China to bar people with bad 'social credit' from planes, trains
reuters.com
reuters.com
I am a Chinese expat, but I don't have a National ID. I have a Chinese passport, but I cannot even buy train tickets online (yet i can ride the train) with it and I cannot open a bank account in my own country. Things will get worse with 'social credit' as another barrier because I won't have a credit history with them.
[edit] removed claim that Chinese expat won't be able to fly in China without National ID because some say the viral news is a rumor. Honestly i cannot tell any more.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
----------------
Slavery is ALLOWED if guilty of a crime. So go on ahead and keep espousing "rah rah USA". We're still in a slave country.
Is any US State or Federal prison running cotton plantations in Georgia with forced, uncompensated labor?
Its officially optional on paper, but in practice it can be held against you and result in worse treatment and longer prison time (such as being used against you in parole hearings). Also, slavery doesn't require being used for labor. While most slavery is for some economic gain to the slave holder, it isn't a required component.
Except in that in the federal system and many state systems, it's officially required of all able-bodied prisoners and refusal gets extra punishment, such as solitary confinement.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...
It is also apparently mentioned in Hillary Clinton's memoirs that they had unpaid prison labor at the governor's mansion to save money.
> Yes, and there are plenty of articles about it. For example:
Let's look up the definition of "slave":
> a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another;
Prison labor is not slavery, this is clearly shown by the fact that you can't buy or sell prisoners on the open market. Prison labor is involuntary servitude. It's still shitty and in need of reform, but hyperbole does no one any good.
Yes, and it is precisely the reason the US is one of the few eligible countries not to have ratified the main current treaty against slavery, the ILO Forced Labor Convention.
> My understanding is that work is optional
Prison labor is generally mandatory for able-bodied prisoners in the federal system, and this is true in some state systems as well.
> Is any US State or Federal prison running cotton plantations in Georgia with forced, uncompensated labor?
Historically, slavery has often had compensation, and, yes, there are literally forced labor prison farms in the USA, such as the Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka “Parchman Farm”.
There have been some reforms since the origins of the penal slavery system in the US, in which the government involved literally rented convicted out to private businesses, but it remains a system of slavery, often involving a public/private partnership for profit.
>> Does the United States actually practice slavery in the prison system in any fashion?
>Yes, and it is precisely the reason the US is one of the few eligible countries not to have ratified the main current treaty against slavery, the ILO Forced Labor Convention.
That's false. Involuntary servitude is not slavery. Here's the definition of slave:
> a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another;
To be a slave, you have to be someone's property, as in able to be bought and sold as chattle.
> the main current treaty against slavery, the ILO Forced Labor Convention.
That treaty clearly prohibits a much broader class of things than just slavery, it purports to ban forced labor of almost any kind (for anyone who isn't "an adult able-bodied male", apparently):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_Labour_Convention
> Its object and purpose is to suppress the use of forced labour in all its forms irrespective of the nature of the work or the sector of activity in which it may be performed. The Convention defines forced labour as "all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", with few exceptions like compulsorly military service. The convention excludes "adult able-bodied males", to whom legal imposition of forced labour is allowed.
Consider the text of the Thirteenth Amendment. It specifically exempts prison labor from its prohibition on slavery.
None of the elements you mention distinguish US penal slavery from historical institutions hmthst were unambiguously recognized as slavery.
Able bodied inmates have no choice whether or not to work when ordered to. Companies routinely rent prison labor to avoid having to pay employee wages for work. Private prisons routinely sell non-able bodied inmates to state run prisons. An inmate can neither purchase their freedom nor purchase out of servitude.
That there is a time limit on inmate ownership does not mean there is no ownership.
This is clearly shown by the fact that the state can't sell your person as chattel to someone else when you're sentenced to prison or community service.
You posted this in response to someone else's comment, and made clear that you are trying to argue with something else.
You were arguing with "rah rah USA," and that just ain't what was said.
Come on, brother, let's grow up for the sake of us all.
"[OTHER COUNTRY] is doing something bad."
"WHAT ABOUT AMERICA?!"
"It's not equivalent."
"Oh, so America is perfect, then?"
This is patently not true. There are plenty of Chinese in the previous generation that gave up their hukou/ID card as required when they gained permanent residency in another country, and use their passport internally (when returning to work in China) like us foreigners must (it seems like these days it isn't necessary to turn in your hukou, but it was in the 90s). A previous colleague at MSRA was in this boat. It was troublesome for sure, but he could fly (even a Chinese can fly internally with a passport, as my wife did when we went from BJ to GZ), open bank accounts (like foreigners can), and so on. The only thing I know he had trouble with was permission to visit Taiwan, they couldn't handle a Chinese citizen without hukou, but that was it.
I'm as critical of the Chinese government as anyone, but bad information really doesn't help.
Do you have a cite for this? I know you lose PRC citizenship when gaining another citizenship (and thus a foreign passport), but I was not under the impression that was true for "permanent residents" of other countries. You can be an Chinese expat while still being a Chinese citizen.
Also, Chinese National IDs cannot be renewed overseas, while passports can. I think the law was pretty explicit that Chinese citizens can't fly under their passport (though they can jump through hoops to get a temporary national ID to fly). I know people who were in a bit of a pickle when this law came into effect because they were overseas when their National ID expired. It's certainly another hassle and bother for expats.
This is false. There were rumors in May 2017 that some airports in China started to reject passports for Chinese citizens per some new internal regulations, so that is probably what was initially reported. As is always, the follow-up was never reported again: top aviation administration and public security department later clarified the law still allows using passports. The real reason for the few occasions of passport bans was because those few airports didn't have networked passports readers to verify it.
That explains it, that's about the time my friend was trying to figure out their document situation for a trip back to China. They ended up opting not to fly domestically because of the uncertainty.
You can fly internally on a chinese passport. Again, because not all chinese citizens have or qualify for ID cards.
Please stop spreading misleading info. Chinese citizens are allowed to fly domestically using passport, I did that dozens of times. It is also explicitly listed on Civil Aviation Administration of China's web site, link provided below, it is explicitly mentioned on the first line.
The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical as ML makes privacy easier and easier to pierce. People who made rational decisions about the risks of sharing various opinions on a small site in 2010 are now locked into the consequences a decade later when both technology and political landscapes have changed.
It would be truly surprising if HN history doesn't eventually play a key role in someone being imprisoned or executed due to having expressed views that a country, religion or other organization finds objectionable.
CCP currently cannot monitoring all foreign websites, so (currently) I don't think people will be hassled because of few archived comments on HM. But who knows, that may change in the future, and somebody may report you just like what people did during Cultural Revolution[0]. So, keep yourself anonymous under another name is always important.
In China, domestic websites are required by law to verify you and record your true personal identity (Phone number for example) when you trying to post anything on it, so you can't be anonymous. When I using that kind of website, I never do anything sensitive (Or even post anything useful).
You can just mine data of a person when they are of interest.
Just assume that a few seconds after you post a comment Google, Bing, Facebook and a few other major Internet sites have scrapped your comment and are analyzing it.
And there a few aggregators that repeat the HN content and alternative UI for HN.
And some users make a local copy to run some statistics or detect dupes or just for curiosity. Some moron even made a Chrome extension to show the deleted and edited comments in HN.
And assume that the spy agencies of the major countries are making a nice backup of all your comments.
So after pressing the send button, just assume that there are 30 copies of your comment floating around.
A delete button only deletes one of them. The idea of Tweeter that you can delete a tweet and everybody really delete it is hilarious. Just assume the there is no "delete" button, it's just a "hide" button.
"Deleting" a comment is useful against a clueless neighbor that hates you because your dog barks too much. If a country with nukes hates you, they probably have the technology to save a copy of the "deleted" comment.
Probably a more common problem than spy agencies, just saying.
Many comments will be and have been mined years after their original posting. It's truly doubtful any country was logging every HN comment in the year you opened your account, for example.
The Hukou system is broken and inconsistent. Getting mine revoked was the biggest pain the ass. I'm sure there are anecdotal evidence to support your view, but the reality is the law is very differently applied depending on where you are in China. I know from first had experience the the original poster is correct.
For example, I rarely see expats in Asia complain about why there are so many Hollywood movies in Asia.
Hukou is broke for sure, but airports are under control of the federal government and have no problem in letting hukou-free individuals travel on passports. My colleague was able to go mostly where I went, except Taiwan as stated above, and our work travelled to a lot of weird airports in the middle of nowheres.
This is the problem with China. Just because the system works for Jack Ma, and Xi Jinping's family, doesn't mean it works for everyone
1.The national ID is revoked only under some special case that the citizen is believed to be leave the country and give up the citizenship.Not for short term stay like visit/travel. For those whose Chinese national ID being revoked, they are not the equivalent of expat in Western country although technically you can insist it's expat. Again as you said the policies in China varied from place to place and even from time to time. Many emigrant such as aged family reunion emigrant can even keep their national IDs
2.China becomes a business orientated society. There's no reason to exclude passport owners to buying a train ticket online if there's a way to do it. The difficulty here is the cost of passport reader which is monopolized by only few US and European manufactures that only border control agencies can afford, while resident ID readers can be purchased from multiple domestic providers competing for quality and price. It's pure technical and economical reason, not because a regime want to do sth against its own people.
Your thoughts about somebody being paid (maybe with wu mao) is interesting and also a quite common belief
You can read the contents of the RFID chip using $100 off-the-shelf hardware, and the decryption key is the OCR string on the “main” page of the passport.
The piece of glass where you lay the passport, the OCR, and the case itself I’m sure any Chinese contractor could easily do as well.
I feel that most people doing this subconsciously feel like they're acting as a counterweight to the ultra patriotism of other segments of the population, but in acting as such a counterweight they appear as absurd as their ideological opponents.
Both sides annoy me for the same reason: they are blind to reality.
But I worry the West will be watching this closely to see how they might implement something similar.
It's terrible, it's even happening directly in the replies do you. This whole post has been almost totally derailed by whataboutism, and a lot of it is literally textbook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> The Guardian deemed whataboutism, as used in Russia, "practically a national ideology". Journalist Julia Ioffe wrote that "Anyone who has ever studied the Soviet Union" was aware of the technique, citing the Soviet rejoinder to criticism, ["]And you are lynching Negroes,["] as a "classic" example of the tactic. Writing for Bloomberg News, Leonid Bershidsky called whataboutism a "Russian tradition", while The New Yorker described the technique as "a strategy of false moral equivalences". Jill Dougherty called whataboutism a "sacred Russian tactic", and compared it to the pot calling the kettle black.
It's not a tactic, it's rooted in traditional Russian law and stems from belief that you can't judge others while breaking exact same principle, or generally being immoral yourself. So pointing out that other party is lynching negroes is legit defense from some accusations from that party.
Were the people trying to hold Russia to account for its knowing, deliberate policies themselves personally oppressing black people? Accusations of double standards were completely unwarranted, which is the whole point of whataboutism. Now we’re talking about America’s largely successful, if incomplete struggle against racism instead of the systematic oppression of people in other countries as official state policy. Thanks for that.
The idea that the Russians invented rejecting someone's argument on the grounds that the person making the argument is a hypocrite strikes me as rather unlikely. I also see problems with the idea that we can simply dismiss complaints about racism as textbook Russian propaganda.
That is definitely exactly what happened. We would say something about them invading Afghanistan or forcibly making satellite states in the Warsaw pact, and they would instantly come back with "Well, we're not the ones lynching black people." It's remarkably persuasive if you don't think it through.
The term you're speaking of "whataboutism" is not refuting the argument on logical priciples, it's an ad hominem attack.
Just because the person accusing you of doing something wrong is doing the same thing does not make it right for you to do it. What is the argument here to justify your behaviours or the judgment of others for your sins, even if they're guilty of the same? If I kill somebody, am I wrong for calling out somebody else out for killing somebody?
The Russians raised this into an art form. They justified Afghanistan by using Vietnam.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/2c9342e9aa17d2237eade9...
https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Populatio...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-i...
This is a different situation, and it's sadly Orwellian.
I had a coworker who grew up in Romania under Ceausescu and the stories he told! He talked about neighbors just disappearing one day and someone new living in the home. People didn't bat an eye since if you started asking questions, you might be next.
He mentioned how there was an election for president and it was a write in ballot. Someone wrote "Mickey Mouse". Despite voting in a booth in private, they figured out who he was and he had to report for "reeducation" every weekend. This involved sitting in the police station watching propaganda all day Saturday and Sunday.
I don't think people in the West can even fathom what it's like to live under an authoritarian system like that.
Thank goodness. However, what you're pointing out is that the difference is not because the principles are different. The difference is primarily that in the west, the people who would do this, don't yet have 100% coverage over society.
Yes, they are. The reason "the people who would do this don't yet have 100% coverage over society" is precisely because, at least for now, principles in the West find this sort of authoritarianism repugnant. This is exactly the kind of false equivalency the parent is talking about.
I'd agree that there are a lot of people who find that kind of authoritarianism repugnant. Then, you have lots of people who work at various tech companies who basically engage in censorship. There are also a lot of people who will wield institutional power to engage in censorship. There are entire academic fields where professors and researchers are fearful of discussing their findings in the mainstream, because they can be castigated for doing so. There are large numbers of people who will use physical violence as a means of political coercion, and there are many, many people who will give their tacit approval of this.
A lot of people in the West find that kind of authoritarianism repugnant. A lot of people in the West find satisfaction in exercising repugnant authoritarianism.
"A lot of" is a conveniently vague quantity. However you quantify it, it's absolutely nothing near the scale of institutional and cultural support for authoritarianism in China.
However you quantify it, there's far, far too much of it here in the United States and in the Western world.
Forceful de-platforming isn't criticism. Criticism is argument. Force isn't argument. De-monetizing videos for unstated political motivations isn't criticism, it's censorship. Making irrational noise, intimidating, pounding on windows, lighting shops on fire, throwing things through windows -- those things aren't criticism. That is force, and many of those are examples of criminal acts. It's non-governmental censorship.
So many of the things which the Extreme Left use as a means of "convincing" people are the exact same things which bigots of the past did to black people and gay people:
- exclusion from clubs and professional organizations
- public rudeness, yelling
- refusal to serve
- not renting homes and apartments
- getting them fired
I believe the negative sentiment towards the NSA, Facebook, Amazon and Google have to do with the fact that activities like collecting and storing sensitive information on individuals brings Western society one step closer to the situation in China. The capability now exists and a historic record about an individuals behaviour can be summoned easily.
What scares me is the idea of laws you're breaking which don't even exist yet, scary stuff.
When I or many others say "China's doing this but look what the NSA is doing", I am not trying to be a CPC apologist by pointing at the NSA. I am being pro civil liberties by using the CPC as an example of what happens when you don't hold your government to account.
America gets to enjoy its relatively high degree of civil liberties precisely because its population is so often critical of and suspicious of its government. Even when the criticism is laughable in comparison to other countries.
That is indeed true. But then, cultures of China and the West are very different. Judging either by the standards of the other is bound to be contentious.
Also, there's arguably some observer bias in the West's pride. Changes in the US after 9/11 were dramatic! What if radical Islamic fundamentalists had done a better job? More waves of attacks, soon after the first?
But anyway, should one judge China based on Western principles and values. If so, what would be the basis for that?
And if not, should one judge China based on principles and values of <some other Asian nation>? I don't see the basis for that, either.
However, it is of course valid for Chinese to judge their own country, based on whatever principles and values they might hold. And to work for change. But that's a very different thing from random Westerners judging China.
Personally, I can't imagine living in China. I have a hard enough time tolerating the US. But it's for sure better than where I came from. Although, I must admit, far from what I had imagined. But so it goes.
I would say that justifying authoritarianism is a perfect example of how appeals to cultural relativism can be dangerous.
However, I do my best to avoid judging. Labeling. Appealing to illusory fundamental ideals and standards.
Sure, but maybe "authoritarianism" is just an abstract concept, and there's a lot more to the current Chinese situation th
You can split hairs saying 'it used to be more authoritarian', 'one party has been in power for a long time', or 'it used to be under the nominal control of a western state' since no place is 1:1, but in the end it shows typical chinese people do not want it either.
Side point but generally speaking you don't need a national ID to open a bank account or buy train tickets online. Banks do require a +86 mobile number, which you can get with your passport alone. You can then use your +86 mobile number, passport, and hotel address to open a bank account. You can then add your bank account to WeChat and buy train tickets there. You will have to line up to pick up your electronically-purchased tickets as paper tickets, using your confirmation code on WeChat and your passport, which is a huge inconvenience compared to those swiping their national IDs to get into the trains (they built the entire train system basically only for locals), but there are separate lines for ticket pickup that move quickly, so it's not as annoying as getting in line to buy tickets and the finding out that seats are sold out. At least your WeChat purchase guarantees you your journey and seat.
You can also use Alipay instead of WeChat if you prefer.
That said I'm not sure if there are additional restrictions on Chinese passports, but a non-Chinese passport can use the above procedure.
Of course it's a massive pain in the ass because of all the stupid SMS confirmations and things involved in the process. Easily the worst UI/UX I've seen of a ticketing system. The trains themselves are fantastic though.
Also, yes, everything is tracked to your passport number, so even if you have no national ID you do still become part of the same "credit" system.
A large number of replies turn the conversation towards how the West is equally bad or worse. Another set of replies talks about how China may inevitably come out ahead.
You can check yourself by Googling 10 HN threads that critique China, versus say, Japan or Poland.
Is China running some indirect social public relations in the style of Russian Facebook ads for Trump? Or is it simply China hawks / nationalists or other casual supporters? My personal conclusion is that there's a decent chance it's a bit of both. And the likelihood of the first may be concerning.
But seriously, check out the pattern and come to your own conclusion.
P.S. If it matters, I'm ethnically Chinese as well, and think well of the Chinese people in general.
I'm sure one of the many pro-china robots will cite something liek "THE NSA IS JUST AS BAD" but the reality is China is 1000000 times worse.
Just mention how Taiwan is in reality an independent country and they go full retard.
I'm a normal person with a normal life, hence the throwaway to reduce even the small chance of getting hit back, something that China seems to like to do (not coincidentally the exact topic of the original link).
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but we know what Russia has likely already done on social media. China is just as clever and resourceful, if not more, and they want to save face. This makes indirect social media influence a temptation that is difficult for the CPC to resist at best.
One possible answer to your question:
I could not find anything that backs what you are saying.
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-Chinese-economy...
The sheer amount of resource and power they can wield against an individual citizen is unparalleled in the entire human history. The only thing stopping them from utilizing it is only its own bureaucratic inefficiency.
It looks like their is a lot of miscommunication on the issue.
Having seen authoritarian regimes behave on a smaller scale, I would not be terribly surprised if the miscommunication was intentional to see how the desired (very negative) policy was received, before backing down with a retraction to something less onerous.
you can. Just select passport and fill the passport number. I did it multiple times.
Everyone's children are going to make mistakes. The wealthy are going to be able to cover up their children's mistakes, the poor are going to be put on 'the list' and become 'restricted.'
The restrictions will grow, and eventually you'll have a new group of 'untouchables'
It is more like a modern iteration of very old Confucian ideals. (Not that I agree with Confucian philosophy)
Confucian philosophy had influenced Chinese culture for several millennial, and the oral tradition was that Confucius (Kong Tzu) himself distilled what went into the Analects from much older rites and cultures.
The basic idea here is that humans don't start out as humans, and require socialization to uplift them and refine their spirit to that of "human". To accomplish this as a society, there is an emphasis on education and behavioral control.
This has permeated many levels of the Chinese culture. What is novel here is the use of Big Data and AI to enforce these.
Confucious's philosophy and its descendent philosophies, though pervasive, are not the only streams that have influenced Chinese culture. If you are looking for echoes of classical liberalism, you'd find it more at home with the Lao-tzu, and the ethos of "let's improve our society with technology" would find an echo with Mo-tzu.
> Everyone's children are going to make mistakes. The wealthy are going to be able to cover up their children's mistakes, the poor are going to be put on 'the list' and become 'restricted.'
This already happens before Big Data, both in China and in Taiwan. It happened with other cultures that were influenced by ancient Chinese Confucian thought -- Korea and Japan.
Confucious also said "those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.”
"Jesus teaches us to be moral, so the inquisition is just letting the government teach us to be more moral."
This social credit is just what the "men of methods" would prescribe replace aristocracy with a bureaucracy. You get automatic four year ban for certain services if social credit drops below certain level.
If this is a modern iteration of confucianism, then confucianism is equivalent to a caste system.
Isn't every caste system.dressed up like that?
I mean that a felony removes your right to vote, makes employment much more difficult.
However, the actual effect of bring that up is to:
1) Blunt criticism of this newly implemented Chinese policy.
2) Distract everyone from it with a debate about US policy.
No one's talking about improving the US OR China here. Because of the whataboutism, we're derailing on if the two are morally comparable or not, which suits the Chinese authoritarians just fine.
You're not even using this term correctly. Not that hardly anyone is since it's become popular...but still. Whataboutism is a very specific thing, and every time someone draws a comparison it doesn't automatically become whataboutism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/2017/12/15/black-mirro...
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-overs...
http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879653.html for air travel
http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879654.html for train travel
and Chinese news summary: http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/201803/16/t20180316_28505546...
Use Google translate to check if this is being misreported.
In China you are "bad credit" if you refuse to pay despite a court order. In the US you could be jailed for contempt of court.
Many times, you can contact the company who you owe and set up a plan where they'll remove the bad mark if you pay the debt in full.
Now that being the case I still don't like credit scores. You can work years, have lots of savings, pay all your bills on time, pay off cars and mortgages and have a rocking credit score. The if one medical vendor sends your $90 bill to the wrong address, you never see it, then they send you to collections you will watch your score crater. This is sadly what happened to me, it is rage inducing!
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/11/5365018...
https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/medical-debt-and...
You can also easily dispute that $90 bill, and easily get it removed from your record. You'll find there's almost zero chance they're going to tangle with you over $90.
If it's a $5,000 medical bill, then they will fight you over that dispute claim.
Just one of the hard realities of the legal system.
This is, exactly, how the immigration debate is being held in DC. One undocumented shot and killed a citizen by accident, and now we're supposed to kick all immigrants out. Visceral emotion is a great tool to optimize society for corner cases.
I can understand why the question is asked though. The jury is there to find facts, i.e. define what has happened. The judge will then find the "correct" sentence if found guilty. The jury should not be swayed to a not guilty finding if they believe a guilty would be correct, just because the possible maximum sentence is too long, even if it would not be imposed in the case at hand anyway.
This is all nitpicky and arbitrary, which is largely my point. The line between misdemeanour and felony is thin, but the consequences of crossing it are severe. In one state, you might get a $50 fine; in the next, you might be barred from voting or lose your green card.
Besides, different states have different laws. This isn't arbitrary but how our country was designed to work.
This is the marketplace at work. It's not a government-imposed ban on access to public services.
A court that doesn't publish felony records is not a secret court. In fact, non-secret courts have been around for centuries even though easily accessible felony records are an extremely recent phenomenon (post-internet).
Reading back I suppose my previous statement came off as callous. That wasn't my intention. But let's take a quick peek at felony recidivism rates [0] Spoiler alert: it's quite high and depends on what they were convicted for.
> Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.
[0]https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...
First, what about the 30% some-odd folks who aren't recidivist? The individual should be smothered over the statistic of the many, because he's in a set of individuals (felons) and there's 70% of this set that repeats? How fair is that.
Secondly, if you're barred from professional or high-paying work because everywhere you go, you fail a criminal background check... Doesn't that mean you're MORE likely to return to crime? I don't know what it's like to have been a street criminal, but I can imagine I'd be a lot more likely to steal if no one hired me because of a past thing I did (like stealing). I'd say, the system is against me, it's corrupt and so forth, so screw it.
That last sentiment I described ("the system is corrupt anyway, it's stacked against me so screw it") is an attitude I see a lot in the (very large) US city where I live, and I know a number of people with criminal histories. They'll never end up in a cubicle farm making 180K writing code, that's for sure.
I'm 100% sure this negatively impacts the ability for those with records to get jobs. That really, really sucks for them. And like you mentioned, of course that would contribute to recidivism. Who's going to hire a thief to work unsupervised where they could just steal stuff again? That might be an unfair characterization, but I'd like to talk to the candidate about that and see if _I_ believed they were not going to steal my shit. If someone has a litany of drug convictions, I'd probably be hesitant to assume they were totally trustworthy to show up to work every day. But I'd like to talk to them about it. I guess your position is "it's none of your business", and you could be right about that.
The average Joe won't experience any difference. The armchair political scientist will argue it endlessly (I put myself in that category, by the way).
From the article:
> People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.
The US may ban you from flying if you are politically controversial [1]+, get kicked off a flight [2, edit: 4], or sneak onto planes without a ticket [3].
Likewise, people who trespass on public transit are often barred from its use. And of course people who break traffic laws are (eventually) kicked off the roads.
I won't comment on whether the Chinese government's characterization of its laws is accurate or not (I don't speak any relevant language and don't know much about the culture, so all I have to go off of is western media). But at least according to the Chinese government, these rules are mostly in-line with how things often work in the US.
[1] https://theintercept.com/document/2014/07/23/march-2013-watc... (edit: changed from http://mentalfloss.com/article/68073/8-ways-you-can-end-no-f...)
[2] https://thepointsguy.com/2017/07/getting-banned-from-an-airl...
[3] e.g., http://wqad.com/2018/02/21/illinois-stowaway-woman-pleads-no...
[4] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39919229/ns/travel-news/t/can-bad-...
+ The "predictive assessments" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-li...) used for putting people on the no-fly list are not very transparent and, IMO, reminiscent of a social credit system. It's extremely hard to imagine such a system that doesn't harshly penalize certain constitutionally protected speech (e.g., about Islam and US foreign policy in the ME).
The provided source doesn't support this claim. The only part which could even remotely be constructed as support for this claim would be 3 and the anecdata there include "He suspects" and "He thinks" - on the other, that you can end on such a list without knowing the reason (and often without recourse afair) is a real problem, but that's not what you claimed.
There are other abuses that we have concrete evidence of. E.g., refusing the cooperate with the FBI. (https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/laws...).
Hell, up until 2005, the TSA used CREDIT SCORES as a component in deciding who should be on no-fly lists...
DHS does not use social media posts alone to place someone on watch lists, but they are incorporated into predictive assessments. Given two people who are otherwise equivalent, the one with public stated controvsial opinions IS more likely to end up on a no-fly list. By the govt's own admission.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/thousands-chin...
Meanwhile, back in the US, we've actually begun to recognize our mistake as a culture. Thus eight states have legalized marijuana, and another dozen will go that way soon. Decriminalization of drug offenses is a common point of discussion in every state. Nearly every state that puts pot legalization on the ballot sees it go through. We've begun recognizing the mistake of how we fail to treat addicts.
Over a decade ago the US recognized the huge mistake of mass incarceration, as such the US prison population has peaked and has begun to decline, with both sides of the political aisle now openly discussing how to correct that broken system.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/grover-norquist/republicans-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/12/prison...
http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/354288-we-must-p...
And there's China, going the other direction full speed.
[2013] "China executes 4 foreigners, televises death march" ... "China has mostly abandoned the once-common practice of parading condemned criminals before crowds in stadiums and through city streets on the way to execution grounds on the edge of cities."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-executes-4-foreigners-tel...
> A court in China has sentenced 10 people to death, mostly for drug-related crimes, in front of thousands of onlookers before taking them away for execution.
Did you mean sentencing in instead of executing? Based on the article you linked, the executions seem to have occurred elsewhere.
Until the US has a share equal to its percentage of the global population of incarcerated people (instead of 4-5 times that), and has abolished the death penalty, the shame that are private prisons, and improved the third-world conditions of its prisons, it has nowhere near "recognized its mistake as a culture".
It just has a few fewer prisoners than a decade ago, because of several factors -- including the legalization of marijuana. It's still as Old Testament and punishing to its inmates, and especially to the black population, as ever otherwise.
Btw, regarding China, let's cut it some slack.
For historical reasons not all countries develop at the same speed or are at the same stage. 40 years ago the US still had aggregation. 80 years ago it still lynched blacks.
And China 50 years ago had mass political executions and a full on political slash civil war -- compared to that, sentencing 10 people on a stadium with a crowd present (not executing them with a crowd) is BS.
(Especially since the US also has non-judicial citizens and even relatives of victims attend executions, to enjoy their revenge on the person dying...).
No, let's not "cut it some slack" on human rights abuses in the making.
That's a pretty flippant statement to make.
China is an authoritarian country that's moving closer to an autocracy, let's not "cut them any slack" and "take [their human rights] abuses" based on some cartoonish caricature of US actions. China is developing new forms of totalitarian social control may superficially resemble certain western practices (e.g. credit scores and background checks) but there are important differences. If you don't find that troubling, I can't really take your views seriously.
>>> For historical reasons not all countries develop at the same speed or are at the same stage.
This belies some fallacious thinking that countries develop along the same track. This is a common foolish mistake when it comes to thinking about China, which is becoming harder to entertain in light of recent events.
No, you read it wrong. The crowd watched felons to be sentenced and then they were taken to the place for execution (private location not open to public display) immediately afterwards. So no public execution like what it was like in the ancient China. I know this because I read similar Chinese news in past.
You would think that, but research shows systemic biases in the justice system throughout the entire funnel: from who gets more police attention, arrests, charges, plea deals and how heavy the sentences are. This is a sign the actions are not well-defined, and quite subjective.
None of this detracts from the fact that these laws are ultimately relatively clear in their restrictions, compared to China's social score.
Theft is theft. Drug possession is drug possession. Had these "unfairly" targeted individuals followed the law, they would not be subject to its penalties.
Sure, I recognize that very few of us are perfectly law abiding citizens. But I have trouble with the notion that heavier police presence, and heavier sentencing for repeat offenders, are somehow unfair phenomena, and these alleged transgressions far too often are lumped together with actual institutional inequity.
In other words, one must not conflate subjectivity in sentencing and policing with some kind of ingrained, institutional caste system, so long as laws are followed as written. If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession. If you do not agree with such laws, work to change them.
The end result is still members of the executive branches of the government deciding who gets punished based on their whims.
Your point saying "...so long as laws are followed as written" cannot apply as long as you ignore when the government chooses not to apply those laws to everyone, even if everyone that's gets charged has violated the law
A good summary is the ACLU’s position paper on Race & the War on Drugs. https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs
You also are repeating a common misconception when you state that “If you want to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.” It has been shown time and time again that black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced. And your trite remark about how “If you do not agree with such laws, work to change them” is puerile. The GP was expressing their opinion; in our democracy that is a critical component of working to change the law.
It's a misconception that you could avoid being in the felon caste by not breaking laws? That's what he said. He didn't say "if you want to gamble with not joining the felon caste, you have fair odds". Lots of soapboxing ITT, threads should decapitate at the first post with 'systemic' in.
With the number of overturned sentences coming out of the courts lately, yes, it seems you can go to jail without ever having actually committed a crime.
Nonetheless, consider this after rereading the GP’s comment. If a doctor told two patients that they could avoid getting cancer by not exposing themselves to carcinogens, knowing that one somehow unknowingly lives on a Superfund site, but deciding to purposefully neglect to mention the risk this entails, would you say the doctor was presenting one patient an incorrect understanding of the issue at hand?
Likewise, if a car manufacturer found a problem with one of their models and decided to notify the US about this by saying “you can avoid harm from the problem by not driving cars,” I would say that thinking that this is not “somehow unfair,” as the GP writes, would be a misconception, as I wrote.
The sort of juvenile discussion you are attempting to bring to this conversation is not really appropriate for HN.
Does personal responsibility exist in your ivory tower?
What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices? We're talking about smoking marijuana and stealing expensive clothing, after all, not theft of food for subsistence.
Why is it that any time race is brought up, any argument that even has the potential to cast minorities in negative light is immediately shouted down with any sort of logic or reason thrown out the window? What about objectivity?
We cannot shout down potential truths simply because they have unpleasant implications.
That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.
Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.
Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.
As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.
You conspicuously failed to substantiate his "misconception".
>It has been shown time and time again black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.
I could not in all charitability/good faith (all your efforts to troll noted btw) extract a relevant point here. If they are disproportionately arrested having committed a crime, that has nothing to do with allthenew's whole post. If one charitably adds the context that in america you can also be arrested for committing no crime at all, then you've switched a basic premise of his post in 'arguing' it.
And you also conveniently ignore that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.
Such discussions cannot be productive until we are willing to admit to both sides of the problem.
I do not deny that there are inequities in our justice system. However, disproportionate police presence in low income communities is not a symptom of racist targeting. The blackness of these individuals is incidental to the fact that low income communities have higher rates of all types of crime, especially violent offenses, and in any other context it would be obviously prudent to assign additional police forces to target high crime areas.
But this discussion has far surpassed the boundaries of what is acceptable on HN, and I will not comment in this thread further.
This is a racist lie. If you control for socioeconomic factors, the difference totally vanishes.
What knowing the controlling variable does is give you additional information about what interventions are likely to change the situation. If you thought the reason for more crimes committed by blacks were their skin color, you might think that vitamin D deficiency is the culprit and attempt to provide them with supplements. Knowing the influence of economic factors makes that suggestion appear silly, and crime-prevention efforts would be better focused on improving the economic standing of blacks.
The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality. It is a very poor way of describing the issue. A much better framing is "black people in the US are disempowered socially, politically and economically and black communities are ignored by US social policy." Another, far more useful framing of the issue, that I hardly ever hear is that black people are more often the victims of crimes.
It sounds like you are the racist here.
Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by the rules when commenting here?
How many times must the particulars of the system be documented and disseminated before these arguments go away completely?
If you are white and wealthy, then drug possession is against the law only in vague terms on paper. It is not your practical reality. That's how the drug war has been made into the new jim crow. It's astonishingly simple, and very real.
> If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.
Yeah, except that most humans don't consider the government a legitimate arbiter of their diet. I'm not going to decide not to consume cannabis because some person in Washington (or my state capital) overstepped his bounds. And yet, because I'm white and not poor, I suffer no consequences of this.
> so long as laws are followed as written
You can't be serious. The whole point is that laws aren't followed as written. If every person driving 56MPH in a 55 zone, if every person possessing cannabis, if every person violations "intellectual property" laws is suddenly subject to enforcement of those laws, they'll change real quick. But instead, only the "lower castes" are subject to enforcement, and they haven't the power to change the laws.
Just please stop spreading this nonsense. There are possibly young people reading these threads whose understanding of basic sociopolitical principles isn't developed yet, and we need to stop poisoning the well of discussion with this, "follow the law and you'll be fine" nonsense.
The world you describe is a world to work toward, but not the one that black and brown people live in today.
Not to discount your other points, but this is exactly how the Chinese system will work as well. (and already does in other respects from what I have heard and read)
>What a bunch of bigoted hogwash.
What did he say that was bigoted? (I am serious, by the actual definition [0], not the pejorative commonly thrown around to silence dissent) As a side note, my brother has a felony on his record, so I have some knowledge of the cause and effects.
[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigoted
Edit: This turned sour fast... not sure it's worth replying to comments.
I mean, that's bigotry. That's something I expect to read on the_donald.
Bigotry [0], are you sure you are using this word correctly?
What aspect of this situation makes the GP's advice untrue? For any individual in either group, the best way to avoid becoming a felon is to avoid committing felonies.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
For a white, wealthy person, the healthiest life choices are to select a diet based only on the effects of the ingested materials in question, independent of their legal status.
For a black person, the healthiest life choice is instead to make very different dietary choices in order to avoid becoming a felon.
It is simply not the case that individuals in the two groups have the same dynamic re: life choices.
I don't think it's likely that a purely scientific and non-emotional discussion about race related subjects can be had these days online. Primarily because too many people frame their arguments in such a way to automatically make the other person wrong.
GP says: 1) laws are clearly defined, 2) increased attention/punishment for repeat offenders != institutional inequity
You say: 1) laws are subjectively enforced, 2) white and/or rich people don't suffer the same consequences
Note that neither of your points are necessarily responsive to or mutually exclusive with gp's.
But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.
I think you're ignoring the more serious point, though. GP literally advised disadvantaged people to more judiciously follow the stupid laws that were designed in the first place to disadvantage them.
> But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.
Listen, I usually find any sort of "protect the children" narrative nauseating. But in the specific case of racism, I do think it's reckless to spout this stuff on this forum. You and I have perhaps read The New Jim Crow or exposed ourselves to the statistics of the drug war, but a lot of people (sure, young and old) come here from other fora where they're more likely to have followed the breadcrumbs of technological development and might need a little more help before being able to pick apart these basic, bedrock examples of institutional discrimination.
Not all laws are that simple. Are you aware that not even the US Federal Government is aware of how many laws apply at any given time in a given place[1]? While I'm not going to justify people breaking laws, there are many federal laws that you can see might cause problems for people that could not reasonable have known that a law was being broken. For instance 16 U.S.C 3372[2] (the Lacey Act):
> It is unlawful for any person [...] to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law
So if you have ever bought or been gifted a fish or plant that at any point broke Indian tribal law (even if you didn't know about it, even if it wasn't the law where you received it, even if the plant or fish is legally farmed and sold in another area) you have broken a federal law and you're now a criminal.
Does it make sense to not allow someone to have their constitutional rights if they were given a fish that was caught in an area where that is prohibited by Indian tribal law, and they weren't aware of that? Not all criminals have been convicted under such strange laws, but having such a black-and-white view of criminals stops being as obvious when you look at cases like this.
[1]: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=279 [2]: http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-16-conservation/16-usc-sec...
According to the article, the actions described seem like discrete and well-defined like giving false information about terrorism, and not paying fines.
Later we voted the cameras out >2 to 1. Try that in China too.
Second, you just made the argument for me, as you implied, fines are easy to define and redefine.
That's just the sales pitch to make it seem reasonable and positive to the average person. It's naive to think that this social credit system won't have a political component. Here are some descriptions of some current pilot programs that make that much clearer:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr...:
> But the fourth category, behaviour and preference, is where it gets interesting.
> Under this system, something as innocuous as a person's shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of products they buy. "Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person," says Li Yingyun, Sesame's Technology Director. "Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility." So the system not only investigates behaviour - it shapes it. It "nudges" citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.
> Friends matter, too. The fifth category is interpersonal relationships. What does their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as "positive energy" online, nice messages about the government or how well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up.
If they're slurping up your purchases and social media for your credit score, it's going to be a lot more than about if you lie or fail to pay fines.
Also what might "false information about terrorism" really mean in practice? Vouching for your friend when the government thinks he's a dissident?
Sounds like a propaganda botnet that uses gamification to spread influence evenly. By incentivizing many intermittent points of influence the propaganda cannot easily be filtered from the rest of the data.
That's true, but I see no reason for the government system to take a more moderate approach.
I don't really buy that Alibaba would have too much power, either. I'm pretty sure the CCP could swat it down pretty easily if it gets too uppity.
> China's social credit system (which doesn't exist yet)
My understanding is that things like Sesame credit are much like pilot projects -- if their ideas work to the CCP's liking, they'll make it into the government system.
I understand the US isn't perfect, but I feel the real effects of comments such as yours do as much to excuse China's brand new system as they do to bring light to flaws in the US's system.
I think it must be emphasized that "once untrustworthy, always restricted" is a new policy in China that's being implemented, while in the US it is a historical principle that's coming under increased skepticism and criticism.
For some context in case anyone was curious, please see the page numbered 116 (but 118 of 240 of the PDF) from this report from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/111213a-lwop-complete-repo...
> You can imagine what would happen. Manna fires you because you don't show up for work a couple times. Now you try to go get a job somewhere else. No other Manna system is going to hire you. There had always been an implicit threat in the American economy -- "if you do not have a job, you cannot make any money and you will therefore become homeless." Manna simply took that threat and turned the screws. If you did not do what Manna told you to, it would fire you. Then you would not be able to get a job anywhere else.
As we get better at collecting and analyzing data on employees (a hot topic whenever tech interviews are discussed on HN), we should remember to exercise a certain amount of "social forgiveness."
Simple conversation with old friends from home show I am a good guy but it’s invisible. Instead we see InstantCheckMate telling the world I was arrested for something. They don’t talk about the nuance of the situation, people only see the Red Bang (!) and stop. Add to that two frivolous firings possibly derived from that image, followed by some shit rung jobs I quit because they were the only ones who’d hire me and hold my lack of options over my head.
Now working like a mad man to do something somebody will pay me for. I like to say it always works out in the end. The good part about being choked nearly to death is I fear nothing anymore, including the latter. So this body is a vessel to show the dangers of this type of system via Internet Archive. Block chain terrifies me in this regard.
I now feel why people run around in fear like I used to. I go to the beach every day and the universe seems to bring me exactly what I need. I feel better than ever.
> On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed [...] capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables [...] and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.
> After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The description goes on to describe how his hard labor was sold to US Steel, and he was sent down into a mine. There he was subject to whipping for not delivering a required 8 tons of coal per day, and threatened with torture for disobedience. More than a thousand other black men were subjected to the same slavery at "Slope 12", 45 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=890511...
It's worth noting that Wells Fargo ironically did that by abusing a fraud reporting system:
> The blacklist is called "U5," and it's maintained by the finance institutions as a way of alerting each other to fraudsters who are fired for breaking finance rules. The list was designed to protect banks from fraud, but it has no defenses against fraudulent banks.
https://boingboing.net/2016/10/31/wells-fargo-blackballed-em...
Where does your "always restricted" come from? Not to be rude, but did you read the article or just the headline?
Beware creating a cohort with nothing left to lose.
A healthy human body releases sweat as one form of regulating body temperature. If it fails to do this, you can reason that the person is unhealthy or has an illness. A cause of a systemic failure. If such feedback loops exist in a society that cause the worst in reputation to fall in even deeper, then there is also a systemic failure here. It promotes the idea that anything broken should just be discarded rather than fixed. It is a very passive way to run a society.
"You won’t be eligible for … positions in public office … social security and welfare … senior level positions in the food and drug sector … sleep in a bed in overnight trains … higher-starred hotels and restaurants … Your children … won’t be allowed to attend more expensive private schools …
We have made extreme advancements in health care because people found flaws in previous practices and had faith that they could improve them. This can be applied to quite literally every single industry, which is why these ranking systems could negatively affect growth, innovation, and our entire economic system as a whole.
If we can no longer challenge our current state of being and question our surroundings, then how can we continue to advance as a collective? As a collective, many of our strengths lie in our differences. A diverse society includes people with all different strengths and brackets of knowledge, but if we’re all racing to get a better ranking, then we could lose a lot of those differences in trying to become “people pleasers” and adhering to social norms."
China's proposed social credit system would be counterproductive to innovation, i.e. the cost may be too high.
>People allowed to own land
Not sure the mental gymnastics you have to go through to convince yourself private ownership of land == freedom
American by chance?
But the social changes technology and development produce are far reaching, and usually well correlated on the long term with a democratic society. It's hard to care about liberty when you don't have food on the table, and a lower educated and poor person is much more likely to accept authoritarianism as an acceptable compromise.
I'm very hopeful for China's future and Hong Kong's peaceful resistance is a model that wil spread.
In other words create comparatively free theme parks for the professional class.
But Xi Jinping does not.
Otherwise he wont have power... I mean, the dictator is not stupid.
and suppressing freedom of expression
That bargain breaks down when growth stops accelerating, and obviously you can't have accelerating growth forever. The CCP's real overarching goal is to "maintain social stability," and that is exactly as dystopian as it sounds, if not more so.
And stifling discussion is a big part of that; this sort of comment would definitely ding your 'score'.
I think Xi knows the economic party is over and that there are going to be extremely bad social consequences to that coming up. The dictatorship is meant to possess the power necessary to put down those consequences in any way they deem necessary.
It may also be a uniquely Chinese thing too though. China has had very powerful Central States for an extremely long time (not just the CPC but all the emperors and what have you). Perhaps that's just the "Chinese Way": absolutist State which largely works for most of the people?
We're at the egalitarian everyone-is-the-same period of the cycle, and people abuse this state of affairs via a variety of ways.
China is at the we-must-stymie-abusers stage, and abusers use that to abuse and stymie innocent people.
Notice how both systems fail to stop abuse, they just move the dial between magnitude and frequency? What allows abuse is bad actors cloaking their activities behind the information asynchrony of a system. Transparency and holding leadership to account seems to be the best way to slow down the corruption of any system.
That's why it should be easier for Americans indict police officers, and harder for a Chinese PM term limits. Those aren't the only issues in either country, but they should be pretty obviously problems to most people.
It's interesting how every wedge issue seems to follow the same pattern. Take a binary choice that society should probably make -- and draw your trench diagonally from top left to bottom right so that both sides make both decisions just in different magnitudes. Leaves people angry, ideologically confused and nothing is ever resolved.
The diagonal line represents policy, or the wedge. In reality it's not always a straight line.
Stymieing bad people is what happens in the left square, empowering good people in the right square. (This left / right correlation with real world political parties is a coincidence. Liberals are often arguing positions to empower good people when conservatives opposition hinges on a claim that they're stymieing bad people, just for different policies (gay rights, abortion and marijuana come to mind).
But for a real world example, The Stoneman Douglas school shooting occurs:
Side1: Restrict gun purchases.
Side2: Give teachers guns.
Here's how I look at this in the context of the portrait. Pink represents keeping guns from bad people, the orange side represents good people having access to have guns. Right down the middle is an aspirational fantasy world where bad people have zero guns and all good people can have all the guns they want. A vertical line on the far right side represents everyone having unrestricted access to every kind of weapon, a vertical line on the far left side represents no one having any weapons at all.
Both sides of the wedge, as it is today, prevents some good people from having access to some weapons and allow a some bad people to have access to some weapons. Flatly restricting guns marginally will marginally reduce the access to guns for both good and bad people. Giving teachers guns will give guns to both good and bad people (some bad people are teachers!). That in particular is a horrible idea, I bet we'd go < 5 years before a teacher shoots a student. Just stupid.
The fact is, finding out who among us is evil is a battle that we've waged for all of human history. We get better at it and they get better at hiding among us. Evil people, undetected, can do evil with any policy on the graph. If society were to engage in a "moon shot" for advancing our ability to suss out the evil among us, an evil person would almost inevitably misclassify innocent people. It's a really tough problem, but we should probably keep at it.
Responding to the school shooting directly: Appeals to authorities were ignored. Are there enough spurious reports to authorities to justify this? School resource officers were hired to mitigate this situation after columbine, here that mitigation failed completely. Do they need more training, better access to intel? (IE: real time info on shooter movement inside schools, etc.)
Those kinds of questions might be asked, but it's all too easy to derail information gathering and honest discussion by tacking on Side1 or Side2's reactions to it with glue of "and that's why we need to".
What marks a good wedge issue is one where both sides blatantly ignore nuance, and whose solutions have broad collateral damage. The collatoral damage to each opinion should be abhorrent to the other side, and uncomfortable but ignorable to your side.
Another interesting thing that really flummoxes American society are gradients that get transformed into binary policy arguments. Arguments over abortion, healthcare, capital punishment, social security, welfare, civil rights and unions represent the neural network of human society trying to figure out "How much is a human life worth?"
The societal instinct is to say "priceless!" and smartly so, because to admit otherwise IMMEDIATELY creates very bizarre side effects. The abortion debate is basically arguing whether (m1 * mother > m2 * child). We try to argue about what m1 is and what m2 (life begins at ?!?!), and pretend that mother and child are both weighted to infinity.
Going to stop ranting before I accidentally write a book. Hopefully you found this interesting.
And has only really had once party in power throughout the history of its democracy (like 3 years or so without): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japa...
Not sure its the best counter example
So has all of Europe, though.
What does any of that have to do with Japan as of 2018? Unless you are arguing that their clean streets and robust infrastructure was some sort of lingering effect of an emperor from 2000 years ago, and not due to post WW2 liberal democratic reforms, this has nothing to do with anything.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this system is not new or novel in concept. Confucian ideals see people as animals on their way to being human. The cultivation of the "superior person" requires education and much socialization. This isn't what people in America should be concerned about.
China was at several point, a dominant power. I think a lot of people forget this. It was in the middle of the Ming dynasty, for various reasons, started turning inwards -- making major extensions of the Great Wall, recalling expedition fleets ... much like America is doing today.
The West may remember China as a third-world country or a target too weak to resist colonization, but the Chinese remember when various regions such as modern-day Vietnam, Okinawa and Korea were vassal states (have you ever seen any Korean historical drama? So much resentment related to that). Chinese as a whole don't feel themselves to be culturally inferior, yet the Western views of China seem to subconsciously think of the Chinese culture that way.
This blind spot seems to miss something that China is doing right now: the Chinese are making a bid to be the next superpower, either as America's peer, or supplanting America in that role. This includes things anywhere from adding Chinese-flavored events to the Olympics; Extending funds and industrialization to Africa; building a rail net that not only ties China internally together, but also extend reach and influence across the Asian and European continents; heavy investment into technologies such as AI, quantum tunneling, in-house chip designs, life sciences, much through luring back Western-educated people with advanced degrees whose student visas have expired; developing military capabilities -- traditional force multipliers such as refurbishing an old Soviet-era aircraft carrier to increasing asymmetric capabilities such as developing drone carriers (the Chinese produced a Sun-Tzu, after all); attempts to break American influence on oil by creating a new reserve currency for trading crude. Much of this is being funded by the money being spent by American consumers. (And the Chinese had already learned the lesson of becoming insular).
The Chinese don't come across as complacent, though I often get that sense of complacency from the Western perspective.
It is this culture that is making a bid as a superpower to influence the rest of the world into doing things the "Chinese Way".
No they aren't, by any means. The autocracy seems to be a serious problem, but just the rate of growth and the clear determination and dedication to progress is breathtaking.
There is also something refreshing about a culture that isn't mired in stupid questions about abortion, contraception, vaccination and climate change. i.e. a culture that actually believes in the scientific method (or at least appears to be from its actions). I don't know if this is a consequence of state censorship or what though.
I mean, guests at the party (spoiler) should be amused at the ghost of the maid and the scandal, filming it and all - especially young guys. It should go completely viral. Instead they stand frowning as if they're 70 - to avoid hurting their score.
Under social credit society, everybody will be forced to act like they're at the end of their life path.
And then there's real content, viral content, assertive content. In short, life. Social credit system fights life because life doesn't follow rules, life doesn't care about likes and life doesn't climb their ladder. So naturally I expect harsh sanctions for anything viral or any unexpected flash mobs in such systems.
Once a system like this is in place it will be abused. It's practically designed to be abused. Where is the accountability?
Once thing I kind of liked about that episode is that it was backwards from a normal Black Mirror episode. Normally they try to make the technology look fun and useful at first before they do the flip and make it horrible and dehumanizing. This episode started out like the end of a normal episode and ended with the main character doing a white girl rap battle with some random dude.
In this case, it's the government giving you a score.
1. Extend social credit to non-Chinese living in China. 2. Expand to companies and individuals doing business with or visiting in China. 3. Export the program to finance dependent nations outside China. 4. Require companies depending on Chinese income to enforce the regulations in a 'know your customer'-esque format.
There will be less resistance to this than one might think.
Strict laws with little enforcement also means that the enforcement can be restricted squarely towards marginalized people and discretion used to avoid enforcement against anyone else.
There are many paragraphs clarifying the definition either here: http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879653.html
Or here: http://www.ce.cn/xwzx/gnsz/gdxw/201803/16/t20180316_28505546...
There is also clearly defined way to lift the restrictions as defined in the NDRC announcement. Most of the restrictions are removed automatically in one year. Certainly not "once untrustworthy, always restricted"
It might be ok to make people with bad credit harder to purchase non life-essential stuff such as cars (you heard it, cars are not essentials in many countries), but they shouldn't be treated as criminals.
"A rapidly tightening labor market is forcing companies across the country to consider workers they once would have turned away. That is providing opportunities to people who have long faced barriers to employment, such as criminal records, disabilities or prolonged bouts of joblessness."
It's funny that this is happening with minimal legislative action (not that I'm okay with that)
As I understand the Chinese social capital system, there is no due process, you may not even know if you've been cited for anything until the punishment comes, and violations are identified without appeal.
None of which apply under the "social credit" system.
We are not all Americans. Most of the Free World does not see the USA as a lodestar in how to treat criminals.
> The number of annual protests has grown steadily since the early 1990s, from approximately 8700 “mass group incidents” in 1993[1] to over 87,000 in 2005.[2] In 2006, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated the number of annual mass incidents to exceed 90,000, and Chinese sociology professor Sun Liping estimated 180,000 incidents in 2010.[3][4] Mass incidents are defined broadly as "planned or impromptu gathering that forms because of internal contradictions", and can include public speeches or demonstrations, physical clashes, public airings of grievances, and other group behaviors that are seen as disrupting social stability.[5]
However
> Despite the increase in protests, some scholars have argued that they may not pose an existential threat to Communist Party rule because they lack “connective tissue;” the preponderance of protests in China are aimed at local-level officials, and only a select few dissident movements seek systemic change.
Who knows how it will play out in the long run, especially with the looming demographic problems of their aging population.
The move is in line with President’s Xi Jinping’s plan to construct a social credit system based on the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted”.
6.15 million Chinese citizens had been banned from taking flights for social misdeeds.
Here in the US, you can get banned from air travel permanently, and you don't even need to do anything wrong!
* taking half the funds and putting it into think tanks that write pro social credit pieces with an earnest focus on making it more accurate and efficient from a technical standpoint (plus perhaps lobbying for its implementation in the West, for street cred)
* taking the other half and putting it towards anti-govt movements within China, using the info gleaned from the think tanks to provide counter-surveillance techniques
The counter-surveillance techniques will cause the govt to invest in more surveillance tech and clamp down tighter on the population. That enforcement will further fuel the anti-govt groups to become more radicalized.
Of course, I'm just armchair quarterbacking this based on vaguely remembering the news around the buildup and aftermath of the Iraq war. I'm sure the Chinese government has thought through these problems more deeply than I have.
edit: grammar
I think the social credit thing sounds horrible, but I don't think there's anything wrong with automatic detection of traffic violations. Traffic codes are here to help people stay safe, they shouldn't be conditional on people seeing a cop.
Note that the facial ID obviously doesn't work very well as they are only posting the affirmative matches. Every intersection in China has far more than two jaywalkers per day.
They started off purchasing and as an initial market as well as testing ground for Western technology and Western technology companies.
Now, China has gained the technology and sophistication to roll their own.
But that doesn't mean they won't market it, both commercially and to aid their allies in creating and maintaining similar forms of governance and stability (at the tip of an connection, if not a gun).
So, they may be building this domestically, from the ground up. Nonetheless, the expression remains and remains apt, and concerning: "China is the prototype."
Many people around the world, in government and in private business, continue to express enormous interest in this type of monitoring and control.
In the U.K., of all places, that "bastion of democracy", leadership is openly advocating for the ability to monitor and censure all connections.
They are going to control with whom you communicate and associate, by way of real world penalties and controls.
In the U.S., what greater limit on "freedom to associate" than taking away one's ability to travel?
"It can't, won't happen here."
Ahuh. Just like outsourcing was going to elevate our employment prospects and wages. "We'll be the managers."
How did that work out?
Automation is going to get a lot more done with less hands. How do you think they are going to decide who benefits?
2. This is going way beyond tradition or culture. Nobody enjoys this.
3. It is being pushed through for the very simple fact that it can be pushed through. Take note: politics is groups of people trying to gain advantage over others and an equilibrium requires a vigorous defense of the smallest things that are yours; without pushback you lose what's yours; nobody will grant to you, only take away.
4. Norms and ideals matter. This is being set as the norm in China, whereas other examples in Western countries are at least considered transgressions against the norm. The delineations are in different places and the outcomes will absolutely not be the same even if they look superficially similar.
I think it is only really different in scale.
sure, state is much more powerful. however, state plays by the rules, and if the rules (aka laws) are changed, state will leave you alone. And laws could be changed.
good luck trying to stop the mob, though.
You can sue someone for attacking you online if they cause provable financial or social distress. Go try suing the CCP in China for not providing freedom of speech and see how that unexplained disappearance treats you.
Or, to put that another way: if there’s a lynch-mob after you, does it matter how many of its members are in uniform?
Anyone can be doxxed in the way you describe--harassed, slandered--for any reason, and a lot of people have been for terrible reasons. This thing has nothing to do with justice against idiots or hateful people. There are already courts, professional organizations, etc for that. It's nothing more than a disgusting, immature, backwards trend that has become an opportunity for hateful people themselves.
So, can we please stop equating doxxing with a government effort and trying to pass it of as being nearly the same or part of an arc because it is not.
Also, how come every time an article is posted about something Orwellian the PRC is doing, the comments are packed with whataboutism fallacies? "Yea, but look at what's happening here in the West!" It happens so frequently and consistently that it must be a quirk of the HN audience...or something more suspiciously intentional.
On the one hand, I would certainly like to know, for example, if the person I trust to teach my children in a public school is explicitly posting on the Internet about how she uses her position to indoctrinate children into extremist white nationalist ideology, Nazism and hate groups, and the "Internet lynch mob" did a great service by exposing this woman [1] -- there is no universe in which she should be allowed to be a teacher.
On the other hand, I think such firings should always be "for cause" with some kind of due process. We need to take away the ultimate power employers have to fire their employees, and make them go through some negotiation, process, discussion before they do so -- like through a union, who is obligated to stand up for wronged employees for example. If someone is failing to perform, provide evidence. If someone's publicly stated values are incompatible with the values of the business, prove it and let them respond. Either that, or we need a strong enough social safety net so that employment is optional for all people.
[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/03/05/flor...
Here's some analysis from a game designer from 2015: https://youtu.be/lHcTKWiZ8sI
What worries me is not that this system might fail, but that it be replaced by a state-of-the art dictatorship that treats the population as slaves.
If you read this article, you will at least understand the reason why they introduce such law.
With 1.6 billion people, it's common to see chaos when a single person doesn't follow the rules, that woman in the news is a typical example. She didn't get any punishment from the railway company, nor the police can do anything about her behaviour, simply because there is no such law exists. In the end, she got suspended from her job as a primary teacher!
I don't agree. It's more about making people compliant with what the government wants in society, and making those who don't follow the "social" rules in the country subject to various restrictions, essentially limiting their freedom if they don't do what the government wants. In essence they're attempting to legitimize their arbitrary policies by making it about something vaguely enforceable.
Harmony.
Imagine being able to shut out a billion people variably by tampering with such and affecting the economy to a great degree.
And people complain about the evolving landscape of DDOS attacks now…
Public transit and free money are just two of many ways to increase the people's dependence on the state. Next up is the "opportunity" of pre-programmed cars.
The Black Mirror episode about a system like this came out in 2016.
In the spirit of this episode and the totalitarian nature of China today and the whole world tomorrow, i think it will be an every [regular] citizen duty to "plug in" for set amount of hours to run your fair share of social computing "dapps" and to sync-up/check the thoughts/emotions as well.
The open office enforced hive-style collaboration/teamwork and always-on IM with implicit contract of immediately dropping everything and lending your brain is a very-very early preview of that future.
That was what the Matrix was originally supposed to be - the humans were wired into a neural network to bootstrap the AIs, but executives were afraid moviegoers wouldn't be smart enough to understand that, so they forced the change to "batteries."
Ahh, jinx!
When The Matrix was first conceived, the machines used humans for some computing, but that was dumbed down a bit in the final product.
EDIT: ugh, double jinx
It wasn't clear what happened in the background, but it seemed like humanity was in a prison and to keep incidents down they made them do hard labor and provided endless mindless entertainment. Probably supposed to be an allegory for 9-5 jobs. The ending suggests that the rest of the planet is alive at least. Maybe humanity was put in prison for wrecking the biosphere and they're giving the planet time to recover?
It does not start out as a dystopian vision. Why should Facebook charge advertisers money to show ads to people with a 400 credit score? The yield of many ads is improved when you have hard demographic and behavioral data as an additional filter.
What's the difference between an Uber Pool rider getting a ride with other similarly-rated riders? Why should I with a near 5 star rating have to risk sitting in a pool with someone who has a 3.2 star rating? I certainly don't want to.
Add to that Facebook’s blocking you from access to your account unless you upload a photo that clearly shows your whole face, which has been reported in recent months. Real name + financial services + facial recognition + is even worse.
Now, what can we do about it? What should we do about it?
This is what North Korea would look like if they had money.
Whether you agree or disagree with the implementation, some sorry of wuantified karma system is probably ne essary to keep people in line.
This is no different from privatized US credit system or a social shaming system (Chinese wouldn’t respond to shaming), except that this is implemented in a very Chinese way of being nationalized instead of privatized.
Is anyone going to sanction countries who bar people like that? Shouldn't it be human right to be viewed outside any calculated measure?
People always say that but it's one of the most compelling episodes.
That's even worse than California's three strikes laws.
http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879653.html
http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879654.html
The documents do not make "bad social credit" (whatever that means) a punishable cause. There is one clause relating to spread of false information but it specifically says "false terrorism information related to civil aviation safety".
There are two classes of offenders. Air travel and luxury/sleeper/high speed G-train travels are banned; regular trains are not.
The first class of offences pertain to directly violating transport regulations, like refusing to quit smoking on an airplane, forcing one's way onto the runway, or refusing to pay for a ticket even after getting caught riding the train without one.
The second class is credit related and has six categories. The first four categories are mostly targeted at resourceful people who have misdeeds but somehow are not criminally punished. One thing that conceivable casts a wider net is for those that refuse to pay social security insurance premiums or obtain social security payments through false documents. The fifth category is about people refusing to follow court orders. The sixth category about "others" that could be added is more elastic but it did say that changes need to be published by editing the document.
Google Translate of the six categories:
1. The party who has the ability to perform but refuses to perform major tax violations;
2. In the field of fiscal fund management and use, there is a person responsible for serious dishonest behaviors such as fraud, false reports, fraud, fraudulent taking, interception, misappropriation, arrears of international financial organizations and foreign governments’ due debts;
3. Those who have serious acts of dishonesty in the following areas in the field of social insurance: employers fail to participate in social insurance in accordance with relevant regulations and refuse rectification; employers have not faithfully applied for social insurance payment bases and have refused to make corrections; Those who have insurance premiums but have the capacity to pay but refuse to pay; conceal, transfer, embezzle, misappropriate social insurance funds or operate in violation of the regulations; fraudulently forge social insurance benefits through fraudulent or forgery proofs or other means; and social insurance service agencies violate the service agreement Or related regulations; refuses to assist the social insurance administrative department in the investigation and verification of accidents and problems;
4. Securities and futures are illegally punished with fines and no overdue payment; overdue entities of the listed company fail to perform their public commitments within the prescribed time limit;
5. The people's courts have taken measures to restrict consumption in accordance with relevant regulations, or have included the list of those who have been breached trustees according to law;
(6) Other Restricted Persons Recognized by the Relevant Departments Responsible persons who commit serious acts of dishonesty in a civil aircraft shall be clearly identified by modifying the document.
To everyone scared: go on, keep being misinformed about everything China does. It’s a common but useless consolation trap to fall into.
Until you actually can see them clearly how can you start learning from their successes?
The rules most of us disrespect are routinely are not useful in the specific cases (eg I'm not going to wait at a red light in the middle of the night as a pedestrian, only as a driver). Almost all people are actually nice to each other, at least where I have been.
right now it is clickbait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda. When criticisms were leveled at the Soviet Union, the Soviet response would be "What about..." followed by an event in the Western world.
> The Guardian deemed whataboutism, as used in Russia, "practically a national ideology". Journalist Julia Ioffe wrote that "Anyone who has ever studied the Soviet Union" was aware of the technique, citing the Soviet rejoinder to criticism, And you are lynching Negroes, as a "classic" example of the tactic.
So you either need to do what I asked, which is explain why the two aren't comparable, or admit that the pushback against these policies is because they're new, foreign, or framed differently than their American counterparts.
Actions of others is not enough to justify one's self (good or bad). All these comments using Chinese/USA or Western/Eastern as their main point of argument is superfluous.
Ideally learning about what bad things other countries are doing would allow us to look at what similar things we do in our own country and then work to improve things. Instead the opposite seems to happen, and we actually draw a line under our current policies while saying “well, at least here...”.
Other people doing horrible things is not justification for us to do less horrible things. Conversely, because we do bad things doesn’t mean we can’t criticize the bad things others do. On the other hand, we are in a much better position to change things in our own country than in foreign countries.
I’ll end my commment by repeating that what China is doing here seems like a step in the wrong direction, and is not something we should be defending.
Either way, having thought I was walking into a ban, I'm shaping up and won't simply contribute negativity. (I still believe HN threads aren't supposed to derail in topic, unless an actual admin conveys otherwise)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_Schoo...
If you don’t like it stop doing bad things and getting bad credit. If you behave you’ll have more privileges and be permitted to interact with others in more ways. It’s the basic social contract but implemented more efficiently. I can only imagine scofflaws is complaining.
If you complain it’s open to abuse well every human system not run by an uncrackable artificial intelligence is open to abuse. Don’t unfairly fear a Chinese system over a Western system when how do you know how clear your ideas are?
If you live under this system and really cannot stand or tolerate then just move to another country and cry out that you’re a fake victim and you can seek asylum from some generous Western nation wanting to pretend it’s morally supremacist.