> Though I admit his heart attack probably wasn't a coincidence, sadly.

He died aged 83...

I didn't know that. A poor assumption I made that his amohetamine use shortened his life significantly.

Most drugs aren't as unhealthy as the government wants you to believe.

Please can we have the other story?

It was a figure of speech, I'd recommend you to follow the news about Turkey.

and the Kent State shootings were in 1970.

Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.

Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.

Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.

Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.

Clearly I’ve hit a nerve if you’re stooping to whataboutism. Perhaps you should reflect on why that is.

I'm pretty sure they don't harden compute in space anymore, that's one thing SpaceX pioneered with their cost-cutting approach early on.

Railways are another example of competition not being possible and where privatisation makes no sense.

Competition is possible, it just is rarely worth it. NYC subways worked fairly well as a competitive system until the city started passing maximum price laws (which in turn meant they couldn't maintain the system and eventually the city took it over). However the competition meant redundant service to the dense areas as each built there, at the expense of less dense areas that should have got service. It also meant that where lines did cross each other (a complex task even in 3d) they generally didn't built transfers even though a single system would have.

The claim competition is not possible is therefor false. We can debate if we want it, but it is incorrect to claim it cannot work.

Competition in rail does exist in the UK and privatization turned around the network's fortunes. The ridership graph is very clear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Traffic dropped a lot in the Great Depression but stabilized immediately after, and remained stable right up until nationalization in 1948 at which point the network entered a period of continuous decline, eventually falling to a level of ridership last seen in 1865. That is a staggering failure.

The moment the railways were privatized ridership starts going up again, despite the privatization not being complete and being unable to roll back the huge damage done under the decades of state ownership (before nationalization the railway companies were entirely self sufficient, which they no longer are).

So to argue that privatization makes "no sense" you have to ignore the fact that when privately managed usage of the railways goes up and when run by the state it goes down. If the goal of the railway is to be used, then it does make sense.

I use Apple Reminders

Words in English are built from characters we can pronounce individually and this extends to words so whilst you might not get it perfect you can at least guess the sound of an English word. This isn't the case for characters in Mandarin or Japanese, no sound is encoded in the strokes, the equivalent of a character.

Actually English spelling is pretty complicated and completely different from pronunciation. Why on Earth you Englishmen write "a" (as in skate) but pronounce it as "ei". And why you have so many versions for each vowel and why you have 3 letters for "k" sound and 2 letters (i, y) for the same sound.

I found it useful at least.