Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids • Hacker News Board

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#151

Post by Retra » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #100

Retra wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students That's the thing, though: he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. So if they are the worst for future generations, why would it be bullshit that he's claiming they're the worst? Maybe he simply isn't optimizing for immediate value, but for long-term value. And why would you be objectin…

> he wasn't speaking as an owned slave, but as a future sociologist/historian. Then he's optimizing for his value. Which is a really narrow-minded way of looking at the situation. One would hope for a sociologist/historian to be more broad-minded than that. But I'm not sure to what degree Oscar Wilde was really a sociologist or historian. He was mostly an author, and he specialized in saying things that were counter…

His point isn't "do evil so that good may come", but rather "it is better (for us) for those who do evil to do it openly so we can unite against it, rather than for it to be done with subtlety so that we remain unable to combat it."

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#152

Post by mjklin » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

hugh4 wrote: post #144

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.

Alternatively, the royals will just loot the sovereign wealth fund and flee the country. Sovereign wealth funds in third-world countries don't tend to last long. Nauru would still be one if the richest countries on Earth except that the sovereign wealth fund somehow found its way into the pockets of the people tasked with looking after the sovereign wealth fund.

I also thought of Nauru. Seems the island center is chewed-up former phosphate mines and the islanders have nothing to show for it. Australia briefly (?) tried to relocate some unwanted refugees there. Not much to say for the place anymore.

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#153

Post by Retra » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #110

Retra wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are those future sociologists and historians. Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? The point is that we are trying to do what we can now to make the world better later . It matters what those in the future will think of us, because they will be the ones with the resources to improve upon it after we are gone. And if we do it right, they will be better at handling this…

>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have. I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable. Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse. Edit: I gu…

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them.

The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves where everybody is waffling and unsure about whether slavery is bad because nobody is being beaten seems to me a bit like a losing proposition. It's the same reason we can't do effective political reform today: people will choose their own convenience when they're not facing a visible evil as a group.

The last thing I would want is for people to think I got beaten because I'm a "naughty slave" or because my owner was a particularly bad guy. No, the reason I got beaten was because I couldn't choose my path. Because I was a slave, and slaves can't choose not to be beaten, even if they would prefer it. When a slave gets beaten, he or she is beaten by slavery as an institution, not by some violent individual.

How much different would the world be if Hitler had announced from day 1 his play to conquer Europe and massacre millions of people? Heck, if we had ended slavery 100 years earlier, maybe we'd be 100 years closer to managing global warming. We don't have time for evils to fester in the margins pretending to be nice.

I remember a couple years ago there was some politician saying we don't need minimum wage laws because companies already pay more than that, so the law is redundant. And in the name of "small government" declared that we should remove the law from the books. All because his favorite corporations are "nice slaveowners" who don't beat their slaves, he thinks that there's nothing wrong with destroying a very important institutional protection.

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#154

Post by mkehrt » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

_nedR wrote: post #120

o0-0o wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large scale social unrest is just what the communists fear the most. To me, that's not worrisome - it's hopeful. Just opining, and I understand that the collateral costs would be worrisome for everyone in the short term.

You probably don't know what you are wishing for. Just scroll through this list : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic... 4 out of the 10 most deadliest human conflicts in human history happened in China. I have a suspicion that the Chinese leadership is acutely aware of this, and their world-view has been moulded by this (favouring stability over everything else including justice, freedom or…

The An Lushan rebellion probably did not wipe out 15% of the world's population. This number comes from comparing before and after census numbers, which is hard because (a) the census was vastly disrupted by the war, and (b) the size of the empire was decreased by the war, so former provinces weren't counted in the later censuses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion#Death_toll

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#155

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

Retra wrote: post #153

jsprogrammer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why should we care about some long-dead slaves' opinion about what is good or bad? Because they had a more direct experience of it than we can ever have. I think the (even if implicit) claim that it is better to physically harm, rape, and kill slaves than to be nice to them is highly questionable. Yes, both are bad situations, but adding additional physical violence doesn't make things better, only worse. Edit: I gu…

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them. The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves wher…

Do you think you would be the same you if you had been born into slavery?

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#156

Post by selimthegrim » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

codyb wrote: post #116

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the oil-rich nations have reasonably large sovereign wealth funds, so they have broad investment exposure to the rest of the global economy. I think the plan is to draw on those as necessary to transition their economies into something more diversified and sustainable.

And it looks (at least in Saudi Arabia's case) that they were trying to diversify towards renewables in a vast way [0], although my google search also turned up more recent articles indicating they're pushing that back [1]. The thing about the Saudi Arabian royal family is that they're all guaranteed allowances and the family grows at a near exponential rate since they all have multiple wives. I couldn't find any goo…

I believe he wrote a long Atlantic article based on the book - 'The Fall of the House of Saud'

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#157

Post by Adlai » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

analyst74 wrote: post #118

littletimmy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by thos…

That's a silly notion. If all slave owners treated their slaves really well, provide them with decent housing, gourmet food, education, social activities and entertainment, vacations, and etc, with the condition that they have to work, then there is probably not going to be a rebellion, and we'd still have slavery today. Oh wait, did I just describe the condition what most of us live in? In the end, rebellions happen…

Vonnegut disagrees in Player Piano. It's an interesting read for programmers, since he got the details of automation wildly wrong, but "the story is true".

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#158

Post by dikdik » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 10:47 PM UTC

veidr wrote: post #68

littletimmy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked this sentiment of Oscar Wilde on charity: “[Charity] is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible…Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by thos…

That quote has always bugged the shit out of me, because: those were only the worst slave owners for future generations of sociology and history students (who mostly didn't descend from slaves). For the actual slaves themselves, the worst slaveowners were the ones who whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value (or just for fun), those who separated children from parents, raped the women or…

>"whipped and tortured their slaves in an attempt to extract more value"

This sounds like the US medical industry. We can only save you, if you work another few years of your life to pay down this debt.

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#159

Post by Retra » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 10:53 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #155

Retra wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my own position is tainted by the belief that slavery is fundamentally wrong as a restriction of freedom, not as a matter of being beaten. So if I were a slave, though I would personally prefer not to be beaten, I would also prefer slavery be seen as a vile practice, and if I have to take a few beatings to make that be known, I would take them. The alternate of nobody being beaten, but still being slaves wher…

Do you think you would be the same you if you had been born into slavery?

I don't think that's a useful hypothetical. If I were born into slavery, I would be a different person, and I can't tell you what that person would think.

Re: Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China's Rich Kids

#160

Post by zhemao » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 10:59 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #104

SCHiM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> collateral costs Read "human lives". I understand and share your sentiment regarding the fact that a chance towards a (seemingly) more liberal form of government is good. But I'd be hesitant to call the costs of unrest at such a scale merely worrisome. The only thing I hope for is that change will come slowly, if it comes at all.

> The only thing I hope for is that change will come slowly, if it comes at all. That's worse than a bloody revolution. If change comes so slowly that you don't get to experience it in your lifetime you might as well have died anyways.

There's a vast spectrum between bloody revolution and glacial change. You only need to go across the strait to see an example of quick but bloodless regime change. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Taiwan was an authoritarian one-party state under martial law. But from the late 70s on, the Taiwanese government steadily introduced reforms until it head its first direct presidential election in 1996. Today, Taiwan is a multi-party democracy with a stable economy. Certainly, it has its fair share of problems (there's been a lot of corruption scandals), but it's definitely come a long way.