Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.

(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).

However, it’s been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they’ve been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I’m wary of calling that Communism).

Are they even left of center nowadays? I don’t know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what’s done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.

I don’t think they’ve yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they’ve kept the Authoritarianism going.

Not all Authoritarians are Fascists.

That said, I would agree that whomever supports Putin, supports Fascism - there is nothing at all Leftwing in present day Russia, quite the contrary.

China is more complicated.

Get the ones with the CE mark as, since 2017, the EU rules for LED Light Bulbs are very strict (for example, models must be tested for min 10k hours of life with at last 95% of the bulbs passing, and 10,000 on-off cycles) and that CE mark means they were tested in accordance with them (unless the mark is fake, obviously).

Also as others pointed out, you want to make sure the light fixtures you have them in do not trap heat: LED lights emit way less heat that incandescant but if it can’t go anywhere temperatures can get pretty high, plus both the actual LEDs and the components of the power converter at the bottom of the lamp (as the Light Emitting Diodes themselves take DC, ideally with a regulated current, not 110/220V AC) are way more sensitive to temperature than the stuff incandescent lamps are made.

Beyond this, also note that when it comes to overall quality (rather than merelly efficiency), that converter circuit makes most of the difference and manufacturers competing mostly on price will often use designs for those with significantly lower quality to save a few cents per unit. You might want to consider getting the Dimmable LED Light Bulbs even if you aren’t going to use them with a dimmer simply because in order for it to be Dimmable that conversion circuit needs to have a different, better, design that the cheapest ways of designing it.

At one point in time, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I looked into setting up a business to import those things from China, and most samples I got from back then still work (except the ones from the really crap manufacturer, of the rest maybe 1 in 5 failed since then) - this is also why I know all those details about EU LED Light Bulb requirements and certification.

I’ve also been using LED Light Bulbs since even before that and have had very few failures in almost 10 years of using those things, even though I never buy the branded expensive stuff.

Last I checked the factory price of a decent 100 lumens LED Filament Light Bulb at the factory in China was around $1 so LED Light bulbs above $/£/€5 are way overpriced.

• User-stocked adictive digital social circle.
• Digital news media sources using Pavlovian click-response headlines.
• Human subconscious-targetting product promotion systems.
• Automated individual tracking and digital-model building systems.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).