No, she also had cancer

The beauty of humanity versus the ugliness of the sterility of wealth

If you're only making a few requests, yes, but it's very easy to detect something like an indexing crawler.

Damn dude don't scab

Also observatories tend to publish their data blobs for free, so if you have some textbooks to learn wtf is happening and how to apply it you can grab the data and do some amateur astrophysics

No, you look at huge tables of data and do differential equations all day trying to figure out how anything relates to anything

Rampancy if instead of becoming hyper intelligent beyond moral constraints you instead got dementia

God, imagine wearing a fancy ass cap like that while reclining in your multi-million dollar vehicle absolutely blowing through the countryside. Love trains

Put a tan filter on it and play some notes on an oud and you'd get most of the way there

No, it counts if it's more than half a term following ascension.

This risk does not arise principally from political causes, even though I have been criticizing the Chinese Communist Party in op-eds, interviews and books over the past two decades.

But wait, evil CCP??? Social credit score?? Was all of that meaningless? You mean posting against the CCP won't get you arrested??

China has taken on a reputation like Russia’s: that of a hostile land with a legal system subject to the whims of political leaders.

Most US state has a set of laws designed to persecute specific groups of people, and DAs have broad powers to prosecute or let people off based on their wealth or whiteness.

Under Chinese law, closing the company entailed paying more than a year’s salary each to a couple of people. They are honest and hard-working people who deserve to be paid, and we are doing that, but incrementally. Meanwhile, I could be prohibited from leaving the country until that debt is settled.

In bad country, you are liable for your debts to others

Visiting foreigners feel they are playing Russian roulette with their freedom the minute they step over the border.

Most are concerned about political missteps: Have they written something that could be construed as anti-China?

But you've been writing opeds openly against China for 20 years and you're fine to go back except for those pesky debts?

Australian mystery writer Yang Hengjun was detained when he flew to Guangzhou in 2019, then jailed for three years and given a suspended death sentence, apparently because of pro-democracy blogging (although he was accused of being a spy).

Sounds like he was arrested for being a spy, not for apparently blogging, because like you pointed out, you've been writing against China for 20 years and you're not worried.

Most commonly, foreigners are detained over a commercial dispute or debt. If a foreign company owes money to a Chinese company or individual, even a few thousand dollars, Chinese law often allows the purported creditor to seize anyone tangentially attached to the company and hold them in a guesthouse or hotel, with guards to prevent departure, until that debt is cleared. This is infuriating.

I've never amassed a debt of "even a few" thousands of dollars to a foreign company or individual, seems like a skill issue. Maybe don't try capital flight? Also, seems a lot less bad than going to jail for stealing money, which is what you've described yourself doing by not settling your debts.

Sometimes, people with only the most tenuous relationship to the company involved in a dispute are simply refused exit from China — a so-called exit ban. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported on an American who had been kept in China for more than six years following a dispute between his company’s head office and its Shanghai subsidiary.

You don't mention that he was an executive, not someone tenuously related to it.

Exit bans may be imposed on executives of large banks or asset-management companies based on a debt owed by a client firm.

Oh no! Consequences for the wealthy!

A particularly problematic aspect of exit bans is that the subject often does not know the ban exists. The U.S. State Department says: “In most cases, U.S. citizens only become aware of an exit ban when they attempt to depart the [People’s Republic of China], and there is no reliable mechanism or legal process to find out how long the ban might continue or to contest it in a court of law.”

How public is the no-fly list again? How do you remove your name from it? Are you put on it for financial crime or for being brown with a suspicious name?

Many Chinese companies resent what my company does: deep research into listed businesses that commit fraud. Corruption operates much more blatantly at the local than the national level, and it can be easy for a big company in a small city or town to buy the complicity of police and courts.

Quick google reveals that our author is the cofounder of J Capital Research, which is an activist research firm which provides investment advice, mostly around which firms should be shorted. Of course they'd be resentful, but don't pretend that buying the courts is unique to China, where judges can be elected at the local level and even the supreme court is wholly owned by special interests. Blatant corruption? Look homewards.

It feels as though a family matter ought to be sheltered from the political winds chilling China’s relationship with the West

This isn't a political matter, you stole money from your employees and owe them a debt.

the Chinese government has long viewed entering or leaving the country as a privilege that only it can bestow

That's what sovereignty is and every country has that "privilege". What kind of bullshit framing is this?

Truly one of the most smooth brained statements ever composed

The PRC's strategy with regards to the island of Taiwan is to politely wait until unification gains enough steam on the island and then peacefully reintegrate. They probably learned this strategy by watching the USA coup and invade nations across the world, only for US regime governments to collapse against local guerillas repeatedly, and deciding to do the opposite of that.

The entire USSR in the liberal mind as it's always pictured in all Western media: one continuous tract of depressing brutalist apartment blocks in the middle of a snowstorm, and also Siberia and bears, and barbed wire everywhere.

Biden is still the president

Nah, there's nothing intentional about the macroscopic cannibalism of capital. It's just what it does when it runs out of people to exploit elsewhere

Being so desperate for validation you spend all day begging the plagiarism machine to produce something that'll make you feel anything at all, and the best you get that

Development is a nebulous term. African societies weren't building oceanic armadas or smelting steel but they were making huge advances in mathematics and physics. Some African societies were larger and wealthier than contemporary European ones. But the western yardstick is to measure the development of a society by how many bombs and iPhones it produces per second. Same goes for pre-columbus American civilizations. South American societies were engaged in full-scale hydrological engineering and advanced animal husbandry and selective agriculture exceeding European development. North American societies were governing massive tracts of land and creating self-sustaining food forest ecosystems.

Every single US president is at best complicit and at worst directly responsible for various mass deaths, wars, and genocides. You cannot name a US president who didn't commit unforgivable crimes during their term except for maybe Harrison because he died immediately.

She's opposed it before