If you can tell the President on Christmas Eve "Let's Go Brandon" which means something vulgar and you don't go to jail then you live in a free country
If you are incarcerated in a re-education camp because of your religion then you live in an unfree country
I think people forget, "Let's Go Brandon," isn't even always a gripe at the US president.
Everyone, the reporter included, knew fully well what the crowds were chanting. That phrase sums in 3 words how corrupt the media is to whitewash and censor any criticism of the establishment president and the mainstream narrative.
The US is orders of magnitude different to and better than China, but still has room for improvement.
I guess an old Soviet anecdote is very relevant here:
US citizen: I live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go next to White House and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
USSR citizen: I also live in a free country! Nobody will prosecute me if I go to Red Square and shout out loud "<name of US president>! You are an old stupid son of a bitch!"
Let's go Brandon is not widely known, I am inclined to think, to the typical audience of President's Christmas Eve address. It does not warrant any action because of this.
I can make violent threats against the President at his face and nobody would bat an eye. But my country is at the peak of unfree. So you didn't help :(
Edit: Ah, silly me. That was just a thinly veiled insult against China, the great big devil.
No nation is truly free, all societies are ruled by a small elite that is only concerned with its own wealth and power. How the elite rules depends on different factors, but their motives are always the same.
I grew up under military dictatorship in Latin America. Back then you could get in serious trouble if you said or did the wrong thing. There is a lot more “freedom” now but the people are still oppressed by their own social condition. Plus ça change…
Those that have individual rights, including freedom of speech/thought/religion and property rights. Independent courts. Freedom of movement. The right to your own body.
Probably a nation whose citizens feel comfortable and free in their nation without constantly having to remind themselves or the world that they are a "free-nation".
No people are truly free, and that's ok. No one should be allowed to walk down the street and attack others. It's not "truly free" in the sense of "absolutely free". It's "to have the correct freedoms".
Show me a mid-market up to top end Android phone that isn't made in China...
Yes I know there's a series of specific Samsung models that are approved for US govt use and are likely made in a facility in south Korea.
I think we have two categories of things
A) phones made in China with software/OS load for CCP compliant censorship and data collection
B) phones made in China with software and OS load for the global market (example would be oxygenOS on an English language OnePlus phone. If it turns out there's hidden data collection or censorship frameworks in oxygenOS I would be very disappointed.)
I bought my Pixel 4a specifically because it wasn't made in China (Vietnam). I would have considered upgrading to the 6 if it were made somewhere else. I also was considering a Google Titan security key until I learned they were made in China, too.
Siemens Gigaset smartphones are made in Bocholt, Germany. I think Siemens is the last of the big consumer mobile manufacturers with any manufacturing in Europe to speak of.
Apparently /e/OS, the free Android distribution by Mandrake founder Gaël Duval, is available pre-installed, so there should be solid LineageOS support.
Where something is made doesn't tell us where the components are sourced however. It is MediaTek based, so make of that what you will.
Just make sure beforehand that they're supported by LineageOS. Then you can wipe the OEM crap and run software you trust instead (assuming you trust the LineageOS developers).
If they're the kind that's sold artificially cheap under the assumption that they can make up the difference by showing you ads for the whole lifetime of the device, running a different OS has the added benefit of eating into their profit margins.
People should also be aware that certain devices will have specific features disabled when flashing to a custom ROM like LineageOS; vendor binary blobs on the OEM side and LineageOS' policy on reverse engineering them.
I believe the only manufacturers that have features disabled for unlocked bootloaders are Sony[1] and Samsung (Galaxy Z Fold 3 only).[2] Many Snapdragon-based Samung devices can't be bootloader-unlocked in the first place, and this includes most U.S. models.
Vendors that are LineageOS-friendly include Google, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Asus.[3] If you already have a Xiaomi phone, replacing the stock operating system with LineageOS could improve your privacy.
I would guess the implication is that almost all phones are built in China. So "Chinese cellphones" is a curious term - "Cellphones designed by Chinese firms" and "Cellphones manufactured in China" are wildly different circles in the venn diagram of mobiles.
Only Chinese cellphone design companies have a meaningful direct responsibily for Chinese government, which makes the difference. Manufacturers have resposibility too, but if they manufacture something else than intended, it will stop quite quickly.
> What is the difference? To not buy branded Chinese phones seems just protectionism and has little to do with security.
How does "protectionism" have anything to do with this? It's weird to inject that economic framing into a question about what kind of policies you want to be subject to, and who you want to be setting those policies.
The local sources in social media all were mentioning protester fatality numbers in hundreds. They are definitely not reliable, however, I would consider the official numbers reported by KZ government - which BBC is quoting - as even less trustworthy than random social media posts.
Until we have better data I think that it is entirely appropriate to treat all current data from KZ government as intentionally falsified and either apply a reasonable multiplier (historically from other similar cases, a 10x multiplier seems appropriate; certainly that would be a better estimate than accepting their reports at face value, in similar earlier situations the reports always have been intentionally adjusted) or treat the local estimates as the best estimates currently available.
Considering the article is trying to make the KZ government look bad, I'd say the part that appears less biased is relevant.
The whole point of HN is to comment on the article. BBC is obviously UK government propaganda, so the fact their headline is clickbait and the little data they do include doesn't support it is relevant.
Why should the UK-propaganda even have a stance on Kazakhstan? This sound like the usual russian troll approach of "Everyone does everything, so bad is relative" fog grenade.
Russia seems to be pretty run-down lately in the east. Especially with Chinese investments basically buying out the usual province robber barons and slowly replacing the owner-caste.
Do you have any basis for the claim that "Kazakhstan's current government is a Russian ally."? President Tokayev seems to mostly continue the course of carefully balancing Kazakhstans national independence with all their foreign relations, so one could as well claim that Kazakhstan current government a chinese ally or a european ally, given that they are not at war with either and those are the three largest trade partners of Kazakhstans. In order of export trade volume: EU, China, Russia and for import trade volume Russia, China, EU. Note that Kazhakstan exports five times more than it imports. (Source: oec.world and comtrade.un.org)
I see how my comment was badly worded and misunderstandable, my point is to refute the strong undertone that a nation can only ever be allied with one side of a cold war bloc as outdated, overly simplistic and completely missing the actual reality of politics and economics in the region.
The data is included because there not much verifiable source to come by. Think about your logic -- BBC is UK propaganda who wants to make Kazakhstan look bad, yet they cited government's number and quoted the president, not anyone from the protesters? The government is a party of the conflict, yet you consider their reported number believable?
Should've made some noise a year ago when this was first announced lol
A similar story unfolding in the early 00's was thwarted by the tech community shaming microsoft into dropping the plans (name Palladium back then). I have a feeling people were much more vigilant and better informed back then.
Testimonies from escapees tend to show they sort of believed at least the negative propaganda about the south, western countries, and China. Not so much the godlike powers of the leadership.
It's similarly true about Soviet propaganda. The people living in Soviet territory commonly believed the propaganda about the US and West as well. Even the highest tiers, including eg Yeltsin, believed some of the false propaganda (which is why Yeltsin couldn't believe his now famous 1989 visit to Randall's grocery store in Houston Texas wasn't wholly staged). Yeltsin was on record admitting that even the upper echelons of Soviet power believed a lot of the false propaganda they were fed.
You can still see a river of false propaganda common among the Russian people in their beliefs about the US. It's all over YouTube in interviews-on-the-street type videos. The Russian people still live under a totalitarian regime that directly controls all media, all democratic actions and tries to control all information.
Russians today have internet access and can travel abroad, it's nothing like back in those days anymore. Also not to defend Putin's regime, which is bad enough, but it's not totalitarian. Totalitarianism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were examples of that. And China seems to be heading in that direction yet again.
Economically, Romania was one of the wealthier countries in the Eastern bloc in the 80s. The fall of the communist government actually led to an economic downturn which took several years to recover from.
First of all, Romania wasn't the one of the wealthiest countries in the Eastern bloc at almost any point. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even the USSR for a while were ahead.
Secondly, even if that were true, Ceaușescu went on a North Korean craze (the OG kpop fan), massive parades and autarky (economic self sufficiency) included. The Romanian economy reached its relative Communist peak before 1980, because Ceaușescu crashed it afterwards trying to pay all foreign debt. Not some, all of it. Oh, and he built the second largest building in the world (current day Palace of the Parliament), spending roughly 1 full state budget on it).
Romania crashed hard because we were making stuff nobody wanted. We were selling it inside the Eastern bloc to captive buyers. On top of that privatization was delayed and initially it was only to internal cronies.
He was also a very popular figure in the West because Romania went against the USSR.
The only leader from the East who was welcomed with full regards by the West at every opportunity. Understandable since as a dictator Ceaușescu only cared about himself not Communist ideology.
I did not say Romania was the richest eastern bloc state. It was relatively wealthier amongst them. Poland, Ukraine, n Korea- all of them were poorer.
I gave a citation as well. You can also look here to see the strong per capita gdp growth rate pre 1989 in the 70s and 80s. Romania started off very poor.
Are you Romanian? Because your comment seems like one of those jokes about aliens seeing humans cooking and then reproducing what the humans are creating, but without the taste, because their monitoring doesn't capture that.
Ceaușescu was the dictator for the entire period you're mentioning, any discussion about Romania in the 70s and 80s implicitly refers to him.
Other than that, Romania's growth was fake from many aspects and almost no Romanian alive at the time will agree with you that the 80s where better for Romania, economically, than the 70s.
Romania's economy was geared towards exporting everything useful, including food, to non competitive markets. Figures were inflated at every level. Vanity projects were taking up half the Romanian economy.
Backyard furnaces 2.0. Make stuff nobody wants or needs, of crap quality, while not feeding people.
And regarding North Korea, it's well documented that Ceaușescu was emulating Kim. But otherwise we were more developed than North Korea since at least the Korean War, so those numbers don't say much. If anything we went down, closer to their level, during the 80s.
>Are you Romanian? Because your comment seems like one of those jokes about aliens seeing humans cooking and then reproducing what the humans are creating, but without the taste, because their monitoring doesn't capture that.
Are you Romanian? Does one have to be Romanian to know Romanian history? Are the rest of the world ignorant to our comings and goings? Do only Romanian opinions on Romania count? Will a Romanian shepherd's opinion on the economy be more accurate than a professional Economist that just so happens to be unfortunate enough to not be born Romanian?
>Other than that, Romania's growth was fake from many aspects and almost no Romanian alive at the time will agree with you that the 80s where better for Romania, economically, than the 70s.
Romania's growth wasn't fake.
Yes, it was an economy geared towards exporting to other bloc countries. The act of exporting caused an economic boom for the country relative to other countries. Budgets were growing, more goods were being produced, and lots of money was being made year over year, but this money wasn't being redistributed back to Romanians. It was lining pockets of party members and used on megalomaniac projects, while food shortages and blackouts were increasingly common because most goods were produced for exporting. Ceausescu incompetently and ignorantly tightened the belt too much. His party members lied to him, and the delusion of the country's prosperity was no longer sustainable. This eventually resulted in a massive disconnect that we all know the end result of.
Finally, people were worse off in the 90s than the 80s. Everything was scrapped and industry in the country essentially died overnight. Whatever profitable entities existed were sold off. random314's comment is correct. No history was rewritten.
The fact that it felt worse for you, a Romanian, in the 80s isn't a result of a lack of growth. It's a result of austerity measures designed to increasingly deprive you while the benefits of growth were distributed unevenly.
I have no idea about Romanian history, but I had the opportunity to work with some Romanian software engineers, and they were some of the best I've encountered.
Not surprising given the Romanian education system. It's great for the high-achievers. Extremely demanding and rigorous. Anecdotally I get the impression that it's not so hot for those who don't fall into this category or are late developers. If only they could fix that.
You can edit comments and titles for a short time, subject to certain conditions. I think it's a window of at most 2 hours, but the window will close (so to speak) once enough people have replied. The same (or similar) is true with regards deleting things.
All this is approximate, and I speak from experience, not knowledge.
