"What Is This Job For?"

      So, Red China's being rocked by protests over their draconian "Zero Covid" policy.  Vaccination rates haven't been great in the country and their own COVID vaccines aren't among the most effective, so they're still doing actual lockdowns -- lock-ins -- over outbreaks that would barely rate mention in most of the rest of the world.  These aren't polite requests to avoid social gatherings and shut down non-essential businesses, either; it's fences and cops and people getting hauled off to quarantine for trying to get around them.

      The Chinese people seem to have become fed up with it after two and a half years.  The story made the front page of the big newspapers here (and people I know who make a point of never reading the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. have been asking "Why isn't the MSM covering this?" which looks pretty silly).

      One place you might go look for coverage of these protests is Twitter.  What you'll find instead is nonsense spam and porn links.  Red China has long had a policy of trying to bend social media their way.  They've used bot farms and half-renminbi-a-post workers (the "Fifty-Cent Army") for years, and they've been, well, flooding the zone with crap over their COVID-policy unrest.  So fat chance trying to find any coverage of the protests on Twitter -- MSM or otherwise.

      You see, Twitter's staff has been cut to the bone and somewhere in all that "nonessential" and even "woke" staff were the people whose jobs it was to yank the rug out from under Communist China's clumsy efforts to control information when they acted up.  Oops.

      In the early days of broadcast television, "Madman" Muntz built the most affordable TVs around, in part by a design process that was said to consist of removing components until the the prototype stopped working, then putting that final part back, and removing parts elsewhere in the circuit until it conked out again.  A critical step was backing up and reinstalling the removed part when the TV set stopped working.  Eventually, they'd get to the bare minimum needed to still have a functional device.

      I sure hope Elon Musk doesn't skip that step.