You'd need a dump truck to carry the irony. People suffering from anxiety? You don't say. The Guardian, BBC, and other MSM propaganda factories are in fact the primary purveyors of such, because they are beating the panic drum over an unremarkable seasonal illness. Increased substance abuse? Of course there is, considering the social distancing and lockdowns that the media itself has relentlessly advocated and supported. Dementia? The vast majority of those who had difficulties with this illness are elderly, a fact that the MSM consistently under-reports. This is the MSM pumping fear. If its stated, official goal were to "demoralize the populace", I can't think what they'd do differently.
Good. It's not medically justifiable to subject children to a relatively untested procedure when there is little possible benefit to them. Doing it en masse, as some governments seem to want to do, would be deliberate mass medical malpractice against children, a colossal crime.
Fear propaganda. Is there actually any claim being made that can be tested in a reasonable amount of time? If not, it's not science. They might as well run the headline "A giant hamburger will squash the earth in a thousand years". It's useless.
The pattern that plays out day after day is this: someone blessed as being associated with Real Science says something, and the press is then free to make a scary story out of it with their ass covered, because they were just relaying what a Real Scientist said. It doesn't matter if it's not really science because it's not a specific claim, or it's not replicable, or whatever. The scientists get publicity, and the media gets clicks. Ten years later when the scary prediction don't come true, nobody remembers. There's no reckoning. Nobody pays any price for their part in endlessly terrorizing the public.
Another epidemic in news coverage is purposeful, deliberate failure to check for precedent. The media has learned that checking for precedent almost always makes things less scary, so why would they ever do that? If they provided context for forest fires, for example, they'd have to say that they're down 90% since a century or so ago. Who's going to click on that?
Fear propaganda. Everyone's concerned about CO2 ppm, as if we're approaching some dangerous unknown territory of high CO2. But CO2 ppm has been much higher than it is today for most of Earth's history. People are terrified about going from 300 to 400 when not that long ago, it was 1000. It's indisputable that CO2 ppm of 400 is closer to a dangerous low than a dangerous high; plant respiration ceases around, what, 150? That would mean the extinction of most life on Earth, right?
Climate catastrophism is a modern doomsday cult that is able to keep operating because the failed predictions are forgotten by the time they're proven false.
Some small amount is expected. For example, if it happens across samples, disliking and then changing it to a like would be counted. Or, like you suggest, if it's clear that it was done by a bot, it could be OK for Google to remove it, and it wouldn't be meaningful. But could that ever explain 95% of the downvotes being hidden?
It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ .
That's what the CCP always does: invade, stick their tentacles into every possible crevice, cut off any avenues by which it might lose power, and begin tightening and strangling, over the screaming protests of the local people. They did it in Tibet, they're doing it in Xinjiang, they're doing it in Hong Kong. They plan to do the same thing in Taiwan.
I am also upset by the lack of elections, but looking at the US politics from Hong Kong, I see a lot of similarities.
The attempts to silence and stigmatize opposition, to close opposition media outlets and deplatform them on social media, harassing advertisers to make sure they don't advertise with the opposition, and the media working with the government to promote some events or views and to bury some others — that all is painfully similar to Hong Kong.
You guys over in the US should take a closer look at that.
Quite a few of us are aware and are taking a look at it. It’s an interesting parallel, and I haven’t heard it drawn quite the way you did. The situation here is a fascinating study that I’d love to read about and analyze in retrospect. Unfortunately, it’s not as fun to live through in real time.
If you look at the New Silk Road Initiative with that mindset, China is in the process of building up influence over countries around half the globe. Foreign governments get huge loans for funding immense infrastructure projects to facilitate trade with China. Reportedly, these loans come with terms that prevent these governments from speaking or acting against China. At least some states are too poor to repay the loans as a lump sum, which gives these agreements teeth.
It's a concerted propaganda effort that is unfortunately not helped by the multitudes of people that uncritically accept their home country's stance on everything.
Conversely, if not for that argument, China would be a hodgepodge of local warlords (what it was post Qing, before ROC's unification). A problem of claims by irredentism is what time period do you consider the proper extent of a nation's territory?
This applies to both the rationalisation of Tibet belonging to China, and for not belonging.
And Corsica was part of Italy (or italian states at least) for 5 centuries and only part of France relatively recently. According to your logic it should return to Italy?
What do I mean by invade? Simply ask anyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, if they want mainland Chinese there, or if they want to be governed by the CCP. I accept that territory is won or lost, and the Tibetans and Uyghurs lost their territory, but they were definitely invaded and conquered.
I have asked many people in those regions excluding Xinjiang, and the answers are never as black and white as the narratives you read online.
In Tibet, people were not too happy about the military presence on the streets, the cultural assimilation or the mao statue in the shadow of Potala palace, but on balance are were happy to be part of China due to the economic development. People felt they would be unemployed without han presence.
In Hong Kong, the most common thing I heard was vaguely racist grumblings about mainlanders. People were unhappy with mainlanders behaving in an "uncivil" manner. There was a majority acknowledgement of China's sovereignty over Hong Kong, and a strong "Chinese" identity.
In Taiwan, things did fit your narrative pretty closely. People want nothing to do with the CCP, and many even wanting nothing to do with the mainland at all.
> In Hong Kong, the most common thing I heard was vaguely racist grumblings about mainlanders. People were unhappy with mainlanders behaving in an "uncivil" manner. There was a majority acknowledgement of China's sovereignty over Hong Kong, and a strong "Chinese" identity.
Really interested to know when did you talk to the people in Hong Kong. What you described might have been the views of some Hong Kong people 10 years ago, but it's definitely not the mainstream view nowadays.
Well, if you are correct, the CCP could/would organize a public vote in Tibet and Hongkong, just like France did in New Caledonia. That is how you handle such a question.
I'm just reporting some anecdotes from my personal experience that I thought were relevant to the discussion. I don't see how that can be "correct" or not.
I agree with you on the principle of the right to self-determination, but it's not so clearly defined. I.e. how do you define "peoples'? I can't succeed from my nation just because me and my family would like to start a principality. At what point does a group become a 'people' deserving of the right to self-determination?
Historically that is done when you either known the result will fall your way or you don't really care.
If California might have a small risk of voting to leave the US do you think the government would hurry and let them vote or try to block it?
I cannot think of a single example where there was a vote of independence where it wasn't either forced (by unrest, war, etc.) or the result was know or didn't matter much. Votes of independence are rarely happening under nice circumstances.
Have you read any well done and independent surveys that support your claim ? Majority does not support the take over like this and chinese identity is much less than hker identity.
We can all disapprove of what the current CCP is doing, but you cannot compare Hong Kong's situation to Taiwan, Tibet or Xinjiang, in fact you're muddling a bunch of completely different situations.
Hong Kong has historically always been a part of "China", you could say it was "invaded" by the British and then the Japanese during WW2.
I obviously disapprove of the suppression of the HK populace with force, but this is no different to how the CCP operate in the rest of China. If anything the British mandated China had to apply different rules to a portion of their own territory, in classic imperialist fashion.
> Hong Kong has historically always been a part of "China", you could say it was "invaded" by the British and then the Japanese during WW2.
Who cares about History? What matters is now and what people want now. If not, you could use that excuse "but X was always part of Y" to justify just about everything.
Well geopolitics is simply not that simple. What if the Chinese government kept telling the USA that california should hold an independence referendum? Might sound like a stupid example, but Americans would be up in arms at such a proposition.
What if China told the USA to end the trade blockade on Cuba so that they fairly take part in the global economy and climb out of poverty? Again, the USA would never consider such a proposition.
The reality is we don't know how many HK residents want to be independent. Ideally they could hold an independence referendum, but the Chinese government don't want that, and due to the geopolitical tensions in the world right now they're not going to take advice from Western nations.
You could make the same argument to the UK about Wales and Scotland, or Spain with Catalunia and the Basque Country. Neither government is going to let a referendum happen for quite a while.
> What if the Chinese government kept telling the USA that california should hold an independence referendum?
If there was good reason to think Californians wanted this, I'd be all for it. Also, there most pressing issue is American investment in California, which isn't so much of an issue in HK.
> What if China told the USA to end the trade blockade on Cuba
Not sure what this has to do with HK, where trade and international relations are generally better than the mainland..
> we don't know how many HK residents want to be independent
and we never will because PRC don't want to know, don't want anyone to know, and make it clear that it will punish democratic support, let alone independence.
> You could make the same argument to the UK about Wales and Scotland, or Spain with Catalunia and the Basque Country
And indeed, I would. But the Spanish government isn't ripping up agreements like PRC, plus its a willing member of the EU.
History does matter. You cannot just invade a country, steal territory and then later say "it doesn't matter if this was once your territory, what matter is NOW and now I own it so get off my lawn".
That's just not how it works. In terms of history Hong Kong belongs to China and only in super recent history it was "taken" by the British always with the arrangement that it still belongs to China and would get handed back to China. So now that China does what is rightfully their right people act surprised, because the West hoped that if a little bit of time passes that China will stop caring but they were wrong. China took care of what was rightfully theirs and kept a tight grip over it because it saw what the West wanted to do and honestly fair play to them.
When I read the constitution of Hong Kong (Basic Law) and the supporting laws in mainland China, I come to the same conclusion as you.
To me, this obviously overrides the text or "spirit" of any handover treaty, specifically the Sino-British Joint Declaration, as the Basic Law is a constitution.
Leaning on that treaty as a Hong Kong citizen or non-British outside observer requires either complete ignorance, or complete desperation to ever reference it. Which I understand for the people of Hong Kong who have no options and don't want the change of life, but it doesn't embolden me to see it as exceptional as it follows their form of due process, by the book.
So, I agree with you. Disagreeing with you requires me to have a completely separate higher standard than how governments we actually respect operate and what they would tolerate.
I'm not comfortable with any of the procedures, but I really do see how we get a very distorted view of what China is, its goals, and how it operates. And there is a level of constitutional consistency towards territorial unity, which is very predictable. If you are willing to accept that (and how almost every action can be construed to undermine territorial unity) then China is very easy to operate and live in comfortably. Not so dissimilar to an institution or amusement park where you never look behind the scenes and just do the PG-rated activities made available to you, and if you stick with that you're fine. Obviously not what we are used to and strive for in "the west", but not really the nightmare its portrayed as either. Its sad to me that even trying to explain things to you all in a pragmatic way could get me detained in China (because its not completely exalting the territorial unity of China and raises questions about it), but I really think its useful to understand and that its impossible to explain another way.
Here's how. Hong Kong is part of China, yeah, but it was (under one country two systems) an autonomous part, with its own constitution, law and judiciary, which was democractic. What makes a state? Territory, legal and executive autonomy, defense. HK did not have defense, but it had everything else. It was a de facto state, and unfortunately HAD to be, because it was to be democratic in China. Hence, it was de-facto invaded when the "security law" was imposed (in violation of HK autonomy). The analogy is not perfect, and for sure this does not make it worse or better (it's bad because it's a violation of democratic rights and against the expressed wishes of at least half the population that demonstrated against the extradition law, NOT because of souvereignity issues). But there is an analogy with invading a foreign country that is pretty strong.
I interpret the parent comment "Chinese don't want to be Chinese" as no one (including Chinese citizens) wants to be under the thumb of an authoritarian government. Not a racist comment.
Don't confuse anti-PRC sentiment with anti-Chinese sentiment. It is a classic strategy to conveniently conflate the two only when the CPC is being criticised.
Surely you should be aiming this at the person who said "Even chinese don't want to be Chinese" - conflating the two, and not the person pointing out how incorrect that statement sounds.
Both points are over generalizations. It's obviously a complex issue. I've been to Taiwan, I've been to Hong Kong, and from my conversations with all types of people the best I can understand as a foreigner is that the Government is not what being Chinese is about. It's about the culture at the end of the day. You could argue that some population of Chinese have kept a certain culture present from a particular time. There's a lot of what I was told (I can't really know) traditional culture in Taiwan. There was an interesting mix of old and new in Hong Kong. It's sad to see so much conflict as a result of weaponizing identity and heritage. The stuff of lore is what makes any story interesting, and we destroy it with inept government structures.
I think you missed a subtlety there, the point is not even the Chinese (people) want to be Chinese (citizens).
It’s not sinophobic to say that the Chinese government and the CCP are messed up. I don’t doubt that many Chinese people would rather they weren’t subjected to that regime.
That is entirely separate from hatred/fear/negativity toward Chinese people and/or their culture.
>If a US born american like his country, it's patriotism.
I'm familiar with lots of narratives that say an American who loves America has been brainwashed by the system. Or is in a position of privilege and is thus not familiar with the problems inherent in the system.
Maybe my experience is limited as I only live in a neighboring country, but the majority of Chinese I know here, and those I have met in China identify strongly as Chinese, even if they dont agree with everything the government does. This take seems borderline sinophobic.
It relates to what I heard in Taiwain (obviously from a biased leaning). But it's not sinophobic from my perspective, let me explain:
From the perspective of some people I talked to in Taiwan, they see it as they "saved" what Chinese culture is, and what China represents today isn't "Chinese culture."
That may not even be the right way to describe it but essentially there's culture vs government as the issue and they're not the same thing. A big fear of the non CCP people's I talked to is that CCP is destroying Chinese culture and that means they aren't Chinese.
Again, just trying to add some color to what I can identify. I rather add color than blur the lines.
Taiwanese are not Chinese though, so my point responding to OP wasn't about them. I mean people who are born & raised Chinese - they usually do want to be Chinese, even if its just in the cultural sense and not the CCP (but even then, most don't seem very vehemently opposed).
Taiwans different as they've had to largely reframe the Taiwanese identity to be more about the island and its history and people who came (including indigenous peoples), rather than just centric to the Han immigration history which was framing the Taiwanese identity more Chinese-centric. I don't expect them to identify as Chinese citizens, even if they share Chinese culture. But again, not my point.
True, I have heard of those people. The handful of Taiwanese people I know say only older people really feel that way anymore, though my mates are all in their 20s, mostly lgbt and living in Tokyo/Taipei - so I can't claim to have an unbiased sample
One issue I constantly run into speaking to friends in English, is that we use the word "Chinese" for a lot of different ideas (even the language). I think its a bit of a semantic landmine in English for these conversations.
I'm pretty sure if you start to buy any substantial proportion of the global supply of food to burn it, raising its price and reducing its availability in the process, you would soon have laws or ordinances banning you from doing so.
Corn ethanol is ethanol produced from corn biomass and is the main source of ethanol fuel in the United States. Approximately 25% of U.S. corn croplands are used for ethanol production.
...
Since 2001, corn ethanol production has increased by more than seven times. [In] 2018, out of 14.62 billions of bushels of corn produced, 5.60 billions of bushels were used to produce corn ethanol, reported by the United States Department of Energy.
Cryptominers are sensitive to electricity prices so they seek to locate their operations where electricity is cheap. Simple logic dictates that they don't increase anyone's electricity price but taking advantage of the cheapest electricity there is.
As to "reducing availability": when was this electricity shortage caused by bitcoin miners?
It's astounding how easy it is to wage FUD and mis-information campaigns. Someone come up with this utterly idiotic argument of Bitcoin energy usage, it was picked up by the press, mindlessly repeated by people not willing to spend even few minutes dissecting it and now you can't have a HN article about Bitcoin without endless repetitions of this specious argument, which perpetuates it even more.
>Supposedly (haven't dug into it yet) videogames consume more energy than bitcoin. [1] Yet we don't see a similar organized effort to ban gaming. Why?*
Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
But you could make identical arguments for gaming, so I don't see how that applies:
>Because intellectual and entertainment pursuits generally benefit society.
The ability to conduct business under oppressive regimes in foreign countries also has value.
> Selfish fucks continuously buying up an already scarce supply of specialized microchips for the sole purpose of greed isn't really comparable.
The same happens with gamers buying up cards, and there have been shortages pre-crypto as well.
> Proof-of-Work crypto has completely screwed some scientists, artists, and just everyday people who might like to just unwind after a long day. During a global pandemic.
Why can't you entertain yourself with something that's less damaging to the environment, like watching a movie?
> Crypto in its current form tends to brings out the worst in us. It's kind of like social media in that regard.
The same could be said for the gaming community, which is saturated with misogyny and racism.
You're equating shortage driven by organic demand to that of shortage from cryptomining.
The fundamental difference is that with organic demand, people typically just want one card. With crypto, the incentive is to get your hands on as many cards as you can, fuck everyone else. Then we find ourselves in this race to the bottom.
Moreover, trying to equate the energy use of both activities is laughable when mining creates an environment where idle compute resources translate to lost profits.
I'm sure many people have taken up watching movies instead. Thing is, the net energy use is still vastly higher because mining creates a perverse incentive for virtually all GPUs to be hoarded, while drawing power 24/7.
I don't disagree that a large swath of gaming culture is a cesspool, nor do I disagree that crypto has beneficial uses. I do however think both are beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm saying is that
the Proof-of-Work model has run amok and is a net detriment to society right now in its current incarnation.
Your argument is much like answering yes to the question "Does a pound of bricks weigh more than two pounds of feathers?" Gaming still uses more energy, even if you try to rationalize it by invoking the motivations of the people consuming the energy.
It's peculiar you chose to focus on gaming. What of professional uses cases? Science, art, engineering.
Even so, GPU demand from gaming is satisfiable.
Mining demand only ceases once the price of the underlying instruments fall sufficiently. More mining won't necessarily make that happen.
My argument is that the mining dynamic itself is potentially insatiable and fundamentally detrimental on a societal level, whilst highly distasteful at that.
It's like advocating for a never-ending greed olympics.
The focus on gaming is just as arbitrary as the focus on bitcoin, and that's my point. Gaming consumes more energy than bitcoin and yet its economic justification is even less clear. And yes, gamers do cause GPU hardware shortages, and they have done so many times in the past.
It boggles my mind that your hill to die on in fighting the "never-ending greed olympics" is a tool that's predominantly used by small-time retail investors, i.e. regular people. According to your system of ethics, it's preferable to be an old-money banker that profits off of the destruction of economy, than it is to be a person using tools (cryptocurrency) designed to divest control over the economy from said profiteers. I strongly suggest you take your war on greed to Wall Street, rather than directing it at the people trying to dismantle the greedy system in the first place.
My point is that, if your goals are really to fight climate change and stop greed in finance, then your priorities are ass-backwards at best, and self-defeating at worst. However, this appears to be more about control than actually accomplishing either of those goals.
>With crypto mining right now, the more GPUs you buy, the more money you make. The demand is effectively infinite.
Here, you admit that your core objection is other people have the wrong economic preferences according to you. The problem isn't the externalities, but rather the mere existence of the demand preference for GPUs. It's a page straight out of the former eastern bloc command economies.
I never said anything about goals. Nor anything about climate change. In fact, my prior comment plainly communicated that I've no interest. Yet, you still attack these points. Except, they're not my points. Stop erecting strawmen.
As for your analysis that basically insinuates I'm a communist, consider how the United States government would respond to a cryptocurrency-fueled chip shortage that was negatively impacting national security.
Climate change and greed were the motivations you originally provided for attacking bitcoin, but now you claim those things don't matter at all. You're being evasive.
The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand. This is what has been done in the past for all the other chip shortages fueled by gamers.
>Climate change and greed were the motivations you originally provided for attacking bitcoin, but now you claim those things don't matter at all. You're being evasive.
False. The very first comment I wrote in reply to you was unsuccessful in its attempt to steer the conversation away from energy. Still, I never mentioned the environment nor climate change.
As for greed, I never said it didn't matter. However, you did try to misrepresent my argument and frame it as some type of war with preference for old money. That you knew my goals or some such.
Since you seem focused on my motivations, here they are:
a) I find people hoarding scarce resources to be extremely selfish and in poor taste. Especially when the intended use for said resources is intellectual in nature.
b) I believe the demand placed upon the GPU market by cryptomining fundamentally differs from the demand created by gaming. The former may never be satiable, due to perverse incentives that promote greed. With the latter, a single person is typically satisfied by one GPU every two years. They're two very different dynamics.
>The US is a market economy, and like in any other market economy, the solution is to increase supply rather to attack demand.
The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources. Government-sanctioned rationing is not unprecedented in the United States, nor outlawing ownership.
That said, I doubt that'll ever become a reality. However, I do hope manufacturers lock down their hardware such that cryptomining is rendered inefficient. Free market solutions and such.
You're just re-emphasizing that you disagree with the demand preference of people buying GPUs, that they should have used those GPUs for gaming instead of mining cryptocurrency.
> The problem arises when manufacturers are unable to increase supply to meet demand. Sometimes it makes sense to attack frivolous demand if that demand involves the hoarding of scarce resources.
That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production. This is precisely the reason why market economies don't suffer from long-term structural supply shortages that plague command economies.
>You're just re-emphasizing that you disagree with the demand preference of people buying GPUs, that they should have used those GPUs for gaming instead of mining cryptocurrency.
Not just gaming: science, art, engineering. If the supply was scarce enough, gaming itself would take a lower priority to those.
>That's not how it works, at least not in a functioning western economy. The more GPUs they sell, the more capital they will have to ramp up production.
Supply is low and demand is skyrocketing. Cryptomining just makes availability of what little supply there is even more miserable. It wouldn't be unreasonable for cryptomining to be treated as a sink for GPU surplus, rather than the current sordid state of affairs.
Because games serve another purpose than just the energy consumption.
Whereas the bitcoin has no utility versus already existing fiat currency, except for the one to prevent any governmental fine tuning on the economics (by decentralizing).
This fine tuning is notably required for, e.g., environmental issues, energy reforms, social support... or just for the government to work at all, deciding budgets, create laws and organize the society.
Wanting to not participate in that in order to increase own's wealth is just wrong, and even wronger when you do that by monopolizing all of the planet's energy.
I was 8 or 9 when I learned about electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Not sure how old I was when my dad warned me about chlorine if I used the wrong salt in the water, but chlorine is a nice clear example of why the thing you use the electricity for matters.
The more laws and regulations you add on, the less the entire thing begins to be its original idea of a free-for-all libertarian paradise currency and begins to make a lot less sense.
I'm sorry you're struggling. There's a process that has worked for me and might work for you, but it takes some patience and effort. Would you be willing to try an experiment that requires 30-45 minutes every day for, say, a month, just to see if it works? If so, the process is described in a free book called "The Path to Nibbana" by David Johnson.
It may seem religious, and that might turn you off, but if you prefer, it makes perfect sense to think of the process as just a psychological training technique, something like CBT.
What I've found is that my basic happiness level (not dependent on any life circumstances) keeps increasing. The vicissitudes of life keep bothering me less and less. My mind is full of kindness, to myself and everyone. This kindness makes it easier and easier to genuinely love life. Whatever you do, I hope you feel better.
