That being said: Your explanation makes more sense to me. It is often enough to anger the wrong person to get a bad treatment (well, even assassination). And looking at history this is exponentiated in dictatorships, where power is concentrated on few ppl, who can act with impunity.
To be fair though, that never was much of a conspiracy. Maybe in the United States it was but in the rest of the world I don't think people believe the WMD story, rather, we believed the UN weapons inspectors' story.
I've told and convinced plenty of anti-vaxxers about the magical secret way our body naturally produces antibodies if we expose our body to dead versions of a virus (or, now, things shaped like that virus). They like magic, secrets and nature, they do not like the word vaccine.
I do the same with the word conspiracy, "That is a secret plan by a group to do something harmful". It rolls off the tongue.
I think that's interpreting the term "conspiracy theory" more broadly than it's typically used. IMHO, colloquially it pretty much only refers to outlandish theories, based little to no actual evidence, and usually requiring a conspiracy so impossibly large and impossibly well executed that it beggars belief.
I don't think the idea that Jack Ma is being targeted by the CCP is just a plausible theory, not a conspiracy theory (in the colloquial sense). You have a group with the motive, means, and MO to do so, you just need to find the proof.
Which is the definition of a conspiracy theory. Words have meaning and this is a technical term; and altho it is common knowledge that it is being used as a smear word, this doesn't mean we have to play the same game here as well.
There is also no reason to pretend that the colloquial usage of conspiracy theory is more than opinion.
And you feel it right. This is what is the explanation for the schizophrenic public position of the Chinese establishment: on one hand they shout out loud that "economic liberalisation is irreversible, opening up will go on," and on other keep tightening all legal, and extralegal nuts on private enterprise, and in overall sliding back into the madness of seventies.
They have accepted the fact of millionaire chicken run to the West being unstoppable, but they at least want to prevent the multimillionaire, and billionaire chicken run.
They simply want their money that much, and that started to outweight the rational interest of "not slaughtering a hen laying golden eggs" in recent 2-3 years.
Keyboard design aside (which was fixed a year ago, and wasn't a poor production standards/cheap materials, etc. issue, it was a BS make-it-thinner-design issue), you mean the best built laptops in the industry, or the CPUs, battery, etc. with universal praise (M1)?
As far as I can see that’s bullshit.
They say what they are measuring, and people do check it.
They’d be open to straight up legal action from both customers and shareholders if they were lying.
Not just the best ever, always 3x or 300% better according to fake benchmarks that nobody can audit. It's beyond Marketing, basically propaganda.
Well that is the new / recent Apple. Steve rarely use these technical benchmarks with specific numbers and only talk about the experience or it is being faster, better.
Now it is just a more polished event Keynote which felt the same as Google event in that they were prepared by tech people for tech people.
So far, every single time, they have been shown to be accurate.
(smallprint) * tested in very specific condition X that does not reflect at all everyday usage of 99.9999% of users.
(The tech media) Apple did it again with 300% perf increase! Mad engineering!
That's just legal department finding a way to make propaganda harder to challenge. It's still propaganda in effect.
They don’t in fact make exaggerations like that, otherwise you’d be able to quote a real one.
The piece with that headline is about the only thing that has been audited and found to be false.
Search for commentary anywhere on that piece and you’ll find it has been completely debunked.
Or perhaps they could start with properly taxing them!
99% they report on gross revenue and complain about how little tax is paid. And almost everyone buys it.
That's why I don't buy the "gross revenue" argument, or the "actually the rich pay more of their income in taxes" arguments.
The rich and big corporations have billions (pun intended) of ways of padding their expenses, hiding their net, moving their wealth around so it can't be taxes, making shell companies etc.
Panama Papers is the most unreported, under-investigated scandal of the century