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foolfoolz

this kind of stuff is such an american way of doing things.

- bid for contracts that enables government to make some real progress

- lose

- sue because you lost, claim winner can’t start until your suit is over

- introduce 1-2 year delay of waiting while your complaint is processed

and people wonder why china gets things done in a quarter of the time

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Yeah, they get things done because they're a totalitarian, completely opaque regime. I'll take western governments with all their faults and inneficiencies, thank you.

Also this is completely ignoring that in China the government would have picked Microsoft over Amazon, and there would be zero legal recourse because there is no rule of law there. And as Chinese subjects we would not be allowed to say anything critical of the government because it threatens the "national dignity." Even if it's obviously cronyism perpetrated by the leadership, like if Microsoft in this case were owned by one of the party officials or a relative. We would be expected to trust our government explicitly even in cases where we personally know that it's wrong.

So sure, you can get a lot done in those cases, but it might not be the right things to do, and there's zero process for remediation except to hope that another party leader takes over and changes it for you.

So when anyone says China is totalitarian this is what is meant and why the US is ideologically opposed to China and Chinese rule.

Plenty of western governments get lots done efficiently. Parent comment was about US practices.

Did you even read the last sentence of the parent comment?

Did you read the first?

I did. I mean, I /could/ focus on only one sentence of a post, argue from that point alone, and insist the conversation hinge on that point but that would be ignorant and rude.

I doubt it's a US prerogative, this happened regularly in my home town in Italy, with the extra fun of really slow justice.

E.g. it took a whole administration (~5 years) to get through with a door-to-door recycling system because of lawsuits and appeals.

If only we could all be so lucky as to live in an authoritarian dictatorship.

Imagine that they aren't suing simply because they lost. Imagine that there was actual evidence for corruption, and Amazon lost a $10-billion contract because Trump put his finger on the scale. How would the whole story look different from our perspective and on what basis did you decide that it's one and not the other?

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