adinobro

The best way to preserve the rainforest is to collapse the US, China and the EU so there is no one to buy from Brazil.

Not practical but a solution...

They also got freedoms that they never had under the British either. The next 10 to 15 years seem to be their golden years.

That used to be the case but that has changed in the last five years.

From memory it used to be about 80% and now it is closer to 20%

You don't have to wonder. It has already happened.

They are currently the best at refining rare earth metals and they are not interested in sharing it.

Have a look at the patent graph: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/3/21/v...

Only in the last 10+ years have large quantities of Chinese people started to earn enough to be able to buy US products.

In the past, virtually none of them had enough money to buy products made in the high end (The US generally makes high quality but expensive products)

There are still almost 50,000,000 people in China that live on less than $2 a day. The GDP per capita is roughly 3x less than the US.

20 years ago there was close to 700,000,000 people living on less than $2 a day and there was no underground subway in all of China. Do you really think this was developed?

A few cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou & Shenzhen) are developed (~6% of the country) while the rest is still not very developed but improving.

Should it still be developing? Probably but not for much longer. How much is up for debate. Some say now. I expect it will happen sometime in the next 10 years.

There are stacks of US companies that have made a significant entry into China:

  * Coke
  * Starbucks (the largest one in the world is currently in Shanghai)
  * KFC
  * McDonalds
  * Pizza Hut
  * Domino's Pizza
  * US movies regularly make as much money in China as they do in the US.
  * General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US.

Have they put in place limits that they are legally allowed to put in place based in WTO rules? Yes.

Part of the reason that AWS has two separate companies is because China, the US & the EU have laws like the CLOUD Act, GDPR and CDPR. It is easier to keep all companies seperate or at least siloed which is what most large companies do.

If this is true then there is nothing for the US to be afraid of.

China already had a top supercomputer a long time before this happened. They didn't need x86 for this...

It helps in the future but for this scenario, it makes not difference.

This is exactly what they do in Shanghai and it works. The rails are not for the whole route just long stretches with lots of lights.

As far as I can tell they have a mixed fleet. Electric for ones that are downtown enough to charge and natural gas for busses that are mainly outside the city.

Things change rapidly so this may no longer be true.

This doesn't stop them from copying what China does.

China has the same problem in Shanghai. The solution they use is overhead wires to charge busses while they are driving for parts of downtown that busses can connect to and disconnect from at will.

This is true but it is also rewriting the past.

The WTO was designed to encourage free trade. The problem with free trade is that countries with developed industries will crash those that don't have developed industries. Basically, there is little incentive to join if you are still developing since it will kill your local industry.

What the WTO did is a compromise. Countries that are developing get special exceptions that expire once the country reaches certain milestones. The US was one of the founding members that helped to write these rules and the rules were designed to largely help US companies.

The exceptions allow developing countries to put rules in place to help local industry. From what I can tell China looks like it will move from a "developing" country into a "developed" country sometime in the next 5 to 10 years (based on rules that the US made when it helped setup the WTO) but now it thinks that it should happen sooner.

If they started the trade war by following rules that the US helped to write then ... I don't know what I think about that ...

https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/devel_e/devel_e.htm

They should copy China to solve the problem.

The standard policy in China is x3 refund if the product is fake.

The all online sellers have this policy but it makes it a lot easier to tell if something is likely to be fake. Also if you get a fake then you get a triple refund...

500,000,000+ people taken out of extreme poverty is generally considered a slight improvement.

There is a metal strip in the real 100 RMB notes that most of the copies don't have.

Why bother? They already have access to cell phone location data and meta information. I'm sure in China it is direct access. In the US it is a two-step process. Not that it would make much difference in practice.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...

There was a great article in Australia about this a few years back: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-16/metadata-retention-pr...

I think you are right. I only used a foreign card for Taobao. I don't think it works for normal purchase...

I'll try it tomorrow and see if it works.

I don't stay in hotels that expensive (I generally have to pay up front) very often and since I'm not Chinese I don't have access to most loans here either.

The wallet option only exists if you have a Chinese Wechat account (using a Chinese phone number).

One of the biggest and more interesting difference is that the US government wants to keep these things secret and investigative reporting finds them.

In China, they want this information public because they want people to know that they know and self regulate - Panopticon.

The cynic in me looks at the US as a country controlled by companies while China is a country that controls companies. I don't know if it makes that much of a difference any more now that companies are almost the same size as countries.

China doesn't actually have a lot of police. It looks like it does but a lot of them are teenagers doing there year of service with no real power or authority.

Enforcement of basically all laws is done using some rotation system. This month it will be X, next month it will be Y. One of the interesting things is that they don't keep it a secret. It isn't published in newspapers but every Chinese person seems to know what the police are targeting now and next month. It gives everyone time to clean up their act before they get in trouble. The enforcement can never be 100%

If people complain enough then it will be resolved quickly. The shops around tourist areas should be fixed quickly because it looks bad.

Out of curiosity do you change your behaviour because of your credit score (created by private companies)?

Considering the fact that the private companies pitching social credit to the government are merchants (Tecent & Aligroup) that is the only data they have access to.

If you want to get a real taxi use Baidu maps. It is in Chinese but you can just drop a pin where you want to go and ask for a real taxi instead of a Didi.

A Chinese person can show you the buttons to press then you can pay with cash.

I didn't say anything about privacy just that it is a private company.

It doesn't seem that different to the US government with AT&T.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130901/23253224379/att-h...

I actually find Alipay easier to use for payments and it is easier to set up. If you don't want to chat I would use it instead.

There is a button that you hold down and it sends a voice message (up to 60 seconds). They generally just send voice messages back and forth.

There is also a + for extra features like: * Sending a photo * Sending a short video * Calling * Money * Location

You don't need to be able to read to use any of them.

WeChat is a private company owned by Tencent.

It is illegal to refuse cash in China but it takes a while for the shops to be found and fined.

A few things worth being aware of Alibaba does not own WeChat but rather's it's competition Alipay. It does not have any access to WeChat data.

So far the "social credit" on seems to be mostly based on how much you buy and it only seems to give you discounts to massively overpriced products (similar to a credit card reward system).

You don't really download apps in Wechat but rather add a link more like a Facebook App (JavaScript & HTML).

Chinese people tend to like one app that does everything. Most of the services talked about in the article as separate services that you can open in WeChat but you can also open most of them in AliPay or Taobao or access them directly on their own websites. This is what Facebook tried to do but failed...

What I find fascinating is that a lot of older people that use WeChat in China are illiterate apart from numbers. They do everything by remembering the pictures and other people help them to set up their account. That is part of the reason why they want a single app that does everything. You don't need to read since you can just send messages, look at pictures and iconography.

Also, everyone in China still accepts cash but you generally need correct change.

If you have any questions feel free to ask. I just found out my sesame-credit score is 622 (not that it does anything...)

Roughly 1,000 people died. The population of Beijing was roughly 10,000,000. Chances are he went home and was ignored since he wasn't a student protestor and was basically a nobody. The most boring answer is most likely to be true but no one ever says that. Everyone always says "maybe he was killed".

The reason why I call it propaganda is because it is. The photos and videos are true. But the media decided to just show a small clip of the footage to make it more dramatic and suppressed the whole clip for years. The whole clip is less dramatic. Basically the same as the 3rd example https://www.boredpanda.com/examples-media-truth-manipulation...

Look at all the videos for the 30-year anniversary. None of them use the full clip. All the ones I've seen either just include the photo or cut out as the 3rd tank roles to a stop.

I've become more disillusioned with the media the more I travel and experience news as it happens and see how biased it is.