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Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

> By 2020, Chinese officials say, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

I think that line says it all.

And before you say, "this will only apply to bad people!" check out the next paragraph:

> The project is a response to the party’s biggest problems: the collapse of confidence in public institutions, and the need to keep track of the changing views and interests of China’s population (without letting them vote). It seeks to collect information on the honesty of ordinary citizens, public officials and companies alike.

In the US, ex-convicts have major problems starting over and getting on their feet but this is a whole other level. This is punishing/excluding people solely based on their opinion, not based on actions or crimes committed.

No wait, disagreeing is the crime.

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China has a pretty big problem of corruption and in general people doing bad things (with the smallest being line cutting). Probably why they're resorting to such drastic measures, and obviously such measures will be abused or have side effects of being used to silence dissenters.

Experts who study corruption say it can exist on a large scale only if those at the top of the government give permission to those under them to take bribes and engage in other criminal practices like pocketing the funds their departments are supposed to be spending.

What is going on is a system where the lower-downs (including the military and police) support the government, and in exchange the government allows them to use their official positions to enrich themselves. The higher-ups do this because they know the public is not behind them, so they need to have a paid-off security apparatus that will suppress the public if it revolts.

Keep this in mind anytime a leader in a country with a high rate of corruption says he sincerely wants to clean things up, but those lower down are stopping him from doing so. He is just plain telling a lie. And anyone who says they believe him is either naive or also telling a lie.

By the way, if you want to know how clean or corrupt a particular nation is, a good place to start is transparency.org

>Keep this in mind anytime a leader in a country with a high rate of corruption says he sincerely wants to clean things up, but those lower down are stopping him from doing so. He is just plain telling a lie.

Doesn't this kind of contradict what you said before, though? The leader needs to allow corruption lest he is overthrown (usually by those lower down such as the military, not the public), so in essence those lower down are preventing him from cleaning up.

There really is no winning here - being a leader means pandering to the people below you, because if you don't they can just get rid of you. In a democracy this problem is partly solved by switching leaders often and dividing the power of the underlings over the entire population, but the dynamic still very much exists. And of course, in a country with no democracy it's many times worse (and very difficult to establish a democracy).

Don't automatically assume that dictators always have bad intentions - they are trapped in a system too.

Of course that doesn't mean that China isn't doing a bad thing here, I was just speaking generally.

Ah, such is the nature of communism - eyes watching each other. China could use a Gorbachev (ok, so the situation is more complicated than that, but still...).

Yes, you are quite right that the dictator is trapped by the system, and I should have explained that.

But the dictator still lies, because he doesn't explain the system, but instead falsely tells the public he really is trying to eliminate corruption and that those below him are simply refusing to follow his orders. That is what Putin, for instance, is saying.

As for China, this has been the system for a long time. Xi Jinping says he is trying to fix it, and seems to be making some progress, but I not sure how things are going to go in the long term. My impression is that clean government usually requires a strong civil society that supports it, and in China that is resisted as threatening the central authoritarian government.

> obviously such measures will be abused or have side effects of being used to silence dissenters

What makes you think that would be a side effect? As far as I can tell, that is the primary intended effect.

Because everyone thinks they are the good guy.

It will be interesting to see the rise of entire industries aimed at fixing your score.

Hahaha. Of course, if someone is politically-connected, they can just get it done with a phone call.

Which in turn, could mean people being incentivized to make all sorts of globally nonoptimal choices.

Won't be surprised if that's the beginning of an "end" for China.

Gaming with this system would be deadly dangerous for most players. Those in this business must be from the top. The sad thing is people are treated just like records in db and most of them have no anger toward this. Every once a while, there are topics tout China would be more powerful and innovative, you know, there is no foundation for it. What China really has is the buying power.

Don't worry. The state will make sure that this system provides no reasonable rewards either. You're cursed into squalor if you follow, and you get persecuted to some extent if you don't.

That's the problem with these systems. Their aim is and must be to get the population to willingly accept poverty and impotence.

Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1

I know it is a weird takeaway from that episode, but I found the ubiquitous social media tweaking while at work to be incredibly unprofessional and I wondered how that society could get anything accomplished... ever. And the whitewashed physical world with almost no other real technical improvements emphasized that point for me.

Their scores would also be tied to their jobs, people would get things done because it's another way to advance your rating. I saw the lack of technological improvements as the episode taking place roughly now, the tech for the rating system basically exist already.

Remember the truck driver with a ~1.4 rating? She said she was a ~4.6 when she was young. That made me think that the technology had been around for awhile and that technology had stagnated.

Then again, the US war on drugs was possibly racist in origin...

That's irrelevant even if true.

It's relevant when the discussion touches on the question of whether a massive, powerful central government can ever really have its citizenry's interests at heart.

While the War on Drugs wasn't completely rooted in racism, it is a verifiable fact that it's inception was heavily rooted in it: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

This is the relevant quote, from John Erlichmen, the Nixon administration's Domestic Affairs Advisor:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Minimum wage too has racist origins.

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