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Elon Musk Offered Chinese Green Card (politico.com)
hackingbear writes: During Elon Musk's trip to China for the ground-breaking of Tesla's first overseas factory, which will allow it to sell vehicles directly in the world's largest market for electric vehicles, he was offered a Chinese green card when he met with Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday in Beijing, where they discussed Tesla's China ambitions. "I love China and want to come here more often," Musk was quoted as saying in the report. "If you do, we can issue you a Chinese green card," the premier replied. Getting a Chinese "green card" has been described as "one of the most difficult tasks in the world." By 2017, only about 10,000 foreigners had been granted permanent residency since the program was introduced in 2004, out of an estimated 1 million foreigners living in China; recipients include Dutch scientist Bernard Feringa, who won the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Communists tend to "lock up" people with good intentions and high ideals - idealists, human rights campaigners, writers, intellectuals. Musk on the other hand is "billions of Dollars unencumbered by democratic ideals and human rights constraints just walked in the door" for China. Musk is exactly what they want - a wealthy industrialist who'll ignore China's horrific human rights abuses and manufacture and sell there anyway. Maybe they offered him the "Dragon Card" because he, for enough dough and benefits, offered to give China some of his SpaceX tech as well? The world is a complicated and often "upside-down" place. "Heroes of Innovation" are sometimes not "true heroes" in real life. A hero is someone who does NOT do anything he or she CAN do for big money. "Resisting temptation" and all that? =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Yes, because the US drives tanks over its protestors. And the US locks up political dissidents. Don't be fucking stupid.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This is a false dichotomy.
Running people down in a tank is hardly the only way to perform rights violations against people. Neither is it the most egregious. In most cases a rights violation is usually depending on several factors. Example... missile striking a building to kill a terrorist while also killing innocents is going to be a rights violation to many people. But missile striking a building to destroy and enemy leader while war is declared that collaterally damages innocents will usually not be considered a rights violation. You can tell that there is already spin in those statements because of the verbiage used to describe them though from a purely "technical" perspective both actions killed innocent people just to kill one specific individual.
Getting back to the primary point, it is difficult to quantify "how rights abusive" a nation actually is. There are many ways to "low-key" violate rights to such a degree that they are common place, well accepted, but just endured. When rights violations of this level occur, people start to forget that they exist. And often times due to their prevalence the suffering low-key rights violations cause could actually be worse that just randomly running down one person in a tank in a show of force.
If you resurrected much of America's passed military heroes today, they would likely equate the USA to be the same as many nations they fought to protect America against in the past.
And besides... we don't need a tank, a police officer can just shoot you and likely not get into "meaningful" trouble.
The real problem here is that you are arbitrarily equating a tank running over a person as being worse because you perceive that "authority" is thumbing its nose at human rights. Well, an officer not being treated exactly like they treat regular citizens for killing a person is pretty much the same thing. I can think of many ways to thumb my nose at human rights and get you to think I respect them, in fact politicians spend a lot of time doing just this very thing and getting people to vote for them.
Let me provide you with a working example.
Take two police chiefs. They have comparable crimes rates, incarceration rates, arrest rates, recidivism rates, kill rates of people shot by officers, response rates to crimes, with policies and operations procedures exactly same right down to the placement of punctuation.
If #1 says it is unfortunate we cannot do a better job of stopping crime... you will likely like them.
If #2 says he does not care if officers mow criminals down in the streets... you will likely hate them... even though their policies and procedures are the same and produce the same results in the end.
The point is that you allow the imagery and rhetoric to shape your judgement far more than you should allow it to shape your judgement. A cop shooting an unarmed person in their home because they had the wrong information is essentially the same rights violation as a tank running a person down carrying groceries. Both are sanctioned by the state and following state orders and disrespected life for no reasonable cause. If the results of your actions get the innocent killed "in these kinds of ways" then you are committing rights violations because these events require that an unreasonable amount of disregard for human life be present in the situation for them to occur in the first place, even if the situations are entirely different in setting, excuses, and arbitrarily applied laws!
Personal experience:
Chinese green card is a thing about which people have very mixed feelings. Application chances are totally random, privileges are a mixed blessing. Chinese state does not give a consistent message about what people should to expect from it.
In other words, it is a very hard to get, yet near meaningless document in comparison to 5 and 10 year work visas, aside you becoming fully subject to the glorious Chinese legal and tax system...
I knew one brilliant expat entrepreneur, undoubtedly a woman of exceptional achievement.
She lived in China since she was 14. She got her PhD in nanotechnology at 26, and by 27 she had an own chemical business that she made with money she won from "1000 talent plan" â" a national level scientific grant.
She owned a number of patents, and spoke 5 languages freely (including 2 Chinese dialects,) and she was a stunning tall beauty on top of that...
I would've said that is somebody was an ideal applicant, it would be her. She went to apply for that green card, and got a refusal notice _the next day_ with reason stated along the lines "we considered your high achievements, but you are too young and lack class..."
The attitudes of Chinese elites towards things like talent, merit, entitlement and personal achievement had not changed much in past decades. China was and is an extremely elitist and snobby country.
This attitude is pretty much telling "talented youngsters have no value besides being patronees,
and pages to the elite"