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Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

I'd go stand in front of a tank right now. Like what are we actually supposed to do?

I have tons of motivation to do something about the largest totalitarian regime. Just tell me where to go and what to do.

I woulnd't assume that quite a few people don't feel this way. The issue isn't lack of motivation. It's the lack of any sort of leverage over a giant totalitarian foreign government.

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If I tell you that I give you a billion dollar to quit your job, and find a solution to this, you will try to do so. Not knowing what to do is something that happens all the time in life: we try anyway. Stopping at "I don't know what to do" is just the first clue that you can see a cost and not a reward sufficient to dig and try.

I'm not taking a moral stand here. I don't think anybody not doing anything is a bad person. But let's not pretend ignorance and inability. We don't even try. Reading HN is much more comfortable, besides life has many challenges already.

So you're saying that if you gave me $1B I would drop everything and try to solve this. That's correct.

I wouldn't spend 100% of my time on that singular social problem, but yes.

But that has nothing to do with reality on account of you having not given me any money, and me not having enough resources to quit my job and fund such initiatives against one of the largest economic powers in the world.

[Setting aside the overwhelming likehood that you are lying, mistaken, or other not genuine in your hypothetical offer.]

If you offer me (1G$/50yr=) 20 million dollars a year to spend eight hours a day trying to find a solution to this, then sure, I'll take that job and do it to the best of my ability. I don't expect to succeed, but as long as the paychecks clear I'll keep working.

If you offer me a billion dollars contingent on finding a solution, I'm going to ignore you, just like I ignore the people offering a million dollars for a solution to P vs NP, or XX million dollars for correctly predicting which six balls they pull out of a basket.

No need to stand in front of a tank. Go convince some Chinese people you know that what is happening in XinJiang is a bad idea.

How? Chinese folk don't hang around western internet sites, if they can even access them and read English.

Going there and spreading that message seems like a bad idea.

I can tell you there are plenty on HN, myself included. I mean if you wanna make a bigger impact you can learn Mandarin and maybe go to China to meet some more people. Actually there are plenty of Chinese in SFBA or Seattle already. Have you talked to some of them???

Have you learned Mandarin?? That seems like a large amount of time to devote to something, only to go to China and immediately get disappeared after contacting a plainclothes cop.

From your previous comment, you dare to stand in front of a tank, yet you wont put in the effort to learn Mandarin. I dont know about others but that's pretty irony to me.

What's more, you replied without read my comment (or misread?). I said I'm a Chinese in the first sentence. I would like to have conversations with people who are serious about the matter but even on HN where people are rational and logical in most other topics are not showing their best when it comes to topics about China.

Anyway here's one guy who learned chinese: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaredfaa (he's a bigger influencer on bilibili coz youtube is unfortunately blocked in China)

here's a guy went around the world and passed China without knowing Mandarin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjI1O11S8KY (one of his several vidoes)

Anyway, ignorance promotes fear. Understand the problem first before propose solutions.

You ignored the next part of my comment. It's a large amount of time to waste, not effort, just to be disappeared the moment I got to China and revealed my intentions.

I mean no disrespect to Mandarin itself.

In what capacity you are sure learning it will be a certain waste of time?

Anyway here's a Chinese social media site with many people working in SFBA. I guess you can have more access to places like that if you know a bit Mandarin.

https://www.douban.com/group/sfbayarea/

Just in the capacity that I have a lot to learn that I deem essential and research already takes up the majority of my free time.

Not that I won't try again, but I know it's an ordeal for me which takes lots of time I already don't have right now. I've taken and failed two separate language courses, not due to a lack of trying.

Learning foreign languages seems quite hard for me due to the nature through which I learned to read. I taught myself to read between age 2-3 and kind of just coasted on that for a long time, since I had mostly subpar public education.

But failing at multiple foreign languages has taught me the need to step back and have a better understanding of language in general before tackling it again.

But Mandarin is so far left field from other popular languages. Learning the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet was hard enough. I have severe ADHD and memory problems. I have used Anki for a long time and spaced repetition alone takes up a lot of my time. And the amount of symbols to learn for Mandarin is staggering.

Last year I took up memory training after studying the techniques of a few memory masters. I'm doing everything I can to improve my memory but just skipping to Mandarin right now is not a smart or efficient use of my time.

You're the one who said they'd go stand in front of a tank. One hour of study a day for three years to learn somewhat decent Mandarin seems like a small sacrifice in comparison.

If you prefer to start right now, there are also plenty of Chinese people desperate for someone to practice their English with, e.g. on https://www.tandem.net/

I addressed this sentiment already in your sibling comment.

The risk of getting disappeared is low if you limit yourself to social media (as I said, Tandem is one way to find Chinese people willing to speak to you in English) or if you make sure to only talk about politics with people you've become friends with. At least I haven't disappeared so far.

Do you know how to do wizadry on a computer? Because if you do, the answer is right here in this thread. Fetch those git repos, help distribute them. Work together with the Chinese who already are doing something. Then branch out…

I want to stop the regime, not document it.

It seems like a lot of people with moderate computer skills are fulfilling this role. My skills and time would be wasted on such an initiative.

I do think it's good advice to contact some people who are already involved, though. They would best know what else needs to be done.

Treat it as just as any other problems and solve it using the startup thinking? Understand the problem, explore the solution, deliver MVP.

Honestly, most comments here misunderstood the problem to the point the purposed solutions are ridicules. Go talk to Chinese people living near you. Ask them why things are operating like this. Plenty live in SFBA/Seattle as far as I know.

Your advice more or less boils down to "figure it out", which isn't very helpful. ;p

I don't know any Chinese people living near me. I don't know many people here at all. I would definitely like to talk to people close to the issue.

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