Yes, that’s a very illuminating documentary. DW shows just half of it, the entire film has around 90 minutes and was available at www.arte.tv until three or so weeks ago. Maybe Arte TV puts it online again at a later time.

So just name a source.

@trevron, what is a good source of information regarding China?

Maybe the author wanted to show that Betteridge’s law of headlines is right? :-)

I have been thinking the same. Maybe ghost.org’s federation over ActivityPub can solve the problem?

Ich hätte das so erwartet, aber nicht aus eigener Intuition, sondern weil es viele Studien gibt, die das praktisch alle bestätigen. Es gibt sogar zufällig eine aktuelle Meta-Studie dazu:

We pay less when we pay cash

Drawing on both academic and industry sources, our research team combined the results from more than four decades of prior research on spending behaviour and payment methods into a large dataset.

This data spanned 71 research papers, 17 countries, and more than 11,000 participants. State-of-the-art meta-analysis techniques then allowed us to collectively analyse the results from all these prior studies, and re-examine their insights.

We found that cashless payments were indeed associated with higher levels of consumer spending compared to cash transactions, something that is referred to in the literature as the “cashless effect”.

This cashless effect was consistent across all other payment methods in the data set.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter whether you use a credit card, debit card or a buy-now-pay-later service – you are likely to spend more money using cashless methods than when you pay with cash.

@BakerBagel@midwest.social The “American aligned entities” seek alliances because of China’s aggression, and they do so by collaborating not just with America but also with each other, e.g., Japan, the Philipines, Australia, and others. These countries collaborates voluntarily with each other because of China’s imperialistic behaviour in the region, not because China is “boxed in” by any Western “entity”.

Beijing has been disputing a lot of its neighbours’ sovereignty on land and at sea, including India’s and Russia’s, and neither India nor Russia are exactly what I would call “American aligned entities”. As @Buffalox already said, even the single-party communist country Vietnam with a similar authoritarian system seeks stronger ties with the USA rather China.

Taiwan is of massive strategic value because it would allow Chinese vessels to access the Pacific Ocean unimpeded.

China has been accessing the Pacific Ocean unimpeded for decades now, no one questions that. The reasons why China wants control over Taiwan are manifold, one being Taiwan’s prominent role in the global supply chain, another is that it would give China better access to the South China Sea and its estimated reserves of 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 11 billion barrels of oil.

Yeah, as you mention Vietnam: the interesting bit here maybe is that Vietnam -a single-party country with a similar totalitarian approach like China- appears to seek closer ties to the U.S. rather then to Beijing, at least that’s my interpretation of the country/'s political moves over the last year or so.

Yeah, they work in a huge network mainly in Europe. As always, we should never trust blindly, but Epicenter appears to do a solid work. I have been disagreeing with what they said in the last years on some incidents, but all in all they do a good work. At least that’s my opinion.

Epicenter Works is a digital rights organizations based in Austria.