China will certainly continue to grow in strength. Its biggest challenge is probably an aging population due to the legacy of the one child policy... but then the world's most developed nations have a similar problem, most notably Japan.

They have as the OP says taken hundreds of millions out of poverty, but at the same time instigated ethnic cleansing against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. China's power (and the potential for lucrative trade deals) means that there has been no real international outcry against what amounts to genocide... no protests beyond a bit of symbolic hand-wringing. China's wealth and size is what makes them immune to criticism.

So whilst this may encourage other authoritarian regimes around the world, it's not like smaller nations can act like China with impunity. If a random Central American or Middle Eastern nation started killing its own people, the US army would be in very quickly.

There is also a danger in seeing China as simply a new version of Russia. They're not; and they represent a much greater threat to US hegemony. For an example of this, we need look no further than the Belt and Road project. This has been condemned as neocolonialist, and as debt-trap diplomacy... but still, protests amount to mere words, and are utterly ineffective. 139 countries are now signed up to Belt and Road, accounting for 40 percent of global GDP, and 63 percent of the world’s population.

This will be China's century. There is very little that anyone can do to change this, or to influence Chinese policy.


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But a general rule has to be applied, surely?

If masks prevent symptomatic spread, then it makes sense that everyone who has symptoms should have to wear a mask.

So how to best ensure that everyone with symptoms wears a mask?

A) Make everyone wear masks. Simple. And despite the vociferous objections from certain quarters, there is almost zero inconvenience. It's the obvious answer.

B) Tell people that you should wear a mask if you have symptoms. Result: some people with symptoms wear masks. Other people with symptoms see the request as (and I have no idea why) some sort of outrageous imposition on their human rights, and don't wear a mask, claiming not to have symptoms. Other people with symptoms don't wear a mask because "it's just a cough, it's not Covid", etc.

Option A is clearly preferable. Same reason that motorways have a speed limit. The blanket rule ensures optimum safety. Professional racing drivers would probably still be capable of driving safely at much higher speeds... but this isn't a reason to abandon the speed limit and ask people to drive at whatever speed they find comfortable.

That's a strange thing to say. I thinking you're veering away from the facts somewhat, and letting emotion come into it. You've also taken a screengrab after Hamilton started to brake, presumably to make it look like he was a long way behind... which my previous image - or indeed the footage - shows wasn't the case. Please try to remain impartial.

Verstappen clearly didn't give any room - he cut straight into Hamilton. There was plenty of room to the outside, it's just that Verstappen, with his usual overly aggressive style, refused to give an inch and insisted on taking the racing line, and instigating a collision. Leclerc by contrast was a lot more mature. Or you could view the footage I posted from an earlier corner, where Verstappen cut inside Hamilton from behind, and Hamilton moved over to give him space.

I do like Verstappen, I think he's a great driver. And it's fine for drivers to be aggressive - they need to be, if they're going to win. A lack of aggression is why Bottas, for example, is not quite at the same standard as the very best drivers. But drivers need to have some tactical awareness. Verstappen only has one setting: attack attack attack.

Yes, that does seem to be the general principle.

But in this instance it's a lot more specific, a lot more targeted. There is uproar in India now following further Pegasus revelations. Modi has been accused of treason as - surprise surprise - the phone number of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi is on the surveillance list. Actually two of his phone numbers, along with the numbers of at least five of his close friends...

We can even look at the situation later in Sunday's race, where Hamilton overtook Leclerc to take the lead in the closing laps. It was almost a perfect copy of the position on lap 1, at the same corner, Hamilton coming up on the inside... and Leclerc left room for him by taking a wider line. It's what most drivers would do.

Has everyone been reading about the Pegasus spyware leak? Apparently some of the world's most authoritarian regimes have been using the software to target human rights activists, journalists and lawyers... 50,000 phone numbers in total. What do people think? Other than, sadly, it being hardly surprising... expect further detail to emerge over the coming days and weeks. Quotes and image are from the link below.

Revealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

It's been more than 5 months of torment. This thread has been going since November.

Nice diagram, but in this context very misleading. Of course I understand the point about who has the racing line... and I understand why Hamilton got the penalty: the application of an 'ideal world' textbook definition to a messy real-world situation. But that example has an attacker sneaking in at the last minute and only their front wing level with the defender's wheel. I don't know if you intentionally snipped my quote after the word 'slightly', but clearly in this instance the situation was different, they'd been racing side by side since the start. It wasn't an attacker diving inside dangerously at the last minute at all. Here's a screengrab of the cars as they enter the corner:

Hamilton is slightly behind. The cars are practically neck-and-neck... and to give it more context, Hamilton had the slipstream all the way down the long straight, he was gaining rapidly... if he'd been a few inches further forward, then he would have had the racing line. It's fine margins, and certainly not an outrageous manouevre by Hamilton.
Verstappen saw him, and cut in, trying to force Hamilton off the track. Verstappen is and always has been a dangerous driver, and this time he put himself in hospital. I'll ask again: if it was Hamilton on the outside with a 33 point championship lead, and Verstappen on the inside, then would there have been a crash? Of course not; Hamilton would have given the position.



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And if that's not enough... we don't even need to treat 'Hamilton on the outside' as a thought experiment, when there is video footage available. Not trying to start an argument, but there are some really short memories here! Literally 20 seconds before the crash, what happened? Well, have a look at the image below. Verstappen behind, going up the inside of Hamilton at a corner. And what happens? Hamilton, in the lead, gives him space and lets him have the position.


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I understand why Hamilton got the penalty. Rule books can't cover every eventuality and circumstance; it's always a best-fit approach. But it was Max who was the reckless idiot who caused the crash. You should never try to force someone off the track like that, particularly at a high speed corner. Hopefully Max will learn a lesson and start driving more sensibly... but of course he never learns.

Well, I suppose we can agree on this part. Stalin and Mao are two of the worst mass-murderers in human history.
But I'd argue that communism or general 'leftism' isn't the cause. I think it's simply that communism doesn't have the inbuilt defences of capitalist democracies, and so often (always?) descends quite rapidly into brutal authoritarianism.

It's authoritarianism that's the problem here, a lack of accountability and, as covered recently in another thread, suppression of press freedom. Communism is simply a very effective enabler, and this is one of the main reasons that it's such a terrible system.

Historically, TV channels and newspapers were the primary sources of news... and because their owners were ultra-rich, the news that reached the general public was communicated in such a way to promote the interests of the ultra-rich, using various tried-and-tested strategies.

What we have now with the rise of the web, and particularly with social media, is the democratisation of news, in that in theory anyone can be a source of news, and there is no filtering through a biased gatekeeper. But this has some unfortunate consequences, too. One is a lack of accountability, so that things may be presented as factual even with no supporting evidence (or, often, in complete opposition to available evidence). Another is that nothing that is important remains truly democratic for long... the rich and powerful now use social media to promote their own agendas, as they already do with TV and newspapers. And they can now be more insidious in their approach.

The basic issue I think can be distilled into two points:
1) The rich and powerful will always try to influence what is available to the public, and try to present it in such a way as to direct public opinion, and
2) Any mechanism of communication that starts off free and democratic will, if it becomes sufficiently important, fall under the control of the rich and powerful.

You say you won't argue against historical precedent, but you are arguing about historical presidents. You are going back to the days of Reagan and GHW Bush. But it's okay; you can come out now. You'll be pleased to discover that there is no Soviet Union. There are no 'commies'. You can relax.

Hamilton wasn't totally level going into the corner, he was slightly behind, but... Verstappen knew he was there, and just drove into him to try to force Hamilton off the track. Hamilton attacked on the outside, was cut off, so then tried the inside instead. That's fair enough, they'd been at it every corner on that opening lap.

It is probably a racing incident, but for me if anyone is to blame, then it is Verstappen. And I say that because... ask yourself what would have happened if the situation (cars and total championship points) were reversed, Hamilton on the outside, Verstappen cutting inside and slightly behind. Would Hamilton have driven straight into him, or would he have reluctantly ceded the position?

The difference is Hamilton in that situation, on the outside, and with a 33 point championship lead, would have let Verstappen through and taken the 18 points for second. But with Verstappen there is no nuance, it's all-or-nothing, so he decided to ram Hamilton rather than settle for second. It's why he's exciting, but it's also why he has a reputation as a dangerous driver. And the result is he lost 25 points in the championship race, rather than the 7 he could have lost if he'd kept his eye on the bigger picture rather than being lost in the moment.

There is a difference between the universe as perceived by our human senses and understood by our human brains, and the universe as it actually is. If we go down to a subatomic level, for example, an electron, which is certainly a thing that exists, does not have any size... but neither does it have a definite location. The universe of solid objects resolves into a cloud of probabilities and uncertainty, perturbations of fields. We've known since Einstein that time and space are relative concepts... but recent progress on quantum gravity makes a lot more sense if we consider an indefinite causal order... and there's even the possibility that quantum causal loops might reconcile QM to general relativity. Cause and effect should not be seen as a given beyond the macroscopic scale.

Ultimately we don't know what space and time are, but we do know that they are nothing like what they seem, intuitively, to our senses.

This would be shocking... if it were actually a shock, rather than being utterly predictable.

My favourite quote from that link...


Based on levels of hearsay. So speculative as to be fantastical. Being generous, perhaps they thought they saw evidence of a huge sprawling conspiracy, but what they actually saw was simply a giant squid.

It's a thread started by BADecker.

It's a two-part issue. Whilst renewables are getting cheaper, non-renewables will also become increasingly expensive as easy-to-reach reserves become ever more depleted.
Green, renewable energy certainly should be the future from an environmental, climate-change angle... but I think it will be the future not because it is better morally, but because as costs drop and the costs of non-renewables rise, it will be cheaper. Money tends to be the driver of decision-making.

A few posters have mentioned nuclear fusion, and this is of course the end goal. While the joke is that this is always a couple of decades away, there have been some major advances recently and some quite innovative new designs, notably from CFS (a spin-off from MIT)... they hope their new compact design can demonstrate net gain by 2025. There is at least the possibility of a commercial reactor within the near(ish) future. I remain optimistic.

Yeah. A new era of regulations does tend to produce one dramatic winner... and then when racing starts and it becomes apparent that one team is miles ahead, the others then start the long process over several seasons of modifying their cars to match the winning design.

Mercedes have been dominant in the current era, and in the first year they were so far ahead it was ridiculous, no-one else could get close... but in recent years other teams have been fairly close, Ferrari arguably had the quicker car for a while, and currently as the era winds to a close Red Bull definitely have taken the lead (although this is probably due in large part to how this year's tweak affected low rake / high rake designs to different extents).

Just hope 2022 doesn't see one team emerge vastly superior to the others...

Well, I'd agree that it looks like one of us is.

No, I certainly don't want that. I don't like Marxism or communism. However, in case you've forgotten, you are saying:

Why would anyone think that racial justice is Marxist? The only reason I can think of is that they don't understand what Marxism means, and are lazily using it as a synonym for 'bad'. Instead of, you know, trying to build a reasoned argument.

Yeah. He did the absolute best he could, but didn't have the fastest car so there was nothing he could do really to stop Hamilton overtaking.
I really hope the rule changes for next year have the desired effect and allow closer racing and more equal racing. Time will tell, but although today's race was exciting, it would be so much better if all the cars were evenly matched.

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I can't see that this makes any sense at all, so I'm unable to respond.

But attempting to conflate 1) non-discrimination due to skin colour / ethnicity with 2) state ownership of the means of production... is just desperate.