5 ms·

The real freakout is that their government combines ruthless authoritarianism with suffocating surveillance technology, and they haven't even gotten started yet

The real freakout is that their government combines ruthless authoritarianism with suffocating surveillance technology, and they haven't even gotten started yet...

rbanffy 7y ago
For me the scariest part is the demonstration that capitalism works better under an authoritarian regime.
- mjevans 7y ago
  Capitalism works well when resources are scarce enough that everyone is short on something, but not so scarce that there isn't enough to even trade goods. (At that point disaster management needs to be very authoritarian.) Capitalism absolutely fails when there's "too much" surplus. Social focused alternatives also fail to survive in to human implementation because power corrupts and greed ruins everything. We need some benevolent dictators to do slightly wrong things for the right reasons, and a lot of right things for the right reasons, to break our cultures out of the insanity that infects them. Or maybe someone can come up with a greed proof form of governance and resource allocation that can tolerate the inherent failure modes associated with using humans as cogs in the system.
  - darkmighty 7y ago
    Europe, and to a certain extent the, US seem to be doing fine, thank you very much -- without need for artificial scarcity or dictatorships. Europe in particular, isn't, for the most part a "Failure of capitalism" -- people are living well enough, much better than in China for instance. The problem here is that even though by most humane standards the average european or american could be better off than the average chinese, perhaps exactly because of this China will achieve more competitively. Maybe optimum standards of living doesn't coincide with optimum productivity. What then? That's a problem for the US in particular because its core justification, so to speak, [for the American social-political-economic system] was this entire premise: 'More productive, more competitive, means ultimately means better in every way'. 'The US was more productive than the USSR, therefore Socialism is bad'; 'We win in competition therefore we have the greater future'. But if China, as a an authoritarian surveillance state is more productive than the US, how to sustain this thesis? And how to deal with China if they may be bound to outgrow their peers in the future? What if they start spreading this cultural modus operandi justified precisely by economic productivity? For me the answer is obvious: this thesis must be abandoned. There are two ways to deal with an enemy that is willing to sacrifice humanity in the name of slightly better performance. (1) Through international law: make agreements and regulations demanding standards of living, democratic minima, etc. that apply globally. (2) Though conflict/direct competition. If an authoritarian hegemony is expanding and threatening our core values, and there is no other way to stop, then you should do the necessary to stop them, degrading temporarily the standards of living to outpace them and override their doctrine in the expectation to restore to a more humane program afterwards. I don't condone the practices of the USSR (it was a very authoritarian and problematic regime on its own), but this is mostly their rationale through the Cold War; this aspect of their ideal at least seems very reasonable to me. Let's hope that either (a) China's approach ultimately doesn't actually show to be as effective as it seems; (b) They fail to expand their regime/doctrine and collapse from internal democratic pressure (unlikely as control/surveillance technology expands); (c) International treaties control the situation and enforce better human rights Before the West needs to enter a conflict. Note how this goes against Nature: we'd be refusing to let the most 'fit' nation out-compete and dominate others through some global coordination, and try to enter a suboptimal (in the competitive sense) quasi-steady-state. It isn't clear we can achieve this, but this would a most beautiful achievement of humanity. Finally taking destiny into our own hands free from the current make of A Blind Watchmaker. Being blind, those Watchmaker very often fail to prevent disasters stemming from their work, another significant sign of its troubles: with our inability, but also necessity, to achieve global coordination in sacrificing maximum naive development speed (but helping humanity's environment in the long run). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17572185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17572185
    - gingabriska 7y ago
      Europe is doing well only because their population is limited and resources are plenty full. Huge oil reserves with a country as small as Norway which has a tiny population. And we can argue lots of these resources were acquired at the time when colonialism was a thing and rest all development is built upon surplus from that. Maybe not all European countries were colonists but later they'll make a union and trade will be free in that union resulting in some countries losing their land and companies to foreign European countries (as happened in some East European countries) So the union ensured that they'll be bailed out on the back of those powerful European countries. Europe is a special case in a book with homogenous population, so religious or racial difference isn't resulting in serious disagreement and violence and this brings a lot of stability to it. All I want to say is China does not have same advantages as European country so it might not work the way you imagine without Chinese Communist Party.
      - mantap 7y ago
        > Europe is a special case in a book with homogenous population Even Ukrainians and Russians can find a way to create an ethnic identity strong enough that it's worth going to war with each other. Or Serbs and Croats. Europe has been at war with itself for 1000s of years. It only stopped when the wars became so bloody that everybody agreed to not do it again.
- javert 7y ago
  They have not demonstrated that.
- lambdasquirrel 7y ago
  Would it be better for capitalism to work under the sort of oligarchy that happened in Russia in the 1990s? Capitalism in a low-trust society is like turning the wolves on the sheep, and that is what US citizens should fear in the US – that it is becoming a low-trust society where the government is incapable of administering effectively. Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore were all authoritarian regimes before they became "freer." The sad reality is that the current environment effectively proves post-facto that China needed a strong hand to guide the country through these difficult head-winds. Would it have been better under Hillary though? That’s what’s troubling about US leadership in these times.
  - petre 7y ago
    The difference is that TW, KR and SG were/are right wing authocracies and the first two evolved more or less peacefully into functional democracies. Japan too. All of these countries except maybe SG had/have the US as their allies and I'm quite sure it was the US that slowly pushed them in this direction. Japan is the prime example of this as it was occupied by the US. Just look at pre 1945 Japan - it was an aggressive militarist authocracy that occupied neighbouring states, with an ambition to conquer the world¹. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiu
- chimpburger 7y ago
  China have only achieved this result using fundamental science, technology and engineering concepts that were invented in the US, Europe, and Japan, with the unfair advantage of ultra cheap labour costs. They have people working like slaves in factories using copied/outsourced/stolen ideas. There is no evidence that their regime could have matched what the Americans have invented from scratch.
  - chimpburger 7y ago
    Voted down. How exactly am I wrong? Even Chinese people agree. 60 million Chinese people were starved to death under the communist regime last century, while the Americans were inventing microprocessors and launching rockets to the moon.
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      Didn't downvote, but your argument is somewhat naive. Now a Chinese person could argue you Americans didn't invent paper but they did, so whenever you designed something on paper it was actually made possible by them. Or how after ww2 some of the brightest scientists from Germany were "taken" by the US and in exchange not persecuted for their involvement with the nazi party. These kinds of arguments just derail the conversation. Everybody is standing on the shoulder of giants in some way.
      - mhh__ 7y ago
        This is perhaps true, but the Chinese seem to have no concept of intellectual property: There is good reason to consider every product sent to made in China's design to be lost
        iforgotpassword 7y ago
        Which is exactly the same situation as with Japan in the 50s. History repeating itself. And since it's apparently so crystal clear that they are that way, it seems companies still deciding to produce in China only deserve it?
- achenatx 7y ago
  authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually collapse because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient allocation of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated million civil servants taking bribes. If china is lucky xi jinping, who is now president for life, will be a great ruler for his whole life. If china is typical, he will make some bad decisions and the system will collapse.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually collapse because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient allocation of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated million civil servants taking bribes. The PRC definitely has a lot more low-level corruption, but the US has enough high-level corruption to be concerning.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      The PRC has lots of high level corruption as well. Much of the Chinese economy is already owned by a few powerful red families.
      - mitfahrener 7y ago
        Ah no. Chinese economy is much bigger than something a few families can own.
        mhh__ 7y ago
        Much and most are not synonymous in this context
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I think it shows the Neo-Liberal/Washington Consensus to be an abject failure. Under that the west decided to forgo government imposed industrial policy in favor of disorganized looting. The Chinese on the other hand imposed hard nosed industrial policies. Western economists have been saying that Chinese industrial/financial/developmental policy was going to result in collapse 'in five to ten years' for the last 30 years. And now it becoming obvious, it's not happening.
- mhh__ 7y ago
  How? It didn't work until it became more free Chinese authoritarianism has relatively little effect on its economic output, it's not run like the Soviet union
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    The Soviets devoted an large percentage of their economy to military industrial goods and services instead of consumer ones. They were running a war command economy from 1940 to 1990. China's military expenditures are small as a percentage of their economy. And unlike the US they have an functional industrial/labor policy apparatus. The US used to, but it was dismantled in the 1980's.
monocasa 7y ago
Lol, as if they have anything on the US wrt surveillance. They block more, but that's a heavy hammer to drop that the US doesn't need to do.

The real freakout is that their government combines ruthless authoritarianism with suffocating surveillance technology, and they haven't even gotten started yet...

rbanffy 7y ago

For me the scariest part is the demonstration that capitalism works better under an authoritarian regime.

mjevans 7y ago
Capitalism works well when resources are scarce enough that everyone is short on something, but not so scarce that there isn't enough to even trade goods. (At that point disaster management needs to be very authoritarian.) Capitalism absolutely fails when there's "too much" surplus. Social focused alternatives also fail to survive in to human implementation because power corrupts and greed ruins everything. We need some benevolent dictators to do slightly wrong things for the right reasons, and a lot of right things for the right reasons, to break our cultures out of the insanity that infects them. Or maybe someone can come up with a greed proof form of governance and resource allocation that can tolerate the inherent failure modes associated with using humans as cogs in the system.
- darkmighty 7y ago
  Europe, and to a certain extent the, US seem to be doing fine, thank you very much -- without need for artificial scarcity or dictatorships. Europe in particular, isn't, for the most part a "Failure of capitalism" -- people are living well enough, much better than in China for instance. The problem here is that even though by most humane standards the average european or american could be better off than the average chinese, perhaps exactly because of this China will achieve more competitively. Maybe optimum standards of living doesn't coincide with optimum productivity. What then? That's a problem for the US in particular because its core justification, so to speak, [for the American social-political-economic system] was this entire premise: 'More productive, more competitive, means ultimately means better in every way'. 'The US was more productive than the USSR, therefore Socialism is bad'; 'We win in competition therefore we have the greater future'. But if China, as a an authoritarian surveillance state is more productive than the US, how to sustain this thesis? And how to deal with China if they may be bound to outgrow their peers in the future? What if they start spreading this cultural modus operandi justified precisely by economic productivity? For me the answer is obvious: this thesis must be abandoned. There are two ways to deal with an enemy that is willing to sacrifice humanity in the name of slightly better performance. (1) Through international law: make agreements and regulations demanding standards of living, democratic minima, etc. that apply globally. (2) Though conflict/direct competition. If an authoritarian hegemony is expanding and threatening our core values, and there is no other way to stop, then you should do the necessary to stop them, degrading temporarily the standards of living to outpace them and override their doctrine in the expectation to restore to a more humane program afterwards. I don't condone the practices of the USSR (it was a very authoritarian and problematic regime on its own), but this is mostly their rationale through the Cold War; this aspect of their ideal at least seems very reasonable to me. Let's hope that either (a) China's approach ultimately doesn't actually show to be as effective as it seems; (b) They fail to expand their regime/doctrine and collapse from internal democratic pressure (unlikely as control/surveillance technology expands); (c) International treaties control the situation and enforce better human rights Before the West needs to enter a conflict. Note how this goes against Nature: we'd be refusing to let the most 'fit' nation out-compete and dominate others through some global coordination, and try to enter a suboptimal (in the competitive sense) quasi-steady-state. It isn't clear we can achieve this, but this would a most beautiful achievement of humanity. Finally taking destiny into our own hands free from the current make of A Blind Watchmaker. Being blind, those Watchmaker very often fail to prevent disasters stemming from their work, another significant sign of its troubles: with our inability, but also necessity, to achieve global coordination in sacrificing maximum naive development speed (but helping humanity's environment in the long run). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17572185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17572185
  - gingabriska 7y ago
    Europe is doing well only because their population is limited and resources are plenty full. Huge oil reserves with a country as small as Norway which has a tiny population. And we can argue lots of these resources were acquired at the time when colonialism was a thing and rest all development is built upon surplus from that. Maybe not all European countries were colonists but later they'll make a union and trade will be free in that union resulting in some countries losing their land and companies to foreign European countries (as happened in some East European countries) So the union ensured that they'll be bailed out on the back of those powerful European countries. Europe is a special case in a book with homogenous population, so religious or racial difference isn't resulting in serious disagreement and violence and this brings a lot of stability to it. All I want to say is China does not have same advantages as European country so it might not work the way you imagine without Chinese Communist Party.
    - mantap 7y ago
      > Europe is a special case in a book with homogenous population Even Ukrainians and Russians can find a way to create an ethnic identity strong enough that it's worth going to war with each other. Or Serbs and Croats. Europe has been at war with itself for 1000s of years. It only stopped when the wars became so bloody that everybody agreed to not do it again.
javert 7y ago
They have not demonstrated that.
lambdasquirrel 7y ago
Would it be better for capitalism to work under the sort of oligarchy that happened in Russia in the 1990s? Capitalism in a low-trust society is like turning the wolves on the sheep, and that is what US citizens should fear in the US – that it is becoming a low-trust society where the government is incapable of administering effectively. Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore were all authoritarian regimes before they became "freer." The sad reality is that the current environment effectively proves post-facto that China needed a strong hand to guide the country through these difficult head-winds. Would it have been better under Hillary though? That’s what’s troubling about US leadership in these times.
- petre 7y ago
  The difference is that TW, KR and SG were/are right wing authocracies and the first two evolved more or less peacefully into functional democracies. Japan too. All of these countries except maybe SG had/have the US as their allies and I'm quite sure it was the US that slowly pushed them in this direction. Japan is the prime example of this as it was occupied by the US. Just look at pre 1945 Japan - it was an aggressive militarist authocracy that occupied neighbouring states, with an ambition to conquer the world¹. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiu
chimpburger 7y ago
China have only achieved this result using fundamental science, technology and engineering concepts that were invented in the US, Europe, and Japan, with the unfair advantage of ultra cheap labour costs. They have people working like slaves in factories using copied/outsourced/stolen ideas. There is no evidence that their regime could have matched what the Americans have invented from scratch.
- chimpburger 7y ago
  Voted down. How exactly am I wrong? Even Chinese people agree. 60 million Chinese people were starved to death under the communist regime last century, while the Americans were inventing microprocessors and launching rockets to the moon.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    Didn't downvote, but your argument is somewhat naive. Now a Chinese person could argue you Americans didn't invent paper but they did, so whenever you designed something on paper it was actually made possible by them. Or how after ww2 some of the brightest scientists from Germany were "taken" by the US and in exchange not persecuted for their involvement with the nazi party. These kinds of arguments just derail the conversation. Everybody is standing on the shoulder of giants in some way.
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      This is perhaps true, but the Chinese seem to have no concept of intellectual property: There is good reason to consider every product sent to made in China's design to be lost
      - iforgotpassword 7y ago
        Which is exactly the same situation as with Japan in the 50s. History repeating itself. And since it's apparently so crystal clear that they are that way, it seems companies still deciding to produce in China only deserve it?
achenatx 7y ago
authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually collapse because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient allocation of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated million civil servants taking bribes. If china is lucky xi jinping, who is now president for life, will be a great ruler for his whole life. If china is typical, he will make some bad decisions and the system will collapse.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > authoritarian regimes can start off very efficiently, but eventually collapse because of corruption. The corruption results in very inefficient allocation of capital. The chinese govt is very corrupt with an estimated million civil servants taking bribes. The PRC definitely has a lot more low-level corruption, but the US has enough high-level corruption to be concerning.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    The PRC has lots of high level corruption as well. Much of the Chinese economy is already owned by a few powerful red families.
    - mitfahrener 7y ago
      Ah no. Chinese economy is much bigger than something a few families can own.
      - mhh__ 7y ago
        Much and most are not synonymous in this context
Gibbon1 7y ago
I think it shows the Neo-Liberal/Washington Consensus to be an abject failure. Under that the west decided to forgo government imposed industrial policy in favor of disorganized looting. The Chinese on the other hand imposed hard nosed industrial policies. Western economists have been saying that Chinese industrial/financial/developmental policy was going to result in collapse 'in five to ten years' for the last 30 years. And now it becoming obvious, it's not happening.
mhh__ 7y ago
How? It didn't work until it became more free Chinese authoritarianism has relatively little effect on its economic output, it's not run like the Soviet union
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  The Soviets devoted an large percentage of their economy to military industrial goods and services instead of consumer ones. They were running a war command economy from 1940 to 1990. China's military expenditures are small as a percentage of their economy. And unlike the US they have an functional industrial/labor policy apparatus. The US used to, but it was dismantled in the 1980's.

monocasa 7y ago

Lol, as if they have anything on the US wrt surveillance. They block more, but that's a heavy hammer to drop that the US doesn't need to do.