinese one. Hell, they invented capitalism a thousand years before Adam Smith was even born. The only difference between the US and China in that regard is that in China the government, in enlightened dynasties, views their economy as part of national security whereas the US is constitutionally unable to regulate or govern the bulk of their industry. A US businessman can move his company offshore at whim. The Chinese one knows that if he does he's never coming back to China again. China is a massive threat to western economies in the regard that it will just sit there and keep being more successful than anyone else because what they do works, and has worked for 2500 years. They plan strategy over generations, not quarters. They'll take losses for thirty years if it means it ends with them being in an unbeatable position afterwards. And we can't match that. Our leaders can't see beyond the next election. In the US any time the ruling party shifts they spend four years undoing everything accomplished by the previous administration. THAT is why the US is in the position it's in.

  • On the post: LinkedIn (Mostly) Exits China, Citing Escalating Demands For Censorship

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 07:33am

    Re: Re: Censorship

    "the majority of Chinese people online doesn't go to the trouble of circumventing the firewall if there's a Chinese site available that are comparable." ...and every time a chinese company achieves functional parity with the foreign version...that's when that foreign company is suddenly leaned on heavily by the state. As soon as Baidu started being on par with Google, Google was pressured into shutting down it's search business. Facebook got banned directly - as soon as Renren was properly up and running. When Weibo took off it was Twitters turn to get blocked...and Maimai may not exactly be LinkedIn but it's close enough. It's the long-term goal of China - complete self-sufficiency, while still getting all the benefits of globalization by selling goods and services abroad. Sure, the average Zhang San or Li Si could use a VPN to sneak past the Great Firewall - but why would they? China is about the same size as the US, has more than four times as many people and a culture more than ten times as old. They have even less use for foreign influence than the US and, looking at the recent spate of chinese blockbusters, no need for Hollywood either. So instead of spending time and money sneaking past the Great Firewall the average chinese netizen just pushes a few tweets on Weibo, checks his social space on Renren and after work watches some mindless xianxia action on iQIYI to relax with a can of Tsingtao or two.

  • On the post: British Telecom Wants Netflix To Pay A Tax Simply Because Squid Game Is Popular

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 03:23am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "What the correct solution is I'm not sure, but the types of people dumb enough to still read the naked anti-civilisation propaganda pushed by the Mail and Express would not exactly take a well deserved public humiliation in the spirit in which it's delivered." So once again any presented solution bounces against the current state of affairs of the citizenry generally being dumber and less inclined to reason than they were half a century ago. I thought this was mainly a US problem.

  • On the post: Report: Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 03:08am

    Re: Re: Re: Totally and absolutely unbelievable

    "For the most part I trust TD's readers to be smart enough to spot the sarcasm..." Well, this may be one of those topics where Poe isn't yet sole sovereign in the discourse, I grant you...

  • On the post: Report: Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 03:07am

    Re: Re: Re: This system isn't the problem

    "Apple always had root access." ...and that's basically it. Apple afficionados have already grown used to the idea that their lives are in the hands of Apple. This extra step is...umm...not that much of a stretch to them.

  • On the post: Report: Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 03:05am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    "Why? Because many of the "off the shelf" devices, even the ones you buy from places like Walmart and Best Buy without a carrier subsidy, around the US are not rooted by default." This another of those "only in america" issues that keep cropping up? Because assuming root is in the rest of the world at least such an important part of Android it's hard to imagine an OEM or carrier locking that down without getting reviews bad enough to sink sales. "If you also want to disable half of your phone features..." Most of those impacted you can really go without. Ordinary core android without bells and whistles will do quite nicely if what you need is credential verification, for instance. "and / or buy an international phone for the privilege." It is an "only in america" issue then. That, to me, points towards the US marketplace being the unhealthy bit, not to Android somehow being flawed in the regard you try to point out. "So which is it? Is my device "insecure" and the web browser should honor SafetyNet's prohibition of access, or is SafetyNet a bunch of crap and the app should work regardless?" You're trying to argue a completely different issue there; What I posited from the start is that Android will not be as easy to force this shit unto as the iPhone is, for a multitude of reasons.
    One such reason is the assumption that the owner of the device owns that device.
    Another being that you're going to have a tough sell telling Samsung, Xiaomi, ZTE, Huwaei, Moto, Lenovo, and the other fifty-odd major Android phone OEM's that they all need to issue phones with hardware hacks allowing the OEM the dubious accountability of going through the private and confidential information of their customer base. This sort of shit only works because enough of the Apple crowd are cultists so beholden to Steve Jobs old view that should leave everything to Apple even this step won't make them cease their ritual of bringing a sleeping bag and a day off to be first in line every time a new iDevice is on offer.

  • On the post: Hollywood Is Betting On Filtering Mandates, But Working Copyright Algorithms Simply Don't Exist

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 02:35am

    Re: Re:

    "It very unlikely they will be able to take control of the internet and it will be very hard to take down every single site they dont like." More to the point, if the copyright cult ever gets exactly what they want and it can be meaningfully enforced, it will be impossible to have an internet at all, because no network provider will be able to afford the legal fees or be able to operate without breaking several fundamental laws just by existing. What they can do, however, is to make sure more and more normal traffic migrates into the darknets as the burdens of staying on the open net become untenable. And that to some extent is what I see happening.
    Once law becomes unacceptable to the majority of businesses the result is never that the majority of businesses cease their practice, it is that the law will become circumvented as the default of ordinary business practice.

  • On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 01:17am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "... did you read your own link before posting it, because it does not say what you seem to think it does. " Of course he didn't. He was probably provided that link on some anti-vaxx echo chamber where they all wave links to studies around. If any of them actually read what those links lead to they'd have an inkling that either it doesn't show what they thought it would show or it will turn out to be a webpage written by some snake oil salesman who's either not a doctor or who has had their license to practice revoked for being a nutjob. It's interesting to note that very few of the older generation are that sceptic about vaccines because they remember polio. My own parents both recall polio. Neighbors devastated one of their children got it, classrooms where one or two people sat where they wouldn't have to move too far to get to the door because they were partially paralyzed, and you couldn't move out-of-doors without encountering someone with crutches or in a wheelchair. This generation grew up with the good fortune of the Salk vaccine having eradicated that terror - and now busily marginalize vaccination from the privileged position of having inherited a society safeguarded by those vaccines they now spurn. I think we should give these benighted fuckwits what they want. Evict them from society and put them all on some island where they can dwell without having to encounter any of the horrors of modern medicine and science. Their malicious bad faith alone has cost the US 600k dead which would all, statistically, be alive even if the government had done nothing but sit on their hands. Instead they made infecting others and risky living a pledge of allegiance to whatever tinpot Qanon conspiracy nonsense they saw fit to believe in.

  • On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 12:58am

    Re: Re: Would you like to try again?

    "Yeah, i've been exposed to this claim lately." I wonder why you'd then go on to prove that claim correct in your next sentence? The nazis did horrible things to people born as an ethnic minority.
    No matter what is done to the anti-vaxxers it will be done because those anti-vaxxers chose to endanger everyone else.
    That you don't see much of a difference is basically taking a shit on some six million graves plus change. Even if every anti-vaxxer was rounded up and incarcerated it would be no more objectionable in principle than the idea of putting everyone pulling a DUI in the slammer until they stop being a road hazard. Finally I do take note that by your own argument George Washington was a nazi because he forced his army to take their vaccines. So not only are you a horrible asshole for pulling the nazi comparison between scapegoating jews and incarcerating those deliberately endangering the public, you are also a moron for doubling down on that malicious nonsense. Just admit the truth to yourself - nothing matters to you except your idea that <party A> is evil. Facts be damned if they show otherwise.

  • On the post: Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 12:47am

    Re:

    He certainly is. Jimmy Carter may have been a lame-duck president but he stands head and shoulders over any other US ex-president through history.

  • On the post: Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 12:38am

    Re:

    I hate to say it but there's hardly absence of proof here. There may be a few Lincoln Project members who are in it for the ideology...but most of those have long since gone independent or joined the right-wing democrats. Politics is much like cooking with a hundred chefs. Most participants in a saner and more healthy body politic will try to cook up a dish of whatever will fit the taste of the majority to whom it will be served, or cater obsequiously to anyone buying the ingredients. There will always be a few trying to sneak in a few dollops of theoretically edible yet odd ingredients; a dab of licorice, papayas or wasabi into a pot roast, for instance.
    There's always going to be a few laughably inept people trying to add inedible or hazardous ingredients, like bleach or gasoline. And there's always that one guy who'll try to shit in the pot and trust heavy use of salt and pepper will mask that. That's how the democrats cook up their politics. Mainstream republicans have, for the last decades, just shat in the pot, held it up to their base, and blamed the democrats. The Lincoln project in this metaphor are the ones trying to sell their base the dish which was cooked 50 years ago when republicans still had policy. Only issue with that is, none of them are chefs, none of them are in the kitchen, and none of them have the recipe or ingredients to deliver that dish. All they've got is a bunch of full-color posters of what that dish is supposed to look like. The Lincoln project is as bereft of actual policy as the mainstream GOP. They still do 100% negative partisanship, just aimed at their own old party. I could be wrong. Aside from the guys caught in recent scandals it may very well be the Lincoln Project was primarily staffed by idealists. Doesn't change the fact that all they stock is the same type of overblown bullshit and hype the GOP does; they have no plans. No roadmap. Just a few high-flying slogans about how it would be good to move back to good old principles.

  • On the post: Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)

    Scary Devil Monastery ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 12:22am

    Re: Re:

    "That transparency format, and the 1x1 size, is how ad blockers find and eliminate these things." As trivia to boot, 1x1 pixels used to be a common vector for sql injection attacks. Possibly still are, I'm a bit rusty on security these days.

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