Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020

bloomberg.com

38 pointspdog24 comments

Another day, another Black Mirror episode becomes eerily closer to our present reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

Did you mean to look to another episode? That one is about being judged by other individuals, resulting in low (or high) ratings due to petty superficial interactions. The article is about being judged by the government, leading to low ratings based on political dissent (or for fare-dodgers, if you believe that).

I thought of the same episode. Either way it seems very dystopian no matter who is providing the ratings to influence citizen's prospects.

There was also an episode ("Majority Rules") of "The Orville" with a similar theme.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/orville/s01/e07

Kinda over-interpreted, it's essentially a state-run TransUnion credit score plus background check. It's primarily targeting at people who borrow a lot money then escape to other cities or abroad to avoid paying the debt. The political suppression part that media is obsessed with is still largely determined by the existing legal system which considers certain anti-CCP behaviors as crime.

There are important differences between this and a TransUnion credit score.

* The government may not discriminate based on a person's TransUnion score, except for limited circumstances where it is directly relevant.

* The government may not discriminate businesses based on whether they serve people with poor TransUnion scores.

Until the Western media is sufficiently assured that this cannot happen, they are (IMO quite rightly) suspicious about the potential of abuse of the infrastructure built to support this by the state. Unfortunately, the exact reasoning why tends to be forgotten, and the suspicion comes across as vague fear, uncertainty, doubt.

This is the actual privacy concern that I worry about. It's not some company using machine learning on my emails to show me ads, or tracking my face when I enter their stores so they can mail me better coupons, or figuring out that I use my voice assistant in the afternoons to get wine delivered.

I can opt out of those. Not always easy, or convenient, or comfortable, but I'm unaware of hardly any commercial relationships that I'm forced to engage in. Most of the complaints I see about corporations taking over our lives are either people complaining about a government-granted monopoly (Comcast) or complaining because they want the benefits of that relationship without any cost (Google).

For me, it's the government and the people who love it for "all the good it can do in the world" deciding that a great use for all those police and military and taxes and guns and bureaucracy is to dig as far into my life as they possibly can (which is a long, long way) to ensure that I'm doing the "right" things, and to make my life a living nightmare if I disagree.

Because then what do I do? Flee the country? What if that government decides "nah, we don't want people to leave"?

Things like this and cops shooting unarmed people and the military droning middle eastern countries and private prisons and civil forfeiture is why I lean libertarian. Yes, I know that's a dirty word. My social capital score just dropped a bit!

Beware of silent drones with ion drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw&feature=youtu.be...

I'm worried libertarians are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

A democratic government is great, but just like corporations, it needs to be held accountable.

That's why I donate to the ACLU. It helps keep government accountable for their abuses of power.

Also, paying for news sources keeps journalists shining a light on corruption.

Also education. An educated populace is a populace that's hard to control.

These are some of the things authoritarian governments (that you're afraid of),go after first as they try to seize power.

Pol pot did it, Stalin did it, North Korea does it.

These are also unironically some of the things that conservatives/liberatarians seem to dislike.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Perhaps we have different views of libertarianism. I’m not an anarchist. I also donate to the ACLU, and EFF, and a bunch of environmental groups, and ProPublica, etc, etc. I am NOT saying we don’t need government. But government is so incredibly powerful by its very nature that I think you should always be skeptical of it, hold it accountable, and be very, very careful about letting it go beyond a certain point in terms of authoritarianism. Because you can’t usually put the genie back in the bottle without revolution once you hit that tipping point.

> These are also unironically some of the things that conservatives/liberatarians seem to dislike.

what do you mean by this? libertarians i know seem to like the ACLU as much as any large institution, and as far as i know, paying for news differs much more by age group than political affiliation, even though many libertarians might feel that the mainstream news doesn't share their values.

> Also education. An educated populace is a populace that's hard to control.

this is definitely one that libertarians/conservatives don't like to pay for, but i do question your claim here. how is an educated populace harder to control when the government administers the education?

I used to donate to the ACLU, but once it started actively throwing due process rights under the bus in the service of highly left-leaning fundamentalism I stopped donating.

I'm in a quandary. Is it better to have the government judging or businesses? Fuckbook, Goggle and Microslurp collect more data about you and in ways that any bureaucracy could not emulate.... Does it matter who watches us? Do we want someone watching?

I mean, how else are you going to get people to stop spitting and cutting in lines en masse.

Welcome to the future

Cool, hopefully they can get some tips from the US, which has been doing this for a long time via credit agencies and secret FBI, Homeland Security, and NSA databases.

> unable to move even a single step

Hey, it's a no-fly list.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-pe...

Let's consult Wikipedia:

> The No Fly List is different from the Terrorist Watch List, a much longer list of people said to be suspected of some involvement with terrorism. As of June 2016, the Terrorist Watch List is estimated to contain over 2,484,442 records, consisting of 1,877,133 individual identities.

That doesn't sound good.

> Otherwise, the software would calculate a "risk score" and then print a code on the boarding pass indicating the appropriate "screening level"

Well, at least when the US calculates "risk scores" for its citizens based on secret information and then denies them travel based on that, it's guaranteed to be good and noble, unlike when those darn Commies do it.

I can't tell where you draw the line. Would you share your alternative to credit scoring information for private money lenders? And government watch lists?

If flying were the only mode of transportation, then, yeah, it'd be like the way them Commies do it.

LOL. Your comment comes just a day before this article on China putting up their no-fly list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18513221

Western money and technology enables the Communists to suppress the population of China. Until the Communists are overthrown then the Chinese people will always be prisoners.

Seems Western people always apply their principles to Asia, HN is not an exception.

Pretty hard to come up with your own principles when you're either dying of hunger or by tanks...

Gross generalization, but the point still stands.

Sound familiar, was this the story that happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria?

Alex Jones/Infowars has been warning about this for a long time.

https://www.infowars.com/infowars-was-right-facebook-using-c...

https://www.infowars.com/journalist-unpersoned-by-chicom-soc...

https://www.infowars.com/democrat-2020-candidate-wants-govt-...

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