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China revises white paper on Taiwan , clawing back potential terms for reunification. Another Congressional delegation visits Taiwan, triggering a predictable response. As a long time observer, all I can say is the hawks won - the US/China and China/Taiwan relationships are now locked in a mutually...

Unconfirmed photo from a PLAN ship that some have geolocated to within 12nm of Taiwan's shore. If it was indeed in territorial waters, Taiwan's Ministry of Defense is staying mum about it. They should ally more closely with the west while there is time, or go to china, with the lessons of Ukraine w...

Chinese MFA announces cancelation/suspension of several China-US initiatives, notably including direct lines of military consultations. Drone and ballistic missile overflights of Taiwanese territory. South Korean president wants no part of this, declines meeting with Pelosi. ASEAN calls for restrai...

China announces live military exercises in territorial waters of Taiwan. And yes, this is legitimate grounds for Taiwan to defend their claimed borders with armed force, although I doubt it'll come to that. This is a move designed to put the ball back in Taiwan's court - "Oh, you want to act l...

Thanks for being an example of a mindset where "misinformation" is simply a sticker to be stuck on the wrong things. Your approach relies on a bevy of assumptions - that government can reliably determine what is true; that government is interested in propagating truth and opposing falsehoo...

This is a painfully naive way of looking at only one thin slice of what makes up misinformation. Google very much relies on human feedback to determine how to rank pages - in fact, it was one of their innovations that made them the dominant search engine. I remember Yahoo. There's a reason Google be...

So, anyone here with a non-western take and/or point of view? Was it exaggerated all out of proportion by westerners to make China look bad? Or maybe it worse than what was reported? Was it a massacre, or were they truly dangerous revolutionaries that had to be stopped at all costs? The CCP point o...

AMD's new Zen 2 Ryzen lineup has been announced and it looks like it'll take back the crown from Intel. I'm also still running a 2500K and plan to upgrade to one of these options. Even if you don't go for it, a new product line usually means price decreases for the existing offerings. The new Radeon...

Given the repeated scandals with violations of privacy (pulling text messages off your phone) and security (storing passwords in plaintext), how many of you trust Facebook to define and apply a policy of acceptable conduct?

Talks at Hanoi broken off early by Trump. DPRK offered to dismantle nuclear complex at Yongbyon under U.S. observation in exchange for partial UN sanctions relief. U.S. wants more (secret sites, delivery vehicles, inventory), walks out and skips the scheduled afternoon session. Trump expresses openn...

So the people actually fighting and who just obtained a legislative wall in order to block them, and this is your take? I really don't buy into the 'any time the dems say something that isn't fighty, undercut them,' angle of rhetoric. I'm sorry, who are we talking about here? If Pelosi gets credit ...

Pelosi's post-midterm speech really exemplifies the spinelessness of Democrats. Against a backdrop of voter suppression, court packing, domestic terrorism, blatant corruption, white supremacy, obstruction of justice, etc what does she do? Blathers on about "marketplace of ideas", bipartisa...

Technology doesn't favour tyranny. It doesn't favour anything. To borrow from Marshall McLuhan, technology essentially functions as an extension of the self. Stop putting technological marvels in the hands of unaccountable tyrannical figures, and the issue goes away. The issue is societal and cultu...

No worries, I appreciate you taking a crack at it :) You have a grid G = {1,...,N}x{1,...,N} and you want to define a random bijective function f: G\to {1,...,N^2}. *Squints at Wikipedia* Yes, I'm looking for a bijective function. (You can probably tell I don't have any actual background in pure mat...

I'm doing a hobby project and curious if there was an easy solution obvious to anybody with a deeper math background... Say that I have a square grid with a side length of N, where N is a power of 2. I am going to fill this grid of N 2 cells with N 2 consecutive integers; one integer per cell. Withi...

Noah has lived here long enough though that he should be familiar with how Americans view race. I don't know if he has any experience in Europe. Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, this is an example of him missing the mark due to different cultural contexts. His crack worked (more or less) in Ameri...

Children as young as 14 said the guards there stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads. “Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 year...

I'm not sure what this obsession over legitimacy is either, Kim's lack of it among the international community hasn't stopped him from ruling the last 7 years. People can cry about it all they want, but the fact is that power demands consideration. You can either manage your relations... or not. It'...

Reunification isn't just propaganda. Before North Korea is Communist, it is nationalist. This is something often overlooked. Remember that most Vietnamese view the Vietnam War not as Communism vs Democracy, but as a war of national liberation. Believe it or not, but even North Koreans are human and ...

Some actual, verifiable steps towards better relations are included in the declaration, like liason offices, family reunions, cessation of hostile acts, etc. Watch out for claims of DPRK agreeing to "denuclearize" in media reports though - that is contingent on the U.S dropping a hostile s...

Yeah, the guy in the car is clearly paying attention only intermittently. Paid tester on a self-driving car only in a developmental stage and people are already slipping. Still, I don't know if a human who was paying attention would've been able to react in time. Uber's self-driving car performance ...

Supposedly a case of the pedestrian stepping out before the car could react, not something like the car glitching out or going berserk at a crossing. I'd be interested in the rate of fatal accidents per mile for the self-driving cars compared to human drivers - Google's are supposed to be fantastic...

I think one thing worth remembering that Wizards derive their sense of identity from their magical powers - I would assert that Wizarding society as a whole maintains a carefully studied ignorance of the Muggle world as a part of that identity. Modernity still manages to diffuse in as new Muggle-bor...

Moon of Alabama is... a heterodox analysis news blog. Not so much alt-right as contrarian with a bit of conspiracy. It tends to attract the unhinged and is prone to lurid exaggeration. That said, most of the stuff is sourced from reputable outlets and isn't so unreliable that everything can be dismi...

My working, conservative assumption is the DPRK has an ICBM that can deliver 250kt to Washington DC. They haven't demonstrated their ability to launch that far , but for the life of me, if you can hit Chicago, I can't imagine them not going the extra step to add a little more range to hit the capita...