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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Actually this pandemic has shown some true colors of many nations.

1) US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company

2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine.

3) European countries are in-fighting for supplies. Switzerland wants supplies from Germany who is unwilling to supply them. Austria and Germany butt heads.

4) India banning critical medical exports

There are so many stories of how each nation is behaving. Even within the US, states are bidding against each other and the federal government has not shown solid leadership.

When times are grim, humans tend to invoke strong tribal instincts (for e.g. brotherhood that forms between soldiers). If we hypothetically had a more deadly virus than Coronavirus, say with a CFR of 50% and we were unable to stop it, there would be in-fighting between counties and neighborhoods.

There are some good stories too, especially the sacrifice of the healthcare workers, delivery staff and politicians.

When times are great -> Globalism

When times are tough -> Isolation and tribalism

View on HN

I personally enjoyed the hypocrisy of China initially requesting Nations to not "overreact" and close borders to its travelers (mid February), then proceeding to do exactly this towards these same nations (mid March) when things became worse overseas.

During Swine Flu outbreak in 2009 china closed it's borders to Mexico, but turns around and says it's unfair when people close their borders to china. Then proceeded to close their borders AGAIN. facepalm

SARS happened in 2002-2004, no?

You're right, I'm thinking Swine Flu. Thanks.

SARS was closer to 1999-2000.

No, it wasn't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

I remembered incorrectly. Thanks for the link.

No one has to listen to the CCP. The CCP acts offended by everything.

The problem is, the WHO does, they even said this thing wasn't transmitted person to person. And they're supposed to be the authority everyone was saying to listen to.

I think that the WHO communication was proportionate to the current knowledge at the time of each of their interventions.

First of all they said, when it was clear there was a problem "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." (and then Trump and almost everybody else did not want to hear that)

And moreover they said more exactly, some time before the previous item, that "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". So your position is a deformation of their words.

No. The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China to the point of disgracefully delaying calling it a pandemic and then playing catch-up when individual countries started ignoring the WHO and implemented their own measures.

Then the WHO switched gears and complained that the countries were doing too little too late.

They've been almost completely worthless in this crisis.

The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China

See also: The whole WHO/Taiwan debacle, which is still ongoing.

The WHO is OK risking the lives of people in Taiwan in order to keep the mainland happy. You would think that the WHO would put the health of people, regardless of where they live, ahead of politics.

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that.if you disagree then you gotta take it to the UN.

It's not about recognition. It's about doing the right thing.

If the virus' impact in Puerto Rico was very different than it was in the rest of the United States, the WHO would note it publicly. But Taiwan't situation was actively suppressed by the WHO because of Beijing.

When has any organization put peoples' lives over politics?

Anyway, the WHO/Taiwan debacle seems to resulted in Taiwan handling this pandemic better than anyone else, considering their proximity to China and the huge amount of trade and travel between them. Taiwan just ignored the WHO and did their own thing, which was the best thing.

Well, they at least published that anti-covid disinfection recipe. At least here in Czech Republic everyone uses that to make emergency disinfection mixtures.

There is no downplaying in "test test test". That could not be farther from downplay. The emergency sense is vibrant in their declaration. Previous declarations were done with a lack of scientific knowledge.

Btw only South Korea did "test test test". And that succeded very very much.

The WHO is obviously in China's pocket. I mean they can't even bring themselves to use the word Taiwan in public communications.

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that, got nothing to do with being in China’s pocket. If you don’t like that, pressure your government to recognize Taiwan, and pressure them to pressure UN.

OK, but let's ignore the recognition of Taiwan for a second.

China censoring social media chat about the virus[0], tons of talk among experts that China faked their numbers and dates[1], meanwhile the WHO praises 'Chinese Transparency'[2][3], while hinting that the actions of censorship and moderate reporting were the right idea to avoid widespread panic.[4]

I'm not anti-WHO, but it's getting harder to believe that they are working objectively. China did a lot wrong in regards to response, but the WHO seems to want to heap on the praise. It makes one wonder. The weird non-response and hangup regarding Taiwan was just the topping on the cake, and it was entirely irresponsible on the WHOs part.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/chinese-social...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/08/8037667...

[2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/28-01-2020-who-china-le...

[3]: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...

[4]: https://apnews.com/16cd6173232a01ec04780db3eea4de79?fbclid=I...

Statements in sources you cite seem rather deceptive, for example insinuating that censorship delayed response. Wiki has a pretty factually sourced timeline with precise dates, and it shows the infamous Dr. Li in question messaged a private group about a lab report he saw from Dec 30 (authorities found out because it was reshared on public forum), when the WHO was notified if it on Dec 31. He was also reprimanded for claiming it was a sars outbreak, when there's no evidence at the time. I suspect many of these news sources are aware of these underlying facts, if they're the sort to do any research before publishing, so the only interesting question here is why they chose to be deceptive anyway.

The WHO technically said they were looking into it and that they had not confirmed it spread human to human. That’s totally different from “we have looked into it and can confirm it does not spread human to human.”

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to interpret this in any way other than the obvious one. This isn’t a philosophical discussion about the limitations of empiricism, it’s a tweet that goes out to millions of people from an organization imbued with serious authority.

And what is the obvious interpretation? Mine is ‘it is preliminary, so results can still change’ and ‘found no clear evidence does not mean evidence will not be found later’.

Or maybe we can agree that there is no such thing as obvious, and different people will necessarily have different interpretations, for better or worse.

I see it as yours but recognize it as probably being read like the parents as not only is the default behavior for absense of evidence to treat it as evidence of absense or subtly of magnitude the fine distinction is lost on most.

It is anti-communication in context as cunningly putting effort into /not/ being clear. If they truly weren't sure a more honest form would be "We have neither confirmed nor denied the possibility of human to human transmission." (Putting aside any biological questions like are there even any crossspecies transmissions which cause propagative symptoms like coughing or sneezing but do not transmit through it.)

Well then it's a good thing that we aren't governed by people who just spend 5 seconds misinterpreting tweets.

Actually they, did say that they could neither confirm nor deny: https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...

but the only reason this statement would come out is to refute any rumors that its spread person-by-person.

So its implied. They cant confirm anything but they need to refute that its spread through humans

By even posting this tweet, it is implied that there is no human-to-human transmission. They could have easily said, "So far, preliminary tests have found no evidence of human-to-human transmission, however we have only just begun research into the matter and thus still recommend social distancing."

Why didn't they say this? Because China seems to have pressured the WHO the entire time, including saying that the borders shouldn't be closed.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-h...

>And what is the obvious interpretation? Mine is ‘it is preliminary, so results can still change’ and ‘found no clear evidence does not mean evidence will not be found later’.

If that's what they meant, then they should have said so. They didn't. As I said before, this is a major health organization that needs to be clear in its communication, not speak in riddles.

They did say, within 24h of that tweet, that they have not ruled out human to human transmission: https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...

There was very clear evidence, the WHO were just ignoring it like they pretend Taiwan isn't it's own independent entity, they won't talk about Taiwan or interact with them for the sake of politics. It's no coincidence that the one country that has the most reason to mistrust the CCP and took the alternate sources from on the ground reporting as trusted that has managed to not get overrun by this virus.

They literally just repeated whatever the CCP said, plenty of information was leaking out of the country through alternate channels, reports about doctor/journalist arrests, and the way the Chinese public was reacting about how serious this virus was. What did they think it was if not human to human transmission? Hundreds of people in multiple cities ate at the same restaurant or tainted meat? People were talking about this virus in China publicly in early January and it was known it was spreading.

The WHO said there's no clear evidence of h2h on Jan 14. The Chinese cdc team didn't conclude their investigation until a few days after, and the advisory was changed after. Your sort know perfectly well why your statements are misleading but will continue to make them for obvious reasons.

Everyone has to listen to the CCP. They control access to the world's second-largest economy.

Seems like a pretty common thing from major powers doesn't it. Maybe it's just human nature? e.g. US banning exports of respirators but throwing a tantrum when India tries to ban the export of hydroxychloroquine.

Not sure what the solution here is, but it certainly does seem it's everyone for themselves in these situations.

Not just China but the WHO, who recommended no international travel restrictions very late into this crisis (https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/who-advice-for...), then ignored Taiwan’s requests in favor of Beijing propaganda and claimed the virus does not transmit between humans (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan...), and has repeated failures seen in their response to other health crises (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-in...).

In addition, WHO is heavily influenced by China; here is an interview with a senior WHO official who was asked about Taiwan - he simply hangs up the phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that. If you disagree then you gotta take it to the UN.

The poor guys at the WHO just want to focus on fighting diseases, and yet everybody is trying to use them for political agendas. If I was that guy I would be inclined to shut down too.

His behavior was nonetheless completely unprofessional. He could easily have stated, exactly as you did, the situation and asked to move on.

Unfortunately for him life is political, and the UN and WHO very much so. I think those organizations should have space for governing entities that might not have complete international support or they aren’t really representing the world population as the name might lead one to believe.

Taiwan is clearly a self governing entity with that is not governed by the CCP. Whatever policy and assistance WHO is giving to CCP does not go to Taiwan. Taiwan has taken a very different approach to coronavirus and the world has a lot to learn from them.

you could still recognize Taiwan exist without saying its a separate entity.

Especially important when they actually are the one handling the issue the best way possible. The way he act is truly abominable. Its like Taiwan is in a separate dimension that didnt exist in this reality, and anything they did didnt happen

when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan ... at the same time neighbor countries with china tried to block cross boarder movement yet china forced those trade routes to stay open well after Wuhan had entered lockdown - pure evil

>when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

I'd like someone else to confirm this because I've not heard about this before now.

A quick Googing indicates that Wuhan airport closed when the city was put into lockdown and re-opened yesterday when the lockdown of the city was lifted.

This makes sense considering that, when the lockdown started, many countries had to discuss with the Chinese government in order to allow special flights to evacuate their citizens.

> when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

Evidence for this claim? I believe they closed all movement, including international flights.

This is false, by the time they shut down movement out of Wuhan, the airport was closed.

There were, however, people who already left Wuhan who then left the country.

There were also repatriation flights out of Wuhan.

I think people forget that they gave 48h warning before the lockdown happened causing a huge amount of what was likely infected people to flee.

It was 8 hours: "At 2 am on 23 January 2020, authorities issued a notice informing residents of Wuhan that from 10 am [..] residents of Wuhan were also not allowed to leave the city without permission from the authorities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns

where is the 48h come from?

Creating a throw-away account just to prove to someone that China did something right...

Because HN and the english speaking world is usually so anti-China, that people who are neutral of China get angry responses or are downvoted badly. Note: I am not even saying supportive of China; even being neutral is already considered unacceptable or lunacy by many people.

Things are so bad that many people are afraid to speak up for China using their own identities. I used to be one of those people who were afraid.

But now I have had enough. I personally experienced the lockdown in China and how distorted the western reporting is. That is why now I am stepping out and letting my voice known.

China is to blame for all of this, and the fact that they did some things right, doesn't clean their fault.

You have bought into the CCP is China bullshit. Without the murdering CCP China could have been Taiwan. Instead you are a new country with 70 years of history that only occupies the space of the great historic nation of China.

From the armchair--I think China is rather hard to govern, and if you study its dynastic history, most existential challenges tended to come from popular revolts from within. Also, the Republic of China's Nationalist Party-led government isn't much older and was no saint for most of their existence. After being ousted to Taiwan in 1949, they kept martial law on the island for almost 4 decades, and famously imprisoned over a hundred thousand perceived enemies of the party, executing thousands during the White Terror. Political and democratic reforms that did emerge in the late 80's were not guaranteed. In a way the same pressures emerged concurrently in the mainland and we know how that turned out.

Edit: The "CCP is China" issue is a great point, and I wish that the distinction between government, nationality, culture, and race could be made a lot clearer (speaking as an American living in the US who is ethnically Chinese). What's personally distressing is how easily the media and politicians here leap from 'China lies and steals,' which is a debatable topic from a political science perspective at least, to 'The Chinese (people) lie and steal,' which is a subjective take on motives. Not sure if that's what you were talking about but wanted to get that out there...

Total false claim.

> when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

The first result I found on Google says the airport was shut down to all departures, along with all public transit. They didn't immediately shut down international driving in private cars, I suppose. https://www.ifn.news/posts/china-shuts-down-wuhan-airport-am...

> at the same time neighbor countries with china tried to block cross boarder movement yet china forced those trade routes to stay open well after Wuhan had entered lockdown

Are you referring to trade of goods? That has been the general approach in most countries even after restricting human travel, as the prevalent thought is that non-living goods don't replicate and shed the virus.

I don't think it's hypocrisy.

At the time the vast majority of the cases in China were in Wuhan and Hubei, which had been put on lockdown with airports closed, but the rest of the country has much fewer cases.

No country imposed full ban on travels with countries that had the number of cases seen in China outside Wuhan/Hubei.

Whether this was the right or wrong decision to make is another issue.

The same discussion can be had about travellers from Italy just a few weeks later.

At the end of the day it is also down to each country to make its own decision on who to accept.

The much fewer cases thing was because doctors were being told to lie about the numbers or attribute it to viral pneumonia, they were carrying off bodies and quarantining sections of cities elsewhere too, you just had to look at WeChat to see it.

Can we please stop this?

HN sinks to the gutter every time China pops up as a subject and no discussion is possible, as seen from the reaction to my previous comment.

HN isn't sinking into the gutter calling out a government for doing horrifying things, spreading misinformation, suppressing accurate information, all to save face/embarrassment and keep its economy.

People here read alternate sources of news, see the videos leaking out on the Internet, they're very savy and know that any reporting that rely on CCP as primary source of info are bird cage liner. The CCP acted in bad faith, and the world suffered for it, and this isn't the first time.

You are proving my point with this bigoted response so please no need to bother 'replying' to my comments. Thanks.

My response is from Chinese people. This is what the ones on the ground in China are saying.

Or are you one of those bigots that can't separate the government from the people? Calling out the CCP has zilch to do with bigotry. Taiwan, HK and Chinese-Americans and diaspora (hence why they got out) aren't the same people and don't endorse the actions of the CCP. Calling out the jailing of journalists, arresting of doctors, and actions like currently rounding up black people in Guangzhou and putting them out in the street. Unless calling out racism by the government authorities is racist? It's as silly as saying calling out British government is calling out all white people, or bigotry towards the Scotish. China is 50+ ethnicities, besides the Han Chinese, so its a dumb argument to say China and race are equivalent, its a border and a government, that's it.

Chinese ex-pats know exactly what's going on there. They still have family there and see what's going on in Chinese social media and what's getting censored.

You can't scream racism and bigotry because someone criticizes a government, that's how we know you're a joke and likely a 50 center.

CCP does not understand that playing asymmetric games from business laws (booting Uber off of China for example), diplomacy and global influence, etc is damaging long term brand and goodwill.

In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice - complete Wuhan style measures are unacceptable say in Sweden. This asymmetry is going to give a short term boost to China. Long term, my opinion is that western democracies will realize what they’re against - all eggs in a single totalitarian basket - is a bad idea. Manufacturing and reliance on China will change.

It is already changing: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-08/japan...

booting off Uber? Have you ever used Uber and its local competitor Didi in China? I've used both multiple times. The competition was just too much, both companies were losing money at a pace that's not sustainable. The Uber China business was acquired, and in return Uber received cash and stakes in Didi.

Oh come on, there is no denying that China subsidizes local businesses asymmetrically.

I've lived in China and have used Didi.

I don’t think you can claim definitively that that is why Uber lost. Uber lost in other markets too, like in Southeast Asia.

I don’t think anyone can win this argument with you since you can always claim that the Chinese government favors local companies, so therefore ____ lost.

But at least I can give some counterpoints: Tesla hasn’t lost in China.

If you look into the details you'll find out that in typical CCP fashion they were tipping the scales on Didi.

> It is already changing: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-08/japan....

This is the same article as the OP.

that's the joke; ggp proves the point

>>In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice

This is no evidence of this either. You can't believe what authoritarian regimes publish. They also are willing to shoot on site if they want to positive-COVID people. There are estimates that the deathtoll under CCP for COVID is > 10x what's reported, and will probably go up.

do you have evidence for your claims?

i know people who live in china, including those who work in hospitals, and the situation handling there is night and day compared with that found in the u.s.

it's unbelievable the amount of biased, subjective anti-chinese propaganda found on hacker news. and most of it is by people who only repeat the propaganda found in u.s. media and/or have never even been to china. there are of course legitimate, serious problems there, but you won't find accurate portrayals of them here, and you will certainly see the same problems in the u.s. and west ignored.

asking for evidence for a comment that requests evidence themselves and then makes unfounded claims gets downvoted. and you see comments like this everywhere. meanwhile, the u.s. is literally failing on nearly every vector which is very scary.

> In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice

South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and Malaysia all look to have handled the crisis very well. India is as well - as far as their figures are to be believed. We'll also find out if Japan's handling of the crisis has been effective in the coming weeks.

I'm not really seeing a pattern in democracies handling this badly. Meanwhile while the Chinese figures probably aren't completely made up, it's also extremely doubtful how reliable they are.

Nations exist to protect it's citizens. So yeah, as they should, each country is prioritizing their own needs before exporting any surplus to other countries. The challenge is no one really has any idea how much of the supplies they actually need.

It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior.

States use serving a “nation” as a retroactive justification for doing what they have always done.

In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

Leaders face a rather difficult situation: the governments of nations exist to protect their own citizens. Were they to export supplies to others, citizens wouldn't be happy. Even were it to save twice as many citizens in a foreign nation as it would have saved in the exporting one. Would you be happy with a national government that placed the lives of foreigners above yours? Even if you would, most people wouldn't be.

This isn't limited to international relations, of course. The federal stockpiles of PPE are nearly depleted [0]. If the virus situation in America worsens, some states will be extremely pissed that the early states got a large chunk of the federal stockpiles, leaving none later on for them. Were the federal government to reserve supplies for states that were affected later, they would face anger from those that are peaking now.

> In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

This is untrue. Keeping supplies does help some people, the ones with whom they are kept. It may hurt others, but it does help people.

I wonder if this is something like a prisoners' dilemma situation. A co-ordinated global response might be the best option, but it would require a sacrifice from each nation. Even if they might benefit in the end, in the days of non-stop media coverage, no government is willing to take the heat for making that sacrifice.

[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/04/09/federal-government-stockpile-o...

> In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

Officials are elected to serve the need of their own constituants first and foremost, not foreign interests. There is nothing selfish about that. The American government doesn't have to consult with Canada or Mexico before taking a decision in times of crisis. This is the very core idea behind a representative democracy.

Where politicians failed is with their lack of foresight when it comes to stocking masks and ventilators, they didn't fail because they were "selfish" toward other nations.

> It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior.

It's not surprising in the sense that it fits the definition of a "nation state".

It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

I think that, in XXI century, we're realizing that the human race is not yet ready for globalization. Heck, we still can't even assimilate into respective cultures properly. People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

As much as it pains me, I think you might be right. Perhaps we're not ready yet.

Then again, who's ready the first time they do something? This pandemic has made obvious a lot of places where our attempt at globalization doesn't work. I hope our societies will learn from it and do better next time.

Nah. Europe, most of the liberal world, are ready and recognize people add value.

How would it work if we got globalism "right"? What if instead of a virus, it was an asteroid which instantly destroyed all the factories in Country X, so there's no way for Country X to send supplies overseas even if they wanted to? If we want to be safe from events like that, we better not outsource any critical production to Country X. But if we don't outsource any critical production to any foreign countries, what's even left of globalism then?

I think doing globalism right would require everyone to mandate some amount of redundancies be left in the supply chains. Some amount of fat left uncut. All in order to derisk the economy in case a random piece of it gets shut down by force majeure.

I mean, imagine if all of AWS was just a single data centre labeled us-west-1. Imagine something happened to it. This is comparable to how Wuhan shutting down impacted the global supply chains.

(I lack a good web comparison for what happened afterwards - the EU, and recently the US, shutting down, hitting the global supply chains again, this time on the demand side.)

Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already be partly using the other dependency! What could possibly go wrong?"

This makes no sense, because the only reason React would suddenly fail on you is if your project is so very badly engineered that you don't pin dependencies and cache them locally. And even then, your deployed instances would remain unaffected.

A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just a single one - but at the very minimum, you should have a plan in place to switch to a different one at a moment's notice. That's reasonable redundancy.

I think I've come up with an analogy for demand-side supply chain issues though. Imagine you have a web service that's constantly under 90% load during normal operations, and that eats almost exactly as much money in the infrastructure costs as it earns. Imagine that service gets mentioned on Hacker News. It almost immediately fails due to increased demand, you can't provision new instances because you don't have enough money in the bank, and then when suddenly the demand drops, you can't afford to keep it on at all.

Only a series of very bad decision would cause the above scenario to happen, and yet it's almost exactly like how supply chains operate in physical space.

We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually not unlike recent scares about China embedding secret transmitters deep inside of circuitboards, etc.

Again, you own your code dependencies[0]. A patch would be quickly released by software security experts, which every half-competent developer could apply to their product on their own. That's the benefit of ownership - you get to fix things. With software, you don't even need spare parts.

Depending on services is where the fragility starts. They're single points of failure, unless you have a plan to quickly switch to an equivalent competitor.

[0] - Unless they have a time-limited commercial license. Then they're essentially a service.

Doing globalism "right" requires that there are no borders at all, so it would be solved in exactly the same manner as if the factories and the supplies were in two different corners of Country X.

We are also not getting there anytime soon.

> People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

the majority of the time, the problems you speak of were caused by the big western powers in the first place

I think that comment was about Californians moving to other states.

Well that's kinda rich. California does a remarkably good job of integrating people from distant lands. Only thing that grates is people from other states coming here and demanding the government be as shitty and regressive as the one they left behind. Frankly that's something foreign immigrants typically don't do.

I think the thing is that people are /never/ ready for changes even if they actually prepare and waiting for to "be ready first" is to wait forever and get even less ready over time.

The reason that the flight attendants tell you to put on your own mask before helping others is so you CAN help others, otherwise everybody dies.

Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and in the coming years as less powerful countries work to stamp this out, we are going to be doing a lot to help them.

As the US goes, so goes the world. The US restricting medical supply exports looks bad on the short term, but it will end up being a net benefit to the planet.

> Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world

It's not a matter of my ideology. I recognize that the US was the most powerful country in the world before the pandemic, but looking at the news about the US response, I have a feeling it will no longer be once the coronavirus is finally dealt with. Then again, maybe I'm just biased by the disproportionate amount of headlines the US is taking in international media.

What are you seeing the suggests that the US is anything other than almost comically more powerful than any other country in the world?

In terms of military might, yes. In terms of economy? We'll see when the pandemic passes. The thing I see is US being too slow to react to COVID-19 threat and its economy being probably one of the most fragile (because of being most market-optimized).

If the US is not the most powerful country then who is? The US has the strongest economy and the strongest military. What other measure are you looking at? Even if you want to look at Europe as a single country then that would be debatable. UK just left and its looking like there is growing support for Spain and Poland to leave. It looks like the EU may be falling apart.

I think you need to look at individual US states vs the US as a whole. The federal government doesn't really have authority to do everything that other country's federal governments do. For example its generally accepted that the federal government cannot force every citizen to be in lockdown while the states can.

The US is extremely divided. Even in these times the political class and society could not get over their differences.

The lack of a social net and out of control capitalism are also massive issues.

The president was downplaying the virus.

The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.

Who looks like most powerful country then?

Well it's pretty obvious that China is vying for the position, and the likeliest to achieve it.

In the long term, perhaps. But US is still dominant today, and that will not suddenly change next year - the gap is just too great.

Besides, China would need to grow its power a lot to even be able to fit the same tier that US does today. And if they can't or don't want to, then the end result is likely a more decentralized world. Not every era is "Pax ..." - there are long gaps in between the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one.

China has shitty positioning too. USA was positioned to be a beacon of freedom since it's founding. Meanwhile China is position as what... Authoritarian country that loves to slaughter it's citizens in various ways? That's not exactly a great idea to sell to the world. The only way China can get on top is by holding the rest of the world hostage. Either by military or commerce backed by military. But as all relationships built on fear, that'd be quite a fragile position.

China's positioning is rapid growth and "social harmony". I'm not saying that they actually deliver on this, but that's how it's being sold.

That's their selling point for country managers and boy do they deliver. But it's not that interesting for the general population. Very few people want rapid growth and "social harmony" by themselves.

You'd be surprised, actually. This is more true in third world countries, and other areas that have experienced instability relatively recently (e.g. ex-USSR countries, including Russia) - at some point people start demanding a "strong hand" and whatnot.

Fun thing is, I am from ex-USSR country.

People still remember Soviet-style "social harmony" and there's a big allergy for that path.

Rapid growth is not exactly popular too for multiple reasons.

Growth-over-ecology brings bad memories from soviet era

Growth-over-labour-rights brings bad memories from 90s and somewhat soviet era

Rapid change itself brings bad memories from 90s and 00s too

Trying to become one doesn't make you one. China is a long long long way to go.

OP was claiming "The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.". If US doesn't count for him.. I'd say China is 3rd world country compared to US.

Coordination (or cooperation) only works up to a point. If resources are truly scarce, then being selfish may be the only way to survive no matter what century you’re in.

If resources are truly scarce, then competition means most players won't survive - whatever resources they manage to hoard for themselves won't be enough for their needs. Cooperation means more will be saved.

(A simple thought experiment: imagine there are 10 equally capable competitors, each needing 2 units of resources to survive, and there are only 10 available globally. Under cooperation, 5 competitors will need to be sacrificed, but 5 will live. Under competition, all 10 will perish, each holding their hard-won single unit of resources.)

If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Otherwise, this is what peaceful cooperation looks like (I’ll give you this in exchange for that, where obviously the one with more desireable goods or services to trade will survive).

>If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Most cultures have very strong social mores that sanction against hoarding or even general unwillingness to share. It's not THAT beyond the pale. What makes it hard is when society becomes disconnected enough, and community bonds get weak enough that social mores no longer bind behavior.

Under competition, one or two will survive by killing off the rest.

And from the perspective of the victors, it will be a better result, because winning guaranteed survival, whereas cooperation is essentially a lottery. So anybody who has a better chances to win a conflict than a lottery would choose conflict, if they are deciding solely on utilitarian rather than ethical grounds.

> It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

More globalists isn't going to solve globalism.

American politicians answer to their constituants, not the China or India. If it looks like policitians didn't first and foremost prioritize the need of their own citizens who elected them then it's treason.

> competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism. The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

So no the solution isn't "a world government", the solution is to take back western industrial force from China.

Today, This is just the bill coming due, this is the real cost of the last 40 years of western industrial policies.

> The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism.

It doesn't mean it's the only path to a global economy.

> The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

The pandemic wouldn't be anywhere near as severe if there was a coordinated global response.

> the solution is to take back western industrial force from China

For that, you'll have to shut down economic liberalism, because otherwise the forces that caused the move of western industrial force into China will still be present, and will cause it again once the public forgets about the pandemic (i.e. in a year), and beancounters everywhere will be free to optimize the corporate balance sheets once again.

Except in this case the only countries that got out unscathed took unilateral action rather than listening to the recommendations of the corrupt multi national organizations that are supposedly trying to protect global public health.

In a way. WHO was way too cautious and severely underplayed the issue in January and February, but even then, the small recommendations they did make were completely ignored by the entire Western world.

> In a way

In a way? Taiwan has less than 350 cases. They didn't wait for the WHO recommendation. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because of greed and bureaucratic incompetence.

Giant centralized institutions are not the solution to humanities' ills and dealing and cooperating with corrupt foreign powers isn't either.

Lots of writing in international relations circles right now about how the slapshod global response to this crisis, in contrast to previous pandemics like ebola and H1N1, is evidence that the era of US hegemony is over. Without a hegemonic entity putting its imprimatur on what the "right way" to do things is, everything ends up being kind of a mess.

I guess we can look forward to Chinese hegemony in the future, since the US doesn't want to do it any more.

Maybe. But there's a lot of doubt as to whether China is cut out to exercise broad hegemonic influence the way the US has. They might not have the cultural cachet or a compelling enough ideological framework for international cooperation the way America's Wilsonian institutionalism was. It's more likely we're heading for a more chaotic and unstable multi-polar world.

Why then have nations?

Nations were useful, particularly when almost all problems were local problems. Doesn't mean it's an ideal top-level organization for XXI century.

You have bodies like Germany or the US, which function as a federation of states. Looking at Germany and EU, you essentially have states within a state within a sort-of state. You can stack governments recursively, so it's possible and in some ways desirable to have a single one at the top level.

There are places where even posing this question - at least if it clearly applies to the corresponding nation - is extremist speech. Nations, like all other corporations, are like organisms themselves. They might still act beneficial to their population, but never at the cost of their own survival.

French seized supplies bound for Britain. Everyone is doing it.

You always protect your own citizens first, then once you're in a position of strength, then you help your neighbor. If you're both in a hole, you have to get out of the hole first before you help your friend out, otherwise you're just both going to be in the hole. Put your mask on before assisting other passengers, etc. So many analogies, but this is very basic behavior and expected. Until a country no longer has a shortage themselves, its only when they have an abundance should they give needed supplies away.

There's got to be a difference between putting on your own mask first and taking your friend's mask...

But when you don’t make your own masks then the one who does is free to shape their own relations and deals.

As it should be. A nation's government should ABSOLUTELY put its citizens over everything else. Not sure what you would have them do instead?

What is happening is unfair to some, but the individual governments are doing exactly what they should be doing, valuing their people above all else.

That's true, but at the same time, it shows the need for a global government to coordinate responses to global problems like this pandemic.

Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO. Thanks but no thanks. At least with nation states you have some checks and balances. It's also way too much concentrated power for my liking.

> Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO.

Or like the federal government of the United States. I think we've been having pretty bad luck this year with large and influential organizations, which is a fair counterpoint to a global government proposal.

A global government would have led to a more uniform response, but arguably that's exactly what we don't want in a crisis like this.

Each nation was able to react differently, and those different responses have provided us the closest thing we have to controlled experiments. Those experiments have allowed us to understand the spread of this disease better.

The global response is pretty uniform (almost every country following the same strategy). But it was too slow, and too uncoordinated in the sense that different countries enacted their protective measures at different times, with little to no warning to others, resulting in unnecessarily severe disruptions of the supply chain.

We're all following the same strategy now because of the countries that didn't follow that strategy taught the rest of us what not to do.

Imagine if a world government had responded the way China did. That is, lie about the problem until it gets too big then forcibly lock people into their homes. What reason do we have to think that a world government would do anything different?

> then forcibly lock people into their homes

Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei. The western equivalent of that would be if the UN ordered isolation of Italy, and then ordered the rest of the EU, the UK and the US to ship food, personnel and PPEs to Italy, all in the space of days.

But UN doesn't have that power, EU doesn't have that power either, so here we are.

>> then forcibly lock people into their homes

> Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

When I say "forcibly locking people in" I mean welding the doors shut[0]. Last I checked that's not something the rest of us are doing.

> Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei.

Which if they hadn't pretended in the first place, would not have been necessary. So why did they pretend, and why did they stop?

My guess is that the deceit was somehow connected to protecting the Chinese government's legitimacy, and that only once news of the outbreak spread and deceit was untenable did they own up to it.

A world government has every incentive to suppress any information that may challenge it's legitimacy, and no external entities capable of publicizing the truth.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/01/coronav...

A global government could very well have planned this diversity. Just like hospitals organize different test groups.

Could have does not imply would have.

Neither the difficulty of planning at that scale, nor the failure modes of a centralized government entity, should be underestimated.

Have morals that aren't a function of geographic location, presumably.

Isn’t it clearly immoral to sacrifice the interests of the people who elected you to support another nation?

Maybe, in the sense that it could be politically destabilizing or something like that.

The morality argument here considers countries (defined as government + population) as actors, rather than governments. So the question is rather whether it's immoral for the people who elect a government to demand that it represents solely their interests to the point of sacrificing other people.

That’s not what is happening if it is a tragedy of the commons.

If you only have limited supplies its immoral to help somebody geographically closer than you than somebody further away?

Ceteris paribus I don't think many people would find that immoral, no.

Some things are a zero sum game, some aren't. Vaccine IP is absolutely in the latter class. You want everyone in every country to be vaccinated, and you absolutely don't want to be poisoning and derailing this universal goal by talk of putting up national barriers around vaccine IP.

Some countries behave even more strangely. India barred entry of its own citizens into India. One KLM flight was turned back from Delhi because it had Indian citizens on board.

The flight was allowed to land 2 days later. The earlier decision was taken in mistake.

Does this attitude almost guarantee we don't reach a global optimum? I mean I get the rationale to protect your own citizens or your own tribe of any sort like family. But in the degenerate case when no one cooperates on anything seems like you have a strong likelihood of everyone losing. If you don't help me then I won't help you, and neither of us gets what we need.

I am curious what will be considered not fake and genuine support? Damned if they and damned if they don’t. AFAIK Dutch issued a article clarify the mistake they made which nobody seems to care. I don’t think any single nation can or will survive this alone unless they want to serve all connections to the world. So why it is not in China best interests to offer genuine support when they can? Not like a short sighted prick?

> So why it is not in China best interests to offer genuine support when they can?

It's definitely in their interest, because in terms of realpolitik, this is their golden opportunity one-up the US on the world stage, possibly even making Europe more aligned with them than with the States.

Turns out everyone is just flailing and drunk on the dance floor, geopolitically.

I just hope they stay away from their respective red button consoles.

All democratic nations should get together and invest in manufacturing. If democracy falls, the treaty would asymetrically punish those that give up rights and freedom of their people.

There are a ton of sources here:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-floods-europe-d...

China is trying the same thing that US did for many decades after WWII - to rally up global support through humanitarian aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid

The problem is that the whole thing feels fake for 2 reasons (this is my personal opinion):

1) They are an authoritarian state using soft power for a democratic nation (Italy, Netherlands) - there is a real conflict of interest.

2) It is "pull" rather than "push" when it comes to soft power. You cannot muscle your way through it. As a superpower, you need to influence other nations such that those nations "want" to collaborate and be influenced - leading by example, helping them gain foothold after the catastrophy, long term investments in shared interests, etc. You can't buy your way into it.

IMO - China has a branding and goodwill problem :-). You're seeing that in HK. People outside of this propaganda sphere have no trust in the CCP.

Those sources are not being honest. Yes countries initially claimed that kits and masks were defective. But later researches showed that countries made wrong orders because of haste, not understanding Chinese standards, etc. I already said elsewhere that the Dutch ordered wrong masks. In case of the Spanish: they ordered kits for testing whether a recovered patient had the virus, not for testing whether one is infected.

Those sources are not being honest because they still present the initial claims as the final truth. No word about later research results that invalidate those claims.

China has now put in stricter export regulations in order to ensure that quality is as expected. But not much mention of that in mainstream western media either.

As for pull rather than push: did the Chinese force aid on countries? No: countries accepted and allowed aid on their own will. In my opinion, this "pull vs push" perception is based on prejudice that China must be pushing something, rather than what is actually happening.

Sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825391

Sources please ( I am Dutch and I am surprised about your claims ).

Let op! Niet elk mondmasker geeft voldoende bescherming tegen corona! -- Explains the different Chinese standards -- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-op-niet-elk-mondmasker-ge...

Trouw -- "Als gevolg van de tekorten zijn de criteria voor het gebruik van de mondmaskers verlaagd" (because of the shortages, they lowered the standards for masks, making it easier to purchase the wrong thing) -- https://www.trouw.nl/politiek/ministerie-van-volksgezondheid...

An analysis of the Chinese standards: https://twitter.com/Gpzy4/status/1244437584815828993?s=20 and https://www.igj.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/03/23/mondmaskers-uit...

Chinese side of the investigation (believe what you will): https://twitter.com/PRCAmbNL/status/1245739420969570304?s=20

China has now introduced export regulations to prevent these incidents from happening again: https://twitter.com/ZichenWanghere/status/124513282016031539...

So you have no source for the claim that 'The Dutch made an ordering mistake'.

I won't read LinkedIn btw, that is not a source.

Why do you not find those sources convincing? Yeah nobody is explicitly making the statement "sorry, I messed up" but if I put the facts together then that's still what happened, in my opinion.

I think you dismiss LinkedIn way too quickly. Hedda Sasburg is a business development consultant specialized in trade with China. I think this counts as expertise w.r.t. what Chinese different products and standards are. Why do you dismiss it so easily?

And okay, how about this then: https://nos.nl/artikel/2329316-afgekeurde-mondkapjes-waren-w...

From the article:

> Maar "de Chinese kwaliteitsstandaard KN95 van de mondmaskers is een medische code", zegt een woordvoerder van de IGJ.

> But "the Chinese standard KN95 means that it's for medical use", said the Dutch ministery of health.

Hedda Sasburg (and not sure why the article doesn't point this out):

> Ik lees dat het KN95 [aka GB2626] mondmaskers zijn; maskers die in China niet zijn bestemd voor medisch gebruik in ziekenhuizen.

> KN95 masks [aka GB2626] are not for medical use.

Note: the Chinese KN95 is not equivalent to the American N95.

Also from the article:

> "De producten stonden beschreven als 'niet-medische maskers' in de douanepapieren"

> The customs paper said that these are non-medical masks.

Even if you don't believe Hedda Sasburg and the Chinese statements, the customs paper seems pretty definitive to me.

The only loose end I still see is why IGJ ruled KN95 to be equivalent to the European EN-149:2001+A1:2009 when even the Chinese don't use them for medical purposes.

Anyway, the issue is now solved. China now sent masks that the Dutch do approve of: https://twitter.com/mjrijn/status/1246154161152045056

The issue with faulty PPE is that demand has surged and tons of Chinese factories are trying to retool to meet that demand.

At the same time, international demand for other types of goods is dropping off a cliff, so Chinese factories have an even greater incentive to retool and produce PPE. With so many inexperienced manufacturers and such a rush to get to market, quality suffers.

There are also all sorts of unscrupulous middlemen and faudsters who are taking advantage of the crisis to sell non-existent, mislabeled or shoddy supplies. Buyers are desperate to obtain PPE quickly, and are willing to spend enormous amounts to get it, so it's a seller's market and fraud is easy. There's an interesting account of the current situation here: [1].

Allowing foreigners to get defrauded is bad for China's brand, so the government recently (in the last few days) issued new regulations on exports of medical equipment.[2] The regulations should improve quality, but will also make it more difficult to obtain PPE from China. Pick your poison: more PPE with poor quality control, or less PPE with better quality control.

1. https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/buying-face-masks-and-o...

2. https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/04/buying-face-masks-and-o...

> The regulations should improve quality, but will also make it more difficult to obtain PPE from China.

This is actually a great idea! We should all be finally supporting this.

People have been complaining for the past 20 years of poor quality from China made goods. But, what do they expect?

They want to buy a $1 USD dollar item, and expect it to be as good quality as a $10 USD dollar item.

What kind of moron failed at basic math, that they can't understand this?

By having all China made goods be labeled as: "Made in China", then you mix the crap with the spectacular. It tarnishes the national brand. There needs to be more distinction.

The China government, should now create 2 or 3 classes.

1) High Quality Products, certified by the China Government

2) International Products, certified by foreign companies

3) Low Quality Products, not certified by anyone, so buy it at your own damn risk, and don't blame China for it

This can actually help shift poor products to other countries. Then, the new "Made in OtherCountry" products, can be known as the crap products. Or, every country should probably do this, if they want to avoid being known as a low quality manufacturer.

One reason people don’t trust China’s aid is that the shortage is caused by China.

They bought up the worlds supply of PPE (over 2 billion masks) and nationalized factories owned by foreign companies (such as 3m) so their masks produced stay internal.

It’s almost as if I cornered the food market and then when people were starving I start selling them food but disguising it as a loving donation. People can see through that

Nonsense.

Here [1] is a fine article of an all-American company in Texas that is too nervous to get back into the business of making masks since they lost a ton of money and had to lay off over 100 staff when demand vanished after the last SARS panic.

They still have the equipment and know-how. They just don't trust the market.

Not a single Chinese government official involved in this sad saga.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...

Just like with oil, any industry can be gamed if a single player accumulates a massive stockpile of a commodity, then floods the market to drive prices down and make production unprofitable for competitors.

Shhh, just join us, "China is bad" is all you had to say, don't waste your own time.

For instance this makes it fake:

"Unsurprisingly, Sweden has received no assistance from China. Instead, one of the country’s hospitals had to secure philanthropic funding to buy Chinese medical gear. Sweden happens to be China’s European bête noire, the result of its support for the imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, who became a Swedish citizen in the 1990s."

"Though an airplane would reach the desperate Spaniards (some 85,000 coronavirus infections, more than 7,000 deaths) much faster, Beijing made sure that the Chinese supplies currently heading for Spain would travel by train along the Belt and Road route, a journey that takes 17 days."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/30/russia-china-coronaviru....

"Some propaganda campaigns are more brazen still. According to recent analysis, 46% of tweets using the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia, which translates as “come on China and Italy,” were generated by automated bots. For #grazieCina, meaning “Thanks China,” it was 37%. China’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua even posted a video on Twitter of Italians in Rome applauding health workers at noon from their balconies—but dubbed with the Chinese national anthem and claiming, spuriously, they were chanting “Grazie, Cina!”"

https://time.com/5814940/china-mask-diplomacy-falters/

> There are some good stories too, especially the sacrifice of the healthcare workers

What is good about that? They are terrified to come to work.

This heroism stuff is just bullshit so we can shame people who refuse to die.

After crisis is over, there will be no financial compensation (overtimes, hazardous environment, no protective equipment).

> This heroism stuff is just bullshit so we can shame people who refuse to die.

Every medical worker who goes into the fray to help save people in this pandemic deserves the highest praise. Every medical worker who doesn't on the grounds that it's extremely unsafe deserves understanding - after all, as the EMS mantra goes, the safety of the rescuer takes priority over the rescue; a sick or dead medical practitioner can't help anyone anymore.

Every hospital administrator and every politician who did anything but their absolute best to help ensure a safe working environment for medical workers, and every private company that continued to fleece healthcare, deserve to be called out, shunned and stripped of their possessions. I have doctors in my family, and I worry about their lives every day. Talking with them, I wouldn't blame my Poland's medical staff if they all decided to just pack up and leave. It's an absolute tragedy that medical personnel has to fight an uphill battle just to have a chance of not dying, trying to save people from COVID-19. As much as I can believe the news, it's the same in most of Europe and in the US.

I hope that after the dust settles, there will be a reckoning. That people will finally demand that their governments unbreak their healthcare.

> after all, as the EMS mantra goes, the safety of the rescuer takes priority over the rescue

Years back when I was trained as a lifeguard, this point was repeatedly emphasized. The first thing you do when you see somebody who needs help is to review the situation for any environmental hazard that could harm you too. It makes no sense to run up to somebody laying on the ground only to slip on the same puddle and crack your skull too. That would only make the situation worse.

Certified first responder here. It was drilled into our training that our safety comes first.

Imagine you rush to help someone and get hurt. Now, you can't help that person AND now there are 2 people that need aid instead of 1. So that 1 ambulance you called out is no longer sufficient.

I agree with most of what you wrote here, but I wish people would stop listing “praise” as the primary thing that healthcare workers deserve. Why not say they deserve money?

Fair, and I absolutely agree with that.

Unfortunately, it would have to be mandated by fiat for it to happen, because market economy tends to reward people in proportion to the inverse of the value they provide to the society at large.

Market economy rewards people in proportion to what costs to replace them, so unskilled jobs get rewarded less. There is no chance in hell writing a crud app delivers more value to society than saving one single life.

> Market economy rewards people in proportion to what costs to replace them

Mostly true. I'd say true, if by "replace" you mean "replace with someone equally capable of earning business the same amount of money". In this sense, top celebrities get absurdly high payouts because they cannot be easily substituted by someone who can bring in equivalent fanbase (=money).

> so unskilled jobs get rewarded less

Not necessarily. A CRUD app often pays more than medicine, but then again sometimes plumbing or construction work pays more than either.

> There is no chance in hell writing a crud app delivers more value to society than saving one single life.

Depends on an app. A one that helps move medicine around more efficiently, or reduce pollution in a city, effectively saves lives. But I've noticed that building such apps tends to be low on the pay scale. What pays best in this industry is usually something that's a net negative to society, like adtech or gambling.

They already get paid, getting paid should really go without saying.

Of course maybe they should be paid more. I don't really know how much they get paid and how much more they should get paid. I've heard the industry is abusive in some ways, but from what I've heard most of the abuse seems like institutionalized hazing; particularly the sleep deprivation stuff. In those respects, I think it's probably on that industry to clean up their own act. The AMA is a professional association for doctors, by doctors. It seems to me they should be able to do something about the abuse.

It is a good story as in if they didn't do what they are doing today - say every healthcare worker quits tomorrow, we are in a huge trouble.

They are identical to soldiers. Some healthcare workers are being exposed to Coronavirus and dying.

In fact, we should have similar veteran-like benefits for healthcare workers for their sacrifice during this time. Same with delivery workers - they are the logistics arm of this war.

> 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine.

Allow me to disagree with this one. I see people questioning China's motives on helping other countries, but in my opinion this is a baseless and overly cynical view of things, not truth. People want to buy into the "China has motives" story so much, that they jump on every incident that may imply that.

The Dutch situation is typical. FYI: I am Dutch. Research has shown that mistakes were made on the Dutch side: because of haste and pressure (because supplies are low), and because the buyers didn't fully understand Chinese mask standards, they ordered the wrong thing. China did not intentionally send bad masks, nor was it a manufacturing quality problem.

The CCP don't have a great track record of giving a shit about people at home. What makes you think they care for anything but the opportunity/ability to project more power abroad?

I will also have to disagree on that one. I was born in China, I now live in Europe, and "CCP doesn't give a shit about people" is a bad western stereotype.

Of course, define "caring". Does any other government, including democratic ones, truly care about people? Debatable. But what I'm saying is that CCP is not the mass-murdering villain that Hacker News makes it out to be.

What about censorship, etc? Yes bad things do happen. Lots of good things also happen. Just like all countries, nothing is perfect. I don't need to remind you of all the human rights violations by the US. The point is: you need to have a more nuanced understanding of the CCP than that of a cartoon villain.

Here are some facts: all coronavirus patients got free treatment, free stays in isolation hotels, all Wuhan residents got free food delivered to their homes. In contrast to what happened here in Europe, the CCP took a strong stance to save as many of their own citizen as they can instead of worrying about economic impact.

You may not believe me. But take a look at these:

"I'm sitting home in Wuhan and eating free vegetables and fish govt sent me and you tell me it hurts my human rights???" -- https://twitter.com/ClaireRChen/status/1241971786062770176?s...

New Wuhan Doctor Speaks Out From Ground Zero -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyUHz62Uan8

American and Canadian, living & studying in China, talk about how it is actually like there -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufxfSJgQuSI

> I was born in China

Did you earn your red scarf?

Yes I did. Not even kidding. You get it when you generally behave like a good student at school. Maybe you associate it with something else (probably Mao mass murdering or w/e) but most Chinese see it as a pretty normal school thing.

I am quite surprised to see those stereotypes on hacker news . Looking at all the accounts with names like systemxxx and throwawayxxx, I feel conspiracy theory is no joke

Unfortunately, this kind of thing makes it on to HN. That's inevitable when a forum has millions of users, anonymity is ok, and the topic is divisive. We do what we can to try to convince people to follow the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and we ban accounts that violate them repeatedly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Slurs like this will get you banned here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827309 also.

People have been hounded off this site because of their national origin. I'm sure you'll agree that that's utterly shameful. Unfortunately it's what we end up with when people allow baser instincts to drive their posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "I'm sitting home in Wuhan and eating free vegetables and fish govt sent me and you tell me it hurts my human rights???"

Delivered via rubbish trucks.

https://mothership.sg/2020/03/garbage-trucks-wuhan/

> American and Canadian, living & studying in china, talk about how it is actually like there

Actual videos from china

https://archive.nothingburger.today/Videos/

Agree but not the good hero you make them out to be either. Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps. Invasive tracking? And extreme sensorships measures?

I didn't claim they are heroes. I explicitly said that bad things do happen. I just want to stress that that doesn't negate the fact that good things also happen, and that all countries have good and bad things. Pointing out bad things is one thing; stereotyping and overly focusing only on the bad things is another.

As for Muslim camps: forced reeducation and deradicalization, yes; concentration/killing/genocide: no. Try these:

Daniel Dumbrill (Canadian living in China) on Uygurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6grvHceQsQ

Kim Iversen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4YZBi4UTc

CGTN discussion on Xinjiang situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2yMjbB1q24 (disclaimer: yes this is Chinese state media, believe whatever you want, but I think it's still worth it to have heard this viewpoint)

And then there is also the fact that tens of Muslim countries officially approved of the Xinjiang situation. That's a bit odd, isn't it?

Now let me be clear: I am not claiming it's all roses and sunshine over there. It isn't, there are real problems, and people are indeed forced into things (though not killed), which is not good. But this is a more complex, nuanced situation than "China doesn't like Muslims so they kill them all".

> "China doesn't like Muslims so they kill them all".

You should know that it's the han way or death for the CCP. I don't understand the point of to your posts. Whataboutism is a poor excuse.

The point is to provide a more balanced and fair view of things. Accusations of whataboutism is disingenuous, especially because I didn't even engage in it: I talked about China only. If anything, the parent I replied to is the one that talked about other nations.

And there you go with the "or death" thing. Forced reeducation and detention, yes. But where is the proof that systematic killing is happening? All the proof of the latter I've seen so far come from US government or US-funded sources with poor research methodology (see for example https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nat...).

And what do you say about the fact that a dozen of Muslim nations officially approve of China's conduct in Xinjiang?

>I don't need to remind you of all the human rights violations by the US.

Whataboutism

>And what do you say about the fact that a dozen of Muslim nations officially approve of China's conduct in Xinjiang?

That's completely irrelevant. Do the people being repressed approve because that's all that matters. And for the record they do not approve of their families being raped and basically held captive by CCP employees despite BS CCP propaganda to the contrary.

Whataboutism is dropping a dead cat on the table in order to steer the conversation towards that cat. I did not steer the conversation to the US, I stayed on the topic of China, therefore it is by definition not whataboutism.

You seem to say that whataboutism is anything that mentions similar crimes committed by another party, implying that the actions of others are completely irrelevant. No. My criticism is not "China does no bad things". It is "China is not represented in a balanced manner and is not held to the same standards as other countries". Since the discussion is about standards, context absolutely matters.

> That's completely irrelevant. Do the people being repressed approve because that's all that matters [...] their families being raped

There you go with the "families being raped" thing. My point with the aprovals of Muslim countries is: maybe those allegations of rape are false?

Like I said: forced reeducation and deradicalization, yes. Rape/killing/concentration/genocide, no. The Gray Zone articles show that claims of the latter rest on shaky sources that are either circular, or funded by US interests and agendas.

We can debate whether forced reeducation and deradicalization is appropriate. But genocide/rape/murder/etc is false.

It is not that they are a good hero. It is that they are a system, not an evil cartoonish villain as a few in the west seems to think.

You could argue that Guantanamo Bay is a Muslim concentration camp, and that the rendition program was (likely is) the most organised torture program since the Nazis.

You could further argue that the overreaching mass surveillance outed by Snowden is invasive tracking.

In a way, you could also argue that all the boogeyman-style news in the west is a form of censorship too - it keeps the masses focused on their hatred of communists, Russians, Chinese, Islam (or whoever), so they don't focus so much on real issues at home.

And all this is just in direct response to your comment - it doesn't even touch on racism (very much alive in the US in particular), wars started on false pretenses and/or for profit, the CIA being able to lie to congress, refusing to not use cluster munitions, etc.

I think sometimes we're so focused on the perceived evils of other nations, that we lose sight of the highly dubious things are own nations are involved in. Perhaps that's the point...

Part of the issue is that we tend to see things that are far away more clearly. It is that much harder to see things clearly up close. Outsider sees most of the game kind of deal. For the record, I am not defending Guantanamo Bay, but even simple things like discussing prison system in US is complicated with anyone, who was born here, because, and it is probably the worst human trait, it has always been this way.

> Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps

India, according to John Oliver.

Of course, bring up India should not normalize the severity of locking people up in camps in China. This is the point: asking for examples of worse behavior is a moot point because camps are bad even if every nation in the world does it. At the same time, camps in China is not necessarily suitable context in all facets of discussion.

When it comes to topics (like whether supplying masks from China makes it a good actor) with too much subjective variables, I personally like to think about issues as independently as possible. Using this logic, PPE from China, whether purchased or donated, is an act of appreciable good gesture; regardless, hard condemnation is a must regarding their abuses.

> Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps

Burma / Myanmar.

EDIT:

https://news.un.org/en/focus/rohingya-refugee-crisis

> I have no doubt that the Rohingya people have always been one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world, without any recognition of the most basic rights starting by the recognition of the right of citizenship by their own country – Myanmar.

> Secretary-General António Guterres in press remarks on his visit to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh – 02 July 2018

https://www.un.org/sg/sites/www.un.org.sg/files/atoms/files/...

> [...] This led to the destruction of villages, numerous dead and wounded, and the internal displacement of up to 140,000 people, mostly confined to IDP camps, which persist to the present (and under the most deplorable conditions). [...]

The CCP are an ideological cult who will stop at nothing until everyone conforms to their ideology. Yes they have created a system, a cold techno-dystopian system that is my worst nightmare. Just because Hitler also built autobahns doesn't mean he was a good guy or his systems were OK.

Considering this is an English site, most of the participants here are probably from the Anglosphere which, being led by the US, would tend to mistrust China. It's interesting how you mention that as Dutch and European, you don't have the same level of mistrust. Without a measure of how China is viewed, not just in the Anglosphere, but in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Islamic world, Central Asia, and other cultural and linguistic spheres that a typical native English speaker wouldn't be able to communicate with, it's really hard to tell how effective China's soft power moves are.

The soft power only works on those that haven’t been exposed to it long enough. If you’ve dealt with China for a while, you know the real deal.

Want to give which geographical region you're from so I can put it down as an anecdotal datapoint?

Lived in China. Also lots of African friends who don’t appreciate how the Chinese do business in their country.

How do they do business?

Are those Chinese representing private companies, or state companies?

Care to give yours?

Canada, currently working in the States.

Sorry posted in response to wrong comment and so not direct response to the comment replied to, more the thread above and editing this in as unable to delete and redo, sorry my bad.

When outsourcing of production and labour suits, it's ignored for the underlying issues, when those underlying issue come to the surface, the same people who shifted for a shareholder appeasement dividend are just as quick to point the finger in every direction apart form themselves.

That in many forms is how things have played out in resource supply chains, this with margin nibbling away and with that a shift from local sourcing todwards, saving some money short-term are only a disaster away from being seen. Alas even those disasters need to be blatant enough to get noticed and the response and excess transportation of products and true impact/cost upon the environment as bit by bit, gets slower in acknowledgement.

But easy to reduce everything as tribal politics when convenient and carry on paying lip service and then wonder why we are in the state we are in. Of course it is akin to claiming everything is down to aliens and when you look at it like that, it's crazy and ignores the real issue of accountable and responsible buying and selling, something that is hard to account and balance upon the company books and with that, the drive for profit being the goal, bad things happen and until the system truly accounts for such things and the impact - the same mistakes will carry on transpiring and the people blamed for crimes they did not commit and those that commit true crimes are allowed to carry on as the law and rules are so slow in catching up that by the time they do, the problems have shifted.

Maybe why tax havens and the like are still a thing as are many other forms of unfairness that play out in the world today.

But we do live in a society that is more geared towards reactive handling of issues over proactive handling.

You posted on the wrong comment mate

I did, sorry, my bad thank you for pointing out i'll fix that mess. ok added edit at start, can't delete now so fixed that context drift.

I don't think this has got anything to do with China's soft power. The Dutch generally look at things in a calm and less emotionally-loaded manner, at least compared to the Americans. There is still a slight slant towards mistrust but it's nowhere near how it is in America.

I see the US social media villanizing China for the most insane things that can be easily disproven. The Dutch at least make an attempt at being objective.

It's a matter of stakes. The Netherlands has no power and very few responsibilities globally. It's often easy to be objective about topics when your stakes are low and distant.

How's that supposed Dutch calm looking when it comes to Italy and fiscal matters these days? I've been following that closely, they've been anything but calm, rational, objective. They're being emotional and subjective, making poor decisions, because it's a very personal subject that is nearby.

The US directly leads the entire military power base of the Western nations, as represented by NATO. And it is the sole backbone to that system. The French and Germans barely have militaries that can project outside of their own borders at this point, and the British are not far behind. China is going the opposite direction, they're a rapidly expanding superpower that is about to project militarily to nearly every corner of the globe, with obvious consequences.

The Netherlands isn't militarily facing off against China in Asia. The US is, every day - and at the eager welcome of numerous nations including Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. The US is the only nation that has directly confronted China and slowed down their annexing of the South China Sea. It won't be the Netherlands that has to make a decision about going to war with China when or if China invades Taiwan to annex them. The Netherlands will barely so much as lift a finger to help; first, they can't do anything because they're weak compared to China; and second they have little real stake in the matter. The US has dozens of allies it is militarily responsible to, countries that count on the US to shield them; the Netherlands has no comparable situation.

The Netherlands has little at stake in the China matter, compared to the US. They're a small trader nation at this point, shielded by larger nations in numerous ways.

So yeah, having dramatically more at stake in every possible way, the US is more charged about the topic than the ... calm and rational Dutch (about a topic they have very little stake in) that don't have to militarily confront China every day.

What you say may have some truth in it. However, does having a stake mean that it is okay to act overly emotional and occasionally throwing out rational analysis?

I also disagree on one thing here: the claim that China is projecting power to the rest of the world, that is trying to conquer the world or becoming an American style militaristic empire. In my opinion this is pure projection (in the psychological sense). China wants to defend themselves from a US invasion or blockade. They are not interested in controlling or occupying other countries, they just want to be able to do business.

What about South China Sea you may ask? They do it in order to deny the US from using that area to blockade them, not to conquer other countries or deny other countries from normal usage. See https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-want-to-control-almost-...

Note, I am not saying whether this is a good or a just thing. But it certainly is different from how most westerners understand it.

The topic is not Captain America saving the world again, it's Chinese medical supplies to Holland. That seems like something the Dutch have far more stake in than Americans.

And a country that has dramatically more at stake by permanently looking for fights all around the world should probably be more rational and calm than one that isn't.

>The French and Germans barely have militaries that can project outside of their own borders at this point

Pardon ? The French military is the one that projects the most in Europe.

> “ but in my opinion this is a baseless and overly cynical view of things, not truth.”

It’s neither baseless or overly cynical if you’ve ever lived in China or have just spent enough time observing the CCP’s actions.

I was born in China. I have family there. My wife is Chinese. I disagree.

> they ordered the wrong thing. China did not intentionally send bad masks, nor was it a manufacturing quality problem.

That doesn't align with what's being reported (by other countries as well):

> "Thousands of testing kits and medical masks are below standard or defective, according to authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands."

> "Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate,"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52092395

That's what they initially said, before the research happened. That caused China to be upset. After the research it turns out to be an order problem on the Dutch side after all.

My sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825391

Anytime the CCP does something bad it's some systemic issue with insane conspiratorial motivation that every citizen is complacent in. Anytime the US does something bad it's 'realpolitik', or 'just a bad government, not everyone believes that'.

If you enumerate all the domestic human rights abuses of the US it doesn't look much better. Internationally, it's much worse. Hell, the US barely has 'democracy'. The chance of your vote _actually_ counting is small, and the two parties are barely better than a strict illusion of choice.

It's nothing more than another red scare. And before people jump down my throat... I don't think the CCP is _good_ either, I would dissolve both governments if it was up to me.

The amount of anti China sentiment in the US media is hyperbolic, that it is not possible to trust most US based media houses reports in this topic.

This topic has become too politicised by people and organisations with hawkish motives that sane discussion on this has become impossible.

>India banning critical medical exports

At this point I need to mention this:

The USA has managed to successfully enforce bogus patents of drugs that should be generics in the EU. So instead of producing them at home we import them from India. The ICU I did my rotation on would be impossible to work without drugs produced in India.

You forgot: 5) Rich nations hoovering up all coronavirus related supplies leaving poor nations precious little.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/world/coronavirus-equipme...

"Scientists in Africa and Latin America have been told by manufacturers that orders for vital testing kits cannot be filled for months, because the supply chain is in upheaval and almost everything they produce is going to America or Europe."

I am particularly saddened by how Europe has handled the situation.

Not that I can blame the EU because I'm pretty sure it couldn't have done (as in imposed) anything there and it clearly highlights the deficiencies of being somewhere in the middle.

It was a litmus test and it's pretty obvious that we need to take it further rather than competing with each other.

>US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company

This is bullshit. At least three of those stories have been quietly retracted. Also you're damn right US should be putting itselt first when in crisis.

This has also confirmed the true colors of the media - hypocrites who spent months comparing COVID to the flu and yelling "sinophobia!" For closing the border, before turning on a dime to shit on the president for not being prepared.

>When times are great -> Globalism

>When times are tough -> Isolation and tribalism

When times are great, people become naive and forget that we live in a world with scarce resources and different cultures. When times are tough we are suddenly reminded of the way things actually are, that life is not the utopian vision that some people seem to think.

Yeah being President sucks. Supposed to be well-informed and make correct decisions, not rely on journalist's whining to create policy and take action. But so much easier to just issue sound-bytes and respond to whatever is the issue of the day.

Everybody screwed up. But journalists have a serious problem with exaggerating and outright falsifying controversies when their party is out of office.

That doesn't excuse the actions of Republican party members but it does destroy the credibility of the journalistic establishment. Which has devolved into a total cash grabbing, activist joke. And this happened before Trump.

Agreed. Sometime after web publishing became a thing, and Editors left the equation.

> India banning critical medical exports

India did allow export for humanitarian purposes (last month).

Given that China seems to force countries to pay for PPE the same countries previously donated to China, you're right for being skeptical.

https://abc14news.com/2020/04/06/china-forces-italy-to-buy-s...

I would find this report more reliable if it quotes Italian officials, not Trump administration said this, Pence said that. Basing an entire article on the hearsay of an unrelated third party (that has a less than stellar track record of telling the truth) is just... odd.

I think people may also be mixing up the two parallel streams of PPEs - there were equipment donations, and at the same time, Chinese manufacturers are selling PPEs like they normally do.

Some of the PPEs were paid orders placed on Chinese private companies, of course they will have to be paid, since they are being purchased. This is not to be confused with donations of equipment.

This claim is false. An interview with an Italian official confirms it to be false. https://twitter.com/honglilai/status/1247163875339800577?s=2...

Unsurprising. The whole concept of 'state' is a group with its own interests.

And not a lot different from the century-old pandemic "Spanish Flu". Essentially civilized reciprocity broke down then too.

In times of a global crisis, it makes sense to first take care of those who are near you. Many nations have sent aids to other nations to fight this pandemic, so I won't say it's complete tribalism. More like this situation has shown us one of the downsides of globalism.

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