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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Western leaders meet Chinese ones and make a mention of human rights… then sign trade deals anyway.

Like how western CEOs pulled out of the Saudi conference... but sent other employees as representatives. They want to look like they are opting out, but they still have every intention of being “in”.

Or maybe taking to their "friends" in the royal family about how MBS is a liability and you know ought to go.

I used to work for a big Consulting engineer who did a lot of work in the middle east and we had our friends in high places (you can probably guess who I worked for)

I am low IQ. Please give me a hint

Bechtel, Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root (now KBR), and Schlumbarger are among the larger energy-projects engineering firms in the US. For the UK, BP.

OP appears to be British.

Lol it was not Ove Arup (I did say consulting not contractors) much much better connected :-)

https://targetjobs.co.uk/uk300/construction-civil-engineerin...

It would be nice if we could just be done with all these dictatorships at some point during my lifetime, but I frankly don’t see it happening.

Even HN is generally overflowing with pro-authoritarian sentiment and people lamenting the slow pace of western governments when you talk about how good Singapore's healthcare is, how many opportunities there are for genetics based medicine research in China, etc, etc.

I'm pretty sure people can advocate for both a little bit more efficiency in critical infrastructure and respect for human rights at the same time.

The power that lets a government steamroll opposition and quarreling over $good_thing can also be used to steamroll opposition to $bad_thing and when everyone's used to seeing the government steamroll opposition for $good_thing they don't ask questions when they see that power used for $bad_thing.

That's true. And the question - IMO worth investigating - is, is there a way to structure the system so that "steamrolling opposition and quarreling" over $good_thing is easier, while doing the same over $bad_thin is difficult? Maybe there isn't, but did we look at it hard enough? Especially that the inability of the western world to create and maintain infrastructure is starting to turn into a huge risk.

Make sure everyone in the group agrees on what good and bad things are? This is much easier in small groups

That, mind you, merely shifts the problem to "make governance-groups smaller". But no politician wants to reduce their job responsibilities such that they now govern fewer people, that's bad for their egos and their resumes.

And nobody seems to have figured out how to refactor the law so that ontology (which is finicky, takes lots of resources to get right, and could be applied globally, even if different nations will want some extra nouns and verbs for their own use) and preferences (which ought be as local as possible) are cleanly separated and the former are easily reusable across nations without obligating that such nations come to global consensus on the latter. Instead, every sovereign entity (USA and EU, not France nor Florida) is its own pile of spaghetti-code.

A steamroller is a steamroller; if all we have are steamrollers, then the only protection that $good has, is might. And I think most would agree that might shouldn't make right. That's why it's important to move away from needing global consensus on questions of law. Maybe even multiple courts could compete for customers in the same geographical areas. (But apparently the nonexistence of a monopoly in the dispute-resolution market - such a monopoly being the definition of "government" - is sacrilegious to most.)

That's an... interesting point, and maybe decentralizing law a bit would help create better societies (if people were free to move to where the law matches their beliefs), but we're talking infrastructure projects here. The kind that can require resources of whole cities to be completed, and that serve even more people. You can't avoid having to deal with many people somehow - either getting them all to agree, or overruling them by fiat.

> But apparently the nonexistence of a monopoly in the dispute-resolution market - such a monopoly being the definition of "government" - is sacrilegious to most.

It's not sacrilegious. It's just smart. A "monopoly in the dispute-resolution market", i.e. a government, is both a) something that groups of humans naturally gravitate towards as they grow, and b) an efficient solution to whole lot of problems of coordination between people.

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