Hacker News Reader

Comment by crimsoneer | Hacker News Reader

I mean, the Chinese government doesn't really believe in checks and balances, or corporations as autonomous to the state. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma). You could argue the US has the Cloud Act, and obviously their respect for rules based law and order as a concept has heavily deteriorated, for but it's a very different kettle of fish to a regime who just doesn't even believe in the concept.

View on HN

Meanwhile Trump is building a surveillance state with all his tech executives friends who all massively benefit from government sponsored schemes, it's TOTALLY different!

At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump has had his tariff policy killed off in the courts (although it'll obviously come back in some form) and in a few months is going to have (probably not great) midterm elections. And there are pretty open efforts to commit genocide in Xinjiang to preserve a nationalist myth of ethnic purity. So, you know, yes.

> That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma)

That is a conspiracy. Do you even know what happened to Jack Ma? From what you're saying you don't.

Also that was MANY years ago. The Shanghai stock market crashed. Companies had a lot of fear then yes. Things have changed and repaired. I'd say China in this sense is moving upwards and the US is going downwards in policy.

> You could argue the US has the Cloud Act

No, not really. Your Jack Ma example happened to Elon Musk to some extent. Jack Ma had a feud with the Chinese government as much as Elon had a feud with the US government in the last year or so. Back then Tesla and the other projects all tanked.

So have you looked at what's happened in the US over the past 10 years?

The US has much further to fall, but it's falling very, very quickly and if there's ever another Democratic president they're going to have to rebuild a lot of the government from scratch.

The unelected bureaucracy was more like the chinese party system. The U.S. has a strong-president model by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The check isn’t supposed to come from unelected bureaucrats, it’s that the strong president is elected every four years. It’s supposed to be a tight feedback loop. Engineers of all people should understand why that’s good.

When the next democrat president gets into office, he or she should do the same thing as Trump: put trusted deputies in charge of various departments and whip them to actually do what people elected the administration to do. That’s how our system is supposed to work. And democratic voters would I’m sure be much happier with the party if they sometimes actually got what they voted for.

I dunno. I'm just glad Congress can barely pass any legislation. What an Executive Order does, another Executive Order can just as easily undo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com