I jumped from boost for Reddit to sync for Lemmy. No regrets loving it.

Edit: just realised boost for lemmy is available now too

Her mistake was to do it in a Muslim country. I have a Muslim friend you wouldn’t even know if they didn’t tell you.

Outdrinks everyone, sometimes eats pork but rarely. But that’s because they only get pub food, according to him food just takes up space that can otherwise be occupied by beer/vodka/gin/burbon. Noone else I know Muslim or not goes to this extreme, it can’t possibly be good for their liver.

He’s at least smart enough not to do this in a Muslim country.

I mean Joe Lycett was briefly known as Hugo Boss, name didn’t stick after he changed it back.

There’s actually a famous instance of it happening. K-19. They had to go into the reactor room to fix up the cooling because of botched manufacturing process.

What happened to them after can only be described as gruesome. I’d rather a bullet to the brain after.

If China wanted peaceful unification they can have it tomorrow.

Cede all power to Taiwan and they can be one country. They definitely won’t be bullied by Taiwan and unlike China Taiwan would accept differing opinions. It’s been done successfully before to a large extent. East and West Germany joined together as one country without the need for border fences or two systems in one country. Just imagine what a basket case of a country if it happened the other way around. 2 systems, border fences different currencies, declining standings on corruption, political freedom etc.

But of course they’ll never do that. Because deep down it’s not the country they care about. They only care about the CCP itself.

Edit: looks like the wumaos are in force, not surprising as a large number of them are otherwise unemployed now 😂

It’s not even internal strife. It all comes down to it’s now or never. If they let this opportunity slip by they will never get Taiwan.

Their population is declining and there’s nothing that can be done about it in any meaningful way. Nothing has worked to get people to have more children. As they get older people of military age will decline.

Right now this generation the males outnumber the females. Which means expendable soldiers. These people will never marry and benefit the state in anyway.

The leverage China has is it’s consumers it’s one of the largest markets. But the Chinese buying things to support international companies is quite minuscule as a percentage of the population and will decline as time goes on, they get all the media attention that’s all . They’ve been struggling to boost internal consumption for years.

And it isn’t that surprising. Chinese people are one of the most tightarse people ever. They haggle everything and that’s even if they get to the point of actually going to buy it. Spending money to make money usually doesn’t factor in.

Dictators seem to outlive most people it seems. Mugabe made it to 90s. Obiang is 81. Everyone is waiting for Putin. Xi could also join this club, if he starts hitting the gym.

Three times the minimum salary doesn’t seem too enticing to go into a warzone. Money is useless if you’re dead and won’t cover for your disabilities if you get injured. But hey that’s just me, each to their own I guess.

Might be a good thing in the end. There is a way to remove him, he will go sooner or later, everyone dies eventually, not even the most powerful dictator can get around that.

What we do know is that he has stuffed up his country for his own personal gain. Killed off so many jobs because Jack Ma and co was getting too powerful. These are high value tech sector jobs that the now unemployed youths would have been happy to be employed as.

He has put in alot of money into state owned enterprises which doesn’t have as much output as more pseudo private companies. Causing higher unemployment.

Zero covid lockdown that was a big cause of this economic situation well it was Xis policy and noone could tell him it wasn’t a good idea until it was too little too late.

Again as I say he has stuffed his country up for his personal gain which wouldn’t even matter in a few decades time once he passes away. But the damage to his country will be lasting and affect future generations (not that he will care, it doesn’t affect him).

Imagine the alternative in which we have a competent dictator. We may all be conquered and have to live under their political model. That’s a hard no from me.

I don’t get what’s so special about Grindr. I only knew about it because it was on the news one time and was known as the gay tinder ripoff. Even down to the name.

If the app was known by something else that doesn’t sound like a Tinder ripoff most people wouldn’t even hear about it.

Not my type of app so I’ve never used it but I can’t think of anything that tinder couldn’t do. All tinder has to do is to have a new column in the database

All the other apps need to do is to check if the person’s gender== their preferred gender then that person is gay. If gay show people of same gender otherwise show opposite gender. Any app can do this.

I hope they lose alot of revenue for forcing people back into the office.

It’s nowhere near a good salary to be potentially shot at blown up and killed. You can get way more than that sitting at an office (most likely at home now due to WFH).

I wouldn’t go at all but if I were to go I would probably want 5x+ that amount minimum due to the inheritent danger.

Edit: since you’re at war you’re effectively working 24/7, I fail to see how anything less than minimum 15-20x the amount is a good salary all things considered.

Whether they do or not isn’t really the question. Can more be done? Yes of course. But Catalan, Occitian, Basque and Galician is co-official which affords them use as a medium of instruction, media usage, can ask for services from the government in those languages etc. How’s France doing for those points?

And more importantly Spain has changed in the past 50 years. Keep in mind even half a century ago Spain was the same as France in terms of repressing cultures. France well, it’s still the same.

Well let’s start.

In Spain the medium of instruction can be and is set by the regional government. Catalan, Basque, Occitian and Galician is used extensively as a medium of instruction in public schools (fully funded by the government)

There’s extensive media which includes government owned media in those languages. And for government services you can ask for someone to speak to you in those languages.

The languages are promoted and are co-official. I have friends from Galicia and have been there.

China is a closed society dictatorship. They’re not attractive to higher educated talented people who have a choice where to immigrate to. It would be good for society as a whole for China to get smaller because of they get too big they will try to conquer a few other countries.

Japan is different and has changed over the last half century. They don’t arbitrary detain you or try to be repressive. Society will not lose out if there are more Japanese in the world.

In fact Japan does well with soft power, all my friends love holidaying there and some would even immigrate if the rules were relaxed. Whereas none would go live permanently in china even if they gave out PR on arrival.

Apples and oranges.

It’s France they’re very xenophobic. Just look at how they treat the Corsicans, Brentons, Basques and Catalans.

Night and day to even a few hundred metres across the road in Spain or Andorra.

They’re very nationalistic especially China. There’s no guarantee they don’t want to conquer the world even if they were not authoritarian. Just ask any of them about the 9 dash line, instead of saying something neutral like no comment they say yeah it belongs to us.

So the best thing is even if they democratise, for the moment never interrupt your enemy whilst they’re making a mistake.

We can all thank our lucky stars for that. Totalitarian regimes are usually corrupt, and talent is based on how much you pay rather than your actual talent. They usually do alot of own goals that benefit the leader and it’s cronies rather than the population at large. And constant purges which again helps the upper echelons but causes the country to go backwards.

We can thank their corruption for their ‘3 day special operation’ taking almost 2 years and counting now.

Similarly China now has a population and economic crisis of their own doing to please their leader. Disallowing tutoring causing alot of younger generations to lose their job and killing the tech industry jobs because of beef with jack ma. And the one child policy which was a large part of the population decline.

We’re lucky that people can’t speak up to their leader when they make mistakes. Imagine if these regimes were competent. We just need to look at Germany in WW2 to see how that can turn out.

China is all aggressive because they know it’s now or never. Even before the bad news with their economy it was already a foregone conclusion beforehand.

Everyone knew their population would decline. Then their comparative advantage disappears. Their advantage is a shitload of people, even with a lower GDP per capita it’s still significant as it’s 4x the population as the next country (besides India, who are on an even lower GDP per capita right now)

Due to the sheer numbers they can use their internal market as political leverage. Disagree with them and no money for you.

There’s a few skirmishes but I think Putin has made Xi think twice. Although I do believe China can sustain quite a bit of losses if they do go to war before their advantage of many people disappears.

Firstly they have excess males so theoretically even if they lose excess soldiers it wouldn’t affect their birth rate as the issue is lack of women not men.

Might be a two eggs in one basket outlook for them, gain a bit of territory and rebalance their gender ratio.

We can only hope Putin’s war has made Xi think twice whilst we bide our time whilst their population decreases.

Eh what’s to investigate? We all know the plane was deliberately bought down to remove specific people from existence. Even blind Freddy knows this.

Inflation is sweeping the rest of the world. It’s a good thing people are buying less of stuff they don’t absolutely need.