The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready", which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand, it is very risky for Xi.
I can't speak for FB. But I know a local (non-US) real estate company which does crap like this (they also love to disable right click and detect when browser tools are open and programmatically close the tab/page when that happens), and they're not paying much. I'm guessing it's double of minimum wage, which isn't high here.
How do home owners get into trouble from falling prices if they're just living in their home?
Sure, if they need to move and sell, the price difference might be less favorable to them, but having to weigh cost vs benefit of moving is a fact of life one way or another.
It's a strange expectation to have that home values should act as an investment that can only ever go up.
Letting that expectation influence policy on making space for living available is one of the root causes of this crisis.
My feeling is because we build little in the way of new units of housing most places. All the money being injected into the real estate industry is from the price-debt spiral.
I'm only proposing to build enough units such that house prices rise at the rate of general inflation or slower. In many highly developed, capitalist systems, their housing prices barely budge in a generation when accounting for general inflation. This is done though careful regional planning. This business of "housing as investment" (for normies) is awful and greatly harms renters.
China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian. They're also preparing for military activities to expand their territory.
It's not that each country needs to develop their own, but it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view.
Like Saudi Arabia and formerly the Saddam regime (when he sold oil in USD)?
While compatible world view is used as an argument against diplomatic and economic relations, in reality it’s just a bonus, not a requirement. What’s important is plain old cost benefit and national interests. The US is still a better ally for EU than China, but it’s gotten drastically worse fast. And while China has territorial ambitions, they are nowhere near EU. The US is the good old status quo ”devil you know”, but it’s abundantly evident now that nobody really knew them, including many of their own political elites domestically.
On diplomacy timescales, ignoring China because of human rights concerns is exceptionally short-sighted, both for EU if US continues current path, and for global stability in case conflicts escalate between China and US. There is no choice that guarantees EU will have a strong ”human rights” ally in 10 years.
> China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian
Let's also say that democracy is very important internally. But as a EU citizen (or even better as a middle east citizen) whether they're democratic or authoritarian makes very little difference to me- I don't get a say in what they do. And in the case of the ME, it wasn't China or its allies that reduced several countries to rubble, it was the democratic US.
> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view
There are no such things as "incompatible world view" but certainly closer or more distant ones. And I think the fundamental values of the US are pretty far away from those of the EU.
I'm not sure I understand what it means to be "compatible". We are talking about different countries with different regimes of course: in what sense two countries are or aren't compatible?
People who professionally answer questions do that, yes. Eg politicians or press secretaries for companies, or even just your professor taking questions after a talk.
> Coming up with all that fluff would keep my brain busy, meaning there's actually no additional breathing room for thinking about an answer.
It gets a lot easier with practice: your brain caches a few of the typical fluff routines.
Mostly that might be down to micro climate and similar highly regional variation in weather.
Here in Berlin, predictions that it will rain or when it will rain are often too pessimistic because the city is a bit warmer and drier than the surrounding areas, which is where the airports are. Tegel, now closed is no the North West, Brandenburg airport is on the South East. They are about 20km apart. The long decommissioned Tempelhof is actually in the middle of the city but I doubt that there still is a weather station there.
Airports are the big consumers of, and important sources of weather data used for making predictions (in addition to satellite data, and weather stations elsewhere). It's more important that the predictions are correct there than 10-15 km away in the downtown areas.
Additionally, many weather apps aren't really precise about where their focus is. You set the city typically; not a postal code. So they'll predict it will rain in Berlin. But it's a big city and that doesn't mean it's going to rain everywhere in the city. It won't do neighborhood by neighborhood predictions. It's technically correct even if not a drop falls where you are. And of course professional users of weather predictions mainly care about the type of weather they need to plan for, which for airports is things like Thunderstorms, poor visibility, etc.
For short term planning, weather radar apps are popular here. Great stuff for guestimating whether you can get home by bike without getting caught up in a big shower. Thunderstorms are very common here throughout the summer but you can see the systems moving west to east hours in advance on the radar apps.
China (or at least the CCP, I find the equivocation of the CCP with the country disagreeable) has had the desire or even need to get revenge for their "century of humiliation" for a long time.
They have a fundamentally different government and social model, basically a one person dictatorship that feels the need to micromanage and control their populace.
They absolutely love seeing democracy and businesses associated with it fail because it reinforces their perspective of the CCP model being superior and thus strengthens their perceived legitimacy (or even inevitability) of CCP control over China.
A rivalry, wanting to score points, wanting to gain standing at the expense of another, are all things that do not have much to do with wanting your opponent to collapse
I think both of you entirely misread the top level comment.
He's saying that owning and using an Apple product requires you to engage in behaviors akin to worship, I imagine e.g. accepting Apple's way of doing X as correct by default (~worship) rather than wanting to customize something based on your thoughts and preferences (questioning).
But that’s just as wrong. Apple products are definitely opinionated, but using a product that’s meant to be used a specific way doesn’t have anything to do with worship? If your personal preferences overlap with Apples design choices, good for you; personally, I prefer to not having lots of ways to tinker with irrelevant details, because I’m very susceptible for that kind of busywork that keeps me from focusing on actual work. But if you feel otherwise, there’s a wide range of alternative products to choose from.
The insistence of some people that Apple products are the devils work because they don’t fit their personal preferences is bogus to me. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
Exactly. Opinionated products are great for those who share the opinion, and for everybody else there’s other products. It’s personal preference, and nobody is “wrong” for preferring one platform above the others.
Could I get along on a Windows or Linux box if I had to? Sure. I even have multiple of both as single-purpose machines. I’m not going to enjoy it, though, and I’m going to end up spending way too much time and energy tweaking either to fit my preferences (being Mac-like). There is no Linux desktop or Windows release that I could put to use as a daily driver without getting pulled down the customization rabbit hole.
> He's saying that owning and using an Apple product requires you to engage in behaviors akin to worship
It doesn’t at all, though. Many things can’t be customised on all computers. Am I worshipping my TV because they only give a few selections for power off time?
You’d never say that for everyone else who puts some restriction on their hardware or software that we must worship them, so why for Apple?
> He wondered if maybe that there was a tangible benefit to the shaking itself, in that it could help perturb out of the traumatized state itself.
As someone with a trauma background who never learned to suppress this shaking, I am very skeptical of that idea. I'm middle aged by now and still have severe social anxiety problems in certain moments. My body will still shake when this process gets triggered off.
The 2027 date was a guideline for their military to be "ready", which they may not be either. That is a far cry from the decision to actually make a move. They will only do that if they're certain it will work out for them, and as things stand, it is very risky for Xi.