And you are correct. But it doesn’t matter to my original point. For any reason, people trust the Government. Because of this trust, policies like the one discussed in the original post don’t alarm the average Chinese netizen.

Although an interesting side note is that while some people think that saying anything bad at all about the Government will get you arrested in China, that’s not really true. You are free to talk all the smack you want about the Government, in private. It’s when you try to start some kind of political movement or organise something in public that now you will be labelled a threat to public order and state security.

I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.

You are half right and half wrong.

The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.

Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.

At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.

I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.

In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.

In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.

I would not be surprised if Meta advertised such a thing to prospective employees as a legitimate benefit of the job. A built-in VR goon cave with 30 TB of material available. Limit 1 hour per person, bookings required 6 months in advance. Sessions subject to monitoring for security and training purposes. May contain trace amounts of Zuck.

The symbol in question:

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

That’s the dual state for you. The normative state applies to all actions by Trump and his goons, everyone else is subject to the prerogative state. This case is just the normative state being used to protect the prerogative state.

I hear that people usually use a fake coin for unlocking the trolleys. But because they only have one fake coin people don’t want to lose it so the trolley is always returned.

In Oregon, all eligible bottles can be returned at any retailer. Large retailers are required by law to accept up to 144 bottles from anyone. The deposit is $0.10 here, so the amount earned by returning a large number of bottles is pretty significant.

The Supreme Court ruled that district courts can only grant relief to the parties of the case. So the district court is powerless to protect those who don’t file a case before it, with one exception, which is a class action. That’s why the DC public defender wants to change the case to a class action, because that is the only way they can get the board to stop enforcing against everyone.

More specifically, the Supreme Court ruled that the court can’t enjoin an agency from enforcing the rule in question, except against the actual named parties to the case.

So if John Doe and Jane Roe sue an agency and want an injunction, the court can only order the agency to not bother those two people. It cannot order the agency stop doing the thing altogether to all people, even in one area only. That requires a class action.

The Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. CASA that district courts don’t have the power to issue nationwide injunctions to enjoin government agencies from enforcing policies nationwide. Instead, they say that a case needs class action status in order for a court to issue nationwide relief.

In the US, some states have a similar scheme. But usually there are dedicated bottle return centres which have a machine that dispenses cash when you scan the receipt printed by the bottle counting machine. And at supermarkets, if you scan the receipt from the bottle counting machine at a self-checkout, it will count as an item with negative price so it will dispense “change” if you finish with a negative total.

People who build their own computers, AKA the group most likely to complain about this

They should make a Windows version called Windows 10P which is the same as Windows 10 but only the bare-bones necessities and no extra crap or required online services, and sell it for $59.99 (seeing that Windows is already de facto freeware). That’s probably an order of magnitude than what they make from intrusive advertising anyway to a single user over the lifespan of a computer.

Damn, even school shooters get to work from home now.

Nay, once every week for the past four years, I go to McDonald’s and order a hamburger for $3, but they ask me for $3.27, so I only put down $3 on the counter and then loudly proclaim I refuse to pay the sales tax on it. Then I walk out of the restaurant to force them to accept my money.

(I have not eaten a hamburger in four years)

Today I learned that if I buy some Bitcoin, this will prevent the Government from taking money from my wallet and bank account to give to these people