China can unite with Taiwan tomorrow if they want to peacefully.

It’s been done before. Look how East and West Germany did it. Overnight.

All China has to do is be East Germany and let Taiwan be West Germany and it will be sorted. But obviously they don’t want that because being one country isn’t their main goal.

It’s the system that is the issue. Without checks and balances if it wasn’t Xi it would just be another guy with a different name.

I believe Deng Xiaoping had two successors lined up last being Hi Jintao, so a dictator was always going to seize power when xi came on.

So you can replace until Xi showed up with until anyone showed up that term.

So if small businesses aren’t what you call producing anything of value then what would you consider would be something that does produce something of value? Out of curiosity.

Because those small businesses are providing services to the community/other businesses which wouldn’t be able to function without them. That’s not the case with the censorship pencil pushers the businesses there would be able to function better without the extra layer of bureaucracy.

And big 4 accounting and investment banking is required, they fill a market in outsourcing by providing expertise where it doesn’t make sense for every company to have a full time employee on it. Good for short term projects the places I worked in all use them. Investment banking well you have to spend money to make money so yes they’re providing value by providing the investment for other businesses to grow.

Well let’s see, I don’t know because I don’t live there. Not everyone/everything lives in/revolves around America.

In any case I’ll bite then. Everyone I know who’s in business degrees are of minimum big 4 or in an investment bank at a minimum, the smarter ones have their own small business.

Are you seriously saying those are less productive than someone who censors information and makes it harder for people to conduct business?

And to your second point the overproduction of housing is two fold, firstly it’s one of the very few investable resources there and second the local government needed to sell the housing to raise taxes and needed to build despite demand or lack of due to keeping people in a job.

Are you hosting it through a provider such as AWS or Azure? That might be why. I had no issues when setting it up on my own.

I have 2x ISPS and through that multiple raspberry pis. Set up docker, then you can set up multiple VPNs (e.g. OpenVPN which I used just before pandemic) so after 2017. It always worked but these days I would also esim it - they can’t block roaming mobile due to the way roaming works and the travel Sim prices are quite competitive these days.

Tldr no issues hosting on personal internet rather than through a cloud provider.

Example ones I use, simple to set up via docker files.

https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/openvpn-as https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/wireguard

It might dissuade people from buying an iPhone or computer every year. So much stuff is thrown away prematurely.

They are own goaling their economy with these counter productive pencil pusher jobs that provide zero or negative input to the economy.

Real estate crisis, reduction of jobs especially in the younger population, lack of investment from overseas because of zero covid for too long forcing companies to move supply chains and that’s before picking a fight with everyone causing uncertainty which makes it less investable.

Cutting down the “private” sector which provided the majority of the jobs because that would threaten pooh bear.

It’ll make China weaker in the long run, but the people in charge won’t care, they’ll be long dead before then. All the people in the top powers are all multi billionaires, even if they lost 95 percent of their wealth they would still live extremely comfortably.

As for the general populace, I like to use the Kim Jong Un anology - a fat man within a nation of skinny men. Not really of importance to the ruling elite.

Funny they’re all very patriotic when it comes to these things. However when asked if they personally want to go to war…well, not so patriotic when you have to put your life on the line.

Through drones we are seeing a first hand view of the war. First time I’ve seen a person shot, someone blown up. It’s not like the Hollywood films that’s for sure.

No bleeding, missing arms like every war film in Hollywood. You don’t see anything, they get shot and just become lifeless. No visible blood or anything. Similarly the drone dropped grenades, I would have thought they would be missing body parts.

But on the outside you wouldn’t even know it’s terminal injuries. And there was another one where the tank commander landed on the roof due to a cook off in what seemed to be in one piece. But then someone calculated the G force as 300gs.

Thanks to drones I now know people mostly go out on a whimper and not a bang.

If it’s any consolation it’s pretty bad to say but it might be good for humanity in the end. Half the issues they have is the lack of men caused by a previous war with a figure that Putin is trying to emulate now.

Putin is sending more of his men to their deaths unnecessarily. Could have been avoided by not starting the war. But what’s done is done, now that it is started the men that has been liquidated will help restrict Russia in the future. They still haven’t recovered from WW2.

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.