561–570 of 602 posts
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In the US there are mandatory Social Security numbers; one needs photo ID to do much of anything; and there certainly are credit scores.
The large population of undocumented immigrants begs to differ.
I am deeply disgusted by false equivalency used in many posts this thread. Whatever you think the West is doing is not even close to this. The Chinese government owns and runs more than 50% of the economy and 100% of the industries they deem essential. They can not only cut your off completely from planes and trains, but also your electricity, driver license, internet, telephone, banks, ability to get any travel docu…
> but I cannot even buy train tickets online (yet i can ride the train) with it and I cannot open a bank account in my own country Side point but generally speaking you don't need a national ID to open a bank account or buy train tickets online. Banks do require a +86 mobile number, which you can get with your passport alone. You can then use your +86 mobile number, passport, and hotel address to open a bank account.…
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If you don't want your career destroyed and your life threatened, don't come to work on "no whites" day at your college.
If your career can be destroyed by having the opinions you decided to post in a public forum under your real name copy-pasted, you're an idiot.
To me the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted” sounds like the beginning of a new caste system. Everyone's children are going to make mistakes. The wealthy are going to be able to cover up their children's mistakes, the poor are going to be put on 'the list' and become 'restricted.' The restrictions will grow, and eventually you'll have a new group of 'untouchables'
Consider the restrictions that US law places on convicted felons. Millions of Americans have been stripped of constitutional rights, often for infractions as minor as stealing a coat or possessing half an ounce of marijuana. Felons often face considerable difficulties in finding employment and housing. "Once untrustworthy, always restricted" is a practical reality in the US.
For some context in case anyone was curious, please see the page numbered 116 (but 118 of 240 of the PDF) from this report from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/111213a-lwop-complete-repo...
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Consider the restrictions that US law places on convicted felons. Millions of Americans have been stripped of constitutional rights, often for infractions as minor as stealing a coat or possessing half an ounce of marijuana. Felons often face considerable difficulties in finding employment and housing. "Once untrustworthy, always restricted" is a practical reality in the US.
Stealing a coat or possessing 1/2 and ounce of marijuana are generally not felonies. Stealing would be larceny and there are cost thresholds associated with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony
I hope our era will be remembered for something other than the abject failure of liberal democracy. The US and Europe are struggling/sabotaging themselves, while Russia and China just consolidate their power. Africa keeps burning. India will take the Sino-Russian path no doubt.
What worries me is not that this system might fail, but that it be replaced by a state-of-the art dictatorship that treats the population as slaves.
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For what it's worth I doubt many of those commented have ever lived (or even visited) China. It's easy to create a false equivalency when you have no real experience of the situation. This is a different situation, and it's sadly Orwellian.
I think this is an important point. I had a coworker who grew up in Romania under Ceausescu and the stories he told! He talked about neighbors just disappearing one day and someone new living in the home. People didn't bat an eye since if you started asking questions, you might be next. He mentioned how there was an election for president and it was a write in ballot. Someone wrote "Mickey Mouse". Despite voting in a…
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China doesn’t have a very powerful central state, local governments have lots of power and often act out of sight from Beijing. This actually leads to more abuses of the system, however.
More decentralization leads to more abuses, yes -- but they tend to be of lower magnitude per event. Positions of power tend to attract abusers. Human nature seems to favor consolidation of hierarchies. China is just on a different part of the power cycle than the US. We're at the egalitarian everyone-is-the-same period of the cycle, and people abuse this state of affairs via a variety of ways. China is at the we-mus…
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Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles? The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical as ML makes privacy easier and easier to pierce. People who made rational decisions about the risks of sharing various opinions on a small site in 2010 are now locked into the consequences a decade later when both technology and political landscapes have changed. It would be trul…
> Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles? CCP currently cannot monitoring all foreign websites, so (currently) I don't think people will be hassled because of few archived comments on HM. But who knows, that may change in the future, and somebody may report you just like what people did during Cultural Revolution[0]. So, keep yourself anonymous under another name is always important.…
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In the US there are mandatory Social Security numbers; one needs photo ID to do much of anything; and there certainly are credit scores.
The large population of undocumented immigrants begs to differ.