That’s probably the closest to the article because the system justifies itself to be right. Other commenters have said that it’s a case of parallel reconstruction . (Which would rule out minority report).
The blame should not be on people who choose not to forgo the comfort of modern technology, it should be on a state which abuses that technology for dubious purposes.
No-one (perhaps except folks like Stallman?) is blameless here.
One of the responsibilities of citizenship is to preserve your liberty against encroachment by State and private actors. Neglecting to consider that is a moral failure, and one I've been guilty of in the past.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily immoral to, say, have a FB account. But it is to have one without considering the implications and acting accordingly.
Is it also a failure (moral or otherwise) for the State to not tell citizens of this particular duty? Speaking anecdotally, citizens' duties are vaguely described as "participate, stay informed, obey and support laws." It took me decades to notice the subtle and complex intentions of the State and private actors that counter freedoms in said laws.
Not being Stallman or a full-time civil liberties defender, what's a good way for the basic citizen to be more informed, and better evaluate FB-like services?
> Is it also a failure (moral or otherwise) for the State to not tell citizens of this particular duty?
Yes - but realistically, what do you think State education is _for_?
Primarily, it's to ensure a citizenry that obeys and supports laws. Staying informed is a very distant second, and participation is actively quashed from the get-go. (What proportion of your local school board consists of children?)
As for how to stay informed - learn the basics of the technologies involved, and follow the news feeds of folks with a deep interest in the field. In this case, the EFF is a good start.
But realistically, there's too much for one person to cover. Tech? Sure, perhaps. But then there's medicine, finance, real estate, construction ...
So really, what you're left with is electing representatives who will provide responsible oversight. But realistically, almost all of them are in the pockets of lobbyists at this point.
TBH I'm not sure what the solution is, here.
So perhaps it _isn't_ a moral failure any more, because the scope has grown to the point where most people say "fuck it" and give up.
For the uninitiated, it's an amazing movie starring Tom Cruise which talks about "precrime" - although no big data involved. Highly recommend that one watch it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)
Has it had an effect on crime rates? If so, this is interesting. It means crime is predictable based on the inputs the system is measuring. It also means the Chinese AI effort is more fruitful than I expected it to be. If this is reducing crime, then we have a discussion of trade-offs. That is interesting, and potentially nuanced.
If it's the latter, however, this is not interesting and there is no reasonable discussion to be had.
To rephrase: You could define whether it is being used corruptly by measuring whether it reduces crime.
This is a loaded research question, of course, because it's studying something that we find abhorrent: Prosecuting people for crimes they haven't actually committed.
Scientifically it's super interesting. Socially and ethically it's a minefield.
Every apprehension under this program is a crime by any definition other than the arbitrary declaration of an illegitimate regime.
It would be absolutely astonishing if the people apprehended were likely to illegally kidnap and hold at least 1 citizen in their basement for at least the length of time that these people are detained.
Not necessarily. If they are capturing these people because they will have committed a crime and that in and of itself is crime then its not reducing crime.
It's possible that once enough people who on balance might commit a crime are arrested or impeded, then crime will indeed decrease.
> Taking an innocent person, and improsoning him against his will is a crime
Every criminal justice system has to balance (1) the risk of convicting the innocent, (2) the risk of letting the true crime-committer commit additional crimes (due to not being caught or caught later), and (3) the risk of being abused. We don’t like pre-crime convictions because we believe risks 1 and 3 outweigh any gains in 2. A culture with a different balance of risks, however, could come to a different but consistent conclusion. I don’t like that conclusion. But it’s at least debatable. Putting political enemies in jail is not.
>Every criminal justice system has to balance (1) the risk of convicting the innocent,
But that's not balancing it. It's just convicting the innocent automatically.
>We don’t like pre-crime convictions because we believe risks 1 and 3 outweigh any gains in 2.
There is no such thing as a pre-crime conviction unless a crime occurs.
>But it’s at least debatable.
It's debatable in the same way any nonsense is debatable - you can put the words together in a sentence - but in the colloquial sense of "debatable" it really isn't.
Have you every lived under a totalitarian regime that uses intense surveillance?
This system is causing a chilling effect on creativity, differentiation and individualism. It forces people to hide their real thoughts and live a life of constant pretence/lies. It makes the safe-space (the creative-space) to shrink to the interior of one's head. It destroys the ability of population to protest and thus participate in the political life of the country.
You do realize this is the same regime that detains political enemies under bogus charges, assassinates them and sells their organs on the black market?
This is probably impossible to know, since totalitarian regimes are known for providing completely fake statistics - and it's usually not like they have one set of numbers (real), but publish another (fake), it's that the whole pipeline is hopelessly corrupt so nobody knows the real numbers. USSR was notoriously plagued by this problem - not only for crime, but also for other things like economical statistics.
In US law, the treatment of each is very, very different. How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed.
No, its going through some motions. If you don't make the attempt, its not an attempt. By 'change of heart' I meant they don't make contact, not that they 'let them go'.
What happens if they are caught before they have a change of heart. Say a kid is caught 10 steps from school grounds with a weapon and intent to attack the school. Would you say they haven't committed a crime since there is still 10 more steps that they could've had a change of heart before they were on the school grounds?
> How about: someone planned, identified a target, went to do it and had a change of heart? Innocent in the US, because, well, no crime was committed.
Of course, if two or more people are involved and only one has a change of heart and stops actively participating (but doesn't take active steps to foil the plan in motion) the one who backed out is still (along with all the others) guilty of conspiracy. And that's true even before anyone gets to the point where they could be individually charged with an attempt, as long as one overt act toward the criminal goal has been done, the whole group is guilty of conspiracy.
And in the US, certain acts are often criminalized specifically when done with the intent to support some other target crime which is not negated by later backing out of the target crime (and in fact allows you to be arrested and convicted when you never got further than the preparatory act.)
Looks like a bigger impact on the latter, if any on the former. And in an increasingly programmable world we live in, everything becomes susceptible to the volatility of gameing for ulterior motives.
As described by Martin Kleppmann at the end of his great book, big data analytics, when used without proper regulation, creates a downward spiral. Western world enforced rules against discrimination based on sex, race, etc., yet everyone seems fine when it's the algorithm spotting and executing on the biases, which statistically are fine, but nevertheless, may be wrong in many individual cases.
the problem is 'bias' is often based on a model that is statistically and operationally accurate, but unfair from a higher order social moral framework.
a sufficiently layered net will pick up second and third order consequential effects that are not formally protected by anti-bias laws, but end up effectively mapping onto the sorts of people in categories the laws were intended to protect.
that's the fundamental problem as I see it, and it's necessarily complicated and nuanced.
Yes but so you can try and target your scare resource against those more likely to commit illegal acts not round up all insert ethnic group of your choice.
Once the algorithms realise that everyone commits at least a few crimes a day they will become 100% infallible by issuing arrest warrants for anyone with a pulse.
I never read Brave New World, but I've heard that was a theme. Everyone used illegal drugs, but there was no enforcement. Instead, if they wanted to bring you in, they just charged you with illegal drug use --because everyone knows that everyone uses illegal drugs.
Not quite... In Brave New World there is a drug called "soma" that is an opium for the masses; it's rationed by the government. The subplot around soma focuses more on trying to get people to not take it so that their minds can be freed.
This will be rolled out further and further, first the rest of China, then other parts of Asia, eventually Europe and the Americas. Strongly resist the rollout of this technology, along with the social credit rating systems.
This is like the last chapter of humanity before we stagnate for hundreds of years.
In the US at least, there are probably enough people with a significant number of firearms that it would take a war to make this work. I’m not usually fond of anti-government fanatics, but I have to admit that in extremes they can be useful.
A less militarized society could reach the same point. "Sending in the special cops with guns" === "sending in the tanks and bombers."
In both cases the government withholds superior strength for itself, regardless of the baseline. The question of "are people willing to risk their life" and "is the government willing to kill in large numbers" seem unchanged.
Sure, but that assumes a government willing to literally go to war with its populace, and why I explicitly said a war would be required. I have no illusions about how that war would end of course... tanks and B-52’s reliably best handguns and rifles. The difference between a country drowning in guns and one without them is that in the latter case it’s just that much easier, a “lower barrier to entry” if you will.
> I have no illusions about how that war would end of course... tanks and B-52’s reliably best handguns and rifles.
Plenty of US adversaries have met these odds and held their own. Aside from some targeted campaigns to eradicate individuals, we haven't truly "won" any notable military conflict since 1945.
IEDs tend to level the playing field, but see how far you get trying to build or acquire those today. You'd be among the first wave of dissidents swept up in the ML-aided dragnet looking for purchasers of batteries and fertilizer.
All good points, and I think it reinforces the incredible cost associated with attempting to institute something as tyrannical as “pre-crime” detention in the US. It could be done, but only over a mountain of corpses and human misery. A government willing to do that, and sacrifice economic and social stability for generations is happily not one which resembles our government. That could change, but it would be a massive change, not some inevitable slog.
In China they’ve already crushed anything like resistance, disarmed their populace, and gone the full “re-education camp” route for a while.
This is not a situation that can (or should) be resolved through violent rebellion.
A violent response would only serve to justify the application of the system, to cut the head off of any leadership structure before it materializes (or just pick off the lone wackos before they cause problems).
If it came to violence then disaster would already have struck, but there is a deterrent effect when a statistically significant portion of your population would fight to prevent it. The cost moves from, “pass some laws, enforce as usual,” to “commit to atrocity, and massive civilian losses.”
The people with the guns will be the ones supporting this. The US Govt won't be going after those types (to start) - this will first be used to justify going after terrorists, pedophiles, and the like.
At this rate, China is 10 years away from being the premiere surveillance state in all history. I mean, think of all the laboratory requirements they meet that no one else does in this grand experiment:
- Single party state
- President-for-life
- Full-spectrum surveillance of their own citizens with little to no oversight
- Court system that criminalizes political dissent
- Large "re-education" and "work-based" prison system
- Widespread and automated censorship of media and online discussion in all forms, combined with a willing rewriting of history (e.g., Tiananmen in 1989 has been completely scrubbed, and discussion of it in any form is deleted within minutes)
- "Social score" system that integrates the surveillance system into the legal and bureaucratic systems
- Limited access to external information of any form outside of the Great Firewall
- The money, capability, and the political willingness to implement and expand all of the above as needed
I am hard-pressed right now to imagine any other country that is drifting more quickly to a dystopian surveillance state than China.
Well it's pretty easy to generate the ROC curves for this one. We're talking discrete events over a defined timespan, right? Just create a control group and monitor the difference.
Companies which name themselves after dystopic objects or ideals with a 'nod and wink' always creep the living hell out of me. There's never a good answer when they inevitably ask, "well what did you think was going to happen?"
Fair enough, I'm not very steeped in the intricacies of Lord of the Rings. I got the feeling that it was the nature of their power and omniscience that corrupted most individuals who used them, sort of like the Ring, but that could be completely wrong.
That's completely wrong. The Palantiri were created by the Noldor (one of the powerful old races of elves) and used without corruption, and then given to the Numenoreans as a gift; they were used for a long time without corruption. They were so powerful that even Sauron could not make arbitrary images appear. But the weak-minded were easily influenced by him through it; not through the nature of the stones.
The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
There's a lot of writing about the omission that I think explains Jackson's thinking (and it's clear he thought about this).
Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
Ok, that was awesome. I don't buy it at all (if Sauron was indeed a threat to Tom, or if Tom could be bound by the art of the Valar, I feel as though the ring would effect him as well), but it was a really fun read.
A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
Yes, but the key difference is we have separation of gov't power and institutions to actually challenge some of these things. When the gov't oversteps it's bounds and they get their hand slapped by the courts, that's the system working. Our gov't is made up of fallible humans, thus we're never going to get to the point where our rights aren't under threat.
Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
Military Commissions Act seems to have passed the scrutiny of both legal and political part of the system. The legal battle has shifted permanently. It's now over details in particular cases, not over the generic principle.
The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
What you're talking about - the erosions in the US system - is an extraordinary distance from where China is at already. You can't talk about Winnie the Pooh in China, or mispronounce the "ping" part of Jinping in the media. Those aren't jokes, that's indicative of China's rapid regression backwards. Over the last five years they've curtailed the few freedoms around business and expression that had been gained. Their economic & business agenda has entirely shifted as have the rules. Dictatorships have historically tended to only go one direction, and China is already a very, very low-rights nation.
Do you really think there are 120,000 people in that province that are all making bulk purchases of unneeded fertilizer?
There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
I'm not going to lie to you, there is no way that could happen.
When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb.
There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
This is crazy. The government is not a wall between you and what scares you; that is what politicians want you to think. The wall is never high enough; it is never deep enough; there are never enough cameras; we need better people deciding what is OK to do on camera and what is not OK.
This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power.
Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.
> The government is not a wall between you and what scares you
While I'm sympathetic to your point, it can be taken too far. Government does provide security to its citizens, and it does that partly by gaining prior intelligence about suspicious activities. Some things should be investigated - if someone posted online about committing murder, in detail and with clear plans, I'd hope law enforcement would check it out.
I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people, so we try to stigmatize our own government. But the truth of the matter is US government is nowhere near the heavy handed ness of China, and we can deal with China to some degree. We can hold China to its actions. After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China, I feel like it’s time to take a stand. It’s time to stop supporting such a bad regime. Time to voice my concerns about China to my government, and vote with my wallet. No more Chinese products if I can. No more trips to Shanghai. I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
From a non US POV, under Obama people seemed disappointed and betrayed by how a man that they saw as on their side was not doing the right things in their eyes.
Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
No. Nothing has fundamentally changed. That's merely partisan wishful dreaming, it makes people feel better to think their side isn't nearly so bad on eg privacy.
The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
Oh come on, neoliberals aren’t much better. They’re two feet to the left of the right wingers when it comes to surveillance, policing, funding the military & pro-military nationalistic rhetoric, with industry hands in their pocket, and their own hands in the media. The seeds for fascism, authoritarianism, and cults of personality are well rooted in the senior offices of congress on both sides. It has been ripe for abuse and we have seen only a small bit of this in 2016.
Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while.
If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
This. Obama radically expanded the surveillance state as did Bush and arguably Clinton abided it even if he didn't outright affect it in the same way as his successors. I'm not going to make the statement that the Chinese surveillance state is wrong, because in this instance I think it's irrelevant to the greater point that its execution is a totally different beast from the government surveillance that takes place in the USA. Whether or not one party in the USA is worse than another, neither is comparable in this context to the CPC.
I think the issue is that Trump and the State department are not going to do anything about a strongman in China. Trump likes strongmen and hasn't doing anything to curb Duerte, Putin and now Xi in China.
Well, that may be true. I'm not sure what another state department might have done in this position against Xi, though; this is a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage either.
> I'm not sure what another state department might have done
The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. It's believed that people with freedom and opportunity become vibrant trade partners and allies, not enemies in war. Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
That historic policy is widely believed to have given the US enormous influence, as people generally feel favorably towards others whose central goal is freedom and opportunity for all.
The current State Dept (including the Secretary of State) and other leading government officials have openly forewarn support for human rights. The Secretary of State said making money is more important (which fits the approach of many in the oil industry, and he was CEO of Exxon). Others deemphasize it for no given reason, and advocate even eliminating the State Dept in favor of military power.
> a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage
A lack of straightforward leverage is pretty normal for international relations; it's the sea in which diplomats swim. Almost every great thing that has been accomplished in that field was done in that environment.
> The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy.
Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim (the relative rarity of democracy-on-democracy war does not require any more than the small proportion of potential historical pairs of nations that consist of two democratic nations to explain it.)
>> > The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy.
> Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide.
But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sacrificed others, on large scales, to narrow interests.
>> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
> There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim
It's hard to prove a negative through evidence, but can you cite and exception? And looking at the obverse, progress in international peace and cooperation, have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO? Remember Europe before democracy.
No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controling for other known sources of variability.
> but can you cite and exception?
Sure, if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow that the expected number of wars if democracies on both sides isn't far less than one, you will also find lots of actual wars between Democracies. Even if you ignore wars where the only pair of democracies are a separatist group and the unit they are separating from (e.g., the American Revolution), there are plenty (War of 1812, for instance, or more recently some parts of the Yugoslav Wars.)
It would be great if you could cite some examples. The American Revolution and War of 1812 clearly are not ones; the UK was not a democracy. The wars in the former Yugoslavia are a stretch; those were at best very nascent democracies.
> if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ...
The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team' depends on how narrow your definition is of 'basketball'.
> The American Revolution and War of 1812 clearly are not ones; the UK was not a democracy.
At what point precisely did the Westminster system, one of the more common models of modern democracy, become a democracy?
Note that the later you peg and the more narrowly you define “democracy” to justify it, the more you make the case that there have been so few democracies that, given the actual historicsl frequency of interstate wars and the number of nations available at any time, the number of wars expected to have a democracy on either side is expected to be near zero even if democracy in both sides of a dyad does nothing to decrease the probability of war between the countries.
(Also note if you claim it's not a democracy because it had territories unrepresented in the national government despite the form of government being democratic, that has the same effect—and even rules out the modern US as a democracy, as well.)
This seems deeply, deeply idealistic to me--but ultimately this seems political, so I'll just say my point was that it's not clear what Obama could have done differently aside from save face and keep the state department staffed.
Let's just see if Trump and the State department make any statements condemning these moves and encouraging democratic institutions. Sometimes all you need is a few strongly worded statements that say we are watching. The US has a lot of influence here.
> This seems deeply, deeply idealistic to me--but ultimately this seems political, so I'll just say my point was that it's not clear what Obama could have done differently aside from save face and keep the state department staffed.
The facts differ from your claims. All you need to do is look at history, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush Jr to Obama and everyone in between. All embraced these things and acted on them.
The current nationalists want to paint it as idealistic, but in fact it has been the mainstream - and very effective - for generations.
Let's be realistic. China has an economy nearly three times the size of the #3 economy, Japan, at this point. They dominate dozens of aspects of global trade and commodities. They're a nuclear power, and clearly the world's #2 military (and persistently trying to close the gap with the US).
So, do what about Xi exactly? Nothing. There's absolutely nothing Trump or Obama could or would be able to do about Xi's power grab. Obama would have issued a PR about concerns of this or that, and it would have been meaningless in actuality (other than making a small number of people feel slightly better for a minute).
China has been authoritarian-heavy in one form or another for most of the last 300 years or so of modern history. Smacking them on the nose about it isn't going to accomplish much. It'll work about as well as it has with Russia over the prior century.
An organized global response would probably dampen ambitions. In fact it's unlikely this would have happened except for in the current situation. There are a lot of ways to wield influence effectively.
Economic partnerships could be formed with the nations that surround China, especially the nations that could potentially restrict China’s access to global shipping. It would force them to spend huge amounts of capital on railroads to maintain control of their connection to the greater world.
All of the surrounding nations would agree with your accusation of authoritarian tendencies from China and would eagerly align themselves with each other and the US in order to level the playing field between them and China.
Another thing that could be done is to shame them on the international stage into adopting policies that restrict their ability to pollute, and subsequently slow their growth.
Tangentially: Is there a way to draw a line between this kind of comment and (IMHO) productive ones, in order to make enforceable, effective rules?
The comment adds no knowledge to the discussion - I'm no wiser after reading it - and is inflammatory, risking further derailment of the discussion. Mostly it communicates the emotional state of the commenter, in regard to this issue, when the comment was written.
There are times and places to do that, but they are very common and we also need the other kind of interaction: A very important problem is how to have substantive, valuable discussion of public affairs, and I'm searching for a solution.
> we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people
Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input.
> After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China
That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand.
> I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china?
Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.
Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.
People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
“
It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
“’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :(”
>Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.
Try a few decades.
> People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow.
Goodness.
> Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
You mean the website full of russian, chinese, european and american propagandists where you can't take anything seriously? Where anyone can pretend to be anything and lie all day long? Did you write that reddit comment?
> sorry my English sucks
Going through your comment history, your english is fine. I don't know why you are pretending and faking as if your english sucks.
> I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese,
I thought native chinese couldn't speak? "People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. "
> I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.
Predictive policing is old, and has been done in consultation with universities before. There are papers on predicting crime vs criminals, predicting by time and address, predicting by age, etc., including discussion on whether this leads to uneven enforcement on minorities. It would be surprising to expect law enforcement to go towards less statistical and software usage.
What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats.
Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.
So as many of the comments echoed they are using big data to perform parallel reconstruction to detain people and justify it using some kind of computational technique ?
> The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass.
Psycho-Pass is excellent. They also released a visual novel in the states, Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. I also found when watching it it felt like it was decently inspired from the older anime Cyber City Oedo 808, which had the plot of the criminal enforcers hunting others.
Cyber City Oedo 808 is excellent visually and story-wise. It's the one bit of scifi I recommend more than anything else, and I've never found someone who didn't like it.
How do you figure? Sure the short story has a dramatically different ending, that I kind of preferred, but on the whole it's not like the short story is that amazingly well written.
It's a shame we moved a lot of the US industrial base to an authoritarian and potentially hostile country like China. A bit scary to think of the generation or two of people who won't have the knowledge to manufacture things should they ever need to because of conflict in some form. Seems like it reduces any leverage the US has for holding China accountable for much that it does.
I like this point but can you elaborate on it more? My knee jerk reaction is to say "why". I'm not very familiar with manufacturing as I'm sure a lot of people aren't, but it seems like most of the knowledge is in the design of the factory not in the skill of the workers. I know that might be an ignorant statement but that's why I'm asking for elaboration.
We need some investors to band up and recreate the hardware environment in Shenzhen. There would be a lot of money made that way too so not sure why there wouldn’t be one in Nevada or Arizona or something.
Yeah, I kinda wish that Apple, as a condition of repatriating its billions at a lower tax rate, had to spend that money standing up Shenzen-like infrastructure somewhere in the US to build its products.
I think the problem is that even if they did, they wouldn't use the facilities, because the labor in the Chinese/Taiwanese facilities would still be cheaper.
While I like the idea, I think there are presently cultural barriers in the way of that succeeding, mainly the Western view of IP vs the Eastern view of IP.
is very reproducible, by USA or anyone. They for decades had 10% GDP growth: BY REDUCING TAXES. Not something popular in California - due to Cali math(CA tax payer does not understand that lower taxes = higher tax revenue )
The other trick China used is that it started with a very small economy. Per capita GDP is still less than $10,000 per person, compared to $56,000 in California.
Have you done your homework on your tax claim? Because it isn't actually guaranteed that lower tax rates will lead to higher tax revenue, it depends on the specifics of the tax regime and proposed cut.
This would not work and it isn't even necessary. Looking at how other low-wage fast-growing countries in the past developed, China's wages and costs will soon get close to Western ones and there will be a more fair competition. Eg. if the 1980's hobby economists had been right, all our cars, electronics and computers would be Japanese by now.
I disagree.... the US was shit at producing weapons before WW2 (apart from Carriers), yet within two years was to able to be the number one mass producer in quantity, and eventually on quality.
When there is both political and economical will, the country will be able to mass-produce again. Right now there is no economic incentive to do so.
They weren't idle (look into what clothes washing alone used to take), but the war effort certainly shifted priorities and also increased the number of women without domestic responsibilities.
I wonder if that's still possible. The US was an industrial country at the time; they had to convert existing factories to other forms of production (e.g., from cars to bombers). Now, manufacturing is much less prevalent; the US would have to create capacity from scratch.
Also, manufacturing is much less productive than other economic activities - that's why it's done in poorer countries that don't have better options while the US does higher value things (ignoring for this purpose the very important issues of the distribution of those higher returns). I wonder what the blow to the economy would be if the US suddenly had to switch large amounts of resources to manufacturing.
Finally, given that manufacturing is no longer the cutting edge of business, I wonder if it might be easier to build capacity than we think. As an example, t-shirts are mostly made outside the US; I would guess that if there was suddenly a critical need for them, the US could ramp up capacity quickly.
Not all manufacturing is less productive. It might not be productive to manufacture t-shirts in the US but it's productive to manufacture airplanes.
There's the flying geese paradigm (FGP) that theorizes the rapid industrialization of Asia. It theorizes the movement of manufacturing form country to country as well as a process of industrial upgrading.
For example, manufacturing began in London, moved to the US, and eventually someone built a factory in Japan. In all these circumstances in order to stay competitive - they had to move to a country with cheaper labor or manufacture a more advanced product with a bigger profit margin. However their competitors catch up and they need to do the same thing again. Find a better more complex product to manufacture or find a way to manufacture it cheaper overseas.
The US started to lose its manufacturing jobs and thus its middle class starting from the 1950s. Most of these jobs were replaced by the service industry for half the pay. Today the service industry employs the most poor Americans today, your cashiers and waiters, and they are soon to be eliminated.
I've been researching manufacturing because I want to make some toothbrushes. In China, I could make them for less than 25 cents. I'm not sure how much it would cost in the USA, and a lot of my colleagues tell me that most manufacturers won't even call them back because they're so small. China on the other hand doesn't care - they're happy to sell you 1000 toothbrushes for 25 cents each.
I don't know what's better. To manufacture in the USA and not be able to compete on price - one of the biggest factors in a purchase or manufacture them in China and be competitive... Well I guess the answer is simple, if you want to make a business, you need to be profitable. If it's not profitable in the US, then China might be your only answer.
America had one overwhelming advantage - thousands of miles of ocean separating it from enemy lines. The industrial capacity of practically every other major nation was laid waste by strategic bombing. America also had domestic production of nearly every important manufacturing input, rendering it practically immune to naval blockade.
Post-war, America didn't spend a single cent on rebuilding infrastructure lost to bombing, while the other major powers needed a decade of austerity just to get back to where they started. Britain was still repaying the Anglo-American war loan in 2006.
America did an excellent job of scaling up manufacturing capacity during WWII, but the factors that made it such a dominant force were largely accidents of geography.
Incidentally this is also a major overlooked factor in the Cold War against the USSR.
America has had 150 years of peace and stability. The Soviet Union was ravaged by a traumatizing war at home and before that a major civil war and revolution.
What would holding China accountable entail, exactly?
"America doesn't like they way you do civilization. We don't like the way you brought 650 million people out of extreme poverty in a generation. If you have to use authoritarian tactics to do that, it's better that they stay poor and addicted to opium. You have to disband now."
"Oh, okay. Sorry America. We recognize the error of our ways. We will stop being China now."
What's actually happening right now, is the US and others (eg South Korea, Japan, some countries in Europe) are aggressively begining to redistribute their capital allocations to other nations (eg Mexico), including South East Asian competitors to China (eg Vietnam).
Samsung for example is making the majority of their phones in Vietnam now.
US imports from Vietnam have gone from nothing to $50+ billion per year in 20 years. A 100 fold increase. It's equivalent to 1/4 of their entire economy and it's almost entirely a deficit. We're going to build large regional competitors to China for strategic purposes. Conveniently, they can also buy up US debt with all of those dollars we're pouring into their economy.
Some of this is because China's manufacturing costs have climbed so much, some of it is intentional strategic emphasis (as the TPP was / is meant to be). The US very clearly has shifted its political interest in Vietnam for example.
You should look more into the history of the US as well as international opinions. The US isn't a paragon of virtue, it is only able to sell its own narrative of events because of its economic and cultural weight.
Even the belief that the rich/powerful mist have some sort of virtue is only one perspective that conveniently allows the US the moral high ground.
No country, no person, no thing is perfect. All evil comes from things that pretend to be and act as if they were. The humans that pretend to or want to be gods inevitably are the one who dehumanize others and so become demons.
Classifying something as tribalism doesn't make it not an important or real factor to be acted upon. Although I think the term nationalism is more pointed. I live in the US. My family lives in the US, and my well-being is attached to the success of the US.
I'm not arbitrarily in favor of everything the US does, but on the margin, I am in favor of policies that optimize this country's success.
The current projections are that the US will probably reclaim its manufacturing crown or get close to it. A big part of China's gains the last ten years are in over-production. As those excesses are eventually removed or reduced, the gap will close to practically nothing within about another 10-15 years. For example, that chart showing the manufacturing levels, if you do nothing else but remove China's current subsidized industrial over-production, the gap narrows such that China is merely ahead by 10-15%. China's manufacturing is no longer expanding meaningfully, whereas US manufacturing continues to expand slowly but surely year after year; the corp tax cuts and very inexpensive US natural gas will continue to bolster that.
It appears that police are still building profiles themselves by sifting the big data for terrorist-matching patterns.
The next step is to let AI do it all. We don't even have to know what is being matched on what, just that Citizen A's "profile" is sufficiently similar to Terrorist B's "profile".
This is how AI takes over the world without requiring sentience.
More correct headline should be "China using big data to detain people who did not commit any crime". At that point you're realizing this has already routinely been done by many countries, including China, without using any big data at all. In fact, detaining people who didn't commit any crime has been done before people knew what "data" is.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadOne of the responsibilities of citizenship is to preserve your liberty against encroachment by State and private actors. Neglecting to consider that is a moral failure, and one I've been guilty of in the past.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily immoral to, say, have a FB account. But it is to have one without considering the implications and acting accordingly.
Not being Stallman or a full-time civil liberties defender, what's a good way for the basic citizen to be more informed, and better evaluate FB-like services?
Yes - but realistically, what do you think State education is _for_?
Primarily, it's to ensure a citizenry that obeys and supports laws. Staying informed is a very distant second, and participation is actively quashed from the get-go. (What proportion of your local school board consists of children?)
As for how to stay informed - learn the basics of the technologies involved, and follow the news feeds of folks with a deep interest in the field. In this case, the EFF is a good start.
But realistically, there's too much for one person to cover. Tech? Sure, perhaps. But then there's medicine, finance, real estate, construction ...
So really, what you're left with is electing representatives who will provide responsible oversight. But realistically, almost all of them are in the pockets of lobbyists at this point.
TBH I'm not sure what the solution is, here.
So perhaps it _isn't_ a moral failure any more, because the scope has grown to the point where most people say "fuck it" and give up.
If it's the latter, however, this is not interesting and there is no reasonable discussion to be had.
This is a loaded research question, of course, because it's studying something that we find abhorrent: Prosecuting people for crimes they haven't actually committed.
Scientifically it's super interesting. Socially and ethically it's a minefield.
Every apprehension under this program is a crime by any definition other than the arbitrary declaration of an illegitimate regime.
It would be absolutely astonishing if the people apprehended were likely to illegally kidnap and hold at least 1 citizen in their basement for at least the length of time that these people are detained.
Thus it can pretty much only increase crime.
It's possible that once enough people who on balance might commit a crime are arrested or impeded, then crime will indeed decrease.
Even if this system works, people who have not committed a crime (yet) are innocent.
Taking an innocent person, and improsoning him against his will is a crime, pretty extreme one.
Even if this system works really well, it's hard to imagine that the crimes it prevents can be more extreme than the crimes it commits.
Every criminal justice system has to balance (1) the risk of convicting the innocent, (2) the risk of letting the true crime-committer commit additional crimes (due to not being caught or caught later), and (3) the risk of being abused. We don’t like pre-crime convictions because we believe risks 1 and 3 outweigh any gains in 2. A culture with a different balance of risks, however, could come to a different but consistent conclusion. I don’t like that conclusion. But it’s at least debatable. Putting political enemies in jail is not.
But that's not balancing it. It's just convicting the innocent automatically.
>We don’t like pre-crime convictions because we believe risks 1 and 3 outweigh any gains in 2.
There is no such thing as a pre-crime conviction unless a crime occurs.
>But it’s at least debatable.
It's debatable in the same way any nonsense is debatable - you can put the words together in a sentence - but in the colloquial sense of "debatable" it really isn't.
I don't think so. You could also likely randomly detain people, and the fear you would cause may also reduce crime rates. That doesn't make it right.
This system is causing a chilling effect on creativity, differentiation and individualism. It forces people to hide their real thoughts and live a life of constant pretence/lies. It makes the safe-space (the creative-space) to shrink to the interior of one's head. It destroys the ability of population to protest and thus participate in the political life of the country.
This is probably impossible to know, since totalitarian regimes are known for providing completely fake statistics - and it's usually not like they have one set of numbers (real), but publish another (fake), it's that the whole pipeline is hopelessly corrupt so nobody knows the real numbers. USSR was notoriously plagued by this problem - not only for crime, but also for other things like economical statistics.
probacriminals
Consider the following cases:
Arresting the guy who kidnapped someone.
Arresting the guy in the act of trying to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who set out to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who is preparing his home to hold a kidnapped victim and is identifying a target.
Arresting the guy who researched how to kidnap someone.
Arresting the guy who has expressed strong interest in kidnapping someone.
Which of these is wrong? I think we would generally agree the last two are, but which of the middle ones do we draw a line at?
When he is A kidnapper who has yet to kidnap?
Of course, if two or more people are involved and only one has a change of heart and stops actively participating (but doesn't take active steps to foil the plan in motion) the one who backed out is still (along with all the others) guilty of conspiracy. And that's true even before anyone gets to the point where they could be individually charged with an attempt, as long as one overt act toward the criminal goal has been done, the whole group is guilty of conspiracy.
And in the US, certain acts are often criminalized specifically when done with the intent to support some other target crime which is not negated by later backing out of the target crime (and in fact allows you to be arrested and convicted when you never got further than the preparatory act.)
http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
a sufficiently layered net will pick up second and third order consequential effects that are not formally protected by anti-bias laws, but end up effectively mapping onto the sorts of people in categories the laws were intended to protect.
that's the fundamental problem as I see it, and it's necessarily complicated and nuanced.
Our intelligence agencies (at least try to) predict terrorist activity and put a stop to it be before anything happens.
Not only was the drug legal, the premise of bringing people in has nothing to do with the plot and theme of the book.
This is like the last chapter of humanity before we stagnate for hundreds of years.
In both cases the government withholds superior strength for itself, regardless of the baseline. The question of "are people willing to risk their life" and "is the government willing to kill in large numbers" seem unchanged.
Plenty of US adversaries have met these odds and held their own. Aside from some targeted campaigns to eradicate individuals, we haven't truly "won" any notable military conflict since 1945.
IEDs tend to level the playing field, but see how far you get trying to build or acquire those today. You'd be among the first wave of dissidents swept up in the ML-aided dragnet looking for purchasers of batteries and fertilizer.
In China they’ve already crushed anything like resistance, disarmed their populace, and gone the full “re-education camp” route for a while.
A violent response would only serve to justify the application of the system, to cut the head off of any leadership structure before it materializes (or just pick off the lone wackos before they cause problems).
- Single party state
- President-for-life
- Full-spectrum surveillance of their own citizens with little to no oversight
- Court system that criminalizes political dissent
- Large "re-education" and "work-based" prison system
- Widespread and automated censorship of media and online discussion in all forms, combined with a willing rewriting of history (e.g., Tiananmen in 1989 has been completely scrubbed, and discussion of it in any form is deleted within minutes)
- "Social score" system that integrates the surveillance system into the legal and bureaucratic systems
- Limited access to external information of any form outside of the Great Firewall
- The money, capability, and the political willingness to implement and expand all of the above as needed
I am hard-pressed right now to imagine any other country that is drifting more quickly to a dystopian surveillance state than China.
What the government can do is something very different. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/opinion/europe-is-spying-...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/fcc-chairman-browsing-history-f...
Anybody got measures of those?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri
I think the name of the company is highly apt.
The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
/s
Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
"Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific"
Well, stuff happens; thanks.
Fortunately we have something called Habeas Corpus
Habeas corpus after 9/11 is not what it used to be. ACLU has been fighting several cases of clear violations.
Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
Same for someone who want to purchase large quality of fertilizer for no real needs.
There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb.
There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power.
Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.
While I'm sympathetic to your point, it can be taken too far. Government does provide security to its citizens, and it does that partly by gaining prior intelligence about suspicious activities. Some things should be investigated - if someone posted online about committing murder, in detail and with clear plans, I'd hope law enforcement would check it out.
Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
Pinning any change here on trump is like blaming the crash on a pilot who took charge after the engines already blew. There is little to no recognition of the abuses of federal government in the government itself, and not for a while.
If any authoritarian power rises, it will be because the democrats are too busy shoveling their shit out of view to put up any real fight. Just look at how blame for a mediocre-at-best platform was shifted to russian propaganda, as if it could have possibly moved the needle more than the hundreds of millions of “legit” propaganda spent by the democrats, as if Bernie Sander's continued popularity doesn't point to a way to strong support in the future that they continue to reject for more unpopular, centrist, neoliberals.
The US State Department, and the entire US government, has for generations made human rights central to US foreign policy. It's believed that people with freedom and opportunity become vibrant trade partners and allies, not enemies in war. Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
That historic policy is widely believed to have given the US enormous influence, as people generally feel favorably towards others whose central goal is freedom and opportunity for all.
The current State Dept (including the Secretary of State) and other leading government officials have openly forewarn support for human rights. The Secretary of State said making money is more important (which fits the approach of many in the oil industry, and he was CEO of Exxon). Others deemphasize it for no given reason, and advocate even eliminating the State Dept in favor of military power.
> a continuation of politics that hardly offered Obama straightforward leverage
A lack of straightforward leverage is pretty normal for international relations; it's the sea in which diplomats swim. Almost every great thing that has been accomplished in that field was done in that environment.
Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim (the relative rarity of democracy-on-democracy war does not require any more than the small proportion of potential historical pairs of nations that consist of two democratic nations to explain it.)
> Rhetorically; the substance is less consistent.
Agreed, but the results are incredible on the scale of human history. Under Pax Americana, look at the amazing spread of liberty and democracy, and of prosperity, to people worldwide.
But yes, more should have been done. Too often the U.S. sacrificed others, on large scales, to narrow interests.
>> Democracies don't start wars against other democracies, as an historical rule.
> There is basically no empirical evidence for this popular claim
It's hard to prove a negative through evidence, but can you cite and exception? And looking at the obverse, progress in international peace and cooperation, have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO? Remember Europe before democracy.
No, it's not, in the usual scientific sense of proof rather than some absolutist one; you show the expected incidence of the inhibitory effect did not exist, and then show that the actual value (either by surveying the whole universe of concern or a random subset) is below that expected value to a degree that makes it improbable that it occurs by chance, while controling for other known sources of variability.
> but can you cite and exception?
Sure, if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow that the expected number of wars if democracies on both sides isn't far less than one, you will also find lots of actual wars between Democracies. Even if you ignore wars where the only pair of democracies are a separatist group and the unit they are separating from (e.g., the American Revolution), there are plenty (War of 1812, for instance, or more recently some parts of the Yugoslav Wars.)
Wikipedia has more discussion and examples:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_between_democra...
> have non-democracies ever achieved anything like the EU or NATO?
Yes, non-democracies have created both continent-spanning multi-national supergovernments like the EU and wide regional military alliances like NATO.
In fact, they did both long before democracies did.
> if you use a definition of Democracy that isn't so narrow ...
The word has a meaning; these aren't narrow definitions any more than saying 'Manchester United isn't a basketball team' depends on how narrow your definition is of 'basketball'.
At what point precisely did the Westminster system, one of the more common models of modern democracy, become a democracy?
Note that the later you peg and the more narrowly you define “democracy” to justify it, the more you make the case that there have been so few democracies that, given the actual historicsl frequency of interstate wars and the number of nations available at any time, the number of wars expected to have a democracy on either side is expected to be near zero even if democracy in both sides of a dyad does nothing to decrease the probability of war between the countries.
(Also note if you claim it's not a democracy because it had territories unrepresented in the national government despite the form of government being democratic, that has the same effect—and even rules out the modern US as a democracy, as well.)
The facts differ from your claims. All you need to do is look at history, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Kennedy to Reagan to Bush Jr to Obama and everyone in between. All embraced these things and acted on them.
The current nationalists want to paint it as idealistic, but in fact it has been the mainstream - and very effective - for generations.
So, do what about Xi exactly? Nothing. There's absolutely nothing Trump or Obama could or would be able to do about Xi's power grab. Obama would have issued a PR about concerns of this or that, and it would have been meaningless in actuality (other than making a small number of people feel slightly better for a minute).
China has been authoritarian-heavy in one form or another for most of the last 300 years or so of modern history. Smacking them on the nose about it isn't going to accomplish much. It'll work about as well as it has with Russia over the prior century.
All of the surrounding nations would agree with your accusation of authoritarian tendencies from China and would eagerly align themselves with each other and the US in order to level the playing field between them and China.
Another thing that could be done is to shame them on the international stage into adopting policies that restrict their ability to pollute, and subsequently slow their growth.
The comment adds no knowledge to the discussion - I'm no wiser after reading it - and is inflammatory, risking further derailment of the discussion. Mostly it communicates the emotional state of the commenter, in regard to this issue, when the comment was written.
There are times and places to do that, but they are very common and we also need the other kind of interaction: A very important problem is how to have substantive, valuable discussion of public affairs, and I'm searching for a solution.
Who are we to change anything about china? Talk about hubris. Considering the horrors and war crimes we committed against china for 150 years, I don't think china is interested on our input.
> After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China
That's as silly as a chinese person saying after reading about the native american "concentrations", they need to take a stand.
> I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
Your friends? If the government is "terrorizing" your friends, what are they doing in china?
Get off your high horse. We aren't the world police and we certainly aren't saints. Pretending we are "moral" while destabilizing countries and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people is rather hypocritical.
Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.
People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
“’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :(”
Try a few decades.
> People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow.
Goodness.
> Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.
You mean the website full of russian, chinese, european and american propagandists where you can't take anything seriously? Where anyone can pretend to be anything and lie all day long? Did you write that reddit comment?
> sorry my English sucks
Going through your comment history, your english is fine. I don't know why you are pretending and faking as if your english sucks.
> I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese,
I thought native chinese couldn't speak? "People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. "
> I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.
Is this for real? Are you gordon chang?
What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats.
Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass
TLDR:
> The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass.
Machine learning is still a black box, and politicians don't seem to understand this.
Bunnie talks about it on his blog here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
Here's one where he tears down a flicker flame lamp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KhtBA0EHDM
Isn't there large issues in USA colleges with students from China cheating left and right?
It's much easier to copy.
is very reproducible, by USA or anyone. They for decades had 10% GDP growth: BY REDUCING TAXES. Not something popular in California - due to Cali math(CA tax payer does not understand that lower taxes = higher tax revenue )
Have you done your homework on your tax claim? Because it isn't actually guaranteed that lower tax rates will lead to higher tax revenue, it depends on the specifics of the tax regime and proposed cut.
Small or big: cutting taxes provides growth. Including more tax revenue.
When there is both political and economical will, the country will be able to mass-produce again. Right now there is no economic incentive to do so.
Also, it would probably be harder to bootstrap 2020s-era manufacturing infrastructure than it would be to bootstrap 1940s-era infrastructure.
They weren't idle (look into what clothes washing alone used to take), but the war effort certainly shifted priorities and also increased the number of women without domestic responsibilities.
I wonder if that's still possible. The US was an industrial country at the time; they had to convert existing factories to other forms of production (e.g., from cars to bombers). Now, manufacturing is much less prevalent; the US would have to create capacity from scratch.
Also, manufacturing is much less productive than other economic activities - that's why it's done in poorer countries that don't have better options while the US does higher value things (ignoring for this purpose the very important issues of the distribution of those higher returns). I wonder what the blow to the economy would be if the US suddenly had to switch large amounts of resources to manufacturing.
Finally, given that manufacturing is no longer the cutting edge of business, I wonder if it might be easier to build capacity than we think. As an example, t-shirts are mostly made outside the US; I would guess that if there was suddenly a critical need for them, the US could ramp up capacity quickly.
There's the flying geese paradigm (FGP) that theorizes the rapid industrialization of Asia. It theorizes the movement of manufacturing form country to country as well as a process of industrial upgrading.
For example, manufacturing began in London, moved to the US, and eventually someone built a factory in Japan. In all these circumstances in order to stay competitive - they had to move to a country with cheaper labor or manufacture a more advanced product with a bigger profit margin. However their competitors catch up and they need to do the same thing again. Find a better more complex product to manufacture or find a way to manufacture it cheaper overseas.
The US started to lose its manufacturing jobs and thus its middle class starting from the 1950s. Most of these jobs were replaced by the service industry for half the pay. Today the service industry employs the most poor Americans today, your cashiers and waiters, and they are soon to be eliminated.
I've been researching manufacturing because I want to make some toothbrushes. In China, I could make them for less than 25 cents. I'm not sure how much it would cost in the USA, and a lot of my colleagues tell me that most manufacturers won't even call them back because they're so small. China on the other hand doesn't care - they're happy to sell you 1000 toothbrushes for 25 cents each.
I don't know what's better. To manufacture in the USA and not be able to compete on price - one of the biggest factors in a purchase or manufacture them in China and be competitive... Well I guess the answer is simple, if you want to make a business, you need to be profitable. If it's not profitable in the US, then China might be your only answer.
Post-war, America didn't spend a single cent on rebuilding infrastructure lost to bombing, while the other major powers needed a decade of austerity just to get back to where they started. Britain was still repaying the Anglo-American war loan in 2006.
America did an excellent job of scaling up manufacturing capacity during WWII, but the factors that made it such a dominant force were largely accidents of geography.
America spent a lot in helping rebuild infrastructure elsewhere.
America has had 150 years of peace and stability. The Soviet Union was ravaged by a traumatizing war at home and before that a major civil war and revolution.
"America doesn't like they way you do civilization. We don't like the way you brought 650 million people out of extreme poverty in a generation. If you have to use authoritarian tactics to do that, it's better that they stay poor and addicted to opium. You have to disband now."
"Oh, okay. Sorry America. We recognize the error of our ways. We will stop being China now."
Samsung for example is making the majority of their phones in Vietnam now.
US imports from Vietnam have gone from nothing to $50+ billion per year in 20 years. A 100 fold increase. It's equivalent to 1/4 of their entire economy and it's almost entirely a deficit. We're going to build large regional competitors to China for strategic purposes. Conveniently, they can also buy up US debt with all of those dollars we're pouring into their economy.
Some of this is because China's manufacturing costs have climbed so much, some of it is intentional strategic emphasis (as the TPP was / is meant to be). The US very clearly has shifted its political interest in Vietnam for example.
Even the belief that the rich/powerful mist have some sort of virtue is only one perspective that conveniently allows the US the moral high ground.
No country, no person, no thing is perfect. All evil comes from things that pretend to be and act as if they were. The humans that pretend to or want to be gods inevitably are the one who dehumanize others and so become demons.
But when you argue about a topic that affects the security of the US, there really is no such thing as "moral high ground".
Edited to add:
I believe China holds that true as well when discussing the security of China, considering the number of spies that are in the US.
So all your concerns boil down to us-vs-them tribalism?
I'm not arbitrarily in favor of everything the US does, but on the margin, I am in favor of policies that optimize this country's success.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/31/united-states-manufacturing-ch...
- Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
The next step is to let AI do it all. We don't even have to know what is being matched on what, just that Citizen A's "profile" is sufficiently similar to Terrorist B's "profile".
This is how AI takes over the world without requiring sentience.