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Yes, one example would be the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks had no chance until they got help from the French, Russian and British empires though.

I hope it doesn’t turn violent, and even if it doesn’t I think the West can offer good help to stave off the influence of communist dictatorship in Hong Kong.

But since the CCP will not respect their autonomy, they need to fight for it.

Plenty of examples of European nations who had to fight violently for their autonomy in the recent two centuries.

If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today, the site deserves the criticism.

You're not going to see your bank accounts empty. You're not even necessarily going to see anyone or anything you care about get hurt by the one percent.

However, when you want something done, when you believe in a cause, you're going to have a harder time than previous generations to exert pressure on the powers that be to make that happen. They will care less about your purchasing power or your vote than was the case for your parents or grandparents. Depending on what injustices you see in the world, you will probably have a harder time finding an organization with any real influence that you can join to make a difference.

This is the biggest problem with inequality; people are fixated on what they have, not on what's possible. The world will change, and everyone has a stake in what it changes into. It's a problem when it changes on the terms of just one group, a problem that of course will always be the case, but can be bigger or smaller. Right not, it's getting bigger.

What if you have twins in that case? Or triplets? ”Baby 1 Surname”, ”Baby 2 Surname”, ”Baby 3 Surname”...

I work in data engineering, and we have multiple systems built by other people talking to our pipeline. Just one of them being off by a little might send the KPIs, the machine learning models and much more into a spiral where they end up completely wrong.

This has unfortunately made me paranoid and uncertain of anything data or calculation related. I cross check all my day to day calculations and, annoyingly, my friends' calculations too. Any known remedies from people with similiar problems would be appreciated.

If you want to read a more thorough and vivid version of all the history mentioned, and so much more, I recommend The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin. One of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

One of the things that's keeping liberal democracy safe is the inefficiencies of governments and businesses, with "not invented here" being one of the biggest ones. What makes Palantir scary is not necessarily that they work with ICE but that they're probably delivering something that adds value. As we get better at machine learning and data engineering, these solutions will not only get much more powerful but also plug and play. That's what I'm really afraid of, at that point they can be rolled out over night.

Same in Sweden, and I'd imagine the rest of the Nordic countries. If not all of Western Europe.

If we ever are in doubt of the system and ask to verify it, those voting machines are essentially just really expensive pencils.

I don’t understand the American obsession with designing new systems yourselves when there’s already plenty of alternatives out there that have been tried and true for generations. Health care that’s affordable, offers longer life expectancy, costs less as a percentage of GDP and available to even the poorest citizens have already been implemented in countries across the globe, in Europe and East Asia in particular but also in Canada and Australia.

Why is it that if a US politician says ”our system is bad, the system from France/Germany/UK/Sweden/Japan is beating us in almost every metric, let’s switch” is met with boos but someone who says ”I have an completely untested idea that’s our old system with some quirks that looks like it was designed by a committee without a vision, let’s try it” is met with cheers?

Only for people who know what they’re doing. If a hacker faces hardware they’ve never seen before it will take some time to read up on it, especially if datasheets and such is not available online.

I fully concede it’s security by obscurity, though. A technician possessing any experience with that hardware is probably going to make short work of its security measures.

I honestly cannot see how one can support the electoral college and not support that the Cherokee get their special representation in Congress as well.

At least, if the argument for the electoral college used is the oft repeated ”people from the more populous states would trample over the less populous states”. Why are people from sparsely populated states a minority that has to be treated like a special snowflake, lest their rights be violated by the more populous ones, but minorities like Native Americans who have suffered centuries of oppression are not? Especially when you can move from one state to another but you cannot stop being Native American.

I agree with casiotone; why pretend you have an important, guiding set of enshrined morals and ethics at all when there’s a clause that nullifies everything by saying ”some people might be fundamentally against our values but if they’re loaded, and they want to do evil stuff more efficiently, we’re the company for them!”?

The analogy avoids the difference that food is a consumable that everyone, from minimum-wage workers and billionaires, uses and getting better quality food doesn’t make you orders of magnitude more powerful than everyone else. Computer technology is different, it enhances the differences between people. An artist working for a villain to make propaganda posters doesn’t raise as many protests as Facebook being open to villains because through Facebook your campaign can get orders of magnitude stronger.

If Happy Meals came with an assault riflevpeopke would probably be more angry at McDonalds for catering to bad guys.

You don’t gave a low cost, accessible national ID. In Europe, we do. Democracy is for everyone, not just those who can drive or with a passport, but everyone so unless the US gets a national ID for everyone any restriction on identification will disproportionately hit low income voters.

Yeah, I don't know. I think the dozen or so other people he recruited from us to follow him might know, however.

I just don't think they care, and they're under the assumption nobody else cares too.

I work for a news publisher in Sweden, and when we got acquired by a larger one the CTO of that company held a huge speech about why working for a news companty was so much more rewarding than working for Spotify. You get to make sure democracy functions, keeping the power in check. Sure, we can't pay you as much as Spotify, and it will not look as good on your cv, but at least you can go home and get a good night's rest knowing you did good. After the speech, minutes later, it was announced to us that this would probably be last time we saw him since he was going to start working for an online gambling business. Kind of took the air out of that whole spiel.

I think he produces ceramic plates for body armor, but he could very well be making weapons too. Either way, he profits off of war.

So, yes, he sees the sugar industry as worse and as something without any sort of utility. Militaries bring security and are necessary, at least in his view, and thus he sees them as a net benefit. Personally, as a software developer, I would not build software for the military especially not anything based off of machine learning because it would be against my ethics, and I think that was his point too; don’t ape his morals, but do at least think whatever you choose to do through.

I had the pleasure of holding a talk at the same event as Saeid Esmaeilzadeh, a rockstar entrepreneur and chemist in Sweden, and one of the questions he got during his talk was how he could reconcile his drive to be an ethical businessman and supply stuff to the military. His response was pretty long but it made a comparison with the sugar industry (paraphrasing here, sorry Saeid if you're reading this and I got something wrong):

"I would never force my ethics on someone else, I will however criticize someone if they don't think their business model through on an ethical level. You should be able to live with what you're doing, personally, without deluding yourself or being in denial. I think Sweden, a democratic country, has an obligation to make sure that the troops we send for peace keeping purposes have the right gear to do the job. However, I would never, ever, supply stuff to the sugar industry. Even though we've found loads of stuff that could be applied to that field, I just couldn't live with myself. It serves absolutely no utility to humanity, it kills more people every year than war and you're primarily marketing stuff to children to form life long habits. It just doesn't square with my morals but I've met other, smart people who have thought long and hard about the sugar industry and came to the conclusion that it's an ethical industry. Whatever floats their boat, but I don't want to make money that way."

Something that I think would do more is for the e-sports community to keep criticizing the CCP on live streams. Ping your favorite players on the issue and ask what they think. A lot of them will probably try to distance themselves from politics altogether but some of them might actually respond in ways that piss people off. If that generates more demands from the CCP to ban people then Blizzard has to think long and hard about who's paying the bills; the players or the CCP.

My grandfather ran a company that designed sawmills. During the 70s and 80s, he did a lot of business in the USSR and he has told many stories from that crazy time. I don't know if he ever was involved in bribery (he has alzheimer's now so even if I asked him I don't know if I'd get an answer that makes sense, and my grandmother has no idea) but he did however experience the corruption of the communist party first hand. Some of the people he did business with became the oligarchs of modern day Russia, leveraging the power and influence they gained from the forest industry to move in on the energy industry.

I'm a bit conflicted about what my grandfather did. As a child and teenager, I always heard the stories as bringing propserity to a poor country, one sawmill could supply tens of thousands of jobs. However, the people he did business with was some of the most dishonest and bad people ever, and my grandfather went into great lengths to make sure that they were never too dependent on the Soviet market and always travelled to Moscow with a lawyer. He never trusted them, and in the 90s and 00s when it surfaced that some of his old clients had become wealthy off the breakup of the Soviet Union, and was now using that wealth to suppress and gouge working people, my grandfather just reacted with "yeah, that sounds like something a shifty guy like him would do".

I still don't know how I should view my grandfather's role in this. The deals he made supplied the USSR with jobs which helped the people, but it also empowered really bad people. I think the same way about business in China, on the one hand the billions of Chinese deserve global abundance just like the rest of us, on the other hand fuck the CCP.

If the Western governments could maybe grow a pair and call out how this is very unfair maybe something would happen.

I work for one of the largest news publishers in the Nordics, and we were criticized for letting the CCP take out a full page ad in our largest newspaper that essentially said "no need for the Western governments to get involved, this is an internal issue that is best handled by us". Our editor in chief of that paper responded with this:

"Now we have the moral high ground. Until the Swedish government can take out a full page ad in The Global Times criticizing the CCP we can use this as one of many examples of how China does not value freedom of speech, but we do."

Does anyone know if Trey and Matt own the IP? What's preventing them from walking away from Comedy Central if the channel kowtows to China and just distribute it online?

I have a completely blind friend. The main reason he uses a Mac and an iPhone is because of their awesome accessibility. He's got a Linux and Windows computer too, Windows because some software he uses is only available on Windows and Linux for when he codes in his free time (you can do basically everything in the terminal anyway).

If Android ever becomes as good at accessibility he told me he'd switch in a heart beat. But, the fact that Apple is so good gives him a lot of brand loyalty and he invests in the newest iPhone on release.

> That narrative is never supported by the facts, and the extradition treaty has been withdrawn. You keep saying it does not make it true.

It’s still not withdrawn, Ms. Lam has only promised she will. But the bill is still in second reading.

> After the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. It's like agreeing to sell your company, then doubling the salary of every employee before handing over the company to the new owner. It's reckless, irresponsible, but sadly, very effective.

These are not employees of the CCP who’s freedom is draining China’s budget, these are people who’s freedom and independent judiciary made them an attractive spot for foreign investment in the first place. The only thing the expansion of voting rights cost the CCP was a more expensive process to influence and pressure Hong Kong. With democracy, such a pointless bill as the extradition bill would not have been proposed in the first place, and the threat of losing re-election would have made the LegCo fully withdraw the bill immediately instead of after months of protest. And, a democracy has checks and balances to investigate police departments for excessive violence and corruption, another thing that the people of Hong Kong lost when the CCP rolled back the amendments that restricted police power.

> Just like the exile of Edward Snowden by no means indicate the unraveling of freedom of speech in the US.

I can publish a full page ad in every US newspaper calling for the US to drop all charges against Snowden and have absolutely no repercussions from the US government. I can’t do that in China calling for the release of Gui. That’s the main reason the case of Edward Snowden is not unravelling free speech in the US, or the west.

I work for Bonnier, one of the largest publishers in the Nordics, and the Hong Kong government took out a full page ad in our largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, where they argued that Western governments should keep out of Hong Kong’s business. The editor in chief, Peter Wolodarski, explained why we did it like this;

”We gave the Chinese regime the opportunity to present their case in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country. An opportunity they deny their own citizens. Because that’s how much we value free speech in Sweden, and that’s how little the CCP values free speech.”

Because the control is still being implemented. To implement it, you need influence.

> Any broadening of rights after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration is suspect. These are ploys to alienate the Hong Kong people from China (離間計).

If you by that mean that giving a place more civil rights and protections against human rights abuses makes it more unlike China, yes, I agree.

And as spacehunt said, British established the independent judiciary which the CCP is trying the dismantle now with the extradition bill and the British also made large scale election reforms, which the CCP rolled back out of fear for democracy.

And, when the CCP can't do anything with the current laws, they kidnap and imprison people for exercising their free speech in Hong Kong. We've waited quite a while now in Sweden for the release of our countryman, the CCP can lend some faith to their insistince that they support "one country, two systems" by releasing him. Anyday now would be nice.

After months of protests. That alone does not convince me.

However, the fact that such a self destructive bill is even proposed by the pro-Beijing government in the first place alone convinces me that ”one country, two systems” is being hollowed out.

He is still on the mainland. I’m Swedish by the way and follow his daughter, Angela Gui. His daughter has been given very limited access to her own father, and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs also has difficulty reaching him. For some reason, the CCP felt it necessary to use a Chinese businessman to try to make a deal with Ms. Gui where she would limit her media apperances and be given more contact with her father. Hardly respecting freedom of speech, in my own country no less.

And, again, this was because of a bookstore owned in Hong Kong, not the mainland.