Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107.

I'm not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it's 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn't do. My point was they're similar and middling in the ranking.

Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.

This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn't that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it's decreasing. The fact that it's steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they're facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You'll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the "free market") in part because the issue doesn't address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn't magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.

Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.

The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn't publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren't doing what they said they would. You're confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There's a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it's because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn't have so much support for the party.

(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it's ranking; inverting the sort order doesn't make the countries less similar, and since they're middling, inverting the sort order means they're still middling. I didn't make a claim that one was better than the other).

They're lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn't control what ads the network uses, but they've literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

I've set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).

Me too. The exact same app. I rarely open the play store with other app stores existing but good lord this is bad.

BRICS is never going to happen with its member countries basically in opposition of one another.

Can you lay out precisely how its member countries are in opposition of one another?

Why do you say that? The website is a little ugly in parts (the colored text bulleted list near the bottom) but it doesn't look "sketch" at all.

And if you can get past some poorly designed home page for a project, they publish the source with supposedly 101 contributors.

Gotta keep in mind this is a ban on ‘state devices and networks.’

Yea in this case I think it's entirely reasonable. I don't think any (Ad)Tech software should be allowed on state devices or networks. It's a security concern whether it's a company in the USA or a foreign company gathering every ounce of data it can hoover up.

You're right. In one, the country has plenty of wealth and resources and just chooses to let its people starve rather than helping them.

People aren’t going hungry in capitalist countries.

Are you kidding? People go hungry constantly in capitalist countries, it's just perhaps people you are told not to care about.

• Homeless people routinely go hungry.
• Disabled people routinely go hungry.
• Low-income people routinely go hungry.
• With the sociopathic demonization of free lunch programs for kids in schools, children routinely go hungry.

Food bank usage has soared, which doesn't solve the problem, but simply temporarily alleviates it for those who have access to food banks. Many places don't have food banks accessible, and if you don't have transportation, getting to the nearest is not always feasible.

I have first-hand experience of going hungry, being in a capitalist country. To pretend it doesn't happen is to be blind and ignorant.

Jesus christ. What useless reporting, every time. Are they paid by the word? These have the same template-looking structure and both have their word count highly inflated with zero added value.

better cameras, larger displays, better battery life

Gotcha, that's exactly what I was asking. I can see how that could matter to some.

I'm not sure if you're constructing a strawman or if you think you're replying to someone else.

I didn't say whether or not it's abusive.

All I said was that your logic of "if their user count doesn't go down it's not abuse" is bullshit. I went on to bring up the "boiling the frog scenario" to further explain how users can become accustomed to abuse.

We’re giving them our older model stuff from the 90s. Compare that to the mothballed museum pieces Russia is rolling out.

Think about this for a moment. The USA is using its older stuff first.

You look at what Russia is using and you think it's old or not as advanced. Why aren't you making the logical conclusion (which is backed by evidence if you look) that Russia is doing the exact same thing as the USA?

Why is the USA's use of old weaponry simply that--use of old weaponry--but Russia's use of old weaponry is...something else? Corruption? Incompetence? Whatever other excuse you want to come up with?

It's safe to assume that Russia knows that the USA and other countries are going to send older reserves of weapons first. So it's not unreasonable for Russia to not use more than is necessary and bring in their newest and best weaponry.