kspacewalk2 (u/kspacewalk2)

kspacewalk2 commented on Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail bbc.com/news/articles/c8d... · Posted by u/tartoran

palmotea · 3 days ago

> I mean, not to descend too deeply into the stereotype of nerds and comic books, but you'd probably be a lot more distraught and critical of Professor X making terrible, self-interested and decidedly unfriendly choices than you would be about Magneto doing Magneto things.

I mean, that's a rationalization for feelings, but I don't explains the responses. Isn't Canada pursing closer relations with China because Trump, for instance? That's like deciding to ally with Magneto because Professor X fell short of your expectations.

kspacewalk2 · 2 days ago

Feelings have nothing to do with it (anymore?). Just a different logic for a different world.

Canada is doing the normal things countries do in a multipolar world in which none of the big players (other than maybe the EU if they become a big player) will be a truly reliable ally from which no danger to its sovereignty emanates.

Due to geographical and logistics constraints, China is in many ways far less dangerous to Canada than the US, if the likelihood of the US going full fash and invading us is anything above 0. It's a good move to offset your complete dependence on the big and somewhat friendly player next door, who can swallow you up whole if it decides to do so, by engaging more closely (than before) with a big and somewhat unfriendly player far far away, who can do little damage to you in case your relationship sours. Realpolitik the big boys call it, I think.

kspacewalk2 commented on Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail bbc.com/news/articles/c8d... · Posted by u/tartoran

derelicta · 3 days ago

Show one example of Chinese imperialism. Or soviet imperialism. Or Vietnamese imperialism. Or Cuban imperialism.

kspacewalk2 · 2 days ago

>Chinese imperialism.

Tibet, Xinjiang, invading Vietnam.

>Or soviet imperialism

You're joking, right? The quintessential imperialist power of the Cold War. Post-WW2 subjugation of eastern Europe. Occupation of the Baltic states. The failed colonialist war against Finland. Suppression of attempts to leave its imperialist orbit in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, to a lesser extent Poland under Gomulka. The disaster in Afghanistan was started b1y the Soviet colonialist war there, of course.

>Or Vietnamese imperialism

Laos was a client state for a while, and their involvement in Cambodia crossed the line into imperialism at various points in the 70s.

>Or Cuban imperialism.

This one has a long and storied history. Cuban mercenaries were used to bolster far-left authoritarians and Soviet-aligned strongmen all over Latam and in Africa too. Even to this day they gladly send mercs to fight Russia's fascist war of aggression in Ukraine.

kspacewalk2 commented on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun europeanbusinessmagazine.... · Posted by u/NewCzech

ehhthing · 2 days ago

This would still rely on Visa/MasterCard allowing dual-branded credit cards for overseas transactions, which isn't a very common arrangement. The only market that has this is in Asia where there are UnionPay + Visa/MasterCard dual branded cards and I suspect that the reason they allow this is because the market is huge, especially compared to Canada.

Also Interac does not do online transactions outside of some very specific merchants that take Apple/Google Pay transactions. This is how Interac reduces fraud risk, which is why interchange rates for Interac are so low.

kspacewalk2 · 2 days ago

You can do this in multiple steps. Start with a credit card usable only with Canadian merchants, which will cover a great majority of transactions of a great majority of Canadians. I'll have an MC for travel and the ordering from non-Canadian merchants, and this Canadian credit card for the other 95% of my expenses. If a significant percentage of Canadians have such a card, major non-Canadian services will add it as a payment option (e.g. ChatGPT or Claude). Then you branch out by either joining or co-branding with the EU credit card company if such a company succeeds.

A world with a patchwork of payments processing options will look different for travel and business, in some ways worse, but such is life in a "multipolar world" which the Americans elected their leadership to conjure up.

kspacewalk2 commented on Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail bbc.com/news/articles/c8d... · Posted by u/tartoran

palmotea · 3 days ago

> In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.

Or, to put it another way: they're really anti-Americans.

It's interesting to see the exaggerated responses to Trump. Objectively, he's less authoritarian than say the PRC, but he's unlocked a lot of probably pre-existing resentment in US allies (probably derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...), and gotten a much stronger and more vicious response.

I mean, if you're mad about what happened to that 5 year old immigrant with the hat in Minneapolis, what you you think about what's happening to kids in Xinjiang and Tibet (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/world/asia/ti...)?

> Gyal Lo, a Tibetan education researcher, became alarmed by the boarding schools in 2016, when he saw that his two preschool-aged grandnieces, who were attending one in his hometown in northwestern China, preferred to speak Mandarin, not Tibetan.

> When the grandnieces, then ages 4 and 5, went home on the weekend, he said in an interview, they appeared withdrawn and spoke awkwardly in Tibetan with their parents, much changed from when he saw them in the previous year. Now they behaved “like strangers in their own home,” he said.

> “I said to my brother, ‘What if you don’t send them to the boarding school?’” Gyal Lo said. “He said he had no choice.”

> Gyal Lo set out to investigate the changes that families were going through as the schools expanded across Tibetan regions in China. Over the next three years he visited dozens of such schools, and saw that many Tibetan students spoke little of their mother tongue and were sometimes only able to see their parents once every several weeks or even months.

It's much worse and more systematic.

kspacewalk2 · 3 days ago

I mean, not to descend too deeply into the stereotype of nerds and comic books, but you'd probably be a lot more distraught and critical of Professor X making terrible, self-interested and decidedly unfriendly choices than you would be about Magneto doing Magneto things.

Annexing Greenland, even if it did happen, is objectively not nearly as terrible as the genocide of Uygurs or murdering tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. You just don't expect it from America, that's all. But no worries, give us time, the rest of us are re-calibrating our expectations and next time we won't be nearly so comically shocked.

kspacewalk2 commented on Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail bbc.com/news/articles/c8d... · Posted by u/tartoran

skinnymuch · 3 days ago

I’m sure the western chauvinists all over Hacker News and Reddit are actually correct. NATO, US, EU going into East Slavic civilization are the innocent ones. “what's a little colonialism between friends” who has ever said that? Why not stick to what is actually said, that it’s an aggressive war by NATO?

kspacewalk2 · 3 days ago

I'm from Ukraine and I'm very curious about this "East Slavic civilization" you mention. What is it? Are my cousins who are fighting to defend their homes, relatives and neighbours from Russian fascists part of this civilization, or only the scumbags trying to re-colonize them?

kspacewalk2 commented on Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail bbc.com/news/articles/c8d... · Posted by u/tartoran

mothballed · 3 days ago

He made some supportive comments of Trump and has advocated for anti-socialist policies, which dumps him in the enemy bucket of anti-fascists.

kspacewalk2 · 3 days ago

In my experience, a very significant proportion of self-reported "anti-fascists" and "anti-imperialists" turn out, upon closer scrutiny, to actually be anti-US-fascism and anti-US-imperialism. They ignore, downplay, deny and ridicule all allegations of fascism and imperialism when perpetrated by others, like China or Russia.

In a somewhat related vein, there are entirely too many "anti-colonialists" in what is now fashionably called The Global South who, when push comes to shove, reveal themselves to be actually kind of okay with colonialism as long as it's not perpetrated against them. When a colonialist war of aggression is perpetrated against these white folks called "Ukrainians", and perpetrated by Russia, a country they really rather like, then what's a little colonialism between friends? Heck, Russia shows up with a colonialist militia to prop up dictators and mine for diamonds and gold all over the Sahel and it's like, heck yeah, thank for your kicking out the French. Really interesting logic.

kspacewalk2 commented on TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues cnn.com/2026/01/26/tech/t... · Posted by u/kotaKat

jfengel · 16 days ago

What kind of cyber warfare? Just knowing what kidz today are into? Or is it an actual malware? Is it targeting certain people?

I'm sure it leaks privacy like crazy, just like any other social app. I'm just still unclear on just how useful it would be, and whether that really merited intervention at the very highest levels.

kspacewalk2 · 15 days ago

Something along the lines of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywxENdhYoXw

kspacewalk2 commented on Show HN: Ocrbase – pdf → .md/.json document OCR and structured extraction API github.com/majcheradam/oc... · Posted by u/adammajcher

jadbox · 23 days ago

Sounds like someone needs to run their own test cases and report back on which solution does a better job...

kspacewalk2 · 23 days ago

Let me fire up Claude code.

kspacewalk2 commented on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025) jpmorgan.com/insights/glo... · Posted by u/andsoitis

Espressosaurus · 23 days ago

Yes, though I expect there to be a European block, the US, and a Chinese block. Russia there as a wildcard. I doubt we see Germany in competition with Britain.

kspacewalk2 · 23 days ago

Russia firmly in that second tier along with better behaved peers that have brighter demographic futures and an actual economy, like India, Indonesia and Brazil.