I think culture and education play much bigger roles than anything else, all the sources I find show Germany and France having similar level of corruption (on top of being geographically and economically close) but completely different level of "social trust".
China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
The corruption numbers break down into: (1) They didn't ask the question in China, (2) They asked somebody if they paid a bribe or if taking a bribe is every justifiable, and (3) "Expert estimates of the extent to which the executive, legislative, judiciary, and bureaucracy engage in bribery and theft, and the making and implementation of laws are susceptible to corruption"
For (2) China doesn't look too different from the U.S., for (3) experts think it has gotten much worse since the time of Mao but I'd say China is on the honest side of the "global South".
Note that lay perceptions of corruption are widespread in the US
> China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.
- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.
- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".
You can’t honestly say that a country where citizens inform on each other and put each other in forced labor camps based on rumor is a society where trust is high.
> The Deutscherblick ("German Look") was a tense, habitual glance over the shoulder used by citizens in Nazi-era Germany before speaking about sensitive topics like food rations, Hitler jokes, or the war’s progress
Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats more of a fear based society than trust. Government can giveth and government can taketh.
We are probably meant to assume ceteris paribus and only vary the dimension of corruption.
I think you’re right that culture plays a key role. For example if small bribes are customary, that doesn’t erode trust, that’s just the way things are.
Selling back to the grid, maybe. But if displacing your own use, 10p/kwh is a pipe dream in the UK, more like 25p+.
And my point is more that in that example price/kwh, the "best" location only returns $150 or so for that same system.
Sure, worth keeping in mind for payback calculations, but not really a "category change" - power prices vary more than that proportion between the countries involved. And certainly not the whole multiples a pure insolation chart might imply.
You don't need scientific arguments for everything you know. What's your argument against consentent 10 year old siblings having sex together if they use protection? I don't have one but I know it's morally wrong and won't bring anything good
> They also provide diplomatic cover and economic support for the Iranian regime
I can't believe some people can still argue in good faith the US and israel are the good guys, do you have a ounce of self reflection? You kidnap presidents, kill entire families of political leaders, talk about them like they are dogs (see the latest white house propaganda videos or Hegseth speeches), and then you come here to argue China is bad because they may one day plan to do something similar, how blind are you? Everything you accuse the others of planning you already have done it or are actively doing it right now...
I've done so. I saw a country that is a mix of third and first, full of wonderful people who the government fear so much they have to cut them off from the rest of the world and run the place as a police state.
In the end cars are just a means to an end. People want to minimize their transportation spending.
People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.
So you might think, but no. The LLM contains a large number of biases, coming from different training texts. Depending on how you structure the question, you can get biased statements.
For instance, if I discuss audio electronics with Google Gemini, depending on what kinds of questions I ask, I can get audiophile crackpot quackery out of it, or I can get solid electronic engineering statements.
The training data contains a vast number of narratives that are filled with different points of view. Generally speaking, you get the ones that resonate with your own narrative threaded through your prompts.
One way is if you ask loaded questions: questions which assume that some statements hold true, and are seeking clarification within that context. If the AI hasn't been system-prompted or fine tuned to push back on that topic, it may just take those assumptions at face value, and then produce token predictions out of narratives which express similar assumptions.
China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
https://ourworldindata.org/corruption
https://ourworldindata.org/trust
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