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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with racism is it's not just immoral, it's also short-sighted. It's not like the US South is the richest. Newsflash: investing in your population yields huge dividends. China gets this.

China does the opposite of DEI. It’s a country where dozens of different ethnic groups all pretend to be “Han Chinese” to facilitate social harmony.

They have explicit quota systems and affirmative action for the official 55 non-Han minorities, and also for people from less wealthy provinces. Sometimes people fake residency in a poorer province to game the system.

The affirmative action programs are largely inconsequential because non-Han only account for 9% of the population. In contrast to DEI in the U.S., where about 45% of the youngest generation belongs to groups that would qualify for racial preferences.

Also, the goal of the Chinese system is assimilation into the Han Chinese dominant culture. And they have reeducation camps for minorities that insist on cultural separatism.

Sociologists will tell you race is a “social construct”. People can wake up tomorrow and start discriminating on the smallest shades you and I wouldn’t care about - in China there’s already a preference for light skin. In the UK they discriminate on accent/location (just within London!), and in China there’s plenty of regional dialects to choose from. Or look at class in the UK.

The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI. Westerners call it “ghost towns”… which then fill up promptly.

Is the China model perfect? Absolutely not. But it makes some strong points

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/the-china-models-...

Ethnicity is a biological construct. You can see my ethnic group as a tight cluster in a genetic chart: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/07/09/the-main-interesti....

> The point is at the end of the day their govt will build trains to every little village because that’s the consensus, they just don’t call it DEI

“DEI” is the promotion of distinct identities with an emphasis on differences (the “D” means “diversity”). In contrast to assimilating into a common, dominant identity. Investing in underdeveloped geographic regions isn’t DEI at all. I agree the Chinese system is vastly better than what we call DEI.

The consensus in sociology and anthropology is that ethnicity is a social construct. At this point I'd say I'm done here, you need to go take classes ideally, or read a book or talk to a frontier LLM. This is why education is so important, and why republicans hate critical race theory.

> The consensus in sociology and anthropology is that ethnicity is a social construct

Biologists meanwhile know that it’s in your DNA: https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212169298.... You can take a DNA sample of me and have a very good idea about my ancestors going back tens of thousands of years.

> why education is so important, and why republicans hate critical race theory.

Or because of appeals to fake authority like you just did here.

It is also true that tens of millions of young adults would like to move to a Tier 1 city to increase their economic prospects, but Beijing does not let them.

Whenever things like that have been tried in the US certain folks have refused to pretend and put up walls instead...

That's like saying "lots of different ethnic groups pretend to be Democrats". No, they just don't have that entrenched legacy of slavery.

I'm trying to figure out how your comment has any relevance to the the coment it's replying to and I can't find it. Is "Han Chinese" a political ideology instead of an ethnic identity and I was just unaware?

It's self-explanatory. People of very different backgrounds can come together to make fair political/economic/social decisions. If you don't get this, it's on you. I literally can't make it any simpler.

So you are in fact claiming that "Han Chinese" is a political ideology rather than an ethnicity? Because that is the only way your point makes any kind of sense.

This is quite the canard. How many actual spoken languages does PRC have on its currency vs USA?

Newsflash: China is conducting a ethnic genocide against the Uyghur Muslims [1], where they are held in concentration camps and likely harvest their organs.

If that's what population investment looks like, count me out.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22278037

> How can squeezing tax-payers to the brink be justified?

You're right it's unjustified. Labor is taxed too heavily considering most of the growth is in productivity. Tax the capital, cut income taxes.

Capital is typically invested itself into growth. Smart people are not holding billions in cash because inflation would quickly erode it.

You want to growth-hack your economy so that the best investment opportunity is the people themselves, then you see serious growth.

Tax payers are not going to be helped by cutting a mere 1B in science funding.

You're right, but making savings is a process of a thousand cuts.

Especially when ICE receives a $75B budget increase to do things that are blatantly unamerican and often illegal.

The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.

These cuts are ideologically driven and use the "saving taxpayers money" line as coverage.

As you noted, ICE just got billions more, as well as the military. Not a single cost cutting measure has been announced in those areas.

Being mindful of taxpayer dollars is not a bad thing, but it has to be across the board. And more so, some of those dollars spent are an investment that pays off (like scientific research) vs those that don't (like a lot of military spending).

If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.

[In comparison, the government just announced increasing funding to ICE by an order of magnitude more than 1B$]

> If my wife suggested that we need to manage our budget by curbing just my spending on the occasional Steam sale, instead of figuring out a way to downsize our two SUVs, I would consider her a huge piece of shit.

You might have a need for two SUVs, and those are investments that you likely have already made massive losses on. Making new investments on the other hand that are not strictly necessary, does not seem wise.

But ignoring that, the investment into reducing illegal immigration is like investing into an expensive tape to plug holes in the water storage. The tape costs far more than the lost water, but the real investment is preventing the damage from water to the surrounding area, the lost water over time, etc. The investment into ICE will likely be realised over several years.

Alternatively, the research that is being cut is largely not intended to increase economic output. If anything, the results will be used to justify opposition to growth measures.

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