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Comment by tolugenius | Hacker News Reader

I don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.

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> making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster.

How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise.

If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society.

Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.

Let us assume a person cannot change society, they simply do not have the leverage, even if they are a billionaire or most politicians. This is a systems problem, requiring enormous investment of time and resources to change trajectories of. Therefore, the choices available are to continue to live in a low trust society, or move to a high trust society and minimize your exposure to low trust society impact on your life. It's unfortunate. I would very much like to be wrong, please correct me if I am mistaken.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...

This data conflicts with my image of Japan and China, and I wonder where the discrepancy lies.

I cannot speak to China, but my recent personal experience is that Japan is high trust throughout Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Would love to hear about the trust situation in China from anywhere who has recent ground truth.

The propagandised idea that living in China means living under an oppressive communist regime, runs counter to the countries wild success at pretty much everything it does.

I don't think success directly translates into high trust.

I think of China as a hypercompetitive place, which to me should mean lower trust.

Explain why hyper competitiveness should mean lower trust?

Doesn’t competition imply rule and order?

The other direction is merely organised crime, which tends to have very few big players.

"Doesn’t competition imply rule and order?"

What? No, how have you formulated that?

Hey, remember Naomi Wu? She used to post a lot here. I wonder whatever happened to her?

Good point. We can always point to Naomi Wu as an real life example of why China is NOT living in the future. She is a good example of why we would never want to replicate what China is doing

I feel like it’s been understood that we live in a low trust society for a while now. If not for all of us, at least for a LOT of us.

In a newly evolving situation, you have to assume that it's possible that the laws will change. Typically the way you account for this is hedging or keeping reserves to adapt.

All day every day you make decisions based on things you think you can safely assume, and things you know you can't assume.

The most likely behavior of a political office is just one of the things you know you can not safely assume, that's all.

What laws do you think will change

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