"People should be allowed to see whatever they want, but if they are attracted to influences controlled by the boogeyman, then the government knows better and should cut off your access, for your own good."
This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media. Considering how magnificent CCP's censorship machine has grown into today, the slope is not that slippery.
> This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media.
This is the justification for censoring China's official government media in the west.
It's absolutely bizarre that they can censor China's government media on the grounds that it might contain messages from the Chinese government. We're long past the slippery slope; we're not even coherent. It's so dumb that we have to pretend like the government of China is a revolutionary terrorist organization in order to convince people not to question the logic of suppressing the speech of designated enemies.
It's not only what you can see on the platform. It's what the platform puts on every device the viewer uses to access. Spyware that scans the rest of the device for data, that streams information back to Chinese servers, and more.
Perhaps we should ban the app, while allowing the web site.
I'm all for banning apps that carry spywares (either by app store policies, or privacy laws), but I see no reason why such ban applies only to apps published by Chinese companies, rather than all apps.
Outside of spyware we should also consider the fact that Tiktok tailors it's algorithm to serve educational content in China and nuclear waste-grade garbage to the West. That should provide some guidance here. We need to move past the black-or-white thinking and add more nuance to the discussion.
China wouldn't allow a social network to abuse Chinese children, but in the US the only social networking business model is shoveling crap into the mouths of children and teenagers. Their crime is identical to Youtube's, and nobody is considering banning that.
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
Not only what videos are shown, but also what videos /topics are suppressed, which is also a useful tool for swaying public opinion as Meta has demonstrated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607698
I've been using Bitwarden's clients (browser extension, mobile apps, desktop apps) with a self-hosted vaultwarden [1] server. It's marginally free if you are already self-hosting other stuff. I'm hosting it on a raspberry pi 4b at home and exposing it to public Internet through Cloudflare zero trust (also free). Had no problems so far.
I have a similar setup but using a $5/month VPS that I also host a few other personal/family apps on. It works really well but I’m wondering how long the api will stay open and accessible given their recent huge VC investment.
I remember this from the era when building websites with FrontPage and DreamWeaver was still a thing. There were sites with catalogs of those "apply cool effects to your website by copy-paste this snippet to your HTML source file", and a clock following the mouse cursor is definitely one of them! Fun times.
I had a GeoCities page and really wanted to try the cursor effects/followers, but they never seemed to work. I kept trying to add them and never saw anything... until I looked at the site on a friend's computer in IE and the screen just exploded with cursor followers. I was primarily a Netscape/Firefox user and didn't consider that my browser might not support the effects!
> Because that's what "Sept", "Oct", "Nov", and "Dec" mean.
Please keep that idea to whatever languages that assign those names to months. East Asian languages have been calling them literally "month 1/2/3/etc." without problems, just like how most languages don't have 31 different words for each day in a month.
Alternatively, if we have to give months aliases, why not fix those languages by e.g. reassigning "September" to the 7th month?
The pandemic changed everything for the airline industry, which went into recession for two years. Pilots' incomes went down 10% to 40%, so did flight attendants' incomes, and losses were widen.
Last year, one of the "big three" airlines[1] recovered 100MMs RMB of revenue through selling pilots. Yep, selling pilots in stock, literally asking them to find jobs elsewhere. The airline industry is in a mess now, but the public doesn't know.
Young pilots complaining that they won't be able to make their mortgage payments; Low morale in the industry. Much higher attrition rates. What do they all mean for an industry that relies on safety?
1. A Qingdao Airlines aircraft ran over a ground crew staff [2]
2. Runway excursion for a China Eastern aircraft in ZLYL [3]
3. Landing gear pins were left not removed on a Lucky Air aircraft (subsidiary of Hainan Airlines) [4]
4. Cracked windshield on a Juneyao Air aircraft [5]
Those all happened within a year. Chinese civil aviation has never had a safety track record as bad as this. People in the industry feel very bad for such shameful moment.
But what would happen next? No idea. Everyone is waiting for that flight with the unlucky ones.
> 3. ... if you forfeit $1 of income and the strike price of options is $1, ...
Does this example need another prerequisite "and the current price of NFLX is $1"? Because if the example runs with NFLX at, say $10, then each option already have an intrinsic value of $9.
And combined with #5, those options look like at-the-money call options that expire in 10 years. But in this case it won't make any sense to set the option price (the amount of income to forfeit for each option) according to either strike price or stock price -- shouldn't it be set according to the difference between the two?
> and combined with #5, those options look like at-the-money call options that expire in 10 years.
Correct.
> But in this case it won't make any sense to set the option price (the amount of income to forfeit for each option) according to either strike price or stock price -- shouldn't it be set according to the difference between the two?
The difference is always $0. The option strike is the same as the current price. The option price is 40% of the current stock price/strike price.
Let's say you make $180K. You opt to put 50% into stock. So each month you will buy $7500 worth of options. On month one, the stock price is $750. The option discount is 60%, so you get your options at $300 each. You buy 25 options at a $750 strike.
So now you're down $7500. But if the stock goes up 40% to $1050, you've broken even. If you exercise your option you buy the shares at $750, sell it at $1050, and make $300 a share.
But the real advantage comes if the stock goes up say 50%. Now you can make a profit of $375 a share, so you just made a 25% gain on your initial investment. It takes a while to break even, but once you do, you have extreme leverage.
People who went stock heavy usually made more from the options than salary, at least in the 2010s.
This has been a common justification for CCP's censorship on Internet and other media. Considering how magnificent CCP's censorship machine has grown into today, the slope is not that slippery.