Though I when last changed countries I did find that I lost some purchases. I would guess it can happen when an item is not available in the new country.
There’s a rate limit on how often you change countries and you’ll need a payment method from the country you want to change to (e.g. a credit card issued in that country, the address on the card doesn’t matter).
You’ll also need to cancel e.g. your Apple TV+ subscription before you can switch.
Thanks. In a first draft I used the words descriptive and prescriptive but then I decided to avoid possibly using the wrong terminology. Would "prescriptive" be a synonym for "normative" in this case or is there an important difference?
I was banned too. I filled in the form 2-3 times already, but I never heard back from them.
My working theory is that I was banned due to using a VPN (Mullvad) with a location set to Europe, at a time when Europe users were not allowed to use the app.
I wasn’t actually in Europe, to be clear, but I live in a country where even WhatsApp voice calls are blocked and so I routinely have my VPN turned on.
The country I live in is officially supported by Anthropic, and so is Europe these days, so it’s quite frustrating that they won’t unban me.
I can’t use ChatGPT and Perplexity either when I have my VPN turned on, but at least they don’t ban my account.
Their support sucks tbh, months ago I used my phone number with my work gmail and wanted to move it to my personal gmail (phone numbers can only be used on one account for some reason) to subscribe, never got a response to the request.
Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too.
However:
- Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish.
- Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed.
I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I don't think debating counterfactuals is a productive way to have this discussion.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
The context of the chain is that you can leave the US or the UK, but you can't leave China. The original comment literally said - if you don't like the US, you can leave, but if you don't like China, you can't leave.
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.
I don't understand how you can give 'American cops routinely kill people' as an example of human rights violations that are being ignored.
Is change lacking? Yes. Is there outrage? Also yes.
Of course, had you were to make the point that Western politicians are complete hypocrites then I would wholeheartedly agree. Although, I also don't think that's a uniquely Western phenomenon.
When mass uprisings are necessary for even a serious discussion of the problem (intention to resolve it is nowhere in sight) - then, yes, killing by cops is being ignored and has been ignored.
_You_ aren't ignoring it - your representative have been ignoring it (and effectively and mostly, still are; they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away.)
The group that was being attacked was something like 'Westerners who criticize China' (I can't find the exact quote since the OP is no longer visible to me). I'm part of that group and that is why I replied.
Your point that "they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away" is true regarding the establishment. I don't see how anyone would disagree with that.
But we have a right to vote and a right to loudly voice our disagreement. And that's different from China. Right now in HK the government is now basically saying that voting against legislation proposed by the establishment 'might be' a violation of the national security law. That's insane.
You’re completely ignoring the fact that protest and speech are exactly how things change in a free democratic society. Try that in China and you’re likely to find yourself in a “re-education” (concentration) camp. It’s not apples to apples comparing the US to China in terms of human rights and civil society... China is truly an authoritarian regime.
"While I haven’t tested the beta myself, it appears it gets to run the whole time you’re on that SSID and it can implement whatever protocol it wants to talk to your proprietary server."
I'm currently in quarantine in a Singapore hotel and the government forced me to install a location tracking app on my phone.
For several reasons that I won't go into, I've come to think that they have issues where the app is being killed by iOS for a lot of people.
Although iOS background killing is obscure, it's well known that background service would definitely get killed(at max ~3 mins?), the behaviour is same across all devices and different OS iterations.
But in Android, apart from default doze, battery optimisation feature, each manufacturer implement their own aggressive app killing services and so managing background tasks becomes very hard. At least in recent versions of Android, app developer can navigate the user to disable battery optimisation for their app if needed, which would affect default system behaviour but out of luck if the manufacturer implements their own app killer.
Unfortunately, I didn't see any of the contact tracing apps of several countries explicitly asking users to disable battery optimisation/app killers or whitelist bg task permission for their apps and I think that's one of the main reasons for the supposed failure of contact tracing apps.
The app doesn't get killed that quickly because it has location services on in the background. It's the same reason that Google Maps doesn't get killed in the background when it's giving you directions. iOS prompts for permission, but the authorities gave us instructions to grant such permissions.
That being said, it is thee case that if you open sufficient apps (especially memory hungry ones) the app will be killed regardless.
I've resigned to manually bringing the app to the foreground every now and then in an attempt to reduce the number of phone calls I get from the government to a minimum (currently 1-2 per day).
The actions of India in Kashmir have certainly been strongly condemned as well. What happens there is terrible.
Perhaps the Kashmir situation got less media attention than Hong Kong, but I think that's more of a result of more developed regions getting more global news attention in general. It's the same reason that the Uyghur situation doesn't get as much media attention as Hong Kong either.
Comparing HK to California seems intellectual dishonest. The history is not comparable at all. The very existence of the notion 'One Country Two Systems' should tell you that the Hong Kong situation is quite special.
As for 'desecrating the Chinese flag'. You can also see that as a hint that people are really angry. I don't understand at all how oppression is a sensible answer to that.
It strikes me that in at least some of these examples, the subject may know the best decision, but they might not know that they know it.
For example, you might have prior experience that your gut is more reliable than your conscious thinking.
Or in the example of Main Street and Spruce Street, the subject might have taken the new experience that the Spruce Street route was faster than expected to wonder whether they _really_ know that Main Street is usually the better route.
Anyway. If you liked this article, you may be interested in looking up experimental philosophy or epistemology.
I think it might be mostly that you're not in an English speaking country. Based on accent, a lot of spam calls appear to originate from developing countries.
That would explain maybe a 100x difference on it's own. But that's already way over, if I aggregate data from close family about how many spam calls they got.
Have you noticed that in Singapore all the nurses are Filipino though? I don't think they earn much and I reckon that has to help with getting costs down...
I also disagree that healthcare is uniformly cheap here. GP visits are not particularly cheap. You get to spend very little time with the GP and typically are sold a bunch of drugs you don't need (in Europe there's separation of clinics and pharmacies, which introduces some checks & balances).
To give another example, in Europe I used to go for a glaucoma test every year (due to family history) and pay about 20-30 euros. However, in Singapore, doctors look at you funny when you request to be tested for this as preventative health care is not really thing here. I did get tested twice for Glaucoma in Singapore (at the National Eye Center) and ended up with a bill of 250 SGD (~ 175 EUR) each time. The second time around, the doctor afterwards admitted that the bulk of the tests I had been given hadn't really been warranted. (Oh, and I couldn't exactly go in the same day by the way. There was a waiting list, though I don't recall how many days/weeks I had to book in advance.)
Finally, getting cancer has been known to bankrupt people in Singapore.
> Have you noticed that in Singapore all the nurses are Filipino though?
Nope? I’ve been in hospital 4 times in the past 8 years. And a 5th time if I include when my daughter was born.
The Nurses in the wards were not filipino. But one of the Nurses in A&E were.
> I also disagree that healthcare is uniformly cheap here. GP visits are not particularly cheap. You get to spend very little time with the GP and typically are sold a bunch of drugs you don't need
I can’t compare to Europe. But I can say that seeing a GP and getting drugs is FAR cheaper in Singapore than Australia... by ALOT. The entire cost of a consultation + drugs is cheaper than the consultation fee in Australia.
Not only that having to then go to a pharmacy to pick up drugs is the worst.
Doctors here also don’t just give drugs you don’t need. They do give drugs more often and that’s due to the mentality of Asia where If they see a doctor they often want drugs to fix a non existent problem. But I’ve had Doctors in Singapore ask more questions than in Australia and give me only what I need or want to give me nothing.
> To give another example, in Europe I used to go for a glaucoma test every year (due to family history) and pay about 20-30 euros.
Specialists aren’t cheap compared to Europe or somewhere like Taiwan, but compared to America it’s peanuts.
> getting cancer has been known to bankrupt people in Singapore.
I don’t believe this for a second, because for Citizens, healthcare is subsidised. And company with more than 50 employees has to have health care insurance. Basically it would only bankrupt you if you were a foreigner at a small company and didn’t buy insurance for yourself. Which again is still cheaper than NZ/Aus.
Though I when last changed countries I did find that I lost some purchases. I would guess it can happen when an item is not available in the new country.
There’s a rate limit on how often you change countries and you’ll need a payment method from the country you want to change to (e.g. a credit card issued in that country, the address on the card doesn’t matter).
You’ll also need to cancel e.g. your Apple TV+ subscription before you can switch.