It makes prison sentences more arbitrary rather than there being a standard fixed in law that is applied universally, somewhat objectively, and not subject to a single person’s unchecked discretion.

As with anything that allows for state power to be exercised more arbitrarily, this legislation is autocratising. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it just means you have to put more trust in the Government to not abuse the power they’ve gained.

I understand the sentiment but the way that they are going about this is just going to blow up in their face and make them look bad.

If they had just quietly changed the sentencing laws to say “A sentence of 25 years imprisonment issued against a defendant convicted of culpable homicide is interpreted to mean a sentence of life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 25 years”, nobody would have batted an eye.

I’m not sure what causes a person to think that starting a war is always the best way to solve problems

Most debt is owned by other Government institutions, the Federal Reserve, and the like. A lot of the US’s public debt exists as ledger entries to mark which departments of the government owe which other departments. This allows extra money earmarked for one department to indirectly be used for other things instead of just being allowed to sit unused.

Imagine trying to share this planet with 1.4 trillion other people 💀

It probably isn’t hard to sneak in drones through Central Asia or the Baltic states into Russia proper. Then just drive them to the city where the target is and then agents inside Russia release the drone and drive back. Four hours later the FSB have the wreckage surrounded but the perpetrators are already halfway to the border. By the time the Russians realise they’ve been played, the people who did it are already celebrating their successful mission in a bar in Riga.

What do you consider “software of consequence”? I worked for a mid-size municipal government. We had hundreds of users (or at least hundreds of Active Directory accounts). Everyone used Lenovo laptops. We had city planners running ArcGIS on them, the engineers at the public works department planned roads and sewage lines on them, HR calculated payroll on them, the council used them for their meetings, the municipal court staff used them for managing filings and tickets, and the police department used them to issue said tickets.

If none of that is “software of consequence”, then what the goddamn fuck is?

Probably rubbish. There is no such thing as digital privacy in China.

That’s a pretty unfortunate viewpoint. At least in the corporate world, Lenovo laptops have a decent reputation for reliability (read: last long enough to where the replacement cycle is economical). Where I last worked IT, the lifespan of a Lenovo laptop was four years. That doesn’t mean that they break after four years, but just that we recycle and replace them with a new computer after that. That seems to be average for a corporate laptop.

Calling them “cheap shit” means you’re either uninformed and unfamiliar or you hold your standards far higher than the average computer buyer.

That’s true but these cars aren’t. There are consumer protections in China. They just tend to be a lot less noticeable.

You are one hundred per cent correct. There’re a million things you can criticise Chinese manufacturing for but universally poor quality isn’t one of them

That view is unfortunately out of date. Many Chinese products are of equal or superior quality to their global counterparts. Think Lenovo laptops and OnePlus smartphones. Chinese stuff can be cheap and high quality.

What a surprise, put a foolish overconfident man with dictatorial ambitions in charge of the state and now he wants to expand the state’s power.

People get blinded by religious extremism. Those that don’t generally just want to live in peace and don’t want to fight wars to maintain a fragile government that wasn’t even that great to begin with.

We all like to think of ourselves as brave souls who would put down our lives for our ideals but at the end of the day most of us will not actually stand up when the time comes to it.