GreyEyedGhost

Let me preface this with I know nothing about beer making and had never heard the word keezer before today. Could it be an extension for the handle, so you could have a different orientation than the standard?

This ignores that, until we had an effective treatment program and mass vaccinations, it had a mortality rate of about 20 times that of the flu. After effective treatment plans, vaccines, antivirals, etc. it was brought more in line with the flu. 0.5% mortality means that you need to know 200 people who got sick to know someone who died. This also ignores all the people we saw online who would deny their family members died of COVID. Having had friends working in hospitals, COVID deaths were happening. And let's be honest, how many people have you personally run into who died of the flu, yet that happens every year. We just shrug and move on. They were old, it was their time. And if it was your child, it was devastating, but could you even relate if your friend's infant had died of the flu?

People historically are really bad at statistical analysis, so tiny risks over huge occurrences are dismissed, and most people will get away with it so we feel like the bad outcomes didn't happen at all. But they do, and they did, and now a lot more people died than had to because people couldn't stay home when they were sick, or wear a mask in public, or not cough in other people's faces because it's just a flu. And I honestly can't show any respect to people who think their life is so much more important than anyone else's that they can't show a little respect and just try to not risk a stranger's health because it might be a little uncomfortable.

So I'm supposed to just buy your anti-intellectualism rhetoric? Why should I trust your dumb ass over an expert in the field?

Hey, look, it's ~~Typhoid Mary~~ COVID Larry, who wants all the privileges of society yet none of the responsibilities. If you don't want to uphold the social contract, I'm okay with it. Get out.

While I don't think this is beneath Trump, I was also pretty interested if he'd endorsed or otherwise claimed or approved of it, mainly because he's committed enough misdeeds that we don't need to add false claims to disparage him. Let him fall because of his own actions, lies aren't necessary.

Meanwhile, any question I ask that has a simple answer is ignored. Why was it commonly believed that China was a civilian dictatorship in 1988, more than a few years after Mao and Dengs time? Why is the one-party state of China not considered a dictatorship when one-party states are?

This entire conversation has been moving goalposts, and every time I defined the goalposts clearly enough to not be moved, you simply ran in another direction. I may not have gotten a university degree, but you've still done an amazingly poor job of defending your thesis.

I will give you points on the checks and balances applied after Mao reducing the risks of harm from the dictatorship of China, but the definition of a dictatorship doesn't rely on the benevolence of the leadership, merely the lack of power of the people to change it, which was not negated by dividing the powers of government between different levels.

My first link has the following quote:

Dictatorships are authoritarian or totalitarian,[1] and they can be classified as military dictatorships, one-party dictatorships, personalist dictatorships, or absolute monarchies. (emphasis mine)

China has been a one-party state for the last 75 years, so the only question is whether or not it was also a dictatorship.

My second link has an infographic labeling China as a civilian dictatorship in 1988, which is prior to Xi putting himself in absolute authority, so how does it have nothing to do with the era prior to Xi taking absolute authority?

As for the handy little link you provided, that only talks about Xi, and we're agreed that he is a dictator running a dictatorship, so, while it's interesting, I'm not sure of the relevance unless your proposal is the the only thing that qualifies as a dictatorship is if it's run by a single individual. In which case, it seems there are a number of people in your purported field who disagree with that stance.

Do you mean like the summary in Wikipedia? Or how about the Democracy-Dictatorship Index? It seems a lot of people in political circles have been calling China a civilian dictatorship for at least 36 years, just based on the cute little pictures.

Feel free to read a definition that's more than one sentence long if you want an explanation for something as nuanced as political systems.

You're right, words do have meaning. Just because there is a transition from one dictator to another without bloodshed or death doesn't mean it isn't a dictatorship. Just because the dictator of the week is chosen by a committee doesn't mean it isn't a dictatorship. One-party systems are commonly accepted to be dictatorships because of the lack of ability by the people to choose their leader, rather it is chosen by the party (usually the party elites).

In this case, China is coming into its own as a regional hegemon, assuming their relatively new status as an outright dictatorship doesn't fuck that up.

China has been an outright dictatorship for a while now, it's just the lifetime leader that was recent.

The first company with reusable, commercial rocket stages, who will likely have the most space launches of any organization ever, has already done more launches than any other organization per year, and has brought the cost to orbit down by at least one order of magnitude, and you claim hype? I get the hate for Elon, but I think your feelings might be blinding you to easily verifiable facts. Just like the fact that in order to get anything passed, the US space program has to engage in some of the most inefficient manufacturing practices imaginable, which leads to the inflated costs I referred to in my previous comment. Again, easily verifiable facts. After all, whose shoulder did NASA tap on to resolve the problem of some stranded astronauts?

We lose thousands of tons of mass every year in the form of gases and gain a lesser amount in material from asteroids over the same period. The mass gain appears to have been quite dramatic, back when the earth was formed. Chaos would have reigned for a significant period after that, then we would likely have had a constantly diminishing amount of asteroid impacts. When exactly the earth went from a net annual gain of mass to a net loss is hard to say, but if you were to ask if the mass of the earth-moon system maintained an annual net zero mass change at any point, the answer would probably be "We don't know for sure."