mamborambo

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last year's protest was this: a government can lose all credibility and social support, and still use law and civil institutions to prop up the hated regime. Isn't this proof that democracy has a huge Achilles' heel?

The way modern democracy works is ultimately easy to corrupt:

- People's power is only exercised once every few years at election time. Weaknesses: Hacking the election process, stacking the field, disqualification of candidates, using the media to spread disinformation.

- Power is concentrated at the top. Once the election is stolen, the "representatives" in parliament and chief executive office can carry out bad agendas to pass evil laws and steal national reserves. There is no longer any effective people's power to restrain them.

- The expression of people's disagreement with the government is normally through free press, arts, civil society interaction, protests, strikes, and petitions. A bad government willing to use police force and ignore international questions can crush dissent.

- Even when the bad government went too far, like in HK, and caused thousands of political victims, it can hide behind the grand facade of "internal affairs". This is a loincloth that no longer has any effective meaning in today's connected, borderless world.

- finally, why are the citizens of a bad country not allowed to obtain help from a third country? The UN's mandate is to set up orderly diplomacy between states, but increasing non-state players also need a voice to be heard at the UN.

The problem is that Beijing has a strange definition of what is National Security. It include suggestions (even if constructive and well-meaning), and also journalism (when the facts do not paint a pretty picture). Where other jurisdiction only proceed to prosecution when there are material action and consequences, China is content to prosecute just on the feeling of being criticised or threatened or citizens just behaving rebelliously -- within the first day HK is already arresting citizens for having banners in their bag and for shouting slogans.

A good question! Just like the CD is just a vehicle for music delivery, the university format is a dated system for delivering advanced education.

Somehow I don't think China care much about the people, so long as they can lay their hands on the wealth. The way they trample over the HK system, most of the elites and international connections will evaporate in a matter of months, and all they will have by the end of the year would be the crumbs of society.

Carrie Lam is a Quisling -- people who become enablers for an invading regime, like when the Soviet forces trying to take over Finland and were able to use the Finnish politicians. Why do they do it? Probably a combination of having dirts, or lack of political courage, or a mistaken belief that they are not really responsible if they just follow order.

Although HK appears to be the direct casualty of US change of trade status, the reality is that China is one who will bleed once the HK trade window is closed.

For too long China practised a kind of hostage diplomacy where it solves its problems by taking hostages and then negotiating for concessions. For instance the two Canadians detained to pressure Canada to release Huawei CFO.

Hong Kong is now another hostage of CCP, Xi betting that the US dare not tighten the screw on its tariff as long as HK is a hostage in its grip. But most likely China will fail, as HK people have prepared themselves to be sacrificed to bring down the CCP. On an individual level HKers will begin another mass exodus like in pre-1997.

The original goal of the Internet's design was a network that can survive even the nuclear war, and that is why TCP/IP has multiple routing and redundancy. Why is the modern Internet so easy for authoritarian governments to control and partition? Knowing China's main motivation, I don't trust any of their so called innovation.

A README.md in most Github repo is already a statically published page, easy to author and easy to access. Even most PWA festures can be added to this setup with just Jekyll configs. Am I missing something in the question?

Reading through the article the appeal process was shown to be highly fuzzy and uncertain even for a group of highly trained legal experts.

This Kafkaesque situation is similar to the way the legal process works inside a totalitarian state like China, where the citizen caught in a sticky legal situation, could not use the appeal and defence mechanisms, because nobody knows what is the actual mechanism.

And similarly the Youtube user has no natural rights or protection, even if the entire misconduct lies with the Youtube copyright strike process.

It is times like this that I start to agree with the way governments have begun to scrutinize Facebook and Google.

Clearly they do have a responsibility beyond a commercial term of service, to provide not just a utility but also to ensure that some degree of fair play, truthfulness, and consistency is applied.

The "Buy it for life" movement would absolutely need to flag software-dependency as an anti-feature. My recent smart TV purchase is regrettably tied to a fixed China-hosted domain name to fetch the main pages, and despite many calls to the manufacturer they refuse to tell me how to change that hard-wired address to another one. I hope the consumers can rally together and create a crowdsourced BIFL database of which brands to avoid, and perhaps how to circumvent these software dependency.

An important side story is that CCP's active political interference of Taiwan's participation in World Health Organisation and other international coordination effort in the past few years, can affect Taiwan's ability to contain any pandemic from spreading.

And since there is estimated 200,000 Taiwan nationals living across the strait, their mobility especially during the Spring festival can become a huge conduit for spreading infection from China into Taiwan.

It is high time that the UN commits to a resolution to insulate shared global issues (hygiene and environment) from politics, and stop China from playing with fire again and again.

The risks of government abusing Internet is omnipresent, but this risk is out of control in countries where the constitutional courts are weak and lawmakers compliant. It shows that tech disruption is ultimately still less powerful than political disruption -- only that can fundamentally bring this civilization forward.

The hopeless situation of Carrie Lam fronting the CCP and having to execute its policy, is what drove Hong Kong into the people's revolution of 2019. Under the CCP, local administrators do not need ideas, just obedience. Carrie Lam's misfortune was to be sandwiched between the increasing paranoia of Xi Jin Ping, and the increasing rebelliousness of HKers, and she has no strategy to resolve the two forces.

Except she could have chosen to take the HKer's side. She is after all a HK citizen and its representative even without true election. Seven million rebels can parallelize a city, but pissing off a few thousand bureaucrats in the politburo simply leads to tantrums and rhetorics. If she had done that, HK's economy would not have stalled, HKers would rally behind her, and the whole Two System debate could be channelled into a consultation process that can remain civil and reasonable.

HKers will not forgive her for her missteps and police brutality that led to thousands of arrested and hundreds of maimed/injured/raped/dead. That will always be her legacy.

But HKers can thank her incompetence for triggering the nationalistic feeling of a Hongkonger. The city of immigrants and world refugees has never been so clearly in sync, and the common enemy so in focus.

The idea of "digital republic" is fascinating. Politically it may be controversial, but technically it deserves further study. As the world shifts to the nomadic, post-industrial, cloud-based societies, countries like Estonia with e-residency may become popular for people to opt-in to join countries with the best social compact.

But once past initial audience discovery, the recurrent billing of patronage donations is just pure service.

So logically creators should only use FB for access to new audience, build a relationship with the newly acquired audience, and pivot to direct billing or Patreon for recurrent collection.

But pas

Writing this from Hong Kong, the danger of being surveilled and having secret dossiere compiled without one's knowledge is always at the back of one's mind. I guess once you buy into using Wechat, Alipay, face id etc you will gradually forget how to survive outside the social credit system... But not me. I will continue to avoid the danger of complacency.

So much truth in this article. We closed down our hobby business, a dance studio, after 10 years of trying to make it work, and finally come to the realisation that we can do much more without the anchor weighing us down. The truth is a passion startup often defies rational analysis, almost like why people have children, it simply fills the part of them that fears regret.

The One China issue has long ago morphed from a rational point of consensus, into an irrational point of oppression.

The attitude has changed drastically, when all the original members of those discussions have been replaced by next generations, and no one can remember the original concilliary tones of those meetings, and all that remains are misunderstandings -- that was how the splits between Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shias, probably happened, and passed down in increasingly dogmatic interpretations.

Scary shit here! I just finished the gsuite trial period and started my first paid month, and then to read this horror story is....

I activated Gsuite because it is the best price/capacity value for cloud storage (at the moment) and also I want to evaluate this product as reselling my IT services. I am not going to be happy if I cannot move back into my free gmail in the futue.

Google, we need a good response from you.

China (PRC) culture suffers from two systemic weakness: the selfishness created in one-child, post Cultural Revolution, and the cha-bu-duo (nearly good enough) attitude of rapid modernization. In Asia many consumers think of Japan and Korea as being committed to craftmanship and China as being low-cost questionable quality.

Engineers and innovators growing up in such environment are naturally not adverse to cutting corners to reach their goals quickly.

However I have to add that, given the huge population of China, the top 0.1% can still be enormous, and once China learn to discard its shardy attitudes, they can race ahead rapidly.