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China

Roboramma said:
There are more direct ways that people in the west collaborate with the CCP (the NBA is a big culprit here, as is Hollywood), but buying Chinese made goods seems to me to be on balance a good thing.
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I'm sure that also depends on the goods. Buying Huawei 5G equipment? Yeah, you're probably helping the CCP. Buying a cheap wrench set at Lowes? Not so much.
 
Ziggurat said:
I'm sure that also depends on the goods. Buying Huawei 5G equipment? Yeah, you're probably helping the CCP. Buying a cheap wrench set at Lowes? Not so much.
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Have you been to Lowe's recently? I think it's entirely plausible that Lowe's is running a psych campaign to drive Americans mad with wrath and thereby reduce our national security. I was there on a Saturday morning and they had nobody staffing the checkouts. Hardware store. On a Saturday morning. That's like a bar sending all its staff home on St Patrick's Day, or a church giving priests Sunday off.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Have you been to Lowe's recently? I think it's entirely plausible that Lowe's is running a psych campaign to drive Americans mad with wrath and thereby reduce our national security. I was there on a Saturday morning and they had nobody staffing the checkouts. Hardware store. On a Saturday morning. That's like a bar sending all its staff home on St Patrick's Day, or a church giving priests Sunday off.
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Last time I went was back in September. Also a weekend, but I forget if it was Saturday or Sunday. Didn't have any problems. Maybe it's just local to where you live.
 
"China has announced it will deactivate a phone app that has tracked people's movements during the pandemic.

"The national app, which has been operational for three years, will go offline at the end of Monday.

"It is the latest policy change that signals Beijing is abandoning its controversial zero-Covid strategy.

"The move is highly symbolic but will not have a huge impact on people's daily lives because of the local apps still in use in cities across China."

China to deactivate national Covid tracking app https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-63941512
 
The shift over here over the last few days has been palpable. We're all going from worrying about getting locked down and doing covid tests every 48 hours to preparing to get covid at some point over the next couple of months.
The government has suddenly ramped up vaccination efforts, and they are organizing it by apartment building. Mine did it the day before yesterday, but only for people over 60. Walking the streets in Shanghai over the last few months you'd see people lined up to get covid tests, yesterday we were out and the lines were of people getting vaccinated.

Interesting times.
 
Roboramma said:
The shift over here over the last few days has been palpable. We're all going from worrying about getting locked down and doing covid tests every 48 hours to preparing to get covid at some point over the next couple of months.
The government has suddenly ramped up vaccination efforts, and they are organizing it by apartment building. Mine did it the day before yesterday, but only for people over 60. Walking the streets in Shanghai over the last few months you'd see people lined up to get covid tests, yesterday we were out and the lines were of people getting vaccinated.

Interesting times.
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Thanks for the update.
 
The Mandate of Heaven for the current regime should have been withdrawn a long time ago.
 
If it's stupid and it works... But does it work? I'd imagine US installations are already pretty good at hiding the good stuff from overhead view. Especially when they know an enemy reconnaissance platform will be flying over. What's China going to see, that isn't already on Wikipedia and Google maps?

Maybe it's a SIGINT platform? Hoping to capture US military radio signatures of some kind? That they can't get from asking an expat to do some war driving?

And how is the data getting back home? Long range radio transmission? That the US isn't bothering to jam?

Maybe this balloon was meant to spy on the Russians. They're probably disorganized and ill equipped enough for this kind of unsubtle approach to actually yield results.
 
Well, tensions between the US and China have ballooned up over the past couple of days.
 
theprestige said:
If it's stupid and it works... But does it work?
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Almost certainly not.

It's just another part of the game they're playing with making empty threats about passage through the SC Sea and incursions into Taiwanese air space.

They're not about to fly through US air space in a plane. This probably cost them $200 for helium and a couple of panels to look like cameras.
 
The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
 
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