Comments by "shazmosushi" (@shazmosushi) on "996, An Explainer" video.

  1. 1:10 Working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week is 72 hours, not 60 hours. I saw a saw video recently (search 'advchina sleep' in YouTube) about the work culture including 2 hour daily lunch breaks (which include midday naps). Do those tech companies you mentioned have siestas as part of the 996 culture?
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  2. 1:05 "Maybe it's better that the Great Firewall exists so as to keep the Chinese in rather than the foreigners out" That's an awful argument (which happens to be used by wumao and the CCP). The Great Firewall prevents 1.4 billion people from connecting the the global internet and freely communicating with the rest of the world (and getting news from a source other than their totalitarian government). The GFC is a huge human-rights problem and I hope governments around the world pressure the CCP to tear down the Great Firewall.
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  3. I've done reading about the GFC in the past and it's indeed very sophisticated. They also approve many VPNs that allow punching through the GFC. Hawkish former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has said ""if we were to take down the firewall which is a 100% within our purview to do" on an interview on YouTube titled "The Chinese Communist Party Is Our Enemy - And What We Must Do To Defeat It" so at least some in the national security sphere are considering the problem. To adapt an old comment of mine from that video (sorry for the length): I think broadcasting 4G/5G mobile internet into China from say Vietnam would not work perfectly, neither would using other mobile-internet based technologies like Google's Project Loon high altitude balloons would not work. Because in the worst case China can always achieve censorship "client-side" (using their total control over end-user devices (eg, any Huawei/Motorola/etc smartphone, or any phone with Chinese spyware including WeChat etc) to block access to external websites. Traditional geostationary satellite internet, or new technologies such as Elon Musk's Starlink would also not work (they need ground-based receivers, and China can and will use spectrum analyzers to track down and immediately execute anybody who is transmitting using an illegal ground-based dish. China could also potentially shoot down the satellites) Cyber attacks against the GFC risk escalating cyber retaliation (not just more hacking/stealing from China, but the United States suddenly experiencing a few Chernobyl style nuclear power plant meltdowns). It's a tough problem. I think economic sanctions (including consumer boycotts) is the only way for the West to eventually cause a peaceful revolution in China (by the people of China) which would bring down the GFC. Other than Trump's tariffs nobody is considering anything like this at the moment.
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