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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • They’re obviously not fascist, and you’d know that if you were being honest about it and bothered educating yourself both on what fascism is, and on the realities of the PRC.

    Also, it’s not “state capitalism”. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. They’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.




  • What a weird framing you’re taking. They’re literally threats. They’re contingent threats, but they’re still threats. Your claim was that they have not made threats; in reality, they have.

    Also: isn’t every threat contingent? If the threat is “I will use nukes if X event occurs” it’s contingent on X occurring. If the threat is “I will use nukes” then it’s still contingent, but the contingency is implied: “I will use nukes if I want to”. There is no such thing as a threat that isn’t contingent.

    In fact, since you asserted that the only threats had come from the US, can you point to any sources from the US that are threats (and let’s use your definition of threats here, too: you don’t get to point to a contingent threat)?




  • I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of attempting to answer the very direct confusion I’m having. You’re doing a lot to make sure it’s obvious how capitalism can and does result in imperialism, which frankly I’m mostly in agreement with. My issue is that you’re asserting that socialism can’t lead to imperialism. You’ve still given no reason that this is to be the case except for this attempt:

    Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people by moving past a society based on exploitation. This is why it wouldn’t engage in colonialism.

    And I agree that, by definition, it’s a society based on the betterment of its people. Stress should be applied there to its people. I’m not justifying imperialism at all, but it’s a pretty obvious argument that by subjugating other nations/peoples and exploiting them, you can make the lives of your people better. Perhaps you’re trying to say that the type of leadership and ideology that creates and maintains socialism would also be ideologically against imperialism, but that seems more pragmatic than theoretic. You’re saying socialism can’t engage in imperialism by definition but the most I’d give is that it doesn’t engage in imperialism in practice.


  • I don’t see how that follows.

    Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism.

    Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people; in theory, why can’t it engage in colonialism to bring in resources to benefit its people?

    There is definitely no other way.

    Its obvious how capitalism leads to imperialism, but it’s definitely not obvious how that would be the only way to arrive there.

    Any elaboration you can provide would be great because you’re acting as if it should be obvious why what you’re saying is true but it absolutely is not.






  • 133arc585@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPrivacy Search Engines
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    2 years ago

    It’s interesting how you went from “it’s not relevant at all” to “it’s relevant in general but not in this case” after I gave you a reply.

    If you have found a new security or privacy flaw, I would love to hear about it. But pushing your irrelevant opinions on others who are not interested, is unpleasant for us, and a waste of time for you.

    My opinions are not irrelevant, as I laid out in my previous comment that you just agreed with. Others are obviously interested, and it’s not “unpleasant” for them, as people responded and upvoted (and no downvotes)–indicating it’s relevant. It’s not a waste of time for me, because not only did it take me negligible time to type literally three sentences (actually, I copy-and-pasted the comment from one I made earlier, I didn’t even write it fresh here), but it has value to others and as such is not a waste of time for me.

    So whether he agrees with you that guys can become girls or vice versa, or whether he believes the same narrative that you do regarding corona is simply irrelevant.

    The strawman construction was a nice little touch. Completely ignoring the part where I laid out that my personal stance and agreement or disagreement with the CEO is irrelevant, you act as if I personally disagree with the CEO and then use that to dismiss me.

    You obviously have an agenda. So be it. But this conversation is truly a waste of time: you were obviously wrong and as soon as that was pointed out you shift goalposts.


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    2 years ago

    If you think the two are unrelated you’re oblivious to the considerations that must be taken into account when discussing potential privacy concerns in software. It’s not ad hominem to acknowledge that the personal convictions and values of the CEO (and indeed other employees) can potentially decrease the sense of privacy of a product.

    If the CEO is so adamant in his anti-X stance that he decides it’s acceptable to censor access to materials about X, or perhaps worse that he decides to expose anyone using his software that discusses or supports X, would not consider those valid concerns?

    Companies are made of people, and software is made by people. Since people are not neutral, companies and software are also not neutral. The stances of a company or software on privacy, freedoms, etc are all influenced by the stances on those exact issues by the constituent people of the company and developers of the software.

    Consider Elon Musk and Twitter. Given Elon’s personal beliefs and how adamant he is to enact and enforce those beliefs, do you consider him a neutral influence on the privacy of Twitter as a product? There is no way to see him as a neutral influence; he has direct influence by his ideological stance on the software. As such, if you have enough distrust in him or his ideological stance, that can transfer to distrust in Twitter as software.

    In fact, it’s not even about whether I support the CEO or whether I think his stance is “right” or “wrong” as you imply. It’s entirely about how the CEO sees his beliefs in relation to the company and product he’s overseeing. I could entirely agree with the CEO and still consider their influence to be a detriment to the product if he puts his ideology ahead of pragmatism, for example.


  • It depends on how Google wants to play this. If they require website operators to use WEI in order to serve ads from Google’s ad network (a real possibility), then suddenly 98.8% of websites that have advertising, and 49.5% of all websites would be unusable unless you’re using Chrome. It’s probably safe to assume they’d also apply this to their own products, which means YouTube, Gmail, Drive/Docs, all of which have large userbases. The spec allows denying attestation if they don’t like your browser, but also if they don’t like your OS. They could effectively disallow LineageOS and all Android derivatives, not just browser alternatives.



  • A fork like Vivaldi, Brave or Opera could opt not to implement these changes

    It doesn’t quite work like that. They wouldn’t choose to not implement the change, because the change comes from upstream via Chromium. They would have to choose to remove the feature which, depending on how it’s integrated, could be just as much work as implementing it (or more, if Google wants to be difficult on purpose). Not implementing the change is zero effort; removing the upstream code is a lot of effort.



  • Within the context of Chrome and other Chromium based web browsers, this means that Google will be able to monitor your web browsing in a new way any time you’re using a browser based on Chrome/Chromium.

    With only slight hyperbole, we can say that Google can do this monitoring already.

    What’s worse, is now they can:

    • Refuse you access to information by refusing to attest your environment.
    • Restrict your browser, extensions, and operating system setup by refusing attestation.
    • Potentially bring litigation against you for attempting to circumvent DRM (in the USA it’s illegal to bypass DRM).
    • Leverage their ad network to require web site operators to use attestation if they wish to serve ads via Google. AKA force you to use Chrome to use big websites.
    • Derank search results for sites that are not using attestation.

    In my opinion, the least harmful part of this is the ability to monitor page access, because they can more or less do this for Chrome users anyway. What’s really harmful here is the potential to restrict access to and destroy practically the entirety of the internet.