TIRM
18hr ago
I was using my wife's old phone signed into the Chinese Apple app store with Chinese WeChat installed. They have Chinese-only versions of apps for only people with Chinese mainland phone numbers and bank accounts. It was effortless. I clicked through a few screens of taking photos and entering info and I was done. A verified foreigner ready to buy a bun from a street vendor with Wechat pay. I'm not sure if the American version of WeChat is as functional.
Many years ago a Chinese immigrant coworker got locked out of WeChat. I tried to helped them get back on by them scanning a QR code from my account. The point being a user in good standing who is physically in front of a person can verify them. WeChat wrongly implied this would unlock their account. It ultimately did not. They couldn't get on as Chinese person recently immigrated to America. Somehow flagged as a fake account. But inexplicably I, an American who worked a bit in China long ago, was let into the system. Something about anarcho-tyranny applies.
TIRM
1d ago
I did similarly this past summer. Wechat let me validate my identity with a selfie and a photo of my US passport.
Incidentally the Motte is accessible in China and I posted from there without VPN. I did not even have a VPN on the phone I brought.
TIRM
1d ago
force the American companies to lift these sanctions
These companies are much more beholden to Secretary Rubio than to Eurocrats. These are Americans in America. Violating official sanctions is not an option. Million dollar penalties and federal imprisonment are the possible punishments for purposefully violating sanctions.
Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
TIRM
2d ago
And you think this is the strongest or most representative ask from women wanting to participate in politics: drinking at the pub with the boys? Not voting or participating in discussion that is separate from hanging out at the pub?
TIRM
2d ago
Long ago some people on 4chan trawled mug shots and screencapped examples of clearly not white people wrongly recorded as white. Not a rigorous statistical analysis, but examples abound if you look for them.
TIRM
3d ago
There's a time window for money and property transfers that count. Typically 2 years. Transfer, wait 2 years or more depending on jurisdiction, declare bankruptcy.
I am pointing out the level of cherrypicking it takes to select a very narrow policy each from a separate country and compare each in isolation to the US. Especially when those countries would underperform each other by almost all these metrics; the North Korean border policy not making it better than the US or Germany at employment law.
And that's not even getting into if these policies are even desirable. North Korea out competing us at extreme insularity. China executing people for all sorts of reasons I don't agree with; including the popular act of getting currency out of China. They sure are "better at" executing people for things that are not crimes in the US or other developed countries. Something North Korea is also much better at than us. Singapore enacting racial housing quotas. They certainly are more extreme by those measures. Not that I'd say they are "better at" setting policy for some of these examples.
TIRM
3d ago
How many examples would you regard as sufficient?
A list of cherrypicked examples beats the typical experience. For the US and almost all other countries for each carefully picked example. On one hand yes, that's how cherrypicked examples work, but it is not impactful or relevant. I'm not learning much about the inadequacies of America in our underperforming relative to North Korean insularity.
TIRM
4d ago
I know multiple people who got hospital bills sent to collections. Always the same story: they never got the bill and were certain they paid all they owed and got a nasty surprise of collections coming after them for more. I don't suppose that's good for your credit score, if that eventually happens to you.
TIRM
7d ago
That would be after collecting monthly payments for a long time. Turning a profit in aggregate for a large pool of lenders.
TIRM
8d ago
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I don't play tabletop game any more, but if I did I'd want old orcs and racial bonuses.
TIRM
12d ago
It is certainly the hottest movie among elementary schoolers. Not sure about a wider cultural impact.
TIRM
13d ago
Yeah they pretended Rittenhouse had a short barreled rifle until the judge asked them if the were sure and propsed getting a tape measure to check. The judge had to dismiss a criminal charge based on it being a short barrel rifle, so it wasn't just idle falsehoods from the prosecution.
TIRM
13d ago
JAQing off
Both a thought defeating cliche and not what Dr. Watson was doing.
TIRM
16d ago
Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges?
That's a regular occurrence right now. At least in some progressive cities with progressive prosecutors. Maybe some day the right will pick up such weapons commonly used by progressives.
TIRM
17d ago
It's a work of fiction
The premise of this conversation is that it is strongly based on two real people and their actual relationship and is identifiable as them; but fictionalized to turn him into a bad man.
I sure am glad no one wrote a popular fictional story that gets turned into a movie in which a fictional character who is identifiably me abuses young women.
TIRM
18d ago
Worse yet "assault" includes hard talk in many jurisdictions. Credibly threatening someone is assault.
Do you assume women's prisons are meaningfully less violent than men's prisons?
Without bothering to look this up: obviously yes. Do you have compelling prison violence statistics that show the opposite?
TIRM
18d ago
Anduril makes drones that fly into other drones, smashing them. You have a bunch of these waiting and they launch when hostile drones come in. If they don't find a drone to intercept then they land and wait for another attack.
https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner/
Also quite a variety of other military drones.
TIRM
21d ago
It has definitely happened before. Egging on terrorists and then they actually try to mass kill people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack
Actually had a single FBI agent following them as they attempted a mass shooting. Only stopped because of a shootout with off duty law enforcement acting as armed security. If it weren't for armed security they would have slaughtered attendees and I don't suppose a single FBI agent would stop two guys with rifles.
TIRM
24d ago
All good points.
My issue is the common trend of people asserting what the views of their opponents should be and declaring them hypocrites based on a simplistic understanding of their views. Attempting to assign ideological positions to someone and then hold them accountable, rather than asking and listening to their actual views.
There are of course actual hypocrites and valid accusations of hypocrisy. But culture war accusations of hypocrisy tend not to be that. They are instead extreme extrapolations from vague sentiments.
I don't think so. They aren't handing the tech over. EU can kick them out but not make them sell their tech. If there's any possible way for the US to block them from selling off their tech, I would support that.
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