IllogicalLogic

If Assange leaked Chinese intelligence secrets, would he be free right now? I expect so.

I'm not sure the whole "China is uniquely evil" idea that is expressed in these comments stands up to even the smallest scrutiny.

>How does a country declare a Cold War, anyways?

Simple, just don't cooperate with western capitalists looking to plunder an area, a Cold War will be declared shortly after.

>I don't think anyone would disagree that she's a pawn in a geopolitical struggle, but it also sounds like she absolutely and intentionally violated US law

Someone that didn't visit the US was arrested for "breaking US law"...replace "US" with "China" and see how this sentence rings.

Sounds like a surviving version of Victorian "blame the victim" thinking. It was a popular and heavily flawed idea that the people the British invaded and robbed (of food in many cases), if faced with food shortages, should have just "had less kids".

When a parasite finds a good host, the logic can get really warped.

I find people's lack of knowledge about what makes Bitcoin valuable interesting.

The reason Bitcoin is valuable is because the work required to create one is significantly harder than Fiat currencies and it is one of the only truly scarce assets in human history (hard cap).

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit any fiat currency? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $10k?

Yes, easy.

How much equipment do you need to counterfeit Bitcoin? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $1 billion?

No, not easy.

You may think this is a trivial distinction but it has tremendous value knowing you have hard uncounterfeitable money with a hard cap.

The US treasury spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting fake bills, that's only 1 of the dozen or so problems bitcoin solves. The second is that all the verification and security is done by the most powerful supercomputer in human history.

These things gives it its value.

Garbage company stocks, you can throw those in the trash if the central banks aren't busy helping pump them.

Hard money wins, soft money gets snuffed in the night.

You have proof that no mass decryption (or attempts) occur/have occurred?

I'm not as optimistic. History shows human nature tends to work as we expect when US economic/security interests are involved...

https://wikileaks.org/nsa-france/selectors.html https://wikileaks.org/nsa-germany/selectors.html https://wikileaks.org/nsa-japan/selectors.html

Not whataboutism, if the case can be made that 350 million people need protection then the case can more easily be made for 1.3 billion people.

Wikileaks also showed us that US agencies were engaged in industrial espionage, stealing German/French industrial technology using the Five Eyes tools and giving it to GE & friends ...

The problem is, my more "reality-based" framing destroys the "China is uniquely evil" narrative that western media/gov is pushing everywhere for primarily economic reasons.

I don't buy that idea, western institutions that we generally think of as unique are quite easy to duplicate in Asia if the focus is put there.

So China is publicly announcing that it's deploying what the Five Eyes have deployed in democratic countries under the cover of darkness across the world (while lying to their citizens, who have a constitutional right to know)?

Points for transparency.

I read it but I think the reasoning might be wrong.

What we believe as American consumers and what is economically true are two different sometimes contradictory stories.

You may overestimate how valuable western eyeballs are, a billion people can recreate this industry with government support quite easily.

Being the weaker party in a negotiation is a new role for US, we'll get used to it...

> Calling our rights "privilege" is throwing out the struggle and sacrifice of everyone that fought for those rights.

Next South Park should do an episode that shows how greedy western leaders running opium/heroin for the better part of now two centuries, turned the most populous country into a paranoid dictatorial hellhole for the Chinese people.

US introspection would be too on the nose?

You ever ask yourself what percentage of the heroin/opium supply would be pulled off the market if China could extradite people from HK? More than 50%... and who gets hurt by that?

The tradeoff where the designer introduces an edge case where a plane crashes unless a pilot has specific additional information?

From my understanding of the issue, Boeing just needs to stop the cost saving measures that led to needing software to stabilize an otherwise unstable plane.

The main reason people turn blueish is because of excessive colloidal silver usage. I expect it is the case for the family in this phony story.

It will be quite funny if the US inadvertently makes the traditional market system obsolete by becoming too "sanction happy". Kind of like how they triggered a de-dollarization push...

China already has a crypto Yuan, there is no reason they can't use a Binance style exchange for frictionless worldwide direct investment in their companies.

China: You want to boycott investing in our companies? We'll route around your whole financial system and help make it obsolete. See what happens to the US economy when banks can no longer collect 20% fees on a growing percentage of the world population's transactions.

It's an appeal to "intelligence of operator" to coverup for poor design.

How about Boeing stops taking cost saving measures that end up throwing unnecessary curve balls at otherwise well trained pilots?

At the end of the day, this is the foundation of the problem.

Maybe we can knock down the Vatican and build this telescope, since we are in the business of ignoring the local's wishes.

Most of Teddy Roosevelt's wealth (the Delano fortune) came from Opium. So did the Coolidge (Thomas Jefferson's family), Sturgis, Low, Green, Forbes (John Kerry's family), & Russell family fortunes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_%26_Company

The trading roster for opium dealing in China is a who's who of who founded this country and funded ivy league schools.

Let's be honest, they pivoted from WMD to the much larger and vaguer umbrella of "terrorist" or "terrorist supporter". This has allowed the USA and its allies to indiscriminately kill millions since the Iraq invasion (and rake in billions in weapons deals).

It's always funny when we ignore the mass murderer in the room and instead focus on China's quite measured response to crime.

Facebook's chronic underhanded tactics requires one to ask for confirmation. The onus is on the dishonest party not the victims.

Good that he asked... we all should more.

Could the Andrew Yang 2020 "Freedom Dividend" solve the homeless issue? Yes.

Extra $1,000 a month allows these homeless people to move to smaller/rural areas and get cheap permanent housing.

We can even create a program where if you help a homeless person on the street get into an apartment, you get a $250-500 referral reward from their dividend.

Many ways to incentivize people to help the homeless. This solution sounds better than increasing congestion/traffic with more high density buildings to house the homeless in SF,LA,SD city limits.

If the US priced oil in gold, it would hurt the US economy in a big way, you are correct. This is part of the reason Saddam and Gaddafi were put in the ground, they wanted to do just that.

Not only does the US get to print the currency that oil is traded in willy-nilly. US also gets to export the resulting inflation (from excessive printing) to the rest of the world.

The problems with the Chinese economy did not begin in the 1950s, this is quite a misunderstanding of history.

To fully understand China's economic path, you would at least need to study the economic terrain/decisions/outcomes starting in the 1750s-1800s.

>Bit more perspective. At the end of 1800’s and start of 1900’s China was still almost feudal agrarian society

Starting in the 20th century? Skipping the first 100 years of Western criminality in China is like talking about the Titanic sinking and ignoring the iceberg it hit.

Western powers collapsed Chinese/Indian/African trade routes. An industrial revolution is great, but it works even better if you murder/colonize/enslave all the competition.

Western powers engaged in industrial espionage and stole trade secrets (Ex. Notice the countries with tea industries (the most consumed beverage on the planet)? Almost all didn't exist before this UK crime in the 1800s). In fact Chinese leadership even offered tons of free tea (one of the most valuable commodities at the time) to the UK if they could just stop producing poison (opium) around the world. The UK ended up stealing tea production secrets from China instead of accepting this offer.

Western power's "opium as a way to avoid trade deficits" policy not only led to countless murders and abuses but also led to 30% of the under 25 population being addicted to opium in China. Even worse, when this turned into an epidemic, Christian missionaries then started giving opium addicts morphine and promoting it as a cure (not a doctor but quite sure that is adding gas to a fire).

Western powers (primarily US) gave the Japanese authorization to expand West into Asia in 1905, after all the drugging they did for the better part of a century (Teddy Roosevelt was a douchebag and his wealth was mostly inherited drug money, unpopular historical fact). If you don't know why Pearl Harbor happened, it is because we reneged on this secret treaty with Japan and assisted China in the 2nd Sino-Japanese war.

The problem with popularized historical narratives (very true in the US especially) is they can be manipulated and mischaracterized for propagandizing effect. Economic history, on the other hand, cannot be played with the same way and what originally was characterized as exceptionalism now we can see is just criminality on an unprecedented scale. We can track most of the opium money, domestic and international trade flows, and economic outcomes of these countries during this period more accurately and thoroughly than using any other set of data points, like political speeches/rhetoric etc...

"Despite Joseph's assertions, the middle-aged engineers who were laid off didn't go away and become software engineers – they largely landed up in worse jobs or on the scrapheap."

Reminds me of something a popular 2020 candidate says regularly about retraining failures as automation arrives to suck up jobs.

UK might need a Yang like $1000 pound/month citizen's dividend.

The only reason China dropped out of super power status was tremendous sabotage/criminality by the top 5 economies of the world.

There rise is not a fluke, this is an inevitability of the planet we live on, India is next and it will outperform China by the end of this century (like it did in the past, pre-British invasion).

General ignorance of world history in the West will make this transition harder than it needs to be for Western populations.

Once the pound became the global reserve currency, the trade deficits started increasing. I expect the same was true for the US.

Does this inevitably lead to less domestic manufacturing? I think that's the outcome, yes.

This is the case for a global reserve currency that isn't controlled by any single country.