champagnois

I know that taking things in context in this way is unpopular among folks who are looking to just sling mud at China. I aim only to provide further context to the intellectually curious who may be wondering how or why.

My posts do not justify or take a side, they merely aim to provide a more expert understanding of the motives and reality.

Except this is about nation state behavior, context, and geopolitics spanning decades rather than some series of small unrelated events.

See my other reply. I am not excusing the behavior of treaty breaking so much as I am saying their leadership has pressure to behave in this way due to the mandate to "right historical wrongs" versus their enemies who killed and attacked them.

I am not the world's leading expert on China, history, or political science -- but I would guess that the fentanyl smuggling operations they are doing are directly related to points (1) through (5) and are some form of revenge in the eyes of their leadership. It probably isn't a coincidence that fentanyl is an opioid, is killing countless Americans, is being laced onto random pills and foods sold, and is all being done by China's intelligence agencies. You know, maybe these events are related!

I wouldn't say that. I would argue this is a lot more like the WW1 relationship to WW2. The events are related to how the Chinese leadership feels pressure from their public to perform and stand up to adversaries.

In short, China's leadership today has pressure to right historical wrongs. We, as Westerners, should work to understand them so that we can make sense of their behavior as a nation state.

China has two major historical enemies with wrongs that the leadership can stand up to:

(1) The UK for the opium wars (and the 100 year fallout).

(2) Japan for WW2 (and, you know, the whole genocide / killing babies for sport thing).

When the CCP does anything involving these two nations, you can always assume the history and the pressure on the leadership is a factor.

Your intentional aversion to the full context doesn't help anyone understand the situation.

When people do not understand any context, they are lead to believe the situation is absurd and is occurring for no reason at all.

Full context allows the public to have a sense of things.

Here is an honest attempt building a storey via several separate but related facts:

(1) In the 1800s, Europe had essentially lost a tradewar with China. The Chinese economy was somewhat of a marvel of the 1700s-1800s, studied by US presidents and founding fathers like Ben Franklin even.

(2) The UK couldn't produce anything the Chinese wanted to buy (a goal to help the UK economy), but ultimately hatched a plan to smuggle a well-known deadly and addictive drug into Chinese ports: Opium, which has been known to grow well in the India colony / Afghanistan and is also related to heroine / morphine / opioids.

(3) The UK's drug smuggling cartel via the British East India Company and backed by their navy eventually causes huge problems for Chinese citizens and their every day life. People are dieing. The Chinese government then organizes special anti-drug smuggling operations to end the illegal drug cartel's drug smuggling.

(4) War starts. The Opium Wars. Plural. The UK navy steps in, the Chinese military was defeated, and this was all to force the Chinese to permit the UK drug cartels to continue operating. Part of the treaty ending one of these Opium wars allows Hong Kong to be leased to the UK for them to set up an offensive post on Chinese territory from which to continue poisoning the Chinese public.

(5) HKs economic miracle was propped up by drug smuggling and money laundering and tax haven status. It wasn't much of a miracle. Drug smuggling and tax dodging are universally condemned both in the West and China.

(6) The public in HK is losing features of Western civilization (like a free press and anti-beijing school programs) as they transition back to governance by the broader Chinese civilization.

(7) There IS a small degree of turmoil as HK society is re-organized, but it should be understood in context. Transition from Civ A to Civ B, who both have completely different systems of law.

Probably because they have a range they are willing to pay depending on what value the candidate can be assumed to bring to the team.

Your last paragraph implies the person you speak of is a hacker, using 0day attacks? I hope such people get caught.

I only worry about innocent westerners living in a society that is creeping toward authoritarianism in the name of some politically polarizing politician. I do not empathize with hackers breaking into systems and causing major problems.

There are ways to create secure communications if need be. I have thought of ways that would work to accomplish doing it.

I won't detail the designs here, but we are talking very cheap to build and design.

I am sure such devices exist and are in the wild, being used by spies.

That said -- I am mostly disappointed with the degree to which our intelligence agencies are inwardly focused rather than breaking up foreign spy rings and operations.

There are some scarey, harmful, and extremely complicated foreign spy rings on US soil. They have people working for all major tech companies and they are embedded in key positions.

The FBI should be making "see something? say something" pushes in tech companies. They should have better followup and reward systems.

Considering endpoints are compromised like swiss cheese in 2021 and third party apps are all compromised, people should be of the belief that they cannot trust anything they didn't write and build themself.

Does this mean voice assistants and GPS will one day be made consumer friendly and support any voice/name we want them to have, rather than this gimicky brand driven marketing malware known as Alexa or Google or Siri?

LC?

Key quotes:

(1) Dr. Lahn had touched a raw nerve in science: race and intelligence....

(2) Dr. Lahn says he is moving away from the research. "It's getting too controversial," he says.

(3) Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin, criticizes Dr. Lahn for implying a conclusion similar to "The Bell Curve," a controversial 1994 bestseller by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book argued that the lower average performance by African-Americans on IQ tests had a genetic component and wasn't solely the result of social factors. Referring to Dr. Lahn and his co-authors, Prof. Ossorio says: "It's exactly what they were getting at. There was a lot of hallway talk. People said he's doing damage to the whole field of genetics."

(4) Dr. Lahn ... says intellectual "police" in the U.S. make such questions difficult to pursue...

(5) "I think that Bruce doesn't understand political correctness," Dr. Harpending says.

(6) Dr. Wells says the project team might try to find evolutionary reasons for physical differences such as why Danes are taller than pygmies. But Dr. Wells says National Geographic won't study the brain. "I think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races," he says...

If I were to work on building a search engine from scratch, I would probably approach this from these directions:

(1) Investigate if running a DNS server will help me get a more robust picture of what websites exist.

(2) Investigate if supplying a custom browser would help me to leverage client PCs to do the crawling / processing for me.

(3) Investigate if there is any point in building a search engine with the data gathered in a non-proffit way... Non-proffits are not as sustainable as for proffit corporations.

I believe a good brain benefits from less stimulation and periods of downtime where one can think of a problem peacefully.

When studying diseases of the brain, there are some dementia cases where a good approach is to modify the environment to be very simple and minimalist so that the brain stays focused and keeps a grip on reality. There is no reason to think that this doesn't also help healthy people.

Linus Torvalds famously works from an empty room with light green walls and a nearly silent computer to enhance his focus. I do similar.

I sometimes see people who are known to be scatterbrained and their work environments are obnoxiously overstimulating. I think to myself, "It is no wonder such a person struggles to grasp difficult concepts and repeatedly fails in their code. The work environment is basically a barrier to their ability to focus."

All of this is to say -- do not overstimulate children. Do not introduce them to low quality content that will rot their brain.

He is friends with Nick Szabo and has a pretty sharp mind with some good experiences. I think he is basically done with the rat race of becoming successful now and he has written a bit of relevant advice for folks.

For someone who talks so much of loathing social media, they seemingly do very little to avoid it.

Acknowledging the technology is basically poison at scale, maybe remove it from your life so you do not suffer the same brainrot as the masses.

The great Naval once wrote: Be wary of anything that uses the word "social".

Social Media is conditioning people to discuss moral crusades, launch moral crusades, and dwell on moral crusades. Humans are being conditioned to write and say things that inspire anger towards the opposition, because that is the best approach to getting likes, upvotes, and subscribes. Poison for your mind.

What can and cannot work on a small scale is generally an indication of how it would perform on a larger scale.

When trying to make a micro macro comparison, I tend to think of governance of nation states as very similar to governance of corporations.

When we think of the small scale that is governance of companies, we know intuitively that a company is best served by having sharp minded decision makers and having smooth talking sales people as a middle layer between company-wide strategy and the public... To put it another way, we intuit the following: A company where all decisions are decided by a diverse comitee of both the dumbest and the smartest would be a bit of a disaster.

The founding fathers of America's republic kind of knew all of this. They tried to put limits to voting in place that would serve to promote a sort of Proof-of-Stake in Democracy (land-owning family men vote, etc). Unpopular as the founders may be in the current attempted corporate neo-marxist zeitgeist, I do believe the founding fathers were on the right track to be limiting voting rights.

I am reasonable enough to see truth in both sides of this argument. Not bad.

Photographers and journalists are people who's time is rewarded with money as compensation, as well as fame and status in some cases. This follows in line with the claim --

>>>"People are transactional and do not have time for one's long and detailed explanation of a self definition unless their time is rewarded in some way."

People who are just empathetic or curious, sure. I will not deny those scenarios exist.

I have lived a hard life, but I acknowledge no one cares about my hardships and they care even less about my identity.

Healthy, functional people are just looking for ways to get further ahead in life. People are transactional and do not have time for one's long and detailed explanation of a self definition unless their time is rewarded in some way.

Happy holidays.

Windows creeps me out.

Software that hates the user / owner creeps me out.

We are no longer Microsoft's customer, but instead we are their product.

I am not the world's biggest fan of where tech has gone.

Planning to try and do something like that.

I really did it.

Context:

I am essentially making a hobby of rebuilding my family's filtered version of the internet, leveraging the same powers as the tech giants.

With my setup, instead of promoting partisan hate, the front ends for search and internet access in my home send us in the direction of improving our focus, improving our connection with our own cultural history, and promoting content that reminds us of the great scientists and inventors that made our world possible...

Why expose my children to content that tells them to hate themself or others? Why expose them to areas of the internet full of foreign disinfo agents and their useful idiots? How about give them the experience I had in the 1990s... Freedom from the noise.

My family will never own Oculus products or anything connected to Facebook.

Block and filter anything related to their platforms.

Yeah, to get too into it is to become part of the problem.

My way of handling it is to not participate and to set a better example for good citizens to follow.

When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.

Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.

It isn't enough to see the flaws of one side, you need to step back and see the whole picture. Both sides are frothing at the mouth for their brand of authoritarianism.

While difficult to pull up from search engines, throughout the riots and looting sprees and jury trials, there were two things I can roughly quote having heard a number of times from figureheads on the left:

John Lewis's "good trouble"

and

"If we don't get (X), then we need to burn it down!"

and

Also the bizarre stuff where jurors in the Rittenhouse trial were being stalked by an NBC journalist who claimed he was illegally stalking the jurors under company orders (NBC then lawyered up and denies this).

All three of these instances were widely reported at the time and I remember them. They all reak of an authoritarian willingness to trample our traditions and rule of law.

We live in a time when the anchors on TV as well as the politicians running the government are telling their supporters to break laws.

Be it January 6th or the riots and looting we have seen for the past two years. Both sides have figures in their parties that are advocating for this madness and normalizing it.

I am a bit of a patriot who is pretty intent on leaving the world better than how I found it. I help people. I try to set good examples. This whole behavior of the right and left has left me thinking they are both morally bankrupt.

I disagree with the article. I do not feel like a sucker. I just feel all of this extremism is really sad and depressing.

Also note that in Apple's largest market, China, iCloud is entirely managed by the government.

There is no reason to have any faith in Apple's endpoint or cloud security.

@renderedcarrot --

Pros, Concerns, and Ideas:

First the pros:

(1)Your product looks clean.

(2)Your heart is definitely in the right place.

(3)I really like what you wrote in your posts here.

(4)It sounds like an experienced team that is passionate.

Concerns:

(1) Apple's 180 on respecting a user's endpoint security and privacy this year.

(2) Security conscious users might soon start migrating away from Apple.

(3) Hitching your boat to Apple locks out the vast majority of potential users.

(4) The landscape of chat apps in 2021 is way different than when Skype came about... Discord is a beast that was built on just MariaDB after a few months of development time and scaled to 100 million users, using only a few terrabytes of data before doing a major re-write of the code switching to Cassandra NoSQL. Your users value privacy? Give them a private cloud and allow them the option of getting away from a provider that compromises their endpoints...

Ideas:

(1) Dark mode. Look at Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost.

(2) Support for opensource, self-hosted clouds would give this app a reason to exist. Example -- Nextcloud integration or something as an alternative to iCloud...

(3) Maybe even sell the software as a completely self hosted, E2E thing using something akin to the OMEMO methods.

(4) Design / Designers could help with branding the product more.

Its just a label that is pretty universally applied to people with that mindset.

I have lived under communist governments. It is what it is, even if you refuse the label.

People are innately different. Marxism, in all iterations, has always been about blaming the different outcomes on some narrative of oppression, be it class or race.

With which part do you disagree?