They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.

Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.

As a Westerner, I value my freedom, so I will happy pay way over the [Chinese-imposed] odds to build a 3D printer of my own than suck on the teat of the CCP and buy a subsidised 3D printer that attacks our freedoms.

I would encourage other right-thinking people who value freedom, democracy and rule-of-law to do the same: build your own or -- at the very least -- support Western 3D printer vendors like Prusa who share our values and contribute back to the community.

Or just China just deserve special treatment?

As bad as the AI hype wave is now, I can't help but wonder if it could have been even worse.

And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.

Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.

Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.

In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.

* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc

* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.

* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.

The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?

If people think that if they get ID card, the government is coming to take their precious bodily fluids, then the country has bigger cultural, political problems than a mere public safety measure.

Amazingly, they've always had ID cards and the world hasn't ended. These countries are in some ways freer and more democratic than the UK.

'Civil libertarianism' has become a self-licking ice cream cone, and their advocacy is not only shrill and counterproductive, but also enables common criminals and bad geopolitical actors, engaging in aggressive hybrid war against free countries.

One of the few ways we are going to be able to fight off the Russian and Chinese hybrid war aggression that is assailing the West online is to hold online commenters accountable by binding their online identities to real-world strong IDs.

The libertarians may not like it, but this is the direction the world is going. Strong ID is a common sense, tried-and-true approach to protecting ourselves against criminals and foreign aggressors. And we'll eventually get digital strong ID, unless the boot-leather connoisseurs amongst us win this argument.

The clincher was when a colleague I worked with in a previous job joined Meta, and went from a fun and interesting person, to creepy and weird. As if he has joined a cult. Then a family member did the same -- the effect was subtle... their political opinions turned distinctly sinister -- like they'd downloaded the inherently un-egalitarian, anti-Western and anti-progress ideology of the founder into their own heads.

I've seen the same cult-like effect of Amazon on people. Literally 'selling' the idea of Jeff Bezos, and flogging his book like their company were some kind of dark techno Amway.

The FAANGs are NOT nice people, and I want nothing to do with them.

AppleScript was never good, but the tooling has been left to rot and other language bindings steadily deprecated. And it seems it has not improved in Tahoe. I know the product manager of scripting for macOS ran it into the ground before being let go, but I've seen no discernible improvements.

For a platform touted as the first choice for technical users, this is a really poor showing.

The 'uniparty' narrative denigrates the Western system of multi-party representative democracy and checks and balances, and equates it with Putin's monstrously corrupt and brutal one-party state.

Unfortunately these fascist narratives are extremely effective on underinformed and unintelligent people -- and our enemies know these people vote.