Go to HackerNews, post a dissenting topic, enjoy no travel or credit!
Work in a high compliance job where you have to submit financials yearly, no more!
We should be a bit vigilant about such concepts creeping into freer societies. They will usually do so either under guise of combating crime, or increasing efficiency. But there is no freedom without some slack.
It's a way more stable system. Allow a very narrow band of opinions in practice while claiming that everyone's free to think whatever they want in theory.
The last very public case I'm aware of was Damore at google, which they must've settled outside of court.
Yet we can't get a microphone, airtime or column inches for anyone in favor of the withdrawal.
I'm free to post pseudonymously though!
First Korea, now this...
The underlying issue here is that democracy is not enough. To state it differently, democracy is a means to an end, with the 'end' being self-representation. Democracy is necessary to achieve self-representation, but it's not sufficient.
An example: remember when The Don wanted to buy Greenland? Well, let's say the US bought Greenland. Their people, then, would be granted US Citizenship, including the right to vote. Throughout the transition, they would reside in democracies. One day they would stop voting in Danish elections and would instead vote in US elections. They would always be able to participate in the democratic process. They would also be extremely pissed off. Why, though? They had their say, didn't they? They voted in the elections, didn't they? But even though the process was democratic, the right of the people of Greenland to self-govern was not observed. They had democracy, but not self-representation.
Folks in the US feel the same way. In the Pacific Northwest, there is a broad consensus that the state should run healthcare, and yet they don't have state-run healthcare. Why? Because they need the consent of folks who live thousands of miles away in Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida! They have democracy, but they don't have self-representation.
When the tide turns and there is majority support, on the national level, for state-run healthcare, what happens in Oklahoma? We're going to force a national healthcare system on them when the vast majority of the citizenry abhor the idea of state healthcare. And why? Because, thousands of miles away in California, Oregon, and Washington, folks support the idea. That's democracy, sure, but it's not self-representation.
The rash of democracies that have taken hold in the world over the last few centuries has been wonderful, but we'd be foolish to assume that we've perfected human governance. There are better, more representative forms of government out there that we need to seek out and implement.
To make the next great leap in human governance, we need to acknowledge the limits of the systems that we currently have. We need to admit that over-large democracies are not conducive to actual self-representation. And we need to exorcise the ghosts of our monarchical forebears. Our governments don't own us, do they? Then why do we allow them to stifle and suppress democratic secession movements, like the recent one in Catalonia?
To ensure that we are truly able to self-govern, we need to pick our governments, not just our representatives.
> To ensure that we are truly able to self-govern, we need to pick our governments, not just our representatives.
i guess im having a hard time imagining what that would look like in concrete terms...
Consider the situation in Oregon, where five rural counties have voted to leave the state of Oregon and to join the state of Idaho.[0] According to WaPo:
> "Lawmakers in Oregon and Idaho would have to enact bills to redefine the states’ boundaries and redistrict their legislatures. They’d also have to muster the votes to override a potential veto from their respective governors. And then Congress would have to sign off on the move."
In other words, these counties can only change states if they're able to get 320 million people to sign off on the change. That's crazy.
Now, how to achieve this in practice? Ideally we would revert to the original Federal system (with a small, weak federal government and strong state governments) and allow for counties to move between states, but that seems unlikely.
Alternatively, we could allow for counties to move between states, and allow States to self-organize into new federal/confederal nations, or to move between nations via some established process (i.e. referenda). These nations should coordinate at a supra-national level (like the EU) to facilitate commerce and free movement, and to allow for the settlement if nation-level disputes.
Huh? They need:
(1) a simple majority of each legislative house in Idaho, which is 18+36=54 people
(2) a simple majority of each legislative house in Colorado, which is 18+33=51 people, and
(3) a simple majority of each House of Congress, which is 51+218=269 people
for a total of 269+54+51=374 people. Your 320 million estimate is off by about 6 orders of magnitude.
(Even if you make the rather unrrasonable assumption that they need to convince enough unique voters to guarantee the election of a sufficient majority in each involved legislature—i.e., you assume that every eligible voter treats every Idaho, Colorado, and federal legislative election as a single issue referendum on the issue—you’ll find that the number is a very small fraction of the ~240 million eligible voters in the US.)
wouldn't such flexibility/decentralization hurt national competitiveness vis-a-vis say, u.s vs china, or russia etc?
It would also allow the states to serve their original role as “the marketplace of ideas”. One could imagine Oregon implementing state-run healthcare or a UBI, or Kansas implementing the “Fair Tax”, whereas now the states look to the federal government to implement these sorts of large policy changes.
From your link: "By 2020,[needs update] it was intended to standardize the assessment of citizens' and businesses' economic and social reputation, or 'Social Credit'."
It's 2021 now and the "Social" part of "Social Credit" is still science-fiction, let alone somebody's web history affecting their ability to obtain credit.
The part that is in place already and works somewhat is a national registry of unpaid debts, so you can find out e.g. that the state-owned investment fund you're dealing with owned a large stake of a mining company that went bankrupt while owing a large sum of money to a state-owned bank, leading to a court case in which the fund was ordered to service part of the debt. Stuff like that.
I don't know how it is implemented, but I would be surprised if it wasn't.
Presumably being on such a blacklist will actually influence individual credit scores once they get rolled out nationwide, but unless I somehow missed the announcement, that hasn't happened yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Xiaodong
So it's a system that's created by the government to make people aware of unpaid debts, but it's the same government that decides to impose debt on said people whenever it wants.
Coolbeans.
Also, I'm under the impression that people imagine something more direct when they talk about web history affecting credit scores, like visiting a site automatically deducting points from a score, or something.