It's concerning that in order to use the internet in the USA and Western Europe, people will be forced to identify themselves. This badge helps internet users to identify sites that don't believe in fascism
California community colleges are some of the best in the USA for taking college classes at a fraction of the cost for in state residents. Even if you aren't in state, establishing residency can be straightforward even for undocumented folks. Just a thought
All "governments" are authoritarian. The USA was founded by authoritarian white slaveowners. So yes, Gen Z and TikTok users will definitely baffle all those who accept US imperialism above all else.
Let's be honest: "Democracy" in the USA is and always has been a game for the rich, especially since the 1908s when Reagan and Thatcher decided that China should be the top dog in the world order.
People just want to live happily. Simple as that. TikTok gives a lot of people a feeling, a snippet, of a little bit of freedom and connection with others. All US media makes people fearful - FOX "news" is literally just fearmongering for boomers and their children who can't afford homes of their own. CNN and MSNBC is just fear mongering against boomers who watch FOX "news". Facebook/Meta/IG/WhatsApp is an extension of these fears into the virtual world and TikTok offers something better.
Jokes on the USA though. RedNOTE is gonna close the cultural divide between America and China and Americans will realize just how far the boomer generation and those who have been elected to uphold boomer beliefs really left younger/current generations behind.
China has won technologically and now begins the cultural victory.
I can foresee, sadly, that there will be an unnecessary loss of lives in the short term however for both the USA and BRICS nations. Hopefully I wind up being wrong.
Lots of hyperbole and feelings but not much evidence.
TikTok is not some bastion of freedom, they did win with critical mass and a vastly superior algorithm. All media makes people fearful, you speak so highly of China but have you consumed mainland Chinese media before? It is like Fox on steroids, packed full with stories that paint China as the victor and America as a dangerous and silly country.
Calling a victory in technology is laughable, mainland manufacturing is incredible, one of the best in the world. Products in China have caught up and in some spaces exceeded western brands. China is still missing out on innovation in high-tech, thats why they have been caught so frequently trying to steal corporate secrets.
RedNOTE is not going to prove anything to americans except the disdain the Chinese have for Americans joining their social network and the level of censorship that exists in a mainland app.
It is like you are a propaganda machine and ironic enough it reads just like a mainland Chinese news article. If there was a conflict everyone would lose out. I am surprised anyone would foreshadow it. China unlike Russia seems to still think through the lens of economic interests, I suspect nobody in the current regime would want any type of conflict. While they may have a military its entirely untested both equipment and men.
I’ve wondered for a long time now why no game studios have developed any open world map game or exploring games - indie or big name studios -given that street view has existed for ten out or fifteen plus years now
Microsoft Flight Simulator lets you fly a plane anywhere in the world based on satellite images and 3D models of various cities.
I’d imagine that any other game studio would have trouble finding enough money to license the rights to satellite images or street view images from which they might build a world.
What will happen to the heaps of digital junk stored on flash drives, hard drives, forgotten online accounts? I get overwhelmed thinking about organizing my own electronics files… wonder what my kids will do with it all.
“Oh. This one is encrypted too. I wonder what mum and dad kept on those… Ah well.”
I mean, with digital stuff all the things that may be worthwhile to pass on can be passed on easily way in advance because you don't have to get rid of anything to do so. Online accounts and such will just be forgotten excepting the ones they need to access to finish your affairs (like banking).
The good part about digital content is that you don't have to do absolutely anything with it.
Keep documents and photos accessible, forget the rest.
As we approach multi-generational widespread digital content "cloud" services, we'll see more and more companies allowing content to be easily passed over to the next generation — but just for reference.
I don't need my father’s iCloud photos, but it'd be nice to take a scroll in 20 years.
The cloud services of big tech cos can be counted on to store things cheaply or for free long term, for now. I do not trust them to hold onto anything or preserve access to it for 50 or 100 years. IMHO, people should be their own digital archivists for the really important stuff on those timescales, to avoid the risk of important data being discarded or held hostage by profit motivated companies at some point down the line we can't see coming yet. "The cloud" is young in terms of human life, and the rules we live by are volatile on that scale, shifting with transfers of power and depletion (or discovery) of important resources.
You won't need grandma's YouTube either, but one of these days the videos from your ancestors' early lives will still be there in the hundreds of hours of high quality full colour. The idea that old people's lives were small black and white portraits once or twice per decade and that the past is a long way away, will totally collapse in the next 25-100 years. I keep wondering if that's going to be a big change to society or not.
I try to remind myself to print albums on a regular basis as I am pretty sure my daughters will be as happy as I am to go through old photos albums as the digital stuff will probably be hard to manage.
I've gone through things like digital photo collections with mine and sent whatever they wanted (mostly pictures from their childhoods etc). They seem to prefer storing it all in their phones (w. cloud backup), but I have it all available through a NAS if they ever want it. I suspect that when the missus and I are gone, the physical digital stuff like drives and computers will simply be sent to recycling.
There's also the part of "by the way, if you want any of the crappy UST we bought into using your money, make sure you claim it before the fork on May 27th or before the end of June! Peace out!"
