I use that KES script that has a feature to highlight the instances so I can discern between what's my home instance content, federated instances and moderated instances. Moderated ones have a red circle in them.
Every time I see a red circle, I know it's going to be yet another shit take from a lemmy.x user, and it never fails.
Not what we’re talking about, but you should be writing to your reps about this. Most people just feel bad and move on. Actually writing a letter will get attention
Me either, but my government is an ally to the US and also contributes their own aid to Israel, so it applies to me. Assuming you’re in a democracy, it’s very likely you have some stake (even small) in the genocide.
Even boycotting goods produced on occupied land is a small step anyone can take.
Sure, but the sheer number of warcrimes the US has committed in foreign countries, like the 1973 Chilean coup to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende and install a military dictatorship, or the 1965 Indonesian mass killings etc. aren’t even comparable to China, or any other country for that matter.
Not to mention the Palestinian genocide they’re funding right now. At least China handles extremist groups like the ETIM by ‘re-educating’ them and assimilating them into the rest of the country. As fucked up as that is since it’s cultural repression, at least they’re not fucking bombing them.
I’m sure you can Google china warcrimes as well. Assuming you’re not inside the great firewall of China, that is. Let’s not pretend China is good just because US is bad.
Never said they were good. Just that it’s absurd to compare China to the sheer amount of death and destruction the US has selfishly caused, and continues to cause, everywhere in the world for the profit of the ruling class.
China, with 5x the population of the US, had 121k covid deaths, while the US had 1.2mil. Because the latter prioritizes capital/profit over human lives, while China does the opposite.
These are clearly in the interest of the Proletariat/working class, not the ruling class; China has actively punished the latter.
And all that without overthrowing foreign governments and causing genocides. So how is China even comparable to the US, aside from their economic growth? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe western media tries to show their geopolitical rivals in a bad light, even when they’re objectively better?
wait, you are using the propaganda figures of an authoritarian shithole that openly genocides one ethnicity after the other as your source?
ya, if you go by that logic, I’d just use PraugerU and claim that America is a morally pure nation who’s only problem is the existence of civil rights…
In China, from 3 January 2020 to 3:52pm CET, 30 November 2023, there have been 99,320,286 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 121,874 deaths, reported to WHO
If you don’t understand how a country self-reporting a statistic like that is unreliable then you’re right, there is no discussion to be had. It would be a waste of anyone’s time (including the time it just took me to write this comment).
How’s Evergrande doing? What about Chinese property in general? All that ghost housing the population have sunk their savings into is appreciating nicely, yes? What’s the birth rate like in China now vs 60 years ago by the way? How’s that compare to other powers? What’s the average age of the Chinese population, again? And boy howdy the Uighurs are going to be glad the CCP aren’t into genocide.
It’s not a good idea to trust the numbers the CCP provides (if you can even get recent ones). I don’t pretend the US is good, but I’m not about to suck the dick of any country like you are just because they’re not America.
Last I heard, Evergrade’s chairman was selling their luxury property to pay for the debt. And you guys are still calling planned cities ‘ghost housing’? Lmao. Cool name though. I’d say the US could learn from it, but they’re unlikely to do something that’s not profitable.
You do realize you can google things yourself, right? China’s demographics are similar to the US, though, afaik.
the Uighurs are going to be glad the CCP aren’t into genocide.
All that ghost housing the population have sunk their savings into is appreciating nicely, yes?
Funny how everyone complains about US investors sitting on property makes housing unaffordable and also complains that surplus housing in China makes housing a bad investment.
Are you trying to imply that everywhere is the same? Different places, different problems, different causes.
Surplus housing was built in China because the population needed a safe investment for their savings. The stock market is too volatile, and investing overseas is tightly controlled, so housing has been the choice because it lasts.
In the US, there’s a conflux of factors that’s led to a housing shortage, then the pandemic exacerbated that situation, and now spiking interest rates are making it unaffordable to move for the few who did manage to buy a home with their meagre resources. Then, of course, there’s institutional investment buying up single-family homes and driving up prices even more.
The point is that China is not some perfect übermensch, even compared to the US, and anyone claiming otherwise needs to be corrected.
The point is that China is not some perfect übermensch,
I didn’t claim they were.
Whatever the cause, the surplus of housing in China can’t be seen as a negative for the same reason a lack of housing is a negative in the US.
You can’t have it both ways.
The trains ran on time under Mussolini. Just because a dictatorship does bad things doesn’t mean absolutely everything must be bad. Just because a democracy does good things doesn’t mean everything is perfect.
The person I originally responded to was, and you replied to me defending their point, so yeah, you’re taking it up. If you didn’t mean to, fine. The rest of my post stands. To wit:
Whatever the cause, the surplus of housing in China can’t be seen as a negative for the same reason a lack of housing is a negative in the US.
What the hell are you talking about? Too much of anything is bad, just like too little is bad. Americans don’t have their entire life savings sunk into investment properties nobody wants. The Chinese population does. If nobody wants those properties they own, nobody buys them, and the value tanks. If the construction of those properties had been funded by the government you might have a point, but when it’s funded by the life savings of 900 million people or more, that’s a major fucking problem, and it’s not related in any way shape or form to the American housing market.
So when I said “just like too little is bad”, which you even actually quoted, you just decided to ignore that and the rest of my words to restate your prior, addressed, and wrong point.
Affordable housing does not depend on bankrupting your entire populace, as in China, nor is it possible in a system like that in the US that refuses to build more housing to sate the demand of the existing populace (let alone population expansion).
Have to pay the prisoners a prevailing wage in the USA when working for private businesses.
Edit: You don’t need to pay them the prevailing wage when they are not working for private companies so. If they are cooking or cleaning in the prison or making license plates they make peanuts.
Seems China underpays their prison labourers but they should get paid. Should.
Edit 2: I kept looking and there is a lack of evidence from what I wrote other than the US government saying they get a prevailing wage, nobody seems to give an exact number of what they make. China actually gives a number. 600 yuan a month in 2019. Take that as you will.
That prevailing wage? Most prison laborers in America make less than $0.50 an hour If they’re even paid at all, and are severely punished if they try to take a sick day.
I can’t find anything that specifically says that Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s or any of the other ones pays even minimum wage to prison laborers, but these businesses do get a $2,400 tax credit for each work release inmate they employ. The work release inmates are probably paid a real wage because they count as real people but I have trouble believing they would ever pay more than they absolutely had to for an inmate’s labor.
It came out a couple years ago that inmates in my state were raising goats and making goat cheese for Whole Foods. The wage for prisoners here is $2/day. There’s a state somewhere to my east where prisoners work at Burger King for similar wages.
I hope this is all part of some psy opp to fuck with the west. I too hope to find a prize sewn inside my clothes and really recapture that cereal box feeling.
You want to know why China is so absurdly cheap for everything? This is part of the reason why. I wonder how many prison mining camps, prison garment/textile camps, etc. Are operating with the sole goal of keeping costs as absolutely rock bottom as possible. China is making a killing by undercutting the global market on costs for just about everything.
Instead, China uses their prison population to bolster their organ transplant market.
Edit: I wonder if the people who downvoted realise that China admitted they had been harvesting organs from prisoners but claimed it was voluntary and that they were stopping. Meanwhile, the exponential growth of their transplant industry continued beyond 2014.
There are no real numbers from china, how many people are actually imprisoned or what even means imprisoned. For example the Uyghurs are not Prisoners in Prison but “Citizens in reeducation camps”- what is a lie. Pictures show they are indeed imprisoned . China is fudging these numbers like the economy numbers at a grand scale.
China is able to force people to work in certain regions or cities. They have a complex system on how to channel work by prohibiting living-, healthcare- and pensions-systems to citizens based on their location and citizens need to apply for changes to these systems to be able to work in other regions.
China - as an authoritarian regime - can force every prisoner to work if they deem it useful. The US has different rules for penal labor, but not make prisoners work like china. The US has a much different landscape.
China undercut every good, in every sector (except some high tech sectors) based on their vast (forced) workforce but also in the strategic sense. They act like Uber (or is Uber acting like China?) in the sense, that their strategy in the last 4 decades was to undercut e.g. Steel-Production for their own advances, but also to cripple the industries in the US and the West in general to come out as the sole supplier for these products and services to then control the prices (like Uber). The US Steelworker Industry is practically gone by now. They did the same with raw-materials and lately with Solar, where they undercut the European (German) markets, to cripple it and control the production/income/spread.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction
Coincidentally, those convicted parties are predominantly Black.
Like, do you actually think this is a real defense for China's behavior? Or are you just blustering because you understand there is no defense and that hurts your world view?
Yes, and prison camps and other structures, changes in landscape over time, and so on. I’m sure if you really think hard you’ll come up with all sorts of ways to get information out of a country when you don’t trust the numbers the government there is giving, especially if you think in terms of having lots of resources. Check out how people in North Korea get access to the unfiltered internet and western media, for example; similar techniques are used to exfiltrate data to piece together the whole picture.
What granularity do you think satellites shoot at?
If you are truly unable to divine the answer to your question from the article from a reputable source that talks about the privacy implications of satellites that can track individual human movements I am happy to spell it out for you:
I don’t think, I know that satellites are capable of tracking individual human movements. There are specialized satellites for different types of information gathering, such as those that can identify an individual by their biometrics (technologyreview.com/…/the-pentagon-has-a-laser-t…). Combine that with imaging in the electromagnetic spectrum, the infrared spectrum, on-the ground spies, unauthorised access to local network infrastructure (hacking), and you can pretty quickly figure out if you’re looking at a hundred thousand people in an area, or a million.
Honestly, this is pretty easy stuff to research. Did you just not bother, or?
You’re not looking at the other comments before replying. Understandably, since it’s a long thread, but I’d recommend you start reading from the first comment
They have a complex system on how to channel work by prohibiting living-, healthcare- and pensions-systems to citizens based on their location and citizens need to apply for changes to these systems to be able to work in other regions.
This is called indentured servitude, it was common in feudal societies.
BTW, you should add a new line between points to have proper formatting
I don’t believe that. Chinas prison stats are around 1.69mil (which is oddly on par with the US - per capita not taken into consideration). However, per the Global Slavery Index, there’s an estimated 5.8 million people enslaved there. And we know that there were over 1 million Uyghur Muslims, and we really don’t even know the extent to which that is happening either.
I’d be willing to bet that there’s a lot more slave/prison labor going over there than even we realize.
In the US, we don’t call them slaves. We call them prisoners. That’s how we stay off the index.
Never mind that we intentionally arrest specific racial groups more than others, and that the laws are such that you can be arrested for almost anything, including things like “looking suspicious while driving and then resisting arrest.”
Slavery never left America. We just decided to start including some poor white people too.
Do they count extreme work hours as effective slavery? If so, then I wouldn’t be surprised at all if China has more “slavery”. If not, then you’ll have to quantify your numbers as well. If they’re including things that are only effectively slavery, then both countries have millions upon millions more than either of those stats, so where the line is drawn makes all the difference.
The GSI is not a reliable index. The Walk Free initiative that publishes the GSI doesn’t use a consistent methodology for every country and will also uncritically accepts reports of human trafficking from unreliable sources.
For example, their report on China includes unverified claims of harvesting organs from members of the Falun Gong, a right wing cult operating out of the US. The Falun Gong also operates the Epoch Times which is a far right conspiratorial newspaper that has promoted Qanon, antivax propaganda, and claims of election fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. You can not trust their testimony on faith alone and yet that’s what Walk Free did.
I don’t remember what it was called, but I seem to recall there being some sort of documentary or movie or something of the likes about someone here in the US who found a note from a prisoner in their brand new pack of Christmas lights (or some similar holiday product).
Don’t get me wrong though prisoners still earn a pittance, anything under 2 Euros/hour has just been declared definitely unconstitutional – that’s raw, untaxed wage though without deduction for any costs, a day of prison costs the state something like 120 Euros and those grills sell like hotcakes even at those prices so why would the state lower prices.
What you should definitely look at in this context is, two things: First, where the money is flowing: Are the prisons hiring out prisoners at a pittance allowing private companies to reap profit still burdening society with the full costs of lockup – or, worse, the profits exceeding the lockup costs and prisoners not seeing a cent of that excess. That’s called straight-up slavery, no ambiguity or grey zone to be had there. Secondly, whether the prisoners actually and truly benefit – and I don’t really mean in monetary terms (though if you go poor to prison you definitely shouldn’t go out indebted, that’s bad policy), but in terms of being able to get a proper and dignified job afterwards: Mindlessly folding cardboard boxes which a machine could do for cheaper if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re earning a cent an hour vs. to wit above, people becoming skilled metalworkers. One of those makes recidivism less likely, the other teaches inmates that labour is something no sane person would ever want to do.
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