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from the the-truth-is-what-we-say-it-is dept.
TechCrunch:
"China's web scrubbers have been busy banning a collection of terms and dropping the hammer on user accounts after the Xi Jinping, the country's premier, got the all-clear to become 'President For Life' after the Communist Party moved to amend the constitution to remove an article that limits Presidential terms to two five-year terms."
BBC:
"The comments remaining on the popular Sina Weibo microblog are mostly monosyllabic statements from users simply say they "like" or "approve" the amendments.
They are likely to be from China's "50 Cent Party" - a nickname coined for internet commentators who are paid small amounts to post messages supporting the government's position.
Some posts have attracted thousands of comments - but only a few are available to view. This is traditionally indicative of online censorship by government administrators. "
China Digital Times:
"Following state media's announcement, censorship authorities began work to limit online discussion. CDT Chinese editors found the following terms blocked from being posted on Weibo: [...]"
Sources:
China's web censors go into overdrive as President Xi Jinping consolidates power
China censorship after Xi Jinping presidency extension proposal
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 27 2018, @10:41PM (3 children)
No. Fuck that jingoistic nationalist bullshit. Do you have any idea how close we came and how many times to nuclear armageddon playing that game with Russia? Besides which, we don't have the natural resources to pull that off any longer, nor the in-country production, manufacturing, etc. abilities.
Now if we'd been spending the last 15-20 years on energy independence, desalinization, and similar tech, and weren't beholden to half the rest of the world for natural resources, maybe this would be a workable if immoral (for the reason above) strategy. But at this point, we don't even have what we need to pull that off from a realpolitik standpoint.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 28 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
The rest of your comment seems fine, but I have to question your bit about natural resources. How does the US lack in that? The US still produces much of its own oil for instance (and probably all its own natgas), there's no shortage of coal (though we don't use it so much, but I do think we export it); honestly I can't think of any resource the US currently lacks that it didn't lack in the past. I think we're lacking in lithium, but I don't think we ever had much of that, we just didn't need much before they invented batteries that used it. We don't have much titanium, but again we never had much of that, Russia did, so when we started trading with Russia after the USSR fell, we could suddenly get it much cheaper and make jewelry with it.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday February 28 2018, @09:38PM (1 child)
Cobalt, tantalum, lithium, rare earths of all sorts, thorium if we ever pull our heads out and get on that...we're past the age where nothing but coal and gas matter. High-tech society needs these lanthanides, transition metals, and (with any luck) low-weight actinides in order to function.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:18PM
Cobalt, tantalum, lithium, rare earths of all sorts, thorium if we ever pull our heads out and get on that
Again, how were we ever flush with these resources? Your original post said "we don't have the natural resources to pull that off any longer", which implies that we did have them at one time. I don't think the US was ever bountiful with cobalt or thorium or lithium.
As for rare earths, I thought we actually did have a lot of those mined in the West.
High-tech society needs these lanthanides, transition metals, and (with any luck) low-weight actinides in order to function.
Explain please.
Lanthanides: neodymium is very useful for high-power permanent magnets. The rest, I have no idea. Nuclear medicine maybe?
Transition metals: this is a very large category, and even includes iron and nickel and chromium, as well as titanium, scandium, molybdenum, silver, gold, copper, etc. In fact, it really contains all the thing that laypeople would consider as "metals". Some of these the US has plenty of, others not as much. I don't think it makes any sense to say that "high-tech society" needs these, any more than to say that it needs matter.
Actinides: this is thorium, uranium, plutonium, americium, etc. Last I heard, there's no shortage of uranium in the US. Plutonium doesn't exist here because it doesn't exist anywhere in nature, it (along with a bunch of others on this list) have to be synthesized. I think americium is used in smoke detectors. We're not really building new nuclear fission plants. Why exactly do we need actinides again?
I'll give you the transition metals thing, but again that is a bit silly because of course modern society needs things like copper and iron (just as ancient societies needed them), you really need to be more specific here. The rest, I really don't see why they're so important.