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We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

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Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#701

Post by INTPenis »

winrid wrote: post #697
skeezyboy wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting. you dont get a credit rating but you have an effective credit check. nobody is giving money out to strangers hoping itll get paid back, theyre all checking your credit history - a mortgage is credit, mortgage defaults still count against your borrowing ability. Its a credit check in all but name

No. Landlords for example cannot request that information.

Actually same in Sweden. I never thought about it until now.

It's mostly for luxury items and services that they request credit checks.

Of course a landlord can still request you send in proof of employment and your salary specification.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#702

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

1718627440 wrote: post #687
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That absolutely is propaganda. Of course it is, and so is the opposite claim. But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda" "merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.

This is true for every propaganda, otherwise it wouldn't work.

Nope. These days, most of it is "flood the zone with crap" stuff (1) that's wrong on even a quick inspection, not to mention contradictory to the rest of the crap.

It's almost refreshing to see a good old-fashioned well-constructed propaganda edifice, and not a big pile of crap, one that that aims to get people to believe in something rather than nothing at all.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotat...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8220792-the-point-of-modern...

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#703

Post by heavyset_go »

egman_ekki wrote: post #592
don_esteban wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory? I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours. You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a doze…

I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees. There was even a joke about this: ⸻ In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard work…

I live near a port and dock workers there make a quarter of a million dollars a year along with great benefits, meanwhile the majority of professors these days are adjuncts who aren't even university employees lol

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#704

Post by heavyset_go »

fragmede wrote: post #696
benreesman wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't an "authoritarian bit", it's not binary. When I was young the idea that your own computer would spy on you, or the one in your phone, or in your car? That was a William Gibson novel, wiretaps happened to mob bosses, you didn't worry about it happening to you as part of a dragnet. Security camera? You mean in a bank right? Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off…

What sounds pretty damned Soviet is people having to carry their papers around with them in case the gestapo or ICE stop them.

And the papers don't matter because the brownshirts signed up to crack skulls, not check paperwork

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#705

Post by corimaith »

9rx wrote: post #695
corimaith wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their claim is that leaving control to that small group of people who are pushing their own personal interests, is, on the spectrum, ultimately less democratic than an equally small group that ostensibly takes in all the considerations of the population at large. Well then it's important then actually to undertand what the CCP itself believes here. This is not what they are claiming explicitly. Wang Huning's critiqu…

> the idea that they are "democratic" is just largely just rhetoric for foreign audiences. They don't claim to be democratic, only more democratic. The alternatives compared against aren't democratic either, so the hypothetical possibility of the CCP being, on the spectrum, more democratic is theoretically sound. Reality isn't, though. The trouble with the claim is that what makes something more or less democratic in…

>They don't claim to be democratic, only more democratic.

No. As shown in Wang Huning's Neo-Authoritarianism, being more democratic is bad. Ideally they'd be operating on greater homogenization.

>Information can be inaccurate, but it doesn't have a side, fundamentally.

You need to seperate foreign rhetoric from actual political beliefs. Do you understand here what are the implications of Huning's beliefs, and lineage they draw from Schmitt? Or are you going to make the claim that Trump is more "democratic", which is banal it's meaningless.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#706

Post by pbhjpbhj »

coldtea wrote: post #643
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prevalence of masked gangs (ostensibly a Gestapo, but without uniform or id) kidnapping people in government buildings without police intervening appears (as an outside observer) to be ~100% higher than under recent USA administrations. Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?

> Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say? Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did? As for your strawman: -- According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally…

Yes, due process is important. Habeus corpus is important. Rule of law is a cornerstone of democracy. People acting for the state, such as border police, should act lawfully; they should identify themselves, wear the proper uniform, get the proper warrants and so on.

Why? Because you're breaching innocent peoples rights and removing their ability to get justice.

The fact that prior administrations did this on a large scale without the need to have gangs of thugs shows that the lawlessness of the administration is unnecessary to meet the ends of managing immigration.

Could you explain why you consider this a strawman? It sounds like you're onboard with the dismantling of USA democracy?

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#707

Post by lesostep »

rafaelmn wrote: post #634
cogman10 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the OP's point was that if you are in the ingroup, you can expect life to be pretty much equivalent to what you'd experience in the US. It's only if you are in the outgroup (like being gay) that you start to see state violence. This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime". To Godwin this, life for a non-jewis…

But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries. Half this forum is calling their political leaders idiots and will work (vote) against them, they are still in group. This is not a small distinction. Also the path upwards in society changes a lot.

>> But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries

That's not true. It requires wilful ignorance in some cases, but sometimes not even that.

Take, for example, russian troll farms. They initially were made to shift in-group opinion, because in-group started to a. get mad at Putin, b. reaching the conclusion that most of the in-group was dissatisfied and something had to be done.

Small forums in Russia (and HN is a small forum) aren't even monitored, but you can find abusive and violent language towards politicians in big social russian networks pretty easily.

So you can be in-group for authority and think yourself a free-thinker who isn't afraid to say the truth and cyberbully the president.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#708

Post by jmrm »

fy20 wrote: post #437
alisonatwork wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact same story pretty much happened to me when I moved to Canada about 15 years ago. I wasn't able to get a credit card for years, and couldn't rent an apartment without a guarantor, despite the fact that I was full-time employed in the tech industry, had zero debt, plenty of savings etc. What I took from the experience (especially after going through various iterations of it in several other countries) is tha…

Maybe this is why Europe is so popular with migrants? I've lived in four European countries and never had anything like that. To rent a place you just need to pay 1 or 2 months deposit up front. I've never heard of anyone being denied to buy a car with cash (but we don't use cheques... the payment is either successful or not - it doesn't need to clear). Loans are a different story, it varies a lot - but in my country…

IIRC some countries, like UK, have a similar thing like Credit Score, mostly used for what type of loans they can give you, max credit card limits, and other financial products, but won't affect at all to buy a car in cash or renting an apartment.

For me it's crazy not being able to rent a place even paying a whole year beforehand.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#709

Post by partomniscient »

don_esteban wrote: post #642
egman_ekki wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees. There was even a joke about this: ⸻ In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard work…

1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low ( 2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. Ther…

>There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)

Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.

The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.

So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.

I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.

Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.

Re: We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

#710

Post by partomniscient »

partomniscient wrote: post #709
don_esteban wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low ( 2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. Ther…

> There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-) Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed…

Too late to edit after a late post-proofread I got distracted by the ICFP2025.

>I really Prague

I really liked Prague... except for the tourist stretch on the non-castle side of the river which way tacky. We have our own tacky shops where I'm from, they're just not all together in a long continuous span.

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