You are making the assumption that everyone has the exact same disposable income.

Those 5000 are the average, and the average tends to be skewed by outliers in the top 1%.
Which means that for most people, and the median, 500 is significantly more than 10%.

More realistic is that there are a bunch of people who wouldn't even notice that amount missing behind their couch.

A very small percentage of people, but enough to support this kind of business model.

(And they probably all know each other.)

Not according to the CIA Factbook.

There are cultures where the family of the bride is expected to pay for the wedding, and it is those in which sons are valued more than daughters.
China is not one of those.

Besides, the one-child-policy was in the 1960s. That hasn't been relevant for decades.
With the 2020s they now have a pro-natalist policy.

Nobody is going to buy Zoom.

Matrix can do everything Zoom can do, and do it better, and without the security holes.
And it is already open source. Free software, even.

I already have a perl script that is reading webcomics for me.

There is no such thing as a tragedy of the commons.

It was invented by a eugenicist.

Someone looked at the facts regarding his claim, and it turns out that Garrett Hardin was wrong. Who would have thought.

It only becomes a tragedy as soon as someone puts a price on commons. In other words, the problems start when the commons are privatised. When they stop being commons.

So what would you use, gamma rays? https://xkcd.com/273/
IR is higher frequency than microwaves.

Not really, no. China sees itself as a democracy.

Maybe you meant to say that pro-union speech is restricted?
Or outspoken support for Communism?
Or any criticism of the dear leader?

Indeed.

What could you say about Xi that you can say about Trump?

That he is the president of the USA?
That he is friends with Elon Musk?
That he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein?
That he imposed tariffs on imports from China?

There are eight parties in the central parliament and the central government in Beijing. It hasn't been a single-party system ever since the CCP defeated the KMT in 1949. The CCP has the absolute majority by popular election.

This is different from countries where a single party rules without the need of having the absolute majority, or even a relative popular majority. In the UK, for example, the ruling party has less than a quarter of all the votes. (And the head of state isn't elected at all.)

Intellectual property? Which type? Copyright, trademark, patents?

Copyright means a temporary monopoly on fine art, you created it, and whoever you sold the rights to can determine who gets to make money off of it and who does not. (In most countries you cannot sell copyright, it is automatic and unalienable. So only you get to decide who gets to do with your work what you want.)

Trademark means that you get what you expect, and nobody else can label something similar with the same brand and claim that it is the same thing. Unless, of course, you let them get away with it. Trademarks must be registered, and they expire as soon as you don't care anymore, so you must also always defend them against appropriation.

A patent means a temporary monopoly on an invention for a specific purpose. Anyone using the invention for something else is not covered. Anyone using a different invention for the same purpose is not covered. Patents must be registered and paid for, whereupon they are published for all the world to copy, but not sell. (And in most countries, the patent must have a working prototype to be eligible. There aren't many patent offices that will blindly register an application, take the money, and leave it to the public to contest the monopoly on grounds of "prior art", "too obvious", or "it doesn't even work".)

Intellectual property means "don't think of it as a monopoly, think of it as property, which the state has to defend against thieves trying to cut in on my monopoly!" Or in other words: "Intellectual property is anything that lets me dictate how other people use the things they own."

This is about none of these things.

What this is about is personality rights. You have the right to your own name, nobody else may pretend to be you; that would be identity theft. (Although there are a lot of people who share the same name; and some people have more than one name. And then there's transliterations of names. Actually, a name is not a good way to identify someone.) You have the right to your own likeness, nobody else gets to pretend to be you. Except, of course, when there is no danger of the pretense being mistaken for the real thing, such as in parodies (Spitting Image comes to mind) or in biopics.

There were also about $1.5 trillion in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added.

This wouldn't have happened with Gradle.
NASA should have upgraded years ago.

Just stop oil.

Per TFS:

That is all it takes.

As far as you know.

Edwin Hubble has discovered that galaxies that are further away are redshifted more, which is odd because one would expect gravitational blueshift.

This correlation between redshift and distance is called the Hubble constant.

One interpretation is that these galaxies are moving away (and that the redshift is a Doppler shift), but that doesn't make sense because at a sufficiently large distance, they appear to be moving away faster than light, and also everything is moving away from everything else. So a better interpretation is that the space between distant galaxies itself is expanding, which has been shown to be the case by the size of the supervoids.

What is not known is why the space is expanding. (A more intuitive interpretation is that the space is constant and everything in it is becoming smaller. But if we use ourselves as reference, we are not becoming smaller relative to ourselves. Space is growing relative to us. The observable universe is expanding.)

This expansion corresponds to a factor (the cosmological constant) describing the accelerating expansion of the universe. And across cosmological time and distances it is not constant, there is some form of energy at work.

It is called "dark energy" (ever since 1998, 27 years ago) because nobody knows what it is. But it is not conjecture, there is definitely something going on.

And that has been discovered, shown, tested, and proven, which makes it theory. Purely descriptive, of course, but proven theory nonetheless.

No, that's Dark Matter.