3, 2, 1 till someone jumps on this to complain about container tabs or the CEO’s pay or whatever.

Article paints a pretty balanced picture. I have been to all these places, and there’s no easy conclusion. Yes, Laos has effectively become a Chinese vassal in the same way that it was once a French vassal. But that railway alone is an absolute wonder of engineering that will serve the country’s needs for generations, and realistically there was no other way it was going to get built.

Easy. Preferences > Contrast control > Manage colors and set the background color to black or whatever.

You will never be whiteflashed again. Some websites will be ugly, a few will be unusable (you’ll have to unset it temporarily for them, or use a different profile). But many will be just as good as with Dark Reader.

In any case, this is literally the only way to banish whiteflash definitively. It also has no speed penalty because it’s native.

Whatever this is, it’s not even slightly new, I’ve been using separate FF profiles for many years. And TFA literally says “Chrome was first”. No it wasn’t!

Well, we will agree to disagree on the directionality aspect of all this. But that was otherwise an unexpectedly civil exchange, with data cited and no inane downvoting or insults. So others can make up their own minds. Good day to you.

I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.

Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.

Okay for the recent figures, but much of the rest is just projections, as I mentioned.

As for the coal GW figures, they are dwarfed by the equivalents for solar, as you surely know. More than 250 GW for the same recent semester, it would seem.

And despite some improvements of air quality, Chinese cities are among the most polluted worldwide.

This is just not true any more, at least for the southern megacities where electrification of transport is in full swing. The AQI comparison with India in particular is now like night and day. Are you as concerned about India’s lack of progress as you seem to be about China’s imperfect progress?

On this latter front I personally have no need for statistics. I have recently breathed the air myself in central Shenzhen and Shanghai. Forget India, the better comparison these days is with Switzerland.

Whatever China’s failings in politics and civil liberties (or lack thereof), I see no reason to deny the obvious truth here: in terms of both the energy transition and liveable cities - i.e. freed from the internal combustion engine - China is now leading the way globally. In comparison we in the West are hypocrites and failures.

is still increasing its coal consumption

AFAIK this is not correct. Permissions for plants continue to be granted but the new plants themselves are not being built. If only because coal is now becoming substantially more expensive than solar, which China is rolling out on almost unfathomable scale.

It’s easy to carp about all the downsides to this revolution, but the uncomfortable fact is that the rest of us signed up to do all this ourselves too, because ultimately it’s the only way to address the climate crisis.

As for air pollution, again, however bad it might still be, it was much much worse only a few years ago. Southern Chinese cities are now almost unrecognizably cleaner than they were. Yes there are ongoing issues, particularly in the north as you say, but I think we should be able to give credit where credit is due.

Despite being a Canadian citizen, Kwok told Nikkei in Tokyo in late October that he has moved to the U.S. with his family because he feels safer there.

Europe and Canada really do need to wake up about this.

Since when did I claim to be “passionate” about anything? My proposal concerns new users, it’s in the title. I’m not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it’s important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.

You’re an argumentative fellow! I’m still not sure exactly what it is you’re disagreeing with. My proposal is pretty boring and inoffensive. Everything’s in the post. But if you disagree, that’s fine.

Servers are communities.

No they’re not. Communities have “c/” in front of their name. I’m sure you know that already.

You’re just saying I should practice what I preach and get off LW, is that it? Can’t be bothered, but fair enough. My proposal here concerns new users.

Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.

Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).

What youre asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.

Terrifying. I saw it for myself last year in Shanghai and elsewhere (including Xinjiang).

This is what awaits the rest of us if we don’t push back. All governments want to do this, deep down. And China will soon be selling them off-the-peg kits. If we live in democracies, we need to quit the nihilism and cynicism, we need to realize what power we still have and get more involved in politics while there’s still time.

People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.

You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?

That’s exactly what they’re saying - and believing - about you. Meanwhile they have the power. Good luck.

Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.

This - IMO - is the kind of thinking that has got US politics into the state it’s in today.