But it does. At the very least, you need to keep paying off the people in power and do everything within the framework of their rules, otherwise you’re in trouble
I can enjoy music at home or at any private space. One of the main ideas behind clubbing is to enjoy the music in a community of like-minded people and fostering that sense of connection and belonging.
In the past it would occur naturally, because electronic music was a niche thing. With raising popularity, door policies had to be implemented to maintain this community. Now that it's mainstream, clueless outsiders start coming in telling people who built the scene what to do.
Quite similar to what happened to tech and the Internet in fact. The club scene is in its Eternal September now.
Incredibly thankful for Berlin bouncers for doing their job properly, and not letting people in who think that as long as they "give money" everything should spread open for them, and who don't even bother to know what the main theme and focus on the event (who's DJing). Exactly the kind of people I'd like to avoid when partying in a techno club.
One can hope that every single one of the 200+ highly educated members of the elite ruling class of Canada made this “honest oversight”. At least they can claim it after some kind of apologies were made. Not so much for Zelensky who didn’t mention this incident at all, since honoring Nazis is business-as-usual in Ukraine.
Still, I can see how it can benefit the Canadian party too, because the original electorate would either not notice this or accept the apology and forget about it, thus not impacting the status quo, but now they also get the neo-Nazi vote after this wink and nod.
See the deafening silence of the media on Nazis in Ukraine, and the recent mind-blowing case of the heads of state of Canada, Ukraine, and the entire Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to a literal SS officer, which has triggered discussions (even here on HN) in the vein of “actually some Nazis were good guys”, which would also be unthinkable just a few years ago.
The parent is talking about communicating with friends and family. My point is not about evading surveillance, it's about not using one of the main tools of the CCP censorship apparatus.
If you're inside China and care about your safety, you would think twice about sending "questionable" messages even on the most secure channel because you're still physically vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.
There is no such thing as "the law" in China. You may be imprisoned or disappeared if you didn't do anything to circumvent "the law", there are always undisclosed "relevant rules and regulations" ready to be unleashed. You can also carry out brazen illegal activities as long as you are well-connected (until you start stepping on toes of someone more well-connected than you).
So what if email is insecure, neither is Wechat. And encrypted email is still a thing.
"Have no choice" is false. Fortunately, email still works. As does any messenger through a VPN. Using Wechat is simply being complicit with censorship out of laziness.
This is because they can't find jobs abroad and can't even speak a foreign language properly after spending their undergrad years in a Chinese international student bubble.
Quoting China Daily is irrelevant because it's a propaganda mouthpiece of the CCP.
> Also they brought the most populous country in the world from extreme poverty to a near superpower status
Before that, they first had to bring the country into extreme poverty (see "The Great Leap Forward"). This is like boasting about stopping to beat your wife.
That's only if your company is a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE), which come with its own special set of deliberately roadblocks which are not there if a Chinese partner is involved.
If anything, the population is underreported. The 2010 census claims it to be around 1.3 billion. But it is widely accepted as a fact that a lot of people in the countryside weren't included in the census because they are "illegal" additional children born in defiance of the one-child policy, and were simply hidden in the basement during the census, as they are hidden whenever any government check is happening.
Those children have no rights, and according to the state, don't exist. They can't go to school, get an official job, etc. They are born to do physical work on the fields and support their parents into their old age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation