Going back 35 years to point out a time when protestors were killed is always a strange thing to me. You can go back just a few weeks until you reach a point where the US killed protestors. Then there's stuff like the Black Lives Matter protests where the US government violently suppressed protests and people died/disappeared.
If 1989 is all a country has as a problem, then that's a sign it's doing great.
There are plenty of other more recent examples in this thread.
I was simply replying to the original statement that China doesn't kill protesters in the street. The notion is so risible that in hindsight it may well have been sarcasm or bait.
But, if you wish to expand the scope of this discussion, sure. There are several clear distinctions between the (horrible) events you list and what happened in Tiananmen Square.
The most obvious is that we are free to talk about them now. I submit that the Chinese state's continued censorship of the subject is a sign that (1) the state is still complicit in these crimes and (2) it is not "doing great".
The scale of brutality is also just incomparable. I say this fully agreeing the events you list were terrible. The horrors committed at Tiananmen Square were simply on another level.
Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:
While it's correct to criticize China's authoritarian policies and lack of civic and religious freedoms that are often taken for granted here, it's still very much a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation. The US's treatment, both historical and modern, of it's black, native, and immigrant populations have been just as or even more brutal than China's crackdown on Islamism. Mass incarceration and criminalization of the poorest sections of society in the US are at levels far beyond what exists in any other country in the world. Political corruption and nepotism have been normalized for decades, and the deep-seated culture of elite impunity is apparent in the total lack of consequences from the Epstein files. US citizens should not be wasting time criticizing other countries for problems our own country has yet to fix.
They've been successfully blocked (for now). No current deportees are headed there so far as I know. But they are busy trying to build the system right here at home.
ICE detention is already beginning to resemble the Salvadoran prison system.
Due process rights get violated. Detainees get shuttled around to different facilities to be lost in the system through engineered incompetence, making it difficult for legal counsel or family to find them, or even to know who has been taken. They subject them to torturous conditions, abuse, and often hold people who've committed no crimes for months.
They are thwarting oversight and defying court orders left and right. And they are trying to scale up like 10x+. And once they do, the detention system won't just be for immigrants. They are going to target anyone they want.
D's have successfully blocked DHS funding for now, but if they (or SCOTUS) allow any of this to go forward, things are likely to get far worse
Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
I'm specifically speaking of the "race to the bottom" offshore consultancies that exploit cheap labor in foreign, largely asian countries, for export to the US to bypass paying US wages. The preexisting meme I referenced is around corporate lies where their "AI" is largely backed by offshore labor. Think the latest Waymo news, etc. Regardless of those controversies, within the US at least, we've been offshoring technical labor overseas for decades.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
Who is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.
I've long suspected that the ban of plastic drinking straws was a manufactured distraction to turn people against environmentalists. The environmental and economical effects are so small, while it so distinctly affects so many Americans every day.
I'm sure you're saying that fully tongue-in-cheek and not genuinely proposing a coordinated anti-environmentalist false-flag conspiracy.
But it is funny to me that, under the interpretation you're (facetiously!) suggesting, if someone believed that sincerely then they would essentially be trying to "attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence"... Presumably because that has the benefit of assigning the fault to whichever side this particular person happens to like less.
Out-group's malice is much easier for many to stomach than in-group's stupidity.
In this particular case, it is likely that it started as a genuine campaign. But the reason it actually was successful I suspect that some corporate strategiests realised the many things this could do for them:
1. Give them some goodwill for doing something for the environment.
2. Distract from the things that did matter. They were happy to replace the straws in their drinks if that meant that people thought less about the burning of Amazonas to create graze-land for their hamburgers.
3. It made the environmentalists look like fools.
I don't question the "in-group stupidity" (I can think of some other examples of, let us say, misdirected campaigns.) On the other hand, considering what we have learned from the actions of anything from tobacco to fossil to pharmaceutical, you don't need to be particularly paranoid to suspect conspiracies both here and there.
You mean the floating plastic islands in our oceans? Or microplastics found everywhere?
The only thing I don't like about the paper straws is that they're worse, they're coated with pfas and they disintegrate while drinking causing it to be ingested where the previous straws didn't. In that particular case yes I think banning them was the wrong move, or at least the paper straws were the wrong replacement.
But the need to reduce single use plastics, yeah that's crystal clear.
We're literally talking about the capacity of vibes-based regulations to turn out doing more harm than good.
"We need to reduce single use plastics" + "Banning plastic drinking straws reduces single use plastics" => "We need to ban plastic drinking straws" is a logic trap, and we've got to stop falling for it and ones that pattern match to it.
Does it feel good? Does it have good optics? Will it get someone somewhere reelected? These are not scientific questions.
Is this an effective thing to mandate? What does it actually do (as opposed to what it seems like it will do)? Is it literally even better than doing nothing instead? These are scientific questions.
I believe policy decisions should be governed by the latter far more than by the former.
Is there any reason to believe there would be any? My understanding of PFAS is that they are used in the application of various coating like things (teflon originally, also since then waterproofing applications, paints, makeup, and firefighting foams)... none of which seem particularly related to making thermoplastics and pushing them through a nozzle into various shapes?
Because the implication is that underlying asset is regressing or degrading. It's very obvious, and this comment just highlights your lack of reading comprehension.
You can find all the professors employed by a public university and their salary. How is ice any different when it comes to accountability for public funds?
