I don't think it was a miscalculation. Greed always ran deep in the West too.
> If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics
It's not always possible. It works in some countries but not in others. For instance, it seems not possible in Russia.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state.
I somewhat agree, as the sinomarxist theorem and strategem is about that (and the sinomarxists also managed to bring out many people out of poverty too), but your analysis is not entirely correct either as China has many superrich now, which is a perversion in the system. So Xi also lies here. Because how can there be so many
super-superrich? This is a master-slave situation, just like in other capitalistic countries. So why then the lie about sinomarxism? They just sell it like an ideology now, not unlike the Juche crap in North Korea.
But Russia has never removed the Communists from power. It removed the Communist party, that's true. But plenty of the revolutionaries were themselves Communists; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were very high-ranking Communists. They liked the idea of economic liberalization, but the political liberalization was only allowed as long as they stayed in power. I'm not sure Russia has seen even a single honest presidential election. The current "president" of Russia is a former KGB officer.
Calling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power. Economic liberalization (which had quite an effect) while holding the political reins tightly is very much like the Chinese communists acted during Deng Xiaoping's tenure. The Chinese managed to bring somehow wiser people to top though, it seems.
Yeltsin may have used Communists as a scare during his campaign. But today's Russia is in hands of a former Communist dictator, much like today's China is in the hands of a career-Communist dictator.
It _is_ correct to say that Yeltsin fought a very dirty campaign, using "dark cash" (the infamous "Xerox box") and unfair agreements with the major media owners.
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.
The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim
was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the
position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against
the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong).
But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the
total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that
is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy
(though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is
still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship.
Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros
oligarchs.)
We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if
that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more
rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s
I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now.
Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading
Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly
similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion
of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell
the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is
that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of
put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries
without nukes.
>But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
One reason why Lai's fate has only limited impact is because it doesn't resonate that strongly with working people for whom Hong Kong isn't an example of upward prosperity. His rags to riches 'boomer optimism' appeals more to the Western audience than to someone who has lived in the stagnation of Hong Kong of the last few decades, where ambitious tech talent now migrates to the mainland.
Likewise on the mainland the youth is significantly less interested in emulating the West or old Hong Kong which to them is not a symbol of dynamism.
1Country2Systems is still in place, just the version that was always meant to be, not the lie western propaganda sold.
HK failed their half of 2System by not implementing national security law on their accord after 20 years of failures and it became obvious they were never going to do it out of own volition. Frankly if local preferences is to be under national security umbrella and be free to commit treason their preferences should be completely nullified because that's unserious position. Hence PRC, after UNREASONABLE patience had shove it down their throats under 1C mandate (1C supercedes 2S) - HK only ever had "high" degree of autonomy, not full autonomy. It was always in Beijing's prerogative to force HK to eat their vegetables, it just took 20 years of HK incompetence before Beijing ran of patience. AKA the 1C2S muh HK has full autonomy under Sino British declaration tier of retarded western propaganda fed to useful idiots was a lie and got dispelled.
That's a whole lots of words to say that the people of HK don't get any say in how their lives are run, and that it's justified to force them into a situation they don't want. That's a crock of shit, and I suspect you know it.
There is no or ever has been a national security issue in one of the safest cities in the world. You could leave it in the doldrums for 50 more years and it wouldn't make a difference.
On the other hand, has John Lee made any real progress regarding the entwinement of the political economy and real estate developers leading to the high housing prices or overcompetition? Not really. So it's just full throated authoritarianism with no benefit. Unlike the West, HK already enjoys efficiency and infrastructure on par if not superior to Tier 1 Chinese Cities, so any appeals to "order" are farcical when the city is already far more orderly than the mainland.
What does that have to do with national security? Public order =/= national security. National security is HK having one of the largest US consulates in the world because it was widely recognized as the western intelligence hub into PRC (a consulate that directly reports strait to US state department lol), no small part due to lack of NSL. That's what HK was, a national security state of exception for treason, one that PRC waited 20 years to close. Cue significant consulate downsizing after PRC pushed through NSL. Beijing cares about national security for the 1C part, not some public order minutiae like grandma getting shanked in 2S.
> progress
Also who cares? HK drowning in stagnant end stage capitalism is exactly the kind of optics PRC wants right now. What is side effect? HK youths flooding to mainland for a good time. Also see recent online discussions around residential fires, many HKers recognizing, valid or not that HK, like rest of west, is farcical procedure shithole that can't get shit done, explicitly highlighting mainland tier1 cities urban management has better execution vs hk having "better" paper laws. They see benefit of actual authoritarianism, just like RoW including disenfranchised in west in the last couple years. They don't want retarded paper order and muh rule of law that hasn't worked for them before or after NSL, because PRC still light kid gloves on HK, increasingly they want to get shit done, like a proper tier1 city.
Debian is kind of slow in adapting to the modern world.
I kind of appreciate that debian put FOSS at a core value
very early on; in fact, it was the first distribution I
used that forced me to learn the commandline. The xorg-server
or rather X11 server back then was not working so I only had
the commandline, and a lean debian handbook. I typed in the
commands and learned from that. Before this I had SUSE and it
had a much thicker book, with a fancypants GUI - and it was
utterly useless. But that was in 2005 or so.
Now, in 2025, I have not used debian or any debian based
distribution in a long time. I either compile from source
loosely inspired by LFS/BLFS; or I may use Manjaro typically
these days, simply because it is the closest to a modern
slackware variant (despite systemd; slackware I used for
a long time, but sadly it slowed down too much in the last
10 years, even with modern variants such as alienbob's
slackware variant - manjaro moves forward like 100x faster
and it also works at the same time, including when I want
to compile from source; for some reason, many older distributions
failed to adapt to the modern era. Systemd may be one barrier
here, but the issue is much more fundamental than that. For
instance, you have many more packages now, and many things
take longer to compile, e. g. LLVM and what not, which in turn
is needed for mesa, then we have cmake, meson/ninja and so
forth. A lot more software to handle nowadays).
> Debian is kind of slow in adapting to the modern world.
Yeah definitely. I guess this is a result of their weird idea that they have to own the entire world. Every bit of open source Linux software ever made must be in Debian.
If you have to upgrade the entire world it's going to take a while...
The problem I see is: people are not going to use a project that is AI generated for long really, unless they do it just for a one-off task. I'd like to constantly generate new music. I also have ideas based on existing music so I want to adjust this, but do so programmatically, and that seems ... hard.
Not a big commitment from a user, and nothing lost if it doesn´t work as hoped.
I'm just positively surprised how quickly you can create a prototype for these sorts of ideas with Claude Code. This is literally just a few hours of vibe-coding.
I kind of want to create music programmatically but
so far it has been way too difficult. I also can
barely find anything useful via oldschool google
search anymore. I am almost stuck like with MIDI
here ...
> The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
We also had this recently with arduino. I don't understand why companies try to get that way. To me it is not an open source licence - it is a closed source business licence. Just with different names.
(As I said above I changed to an AGPL earlier today but I'll speak to my BSL logic)
I liked BSL because the code ~was~ proprietary for a time so someone couldn't duplicate my software I've worked so hard on, paywall it, and put me out of business. I'm a one-man development operation and a strong gust of wind could blow me over. I liked BSL because it naturally decayed into a permissive open source license automatically after a timeout. I'd get a head start but users could still use it and modify it from day one as long as they didn't charge money for it.
Totally fair - but just call it Source Available then.
Open Source has a specific definition and this license does not conform to that definition.
Stating it is open source creates a bait and switch effect with people who understand this definition, get excited, then realize this project is not actually open source.
Could you please stop that? First it is not true. "Open Source" has nothing to do with the "Open Source Initiative" it existed long before. Second you are making people keep their source closed (not available) which is not a good thing.
"Open Source has a specific definition and this license does not conform to that definition."
To be fair, this wouldn't be an issue if Open Source stuck with "Debian Free Software". If you really want to call it a bait and switch, open source did it first.
Meta leading the charge. Tencent just tried to do it this week. People need to to call them on it and AI ‘influencers’ never do, quite the opposite actually
I'm not seeing the justification for this comment. If anything that license, like the BSL, is aimed at keeping the small guy who worked on X in business so they can profit from their work (always need to put food on the table) while also sharing its innards with the world.
If you’re able to self host and run the tool for any use, it’s effectively a free, extensible, modifiable software solution.
Copyleft licenses are as restrictive as the license DHH put out with Fizzy. I’m an Apache 2.0 or MIT licensing OSS advocate myself, but it’s difficult to argue that it’s worse or equal to a fully closed SaaS solution.
It’s not even remotely close to one of these bullshit “ee” OSS licenses
> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or
streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners
Yeah. To me it is not really relevant. I actually was not using spotify
and if I need to have songs I use ytldp for youtube but even that is
becoming increasingly rare. Today's music just doesn't interest me as
much and I have the songs I listen to regularly. I do, however had, also
listen to music on youtube in the background; in fact, that is now my
primary use case for youtube, even surpassing watching movies or anything
else. (I do use youtube for getting some news too though; it is so sad that
Google controls this.)
I don't think it was a miscalculation. Greed always ran deep in the West too.
> If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics
It's not always possible. It works in some countries but not in others. For instance, it seems not possible in Russia.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state.
I somewhat agree, as the sinomarxist theorem and strategem is about that (and the sinomarxists also managed to bring out many people out of poverty too), but your analysis is not entirely correct either as China has many superrich now, which is a perversion in the system. So Xi also lies here. Because how can there be so many super-superrich? This is a master-slave situation, just like in other capitalistic countries. So why then the lie about sinomarxism? They just sell it like an ideology now, not unlike the Juche crap in North Korea.
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