Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardtokill | Hacker News Reader

We really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively Forcing uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migrants who aren’t coming back. And China hasn’t even apologized yet!

If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world. Many people I know will not buy from China again unless they absolutely have to

View on HN

The US on a federal level 'has done nothing and is all out of ideas' as the memes go, except perhaps suppressing states to do their own testing. This is in a way inverse of what happened in China and arguably worse because in China when the federal-level authority caught wind of the scale of the problem they dropped the hammer so hard the whole world is still ringing. The US on the other hand knows there's an epidemic in progress and the CDC flip-flops from 'haven't been to china, won't get tested' to 'the virus is endemic, won't get tested' in 48h.

One of the biggest advantages of the US system is that power is spread out between the federal, state, and local governments, and corporations, and private individuals. Rampant incompetence at one level of the system can be fixed by other levels.

Can be fixed, but wont necessarily be fixed. In fact, it means that multiple levels can be incompetent or even actively malicious, increasing the dysfunction past what a central authority is capable of. Each "check and balance" can be used to force an otherwise working system into deadlock, which can have very destructive to whomever or whatever depends on that system.

You can see this in our easily manipulated and poorly deployed voting system, our poor response to the current pandemic, our limited and overly expensive healthcare, on and on.

Because awareness and testing has been poor, who's to say that some deaths attributed to pulmonary fibrosis in the last quarter of 2019, was actually due to Covid-19?

Well the admin was very quick to shut down travel from China.

And the Trump did order masks from 3M early on.

I don't deny that there has been a display of incompetence to date be careful not to let partisanship blind you into denying credit where it is due.

ha, no worries :) i'm sitting across the pond with my own share of incompetencies and complacencies abound. it's just hard to ignore what the US is (not) doing because it looks to be on a whole another level.

This reads like 'Yellow Peril' nonsense.

Mixing facts and lies, and write unintentional things as if they were intentional is really the best way misinform people.

I really don't see why should China try to hide an outbreak. China will be, and is hurt the most without a doubt. China isn't mother nature, you can't just assume its government is somewhat almighty, knows everything before its happened and blame it for not doing anything. No government can be that.

The only sane explaination why any government would try to downplay it will only be of one reason, they don't know how serious it could be, and frankly, when the outbreak starts in China, we know nothing about the virus, but at this moment, we have much more accurate data and research about how the virus works, and we should expect our governments to have better solutions at hand.

The US is literally doing the exact same thing right now.

I'm a bit surprised this is being downvoted. It's quite clear the federal government has been suppressing testing. (I assume that's what the comment refers to, not that the USA is forcing anyone to work in factories).

I thought the comment was trying to get factories out of China and more manufacturing happening domestically (especially now that we're seeing the downsides to globalism with medical supply issues, etc). That's more or less been the whole point of the trade war. This is also good for the environment, people cut down trees in Canada, ship them to china, that get made into things, to get sold in the US, the carbon footprint on all that transport must be enormous, especially when you factor in the environmentally lax conditions in overseas manufacturing that effects the whole world.

Source?

I'd really like to start seeing less of this sort of comment on Hacker News. It's not even close to literally true.

Just breaking: White House orders federal health officials to treat coronavirus planning as classified, something that has never been done for public health emergencies.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...

Holy crap that is really really bad

What part?

“This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks”

That’s the same as the USA refusing to test everyone in sufficient quantities right? South Korea is testing 10k per day, has the US completed even 10k tests yet?

“let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city”

That’s every state apart from perhaps 1 section on NY city and small parts of Seattle.

“doctored numbers”

Thats the refusing to test thing again right? There’s states with reportedly zero cases. Yeah right.

“then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries”

That’s the current right wing press stating this is all baloney from the dems for their benefit.

I’ve given a point by point refutation to the best of my ability, care to respond thoughtfully?

The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence, but given the nature of our laws and society people are free to point out the shortcomings of the response.

In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.

Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.

Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.

Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.

"freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly."

This honestly is just a wishful thinking. Autocracy are more efficient than democracy in terms of that. It's just how it's designed. Democracy means debate, and it means time wasted, a lot more than in autocracy. The only problem with autocracy is that if they made a poor decision, all those people will die with it. And democracy is built in the way that a fair share of people will never do what the government says, this would be useful if the government made a bad decision, but not if they made a good one.

The virus can still kill you no matter how 'free' you feel you are. I'm pretty sure dead people are much more freer than us as they don't have to think about any of these non-sense.

You're missing the point. The freedom may make the virus less likely to spread as information about it is easier to come by. The more people know and the sooner, the better off we all are.

I know where you're coming from, but we don't live in a world where everyone CAN make seasoned decisions based on all these information available, they mostly just listen to auhtories of their choice maybe it's because of education, time or intelligence I don't know. And in this case your neighbor's choice hurt you regardless what your choice is. Just think about how many parents still refuse vacination for kids. Maybe on a college campus this could be true, but outside of it? I don't think so.

The White House just made coronavirus planning classified. And in such a capricious way, that critical staff were excluded from meetings. Not sure how America's "freedom" is helping here.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...

>The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence

I wouldn't be so sure. Trump's stock market is his best argument for re-election. It's very reasonable to think he would want to downplay anything that could disrupt the economy in the run up to the election.

That theory still alleges incompetence, because covering it up for an extra month or even two won't impact the elections which are a long time from now.

The Republican talking points right now are that coronavirus doesn't really matter, and it's being blown up as a democratic attempt to have an election year topic.

When all my Republican family is spouting the same BS, that means it's being pushed hard in the soft right wing information channels.

EDIT: Even NBC news is hinting that government policies are getting in the way of determining real corona virus infection rates. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-y-gov-cuomo-questions...

The number of tested individuals are only about 2x the number of confirmed cases. Not a great margin of error.

It isn’t China’s fault that this disease happened to emerge in the country. And judging by what we see from other countries, their handling of it seems to be at least as good as mosts’, not even taking into account that countries like US had two months extra to prepare.

So maybe chill on the nationalism (and the exclamation marks)

There were delays and suppression of vital news, but overall their response has been far more robust than our own. As for blame of the emergence, one has wonder, were it not for China's open market trade of wild animals, would this virus be with us now?

Uhh, they could have permanently banned wet markets. Every epidemiologist knew that something like this pandemic was eventually inevitable

China absolutely could have prevented this but there wasn't a desire to do so because CCP officials like to eat bats sometimes too

There is absolutely no proof that this originated with someone eating bats. Bats often life close to humans—in attics for instance—and aren’t eaten raw. That makes it far more likely initial transmission was due to someone accidentally touching bat shit than anyone eating bats.

That this theory is widely being accepted as proven fact is itself evidence of the accusation of racism you’re trying to defend against.

Source on this please? You're right that it likely wasn't bats but scientists think it may have been in snakes or Pangolins

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51496830

But there seems to be a consensus that this bug started in their wetmarket. I don't care if it was consumption of the animal or from fecal matter. Wetmarkets should be permanently banned. Wealthy CCP cadre members didn't want to do this and it cost the world big time

Also, racism? When did I bring that up?

It's starting to look like China will be getting back to more or less normal production much sooner than the US. 500 million people were put in lockdown, and it worked.[1] New cases in Wuhan have dropped to nearly zero, and restrictions are being lifted while surveillance continues.

The US approach is just to slow transmission down a little without impacting daily life too much. That just spreads the epidemic out over time. The US may spend a year or two in the current state, until there is a vaccine.

[1] http://archive.is/qWmFw

Why is this kind of comment allowed on HN? I see no difference between this and a comment a person paid by some government/organisation hostile to China would write.

This person is spewing nationalistic hate without any sources and arguments. Almost nothing in the comment is falsifiable.

Can dang elaborate on this issue? Are comments of this kind usually removed or not? I'm thinking of writing a browser extension which would remove those from new and problematic users. I come to HN to avoid this stuff.

This was all verifiable in real time and is consistent with the behavior of authoritarian regimes. You want to pretend China isn't interning Uigurs as well?

Hell, that doctor whistleblower who ended up dead from the virus was officially "admonished" and forced to publicaly apologize for "spreading rumors".

The world isn't the Disney movie land that most Americans grew up. Plenty of organized evil exists throughout the world.

Trying to claim that the United States has some moral high ground above China is laughable. China has certainly committed plenty of human rights violations, but so have plenty of Western nations.

Laughable? The US does some pretty bad shit but the Chinese treatment of it's millions of ungyrs and confirmed organ harvesting of prisoners outweighs all the domestic bad shit that the US has ever done

Who made that claim?

This whole thread? The basis of the argument is that China is authoritarian regime that we should not be doing business with.

>The basis of the argument is that China is authoritarian regime that we should not be doing business with

I don't think anybody is saying that. What I'm saying is that criticism of the Chinese response/government is neither sinophobia nor nationalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com