Maybe part of the trade war retaliations?
But there were all sorts of web shutdowns leading up to previous anniversaries.
And you miss the whole point of censorship. It's about making people reluctant to remembering it.
BTW: It been blocked days ago. The with no obvious reason, but the time is a (loose) match, weird.
* Please add to the debate rather than down-voting. Also Hayek wasn't musing about future autonomous cars, its a metaphor about how deciding what everyone in society should do/think doesn't scale.
However, I'm not sure that's in any way relevant to freedom of thought and freedom of information.
In general I am skeptical of "Communism is bad because the government will X" arguments where private industry is capable of doing X in as thorough a way for the average citizen's practical liberty and especially where private industry is already trying X.
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic
Ironically, in the capitalist future, each car will decide where to go through a computer system controlled by a single company instead.
Distributed systems have many interesting properties, like resilience / fault-tolerance and flexibility. But efficiency is not one of those properties, as evidenced by ridiculous amount of waste generated by the process of competition.
Note that I'm not arguing the soviets were right and the world should be run from Moscow. I do however believe that spectacular failure modes of centrally planned economies were caused mostly by slow, incomplete and unreliable feedback loops, and not because the idea is inherently bad (it works for businesses pretty well). Moreover, I hate this clueless criticizing I frequently see that "centralized = bad", "distributed = good". Truth is, "distributed = wasteful", "centralized = efficient", but sometimes it's worth to be inefficient to get the benefits distribution brings.
Genuine question as my knowledge of org charts is roughly as simplistic as this cartoon: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6?o...
Corporations want to be centrally controlled, but the control is so poorly organized in most cases it's chaotic at best. And then there are multiple forms of organizations, not every of them works top-down, there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.
Note that's still central control, just with fatter signalling pipe which can send ideas upstairs, and not just results. Directions and evaluations still come from the top.
Precisely not as I have pointed out. It's like saying a democracy is a centrally controlled system as well, since you only have one government. But in practice the government listens to the people in order to decide what to do next. It goes both ways.
(And I'm not even joking. Somebody soon will have the "brilliant" insight that "going to a place" isn't what the consumers truly want - surely, they want for some thing they desire to happen, and they may be flexible about the physical location of that thing, or about who's gonna do that thing.)
The assumption you're making is that the Chinese government, or any government actually, optimizes for the prosperity of the people. Governments optimize for the prosperity of some people. In China that appears to be the ruling elite. In America it's the wealthy. Here in the UK it's the establishment (which is the existing upper class and the newly wealthy).
I don't think any government genuinely has the interests of all the people at heart, but I am massively pessimistic and cynical so maybe it's me.
The vast majority of the Chinese population has seen dramatic improvements during the last 40 years.
I wish more people watch the Documentary, Yes Minster, it perfectly describe modern days politics with sense of humour, and many of it are still true even if it was done some 40 years ago.
On the other hand, immigrants I've spoken to from countries with autocratic regimes, while not starry eyed about the nature of western governments, have no problem explaining why the situation in their countries of origin is much, much worse, and why the government of their new country is much fairer and functional.
If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government has failed in its duty.
There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively oppressing the people" to "genuinely helping the people". Too many governments are at the wrong end, and very few are at the right end. Most seem to be somewhere in the middle. That, in my opinion, isn't good enough.
Yes, it would have, but many governments, including the UK, can be described in far better terms than this, and my point was that living under such a government can blind you to them.
The UK government does many things that it would not bother to do if it was only concerned with a wealthy elite (note that I said "only", obviously the government does plenty of things that are for a wealthy elite). It funds welfare programmes and state pensions that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces a minimum wage that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It enforces worker rights and safety regulations that have no direct benefit to the rich elite. It has a progressive tax regime that has no direct benefit to the rich elite. It allows ordinary citizens a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression that has no direct benefit to the rich elite.
And yes, it's easy to find examples in all these areas where the implementation falls far short of the theory. But nonetheless there is still a huge difference between both the theory and implementation of government in the UK vs a country like China, North Korea, Iran, etc.
Criticism of every government is useful and important, but criticism should be grounded in reality. In a fair and reasonable assessment of what is done right as well as what is done wrong. Instead, most criticism I see of western governments by their own citizens is incredibly facile; uninformed by fact, and ignorant of both the history and reality of its political institutions, substituting nuance for lazy stereotypes and received opinions about the supposed inherent corruption and incompetence of all politics and politicians.
I always thought the people in power do this because they learned the hard way that revolutions and uprisings are frightening and that conceding to some, mostly trivial, requests from the rest of the people is a good way to prevent them from happening. As you point out, China, NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia & co. show that there are other ways of doing the same that work just as well (for now, at least - and with differing sets of side-effects, obviously), but they all have the same goal: to stay in power and rule over the people.
I'm not saying it's intrinsically bad or anything, but I think that saying the people ruling the West are all idealists who wish to serve the people, while people in the exact same positions elsewhere in the world are power-hungry despots seems kind of... too optimistic, maybe?
There was this consul in ancient Rome (IIRC) who was a farmer, was appointed as a leader to win the war, then he won the war and then left his office to go back to his farm. There's probably a reason why this became a legend - it wouldn't be this famous a tale if things like that used to happen every other day.
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/croatian-wikipedia-fascist-t...