3 ms·

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and righ

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal. President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing. Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside. Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too. When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out. Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves. Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.

mmooss 3mo ago
I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry. Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects. They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off. Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change? Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits. Real wages are going up. The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people. It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    As I said, I have yet to see evidence. That's a bunch of words, but if we didn't know before LLMs and before the Internet, we know now: words are cheap and valueless without other properties. What distinguishes those words from propaganda? Why should someone believe it's true? Throwing insults at people who disagree or question you makes it less likely there is substance to the words.
    - nixon_why69 3mo ago
      That comment threw no insults and made a bunch of easily verifiable claims.
      - mmooss 3mo ago
        "lazy Americans" > easily verifiable claims. I disagree that they are verifiable, not being factual statements. But if you think so, then verify them. I'm not going around HN verifying the claims in everyone else's comments.
- ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
  > Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence. And if I show you official statistics you will say statistics out of China can’t be trusted. Folks like yourself will only realise when it’s too late
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    So you have no evidence.
- someguynamedq 3mo ago
  When is the last time someone was given the death penalty for a white collar crime in the US?
ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
> we had shame back then The collapse of our standards has been heartbreaking to see and I am observing that most are simply in denial.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  This comes and goes in seasons. At the turn of the last century the broligarchs of the time (they called them robber barons then) had the game stitched up worse than today. They owned the state legislatures (who elected the senators at that time) lock, stock, and barrel. They bought laws as they pleased. The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it. Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone. But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him. This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression. Until then? The worse? The better.

mmooss 3mo ago

I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry. Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects. They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off. Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change? Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits. Real wages are going up. The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people. It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.
- mmooss 3mo ago
  As I said, I have yet to see evidence. That's a bunch of words, but if we didn't know before LLMs and before the Internet, we know now: words are cheap and valueless without other properties. What distinguishes those words from propaganda? Why should someone believe it's true? Throwing insults at people who disagree or question you makes it less likely there is substance to the words.
  - nixon_why69 3mo ago
    That comment threw no insults and made a bunch of easily verifiable claims.
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      "lazy Americans" > easily verifiable claims. I disagree that they are verifiable, not being factual statements. But if you think so, then verify them. I'm not going around HN verifying the claims in everyone else's comments.
ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
> Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence. And if I show you official statistics you will say statistics out of China can’t be trusted. Folks like yourself will only realise when it’s too late
- mmooss 3mo ago
  So you have no evidence.
someguynamedq 3mo ago
When is the last time someone was given the death penalty for a white collar crime in the US?

ClumsyPilot 3mo ago

> we had shame back then The collapse of our standards has been heartbreaking to see and I am observing that most are simply in denial.

reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
This comes and goes in seasons. At the turn of the last century the broligarchs of the time (they called them robber barons then) had the game stitched up worse than today. They owned the state legislatures (who elected the senators at that time) lock, stock, and barrel. They bought laws as they pleased. The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it. Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone. But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him. This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression. Until then? The worse? The better.