Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

tsangchungshu.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 80 posts

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#61

Post by kar5pt »

rualca wrote: post #19
barry-cotter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please expand. Japan is much, much poorer. The work environment is awful in at least two different ways, dualisation and insane levels of presenteeism. It’s quite sexist by European or US standards. What makes Japan look good?

The US's appalling lack of basic social safety nets, specially regarding healthcare, coupled with its poverty rate (over twice of Brazil's) and violence epidemic don't make it a shining beacon of a functioning society. Just because STEM graduates in the US can aspire to live in a comfort bubble due to their access to a cushy job, that does not make it an example of a well-functioning society by no means. It makes abs…

Please provide a source for the claim that the US poverty rate is twice that of Brazil's. You may be comparing the rates of people below the poverty line for that country. Being below the poverty line in the US is still going to be a higher standard of living than being below the poverty line in a developing nation.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#62

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

_hzrk wrote: post #59
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you give up on freedom Not OP, but I would guess the simplest formula is to total up (Heath care - gun violence). i.e. the more likely you are to have health care for whatever happens to you, and the less likely you are to get shot, the better. I agree with William Gibson: "People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary." - https://twi…

Freedom does not translate into gun ownership. That's a very leftist/right-wing thing to say. Seems like people have been hardwired by the media to only think about America in terms of gun violence. When a Yakuza mobster terrorizes a small business in Kyoto, I wonder how a guaranteed medical insurance will help then. Don't forget that Japan is the country with the highest mob involvement in the legitimate economy. If…

> Freedom does not translate into gun ownership.

I am not going to move to Japan for a number of reasons (language and ethnicity for a start) and sure that society isn't either objectively perfect without corruption or prejudice, or perfect for me. So I don't feel the need to defend Japan here (I hope to visit Japan some day!)

However I have seriously considered moving to places in the USA, and I assure you that the question "what is the gun violence to healthcare ratio of that state?" was one of the first questions in my mind. It seems relevant, even though you did not raise it. Both guns and healthcare are representative of a group of related features of the society, of which they are only the most noticeable examples.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#63

Post by em-bee »

Iv wrote: post #39
donw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, absolutely. It does prompt the question: what education systems do you favor?

I have been disappointed by both the French and Japanese education. I'd love to give Montessori and Freinet style of education a try. But I find it weird that education can't reinvent itself radically. The system we have was based around a scarcity of books and a need for the production of standardized workers. I suspect the education system's main constraint is not the needs of kids but the possibility/will of the c…

the argument that i keep hearing is that school was designed to create obedient factory workers.

montessori has all the things you liked above and more.

cleaning up after yourself, and serving food, working with various household tools are apart of the curriculum. they are not just chores, but already in kindergarten kids are learning these things playfully.

kindergarten age kids are interested in the adult world, so for them, cutting fruit is an interesting activity just like learning to count. i can trust our kids with sharp knives and scissors, because they learnt how to handle them.

i don't know about the older levels, but cleaning up the classroom would be a natural continuation of kids cleaning up after themselves.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#64

Post by tored »

rualca wrote: post #60
tored wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reframing on what I already said. I include older generations in "we".

Reframing it does not address it's problem. It is not an issue of "quality of life". It's a problem of being unable to produce the goods and services required to maintain the older segment of the population, which are no longer able to generate income to provide for themselves and have an increasingly greater demand for healthcare.

That is an assumption that our means of production stays the same, but with technology it increases.

In a more and more high skilled society, increasing population can have the opposite effect, do everyone have the skills and knowledge to operate in high skill society? If not, who will feed them?

Combine this with automation and old truths about increasing population to maintain standard of living falls apart.

On top of that, what the lockdowns has showed us is that many jobs are not actually needed for having a functioning society.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#65

Post by atoav »

enkid wrote: post #57
atoav wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a european perspective I find the current state the US is in vastly more dystopian than Japan. As of now I'd rather live in Japan than the US.

Do you have any personal experience or data to back this up, or is this just based on your perceptions?

It is just my perception, but I didn't claim anything more.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#66

Post by SiempreViernes »

bildung wrote: post #58
SiempreViernes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is quite right, if the Overton window is different then so are the the poles (for any reasonable definition of pole). What is shared is the "directions" in "moral space", while a pole is above all a specific point. And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral questions, not that these debates don't happen. The articl…

> I don't think this is quite right, if the Overton window is different then so are the the poles (for any reasonable definition of pole) Why? In my understanding the overton window is a sliding frame on an axis, so it makes no statement about the axis, only about the position on the axis. > And to clarify, the main point of the article is that in Japan politics is not organised around how people stand on these moral…

> In my understanding the overton window is a sliding frame on an axis

I guess it's a technical and semantic objection: A (one dimensional) window by necessity has two endpoints, and "pole" is a word that defines a point. Your use of pole is however more in the sense of direction rather than endpoint; an axis is a direction and as such can be defined by any two points along it and no set of points have such a privileged position that they warrant the label "pole".

> I find it hard to believe that there is no ideological consistency

Again, it's a statement about how parties are organised and not about how people in general believe the world works. Though I suppose this circumstance also implies there is a fairly dominant agreement on the essentials of the world-view.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#67

Post by dslkfjg »

donw wrote: post #29
dbt00 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The school can't do it but in plenty of communities there are community organizations where parents and kids help clean up their local neighborhood and beautify things. I grew up in such a place, in what was often a troubled neighborhood in Chicago. It doesn't have to be the school that does it.

It depends on what your goals are. We had similar volunteer programs where I grew up. Things were clean enough, but the classrooms were still a mess, and people still threw their trash away on the street for the volunteers to pick up. For Americans that have never spent time in Japan, Korea, or Switzerland for that matter, they are nominally clean in a way that is rare-nigh-on-extinct in the US. In Japan, seeing tras…

Japan and Korea have a homogeneous population with a self-conscious national identity which is a source of pride to each individual. That's the difference you're seeing.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#68

Post by Viliam1234 »

Iv wrote: post #39
donw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, absolutely. It does prompt the question: what education systems do you favor?

I have been disappointed by both the French and Japanese education. I'd love to give Montessori and Freinet style of education a try. But I find it weird that education can't reinvent itself radically. The system we have was based around a scarcity of books and a need for the production of standardized workers. I suspect the education system's main constraint is not the needs of kids but the possibility/will of the c…

> But I find it weird that education can't reinvent itself radically.

Long version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

Short version: The existing system is good for those who win at it, so they have no incentive to change it. The important thing about schools is not education, but certification. Spend five years doing difficult but ultimately meaningless tasks at school; the school will certify you "this person is smart and hard working and obedient", and the employers will prefer you to people without such certificate.

Improving education would go against the goals of the current system. Imagine that you can make learning 100% fun -- how would you now distinguish between obedient people, and those who are only doing it because it is fun? Imagine that you can explain things in a way that literally everyone could easily understand -- how would you now distinguish between really smart and average people?

The fact that many kids fail at school is a feature, not a bug. The purpose of the school is to select elite employees. Their knowledge is less important than their character traits (intelligence, hard work, obedience), because if you employ the right kind of person, they can learn everything they need at work. Make no mistake, even startups who want to disrupt everything, don't want to have their own workplace disrupted by the same personality type.

So... if you want to be an employee, and you are smart, hard working, and obedient, the current school system is great, because it will give you a certificate that gives you an advantage over your competition. If you want to be an employer, the current school system is great, because it will certify for you the kind of employee you want. And if you are neither rich nor smart, the system works against you, but that's okay because your opinion does not matter.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#69

Post by unishark »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #41
johnnycerberus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you give up on freedom and live in a society as rigid (not in a derogatory sense) as Japan's? I'm also European, but I would rather live in US than in Japan. I believe opinions on US differ in Europe, you should have said that it's your personal opinion, if you dislike US that doesn't mean that it has any correlation with the fact thay you are European.

> Why would you give up on freedom Not OP, but I would guess the simplest formula is to total up (Heath care - gun violence). i.e. the more likely you are to have health care for whatever happens to you, and the less likely you are to get shot, the better. I agree with William Gibson: "People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary." - https://twi…

> Not OP, but I would guess the simplest formula is to total up (Heath care - gun violence). i.e. the more likely you are to have health care for whatever happens to you, and the less likely you are to get shot, the better.

What in the world does that formula have to do with freedom? If anything, you are trying to maximize for security with it, which is generally in opposition to freedom.

As for bankruptcy, it depends on whether you are talking about chapter 7 or chapter 13. Just kidding, that question was nonsense too. I think you're just trying to shoehorn zingers into the response.

Re: Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

#70

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

unishark wrote: post #69
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you give up on freedom Not OP, but I would guess the simplest formula is to total up (Heath care - gun violence). i.e. the more likely you are to have health care for whatever happens to you, and the less likely you are to get shot, the better. I agree with William Gibson: "People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary." - https://twi…

> Not OP, but I would guess the simplest formula is to total up (Heath care - gun violence). i.e. the more likely you are to have health care for whatever happens to you, and the less likely you are to get shot, the better. What in the world does that formula have to do with freedom? If anything, you are trying to maximize for security with it, which is generally in opposition to freedom. As for bankruptcy, it depend…

> you are trying to maximize for security with it, which is generally in opposition to freedom.

So you're saying that employees who don't dare leave the corporate job because they really depend on the company's healthcare plan are more free. Cool.

> medical bankruptcy ... was nonsense too. I think you're just trying to shoehorn zingers

Great zinger yourself, bro.

You're welcome to equate a growing precariat who are vulnerable to exploitation as "Freedom", but don't expect that opinion to be universal.

Post reply on HN