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Data Dictatorships: The Arms Race to Hack Humankind

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Re: Data Dictatorships: The Arms Race to Hack Humankind

#51

Post by newen »

allemagne wrote: post #36

People make the mistake of assuming that a more assertive authoritarian state means a more confident authoritarian state, when the inverse is more often the case. China's growth is slowing and its leadership will always have the specter of Soviet collapse haunting them. The actual potential for Chinese growth and innovation will always be out of reach because creative destruction is unacceptable to entrenched interes…

People have been saying for decades that China is going to collapse due to some variation of them not being creative, flexible, etc. It's mostly a fantasy generated due to an internal contradiction of seeing a country with very different principles do well.

Re: Data Dictatorships: The Arms Race to Hack Humankind

#52

Post by solveit »

newen wrote: post #51
allemagne wrote: post #36

People make the mistake of assuming that a more assertive authoritarian state means a more confident authoritarian state, when the inverse is more often the case. China's growth is slowing and its leadership will always have the specter of Soviet collapse haunting them. The actual potential for Chinese growth and innovation will always be out of reach because creative destruction is unacceptable to entrenched interes…

People have been saying for decades that China is going to collapse due to some variation of them not being creative, flexible, etc. It's mostly a fantasy generated due to an internal contradiction of seeing a country with very different principles do well.

But China isn't doing unbelievably well. Strong centralized near-totalitarian government quickly industrializes enormous population and becomes Great Power is basically half the story of modern history. The question is whether they'll reach first-world levels of (per capita) living and whether they'll be able to do so without transitioning into a liberal democracy. If any country's success is challenging deeply entrenched beliefs it's Singapore.

Re: Data Dictatorships: The Arms Race to Hack Humankind

#54

Post by kmlx »

nx2059 wrote: post #37
kmlx wrote: post #4

i was born in a communist country and lived thru the downfall of the USSR. the level of censorship and control that we have now is nothing compared to what the soviets were doing. that's why my impression of the paper is very negative. we're the generation that has the most access to information in history, we can travel like no other human generation travelled in history. and we have so much money and access that ob…

The fact that kmix was downvoted indicates with the problem with a LOT of the youth today. I grew up in the 80's during the cold war. I remember the freedoms we "had" in the USA, and how people defected from the communist "utopia" of the USSR. When I was young I learned that our constitutional republic is based on the assumption that people in power are corrupt. And believed in quotes such as "When the government fea…

i learned the hard way that it doesn't matter if it happened yesterday, people will 100% forget about it.

Stalin? Misunderstood. USSR killed more people than the nazis? Impossible.

Re: Data Dictatorships: The Arms Race to Hack Humankind

#55

Post by kmlx »

myth_drannon wrote: post #8
kmlx wrote: post #4

i was born in a communist country and lived thru the downfall of the USSR. the level of censorship and control that we have now is nothing compared to what the soviets were doing. that's why my impression of the paper is very negative. we're the generation that has the most access to information in history, we can travel like no other human generation travelled in history. and we have so much money and access that ob…

That's what the Soviet citizens were saying about the citizens of the Western block too. The reality is, it's probably all the same. There are very subtle differences of course, which tend to be exaggerated.

having lived in those times i cannot believe that comments such as yours exist.

things were Horrible. i had relatives who were killed in the streets because they didn't aspire to the latest communist trend. and no travelling outside the country, or even outside your city in some circumstances. at least not without being part of the party.

what about food? queue for 2 hours for a pint of milk, and meat only once per month because the party doesn't want to be indebted to capitalist countries.

the famine and the pain that the communists brought is in a different world than the massive opportunities that we have today (and food, food is available everywhere now).

i guess this teaches us something very important: history needs to be taught since the first school years.

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