Earlier quoted context omitted.
> parking lots full of empty school buses and claimed he had no way to evacuate citizens That just sounds like a sensational headline lacking in context and details. For example, with Hurricane Harvey in Houston they had to weigh calling mass evacuation against the ability of the road system to handle that much traffic. It doesn't matter how many buses you have in a parking lot if they can't leave the city. I'm not s…
> That just sounds like a sensational headline lacking in context and details. It was well documented by multiple investigations after the fact.
China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
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Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact the levees were designed to survive a Katrina-sized storm, but of course never had to prove they could, until they failed. What's also funny is for a bunch of engineers and software developers to expect the govt to enact a system that is impossible to really test, and just have it work smoothly when needed. Rich cities in california were also a dysfunctional mess dealing with fires. It was only when the same…
In fact the levees were designed to survive a Katrina-sized storm, but of course never had to prove they could, until they failed. They were not, and the fact was well-known in advance. Their limit was a category 3 hurricane and there had been years of passing the buck about upgrading the levees to give the city a shot. Then Katrina happened and everyone who had passed the buck claimed that it wasn't their fault.
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're getting knee-jerk downvotes, but I think your reply is more thoughtful than some are giving you credit for. My original comment more or less agrees with you. However, I'd also temper it by saying that one of the downsides of a highly central government is that it falls prey to the negatives of the "Eye of Sauron". This means that where the relatively few people at the top can focus, and for however long they c…
> But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time. A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically author…
However, in governance, its much harder to measure "effectiveness" -- and every measure ends up becoming a target/goal of those being measured. Is it GDP? Sentiment analysis of social media for indicators of social discord? I don't really know, and neither does anybody else.
So some authority simply sets some desired set of strategic goals (2% GDP growth, 3% increase in high school graduations, average household income up by 2.3%, etc.) and then works to create conditions such that those are met.
But with more of a diversity of goals seems to require a diversity of executors of those goals since human attention is limited. This implies again an ability to delegate and so on and I'm not really sure if authoritarian governments can spare the attention to make sure each of the delegated executors can work on such a plethora of goals.
In business, the number of direct reports to the CEO, COO, VP and so on seems to indicate the number of strategic goals an organization can pursue at once. In most companies it seems to be only a handful as the ability of the CEO to direct many reports diminishes as there are more of them.
In the U.S. this need to spread focus works in the executive branch by appointing department heads (cabinet secretaries) who basically have a single overriding raison d'être for their existence (e.g. commerce, housing, transportation, etc.) with a set of strategic goals that those executives can focus on. In the U.S. that's something like 15 departments (plus a very large number of independent "establishments and corporations) which are more or less treated like a company might treat a subsidiary rather than a department. [1]
China also has a complex system as well, much more complicated than I think outsiders give it credit for. It's not a surprise though, the ancient Chinese practically invented the idea of a bureaucracy [2]. I think the primary structural problem for China is not the simple notion of authoritarianism per se, but the parallel bureaucracy of the party structure.
1 - https://www.usgovernmentmanual.gov/ReadLibraryItem.ashx?SFN=...
2 - https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-a-chart-that-visually...
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s mostly due to laws that make all police blotters (records of arrests and other incidents) in Florida open to the public immediately (and thus easy for journalists to mine for interesting stories). Couple that with a huge population and something weird will happen most days.
As a 48 year old native Floridian who has traveled to less crazy states and countries, I do not believe our open records policies entirely explain the documented weirdness. The native born are a minority. Most of our population came here from somewhere else. I have been to the kinds of places from which they emigrate. To survive and thrive in places where it snows for a good chunk of the year requires a certain amoun…
The ones who don't succeed in rehab get kicked out and the result is that addicts for various things (including alcohol, meth and opioids) wind up migrating the Florida and then getting stuck there.
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How stable is the power that Xi has consolidated? Very stable. Basically nothing besides something coming from withing the party itself can shake him, and he took down all of those threats to him from within the party. Not even Mao ever managed to cleanse all of his detractors from the party up until his death. Saying this, you should not be confusing that "people are throwing looks into his back," and quiet whispe…
> If you can write Chinese, google those skeletons, they are up to everybody to see. Even taxi drivers here know of Xi's billionaire sister, but... taxi drivers and other general public can't do anything about that. Why would I need to read Chinese to find out about this? The Chinese state isn't able to censor content in Chinese, but has got the Western internet under its thumb?
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#406A friend of mine is leaving HK today - he lives there, so this is not a casual trip abroad. He said the level of fear is making it impossible to live there as a single person. The shops and restaurants are closed. Even his own employer shut its doors indefinitely - and they’re just a video production company. The virus won’t be what ruins China. It’s the panic itself.
Speaking of Hong Kong, what impact is this outbreak having on the conflict with Beijing?
Medical personnel going on strike this week.
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#407Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#408Gorbachev used to say that Chernobyl was where the USSR really started to crumble. The disaster made clear how morally bankrupt and technically incompetent the system really was, wiping out any remaining goodwill or trust. Similarly, Katrina was where the semi-fascist US consensus under GW Bush went to pieces. I suspect China will experience a similar moment at some point. This might well be it.
What semi-fascist consensus do you imagine existed, and how was it affected by Katrina?
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How stable is the power that Xi has consolidated? Very stable. Basically nothing besides something coming from withing the party itself can shake him, and he took down all of those threats to him from within the party. Not even Mao ever managed to cleanse all of his detractors from the party up until his death. Saying this, you should not be confusing that "people are throwing looks into his back," and quiet whispe…
> If you can write Chinese, google those skeletons, they are up to everybody to see. Even taxi drivers here know of Xi's billionaire sister, but... taxi drivers and other general public can't do anything about that. Why would I need to read Chinese to find out about this? The Chinese state isn't able to censor content in Chinese, but has got the Western internet under its thumb?
Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That just sounds like a sensational headline lacking in context and details. It was well documented by multiple investigations after the fact.
That they had a bunch of school buses sitting around? Did they also have a bunch of bus drivers, or other qualified people with CDLs, sitting around on call? Because most of them are usually part time employees with second or third jobs and probably also had their own families and problems to solve.
You unwittingly demonstrate the cruelty of bearaucratic thinking that is inconsequential in the face of real human disaster, ultimately leading to tragedy.