It's foolish to assume this is not a calculated effort. It's make us feel good that there isn't people who are actually evil enough to coordinate these full-blown authoritarian campaigns.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
Maybe for Putin, but for Trump it's hard to see it as anything but his completely mercurial nature just causing so much random melodrama that less-urgent problems completely vanish. The same people who love carbon also hate the damage he's doing to global markets. I mean except Putin again.
A large cap company I totally dont work at paid 4% of revenue in tariffs last year. Our bonuses were cut in half. I dont have visibility into our customer pricing. It is fucking obscene how stupid this tax is. And all for what? So billionaires can get a bit richer? How did this help us, like at all???
All this fuckery makes it hard to keep track of financial inflows and outflows, which in turn makes it easy to commit graft and corruption. Especially coupled with the forced retirement of those principled people formerly in bureaucratic positions, and the lack of consequences for lying and scheming on behalf of the kleptocracy.
read from where? Because over 92% of tariff costs were born by domestic importers. Thats american companies who then offload that tax through higher purchasing costs.
We have Chinese businesses that are domestic importers.
(To some extent, this was to facilitate tariff fraud. As an American business buying abroad, your foreign supplier would take over responsibility for importing into the US, and then you could pretend you were unaware it was fraudulently undervaluing its imports to lower effective tariffs paid. Any possible consequences for the foreign entity getting caught doing fraud are minimal.)
That article doesn't even mention nonresident importers (NRIs). The percentage that are NRIs is not public information but it is believed to have grown during this trade conflict.
What got my attention on this was this HN comment by rstuart4133:
"There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs. For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China. Truly delicious."
The rest is financed by debt. The theft-class stole the rest from the govt thru debt, and expect the rest of us and the following generations to deal with the fallout while they sit on top of their obscene gobs of cash insulated from the fire they created.
I often find myself wondering about these things in the context of star trek... like... could Geordi actually code? Could he actually fix things? Or did the computer do all the heavy lifting. They asked "the computer" to do SO MANY things that really parallel today's direction with "AI". Even Data would ask the computer to do gobs of simulations.
Is the value in knowing how to do an operation by hand, or is the value in knowing WHICH operation to do?
For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
> If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.
This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.
Sure. There's always going to be someone opposing something. But I'm not aware of cases where a disagreement in an environment good for everyone was large enough that it caused the leadership/government collapse. Similarly on a small scale, the number of grumpy people at companies I worked at scaled more or less with how good things were for everyone.
In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.
Foreign state-actors love to sow discontent in enemy territories. It doesn't matter what they say to rile up the population and cause instability -- they'll just do it.
Social credit system is not really a thing. Yes various apps have various ‘credit scores’ and if you are convicted of crimes you can get travel limitations, but there is no such thing as a ‘social credit system’. Much like how the government is not centralised at all, provinces can make their own laws and so on.
I believe the premise is that you have to oppress the rich to a certain extent to prevent them from usurping the people's government for their own ends.
Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old.
There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.
i dont have.. and nobody talks about it.. in china.
this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.
If no one talks about it, why is this .gov.cn article discusses the problems currently posed by the existing social credit system? There isn't indeed a nation-wide score, but given the size of Chinese municipalities (often larger than most countries in the world), it's far from anecdotal.
There is a credit reporting system, similar to the one in the US. However, most people are not affected by it in their daily lives. Only those who are in serious financial trouble and cannot pay off their debts are placed on a blacklist, which restricts them from traveling by high-speed rail or flights.
Yeah, I was on my way to being convinced that my understanding was a misconception, but this just halted that in its tracks. You’ve just stated the slippery slope has been built and is ready when desired.
there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.
I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.
There's a social credit system everywhere. It's called "money". It's quite literally and explicitly a credit system that rewards certain behaviours and castes and punishes and disempowers others.
The fact that everyone in the West is used to it doesn't alter the fact that it's social engineering at scale and not a law of nature.
Dude come on, the US already has a social credit system. Where do you think China got the idea of credit scores from? Try getting a good loan in the US if your credit score is under 400. You're barred from having certain jobs if you don't have a good credit score.
Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.
It's not just loans and banking. Bad credit severely limits your housing options, even rooms for rent are running credit checks these days. Some employers too, even in roles where you aren't directly handling money or anything close to it.
I understand this, but I meant that the data sources used to build credit scores are mainly banking/debt related. Jaywalking ore saying slurs online won't affect it, unlike in China.
*not yet. And if you are not US citizen and coming in as a tourist, what you write applies heavily and can end up in properly harsh treatment. So its not as rosy as you write (which already ain't rosy)
The difference between a social credit score and a credit score is when you criticize the president, your social credit score goes down, but your credit score stays the same.
The people who have been stalked and apprehended by ICE for online criticism of what ICE is doing might not agree.
As might visitors who are being asked to show five years of social media history to make sure their views are politically acceptable.
Free speech is over. If dissent isn't being actively punished - the current push for deanonymisation is coincidental, no doubt - at the very least it's heavily throttled algorithmically.
Consider for a moment that there ARE people this straight-up evil....
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