these examples look ridiculous but you have to remember that people are used to chinese characters and can't easily recognize if a url written in latin characters is right or wrong. this is made even worse by the fact that even official websites are not always hosted on an official domain, and even when they are they use ridiculous hostnames, because again whoever is setting up the site just sees a sequence of letters that they are not closely familiar with.
There is that and there is the fact that 50-60 years ago China was coming out of a Cultural Revolution that had shut down the education system, and places like Shenzhen were fishing villages with dirt roads well within living memory.
It is not exactly surprising that in such a breakneck development pace that some people did not get up to speed at the same pace.
———
I will also say I think that China’s embrace of super apps and the quasi-app-internet is not helping with online literacy.
Productivity has risen to the point that the world simply has too many people to meaningfully employ them all. If history is a guide, the correction to this situation will be ugly.
A slow unraveling of the accumulated wealth of billionaires and corporations. Catch the falling knife with your strong hand. Be even better if the rich did it voluntarily.
Wealth destroyed this way just disappears, it's gone. As we saw after the communist revolutions in Russia and China, which led to decades of extreme poverty and tens of millions of people starving to death. There's not a single case in history where the state mass appropriating assets from the rich improved the people's standard of living; the only people whose standard of living improved was the cadres who now controlled all the nation's wealth.
Only if the assumption is that people need to be employed 40 hours a week. If we reduce the preferred workweek to something closer to 20, then we have 2x the amount of jobs available.
Wherever one can get jobs, there the cost of living--mostly housing--is exorbitantly high. Whether one works 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week depends on the cost of housing.
We brought women into the workforce but instead of splitting the work 50/50 we split it 100/100. Now nobody has time to raise children, but hey, the stocks, bonds, and real estate got pumped (in units of median-worker-hours) and I guess that's what's important. Ugh. What to do? Policy aimed at reducing the market-induced-labor-quota so that people can raise kids again? Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time? No, never! That's radical! That's lazy! (Unintelligible screeching vaguely resembling the words "pareto optimality.")
We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult).
Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.
> Something that substitutes the effect of "one spouse works, one spouse stays home" but without the sexism this time
This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery.
Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands.
Peasant and working class women have always had jobs.
I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
It says volumes that your reference for "normal" is Dickens, the industrial revolution working class, subsistence farming, and literal peasants. You had to put the bar on the floor to make our policies sound reasonable.
For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
> For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis.
Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me.
> Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you.
...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions?
If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
> So you're saying women didn't tend to be excluded from the formal economy? That's news to me.
No I’m saying the 1-income household utopia was built on someone doing that work. Usually unseen, unsung, and poorly rewarded.
And for lots of people that utopia never existed. They simply weren’t allowed or able to partake.
For the record: I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. I’m trying to provide an alternative view of default expectations from a different cultural and socioeconomic background. In my neck of the woods, for example, we didn’t have America’s post-ww2 boom. We were too busy industrializing from a mostly agrarian pre-war economy while also building a new country on the ashes of the old country (we had a civil war on top of the ww2 occupation thingy).
Our World in Data has a nice series on this here. [1] Female labor participation rate was dramatically lower in the past. Unfortunately it only goes back to 1890 but even as 'recent' as that, it was still only ~19%.
The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house. So the notion of work was just starkly different than what it is today in most urban Western areas.
> The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house
So here’s my question: Would a woman helping out in her husband’s shop/restaurant/farm/etc even count as a job in terms of labor force participation?
Personally I’d consider that a job but I have a feeling it doesn’t show up in stats because it’s an unpaid position and just considered the default expectation in a family business. Especially back then.
From my personal research of some local history, I've seen "farmer's wife" consistently listed as a woman's occupation from the 19th Century, in the same context of terms like "schoolmistress". Conversely, there are probably occupations today, that wouldn't have been regarded as occupations previously.
That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.
I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes.
Central planning, collective ownership (meaning nobody felt the need to actually manage those assets since they were owned just by state) was a disaster in every single effin' country it implemented. Literally everybody was stealing stuff somehow.
When I look at my ancestors, women worked darn hard. Giving birth directly on the field in the middle of work and resuming said work right after was considered normal. Those were not some rosy times some folks desperately wanting to own properties right here right now like to paint as.
Yep. We weren’t quite as communist as that, but my parents used to share stories of going on work brigades in high school. Altho they must’ve had the mellower 1970’s version that was more about building the socialist spirit than getting actual work done.
> I come from former communist country and you are absolutely right - everybody had to work, both men and women, not having a job was a straight ticket to long and nasty jail. Of course that's artificial, so lower classes had absolutely meaningless jobs just to tick checkboxes.
Come on, many jobs back then weren't what you would consider a job these days. And after work, you were free to do whatever you wanted. No on-call duties, no late-night catch-up after hours, etc.
At least there was a sense of community—everyone knew and helped each other. There were a lot of bad things, especially in the economy. But there were also a lot of good things in society that were killed by capitalism and a Darwinian society.
Nobody says there was nothing good. There was no organized crime, there were no drugs apart from cigarettes and alcohol, but alcoholism was and still is rampart and ignored, and so was lung cancer.
People lived in literal reality bubble compared to rest of the world and were brutally naive in many aspects (just like you would expect North Koreans to be naive about many aspects of the rest of the world). That naivity hit hard when iron curtain fell, the concept of defending democracy and 'fighting' for whats good in life and society is simply too alien, even now. As long as you kept pretending all is good and you don't mind lack of basic freedom, system largely left you alone, you just couldn't travel or say what you wanted. But that pesky freedom is something you can't keep ignoring for your whole life.
But if any of your ancestors or even more distant family said or did anything even mildly perceived as non-alignment even decades ago, then your kids who could be brilliant students, were forced to do to worst trade high school (since they were mandatory just like employment) and banned from universities or many other aspects of society. This is story of my mother, 1st in economic university entrance exams, banned because my grandfather stepped away from communist party when soviet union invaded us in 1968, more than a decade before. Stories like this are everywhere if you care to ask, brilliance was punished as a threat to regime and mediocrity and bowed head was celebrated.
But who would make that adjustment? Companies aren't going to choose to make less money. Governments can fiddle with minimum wages and full-time thresholds, but companies will work around those and pass any cost-increases to the customers. And very many employees will gladly work 40 hours anyway to outcompete their 20 hour coworkers for promotions and bonuses.
There’s been too much consolidation bordering on monopolies. Whenever you hear about two companies merging and laying off thousands of staff, maybe it’s time to stop letting that happen.
Do you have any recent examples of this? I'm having hard time coming up with recent large mergers and acquisitions in tech. The best I've got is Broadcom buying VMware, but VMware is mid-sized and in decline.
Slack was crazy. Aside from huddles I can’t think of a single feature I’ve used that they’ve added since their acquisition by Salesforce. Like what are they doing with so many people? (I know that’s a trope, but seriously…)
Hunger is only a distribution problem in the sense that people in certain regions don't produce enough food to feed themselves or anything of enough value to trade for food. Which is a problem with the social and economic systems of those countries, something that can't be fixed externally (unless somebody wants to e.g. invade and depose King Jong Un..)
It is partially that and partially logistics. Food waste is significantly higher in areas where hunger is endemic because a lot of food never makes it to a market where it would be purchased due to poor transport links, lack of refrigeration, etc.
Housing is inexpensive in places where there are not enough jobs. Cities were born due to industrialization moving jobs to them, not because people suddenly wanted to become urban.
So, what individuals want has little to do with it.
>Productivity has risen to the point that the world simply has too many people to meaningfully employ them all.
China doesn't have a domestic or international consumer base large enough to buy everything it produces. For some years now Chinese growth has been fueled by a real estate bubble of truly historic proportions that has burst. Even in a healthy economy with a healthy demographic structure it takes time to recover from the depths of the business cycle, China is healthy in neither sense and this is an economic crash its unlikely to meaningfully recover from.
If the problem were that simple, the world could be drastically improved by just throwing more money at infrastructure jobs and getting more people employed, while also improving infra. So I doubt it's that simple.
But AI is probably going to hit the labor market like a wrecking ball anyway, at which point it will be exactly like that.
> Productivity has risen to the point that the world simply has too many people to meaningfully employ them all.
This is only a problem because the increase in productivity is captured by corporations. If people were paid accordingly, they could autonomously decide to work fewer hours and everyone would be able to put in the 10-20h/week. Keynes foresaw it nearly 100 years ago.
I agree. Without intervention, most of all humanity will gradually slip into poverty and deprivation. Wealth and income redistribution will be essential but it will not happen voluntarily since the billionaires and the centimillionaires will refuse to reduce corruption or share to reduce suffering.
Most people used to work in farming. Now that is done with about 1% of the population. The rest still find things to do. If history is any guide similar will happen.
These are old news. Everyone keeps beating on Cambodia for this. There have been many crackdowns and the scammers have moved on to other countries. Cambodia is an easy country for western critics to rain on because it does not have the money to run its own PR campaigns like Thailand or Vietnam which also have many of these scam operations.
I have nothing against Cambodia. I posted these links because of the Chinese mafia connection. The latter will move to another country and lure people desperate for jobs (Indians to scam Indians, Chinese to scam fellow countrymen).
Try searching for Cambodia and see how many times it shows up. Now try Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Do you want to know the truth? The truth is those are now rich countries that can spend more on PR and wield greater influence on foreign media than Cambodia. So, the international media pile on the easy target that is Cambodia.
That’s an impressive statement given the recent political event in Thailand where the biggest populist party just got dissolved and the politicians got banned for decades again! As for Vietnam, have you tried living there and doing any business? Check out this first hand experience by an American businessman:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6hAagmq5pwk
The lack of “rule of law” is a convenient phrase to denigrate a country you have little to no experience living in. Cambodia is not perfect but it is not necessarily worse than its neighbors when it comes to the “rule of law.” The subject is complex and full of nuances that a single phrase is not gonna do anyone justice.
Dunno - I've spent time in all those places and Cambodia is easily the worst in that way and I think the only one of the three that supports the stuff mentioned. Apparently the other country in the region with similar stuff going on is Myanmar.
Why would it be creepy? Could you explain? Also why would that prove the rule of law does not exist? You can do the exact same thing in the USA with FOIA request. Your statement just proves that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Beside government sources, there are many other commercial ways to get a person’s travel history. If you think your travel history is private, you are delusional.
You are completely out of sense if you think it is normal to go around telling people you can check their travel history with local authorities. You are just too weird to not notice that saying that only picture you as a crazy harasser. You are not making things looks better for Cambodia, pretty much the opposite.
I never said I was gonna do it without the person’s signed consent. That’s your wrong assumption. I even asked if he wanted to do it. I was not even 100% sure it would be possible. I just assumed Cambodia would have the same processes as the US FOIA. Google it yourself.
For the connection, it is also your assumption that it is with local authorities. For all you know, I could mean any international law firm that is willing to do some paper work. See how your biases cloud your views? You assume the worst for anyone not sharing your backgrounds or views.
As for harassing, I don’t think calling out people’s BS on the internet is harassing and it should be protected as an exercise in freedom of speech. That’s what I tried to do. Calling out what I believed was complete BS.
Do I need to make Cambodia look better? No but I have actually been there and I have seen the bomb craters left from Nixon and LBJ’s bombs and I read about the subsequent effects the bombings had. Take from this whatever you want.
Speak for yourself. Looking at our post histories and compare to see who is more of a keyboard warrior here, I must concede that you are truly the superior and more hard working qwerty warrior.
It is easy for you as a keyboard warrior to denigrate a country with real elections as a “corrupt dictatorship.” What proof do you have to make such a disparaging statement? How long did you live in Cambodia? How many bribes did you have to pay? Do you have the conscience to actually admit the truth?
Keyboard warrior: a person who posts highly opinionated text and images online in an aggressive or abusive manner, often without revealing their own identity.
Here is my recommendation. Go outside and touch grass. You don’t need to go online and make posts every day.
What part of that did I violate? Is it not true based on your posting history that you are on here everyday? Do you know what I would lose if I get banned here? Nothing. This place seems to mean a lot more to you. What does that say about you?
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
You should also follow these sections. You dismissed a country as “corrupt dictatorship.” Is that kind? Is that not shallow dismissal?
Can you explain how you can be so confident that Cambodia is worse? Have you actually seen the scam compounds yourself? Have you actually talked to a victim? How do you know Cambodia supports the stuff mentioned? Do you have proof? You sound like a keyboard warrior who likes the beat on easy targets.
For comparison, when was the last free and fair election held in Vietnam where you considered to be better? Never!
Which country do you think has death penalty? Cambodia or Vietnam? That’s right Vietnam! Cambodia has none.
Which country has opposition parties and media? Not Vietnam. Do you know how many political parties Cambodia has? 18!
Too much "bleak Chinese economy" pieces in the West, not enough "China is leapfrogging us" takes. eg China uses machine learning to automate production more than is done in the West and lowers production costs, meanwhile in the West we say they're dumping/subsidizing their industry (when the reality is they don't need to, their cost is genuinely lower) and we're busy building another model predicting words or pixels while our ability to build anything from cars to artillery shells atrophies
I’ve been seeing “China is doomed” articles for the last decade and yet it seems to be chugging along just fine. My wife and I decided to go there and see for ourselves. Can confirm, they’re doing more than all right. We’ll be back.
There's no contradiction between bleak economies (for individuals) and production growth when there is no freedom. The economy is for workers to squeeze against each other, the Party squeezes everybody.
If you want a smaller-scale domestic analogy, look at how the federal reserve sees low unemployment as a sign to raise interest rates.
> meanwhile in the West we say they're dumping/subsidizing their industry
Machine learning isn’t manufacturing ev batteries or solar panels at below cost.
Also if you think they invented using machine learning to optimize production lines you must not actually work with any US based manufacturing companies. I can tell you I was helping US companies optimize via IOT sensors over a decade ago, and they were doing machine learning against those inputs before it became the hot new Silicon Valley term of the decade.
Germany has a bleak economy currently , definitely not leap frogging anyone but definitely no scammers on young Germans finishing their diplomas.
Do you think these scammers are a healthy sign of the Chinese economy ?
I think Germany, while bleak, still has a lot more labor protection and unemployment benefits. While the labor protection makes it harder for new people to enter the job market - which is especially bad in the current economy - it makes people less worried about losing their jobs. The unemployment benefits make scamming less attractive, as the financial rock-bottom is quite high for now.
The only question is what will happen in the next few years if the middle class further erodes and there's no tax base to pay those unemployment benefits left.
I've been nagging about it for years, there are too many people and not enough jobs.
And it's one large reason why salaries have stagnated, especially in the service industry where there are numerous applications for a position, they'll simply get the lowest bidder who is capable enough to do the job.
Raising the minimum wage could help a little, but I suspect most will just cut employees and merge roles, and again find the lowest bidder.
In the end, Earth is an economically closed system, and what everyone collectively earns and spends must be in some balance. In that light, I’m not sure the total number of people is a problem, barring overpopulation.
That idea is incompatible with all mainstream economic science. Economies are not closed systems, wealth can be created and destroyed. This is, for example, why industrialization led to wealthier societies. The productivity gains created more wealth per person. Likewise, you can bomb a city and a lot of wealth will be destroyed.
What you all are discussing is specifically the jobs market, which is a much more narrow issue. The biggest problem with employment is matching worker skill to the available jobs.
I didn’t mean to imply that there is a conservation of wealth. I meant that there is no exchange with participants outside of the population of Earth; and at any given time, if you want people to be able to spend x, they must also be able to earn x. And if you have an economy that works with a population of n, then in principle the same should be possible with a population of (say) 2n, because you can just imagine having the first one twice independently side-by-side. The only hard limit is when you exceed Earth’s resources, hence overpopulation. But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century. The reason for our present difficulties is not that there are too many people.
> But we’re not there yet, and according to projections we also won’t reach it this century
The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.
Thermodynamics is the enemy of all "economic$cience". There can only be peace if the physicsdepartment, the messenger of reality, is brought down in armed struggle.
Where I live in Vermont, nearly every business has a "Help Wanted" sign- from gas stations and McDonald's through construction, engineering, and knowledge work. None of these places are paying minimum wage.
I'm sure there are other places where the inverse is true - the issue has more to do with the distribution of people and work rather than sheer numbers, at least at this point.
That's true. The US economy is still very strong by world standards.
In my country (Finland) even entry-level jobs that pay peanuts often have multi-round interviews, with applicants recording videos and taking psychological tests. It's all handled by recruiting firms, which make good money by filtering the masses of desperate applicants through meaningless tasks like this.
Even if the workforce is small, job market can still be highly competitive when the there are simply too few successful employers.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadMore like two individuals who were victims of fraud/exploitation.
I have to doubt this would have ever been pubished at all, except for the male breast augmentation angle of the story.
The UN estimates that there are 100,000 victims of human trafficking to work at scam call centers in Myanmar alone, and many of those are Chinese nationals. https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-mafia-are-running-a-scam-f...
The problem is so bad and well-known that a movie was published in China’s strictly censored market and made $500M at the box office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets?wprov=sfti1
HKPF reminds the public that the following websites are not the official Hong Kong Police Force website.
1. 96o.1ss5623.com 2. joshhyoung.icu 3. amylfraser.xyz 4. tiaflowe.icu
It is not exactly surprising that in such a breakneck development pace that some people did not get up to speed at the same pace.
———
I will also say I think that China’s embrace of super apps and the quasi-app-internet is not helping with online literacy.
We've seen the complete domination of labor by capital once before: in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was fixed by a giant war that wiped out the asset holders in Europe and a less cataclysmic series of events that reduced their power in America (Great Depression got FDR into office, business leaders got caught red-handed trying to coup him and forced into concessions, WWII veterans made labor delegitimization difficult).
Here's hoping we can find another Roosevelt without finding out what WWIII means.
This more or less only existed in the upper classes and for a brief few decades after ww2 when global economy was growing fast fueled by recovery.
Lower classes never had this. Read some Dickens — all the women have full time jobs. Read some post-ww2 communist stuff – all women are expected to work. Even before industrialization women worked on subsistence farms right alongside their husbands.
Peasant and working class women have always had jobs.
I remember a discovery channel documentary about Victorian life and it had this fun line: While the doctors debated if exercise is healthy for women, the women working in their kitchens were throwing around 50L pots of water (50kg) all day like it’s nothing.
For your next act, could you tell us how the children yearn for the mines?
No but I can tell you that both my surviving grandparents worked in the local factory and that at my great grandma’s farm every able bodied man woman and child pitched in during harvest and slaughter time. And yeah my mom worked up to 3 jobs at times to make ends meet for me and my sis.
Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you. Most people you interact with are living Dickens right now. The lives of your uber driver, facebook moderator, barista, hair stylist, etc are much more Dickens than Austen.
> Dickens is normal for a large majority of the world population. Look around you.
...and why is that? Is it because everyone isn't working hard enough? Or is it because we have a system that needs less labor than it has, thereby dumping the price of labor unless we control this dynamic with policy interventions?
If you don't want to consider the division of labor as a natural experiment, let's dig into something else that you cited: the reconstruction era following WWII. It led to a golden age for labor, and not just in the US. Isn't that odd? The need for labor shot up, but instead of making labor more stressed it did the opposite, and let them partake in the prosperity. This dynamic isn't unique to WWII, and it isn't unique to events that negatively impact capital. Events that positively impact capital tend to dump labor. Germany after the Franco-Prussian war is probably the cleanest example, but the offshoring of the United States industrial base is probably the most familiar. This should be a hint: the disease perpetually afflicting labor is not laziness, it's bargaining power. Policy interventions that target laziness will tend to make the problem worse, and policy interventions that tend to improve bargaining power will tend to make the problem better.
No I’m saying the 1-income household utopia was built on someone doing that work. Usually unseen, unsung, and poorly rewarded.
And for lots of people that utopia never existed. They simply weren’t allowed or able to partake.
For the record: I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. I’m trying to provide an alternative view of default expectations from a different cultural and socioeconomic background. In my neck of the woods, for example, we didn’t have America’s post-ww2 boom. We were too busy industrializing from a mostly agrarian pre-war economy while also building a new country on the ashes of the old country (we had a civil war on top of the ww2 occupation thingy).
The nature of work was also dramatically different in the past with the overwhelming majority of people being independently employed, or working at extremely small local businesses. Said businesses would also generally double as the store owner's house. So the notion of work was just starkly different than what it is today in most urban Western areas.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply
So here’s my question: Would a woman helping out in her husband’s shop/restaurant/farm/etc even count as a job in terms of labor force participation?
Personally I’d consider that a job but I have a feeling it doesn’t show up in stats because it’s an unpaid position and just considered the default expectation in a family business. Especially back then.
That's not taking into account all the handcrafted goods: half the stuff we buy, would've been made instead, and that proportion would probably increase the further back in time you go. But the labour to buy stuff is counted as worked hours, while made stuff isn't. That makes some sense in the perspective of economic exchanges, but not for many comparisons.
Central planning, collective ownership (meaning nobody felt the need to actually manage those assets since they were owned just by state) was a disaster in every single effin' country it implemented. Literally everybody was stealing stuff somehow.
When I look at my ancestors, women worked darn hard. Giving birth directly on the field in the middle of work and resuming said work right after was considered normal. Those were not some rosy times some folks desperately wanting to own properties right here right now like to paint as.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions
Come on, many jobs back then weren't what you would consider a job these days. And after work, you were free to do whatever you wanted. No on-call duties, no late-night catch-up after hours, etc.
At least there was a sense of community—everyone knew and helped each other. There were a lot of bad things, especially in the economy. But there were also a lot of good things in society that were killed by capitalism and a Darwinian society.
People lived in literal reality bubble compared to rest of the world and were brutally naive in many aspects (just like you would expect North Koreans to be naive about many aspects of the rest of the world). That naivity hit hard when iron curtain fell, the concept of defending democracy and 'fighting' for whats good in life and society is simply too alien, even now. As long as you kept pretending all is good and you don't mind lack of basic freedom, system largely left you alone, you just couldn't travel or say what you wanted. But that pesky freedom is something you can't keep ignoring for your whole life.
But if any of your ancestors or even more distant family said or did anything even mildly perceived as non-alignment even decades ago, then your kids who could be brilliant students, were forced to do to worst trade high school (since they were mandatory just like employment) and banned from universities or many other aspects of society. This is story of my mother, 1st in economic university entrance exams, banned because my grandfather stepped away from communist party when soviet union invaded us in 1968, more than a decade before. Stories like this are everywhere if you care to ask, brilliance was punished as a threat to regime and mediocrity and bowed head was celebrated.
It is happening again slow moving, just due to lack of mating success.
How is VMware mid sized? By what standards?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...
VMware was also an enormous deal. $61b.
Meanwhile, the HN zeitgeist complains about Tesla not being allowed to sell cars directly to consumer.
Having lots of independent dealers is a job creation feature, not a bug. Dozens of industries in America have the same regulation.
Not everything should be maximally efficient, especially if it reduces competition.
Most of our food is produced by a few percent of the population, yet people go hungry.
I don't know what the right answer is, but we live in strange economic times
Hunger is generally a distribution and pricing problem more than a supply problem.
So, what individuals want has little to do with it.
China doesn't have a domestic or international consumer base large enough to buy everything it produces. For some years now Chinese growth has been fueled by a real estate bubble of truly historic proportions that has burst. Even in a healthy economy with a healthy demographic structure it takes time to recover from the depths of the business cycle, China is healthy in neither sense and this is an economic crash its unlikely to meaningfully recover from.
But AI is probably going to hit the labor market like a wrecking ball anyway, at which point it will be exactly like that.
This is only a problem because the increase in productivity is captured by corporations. If people were paid accordingly, they could autonomously decide to work fewer hours and everyone would be able to put in the 10-20h/week. Keynes foresaw it nearly 100 years ago.
A wave of new automation.
Dial the standard workweek back to 2x hours. Adjust the minimum wage accordingly.
A wave of new automation.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Expect it to converge towards a value, but a value that monotonically decreases over time.
Even many Indians are trafficked to SE Asia in the name of employment, only to scam Indians. And these scam centers are run by Chinese.
[1] Cambodia: Hundreds of Indians rescued from cyber-scam factories: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68705913
[2] Cambodia Job Scam Victims Beaten & Deprived Of Meals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5X5xVSiFHQ
[3] In Cambodia, reporting on illegal scam centers brings threats https://www.voanews.com/a/in-cambodia-reporting-on-illegal-s...
[4] They’re Forced to Run Online Scams. Their Captors Are Untouchable. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/world/asia/cambodia-cyber... https://archive.is/H7Vex
[5] Inside the 'living hell' of Cambodia's scam operations https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221109-inside-the-li...
[6] Chinese Mob Has 100K Slaves Working in Cambodian Cybercrime Mills https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/chine...
Try searching for Cambodia and see how many times it shows up. Now try Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Do you want to know the truth? The truth is those are now rich countries that can spend more on PR and wield greater influence on foreign media than Cambodia. So, the international media pile on the easy target that is Cambodia.
The lack of “rule of law” is a convenient phrase to denigrate a country you have little to no experience living in. Cambodia is not perfect but it is not necessarily worse than its neighbors when it comes to the “rule of law.” The subject is complex and full of nuances that a single phrase is not gonna do anyone justice.
Beside government sources, there are many other commercial ways to get a person’s travel history. If you think your travel history is private, you are delusional.
For the connection, it is also your assumption that it is with local authorities. For all you know, I could mean any international law firm that is willing to do some paper work. See how your biases cloud your views? You assume the worst for anyone not sharing your backgrounds or views.
As for harassing, I don’t think calling out people’s BS on the internet is harassing and it should be protected as an exercise in freedom of speech. That’s what I tried to do. Calling out what I believed was complete BS.
Do I need to make Cambodia look better? No but I have actually been there and I have seen the bomb craters left from Nixon and LBJ’s bombs and I read about the subsequent effects the bombings had. Take from this whatever you want.
Here is my recommendation. Go outside and touch grass. You don’t need to go online and make posts every day.
> In Comments
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
etc
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
You should also follow these sections. You dismissed a country as “corrupt dictatorship.” Is that kind? Is that not shallow dismissal?
For comparison, when was the last free and fair election held in Vietnam where you considered to be better? Never!
Which country do you think has death penalty? Cambodia or Vietnam? That’s right Vietnam! Cambodia has none.
Which country has opposition parties and media? Not Vietnam. Do you know how many political parties Cambodia has? 18!
吃到一半，结果其中一人突然把话题转到了经济情况，他说现在经济十分不景气，家里的生易亏了很多钱。
另一个人则吐槽起了就业压力大，996，物价上涨什么之类的。
第一个人把矛头一转，对准了中共，说中共现在瞎搞把经济都搞坏了。
https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/1evf77w/%E5...
如果粉红能思考, 自然也就不会粉红了.
那些留学还回去的粉红, 我至少还对他们保留一丝尊敬, 就算愚蠢, 他们至少言行一致.
选择留在民主国家生活, 但是离岸爱国的粉红, 我是真不太懂.
If you want a smaller-scale domestic analogy, look at how the federal reserve sees low unemployment as a sign to raise interest rates.
What are you reading? This is the dominant drumbeat. There are also subsidies, which we’re now matching.
Machine learning isn’t manufacturing ev batteries or solar panels at below cost.
Also if you think they invented using machine learning to optimize production lines you must not actually work with any US based manufacturing companies. I can tell you I was helping US companies optimize via IOT sensors over a decade ago, and they were doing machine learning against those inputs before it became the hot new Silicon Valley term of the decade.
The only question is what will happen in the next few years if the middle class further erodes and there's no tax base to pay those unemployment benefits left.
And it's one large reason why salaries have stagnated, especially in the service industry where there are numerous applications for a position, they'll simply get the lowest bidder who is capable enough to do the job.
Raising the minimum wage could help a little, but I suspect most will just cut employees and merge roles, and again find the lowest bidder.
What you all are discussing is specifically the jobs market, which is a much more narrow issue. The biggest problem with employment is matching worker skill to the available jobs.
Money does not, however, measure wealth. Satisfaction of needs does.
That is where industrialization came in. And that might also be why we will see a stagnation of wealth.
There are not many needs that need to be solved (from a commodity point of view).
Current needs are more of a social and spiritual nature, and the markets are not efficient at providing to these.
The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_gr...
Where I live in Vermont, nearly every business has a "Help Wanted" sign- from gas stations and McDonald's through construction, engineering, and knowledge work. None of these places are paying minimum wage.
I'm sure there are other places where the inverse is true - the issue has more to do with the distribution of people and work rather than sheer numbers, at least at this point.
In my country (Finland) even entry-level jobs that pay peanuts often have multi-round interviews, with applicants recording videos and taking psychological tests. It's all handled by recruiting firms, which make good money by filtering the masses of desperate applicants through meaningless tasks like this.
Even if the workforce is small, job market can still be highly competitive when the there are simply too few successful employers.