>Far more Chinese think that their country is a democracy and the government serves the people than in the US.
>Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
Correct, as a general rule, slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
( what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
The average chinese netizen is approximately 100x more aware of their position in society and the propaganda being broadcast in their direction than the average american
I see this so much with regard to Chinese/Russians and increasingly Americans (I know people in each camp). The point of the propaganda is just that, to make them distrust all information and fall in line by default. It makes it impossible to argue against the main narrative being broadcast because "who's to say what's true?" And frankly I'm getting real sick of it. It's not the same thing as being media literate.
I can hear the argument that the Chinese government serves their people better than the US gov. Not necessarily agree with it but it's worth discussing.
However I don't know by what definition of democracy a country with a unique party, with so little freedom of press, can be considered as one.
>I can hear the argument that the Chinese government serves their people better than the US gov. Not necessarily agree with it but it's worth discussing.
Correct, as a general rule (true) slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
(what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
Oh so like, what trump is attempting to do now by cutting programs to blue states and putting brown shirts on the streets to shoot anyone who disagrees in the face?
A 1 party system can still be democratic in a way. Just participation in the policymaking works differently. In China this is feedback from the public and local committees.
Also that freedom of speech is very limited is correct, and there is extensive online censorship. But that doesn't mean the government ignores what people think. Almost all domestic government policies are broadly supported by the population. And when public opposition is strong then the government is known to delay implementation or change course.
Notable examples are Covid Zero, the K Visa, and the reclassification of drug use offenses.
I put the blame squarely on Microsoft, how they released a turd with WP7 (a shiny one with responsive UI, but nonetheless a turd).
About phone OS upgrades, remember the HTC HD2 which originally released with WM6.5 but could be upgraded to WP7 and then to WP8 through after-market community ROMs. It was also Microsoft's decision to not officially allow that.
> In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy
Carriers were especially unhappy that Microsoft bought Skype at the time and tried to run it as a loss-making business to undermine carrier voice and messaging revenues.
Windows Vista SP2 was basically identical to Windows 7 RTM, with mostly cosmetic differences.
What changed is that by Windows 7 launch, PC specs had caught up with system requirements and WDDM drivers had matured and were no longer crashing all the time. So the first impression was very different.
It turns out rather ok without actual infinity, by limiting oneself to potential infinity. Think a Turing Machine where every time it reaches the end of its tape, an operator ("tape ape") will come and put in another reel.
Things are far more complicated these days vs the 90s. These specifications still seem to lack important details which you notice if you try implementing the spec.
Sony supports pairing Bluetooth devices via USB since PS3 and Apple supports this since wireless peripherals with Lightning port.
However the protocols to do that are all proprietary and mutually incompatible. At least the PS3 protocol has been sufficiently reverse engineered so you can plug a DualShock 3 controller into a Steam Deck and have it just work wirelessly afterwards.
> I think the concern here is more with the implementations (coming out of China) than the instruction set itself.
Yes that is the pretense, but what they actually want to block is RISC-V adoption.
It's a bit similar to car industry opposition to right to repair, they ran TV ads claiming dangers for safety and security if independent repair were allowed. Louis Rossmann did a series of videos on this.
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees.
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
> It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
Labor is always a big driver of cost, because you need to plan, build, maintain and operate those factories with humans even if fully automated, and a lot of the indirect costs is going to scale with the price of labor, too (local legal representation, transport/logistics, ...)
That is objectively dirt-cheap compared to basically all of the west.
Yes, wages might be even cheaper in neighboring countries, but those lag behind in infrastructure, education, political stability, availability of capital and network effects from existing industry (and are thus not a viable alternative to China yet for lots of things).
> Manufacturing labor cost in China has surpassed parts of Eastern Europe.
This is a good point, but I think that only really the underdeveloped/underindustrialized/unstable parts really qualify, possibly Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, with similar caveats than Chinas neighbors.
Despite all this a lot of European manufacturing (e.g. cars), has shifted into the more viable low-wage countries over the last decades (despite language barriers and very high automation; talking mainly Poland, Slovenia, Hungary here).
You still need labor to build, maintain and operate factories, even if they are filled with robots; people here underestimate the benefit of cheap labor by a lot.
Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
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