People who find an edge and actually make a lot of money aren’t really gamblers though, they’re hackers. The bets they’re placing are guaranteed to pay out as long as their edge is maintained. They often retire after the edge is discovered and fixed.
The Chinese absolutely bear responsibility for how they've governed the last 30 years, just as the British bear responsibility for how they governed the prior 150.
The fact that British HK liberalized a little at the very last second before handover is better than nothing, and the National Security Law is definitely bad, but right now the scoreboard is 7/150 years of free speech under the UK, compared to 23/28 years of free speech under PRC. It'll take another 100 years for the PRC to have a worse record than the UK.
I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to ignore the trend direction.
The Netherlands has a longer history of monarchy under their current government (present monarchy founded 1813) than North Korea (current government established 1948). Does that mean you’d rather live in North Korea than the Netherlands?
The plain and obvious fact remains that Hong Kongers would have more political liberties today if the UK retained control of the territory, regardless of the complete colonial insanity of the original arrangement.
Can you name one present existing British overseas territory that has less of a right to criticize the government than Hong Kong? There are still a bunch of them to choose from from.
Wasn't meaning to ignore the trend, the PRC bears full responsibility for their actions. Just saying that complaints from the British in particular are a little rich.
Also they appear to be arresting more people for speech in total and per-capita than HK:
That is not even remote comparable. There is a huge difference between arrest and conviction, and whether people are given a proper hearing or not, between legal process and things like disappearances, and between laws that punish criticism of the authorities and hate speech laws.
I do not like the UK's hate speech laws at all, but the fact is that I can criticise them, from the UK, without fear, and I can criticise the government. Could I do that in China? Of course not.
I'm not disagreeing too hard with you, we probably feel similarly about both cases. I just don't like how western media takes a "we're the good guys and they're a dystopia" approach to reporting it.
They've charged like 250 people in 5 years under this law[1], I don't like any one of those cases, I'm also against it, but it gets characterized like nobody ever catches a bullshit charge in the West.
Its a pretty big detriment to American thinking that they take cold-war era characterizations of the Russian economy and then apply them to 2025 China.
The current Chinese worries are about having too much competition rather than too little, Google "involution" to read about it.
FWIW, the ritual of codifying your experimentation like this does still serve a dubious purpose -- it gives your boss a way to talk about it with their boss. This doesn't solve the problem faster, it slows things down in fact, but we live in a society and your boss needs a way to talk about your work.
I'm fine with providing status updates and a rough idea of next steps. Less so fully breaking down projects into small items, or building a year(s)-long roadmap based on a quarterly release schedule with committed items etc...
They’re not random, they’re called “flags of convenience” since the ship is subject to the laws of the country where it is registered, including labor laws and safety standards. Panama and Liberia are common flags for merchant ships because they make it cheap to register, exempt the ship from some taxes, and hire foreign labor.
The rules for ships are a bit different for rules for cars.
There's a number of countries (some of them land-locked) that sell flags of convenience, but in that particular case, it's possible that didn't happen.
Some public evidence: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/google-lays-off-c...
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