On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself.

People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.

Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution.

(P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)

You're confusing "ally" and "vassal". Allies are countries that send troops to help you in war.

Nah he's correct, local government compete on implementation details, not overall strategy that is monopolize by the central government. Which has the same pitfalls (-see zero-covid or the debt crisis owing to gdp targets)

Yeah but China have death penalty for corruption while Trump literally selling subscription for faster tweet access

I don't think he was badmouthing China at all. He's basically using different words to make the exact same point you're trying to make.

When there's no real accountability, in a reasonable timeframe, it's much easier to plan long term.

It's the same within companies. When the CEO assumes he'll be around for 5 years, should he shoot for the 10 year goal and reduce outcomes in the early years? Or does he just optimize for the next 5 years, thereby neglecting the long term goal?

Did you forget about what happened with Hong Kong?

GP isn't "badmouthing" China, that description applies to every non-democratic country, one leader with the power, not the people.

Autocracies are great in the hands of a competent leader who plans the economy long term, and the grows of the country for the benefit of the country and society (look up "benevolent dictators"). They are not afraid of long term plans, or pleasing the population in the short term. He can break some eggs now to feed the whole country tomorrow. This is not something a democratic leader can afford. They live in 4-5 years cycles to please an electorate who looks for immediate benefits.

In the hands of an incompetent and abusive leader autocracy is a nightmare that's supported only by fear and violence against the people. These are most dictatorships. Society suffers but can't do anything for fear of being steamrolled by the army.

China is straddling a middle ground where the country grew by leaps and bounds, faster than anything else in history probably, but they also use a heavy hand to do this.

In this case, I'd appreciate it if you could understand it as my 'native language.' When you input a language that isn't English into a computer, it often doesn't work well with ASCII—it frequently breaks in many places.

Because the standards for computer work are mostly set by the US, people in Asia often call the ASCII system 'the privilege of one byte.' A single hardware switch maps directly to one byte of memory. You don't need an IME—Linux requires programmers to configure that manually.

For native languages like Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, you can't just type characters onto the screen directly. IME daemons like ibus or fcitx run in the background, intercept key events, and compose them in buffers. In that regard, Windows is much better. And this ties in well with the topic of this post

Using Linux outside the English speaking world means you have to study encoding history and filesystem structures just to open a document. It practically becomes a hobby. It's awful.

But Windows solves that problem first, because it wants to sell Windows in those countries. NTFS stores filenames in UTF-16, so multilingual input is standard. When you open a terminal in Linux, you get the horrible experience of seeing your native language rendered as broken characters. I do use Linux, of course. I think its lightweight nature is a plus, but in my work environment, Linux is hard to use properly except on servers