The US incarceration rate is rapidly declining and has been falling for ten years.
The US is pursuing drug legalization and decriminalization and is widely seeking to soften its approach overall. China is doing no such thing and has no interest in such, they regard drugs across the board to be completely opposed to their system's values.
The US is pursuing the end of its failed mass-incarceration policies, with wide-spread bi-partisan support. China is aggressively clamping down on its people in just about every possible manner. It's so aggressive at this point, it's difficult to keep up with all the stories pouring out of China about a new repression/restriction.
The US maintains extremely high degrees of freedom of speech, demonstration, expression, religion, movement. Yes, it's obviously not perfect on any given thing, that hardly needs said (and it's better at some things than others, for example it remains world-class on freedom of speech protections).
China has almost none of that and is persistently revoking the gains that had been made.
One need merely compare the vast, endless protest of Trump's Presidency and many of its policies, the terrible things that have been said about him and his family, the violent threats that are routinely made toward him across social media, the nude statue, the giant protest ducky, and on and on and on. Or, eg most media being stacked against him (~90% of all stories being negative; or just see: Colbert and Kimmel and the things they've said, which would get you immediately put into prison in China or worse).
Now contrast that with how China treats Xi, from protests (lack thereof) to media. Or to simplify, see: Winnie the Pooh. You can't even say bad things about Mao in China, that's enough to get you put into prison. Feel free to call George Washington a devil slave owning piece of trash, all day long, all over the Internet, if you like.
The US legalized gay marriage and has made vast strides over the decades in regards to equality for gay persons. China actively tortures gay people in trying to convert them and censors gay culture.
The US has millions of Muslims that have assimilated fairly well into its culture and laws. Conflicts between US non-Muslims and US Muslims are rare, despite the US being overwhelmingly a Christian/Catholic nation. No purges are occuring, no culture eradication is occuring, no mass detentions are occuring; mass killings of Muslims did not occur after 9/11. China is torturing Muslims and seeking to wipe out Muslim culture in the Xinjiang region.
What China is doing in Xinjiang is Guantanamo x1000, literally. Except Guantanamo was overwhelmingly directed at terrorists and battlefield combatants (and yes it failed at that premise on many occasions). What China is doing is targeting all Muslims because they're Muslims. And they may just be getting warmed up, if the history of dictatorships is any indication.
Trump ran on a platform of decreasing the US military's expanse and the involvement in war in the Middle East. He routinely points out the stupidity of what the US has done in the Middle East in the past, no other President has dared to say such things. He just had to be talked into staying involved in Syria by the Europeans. The American people increasingly poll that they'd like to see a draw-down of the US military on the global stage, less entanglement rather than more; Americans are beyond war weary.
China is going the opposite direction. They're violently annexing vast territory from other nations, persistently threatening Taiwan (with violent annexation seeming like an inevitability), and seeking global expansion for their military.
Factually we don't have an accurate count at all on just how vast the torture camps are in China ('re-education camps'), how many people they're putting into prison, and how many people they're executing.
Whataboutism is a powerful disease of modern discourse. Pretty soon we will start letting killers go because John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer killed more people.
I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy, but the result is a race to the bottom where any other example negates any criticism. Nobody is perfect so if you have to be perfect to criticize no criticism is possible.
In the board game Warhammer there is the tale of the Dwarves strongholds. They forever remembered grudges. Even over the course of time, when the nature of the grudge was forgotten, they still held on to the ill will. This article is well reasoned, researched, and makes sense to a Chinese speaker. However, this will be dismissed like the UN Tribunal simply because the result contradicts the official narrative promoted by China.
There is simply too much nationalism and national pride locked up with the whole South China Sea and Taiwan that no amount of logic and truth can change how it is perceived in China.
The South China Sea dispute has nothing to facts like these, and all about geopolitics and power within China. Like with the Austria pre-ww2, if the Chinese were to invade and conquer Taiwan and control the entire SCS, they'll magically find other "distractions" and "conflicts" to distract people away from their own misrule and corruption.
With Putin's Russia and the CCP, there must always be enemies (both internal and external). If they don't exist, you create one (think FalunGong)
This is it. Thank you, I commented about my local experiences with government in Europe and US/Canada but did not know the correct terms and you're right, I think this is the big difference and a driver of fear outside of the EU. In Canada I found the police, by-law enforcers, and almost any official are essentially rules based robots, very much different to my experience in the UK. Thank you for teaching me about rules-based and principles-based regulation. This is one of the big reasons I enjoy living in Europe tbh, a bit of discretion and old 'common sense' is actually quite an awesome thing.
I think you and everyone making similar points in this thread are getting tripped up by the difference between rules-based regulation and principles-based regulation. This is unsurprising, given that the US is so heavily rules-based, but the EU (certainly the UK) has a long history of principles-based regulation.
In rules-based regulation, all the rules are spelled out in advance, and the regulator is basically an automaton once the rules are set. In principles-based regulation, the rules are extensive rather than complete and you expect the regulator to have some lattitude (and, if the system is well designed, a mechanism of recourse if they do something stupid).
An advocate of rules-based regulation would say this can make regulators unpredictable and capricious. An advocate of principles-based regulation would say it is an important safeguard against "rules-lawyering" and regulatory capture (especially the kind that ties new entrants up in check-box compliance that doesn't actually affect your business because all the rules have been worked around).
A classic example would be the time PayPal tried to tell the UK regulators they shouldn't be regulated like a financial institution (which is a claim they successfully made in the US). They pointed to chapter and verse of the relevant law, and said that according to subparagraph 2.b.c(iii)... and the relevant regulator essentially told them "shut up, you keep consumers' money for them and will be treated accordingly". As a result, the worst "PayPal took all my money and I can't get it back" stories generally do not come from the UK. (And when they do, they are accompanied by referrals to the Financial Conduct Authority, who have teeth.)
You can approve of this way of working or not, but the GDPR is a principles-based regulation, and you'll have to engage with it on those terms.
I believe they're referring to the premise that US prisons are overwhelmingly filled with innocent, non-violent offenders, with the majority specifically consisting of black and hispanic men.
The US has a real negative mark there and deserves the flack that it gets for it.
However, while China seems to be racing toward some terrifying authoritarian nightmare with its Xi dictatorship and bringing back camps, the US incarceration rate has been declining for a decade. It has been rolled back to 1995-1996 levels and is on an aggressive downward slope.
Most likely with the continued legalization / de-criminalization of marijuana, the US will see its incarceration rate continue to plunge for the next 10-20 years. The prison explosion began around 1978-1979. In another ten years we should have the incarceration rate back down to late 1980s levels. That would still be 2x higher than the late 1970s levels, and a lot more work would still need to be done. For reference, peak incarceration was around 2007, and was about 5x what the rate was in the late 1970s (per capita).
Both political parties have widespread agreement that the failed US policies of mass-incarceration have to be reversed / ended.
The US has not done border-expanding territorialism like China has in a very very long time. Perhaps the US should, since everyone apparently thinks it is happening anyways.
Ex Amazon here. Most grumpy system engineers did not disappear: we got hired by Google/Amazon/etc to build large-scale infrastructure... and sometimes sell it back to you as a service.
Believe me or not, most of the underlying infra does not run on the popular technology of the year. Far, far from it. That's why it works.
Modern devops, with its million tools that break backward compatibility every month sometimes becomes the running joke at lunch.
I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available.
It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.
This is then usually (but not always) "anonymized" by cutting it in to ~5 second chunks. It's easy to put it back together again. We can figure out everything about your day from when you wake up to where you go to when you sleep.
This data is sold to whoever wants it. Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go. This isn't fantasy, it's what happens every day.
Almost every web/smartphone mapping company is doing it, so is almost everyone that tracks you for some service - "turn the lights on when I get home". The web mapping companies and those that provide SDKs for "free". It's a monetization model for apps which don't need location. That's why Apple is trying hard to restrict it without scaring off consumers.
This pretty much happened to me too, a regular user went after me particularly viciously. It was a bad enough experience that I never posted again. That was in 2002/2004-ish. Ten years on and that enormous asshole is still a regular contributor. I have nothing against the moderators, they are some of the best on the 'net. I don't even have a problem with most of the participators there. But there are about three regular users that for me cause so much hatred to well up when I see just their usernames, that I rarely ever go back.
Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" documents the process of imposing authoritarianism. Particularly important is the combination of surveillance and the threat of violence. You can't have a thug with a baton on every street corner, but with enough information, you can credibly extend the threat of violence far beyond the number of thugs available. The number of nodes in a tree grows much faster than its depth.
How should we compare this kind of upstream oppression--heading off free expression, movement, association before they happen--with more localized forms of assault? More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?
The speedy US ramp up in WWII is illusory, because the US essentially entered the war effort in 1940, well before its official entry in 1941.
That said, logistics has long been one of the core competencies of the US. As far back as the American Revolution, Henry Knox transported captured cannon at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston--in the middle of winter--and then installed them in a single night on Dorchester Heights, which forced the British evacuation of Boston. The Americans also managed a major supply route to China via an aerial airlift (The Hump), which became the template for supplying Berlin via airlift--something most military planners thought completely impossible until the British and the Americans pulled it off.
It's much simpler: Private Banking is offered for a profit, not because it is in demand. If an international bank can make more black ink stateside rather than Samoa, even if the risk/reward ratio isn't that different, the larger bank chooses the more profitable market to distribute it's loans. This puts Samoa in an awkward spot where they have a dearth of services, despite demand, simply because every bank made this analysis. It's classic Tragedy Of The Commons.
A public bank, in contrast, does not have to put this absolute profit first, giving them the flexibility to enter markets where they might not be as successful, but they don't have nearly the competition for their services. Additionally, since this is operated by the state, they can benefit from business loans and interest as another form of revenue, giving them room to cut taxes or improve services.
EDIT: As consolidation creates both larger businesses and larger reserves of capital, this causes the bank to make more conservative loans. They must play more defensively. As these banks retreat from "riskier" markets, it leaves genuine demand behind. Look at the article's description of "predatory lending" near the top of the article.
Because there is this pent-up demand, a local bank could open a branch that captures some of that demand, and incentivizes locals with higher returns than the international bank because they can charge a higher interest rate. But the IntBank wouldn't still enter this market because the size is still too tiny to warrant their attention and/or the interest rates locally don't move the needle in their global reserves. It's literally too small to be worth the effort.
Maybe, but my experience with US companies is that surprisingly large companies sometimes think they'll get away with just doing stuff that's legal under US law and pretend the EU is just another US state.
E.g. I spent 3 years at Yahoo (more than a decade ago now) wrangling with US product managers that found it incredibly hard to accept that the "workarounds" they kept proposing for EU requirements for payments systems were highly illegal in the European countries we operated in, as a means to cut effort. My team existed pretty much only to form a protective layer between the US payments team and the European business because the European business didn't trust them to not pull a fast one to save time, because they didn't understand the seriousness of the requirements.
But in many European countries, the courts takes a very dim view on that kind of attitude.
Performance of the contract does not mean whatever they want it to mean. Here's the ICO FAQ on the GDPR (emphasis mine):
"The processing must be necessary to deliver your side of the contract with this particular person. If the processing is only necessary to maintain your business model more generally, this lawful basis will not apply and you should consider another lawful basis, such as legitimate interests."
> Funding by targeted ads isn't illegal last time I checked.
It is if you don't get consent. And you can't make that consent required to provide a service, since then it won't be "freely given", as per Article 7.
I feel like the "rise of the machines" won't be some bloodbath with terminators or AI killing people outright, it will just be that everything will be a Kafka-esque maze of bureaucratic complexity with no human recourse when you get caught in the system. It's like those Coke Freestyle machines, where you get stuck in line behind someone trying to figure out the touchscreen system when all you want to do is get a Coke. The future of society is all of us frustratedly waving our hands in front of an automated paper towel dispenser before we just give up and wipe our hands on our pants.
I'm looking forward to seeing the full NTSB report.
This hints that Uber's mindset is focused on "obstacles", not "flat road". The first job of automated driving is to drive only on flat surfaces. Doesn't matter why it's not flat. Then you worry about where to go. That's how the off-road DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles had to work. "Flat road" is a pure geometry thing. Not much AI needed.
On road, non-flat road is rare, and you don't have to worry much about going off cliffs, rocks in the road, and such. So it's tempting to focus on "obstacles" to be tallied and classified. Tesla definitely has an "obstacle" focus, and a limited class of obstacles considered. Waymo profiles the ground. Looks like Uber had the "obstacle" focus.
If you have a "flat road" detection system, things the obstacle detector doesn't understand get stopped for or bypassed. So the vehicle isn't vulnerable to this flaw. There's a higher false alarm rate, though. And a non false alarm problem. A piece of trash on the road is likely to result in a slowdown and careful avoidance, not a bump as the car rolls over it. Still, better to take the safe approach unless you're on a freeway and the cars ahead of you just got past the obstacle successfully.
The Udacity self driving car "nanodegree" trains people to build obstacle detectors and classifiers. That may be a problem.
>Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course.
Yes, and this also nicely self-regulates the media marketplace to balance monopolies like FB. Want to target a narrow niche, advertise in specialist media to a smaller audience at higher rates. Want to carpet bomb, advertise in mass media at bulk rates. Mass media being able to segment their audience has killed specialist titles income stream and created monopolies. Without that regulation FB has been allowed to have their cake and eat everybody elses.
Well, it depends which “Communism” you are talking about.
If you are talking about the broad set of political theories going by the name “Communism”, then the difference is that Communism is a broad set of theories of which Marxism is one specific theory (or, depending on how broadly you use the term “Marxism”, a distinct set of closely related theories within the broader universe of Communism.)
If, OTOH, you mean “the set of regimes which established control of various states starting with the Soviet Union and including a large number of others throughout the 20th century, with somemretaining power into the 21st”, then the difference is that “Communism” is really Leninism and it's derivatives, which (again depending on how broadly you see Marxism) is either a radical departure from key premises of Marxism that has an affectation of rhetorically labelling itself a subset of Marxism despite that radical departure, or a particular distinct subset of Marxism characterized most importantly by adaptation to the conditions in much of the world outside of North America and Western Europe in the 20th Century by abandoning the precondition of development of a broad proletarian class consciousness under developed capitalism in favor of the leadership of a narrow activist elite to shepherd the revolution (vanguardism).
> Marx makes it pretty clear Manifesto of the Communist Party what policies he thinks should be implemented.
Marx and Engels make pretty clear in the Manifesto what they thought should be the next policy steps taken given prevailing conditions in developed capitalist states in Western Europe at the time.
To the limited extent that those recommendations have subsequently been adopted in developed capitalist states, they've worked out pretty well; the developed world has pretty much abandoned the system 19th Century critics named “capitalism” in the course of criticizing it for the hybrid modern “mixed economy”, and while there are certainly people—especially those at, or who dream they would be at, the top of the pile of capitalist heap—who’d like to go back, that doesn't seem to be a big mass movement.
If I tell you a course you should take to get from point A to point B and you start out at point C but try to follow it's sequence of headings and distances, with some invented alterations of your own, and end up falling into a volcano instead of getting to point B, it may not be my directions that are at fault.
There's a fascinating TLP article on this very topic[0]. Here's the most relevant bit:
*
The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story.
Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?
The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't feel the same. I know.
What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one. Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.
*
Translating to the present topic, what makes Jordan Belfort attractive is not his role as "rich stock trader crook" or the cars and yachts that go with it, it's that he has a role and is confident that that is his role, as opposed to, let's say, oscillating between "Maybe I should start day trading" and "Maybe I should write the great American novel" and "Maybe I should write an indie game" but never doing any of them because that would remove the option of doing the other ones.
If you didn't nail the "why", you certainly came about as close as one can get.
From my personal experience, I think that we may be missing the "social clubs" from past decades. There's something to being a new person to a club or group that forces people to stop thinking of themselves as special/unique and defer to the group dynamic, and I think this is (in most cases) a healthy process. I've played ice hockey with the same group of guys/gals for ~15 years, and when a person joins our group, you can tell almost immediately if they're going to last: if they keep their mouth shut on the ice and let their playing do the talking, but off the ice they are sociable and have interesting things to add to the conversation, then they will be a long-term member. If they, instead, start whining about this or that on the ice or don't want to join in some of the off-ice socializing, they typically aren't going to last very long.
> nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out
Self-centeredness runs high these days. Us young people want the world to cater to us. However, two self-centered people don't get along that great.
If I want to make friends, then I have to choose to actively put time and energy into someone else; sometimes without getting much back.
The most lonely I've ever been (or ever seen someone else), is when I am totally self-focused - spending all my time on my plans and situation and looking for ways people can fit into those plans.
This isn't the only problem, but it's certainly a player.
I'm not sure why you're downvoted, this is most definitely contributing towards the problem, along with a (perceived?) lack of tolerance to other people's values and beliefs.
Somewhere we diverged from "live and let live" and "meet the other person half way" to "if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best" at scale. "Social Selfishness" or "The Peacock Effect", and it seems social networks galvanize attitudes in this direction.
Unsolicited advice: Delete your Facebook and Twitter, leave your phone in your pocket or your car, and enjoy the company of others over a meal or shared activity. Listen more than you speak. Give the benefit of the doubt. Be present in the moment. Be mindful about your emotions when your beliefs or values conflict with those of others. Make the effort to stay in touch with those you love and/or care about (phone or email works, postcards are fun). Empathize.
HN is definitely an outlier for population that uses social media. I'm not trying to be edgy, but I believe it's our relationship with computers/technology that makes us this way.
Computers do what we say (to our own detriment sometimes!) and we are used to parsing what the computer is telling us. We think of computers and systems as their parts and as a whole.
So we are wary of computers/phones/internet by training (self or taught or nature). Because of this relationship, we have an easier path to detach ourselves from "Facebook" and simply stop. Facebook is not doing what "I" intended, cut it out.
I think the general population's relationship with technology is that it tells you information and the information becomes your world. To them, it's an eye, an ear, an arm. Cutting out a body part is hard.
The real kicker is that we as programmers understand Facebook wants "engagement" and that it is programmed to maximize our engagement. The general population doesn't know or understand this fact. Some of use choose to disengage because it isn't desirable behavior. Some of us don't mind/care. I think the general population (on average) understand know enough to care.
The programs are very uniform. There is not multiple ways of doing things (at a presentation level). So you get to use hundreds of thousands of existing apps written over the last N decades in your modern web application.
You just couldn’t write them all over again, there isn’t a team on earth that could, even with infinite money. You’d be talking, I think, more than high double digits, millions of LOC.
JavaScript by comparison .. today it’s React/Angular, but it is very fluid. Not much code will be practically reusable in 5/yr from now.
Written by two of the people who helped develop INFOSEC field and early secure systems. Schell was an acquisitions guy who worked with Paul in early pentests, pushed "COMPUSEC" when few believed in it, pushed for security certifications, was sneaking funding into secure systems like SCOMP, and spent rest of his career pushing solutions based on GEMSOS security kernel.
Paul Karger who was an engineer that worked with him early on doing pentests that were quite embarrassing to military and commercial sector. Paul designed and built a number of highly-secure systems at a time when it was little understood. Here's his publication list and an obituary summarizing some of his work.
My favorite was VAX Security Kernel whose design is still stronger than most modern VMM's. It was also the project where the application of covert-channel analysis discovered cache-based, timing channels in processors. The high-assurance, security field started freaking out about how insecure CPU hardware was around that point. Both problems ignored by other groups in security much like results and advice from MULTICS evaluation. His last project was a secure, smartcard OS for IBM designed for EAL7 evaluation. He and/or his team wisely split it up into intermediate deliverables that had independent value and potential sales to keep the long-term project funded despite effects of management impatience or changes.
The US incarceration rate is rapidly declining and has been falling for ten years.
The US is pursuing drug legalization and decriminalization and is widely seeking to soften its approach overall. China is doing no such thing and has no interest in such, they regard drugs across the board to be completely opposed to their system's values.
The US is pursuing the end of its failed mass-incarceration policies, with wide-spread bi-partisan support. China is aggressively clamping down on its people in just about every possible manner. It's so aggressive at this point, it's difficult to keep up with all the stories pouring out of China about a new repression/restriction.
The US maintains extremely high degrees of freedom of speech, demonstration, expression, religion, movement. Yes, it's obviously not perfect on any given thing, that hardly needs said (and it's better at some things than others, for example it remains world-class on freedom of speech protections).
China has almost none of that and is persistently revoking the gains that had been made.
One need merely compare the vast, endless protest of Trump's Presidency and many of its policies, the terrible things that have been said about him and his family, the violent threats that are routinely made toward him across social media, the nude statue, the giant protest ducky, and on and on and on. Or, eg most media being stacked against him (~90% of all stories being negative; or just see: Colbert and Kimmel and the things they've said, which would get you immediately put into prison in China or worse).
Now contrast that with how China treats Xi, from protests (lack thereof) to media. Or to simplify, see: Winnie the Pooh. You can't even say bad things about Mao in China, that's enough to get you put into prison. Feel free to call George Washington a devil slave owning piece of trash, all day long, all over the Internet, if you like.
The US legalized gay marriage and has made vast strides over the decades in regards to equality for gay persons. China actively tortures gay people in trying to convert them and censors gay culture.
The US has millions of Muslims that have assimilated fairly well into its culture and laws. Conflicts between US non-Muslims and US Muslims are rare, despite the US being overwhelmingly a Christian/Catholic nation. No purges are occuring, no culture eradication is occuring, no mass detentions are occuring; mass killings of Muslims did not occur after 9/11. China is torturing Muslims and seeking to wipe out Muslim culture in the Xinjiang region.
What China is doing in Xinjiang is Guantanamo x1000, literally. Except Guantanamo was overwhelmingly directed at terrorists and battlefield combatants (and yes it failed at that premise on many occasions). What China is doing is targeting all Muslims because they're Muslims. And they may just be getting warmed up, if the history of dictatorships is any indication.
Trump ran on a platform of decreasing the US military's expanse and the involvement in war in the Middle East. He routinely points out the stupidity of what the US has done in the Middle East in the past, no other President has dared to say such things. He just had to be talked into staying involved in Syria by the Europeans. The American people increasingly poll that they'd like to see a draw-down of the US military on the global stage, less entanglement rather than more; Americans are beyond war weary.
China is going the opposite direction. They're violently annexing vast territory from other nations, persistently threatening Taiwan (with violent annexation seeming like an inevitability), and seeking global expansion for their military.
Factually we don't have an accurate count at all on just how vast the torture camps are in China ('re-education camps'), how many people they're putting into prison, and how many people they're executing.