legofr's comments

legofr | 4 years ago | on: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

If your market is large enough and the tariffs are high enough then it seems logical that tariffs will force the companies to manufacture their goods elsewhere to stay competitive and increase revenue.

Short term the tariffs are likely paid for by the exporting country, company and/or consumer (there's a limit to how much you can pass on to the consumer), whereas long term the goods will be manufactured/assembled in another country.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: New iPhone SE

We definitely need laws that require companies to display this information online as well so that ethical shoppers aren't forced to go to the stores to avoid Made in China products.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Cloudflare Weirdly Quiet on Russian Invasion of Ukraine

I hope they don't do anything. It's extremely hypocritical to see companies stand up to Russia yet fail to do the same with China, who in recent years stripped Hong Kongers of their human rights, send innocent Uyghurs to concentration camps and engage in genocide, and caused a global pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world (not to mention their human rights abuses in Tibet, organ harvesting industry, etc., all of which is actively taking place today). They (both the CCP and the majority of the people) also happen to support Russia's invasion.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Slack is down for some users

That spyware thankfully isn't no mine, and if you're forced to use it (if you for whatever reason can't use Jitsi/Teams) then I strongly encourage you not to install the app and instead use the web version.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Firefox 96

I think you can compare it to "natural scrolling" - imagine if an operating system suddenly flipped the default scrolling direction without even presenting a dialog where you could choose your preferred option.

> everytime I go back to Edge or Chrome, it becomes painful to the point I have to use the mouse for moving through tabs

Sometimes I worry if that's exactly what they hoped would happen, similar to how Windows/Linux users often hate using a MacOS keyboard layout and vice versa.. but hopefully that isn't the case, especially because I can't think of any other software where you don't cycle through the tabs in their located order.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Firefox 96

They had a couple big blunders with the ugly border/expansion when clicking the address bar, and "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order".. both of these things should have never been the default (or at least we should've been given the option to select a default when they were first added, similar to what they did with the new color theme support), but besides that then I can't think of anything terrible and always happy to see new updates.

I would especially love to see deeper integration with their Multi-Account Containers add-on, e.g. allow us to tell a bookmark to open in X container, or allow us to always open X container based on URL path instead of just domain name.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

I don't think it's one-sided at all. If you look at the 30 most popular stories in the past year then 5 of them paints China in a positive light (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...):

- China lands rover on Mars (581 points, 314 comments)

- China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors (261 points, 354 comments)

- China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures (243 points, 66 comments)

- China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover (236 points, 167 comments)

- China unveils 600 kph maglev train (229 points, 433 comments)

You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).

I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).

legofr | 4 years ago | on: No one died in China of Covid since April 15th 2020

The Economist claim China have had 140k to 1.9m excess deaths since the pandemic started in Wuhan (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...).

It's of course worth noting that China is one of the countries that stopped reporting excess deaths themselves since it would be pretty obvious that if China e.g. reported a million excess deaths then the majority could likely be attributed to SARS2 (whether they die directly from the virus or starve as a result of their brutal lockdowns).

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Steam has been banned in China

The reason it took more than a year for me to realize this phenomenon is because when I first visited the country then I relied on travel agencies, international hotel booking apps, and had accommodation provided for me. It's certainly possible to live in China for even a decade without realizing the reality of the situation if you exclusively stay at 4-5 star hotels, or only book hotels through international hotel booking apps, or rely on agencies to help you find apartment and other type of accommodation since they have a list of the ones that accept foreigners.

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/starrated-hotel-operation/... claim there are 10 million hotels in China - what percentage do you reckon are included in the international hotel booking apps? My guess would be less than 0.5%. That's why you need to walk into the random hotels/apartments you see on the street if you want to verify the reality of the situation. For you specifically then it might be difficult since you're ethnically Chinese, so while you might encounter some discrimination and exclusion from society (if you don't have a national id card) then it certainly won't be comparable to what white and especially black people experience while living in China. In my experience then the 9/10 number is not an exaggeration at all but if you asked other westerners who visited China then they will likely give different numbers based on their price range, location, booking method, etc.

I also think you greatly exaggerate how much you actually learn about another country by going there for a short trip. Even the most brutal regimes can look like a wonderful paradise, e.g. see the national day celebration in 1959 which took place at a time where tens of millions of people were dying of starvation (https://youtu.be/M-XQSffVpfY?t=43).

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Steam has been banned in China

In every other country you show them your passport, you write your signature and you pay a deposit - done.

In China you either need to go through an agency that have something similar to "The Negro Motorist Green Book" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book), or you need to speak Chinese, convince the reception that they don't need a certificate they believe they're legally required to have, convince the reception to call the owner who will no doubt repeat a foreigner is not allowed, then you need to contact the police to convince the owner, if the police agree that a certificate is required then you need to convince the police that they don't know their own laws, convince them to call the Provincial Foreign Affairs Bureau.. that's what the person in your blogpost has been doing. She even told the police to give her their badge numbers so she could file an official complaint. That person is certainly living on the edge.

Even if it's technically legal, then surely the end result will be the same - 9/10 hotels and apartments will refuse foreigners (for the apartments I rented then everything was done on paper, I doubt they have the booking system mentioned in the blogpost - not sure if all hotels use the same since I have never walked behind the desk and looked at their computer.. and they probably wouldn't allow it if I asked) because who in their right mind want to spend several hours and likely get the police involved just so they can rent a room for 200rmb.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Steam has been banned in China

We wouldn't be turning into China if we only banned Chinese companies, if we only blacklisted/punished western companies that spread CCP propaganda (nine-dash line, calling Taiwan a province of China, etc).

To quote HN user stale2002: Tit for tat reciprocity is the basis of most modern trade relations.

legofr | 4 years ago | on: Steam has been banned in China

I'm personally opposed to the idea of visiting certain countries, such as China and North Korea, to 'see for yourself', especially when you don't know the language, when you're not willing to risk your life to understand and uncover the parts the government doesn't want you to see, like VICE did in Xinjiang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ

That being said, if you go then please try to walk into a random hotel/apartment you see on the street to try to book a room.. then you'll discover that 9/10 hotels/apartments won't allow foreigners to live there. I lived in China for more than a year before I realized this was the case, and I have on multiple occasions even been kicked out of friends/partners apartment because someone told the landlord there was a foreigner in the building (or maybe they saw through the surveillance camera).

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