The Taiwan issue has exactly to do with the fact that sending official diplomatic representatives to it means recognising its legitimacy and sovereignty. Even though most Western countries already believe this, sending the representatives would be to express that they believe this which is what upsets the Chinese government. China doesn’t care what people think as long as they keep it to themselves. It’s when they get “embarrassed” on the world stage that Chinese leadership thinks it demands action.

The whole system of formal diplomatic recognition needs to die. Right now, “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people. This is a very obstructive and unproductive system. It doesn’t matter whether you “recognise” a government and it also doesn’t matter what you decide to call your representatives to it. Refusing to recognise a government doesn’t mean that group of people doesn’t hold power or doesn’t actually control territory. It just prevents you from engaging with them in a constructive manner. It’s just a head-in-the-sand approach to intergovernmental relations.

If there’s a group of people calling themselves a government that holds power over a group of people or a piece of territory that you are interested in, it shouldn’t have to result in this whole game of charades. You should be able to send official representatives to that group without having to worry about offending everyone else. The whole concept of “recognition” is just nonsense.

Let me put it this way. Lemmy infamously only has four topics that people post about:

1. Politics
2. Linux
3. Star Trek
4. Porn

Any community that isn’t about topics 2 to 4 will eventually become one about topic 1.

I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I view this post as an example of a very persistent problem with Lemmy as a platform. Namely, that it seems only have four topics that people ever post about:

1. Politics
2. Linux
3. Star Trek
4. Porn

There’s nothing inherently wrong with posting about these topics but it really seems like whenever there exists a community isn’t about topics 2-4, people will make it about topic 1.

Yeah, okay. But anger doesn’t make my life better. If I’m browsing this community I expect tips that can potentially improve the quality of my life, not just finding out about more mud on a dead 20th century dirt bag politician to be angry about.

Why are you posting this in YSK? How does this information improve anyone’s life in any way?

There is literally no-one here who doesn’t already think Thatcher was a piece of shit.

The presence of far-right politics has really seen an uptick in recent years. It seems to have started in America but has spread to Europe and other countries like a plague. You have the AfD in Germany who claimed second place unseating a centre-left government, the entry of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party into the British parliament (even overtaking the traditional Conservative Party in recent polls), the fourth consecutive election in Portugal where the nationalist Chega party has gained seats, and Canada narrowly avoiding electing Pierre Poilievre the “Maple MAGA”.

Surprisingly enough, prior to Donald Trump blowing up the US-Canada alliance, Poilievre was predicted to win in a landslide in Canada with a 90%+ chance of his party getting a majority but somehow it really does seem like everyone who associates with Trump outside the US loses their election. The premiership really shipped right through Poilievre’s hands like a lump of dry beach sand. Lol

Yet another irreplaceable natural landmark destroyed by idiot hooliganism. There is nothing the courts can do that will ever bring that tree back.

Edit: Apparently the tree sprouted from its stump.

I do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.

In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.

Somalia does not have a functioning state apparatus to enforce any of its laws in most of the country

Nooo not the billionaires!

I’m pretty sure Somalia does not have paid maternity leave

Entered the kitchen, complained about it being too hot

Governments are always offering weird wacky incentives for women to have children, when the solution is usually patently obvious: you can increase fertility by making it easy and affordable to have children. Stipends for food, paid maternity/paternity leave, free childcare services, affordable housing, and a good economy with an abundance of high-paying jobs.

I mean… there’s a reason the baby boom happened in the 50s! But no, that would be socialism!!

Yeah, I did. No good, unfortunately. Could not get TOR to work at all unless connected to a VPN or using a foreign SIM card.

If you have a foreign SIM card then you can get access to the unfiltered Internet in China. So if you’re planning a trip to China, I recommend doing that. I bought an eSim from SoSim which is a Hong Kong carrier (there is no firewall in Hong Kong—yet) and it was like 20 USD for the 14-day “Greater China region” pass. I think it had like 10 GB of data which was enough for my purposes. Extra data is pretty cheap anyway and they take foreign credit cards. No 5G or even 4G LTE though (you have to pay extra for that which sucks). You only get plain old 4G which is passable but disappointing. China throttles traffic to foreign IPs (even unblocked ones) so I don’t think 5G would be a huge benefit anyway.

While connected to WiFi, I was able to set up my own OpenVPN server and that worked as well. Their blocking seems to be DNS based. If you keep it to yourself and don’t share your server publicly, I think you should be good.

Since China is mostly cashless, all digital transactions are tracked and monitored, and selling access to an illegal VPN server will result in severe consequences. The Government doesn’t actually care about individual people getting around the Great Firewall.

But like I said, the idea is not to be perfect but to make it annoying enough to get around that ordinary people don’t bother.

The only experience I have with countries that have censored Internet access is China, but I can say that all ordinary methods for connecting to Tor will not work and using commercial VPNs is really a game of whack-a-mole with the Chinese government.

The idea is not to be 100% effective, it’s to make evading the censorship hard enough that most people don’t really care to do so. Everyone in China knows how to evade the Great Firewall but most people just don’t care about the fact that their Internet access is censored.

This is some gamble to make with unclear payoff. It costs billions of dollars to get the manufacturing contracts, hire the engineers, and obtain the procurement contracts. Not to mention the years of effort it would take. Unless you spend decades growing your own talent, the only way you’re going to be able to attract the talent needed to build this project is by poaching them from Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Huawei by doubling their salaries. And by buying out their non-compete agreements or hiring the best lawyers in the world. You’re betting on two facts to remain true:

1. That the issue of avoiding American products will even be salient in three to four years’ time. By that time it’s pretty likely that America has either taken over the word or been reduced to rubble. Trump will either be god-emperor of mankind or leaving office a broken, defeated man (or perhaps in a coffin before that—the man eats more Mcdonald’s than can be good for him, especially at his advanced age)
2. That people care enough about this to pay double the price of an American-made cell phone.
3. That your customers don’t count the fact that their phones were made mostly by American or Chinese engineers against you. America attracted all the best tech talent in the world with high salaries and China basically brute forced it with sheer numbers.

Number 2 is really the problem here. Even if you could get a competitive cell phone to market literally tomorrow, it’d have to cost twice as much as an iPhone and four times the price of the latest Huawei or Xiaomi model. While customers are more than happy to pay $6 for Quebec maple syrup so they can avoid $3 Vermont syrup, the proposition of paying $3,000 for a Canadian cell phone versus $1,500 for an iPhone is a much more difficult one to accept. And one that not many people are likely to be able to afford.

It is not because of a shortage of asphalt that potholes exist. It is a shortage of attention and money to fill said potholes.

Cannot agree more. I say things all the time here that people hate and downvote me for but the numbers are even more useless here than on Reddit so it’s difficult to care.