Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.

Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They’re higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private… life is pretty good in Finland.

Not just that, Nordic sex workers have a combination of problems in the various countries, like not being able to rent private housing because that’s seen as profiting off sex workers (pimping) and various other ancillary limitations surrounding that.

You’re better off fully decriminalizing first, and then later probably creating some sort of government sanctioned organization made up of sex workers and customers, to regulate the industry.

It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.

I feel like communism has been conflated with ‘tankie’ (as in, the meaning, not the word) for a long while thanks to the red scares. “Tankie” seems to be a more recent (or at least, recently resurrected) term that is attempting to split the authoritarianism away from ‘communism’ and bring that latter term back to its roots as ‘classless, stateless, cashless society’.

But also, you can often avoid using loaded terms like communism. Personally I like to just double down on “democracy” since it literally means rule by people and has positive connotations. If you add more and more rule by people, eventually you get communism.

What do you think is China choosing, A or B?

Do you know? Are you prescient? Don’t pretend you can predict what China would do - especially rich coming from Mr. 90% Articles About China.

You’re still yapping on about the off topic thing I see. Come back when we’re talking about subsidies again please. If you have to steer the conversation away when you’re losing the argument, onto a topic I don’t even necessarily disagree with (forced labour, environmental and social concerns)… I don’t know what to say, you’re just being a weirdo.

Given this lack of transparency, is a trusted cooperation possible? (The answer is: no, it isn’t.)

This is silly and absolutist reasoning. The law exists to encourage companies to push their suppliers for more ethical behaviour, if China won’t allow transparency, then it’s a violation of the supply chain transparency law and they’ll have to choose between A) more transparency, or B) not being on the receiving end of deals. The crucial difference is this only targets the things you pointed out that weren’t even on topic to subsidies to begin with, but instead we’re enacting protectionist policies and complaining about “unfairness” with the amount of subsidies they have.

You are just repeating your statements and ignoring mine it seems.

That’s funny considering you changed the subject. I’m trying to stay on topic with the original article talking about subsidies, you’re moving the goalpost. I don’t have to respond to things that aren’t on topic.

No. Especially in this case, it is also a term for cheap manufacturing processes by ignoring environmental and social norms, including the use of forced labour. […]

Then just target the anti-environmental, social, and forced labour parts? This article is specifically about unfair subsidies, not what you just mentioned. You’re moving the goalpost.

That’s a good idea, but it only works if and when both sides apply […]

Supply chain transparency in the countries that have enacted laws like that, apply internationally:

The [Norwegian Transparency Act] mandates that liable firms be able to account for the human rights and fair labor practices, not only of direct or “Tier 1” suppliers, but of all those indirect vendors and subcontractors who comprise the entirety of the upstream and downstream value chain.

Your anti-western sentiment is somewhat weird if I may say so.

I literally described Norway in a very positive way - my ideal approach. Are they no longer western? Or are you just being a weirdo because I don’t like propaganda in general? I don’t like Chinese propaganda, and I don’t like whatever you’re doing by having a profile consisting of 90% news articles about China. You’re basically doing marketing by constantly pushing articles about China, similar to how adverts are constantly pushed in our faces. A normal person might post a few articles about China here and there, but your history is 90%.

There you go, here’s your response to the article (below). It took me 43 minutes to respond, while it took you a single copy paste to post the article (probably 5 seconds of effort). Maybe now you understand why I don’t feel like responding to every single thing you post with a debunking? The effort it takes to tackle misinformation is much higher than simply copy pasting URLs.

My general/summarized thoughts:

At the end of the day, if we do protectionism and bar China, I can only hope we do enact more subsidies, close if not on par with China, for our own industries so that we accelerate our transition to green energy. I don’t really personally care if we ban Chinese products, I just think this is a bit of cope about someone who’s just… doing better economic policies, that we should also be doing, instead of crying about “unfair market competition” as if free market absolutism is necessarily good (China isn’t doing enough “free market” so they’re “unfair”, even though we’re doing the same to a slightly lesser degree).

My personal preference would be doing what Norway is doing: setting up democratic state run organizations that do green tech so that we socialize the profits we do make from such an industry. That’s Norway’s approach to hydropower, where they own the vast majority of it, and they’re ramping up efforts towards wind energy too. They also have a state oil industry, but obviously I’m not too happy about that in the context of climate change - however, it has been incredibly economically beneficial for the people of Norway, so we should likely copy their strategy for green tech.

Responding to specific paragraphs:

During a trip to China, Yellen said the country’s unfair trade practices — dumping artificially cheap products on global markets — were a threat to US businesses and jobs. Washington is considering imposing higher tariffs and closing trade loopholes if Beijing maintains its existing policy.

“Artificially cheap” is basically a loaded term for “subsidized”. We do the same thing for certain industries here in Europe, there’s really nothing special about it. In fact, we should probably be doing more subsidies.

“Chinese subsidies are pervasive,” Rolf Langhammer, former vice president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW-Kiel), told DW. “They encompass almost all industries and are far larger than any EU or US subsidies.”

Maybe we should increase our own subsidies instead? I really don’t see the argument here - would we transition to a green economy too fast when climate change is a crisis in waiting? Why are cheap products a problem all of a sudden, I thought that was the primary reason we started using China to mass produce stuff on our behalf, i.e. we took advantage of their horrible working conditions that we know led to suicides and anti-jump fences. But now all of a sudden cheap stuff is a problem?

In addition to the huge subsidies, the report’s authors noted, Chinese producers also benefit from preferential access to critical raw materials, forced technological transfers and less domestic red tape than their foreign competitors.

All of these sound like good things we should be doing. In fact, we are doing a little bit more of transparency (which is what “forced tech transfers” are, in less loaded terms - it’s literally just making corporations share knowledge and cooperate) e.g. supply chain transparency in Europe is growing. Less domestic red tape sounds like a good thing? Norway has a similar “problem” of a government being a little bit too efficient. Obviously that’s not a bad thing - maybe we should figure out why we’re comparatively slow?

Langhammer noted that the West also benefits from the Chinese subsidies, as consumers can buy cars at a lower price while companies can access cheaper Chinese parts. Despite the threat from cheaper Chinese EVs, he said, some automakers were skeptical about the EU probe into Beijing’s subsidies as firms such as Germany’s Volkswagen and US EV leader Tesla receive them, too.

As in, Tesla has received Chinese subsidies. It has also received US and (I believe) EU subsidies too. And I’m talking about supply side subsidies, demand side subsidies like governments paying part of the price of EV cars have provided tens of billions in plenty of EU and EEA countries.

Yes, unlike you I don’t post constant articles about China. I’d prefer not to see propaganda, whether that’s Chinese funded propaganda, or your constant posting of anti-Chinese free market biased articles. If the rules of this sub didn’t explicitly carve out an exception for you, maybe you would’ve been banned by now - unfortunately, only “foreign” and “billionaire” misinformation is banned from this sub, domestic/western misinformation is OK.

Also, I will respond to the article, but I’m not a paid state actor who does this as a full time job (unlike maybe you, otherwise your obsession with China is pretty weird), so I don’t have the time to tackle the multiple articles you post about China ever day. I can only do so much as a normal person, and I can only really tackle the articles I have knowledge about (e.g. economics).

Reminder that OP’s account is 90% articles about China and has said they have “Chinese friends so they aren’t xenophobic” in defense of doing so. Bias and misinformation probabilities are high.

But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.

This is funny when you just look at your profile’s first page and see you’ve made comments like these:

I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

So you deny “unproblematic” women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you’re also denying people’s gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman’s fight for her right to access women’s spaces? So you’re hateful towards people you perceive to be “men” while complaining about “man haters” elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.

With this context, it gets more interesting:

On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can’t have sex and they’re not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.

This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.

And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.

What’s your source there? I ask because I was curious and found the exact opposite (but I’ve not done any in-depth dive into this topic):

The scientists found no evidence that frequent ejaculations mark an increased risk of prostate cancer. In fact, the reverse was true: High ejaculation frequency was linked to a decreased risk. Compared to men who reported 4–7 ejaculations per month across their lifetimes, men who ejaculated 21 or more times a month enjoyed a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer. And the results held up to rigorous statistical evaluation even after other lifestyle factors and the frequency of PSA testing were taken into account.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer

Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially

This part I’d agree with

and economically, closer to the US

This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.

Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).

It’s sad that it’s taking so long when like 10 years ago we had politicians warning us about Russian oligarchs meddling with elections, or as in the UK, killing people with radioactive poison. We could’ve done something then but chose to wait and now the damage has grown larger. It’s like waiting to get cancer, only to yell about it and do nothing, and only start caring when it’s on the brink of terminal/irreversible before actually doing something, instead of actively doing things that reduce cancer probabilities.

(the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)

In practice, does the US?

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.

e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.

That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.