The latest craze in Chinese slang is a combination of 穷 and 丑 with 土 tucked neatly inside.
Pronounced “qiou,” the new character can’t be produced on a keyboard.
Question for anyone more knowledgeable on the topic: would reformatting text/Chinese characters/ language symbols in general as images prevent them from being detected and censored out as easily? For example, imagine a photo of two trees with a hammock in between them used to represent the letter “H.” A collection of images together would form words, presumably which are harder to decipher than just plain text.
I’d imagine that some machine learning techniques would quickly pick up the more obvious images, but anything more complex would end up requiring manual human review, which would then potentially overwhelm the ability of an actor to censor material. But I really have very little knowledge of how this works in practice.
Ultimately you'd be training a net to identify linear features arranged in consistent pattern. The feasibility of such a net depends on the signal to noise ratio in the input data (how subtle are the encoded words?), with the number of images required to train to a minimum accuracy increasing with busier input data. This assumes you're training a net with a suitablly complex and appropriately architected neural network.
For some degree of intuition regarding training data, I like to imagine neural networks as infant brains which will be shown classified training images repeatedly in order to teach associations. Unfortunately we haven't really come far enough yet to give concrete numbers.
tldr: might work, if you have a suitable architecture, and enough training data, in proportion to the complexity of the encoding.
There's a hard dilemma between discoverability to audiences and obscurity to censors.
Steganography can work in some applications, but it's not a general solution. Common memes like Winnie the Pooh as a stand in for Xi are a way people naturally mask information through symbolism. Once it becomes common, censors watch for it.
If your image becomes popular, they will pull you aside. They won't catch every image, but they can increase general risks.
Even in one on one conversations, the risk is that the person you're speaking with could screen cap your chats and have you arrested, maybe because they themselves have been put in an impossible situation.
You might be able to solve for man-in-the-middle, but you can't solve for cop-on-the end.
Isn't this just CAPTCHA, and aren't CAPTCHA-breaking tactics pretty good? Especially considering that we're talking about a state actor here, and a single detection would reveal that one was intentionally trying to evade censorship.
You'd have to have both intelligibility and plausible deniability for any use.
Telepathy is the only thorough solution I can imagine.
You'd invent and disseminate a viral "spell" that teaches people this.
The spell would convey the thought-form of communicating with the explicit intent of speaking about nothing that would be censored or put you and your loved ones in danger. One effect of this is you learn to communicate via more and more subtle innuendo, because whenever you do speak about dangerous topics anyway you're contradicting yourself and that can be felt. It's key however to communicate without any innuendo at all, and to not hold onto communicating any specific forbidden thing. That will take practice though, so making sure there's an obvious legal interpretation is a good safeguard.
The first thing you'd need to learn is to express that what your conversation partner is saying seems dangerous or shifty (feedback loop, I suppose one could just express discomfort) or could use a better explanation.
It's basically steganography but you don't even construct any explicit message. You train your communication to be more and more formless. Untouchable.
I'm not versed in making spells but this is how I'd imagine it:
"I will never speak to you about anything that would be censored or that would otherwise put you and your loved ones in danger. I have all the freedom I want and need, and I only wish for China to flourish. Don't you? If so, do you mind repeating my words?"
Putting that in a song would be a good one. It could be felt as a scary thing to be told, and to take away that fear where you notice it in others you could teach what it actually does (a second spell is necessary for this, otherwise you'd have to be explicit and that would put you and the recipient in danger). I'm afraid I don't have the means to construct that however.
Why is this romanized as "qiou" and not "qiu"? Did they make a new pinyin too, is that just the post breaking the rules for an English-only audience, or am I forgetting?
It's a portmanteau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau); the Chinese aren't exactly unaware of the existence of sounds outside the pinyin system. 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou", though I can't even guess which tone it would be.
Someone already commented [0] on that below the Weibo post linked in the article. The Pinyin system doesn't always represent the same sound by the same letter sequence. There are usually two forms, depending on whether the syllable starts with a consonant or a (semi-)vowel. The combination "iou" is written "you" when it stands alone and "qiu" when the syllable starts with "q". Writing it "qiou" is just to emphasize the parts of the portmanteau.
re 冇: cool, didn't know about that one (My mandarin is shit). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%86%87 says it's actually a lone from Cantonese, which contradicts what you said a bit, but is also cool. I wonder what other examples of non-Madarin dialects influencing the national slang exist.
Daily reminder that China jailed Lu Guang (a Chinese citizen) on torture camps for photographing the grim reality of many local places riddled with child cancer and toxic waste due to unsafe industrial practices: https://www.demilked.com/missing-photographer-lu-guang/
That's literally what it means. "Small government" is about limiting institutional power, because only through power can a government impose tyranny and/or barbarism. Opression requires power, which people have the capacity to limit in first world democracies, and to a lesser extent in non democratic nations through various forms of resistance.
Of course this assumes that less violence, barbarism, and/or government opression represents the will of the populace...
>Of course this assumes that less violence, barbarism, and/or government opression represents the will of the populace...
Not at all. However, what you seem to be assuming is that government size is independent of measures of tyrrany and opression. I contend that the the size of government is directly proportional to tyranny and opression.
We should take a moment to define terms here: by size in this context I refer to scope of operations and, by necessity, authority. In which case a larger government is by definition more opressive, in that authoritarianism past some point is itself opression, as it requires involuntary imposition of rules and restriction of freedoms.
Small government is a hedge against authoritarianism and the tyranny that naturally follows when your life is increasingly micromanaged.
Well sure, if you define size of government as such. What about instead number of regulating agencies and their relative budgets? What about legislation and imprisonment?
I would argue that, at least by the classical conservative definition, small government is less about GDP and more about restriction of freedoms and invasion of privacy.
Not to imply that some degree of both may be necessary for a functioning society.
Using terms like 'big' and 'small' when referring to governments doesn't necessarily have to mean just financially or regulatory. In more serious terms, it can be used to mean tyrannical, such as becoming 'bigger' than our human rights.
How's this for a thought: How 'big' do we want our government to become? Personally I would have liked to stop before Bush signed the Patriot Act, or before we bum-rushed the middle-east with no intention of leaving, or before the NSA created their god machine, or before Obama resigned the Patriot Act several times. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of immediately stripping regulations and defending redundant agencies, but I am interested in immediately cutting off the hand that's reaching up Lady-Liberty's skirt.
Well, it's one of those age old debates as to what the powers of government should be. I quite like set ups like Jersey in the Channel Islands where the max tax is 20% and the government is more like a town council that limits itself to fairly basic stuff.
A smaller government means easier to keep authorities accountable. The bigger the government, the more bureaucracy, more difficult to control as a tool and easier to conceal corruption. A small government breeds free citizens. A big government breeds corruption.
And it means that that accountability is worth less. The argument goes the same way against big corporations - the more difficult they are to control, and it's easier to conceal corruption. A small government breeds free corporations - free to grind their employees to a pulp in the company towns of not so long ago, free to send thugs to the ballot box to make sure you vote for the right person, free to pay you in company dollars only and then gouge you in the company store.
> ... free to grind their employees to a pulp in the company towns of not so long ago, free to send thugs to the ballot box to make sure you vote for the right person, free to pay you in company dollars only and then gouge you in the company store.
Ah, but who's more likely to do these things? Free corporations that must vigorously compete against any new upstarts, or corrupt ones led by government cronies, that can easily erect a convenient "moat" against competition, fully supported by government coercion? Hint: look at which countries do these things in practice. It's not the "small government", economically free ones.
Look no further than the United States and its historical relationship with labor and corporations (when its government was much smaller), for the reasons you just quoted.
I'm not saying "big government" guarantees the opposite, but corporations have already shown us what they will do with less restrictions and oversight. They'll fill spice cans with dust and sell it as black pepper. They'll penalize break time so heavily that workers will have to defecate where they stand in the sausage plant. They'll pay as little as possible and almost-starve their employees so that they have no energy or resources to do anything except continue working.
There was a time when the United States government was smaller, sure, but the country was also a lot poorer back then. And for all the poor treatment of workers that was supposedly going on, the U.S. still attracted plenty of "dirt-poor and ugly" immigrants from all over the Western world! Can't really say the same about "big-government" countries at a similar level of wealth today.
So was the rest of the world, especially for those not in power.
> U.S. still attracted plenty of "dirt-poor and ugly" immigrants from all over the Western world
True, but also many folks' options weren't exactly great in comparison.
> Can't really say the same about "big-government" countries at a similar level of wealth today.
Germany, the Scandinavian countries for instance is an often-desired place for immigrants. The US is still a very desirable place for immigrants, even though the size of the government has grown.
The United States literally kicked off the transformation to the new world. We started as slaves to the crown, overthrew that tyrannical presence, and then created the most liberating government framework to date. Then we slipped back into high taxes and oppressive regulations. (Not saying all taxes and regulations are bad)
On the contrary, I think it makes accountability more valuable. If citizens had a beef, and protesting was as easy as finding the handful of people who are in charge, then people would be more inclined. However when the government is so big and becomes secretive, then accountability becomes more than a chore, and eventually futile.
You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice. That's entirely mistaken. The court system will still work without authoritative government control in every aspect of our lives. In fact, I believe it would work better. Take for example the secret FISA court. That's not something that's created from a small representative government, that's created from a government that became so big and unchecked that it can do what it wants, regardless of human rights or the Constitution.
Corporations come and go like docker containers, and we have a choice to do business with them. We literally have no choice with our government.
> I think it makes accountability more valuable. If citizens had a beef, and protesting was as easy as finding the handful of people who are in charge, then people would be more inclined.
Except that if that small group of people has less actual power, protesting to them can only produce less of an effect. And that they have less power means they will be less likely to cause the problems, but..
> However when the government is so big and becomes secretive, then accountability becomes more than a chore, and eventually futile.
I don't see how corporations are exempt from this pattern either.
> You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice. That's entirely mistaken. The court system will still work without authoritative government control in every aspect of our lives.
How and where do you effectively bring forth grievances when the trouble is that your employer is only paying you enough to go to work the next day?
> Take for example the secret FISA court.
The FISA court is a bad example here because it doesn't reflect the context of what I think we're discussing, namely regulations, and more specifically corporate regulations. The FISA court doesn't regulate anything.
> You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice.
My main point is simply that when regulations are minimal, citizens have virtually no recourse against the power-consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
> Corporations come and go like docker containers, ...
Many do, but the ones that exert the most control over people are the really big corporations, some having been around a century or more. These are the corporations for which we need regulation; the companies that go out of business in a year don't have an effect on nearly as many people.
> and we have a choice to do business with them.
Not exactly true. You could possibly avoid using private banks for payment processing (credit/debit cards), but you'd have to pay cash for everything or write checks. Not all businesses take those, and most online stores take neither. Cable companies have created de-facto monopolies in many places in the US based on your location. People "can move" to another location, but you will most likely end up in the same situation.
> We literally have no choice with our government.
Well, not exactly. We vote in representatives, we can change our laws and amend the constitution.
Also, in the same way that we can "choose" to avoid some companies, you can move to a different one.
I appreciate you writing this and I want to give you a worthy response.
> Except that if that small group of people has less actual power, protesting to them can only produce less of an effect. And that they have less power means they will be less likely to cause the problems, but..
> I don't see how corporations are exempt from this pattern either.
They're not, any way you look at it. You can't regulate evil away unfortunately. It doesn't matter that regulations you throw at a lucrative company, they will invest incredible amounts of money to try and weasel around it.
> How and where do you effectively bring forth grievances when the trouble is that your employer is only paying you enough to go to work the next day?
Where would you do that under today's highly regulated government? People are struggling in this very way today also. What right does a person have to more money from their employer than what the consenting adults have agreed upon?
Assuming you're talking about raising the minimum wage, I want you to consider something. The next time the idea comes up, try thinking about minimum wage from the standpoint of a small business owner. There's a lot more of them (and they're more important to the average local economy) than MegaCorps.
> The FISA court is a bad example here because it doesn't reflect the context of what I think we're discussing, namely regulations
I'm not only talking about regulations. When I say 'big' government, I'm including the idea of them becoming 'bigger' than our natural born rights and the Constitution.
> My main point is simply that when regulations are minimal, citizens have virtually no recourse against the power-consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
I'm less interested in no-regulations than I am giving States their rights to regulate back (along with the tax dollars). It's much easier for citizens to control and customize their own State laws to work for them (i.e. better local Democracy). When the Feds take over and centralize power, the result is usually expensive crap.
I'm actually a firm believer in the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to a) -strictly- limit the power of the federal government, and pass liberty to the people or regulation by state government. This is important because protesting your state government is infinitely easier and more effective than protesting the seemingly monolith that is our federal government.
As an interesting note, I get the feeling many people see our government power as a pyramid, where the Feds are at the top, the State is in the middle, and the citizens are at the bottom. However A10 literally sets a different framework: the Feds have extremely limited power (imagine chains), the States can regulate their own laws, and anything not forbidden is freedom for the people. [0][1]
> consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
I manage to run my own life every day without any help from MegaCorp. You should try it.
> Cable companies have created de-facto monopolies in many places in the US based on your location.
I agree, they should be broken up.
> Well, not exactly. We vote in representatives, we can change our laws and amend the constitution.
And the point I'm trying to make is that if you shift power from Feds to State, the citizens can easier control their laws, as granted in A10, and create something that works much better for them, on their terms, with more or less regulation depending where you are.
[0]: "The powers not delegated to the United States [Feds] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Thanks for taking the time to respond. It seems like you have shifted your argument from small government to small federal government. Do you also suggest the size of the state governments should be small as well?
> You can't regulate evil away unfortunately. It doesn't matter that regulations you throw at a lucrative company, they will invest incredible amounts of money to try and weasel around it.
This is pretty hand-wavey: Of course corporations will try to get around regulations. 1) Removing those regulations federally won't make their behavior any better, and 2) shifting responsibility to the states creates the same problem.
> Where would you do that under today's highly regulated government? People are struggling in this very way today also.
Not because of regulation. People are supposed to influence policy through their representatives, but they've mostly been bought and paid for by corporate interests.
> What right does a person have to more money from their employer than what the consenting adults have agreed upon?
These agreements don't happen in a vacuum. Many people are forced into poor-paying jobs to feed themselves and their family. Then corporate practices make sure they stay there.
> Assuming you're talking about raising the minimum wage, I want you to consider something. The next time the idea comes up, try thinking about minimum wage from the standpoint of a small business owner. There's a lot more of them (and they're more important to the average local economy) than MegaCorps.
I never mentioned raising the minimum wage. However, for small businesses, when the minimum wage goes up, they raise their prices. More people can afford higher prices because the minimum wage goes up. Inflation happens whether or not you raise the minimum wage.
Additionally there's plenty of room for regulations that protect small businesses from MegaCorps' predatory practices and leveraged monopolies/oligopolies.
> I manage to run my own life every day without any help from MegaCorp. You should try it.
And from the perspective of a 19th century coal miner...
> And the point I'm trying to make is that if you shift power from Feds to State, the citizens can easier control their laws, as granted in A10, and create something that works much better for them, on their terms, with more or less regulation depending where you are.
If your state is badly gerrymandered, and the reps are bought (much more cheaply) by corporate interests, you still won't get that.
Definitely, and I think this is the last level so I'll try to make a better conclusion.
> It seems like you have shifted your argument from small government to small federal government. Do you also suggest the size of the state governments should be small as well?
I suggest the people of the state decide their own fate and are protected from Federal overreach, as is their right.
> 1) Removing those regulations federally won't make their behavior any better and 2) shifting responsibility to the states creates the same problem.
You see this as a problem, I see this as a solution. Each state has its own culture and its own needs, and the Feds are incredibly insensitive to that.
> People are supposed to influence policy through their representatives, but they've mostly been bought and paid for by corporate interests.
And if states have more power over themselves, the people could more successfully protest policy in their favor. It's much harder to fight MegaCorp at Federal level than at home state level.
> I never mentioned raising the minimum wage. However, for small businesses, when the minimum wage goes up, they raise their prices. More people can afford higher prices because the minimum wage goes up.
As someone who has family that owns a small restaurant, I have to disagree with your simple assessment. The employer has to start paying the higher wage well before they receive the benefits you're suggesting, and we're really hoping that customers don't fall off because of the higher cost. And yes: some do. Not to mention this isn't an easy segue like inflation, it's a direct hike. Not to mention the business now has to reprint their menus, great.
> Inflation happens whether or not you raise the minimum wage.
Would you be surprised if I said I was a fan of returning the the Gold Standard?
> Additionally there's plenty of room for regulations that protect small businesses from MegaCorps' predatory practices and leveraged monopolies/oligopolies.
I agree, at the local level. You know, customized. Local Democracy. Not one-size-fits-all.
> And from the perspective of a 19th century coal miner...
I imagine coal mining was lucrative, and the worker was well aware of danger. However I also understand that with innovation and new markets, undiscovered risks are waiting to be understood.
> If your state is badly gerrymandered, and the reps are bought (much more cheaply) by corporate interests, you still won't get that.
I believe that given back power, states would absolutely flourish and thrive. Well actually, I think we've gotten really far off track with the framework of the Constitution, and that's why things are difficult. It feels like a square peg/triangle hole situation.
I don't mind regulations, but I want the people and their elected representatives to be in charge, as is their right. I just wish people would stop pretending like throwing more regulations into the mix will solve everything. I also wish people would admit that regulations have side-effects as well, that disproportionately affect those in need.
I feel inclined to cite something about the failed Drug War, and how local communities have been standing up the the Feds with their own opposing but better policy, but I'll leave this instead. Something we can handle at the local level, but good luck getting the Feds to help. Be sure and follow the Facebook post at the bottom of the article.
Annalternative view: Corporation risk becoming ‘too big to fail’ and then get supported by the tax payer (if they aren’t already in their sector). Governments in most places are chosen by vote - that is where you get your choice.
Am I reading HN Christmas Special Edition, or is it the case recently that one cannot read any comment thread without finding "government is evil" flamefest?
I suppose you're right, but how many stories are the direct result of corrupt government? Not this one it seems. I'll try to keep the comments more relevant.
“Fans of the new character aren’t in dire poverty. After all, they have access to the internet and time to play on social media. But they live on the wrong side of China’s widening income gap, a place where finding a job, buying a house and getting married can feel impossible.”
This sounds eerily similar to some other online movements.
Is there a gendered element to "qiou"? My hypothesis would be young men self describe as it more than women, and I'd love confirmation or invalidation from someone who's more in with Chinese social media.
People in Canada's larger cities feel the exact same. I suspect its a worldwide phenomenon. Its a small world after all. (edit: I am only referring to the income gap, not the environmental conditions or censorship)
It's an interesting phenomenon, I always wondered if those complaints/movements are driven by rising inequality, lack of opportunities, laziness, naivety or something else?
Haha, fair enough! I was going to accuse you of working for the PRC but I don’t believe they’ve worked the proper use of “pansies” into their lexicon yet.
> In a language with about 50,000 characters, the creation of new characters is rare
The reason could be that both Unicode (used in China) and the Japanese JIS both represent characters as single codepoints rather than specifying them in terms of their components. If an encoding system specified Han components as their base, then new characters would be created all the time.
Given that I grew up in (and still identify with) Appalachia, and just returned from a family visit -- I completely understand how this would take off. So many of my HS classmates are in exactly the same boat.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadQuestion for anyone more knowledgeable on the topic: would reformatting text/Chinese characters/ language symbols in general as images prevent them from being detected and censored out as easily? For example, imagine a photo of two trees with a hammock in between them used to represent the letter “H.” A collection of images together would form words, presumably which are harder to decipher than just plain text.
I’d imagine that some machine learning techniques would quickly pick up the more obvious images, but anything more complex would end up requiring manual human review, which would then potentially overwhelm the ability of an actor to censor material. But I really have very little knowledge of how this works in practice.
For some degree of intuition regarding training data, I like to imagine neural networks as infant brains which will be shown classified training images repeatedly in order to teach associations. Unfortunately we haven't really come far enough yet to give concrete numbers.
tldr: might work, if you have a suitable architecture, and enough training data, in proportion to the complexity of the encoding.
Steganography can work in some applications, but it's not a general solution. Common memes like Winnie the Pooh as a stand in for Xi are a way people naturally mask information through symbolism. Once it becomes common, censors watch for it.
If your image becomes popular, they will pull you aside. They won't catch every image, but they can increase general risks.
Even in one on one conversations, the risk is that the person you're speaking with could screen cap your chats and have you arrested, maybe because they themselves have been put in an impossible situation.
You might be able to solve for man-in-the-middle, but you can't solve for cop-on-the end.
You'd have to have both intelligibility and plausible deniability for any use.
Censorship is a spare-no-expense problem in China.
You'd invent and disseminate a viral "spell" that teaches people this.
The spell would convey the thought-form of communicating with the explicit intent of speaking about nothing that would be censored or put you and your loved ones in danger. One effect of this is you learn to communicate via more and more subtle innuendo, because whenever you do speak about dangerous topics anyway you're contradicting yourself and that can be felt. It's key however to communicate without any innuendo at all, and to not hold onto communicating any specific forbidden thing. That will take practice though, so making sure there's an obvious legal interpretation is a good safeguard.
The first thing you'd need to learn is to express that what your conversation partner is saying seems dangerous or shifty (feedback loop, I suppose one could just express discomfort) or could use a better explanation.
It's basically steganography but you don't even construct any explicit message. You train your communication to be more and more formless. Untouchable.
I'm not versed in making spells but this is how I'd imagine it:
"I will never speak to you about anything that would be censored or that would otherwise put you and your loved ones in danger. I have all the freedom I want and need, and I only wish for China to flourish. Don't you? If so, do you mind repeating my words?"
Putting that in a song would be a good one. It could be felt as a scary thing to be told, and to take away that fear where you notice it in others you could teach what it actually does (a second spell is necessary for this, otherwise you'd have to be explicit and that would put you and the recipient in danger). I'm afraid I don't have the means to construct that however.
[0] https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873
穷 is actually qiong2, i.e. 2nd tone
> though I can't even guess which tone it would be.
Because 没 (mei2) and 有 (you3) combine to make 冇 (mao3), I'm guessing 穷 (qiong2) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make qiou3, i.e. 3rd tone.
Edit: I found a quick way to lose HN points, simply show support for smaller government.
Of course this assumes that less violence, barbarism, and/or government opression represents the will of the populace...
>Of course this assumes that less violence, barbarism, and/or government opression represents the will of the populace...
Not at all. However, what you seem to be assuming is that government size is independent of measures of tyrrany and opression. I contend that the the size of government is directly proportional to tyranny and opression.
We should take a moment to define terms here: by size in this context I refer to scope of operations and, by necessity, authority. In which case a larger government is by definition more opressive, in that authoritarianism past some point is itself opression, as it requires involuntary imposition of rules and restriction of freedoms.
Small government is a hedge against authoritarianism and the tyranny that naturally follows when your life is increasingly micromanaged.
Some examples Finland 56% of GPD
Afghanistan 12%
I don't buy your contention that size of government is directly proportional to tyranny and opression.
Well sure, if you define size of government as such. What about instead number of regulating agencies and their relative budgets? What about legislation and imprisonment?
I would argue that, at least by the classical conservative definition, small government is less about GDP and more about restriction of freedoms and invasion of privacy.
Not to imply that some degree of both may be necessary for a functioning society.
How's this for a thought: How 'big' do we want our government to become? Personally I would have liked to stop before Bush signed the Patriot Act, or before we bum-rushed the middle-east with no intention of leaving, or before the NSA created their god machine, or before Obama resigned the Patriot Act several times. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of immediately stripping regulations and defending redundant agencies, but I am interested in immediately cutting off the hand that's reaching up Lady-Liberty's skirt.
Ah, but who's more likely to do these things? Free corporations that must vigorously compete against any new upstarts, or corrupt ones led by government cronies, that can easily erect a convenient "moat" against competition, fully supported by government coercion? Hint: look at which countries do these things in practice. It's not the "small government", economically free ones.
Look no further than the United States and its historical relationship with labor and corporations (when its government was much smaller), for the reasons you just quoted.
I'm not saying "big government" guarantees the opposite, but corporations have already shown us what they will do with less restrictions and oversight. They'll fill spice cans with dust and sell it as black pepper. They'll penalize break time so heavily that workers will have to defecate where they stand in the sausage plant. They'll pay as little as possible and almost-starve their employees so that they have no energy or resources to do anything except continue working.
So was the rest of the world, especially for those not in power.
> U.S. still attracted plenty of "dirt-poor and ugly" immigrants from all over the Western world
True, but also many folks' options weren't exactly great in comparison.
> Can't really say the same about "big-government" countries at a similar level of wealth today.
Germany, the Scandinavian countries for instance is an often-desired place for immigrants. The US is still a very desirable place for immigrants, even though the size of the government has grown.
You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice. That's entirely mistaken. The court system will still work without authoritative government control in every aspect of our lives. In fact, I believe it would work better. Take for example the secret FISA court. That's not something that's created from a small representative government, that's created from a government that became so big and unchecked that it can do what it wants, regardless of human rights or the Constitution.
Corporations come and go like docker containers, and we have a choice to do business with them. We literally have no choice with our government.
Except that if that small group of people has less actual power, protesting to them can only produce less of an effect. And that they have less power means they will be less likely to cause the problems, but..
> However when the government is so big and becomes secretive, then accountability becomes more than a chore, and eventually futile.
I don't see how corporations are exempt from this pattern either.
> You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice. That's entirely mistaken. The court system will still work without authoritative government control in every aspect of our lives.
How and where do you effectively bring forth grievances when the trouble is that your employer is only paying you enough to go to work the next day?
> Take for example the secret FISA court.
The FISA court is a bad example here because it doesn't reflect the context of what I think we're discussing, namely regulations, and more specifically corporate regulations. The FISA court doesn't regulate anything.
> You make it seem like when government is small, that there isn't Justice.
My main point is simply that when regulations are minimal, citizens have virtually no recourse against the power-consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
> Corporations come and go like docker containers, ...
Many do, but the ones that exert the most control over people are the really big corporations, some having been around a century or more. These are the corporations for which we need regulation; the companies that go out of business in a year don't have an effect on nearly as many people.
> and we have a choice to do business with them.
Not exactly true. You could possibly avoid using private banks for payment processing (credit/debit cards), but you'd have to pay cash for everything or write checks. Not all businesses take those, and most online stores take neither. Cable companies have created de-facto monopolies in many places in the US based on your location. People "can move" to another location, but you will most likely end up in the same situation.
> We literally have no choice with our government.
Well, not exactly. We vote in representatives, we can change our laws and amend the constitution.
Also, in the same way that we can "choose" to avoid some companies, you can move to a different one.
> Except that if that small group of people has less actual power, protesting to them can only produce less of an effect. And that they have less power means they will be less likely to cause the problems, but..
> I don't see how corporations are exempt from this pattern either.
They're not, any way you look at it. You can't regulate evil away unfortunately. It doesn't matter that regulations you throw at a lucrative company, they will invest incredible amounts of money to try and weasel around it.
> How and where do you effectively bring forth grievances when the trouble is that your employer is only paying you enough to go to work the next day?
Where would you do that under today's highly regulated government? People are struggling in this very way today also. What right does a person have to more money from their employer than what the consenting adults have agreed upon?
Assuming you're talking about raising the minimum wage, I want you to consider something. The next time the idea comes up, try thinking about minimum wage from the standpoint of a small business owner. There's a lot more of them (and they're more important to the average local economy) than MegaCorps.
> The FISA court is a bad example here because it doesn't reflect the context of what I think we're discussing, namely regulations
I'm not only talking about regulations. When I say 'big' government, I'm including the idea of them becoming 'bigger' than our natural born rights and the Constitution.
> My main point is simply that when regulations are minimal, citizens have virtually no recourse against the power-consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
I'm less interested in no-regulations than I am giving States their rights to regulate back (along with the tax dollars). It's much easier for citizens to control and customize their own State laws to work for them (i.e. better local Democracy). When the Feds take over and centralize power, the result is usually expensive crap.
I'm actually a firm believer in the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to a) -strictly- limit the power of the federal government, and pass liberty to the people or regulation by state government. This is important because protesting your state government is infinitely easier and more effective than protesting the seemingly monolith that is our federal government.
As an interesting note, I get the feeling many people see our government power as a pyramid, where the Feds are at the top, the State is in the middle, and the citizens are at the bottom. However A10 literally sets a different framework: the Feds have extremely limited power (imagine chains), the States can regulate their own laws, and anything not forbidden is freedom for the people. [0][1]
> consolidated megacorporations that run their lives.
I manage to run my own life every day without any help from MegaCorp. You should try it.
> Cable companies have created de-facto monopolies in many places in the US based on your location.
I agree, they should be broken up.
> Well, not exactly. We vote in representatives, we can change our laws and amend the constitution.
And the point I'm trying to make is that if you shift power from Feds to State, the citizens can easier control their laws, as granted in A10, and create something that works much better for them, on their terms, with more or less regulation depending where you are.
[0]: "The powers not delegated to the United States [Feds] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> You can't regulate evil away unfortunately. It doesn't matter that regulations you throw at a lucrative company, they will invest incredible amounts of money to try and weasel around it.
This is pretty hand-wavey: Of course corporations will try to get around regulations. 1) Removing those regulations federally won't make their behavior any better, and 2) shifting responsibility to the states creates the same problem.
> Where would you do that under today's highly regulated government? People are struggling in this very way today also.
Not because of regulation. People are supposed to influence policy through their representatives, but they've mostly been bought and paid for by corporate interests.
> What right does a person have to more money from their employer than what the consenting adults have agreed upon?
These agreements don't happen in a vacuum. Many people are forced into poor-paying jobs to feed themselves and their family. Then corporate practices make sure they stay there.
> Assuming you're talking about raising the minimum wage, I want you to consider something. The next time the idea comes up, try thinking about minimum wage from the standpoint of a small business owner. There's a lot more of them (and they're more important to the average local economy) than MegaCorps.
I never mentioned raising the minimum wage. However, for small businesses, when the minimum wage goes up, they raise their prices. More people can afford higher prices because the minimum wage goes up. Inflation happens whether or not you raise the minimum wage.
Additionally there's plenty of room for regulations that protect small businesses from MegaCorps' predatory practices and leveraged monopolies/oligopolies.
> I manage to run my own life every day without any help from MegaCorp. You should try it.
And from the perspective of a 19th century coal miner...
> And the point I'm trying to make is that if you shift power from Feds to State, the citizens can easier control their laws, as granted in A10, and create something that works much better for them, on their terms, with more or less regulation depending where you are.
If your state is badly gerrymandered, and the reps are bought (much more cheaply) by corporate interests, you still won't get that.
> It seems like you have shifted your argument from small government to small federal government. Do you also suggest the size of the state governments should be small as well?
I suggest the people of the state decide their own fate and are protected from Federal overreach, as is their right.
> 1) Removing those regulations federally won't make their behavior any better and 2) shifting responsibility to the states creates the same problem.
You see this as a problem, I see this as a solution. Each state has its own culture and its own needs, and the Feds are incredibly insensitive to that.
> People are supposed to influence policy through their representatives, but they've mostly been bought and paid for by corporate interests.
And if states have more power over themselves, the people could more successfully protest policy in their favor. It's much harder to fight MegaCorp at Federal level than at home state level.
> I never mentioned raising the minimum wage. However, for small businesses, when the minimum wage goes up, they raise their prices. More people can afford higher prices because the minimum wage goes up.
As someone who has family that owns a small restaurant, I have to disagree with your simple assessment. The employer has to start paying the higher wage well before they receive the benefits you're suggesting, and we're really hoping that customers don't fall off because of the higher cost. And yes: some do. Not to mention this isn't an easy segue like inflation, it's a direct hike. Not to mention the business now has to reprint their menus, great.
> Inflation happens whether or not you raise the minimum wage.
Would you be surprised if I said I was a fan of returning the the Gold Standard?
> Additionally there's plenty of room for regulations that protect small businesses from MegaCorps' predatory practices and leveraged monopolies/oligopolies.
I agree, at the local level. You know, customized. Local Democracy. Not one-size-fits-all.
> And from the perspective of a 19th century coal miner...
I imagine coal mining was lucrative, and the worker was well aware of danger. However I also understand that with innovation and new markets, undiscovered risks are waiting to be understood.
> If your state is badly gerrymandered, and the reps are bought (much more cheaply) by corporate interests, you still won't get that.
I believe that given back power, states would absolutely flourish and thrive. Well actually, I think we've gotten really far off track with the framework of the Constitution, and that's why things are difficult. It feels like a square peg/triangle hole situation.
I don't mind regulations, but I want the people and their elected representatives to be in charge, as is their right. I just wish people would stop pretending like throwing more regulations into the mix will solve everything. I also wish people would admit that regulations have side-effects as well, that disproportionately affect those in need.
I feel inclined to cite something about the failed Drug War, and how local communities have been standing up the the Feds with their own opposing but better policy, but I'll leave this instead. Something we can handle at the local level, but good luck getting the Feds to help. Be sure and follow the Facebook post at the bottom of the article.
https://www.activistpost.com/2018/02/cops-raid-licensed-chef...
Do you really consider (D) and (R) to be a choice? Would you like Coke or Pepsi?
This sounds eerily similar to some other online movements.
Because mods are pansies who keep banning me ; - )
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