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jgome

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As much as you can (rightly) criticize the US, particularly the current administration, the US still has the rule of law to a degree far larger than almost all of the rest of the world

And, conveniently, there are ad-hoc courts (FISA) for when you have to "legalize" massive surveillance.

see all the actions and settlements with Swiss banks as examples

Meanwhile, banks at home apparently have no problem with this... As long as it benefits american corporations, of course.

Contrast this to China. Questionable rule of law. Chinese companies and their leaders are certainly complicit with the Chinese government and intelligence agencies

Oh, I'm sure the NSA didn't have their support...:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

There have been recent stories about how the Muslim population is spied upon and/or put in "re-education" camps

Meanwhile in your country, 2% of your population is imprisoned (more than any other country in the world), and illegal immigrants are being detained FOR YEARS. Talk about "re-education camps"

Xi Jinping is largely installed himself as a Putinesque dictator (eg term limits for the presidency were recently abolished).

The Clintons have been in power for how many years? What about the Bush family, Bolton and friends?

Also, have you ever questioned the amount of power US corporations have? Apparently not...

Given a choice between the US spying on me and China, it wouldn't even be close. The US "wins" hands down.

I'm sure the US "wins" too, they can spy on you freely, and are said to be able to collect practically all your phone calls and 10% of all internet traffic (i.e., all data, excluding videos and other irrelevant stuff).

China has aggressively pursued an agenda to further its national interest that includes the arguable exploitation of developing nations

They are literally copying what the US and Western powers have taught them. At least they don't bomb random countries thousands of miles away from their homeland under the argument of "freeing" them and "defending democracy", unlike US & EU neocolonial powers.

As largely tech people here we all know something about security. To me it's obvious that ceding control of your network

And that includes trusting your own govt., right? People who "know something about security" should know that you simply can't do anything against governments... Much less against the most powerful govt. on this planet.

Huawei (and others eg ZTE) have been caught here as bad actors and not actors I personally would trust if I had anything worth protecting.

Unlike those "accidental" backdoors in Cisco equipment, which your ISP probably trusts 100%?

China plays favourites with its own companies

Exactly what the US govt. does when it talks about "national interests". Or, do you think your government is there to defend YOUR interests?

It has clearly decided that it doesn't want a foreign company to control a local market, any local market, which is why you have the likes of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent instead of Google, Amazon and Facebook. And no it's not because foreign companies don't understand the Chinese market. It's because the Chinese government wills it

And they are right to do so. Why would they let a government that is known to play dirty control of their population? Obama, the democrat, a Nobel peace prize, bombarded 8 countries, even more than Bush Jr., yet people still believe he was a "good leader" and "better than Bush". It doesn't take much intelligence to notice the brainwashing...

Access to China's 1B citizens has been dangled as a carrot to the developed world for years.

The US has been doing that for decades. And anyone who dares disobey gets a coup d'etat or destroyed.

It should be clear that the game is rigged.

Indeed... It is rigged by the US (govt and corporations), against anyone who wants to compete fairly.

So, if China has decided not to relinquish control of domestic markets to foreign companies, why shouldn't the US respond in kind?

Yeah, the US should mind its own business, leave China AND the rest of the world alone, and not play world police, stop cheating, stop imposing its ideology, and so on.

Seriously, go read some history books.

Kinda off-topic, but I feel like they could gain a lot by opening their graphics stacks or simply by letting FOSS devs work on them, instead of making their work more difficult/impossible (see: history of the FOSS lima driver).

This has directly affected the ranking of Chile in a negative way, for at least 4 years.

The person who was in charge of the group responsible for the supposed "screw up", Augusto Lopez-Claros, is chilean.

Chile currently has a "socialist" female president that has been in government for almost 4 years, and is leaving on March. There were elections last year in Chile ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_general_election,_2017 ), and the opposition candidate, Sebastián Piñera, won against the continuity candidate. Part of his campaign was based on the idea that Chile could become a "Chilezuela" if his adversary won.

AFAIU (prolly not much), GDP measures money that comes and goes to/from a country. If, let's say, products/services were exchanged directly, without moving money, that wouldn't be counted; OTOH, if certain country, say the US, gave money to another country only to buy products from US companies, that would count doubly... Which is why it's really bad as a tool for comparing wealth of nations.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

What I mean is exactly what I said: start by looking at the dirt your own country may have BEFORE looking at someone else's dirt. You may learn a thing or two about your government, the upper classes in your country, the racism and xenophobia they use as a way to get more power elsewhere, the reasons the other governments have to do what they do, etc.

It is normal (be it "lefty" democratic, or republican US presidents) for the US government to use its power to destroy other countries and steal its resources...

And yet here you are discussing "cynicism and [...] deliberate single mindedness".

As a lefty, you fail to put things in perspective... But I guess it's just not convenient, sometimes, is it?

As opposed to the "blood money" invested by the US govt. in technology companies? Do you also have problems with Twitter, Google and Facebook getting money from the US govt.?

Let's not forget, the US govt., both Republicans and Democrats, have directly or indirectly killed millions of people in the last decade...

I don't see you complaining about that "blood money" here or anywhere, though.

The US doesn't need to annex any country, they just pay their "partners" overseas, or, if they go "rogue", a few US navy ships show up and that's it.

BTW, you are forgetting more recent events in which the US govt. has been involved, directly or indirectly:

Iraq (war)

Afghanistan (war)

Syria (war)

Libya (war)

Honduras (coup d'etat)

Brazil (soft coup d'etat)

Paraguay (soft coup d'etat)

Venezuela (economic blockade)

Mali (war)

I suggest that you don't buy the hype and the bullshit. All this China/Russia stuff... It's nothing new, and it's not like the US doesn't do the same, and worse.

And yet here we are, talking about the russians "hacking elections" and the chinese stealing "economic secrets", the first topic, pushed by infosec companies that also have political-economic interests, is being presented without any proof whatsoever, and the second topic clearly showing the level of paranoia in which US people live (IIRC, some espionage cases involving chinese citizens were proven in court to be false).

Perhaps US people and their govt should care more about their own people being extremely greedy and true psychopaths before judging foreign govts and nations...

For someone who lives in a remote area and survives on hunting wild animals, being able to tell where game is situated, is more valuable than matching some geometrical figures or knowing capital city of a country he will never visit. Such tests that take into account language and cultural differences don't exist.

If you have studied engineering or simply maths, and like learning maths, you already have some background on geometry, algebra, etc. (and specially geometry/spatial stuff). At least the tests I've seen have some stuff that seems quite obviously been taking from maths... So, IMO, you can obviously score higher than someone that is, perhaps, as intelligent as you are, yet doesn't know or care about maths, or sorting things in certain way, or whatever.

While I don't really know much about the topic, IMO these tests ignore the fact that you can learn to solve certain problems, and yet "experts" still say they are about general intelligence. And by that logic, if you weren't to measure intelligence by a set of arbitrary characteristics, some of which can be learned in some specific social contexts... How would you even measure general intelligence? As you say, intelligence is relative to context. You can "learn" intelligence measured by these tests, or you can be "dumb" according to these tests, simply because you are ignorant of some things.

if you're willing to make arguments that sending troops 4000km to protect your own citizens

You mean, the colonialists sent by the UK government?

They shouldn't have been there in the first place.

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if they did, they would have been released well before millions of people had already voted, and not on the eve of the election.

Assange has claimed multiple times, that he thinks these elections are a farce... Perhaps he knows some things you and me don't.

BTW, I'm not a trump supporter (not even a US citizen), but I don't think Clinton is better than him, at least for the rest of the world. Trump talks a lot, but his administration will probably be more or less the continuation of the Bush/Obama policies, particularly the foreign policy...

[dead] 10 years ago

Private emails... From political parties, public representatives and lobbyists. These are VERY PUBLIC people. IMO, these people should not enjoy having a private life in the first place, because, as the Podesta emails show, they end up using their political career as a way to get more money and power, NOT to serve the People.

[dead] 10 years ago

From Reddit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/5bjhwx/wikileaks... ):

CNN colluding with DNC over questions to ask Trump. Apr 2016

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/25846

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/25284

Here's another one for Cruz:

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/23554

Sure, these are not the end of the world, but... They are documented proof that CNN and Dems colluded.

BTW, did you notice that I also mentioned "DNC" and "Clinton" emails?

Here are the new DNC emails: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=%40releasedate+%222016-1...

Oh, and they dumped the whole Podesta file: https://file.wikileaks.org/file/podesta-emails/

[dead] 10 years ago

Right after WikiLeaks released the last batch of DNC/Podesta/Clinton emails, the most damning ones...

Hmm...