boapnuaput

* There are millions of people imprisoned in China. Could be as few as 1.5mil, but likelier around 3.5mil, [2] including likely over 1mil in "re-education" concentration camps in the Western region of Xinjiang. [1] By comparison, while the USA's legendarily held the highest per-capita incarceration rate for decades, presumably this is because we are more honest than China about our rates. (Not to mention Russia.) Also, consider this map of incarceration per state in the USA. [3] Thanks, Louisiana.

* The Internet is neither Free nor neutral in China. [4] You can expect not just to be spied upon, but also to have lots of non-Chinese literature removed from your view, and also to face social consequences from your Internet browsing choices. You would already be known as outspoken for your posts, which would not be hidden or pseudonymous, and which would travel through both automated and manually-reviewed filters before being published. Rumor has it that both Russia and China are researching ways to construct their own Internet-like sub-networks and infrastructure so that they can disconnect entirely from the rest of the world.

* A family-and-caste system, hukou [5], is used to systematically deny freedom of movement to the vast majority of Chinese citizens. While the system has experienced reforms since Deng, in the time of Mao, hukou was an oppressive tool, and to this day, one must apply for a permit to move to large cities in Eastern China like Beijing. Worse, if I understand correctly, the hukou permits can be zoned within a metropolitan area, so that one is only permitted to move to certain parts of Beijing. As a reminder, for contrast, the USA has a strong history of legally supporting the right to freedom of movement since 1823 [6], even if we have often failed to ensure those rights. [7]

* The USA has freedom of religion written into the Constitution, in the First Amendment. China does not have freedom of religion. [8] Party members must be atheists. Christians must belong to state-run churches. [11] Tibetan Buddhism is state-managed; lamas must fill out permits for reincarnation [9] and the Panchen Lama has been kidnapped and replaced with a state-chosen impostor. [10] Falun Gong has been systematically persecuted. [12]

* Tibet. [13] Additionally, Hong Kong. [15]

* In more recent fields of human rights: Homosexuality and non-binary sexuality are only recently permitted, within the past few decades, and associated rights like marriage/civil unions are still forthcoming.

* Meta: The Communist Party of China wants to appear to have a unified will. To this end, they tend to allow whatever the Central Committee wants, to promote their ability and right to do whatever they like to the people of China, to dismiss individual human rights as deleterious to the Party and its state, and to concentrate power arbitrarily. Compare and contrast with the USA.

In the time when the Constitution was framed, and in many times since, there is the meme of "checks and balances". [0] The overall idea is that no one branch of the Federal powers may be unilaterally or universally unabridged in its ability to act; other branches have powers which may check, veto, review, or otherwise neutralize certain actions.

So, why is the President sometimes called "chief"? Because, as Article Two also states, they are the "Commander in Chief" of the armed forces. When it comes to military decisions, yes, there is no office above the President's; however, note that the President's military powers are neither unilateral nor unlimited. Crucially, the President isn't able to declare war or allocate funds for military use without Congress' approval.

Hope this was informative. The USA's Constitution is a fascinating document worth reading, even for those not from the USA.

The Constitution outlines specific responsibilities of the President in Article Two. [1] Those responsibilities:

* Command the armed forces

* Have a Cabinet (have the heads of subbranches as direct reports)

* Conduct foreign diplomacy

* Give State-of-the-Union addresses

* Not be bad at carrying out the will of the law; "faithfully execute" whatever the law tells them to do

* Get impeached if Congress says so

There are some things that the President is enabled to do at a whim, but they are not as broad as you'd think:

* Issue pardons

* Appoint judges, diplomats, etc. with Congress's approval

* Call special sessions of Congress

I agree that, in order to be aware of the full nature of the law, the President needs to be surrounded with legal professionals who can advise them on how to not violate the law. But, in Article Two, it's clearly spelled out that the President should have a Cabinet in order to delegate day-to-day responsibilities further.

Finally, as a reminder, the President wasn't supposed to be chosen by the people, but by the Electoral College. [2] The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.

Can the V toolchain translate C++ to V? It could in February [0] and May [1]. You had only to document it [2]; will the feature be available at the end of the week?

There are three problems. The first is that closed languages die [0]. V is not Free Software, which is disappointing but not atypical; however, V is not even open source, which precludes a healthy community. Additionally, closed languages tend to have bad patterns like code dumps over the wall, poor community communication, untrustworthy binary behaviors [1], and delayed product/feature releases. Yes, it's certainly embarrassing to have years of history on display for everybody to see, but we all apparently have gotten over it. What's hiding in V's codebase? We don't know. As a best guess, I think that the author may be ashamed of the particular nature of their bootstrap.

The second is that V's author makes promises and claims which are then retracted, falsified, or untestable. Most notably, source for V's toolchain has been teased repeatedly as coming soon, but has never been released. Without an open toolchain, none of the claims made on V's front page [2] can be verified.

Finally, because we can't not talk about it, V isn't a very compelling language. At best, it could be seen as an iterative improvement on Go. If V were more open, then we could make more sincere and complete comparisions, but as it is, V's author alone gets to control the comparisons [3] and benchmarks [4]. Maybe the best argument to be made is that there is room for a series of languages which focus on compile speed, where languages like Go, Jai, and V compete based primarily on how quickly they can transform zero-cost abstractions into low-level code in a single pass.

...But if that's the game, then it's only a matter of time until one of them rediscovers FORTH...

No country has ever had truest freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that freedom of speech is bad; it could just as well mean that no country has ever been out of the hands of aristocrats for long enough to forge a freedom of speech which trumps their desire to be immune from the lower classes. But you're critiquing a position which has not yet existed and implying that the world will collapse if that position is realized, again without evidence.

The phrase "turn everyone into mindless drones" is telltale; it shows that you currently believe that people are not mindless drones. To the contrary, though, it's even easier to imagine that people have been gaining more freedoms through the centuries, and that people are turning into more mindful creatures, with less droning behavior. Even if progressivism is wrong, certainly the communication technologies that we have invented have given the everyday person a power of speech that empowers them beyond what their ancestors had.

Speaking of power, the cheesy line I'll choose today is that power and responsibility are formally dual in any category of social relations; if X has power over Y to do Z, then Y has responsibilities to do Z for X. And yes, freedom of speech is an insistence that this power not be abridged from everyday citizens. That's not a bad thing at all; beyond the progressive metanarrative, the slow and steady task of decentralizing and dividing power amongst people is important.

To summarize, you are suffering from tropes three through five from the list of censorship tropes. [0]