Imnebuddy

joined 3 years ago
[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The Great Firewall serves as a protectionist policy to encourage Chinese citizens to use China's own platforms to help build China's technological sovereignty while also filtering out a lot of reactionary crap. The Chinese people use VPNs to access YouTube and such all the time. I recommend watching Ben Norton's video on his experience living in China as he does talk about the Great Firewall and its purpose.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/

What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?

One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.

Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.

Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

https://archive.ph/aghlG

In 2024, home ownership in China is 93%, where in the US it is 65%.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/

How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness?

In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas”. The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns.

Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases.

Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.

Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc.

This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I was able to get some Linksys E8450 routers for cheap (~$40 each) on eBay a couple years ago, but they are more expensive atm (but $70 each, which is cheaper than a lot of other options). They require a bit of work to get OpenWRT installed, but it's not bad once the work is done (I have received nearly 400 Mb/s when I am close to the wireless connection sometimes, which is what my internet is capped at). I have used them as a mesh with one as a main gateway and the rest as access points with additional Ethernet ports. They do have the OKD issue fixed now, too, and they're also Wi-Fi 6. I'm looking into getting a Banana Pi BPI-R3 or R4, though I am not sure how well they are with mesh specifically, but have seen a few forum threads of people having some issues with mesh on these specific routers. I hope to switch to fast roaming (wired backhaul) eventually.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

"I have never really understood exactly what a 'liberal' is, since I have heard 'liberals' express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they're coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal.

As far as I'm concerned, 'liberal' is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are 'liberal'. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you're talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges."

---Assata: An Autobiography

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

$0/month for unlimited domains and catch-all aliases (only email forwarding)

$3/month for unlimited domains and aliases for a "single user"

$9/month for teams:

https://forwardemail.net

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Have you tried one of these providers? https://providers.xmpp.net/

I didn't have an issue with registration on macaw.me or monocles.de, but I haven't used those accounts yet.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I will be honest, I haven't came around to using XMPP myself yet, but I am pretty sure you are able to do all of those things, at least with the help of extensions. Here's the XMPP standards that are currently stable or experimental:

Files/Images:

Emojis/Stickers:

Looking at clients, I see various ones that have at least some of the features you are looking for (especially file and image sharing, I haven't found a client that has explicitly implemented the stickers specification yet, but Movim seems to have them):

I would give it some more time. It seems those features are in development, but this is essentially an alternative to Matrix that is more standardized. It's a widely adopted and integrated protocol, so I don't doubt the features you are looking for will become more fleshed out some day.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

That's like saying you can use email if you like living in the 70s-80s. XMPP is a pretty healthy and active project that is standardized like email and ActivityPub. I would consider XMPP pretty modern, especially considering its features, extensions, etc., as well as the numerous applications it is integrated in.

XMPP is also used in very popular games, consoles, and clients.

[–] Imnebuddy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

XMPP it is, then.

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