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This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have
by invalidusernam3 2mo ago
This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.
- mcv 2mo agoSecurity concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.
- frgturpwd 2mo agoHonestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.
- VBprogrammer 2mo agoThis has become a running joke with a couple of the people in my office who have recently visited China (from the UK). The next 2 years will be interesting for democracy as a whole.
- expedition32 2mo agoChina actually wants people to visit them and spend money. And although I don't agree with the CCP ideology the Shanghai subway is ridiculously impressive.
- inigyou 2mo agoRemember most of the Chinese train infrastructure was built in the time since the Hyperloop.
- Ferret7446 2mo agoChinese train infrastructure also had a lot more casualties than any modern Western nation, even with a conservative estimate of the covered up ones. Building fast is a lot easier if you can break some eggs.
- don_esteban 2mo agoYou mean casualties among workers building it? Or casualties among the passengers traveling on it?
- Markoff 2mo agoI was not impressed when I was sent there on business trip, from what I remember their subways were not as big as in Beijing or other CN places and I hit there my head, obviously anything is better than HK/London. Normally I'm not claustrofobic, but in HK subway...
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoI haven't been to the US since Trump first got elected, but even before that, immigration agents often seemed oddly adversarial, whereas immigration agents in China just don't really seem to give a shit.
- crossroadsguy 2mo agoFrom what I read about them (never had the honour and pleasure of interacting with one) it seems for some time they have had too much power with almost zero accountability and consequences.
- vintermann 2mo agoMaybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.
- inigyou 2mo agoIn China I would expect to be kicked out for having the wrong opinion as long as I didn't cause a big fuss. In the US I'd worry about being imprisoned.
- mc32 2mo agoChina is known to hold Canadians on the excuse of being spies… spying for them is oftentimes filming without prior approval in non coastal but still civilian regions.
- jeromegv 2mo agoBut weren't they... spies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig#:~:text=In%20December%202018%2C%20Canadian%20nationals,in%20Canada%20on%20December%201. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an... > According to a report by The Globe and Mail in November 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement against the federal government for involving him in espionage activities without his knowledge. Spavor alleged that he provided Michael Kovrig with intelligence on North Korea, which Kovrig then secretly gave to the Canadian government and its Five Eyes allies without Spavor's permission, leading to their arrest and detention
- fn-mote 2mo agoThe article clearly indicates the gray area. Your comment oversimplifies that dramatically.
- CWuestefeld 2mo ago
- RobotToaster 2mo agoAt this point I'd be less nervous about vising North Korea.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo agoSomething I think is funny is that a lot of Chinese police think of themselves as catching up to the US in terms of surveillance tech. Think about how many internal migrant workers China has coming to the cities for work then back out to the rural areas.
- inigyou 2mo agothis reminds me of the fact that Adolf Hitler learned his craft by trying to emulate how the USA treated native americans
- Markoff 2mo agoNobody in China cares about your phone/laptop.* *Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician. US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation. Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues. You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually. By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience. People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
- curt15 2mo agoWere you a Caucasian in China? Foreigners, particularly those from powerful Western countries, tend to get much more deferential treatment than locals.
- Markoff 2mo agoObviously, if you do your research you will not go as black (partly also brown) person to China/Japan/East Asia unless you have any other option (though I guess students from poor African/*stan countries don't have many options). I would disagree with different treatment compared to locals vs whites. It's not like whites/foreigners have only benefits, good luck booking ANY hotel (I guess this improved since visa free policy) or renting an apartment as foreigner, which was a shit show or even good price in some markets in past (this was solved by online shopping). But you will get definitely different treatment as white foreigner vs "darker the skin worse the treatment" foreigner.
- frgturpwd 2mo agoI wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.
- oceanhaiyang 2mo agoWhat is illegal content in this context?
- rolisz 2mo agoJokes about Supreme Leader Trump? (I'm not the person you replied to, I have no idea)
- philipallstar 2mo agoJokes about Trump are rife in America, as are leader jokes in many Western countries. These are the last places you will need to worry about that.
- syockit 2mo agoIsn't Germany an exception to that?
- philipallstar 2mo agoI don't know. Can you not make jokes about the chancellor in Germany?
- defrost 2mo agoSure .. just not jokes about how tall they are with a punchline that involves raising an arm to demonstrate.
- zombot 2mo ago> for visiting a supposed first world country. ... which by now is a banana republic of the worst kind. Can you interact sanely with an insane counterpart? Avoiding to visit would be my recommendation too.
- itake 2mo agoJust out of curiosity, like what country would you not have to worry about this in? The US is quite transparent about these rules, and certainly other countries are not necessarily searching peoples phones as publicly But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoSchengen, Nordics, Japan, Canada, in that order. Trump’s America: when confronted with negative traits of your country, always assume your country is the lesser of all evils.
- inigyou 2mo agoAustralia has stricter screening for fruit than for people. don't bring anything organic to Australia unless it's been commercially processed, and even then show it to the border officers so they can make the call. You don't get penalized for showing them something not allowed, you just can't bring it into the country, and they throw it in the bin for incineration. Penalties start when you try to sneak something in anyway.
- nephihaha 2mo agoAustralia has very one sided arrangements with some other places. It is far easier for Aussies to get into the UK than vice versa, for example. They get in visa free, but UK citizens need a visa. I have an Australian acquaintance who got into trouble recently since he was born in Scotland but moved to Australia as a child. He is about as Aussie sounding as they come and went to school there, but after working in the UK for a year or two, Australian immigration gave him grief when he decided to return. Australians actually comprise one of the biggest groups of illegal migrants in the UK, but they are more rarely commented on as they are much less visible than certain other groups. Australians with a parent or grandparent from the UK qualify, whereas those who don't, don't. But the ones who don't are rarely deported, and can't be easily distinguished in many cases.
- InsideOutSanta 2mo agoI used to love visiting the US. I have many friends there, and I really enjoy staying in places like Seattle and SF. But I haven't gone there since Trump 1. That said, I think protecting your privacy is a good idea in general.
- inigyou 2mo agoThe US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing. It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.
- bigDinosaur 2mo agoThe biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.
- inigyou 2mo agoMany developing countries have extreme inequality. What would it look like if the whole world's reserve currency accidentally ended up being the South African Rand?
- prepend 2mo agoWhy do yo think the US should be classified as a developing nation? There’s a definition independent from 1st/2nd/3rd world [0] and the US’ income seems to clearly make it developed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
- inigyou 2mo agoWho made them the law? I don't trust the OSI to define open-source, either.
- toyg 2mo agoThis is not true. However, because of the massive inequality, I often found it easy to use a sentence I saw somewhere: "the US is a South American country that happened to become successful".
- buellerbueller 2mo ago
- bambax 2mo agoYes, I will probably never go back to the US. But I find it sad that my kids for example, will have to think twice before visiting, if they do.
- ChoGGi 2mo agoMy dad's eighty+ years old, he was born in the States, though he did give up his citizenship. He brings a "fake" phone when visiting family, he's been doing so for years. Me; I just change all my tabs and recent history to slightly kinky porn and truth social. They do look hard, but they don't look hard.
- realo 2mo agoThe older guys cannot look too hard but the young guys can certainly look quite hard while browsing through your kinky porn. (Laughs expected here)