Ain't capitalism grand. /s

Even grander with "chinese characteristics", as the Party which was in fact built on the idea of capitalists "buying rope" etc. might put it.

Turns out the Wanda Group from the PRC just sold most of its stake in AMC in the last week or two. Thanks for the ingenious news. Wanda apparently made quite a killing on their investment too.

These companies with volatile stock pumps and dumps apparently initiated by Reddit (also significant PRC ownership FWIW - the last time I checked anyway!) users/manipulators have interesting targets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/small...

AMC Theatres (US and elsewhere) were bought by a company from the "People's Republic" of China in 2012. The primary play was for influence in Hollywood. Think about that for a minute. But what else?

Greenwald's sources...

Journalists and researchers have already pointed out that Greenwald's claim in this tweet about Parler is demonstrably false.

So I was curious where he got it from.

It turns out he was credulously parroting an anonymous Parler exec.

https://twitter.com/nickmartin...

Since the (IMO justified) revelations of criminal actions by the US military during the neo-con Iraq war, *everything* I've seen from Greenwald has been *ideologically* opposed to US, to the extent of him deserving the highest *Russian* military honours Putin can bestow on him.

Whatever journalisms he still engages in is merely harnessed for the purpose of propaganda.

Don't get me wrong, the US military policies have for decades deserved harsh criticism, but it needs to be rational and non-ideological rather than aimed to serve the enemies of the USA specifically and enemies of democracy in general.

Now, this was Greenwald's starting point wrt. Parler use among the insurrectionists:

"Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler?

Zero.

The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald...

Undoing mod I fxxxed up.

And it would be nice if Mediatek could find it in their interests to offer better support for OSS development. It's almost as it they're intentionally pushing low-end OEMs and OSS developers towards the People's Republic of China-based RockChip.

In the next stage of the new Great Game, location matters.

Democratic nations should absolutely establish remuneration schemes to support Open Source developers, according to their (both funders' and coders') abilities. Where necessary, developed countries should support developing ones because were talking about mutually beneficial infrastructure anyway.

What remains something of an issue is that the regimes that have, as part of their existential struggle, been exporting authoritarianism to democracies (disinformation, trolls, corruption), those regimes will get also a free ride... But perhaps that is a price worth paying.

Nevertheless, with authoritarianism (and worse) now again on the rise (thanks to the People's Republic of C, Putin and their vassals and useful idiots) there are more people needing security from their "government" than ever before. And it's the good, decent people authoritarians always want to eliminate.

Code as if you wanted to protect Mandela, Liu Xiaobo or Magnitsky from state sponsored terror. You know they're not the only or last of their kind. These people depend on security right now.

One day the "unknown open-source coder" will be Time Magazine's Person of The Year. For many of us it's been that way for decades already...

Sorry but that is just (tankie?) BS.

This link details the process.

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p...

There was inertia certainly, but when other former British colonies were starting to become independent, the People's Republic of China was being put through various violent phases by its dictatorship. During the "Cultural Revolution" the CCP tried staging violent uprising in Hong Kong too and the UK were threatened with PLA invasion of Hong Kong if they tried to instill democracy there.

After the 1997 handover it was the (ethnic Chinese) Hong Kong tycoons and the compromised business classes (with mainland China profit interests) who became main local backers of the CCP-installed puppet regime while CCP-aligned ("United Front") political stooges started running the administration.

Please try to avoid making sweeping authoritative claims about issues which you clearly neither understand nor know enough about.

Technically it is true.

In January the Chinese regime "warned the world" not to ban flights out of the People's Republic of China or else.

The WHO then parroted that same message in their official capacity.

https://twitter.com/WHO/status...

PS. My Slashdot .sig is probably more than twenty years old by now. Watching the CCP steamroll their non-Chinese colonial subjects, civil rights activists and increasingly the freedom of expression globally though all these years while "business must go on" hasn't been easy.

Their home market of the People's Republic of China is supposed to be up and running while the rest of the world is dealing with the pandemonium of their making and Lenovo, who've owned Motorola since 2014, are among the favourite giant corporations of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

So why feel sorry for them?

And the state planners and computer scientists of a certain very large communist dictatorship with massive investment in AI were shocked, SHOCKED, upon learning this.

The names behind the "malware company" indicate that the plaintiffs were mainland Chinese who were simply operating behind the facade of an easily registered Hong Kong "Ltd".

Practically anyone with a little cash can register a company there, but particularly mainland Chinese companies and individuals are increasingly using the territory to mask their de facto origins.

My guess is that whatever operations this company had were conducted across the border in mainland China. Incidentally I would also guess that is exactly where "your nation" is.

I had totally missed it. Thank you.

The Circles concept is sound even if the average user didn't quite grasp the implementation.

There should really be a universally interoperational social networking platform standard that isn't controlled by any single corporation or country. Diaspora has many good ideas, but unfortunately lacks resources.

And then get banned from doing any business in that country.
Hint - (They want to make lots of money in China.)

Once a foreign company has gotten permission to operate in China and has invested there, the ruling Communist Party can use that as leverage to influence that company's operations everywhere.

Nudge, wink, or else.

As the Communist Party feels increasingly powerful and finds these methods are working (as they have been) they will only become more brazen.

Another example of genetic adaptations that was discovered earlier are the Tibetans, whose homeland is a vast highland with average altitude of about 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). Having superior oxygen intake and resistance to effects like Acute Mountain Sickness helped the Tibetans to populate and defend their highland territory over the millenia. The few foreign expeditions that ever made it to their capital Lhasa were either allowed to enter (e.g. Mongols who ended up adopting Buddhism from Tibet) or didn't linger for too long.

It was only due the emergence of modern mechanized military technology (from the West) and the repressive and expansionist ideology of communism (again from West) that the newly victorious and idle armies of Mao Zedong were able to invade and actually occupy Tibet in its entirety from 1950-1951 onwards. Special thanks go to Stalin for arming the PLA, with surplus American WWII war aid also finding new somewhat less liberating uses over there.

Over the eons, sometimes as quickly as over a few millenia, people (and anything living within tolerances) are able to adapt to changing surroundings, or die trying

Technology can be used either to protect and develop life, or it can be used to destroy it.

Philosophy may seem quaint and pointless in this era of ever increasing specialization and culture of constant entertainment and distraction, but as we march into the future it would be beneficial to at least have a faint idea what it is we're doing and why.