free_rms

26 ms·

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by free_rms 6y ago
If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) diffe
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by free_rms 6y ago
Let's slow down on calling anyone else privileged when most of us are in arguably the most privileged profession to ever exist. A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also mo
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by free_rms 6y ago
Also a great way to solidify them and get people to dig in their heels. Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.
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by free_rms 6y ago
You guys actually formally and physically made 2 separate ideological bubbles?
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by free_rms 6y ago
I should have been more specific. Rural, or cities below a certain tier, in general, often means very poor in China. The ethnic minority areas are very rural and far away from places that generate wealth. It's not because they&#x27
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by free_rms 6y ago
Also, to tack back to economics, "rural ethnic minorities" means "third world subsistence farming with no health or dental care". The approach the government is taking there is certainly heavy-handed, but I think we shou
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by free_rms 6y ago
> China's scorekeeping is perpetual. There is no forgiveness. No second chances. This is in a special category of "not even wrong". 1) There's no singular Social Credit System at the moment, there are a dozen trials
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by free_rms 6y ago
A few years back, I remember a bunch of SV startups trying to invent... a social credit system... for underbanked countries without credit systems. We'll just hook up to the facebook API to find who's creditworthy. Everyone clap
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by free_rms 6y ago
Thanks :) Point of pride for me if I can get downvoted for a thoroughly classy comment.
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by free_rms 6y ago
It's definitely a super interesting piece, thanks for linking, I've emailed it to myself to give a deeper read. This one resonates with me in our current moment: > From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed
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by free_rms 6y ago
I mean, if we're talking about the Eastern Front, the basic necessities of life were a lot more stark there than they are in 21st century America, right? "These people are coming, and they're gonna kill and rape everyone&quo
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by free_rms 6y ago
My related theory is that it's a decoupling of politics from material outcomes. Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Re
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by free_rms 6y ago
Ok, but it's still out of 13, so maybe we're going for 8?
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by free_rms 6y ago
So that's 43% of 13%, call it 5%. A far cry from 71. And if I'm not mistaken, the city still gets that money as long as the job is located there anyways.
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by free_rms 6y ago
The richest city on the planet can't afford to fill potholes?
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by free_rms 6y ago
They're not lying, most likely, just uninformed. Most Americans know literally dick-all about Chinese history and substitute a combination of Cold War and WWII history where we're the good guys and the antagonists are the bad guys
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by free_rms 6y ago
All that without a shot fired! Imagine if they actually had a military as active as the US, NATO, or the Russians. Where do you go from here, rhetorically?
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by free_rms 6y ago
The PRC conflict with Vietnam lasted 3 weeks. Is it possible, that rather than being a massive cover-up, that war simply wasn't a generation-defining moment for them? Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietn
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by free_rms 6y ago
Worth noting that there weren't any 'good guys' in WWI like the story we're told about WWII. It was just a slugfest between colonial powers who were all doing awful stuff.
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by free_rms 6y ago
Citation? The US has a record of wanting to be hegemon and specifically wanting to export our ideology. China, not so much outside of their borders and immediate sea lanes. Are you just assuming they want to do so because that's what
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by free_rms 6y ago
Afghanistan, Iraq? And that's before we get into proxy wars.
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by free_rms 6y ago
The phrase han supremacy itself is projection. It's super American to put things specifically in racial terms. Mao was giving minority cultures exemptions from the 1-child policy, subsidies, and all sorts of other stuff at a time when
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by free_rms 6y ago
You know the Chinese citizens live there, right? Consider that they probably understand their government better than you do. They saw a great coronavirus response followed immediately by a stellar response to a 100-year flood event, the ki
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by free_rms 6y ago
I'm not a lawyer but I'm super willing to bet that someone who embarasses both Amazon and the FBI is gonna wind up with a federal rap and very few friends to fight it.
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by free_rms 6y ago
Technically, he probably made the mustard gas himself with our money while getting billions of dollars from us for a decade of the Iran-Iraq war.
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by free_rms 6y ago
Amazon operates in all 50 states. For it to be a federal crime, there just needs to be federal interest. They can make it a federal crime if they're interested.
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by free_rms 6y ago
Maybe we should look into things like being able to manufacture frickin masks 8 months into a pandemic, then we can double back and worry about kneecapping rivals.
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by free_rms 6y ago
Many things can crash cars but if you crash one you're liable. If the wildfires in CA were a new thing this season, I wouldn't want to witch hunt this year's culprit. But it's been a huge hazard for years now -- neglige
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by free_rms 6y ago
That's only 25% of people in general.. round up to 27% and you've got the Alan Keyes Crazification Factor. http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-c...
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by free_rms 6y ago
I'm no fan of Trump but it's worth noting that we tapped Angela Merkel's phone under Nobel Peace Prize Winner President Obama. Better PR is nice but it doesn't change the underlying incentives.

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