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Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

blog.emojipedia.org

301–310 of 730 posts

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#301
The craziest part of this article is the note at the end about airlines being forced to remove mention of Taiwan in order to do business in China. Went to Delta website to find a flight to Taipei, and sure enough every stop of trip lists city, state/country and for Taipei is just says:

Taipei,

According to the article, even this is still 'out of compliance,' because it should say 'Taipei, Taiwan China,' blown away this is how the booking page appears on the Delta website when loaded from the United States.

Makes me worry, localization takes effort, and effort often leads to blanket solutions that 'check everyone's boxes.' The most worrying examples of this in my opinion have been the superhero movies of the past decade. These blockbuster franchises were all written to accommodate distribution in China (and worldwide for that matter) as a goal. This led to simplified dialogues for translation, story lines that avoided pushing controversial buttons, and the result was a decade of moderately entertaining and decidedly safe cinema. Sure, blockbusters are not the best barometer for a nation's ability to push artistic boundaries, but they have historically spoken to the sentiments, dreams, and challenges of a time. Unfortunately with the sequels and superheros era, it seems the tone has been one of risk-averse idealism, which strikes me as a particularly low form of entertainment, entertainment that is truly disposable, unable and unwilling to stand the test of time. Possibly straying into problems with corporate consolidations, but I think it's all related as larger corporations tend to take smaller risks in efforts to appeal to broader audiences. If very few companies are able/willing to tell China no, censorship features become acceptable, and then they become normal, and then maintaining two branches becomes burdensome, so then censorship becomes the compliant option, and at that point the dream of technology empowering regular people to do amazing things, to become real superheros, fighting corruption, injustice and oppression, that dream will be truly dead. Think about how much things have changed since the Arab spring... it happens quickly.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#302
post #182

What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this? If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me. Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use…

Perhaps that engineer had a baby on the way and was terrified of losing health coverage, or was in the United States on an H1B visa and was afraid they'd be deported... I'd probably have made the same decision as you (I'm fortunate to have a safety net), but many people don't have that luxury.

A married man with a family will do anything for money.

Talleyrand

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#303
post #182

What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this? If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me. Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use…

There is way for engineers to exercise their power to prevent things like this from happening, but it can only happen through collective action. Getting fired for not acceding to a demand like this isn't the result of an individual manager making a decision but the entire apparatus of corporate governance coming to bear on the person. It can be only be meaningfully resisted and fought with an equally organized group…

So you’re proposing a union that engages in political activism? I presume people who didn’t agree with the political stances adopted by the union would be expected to start their own competing union to represent their own political interests. Would sure be interesting to see one union threatening action if an employer chooses to do something, with a competing union threatening to take action if they choose not to. Or perhaps this just isn’t a problem you can solve with a union, and would be better addressed by having individuals putting consideration into where they work. Something I believe people already do.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#304
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is showing the ability to control one of the world's largest, and most advanced companies. It isn't petty–it is scary. The U.S. and others have sold their soul to the devil for $299 flat screen tvs.

Pushing back on China trade is the one and probably only thing I agree with Trump on, and I've wondered if getting rid of Clinton and the TPP wasn't actually worth tolerating Trump being an ass for four years. All I know is that I'm glad the TPP is dead and I'll be happy if nobody with the last names Clinton or Bush ever sits in the White House again. I say this as someone who leans more toward the 'woke' side of the…

>Pushing back on China trade >I'm glad the TPP is dead

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-16/best-b...

https://www.piie.com/publications/wp/wp16-2.pdf

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#305
post #182

What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this? If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me. Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use…

This might not be a coding change. So blaming an engineer might not be the right approach.

It could be configuration. Emoji settings are configured by region. So maybe someone with no dev experience could go into the iOS deployment package and simply change some config files around.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#306
post #182

What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this? If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me. Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use…

Each truly international product has hundreds, if not thousands policies like this codified. How to render border between India and Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine, what words to exclude from dictionaries and suspend in auto-suggest, etc.

For engineer it’s just another rule, they get update like “locale X passed the law to do Y, update software to comply”. It’s not their job to do legal or ethical evaluations, and it’s unreasonable to expect it from them.

If you think it’s obvious, and any engineer should be well-equipped to do so, there is a story from inside the Big G. When Google employees had a protest-du-jour about Google planning to implement restricted version of search in China, it turned out that many Google employees of Chinese descent actually supported implemented restricted search in China arguing that restricted search is better than no search. Now, if you were an internatialization engineer working on restricting features, how would you evaluate claims of both groups and is it your responsibility to do so?

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should still blame the engineer, but they shouldn't shoulder the majority of the blame.

Maybe if all engineers quit with the first immoral request by the management, it would actually pave way for more morally ignorant engineers to replace them. We only see what has happened, not what has not happened. What if the iOS engineers do in fact have moral values and have declined some of the management's more immoral requests many times, but this particular request seemed the lesser of two devils? Maybe those…

> it would actually pave way for more morally ignorant engineers to replace them

All the more reason why they (the replacement) should be blamed. Obviously, those who might have refused to comply and were replaced made a moral stand and deserve commendation, not blame.

> Maybe those engineers don't quit exactly because they want to hinder such actions by the management.

Perhaps. There are a lot of hypothetical scenarios we could construct that might absolve the implementor of blame but this is possible in any scenario where we're not privy to the internal process that culminates in a corporate decision.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#308

The degree that China goes to censor things reminds me of kindergarten. Pull the shades down, and kids won't want to go outside? Is it simply a reminder to their people of who's in charge, at this level of pettiness?

> Is it simply a reminder to their people of who's in charge, at this level of pettiness? Most countries have petty border disputes. A famous country occupies territory in Cuba where it built a military prison. Cuba claims that the military presence is occupation of territory it rightfully owns. The famous country refuses to leave; it claims it only leases it based on a hundred-year-old document, and sends $4k checks…

That's hardly an accurate telling.

Cuba started a war for independence. The US sunk their own ship, the USS Maine to get an excuse to go to war (according to the Northwoods document declassified in 1998). This kicks off the Spanish-American war where Teddy Roosevelt rises to prominence (the perhaps biggest point of note was the butchering of whole villages, mass rapes, and what were essentially concentration camps in the Philippines).

After liberating Cuba, the US government drafted the Platt Amendment as conditions for giving up the Cuban territory they had won from Spain. There were 7 conditions and one of those was the establishment of Guantanamo Bay. Fidel Castro and his chief gestapo butcher Che Guevara overthrow the previous government and then proceed to break most of the other conditions (though it could be argued that the US should have exercised article 3 and prevented the coup).

Cuba later argues that the Vienna convention on treaties overrules the previous agreement, but the Vienna convention is explicitly non-retroactive (and more to the point, agreements due to a war are by their very nature coercive). It could be argued that the US created an excuse for war isn't very savory and most Americans of the time would have opposed involvement if an honest case had been made (I agree with this). If they had not, it's most likely that Cuba would have remained a Spanish colony and that point is immaterial.

International law doesn't leave room for "pettiness" in this case. If the US were trying to pretend the Cuban government didn't exist and was trying to force non-US entities to comply with that non-reality, that go far beyond petty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base#Guan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_Amendment

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh we definitely have, everyone benefitted massively from the "manifest destiny" attitude behind the many atrocities committed against the native Americans. It's also not our fault , infar as we didn't literally pull any triggers. We're probably still complicit to some degree, however, by our general lack of support for reparation actions.

We all pay taxes that buy triggers and pay to have them pulled. You can argue this is compelled, but I personally have more respect for those who refuse to pay taxes and face the wrath of the US government than I have for my own cowardly position of paying taxes and continuing to complain about the horrors committed using that money.

If no one paid taxes, then the governments capacity to do bad things would certainly go down. However, then there also probably would be no government and everyone would be worse off.

I'm sure lots of tax money is wasted, or used for bad things, but also a lot of good as well. Roads, police (that keep the peace), firefighters, education, foreign aid, etc.

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