A 'small' island with one of the most successful and thriving democracies in the East, that has world class industry. China cannot have a successful democracy on their doorstep, it undermines their perception of absolute Chinese superiority.
This doesn't really make sense, the Chinese standard of living has risen to very comfortable levels over the past couple decades. There aren't throngs of desperately poor Chinese people longing for the capitalist democratic paradise over in Taiwan.
If anything, China's rising wealth and living standard is a threat to the United States' sense of superiority. I don't see the US saying "Screw it, let's try totalitarianism" if it wasn't falling behind.
They don't hate them, but it is an emberassment that a group from the same culture is so successful under a different political system that allows for more freedom. That combined with cultural revanchism about not breaking up the country (and having spent a lot of time there I can tell you it is strong) makes the existence of Taiwan as an independent nation a real sore point.
I don't think the CCP views Taiwan as more successful than mainland China. The CCP position is that Taiwan is already part of China and by that logic Taiwanese success is automatically Chinese success. I agree that cultural revanchism plays a major role.
They might not be more successful, but they are still very successful given the difficulties they face, and any Chinese person with half a brain can realize they give lie to the idea the CCP likes to propogate that there's something intrinsic to Chinese culture that requires an authoritarian approach.
This seems like one of Putin's motivations for invading Ukraine. He couldn't stand having a prosperous Ukraine aligned with the EU and the US that could foment discontent inside Russia.
Ukraine was the poorest country in Europe, and by most metrics, worse off than Russia before the war.
Sure, you can write all sorts of alt-history fanfiction about how great it would be if 2014 didn't happen, but that's just one of many possible futures.
Leaving aside the war, Ukraine has many of the positive resources of the Baltics (just more so.) There is every reason to believe that an EU-aligned (or member) Ukraine would be an economic success story.
It's not just that he couldn't stand it, but rather what it does to his position inside Russia. If your business model is to rabbit on about how wonderful Russia is, and how sucky all other countries are, if there's a more successful more free country next door containing almost the same kind of people, then your words are hollow.
USA will, from all signs, not only continue to have a hostile Cuba, but also create a hostile Mexico.
And that's even before considering the internal hostility to the regime that the deliberately-engineered major economic collapse--that is already happening despite numerous policies that will deepen it still being in the pipeline and not yet in place--will create.
The US withdrawing from international engagement, trashing alliances, and trashing its own economy may enable competing powers more space to dominate their own regions, but it doesn't do anything to strengthen the US's regional position, it radically weakens it.
China is a democracy. It's literally what you're describing Taiwan as. That said I do agree that it does cause China's superiority to be called into question. Imagine if the Confederate states of America managed to take hold of Cuba and hold out.
EDIT: I'm literally factually correct. In 5 of the 6 indexes China has a Democracy score where as Brunei, an absolute monarchy, doesn't!
Legally (according to their constitution) USSR was also a democracy. But that hardly meant much in practice. Of course the Chinese society is probably much "freer" than than the Soviet one was prior to Gorbachev's reforms but again.. an extremely low standard.
Brunei isn't on the Bertelsmann because it is small (<1 million people), not because of its political structure.
The EDI explicitly does not try to asses whether a country is democratic or not, but just allows relative comparisons. It also doesn't include smaller countries but doesn't have as clear of a cutoff.
If you are going to use inclusion on one or more of these lists as an argument, you'll have actually cite where those lists use status as a democracy as a criteria for inclusion and how that is assessed.
China has a fig leaf of a democracy. It meets the simplest definition of a democracy, the citizens do get to vote on something. Compared to most of the developed world, it's a far cry from a liberal democracy that allows for dissenting positions and parties. China's flavor of governing is objectively neither good nor bad (they have managed to become a superpower after all) but it's nothing like the democracies of the West.
China has "democracy" in the same way it has the freedom of speech.
In China, you can vote for The Party, or, for The Party. Much like how in the USA, you can vote for the red wing of the Centralized Corporate Power Party, or the blue wing of the Centralized Corporate Power Party.
Much like how in China, you have the freedom to stand in Tienanmen Square and shout "Down with the USA, long live Chairman Mao, long live The Party" much like you can do so in Times Square or in front of 1600 Penn or in downtown LA.
More like the Union holding out for 70 years in Puerto Rico after the Confederates won. In what sense do you mean China is a democracy? I may be brainwashed on CIA propaganda, but as far as I understand only party-vetted candidates may stand for election.
Wait do you not know what the KMT did? They're a rightwing party that killed/disappeared 30k journalists and intellectuals in Taiwan. How in the world is that comparable to the "union"? (But also yes Puerto Rico might be a better example).
In the sense that they're on the V-Dem index, they have election laws, they have voter rolls, they have voter turnout, etc. Yes they have one party, so you don't directly vote for the President, but neither do Americans.
It's democratic because it's on the index? Every state is on the index. China ranks 177 out of 179 states on the index lol. So sure, where a perfect democracy score is 1.0, they score 0.015. It's not zero.
Yes, the KMT dictatorship era was awful. You might be surprised to know that in Taiwan there are national holidays commemorating those persecuted by the KMT. The reason The ROC (Taiwan) is more aptly comparable to the Union when making an analogy to alternative American history is because it was the original, legitimate government of China and the PRC were the rebels, just like the USA and Confederacy.
You are confused. Look at Taiwan's present, not its long gone past. As I mentioned in another thread, during my last trip to Taiwan, I revisited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, which features a museum where Chiang Kai-shek's life and rule are documented. The errors and brutality of his rule in particular are well-documented and preserved, officially accessible to all citizens and visitors. This is a wonderful example of transparency. You won't find anything like this in mainland China.
Democracy isn't when you have multiple parties. It's when you elect people to govern. Many americans think that America has a uniparty, despite all appearances.
I feel like you have it the wrong way around. There are a lot of political setups where you "elect someone" that are absolutely not democracies. I can be an authoritarian supreme leader who allows citizens to elect who will run their province (from my choice of candidates of course!) and I really don't think it's reasonable to claim that this situation is a "democracy".
It's autocracy with democratic characteristics.
I agree your criticisms of democracy in the US and Taiwan have some validity but in terms of deciding whether China might be a democracy or not they seem like whataboutism.
Considering they are one of the most democratic countries in the world (as per The Economist Democracy Index), even outranking the United States, I think they are more than capable of determining themselves what their future should be through their right of self-determination.
This already makes a large assumption about the type of reactor you are using. For example, a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) does not suffer from the xenon poisoning issue, as do many other designs.
It's an interesting thing that pro-nuclear people always talk about "Gen X" power plats with no issues and just a big fat gogo stamp on them, but when you ask about any commercial examples they all come up short.
I'm pro nuclear, but I don't think using hypotheticals and futures is how to convince people nuclear is good, it's good because it works and it doesn't poison the planet (Yes there have been accidents and they have been dramatised but count deaths and it becomes as irrational as being afraid of flying)
Molten Salt reactors are designs from the 60s-70s and afaik no one ever built on commercially. No one was willing to take a gamble on building a new design when we had working reactors already and approval for those was already difficult enough.
AFAIU the corrosion problems are still not solved from a commercial PoV. Ie, without having to shut down and replace piping too often for it too be viable.
I really wish they would do to Firefox what they did to Thunderbird, which is to spin it off into its own thing so it can stand independently. I want to support Firefox, but I do not feel comfortable donating to the Mozilla foundation.
Firefox should just do a Wikipedia style beg button once a year and be transparent on where the money is being spent.
twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still losing money
"The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the face value of the debt."
If you looks at the history then you will see that many different solutions have been proposed but Christoph's responses essentially boil down to 'do it somewhere else' and 'no not there', until it is basically 'not at all'. He is not in a position to make this decision, only Linus is. The patch as it stands lives outside of any sub-systems within Christoph's purview, he is simply being obstructionist out of tribalism.
> he is simply being obstructionist out of tribalism.
What about the part quoted in GPs comment?
> > The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this
Wouldn't adding another language add an internal boundary? I don't know enough the kernel or kernel development to say it's an good argument or not, but it doesn't seem to be tribalism. I do know Rust already seems to be in some/few places in the kernel, but adding more would add more internal boundaries, as it'll get more and more divided. But again, maybe I don't understand clearly.
I agree that it may not be tribalistic, it's very possible that the maintainer has a valid technical/social opinion on this.
However, I don't think it is in any way acceptable to insert this in discussions about a random Rust patch. It's disrespectful to the time and expertise of the people who submitted these patches to first nitpick various technical items, only to later make it clear you were never going to accept their patch in the first place, because you dislike and oppose the decision that you know has already been made, to allow Rust in the kernel.
If he instead was (1) upfront about the fact that he would never allow Rust code in the subcomponent he maintains, and (2) stepped out of the discussion of this patch once it was moved out of said component, and then (3) started a completely separate thread on changing the kernel's stance on Rust to block all future patches and consider removing it entirely, that would all have been normal respectable behavior.
Although it was a DMA patch, it was not in the DMA subsystem that Christoph maintains. More specifically, it was not a file in the kernel/dma directory, but rather a file in the rust/kernel directory, which is where the Rust subsystem lives.
The Rust code is essentially a consumer of the DMA public API, much like many other subsystems in the kernel that consume it.
This is why some people are upset and confused about the situation; he added a Nacked-by tag to a patch that is outside his area. He had good reasons for it, but it was hard to see them based on the way he wrote his replies.
C++ isn't the reason it's blazing fast, moreso that they took the rewrite opportunity to improve the parallelism and be more clever about which metadata actually needs to be downloaded instead of downloading all of it, every time.
Jokes apart, I guess that not all is procedsing yhere is also IO and other stuff going on here so I would not expect C++ to be critical here for most of the workload.
It already does for web purchases, so there is no reason it could not. Not sure why this is not more commonplace.