Agreed. This system of giving out money and getting what we paid for sold back to us is fucking dumb.

Yeah. I have a car that has telemetry. Sucks for privacy, but if I was going to commit a crime, I would just ******************************************************************************, use the system to obfuscate the data.

Who in the current admin would you like to see run it? Because one of them would if it were nationalized. Who would be your pick?

It would be under NASA, but the argument is moot, since it wouldn't happen under a MAGA Nazi administration. It will have to wait until Americans take back our government. Then we can nationalize Space X, confiscate the DOGE Goblin's fortune, and deport him back to South Africa.

The current regime is full of ignorant buffoons but at least in that case it would normally be temporary.

In the private model where the gov pays for everything anyway, the taxpayer pays the cost of doing the thing plus whatever profit the oligarch wants to make and you have no way of switching to another oligarch should the current one becomes unacceptable. There is simply no upside to SpaceX as a private entity

Then what's this

Show me the youth unemployment figures.

spreading the contact of Chinese people with westerners through for example XiaoHongShu (RedNote) or TikTok, which is why the US wants to ban access to these apps

You missed the part where China hurried through a tiktok like curtain to silo users.

You must have also missed the social credit scoring. The HK protests.

You may or may not think that this is justified, but it's quite literally the definition of "closing up", and China is engaging in exactly the opposite.

This is textbook tolerance paradox stuff, either accept propaganda or you ae against free speech. Oligarchical authoritarian cunts should not have access into a foreign population, that is why Trump is in power. Are you telling me the EU has less press freedoms than Russia or China? Because closing the gap doesnt mean much if its by a tenth of a degree.

I beg you tell the same to a Ukrainian or to a Vietnamese

Its clear you are passionate and refusing to take on board an alternative view. There is nothing in what I have said that should lead you to reply with this. Understand proxy wars and realise that military spending kept the direct warfare cold.

Ukraine is atrocity that is only tied to the cold war by way of Russia continuing fighting it while the US got complacent and allowed their government to fall which lead to a lack of support/tacit support for Russia.

I live neither in china or the usa, but I don't want myself be recorded by either of their appliances that I use. and that naturally also extends to my neighbors and wherever I go.

its quite interesting how many people suddenly started to love mass surveillance

Don’t know why exactly are you downvoted

It's very weird. maybe I was a bit too harsh in the beginning, but I don't think it was nearly this bad.

For example I bet the insurance companies love to have some driver behaviour data about you, and the big retail likes to know where/what time you are on the move (though they already get it from the dozens of apps on your phone that have access to location data, like Google Maps)

there are ways to clean it out of a phone, but cars are much more closed down, and if I had to guess they are probably even protected against you cleaning it out software-wise by safety regulations

Show me the youth unemployment figures

According to SCMP, "The urban jobless rate among those aged 16 to 24 – excluding students – fell to 15.8 per cent last month, down from 16.5 per cent in March, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday". What's your point? It literally says "released by the National Bureau of Statistics", what's the government hiding??

You missed the part where China hurried through a tiktok like curtain to silo users.

Can you source this claim, please?

You must have also missed the social credit scoring

This is a nothingburger made up by western bad-faith actors. There is no such thing as a social credit score in China. Unlike in the US, where you can go into your bank account to check your "good citizen meter" and see how likely you are to get a mortgage.

The HK protests

Nothing compared to ICE kidnapping people from their literal homes masked, putting them into unmarked vans, and deporting them without due process or putting them in prison.

This is textbook tolerance paradox stuff, either accept propaganda or you ae against free speech

So, China forbidding western media is oppressive and dictatorial because western press good, but the West forbidding Russian media is cool and based because Russian media bad? You're only showing your bias here if you think western media has any semblance of objectivity, especially when it comes to international politics.

Are you telling me the EU has less press freedoms than Russia or China?

Not than Russia, Russia is further advanced towards fascism than the EU, so it's worse. But China is getting better and the EU is getting worse.

Its clear you are passionate and refusing to take on board an alternative view.

It's clear that you only care about deaths if they take place on the first world. You want to avoid "direct confrontation" because you care more about Europeans and Americans than you do about Vietnamese, Korean or Iraqi. You take pride in how much the "military expenditure in the cold war prevented direct conflict" without caring about how much more conflict it stoked outside the west.

Ukraine is atrocity that is only tied to the cold war by way of Russia

False. The invasion of Ukraine is a policy pursued by the Russian goverment as a way to preserve the sphere of influence that the west is eroding each day through NATO and economic/soft power. You can condemn it, it's cruel and abhorrent, but it's not exclusively Russia to blame, and in 10 years from now this will be clear to everyone.

it’s not exclusively Russia to blame

of course. the poor russia was forced to attack the neigbouring country. fuck off, troll.

there is no such thing as "sphere of influence" you are entitled to. your country end at your borders.

China would love so much to rule the world, that’s why it hasn’t entered any war in the past 40+ years

The Hundred-Year Marathon - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

the global south are happy to enter the comparably advantageous economic deals

are they happy? and are the deals advantageous? can you back up your claims?

As for “dictator”, look at the approval rates of Xi in China

oh yes, the approval rating of a dictator in a dictatorship is very valid metric . (hint hint: they are irrelevant even if they were not fixed. any kind of approval rating bears zero relevance to whether the country is a totalitarian state or not, or whether the country is a threat to its neighbours or not).

You’ ve been explained this whole scenario years ago when Putin was pushing for Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

That was EU chance to get dirt cheap energy and raw materials.

what?

Competition is good for the consumer.

except what is happening now is not really any kind of fair competition. the european manufacturers exported they know-how to china, which was strategic failure, it was stolen, and now it is sold back to us with the advantage of cheap chinese production.

they will ruin our production and we will be in a similar situation where we were during covid, when the political leadership were saluting the china cargo airplanes on tarmac, otherwise it would not bring us masks, syringes, or any other stuff whose production we had given up and outsourced to china

unless we turn the ship around quite soon, we will be regretting it soon and for a long time.

the guy alone has that amount of crushing power.

Nobody of right mind takes this at face value. This isn't a pro wrestling heavyweight championship belt, with Jinping suplexing the Hong Kong protestors.

It's obviously as head of an autoritarian communist regime, using corona measures and a militarized police to suppress people for the extravagant act of desiring freedom from the CCP.

I don't think that has ever been true, really. Nor should it be, Laissez Faire is a trainwreck waiting to happen, probably literally and figuratively.

Textbooks will tell you that the USA, and other countries like China and Russia, are a regulated "Market System" which in some markets teeters on strict Oligopoly.

Xi became president for life almost a decade ago, Putin ignored term limits in like 2008. Musk is failing to do what they have done, and he doesn't even express any real power over the president given he hid his role from the courts and left the white house with a black eye.

But even that is incorrect.

Yes, Xi Jinping is powerful as the Chairman of the party, but the communist party of China is not the military, and there is a fair amount of decentralization in decision making.

Further, the guy above goes "look at how Xi is suplexing Taiwan?!?!" even though he isn't because guess what, he doesn't actually have the power to do so.

Also, none of this has anything to do with the topic of EV production, which is in the hands of a private company which largely operates independently of the government, much like millions of other companies that operate in China.

Which is why I said the dude is just spewing brainless US state propaganda and Red Herring.

I don't know why you didn't just fund NASA properly.

They have terrible customer service in the US too. I think it's their business model: find people who enjoy being treated like an asshole and sell them overpriced shit.