The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. Extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them.
Cultural diplomacy should be positive, so that it doesn’t cast a pall on everything else that the originating culture does.
Cultural diplomacy is typically not a bad thing. Here’s a nice example: Thailand sponsors Thai restaurants abroad, with pretty golden elephant decor and pictures of the King. As a result, everyone thinks Thai food is great and feels positively towards Thailand. So, it is possible for a government to “propagandize” foreign civilians in a positive way, one that doesn’t harm relations between the cultures.
Chinese cultural diplomacy has turned negative: employing violent control of Chinese-language media to attack individuals overseas. This makes Chinese media a local problem for other countries, a source of disharmony, thus promoting the view that (e.g.) Chinese internet services like WeChat and TikTok are vectors of malicious attack, rather than cultural connection.
And so, a lot of people in the Internet security business now expect that anything from China is an attack vector. And regional & national governments are starting to agree — e.g. banning TikTok from government-owned computers. Relations between the cultures are harmed because of the visibly violent control of China government over Chinese cultural media, and the harm done to other countries through these media.
Well said. There’s a lot of nuance and I think this is a good summary.
As China, Russia, Iran, and various other strict authoritarian governments challenge the status quo of increasing democracy and peace, it’s important to look at the alternative they’re promoting.
“I never said I was duped by Trump,” Chansely told the BBC. “I never denounced Q or the QAnon community… and I am not schizophrenic, bipolar, depressed or delusional.”
This comes up all the time for student loans. The answer is pretty straightforward: if people could discharge student loans, nobody would ever lend money for student loans.
If you had some money and a 17 year old with no income and no credit history wanted to borrow 300k from you… Would you let them? Of course nobody would. The inability to discharge the debt was basically a way for the government to help improve the risk equation for banks lending that much money in such a risky way.
The real answer for this stuff is to instead focus on fixing the college funding model - probably through some voucher system or by making state schools free for undergrad. Once that’s done, you can worry about lessening existing debt burdens for people who need the help.
I don’t see that going well for those headscarf police. The populace isn’t putting up with it anymore. Those police are going to be beaten up pretty badly at least.
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