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China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

reuters.com

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Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#471

Post by anchpop »

sigil wrote: post #453
ShorsHammer wrote: post #427

Meta: 185 top comment replies, 278 comments total. The redditfication of this place continues. China articles are essentially broken and there's no point trying to advance the discussion or have healthy debate. Someone should make an extension that collapses all replies and only shows top level comments, think it might be a lot healthier for online discourse.

Reddit has a solution to this problem, and HN should steal it: randomize top-level comment order. This keeps the highest ranked comment from becoming a top-heavy attractor for all further discussion. I agree this is a real problem for discourse on HN these days!

Maybe an option, but I like that the top comment is usually above the average quality for that thread. Maybe something like a multi-arm bandit could work, where the nth top comment 'slot' on the page has an 80% chance of being the nth most upvoted comment, and a 20% chance of being a randomly selected comment?

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#472

Post by whatsmyusername »

toyg wrote: post #130

Gorbachev 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.

I'm excited to see if it takes a newer event for this to happen to the US, or if the garbage going on now will be enough.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#473

Post by bouncycastle »

ineedasername wrote: post #119
daenz wrote: post #31

Maybe this is demonstrates an immediate consequence of having a people (mainland China, not necessarily HK) that is governed primarily by fear: reactions of extreme subordination, which keep things running "smoothly" under normal conditions, can threaten the whole system to collapse under abnormal conditions.

Maybe outside of China we see it as "ruled by fear", but that's really not the case in China, at least for the majority: China doesn't try to make it's citizens afraid. Quite the opposite. Their modus operandi is "move along, nothing to see here, everything is fine." Indeed, that was their initial message to the public for this virus. So, the problem and partial cause of panic is when there is a problem that is very…

"move along, nothing to see here, everything is fine."

Because, what is the alternative? To blow the whistle? Surely most would be too afraid to do that, so naturally the safest bet is to play the "everything is fine" game.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#474

Post by sudosysgen »

BurningFrog wrote: post #146
toyg wrote: post #130

Gorbachev 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.

This won't be it. For one thing, China is quite technically competent.

The USSR was also exceedingly technically competent, except in some key areas and in administration.

China could have averted this entire epidemic if they simply let the doctors warn the population of what was happening.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#475

Post by sudosysgen »

ithinkinstereo wrote: post #209
ptx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response might not have needed to be as massive if the initial reaction of the Chinese authorities hadn't been to send the police after the doctors who discovered the problem[1] and try to hush it up. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/world/asia/china-coronavi...

Maybe, maybe not. I think the contrast to past epidemics is stark and shows the government is willing to learn and improve. In any case, the comparison to Chernobyl and 80s USSR is pretty off-base, wouldn't you agree?

Understanding the exponential fiction is key here. You can do 50x times as much effort with great technical ability and execution a month and a half later, it will barely be as effective as telling people to be careful a month and a half earlier.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#476

Post by selimthegrim »

btilly wrote: post #398
unishark wrote: post #283

Earlier 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.

Design of the levee was Army Corps/Federal responsibility and maintenance was the local one.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#477

Post by lsc »

spats1990 wrote: post #405
dmurray wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Hypothetically speaking, would you rather read about the recent US impeachment proceedings in Korean or in English? You know, the language most widely spoken in the US?

>Hypothetically speaking, would you rather read about the recent US impeachment proceedings in Korean or in English? You know, the language most widely spoken in the US?

So, I mean, I agree with your point. but as an aside, I think it would be really interesting to see the perspective of a Spanish historian on the recent events in my country

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#478

Post by beamatronic »

BostonEnginerd wrote: post #452
koheripbal wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media websites all suffer from a phenomenon of being flooded low quality content the moment they become popular. Reddit's content quality dropped significantly the moment they deployed their mobile app, though it had been on a downward decline for a while. I've seen HN being discussed at length on Reddit as a better alternative for "adylts", but now we see the same slow decline here. The important questions ar…

Metafilter has maintained reasonably high levels of discussion and civility. Part of this is active mods, the other part is that an account costs some money to open.

I’d pay for HN

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#479

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

grecy wrote: post #380
nate_meurer wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have huge problems with policing in this country, no doubt. This is simply not comparable to the systemic oppression and persecution of political and ethnic undesirables in places like China. Note that millions of us Americans who are disgusted with systemic racism and authoritarian overreach in our country are free to discuss it openly, assemble in opposition, and vote our conscience. Do you imagine a person in C…

You're missing my point entirely. Americans have no idea they are being fed propaganda. That's my point. That's what I said right back at the start. It's not relevant what a person in China can or can't do.

In the US (and most open democracies, probably) - propagandists are warring with other propagandists, in a perpetual contest for influence and power. Nearly everyone is aware that there are tremendous amounts of misinformation and propaganda being thrown at them every day. And its not just Democrats vs Republicans. Its also corporations, activists, advertisers, or even other nation states, etc.

People are quite good at recognizing the propaganda from other bubbles that aren't their own (hence everyone on the left seeing Fox News for what is... and everyone on the right seeing CNN/MSNBC for what they are). Many of the resources within each bubble are dedicated to exposing the propaganda of other bubbles. A bubble's inhabitants do less well at recognizing and acknowledging the propaganda of their own bubble, however.

Democracies are basically (thought) bubble blowing contests.

Its not quite the market place of ideas we wanted or hoped for... but its what we have today, and its still preferable to the alternative, where there's only one despot-controlled bubble - and so we don't even realize that bubbles exist at all - or if we do, we don't mention it out loud, if we know whats "good" for us.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#480

Post by ShorsHammer »

sigil wrote: post #453
ShorsHammer wrote: post #427

Meta: 185 top comment replies, 278 comments total. The redditfication of this place continues. China articles are essentially broken and there's no point trying to advance the discussion or have healthy debate. Someone should make an extension that collapses all replies and only shows top level comments, think it might be a lot healthier for online discourse.

Reddit has a solution to this problem, and HN should steal it: randomize top-level comment order. This keeps the highest ranked comment from becoming a top-heavy attractor for all further discussion. I agree this is a real problem for discourse on HN these days!

Think I've seen this in a few subs as default? Randomised comments for each unique client, even with some weighting perhaps might bring some balance back.
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