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Comment by jksflkjl3jk3 | Hacker News Reader

How about going in the other direction? Completely stay out of their business and let whatever emerges from the chaos develop on its own?

Central planning of societies doesn't have a good track record, especially when there are competing external interests. Look at the horrific consequences of the American meddling in geopolitics of the third world over the last 100 years. The CIA and war industry is responsible for the destruction of countless traditional cultures and the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide.

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Not to excuse the various bad decisions and bungled coups supported by the US during the Cold War, but – had they just "completely stayed out of their business" then the Soviets merely would have intervened (as they actually did in many, many places). In real life, geopolitics is a complex game theory problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_S...

I suppose the status quo is an inevitable consequence of technology expanding the practical spheres of influence of world powers. It sure would be nice though to have a world without globalization, still full of cultural diversity.

But only the good and inoffensive parts of cultural diversity, right? Not the parts that involve misogyny or patriarchy or homophobia or beheading apostates? When people advocate against globalization and for cultural diversity they're usually only in favor of the most shallow aspects: food, clothes, entertainment, architecture, etc. Not the stuff that actually matters for safety and quality of life in other countries.

And to be clear I'm not advocating for forcibly imposing our cultural values on those other countries. But let's not have an overly romanticized view of cultural diversity.

Works for natural ecosystems because we accept that mass casualties is "normal" in the natural world; if some species doesn't survive a mass fire/drought/etc, welp, that's nature. When millions of people starve to death, we don't accept that.

(lol, well, we do accept it, as history has shown us time and time again, but we tend to not want to do nothing)

Agreed. Parent is ignoring the positive effects of intervention while highlighting the negative.

USAID funds USD$50b / year, and the US funds UNICEF to the tune of USD$1.4b / year.

Which, among other things, supports the polio vaccination campaign being rolled out in Gaza, to prevent a public health catastrophe and possible resurgence of polio in the Middle East.

It's easy to say "Let them eat cake" when one is sitting in the palace and opining about CIA boondoggles.

In the real world, that means people are starving and children are crippled.

We can (and should) strive for better than nasty, brutish, and short lives, regardless of a person's nationality.

And do remind us, who is funding the bombing of Gaza?

https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies

Kind of an international effort.

It’s an “international effort” in the same way the second Iraq war was. The US is funding the lion’s share of this genocide

The right-wing Israeli government?

Seeing as that's who their military reports to.

The US may not be restraining them sufficiently, inasmuch as any country can another, but it's kind of a weird question.

Israeli is more than capable of bombing Gaza into the stone age even absent US military aid.

The broader finger pointing should be that, as always, nobody actually cares about the Palestinians.

The West doesn't care, because Israel. The East doesn't care, because why would they? And the Middle East doesn't care, because as much as they trumpet the Palestinian cause to boost domestic popularity, none of them are actually willing to suffer consequences for the benefit of Palestinians.

Which leaves... the Houthis and Iran, neither of which are very linked to the global economic network at this point, and so have little to lose.

Israeli is more than capable of bombing Gaza into the stone age even absent US military aid.

That's not true at all.

Israel's military machine is far more self-sufficient than it was 20+ years ago. But over time, its capabilities would be significantly hobbled without U.S.-supplied parts and munitions. Don't forget those two aircraft carriers parked offshore, either.

Losing access to U.S. military aid, weapons sales, and strategic backing would definitely hurt. Given that it has now chosen to expand the war to 3 fronts, it really doesn't want to put itself in that box.

The Israelis have always been realistic about the fact that their access to US arms might be cut off. Hence why they (alone?) negotiated integration rights for their F-35s with domestic systems and munitions.

The greatest loss to Israel if the US were to withdraw aid would be in air defense -- specifically the US leaning on its allies in the region (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt) to quietly use airspace and basing to defend Israel from missile barrages.

At this point, it seems like Netanyahu doesn't much care what happens in the future, as long as his short-term political survival continues.

We'll see if the hostage death protests change anything, since the Israeli public seems like the only entity that can prompt policy change.

Did you forget $15B in “lethal aid” (so far)?

I didn't.

Israeli is right behind Australia and Poland in terms of defense expenditures. Wanting for funding, they're not.

Would you care to address my comment, instead of throwing fact darts and seeing what sticks?

The current chaos is a result of UAE and Saudi having a proxy war there. Basically the developed world stepping out to let these countries figure shit out for themselves just led to another group of countries stepping in.

If we look at the havoc of any conflict region (Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia,...) we can see that both engaging in the conflict and staying out of it is tremendously expensive.

Paying Turkey to hold the Syrian refugees back and housing those that passed through costs Europe tens of billions each year. Engagement would have been hard, but one is left to wonder if we shouldn't try harder for own benefit.

Central planning has a very good record in countries like China/South Korea. Non central social changes are just very very slow.

Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well. Main reason why EU won't ever compete with US economically, while being also very rich and actually more populous.

You should also compare it to situation where those countries wouldn't be centrally planned. Not so possible without time machine, so let's leave out measuring of efficiency of such systems. Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed and fell down overnight, literally all those economies experienced massive boosts. I know I've lived through such transition there, hard to describe with words.

> Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed

I am not saying central planning is a cure all. Trying a bad economic system with any kind of planning will fail.

> Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well.

Correct, in the absence of strong top down rule (whether democracy or not), social changes are just going to be very slow (this doesn't mean strong top down rule will result in good changes, just that otherwise it is slow). The US needed a civil war to abolish slavery and two world wars for many other social changes (similar to most of western Europe).

I am not saying A or B is better. But without central planning the chances of any big cultural changes in Sudan type countries happening in the next 50 or even 100 years is very remote.

That is not the main reason. Not even close. Here’s a list of main reasons, in no particular order:

- 8 different currencies across EU member states - 24 languages - 27 sovereign countries with wildly different economic, social, foreign, military … policies - laws and regulations are only slowly harmonised across the board - deep seating historic prejudices (which lead to major wars in the past) - unfriendly and downright hostile neighbours - a smaller amount of natural resources to exploit - etc etc

The EU has existed for less than a lifetime. Before that we were competing against each other, with bloody consequences.

How many wars were fought on European soil between 1776 and today? I couldn't even begin to answer that.

With regards to central planning, neither China nor the US is fully in or out of it.

China still has Five Year Plans and some central planning, but Deng Xioping took steps away from it in the 1980s.

There's a mythology the US has no central planning, but it has had a lot of central planning since 1932 and certainly since 1941. Market makers watch for the presidentially nominated Powell to come out and announce the fed funds rate for our fiat currency, and the economy either speeds up or slows down in response. We are typing on a network the government paid BBN and other companies to create, on chips descended from the Fairchild chips that Air Force contracts funded. For various historical reasons, much of the central planning in the US is done via its very well funded military (then well funded military contractors pay think tanks and politicians to go out and say they're not so well funded)

I'm not sure China is a good example of it working, unless you limit it to the past couple decades and ignore the human rights issues. South Korea may be a decent example, but also has some possible indirect negative effects, given all the protests, urban/rural divide, and social/birthrate issues. Sure they have the whole not starving thing handled, but so do the majority of countries regardless of central planning or not.

Do you realise you are commenting in the context of a massive famine and millions of lives lost? All the countries in Africa and almost any non developed country will gladly take post Mao Chinese leadership and there current status quo over their current lives.

Human rights don't come before people have a certain dignity to live. Trying to preach human rights to a starving population is just .....

Do you realize we're talking about approaches that work? What stages did China and South Korea go through to get to today? The 40s and 50s were pretty bad in either country. Show me a prosperous centralized government that didn't have some ethnic or political cleansing at it's roots.

Or you could not red herring me and supply a proposed solution that could work instead of painting my opposition to central planning as an opposition to fixing famine in an emotional appeal.

>Central planning has a very good record in countries like China

It's got a very terrible track record in China; the government caused tens of millions of its own people to starve to death, and set the economic development back decades. The GDP per capita in Taiwan is more than double that of China currently, but both started at a similar position. If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.

> If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.

This is just absurd. Taiwan's entire economy is TSMC + some small things. Copying political systems doesn't get you per capita standard of living.

Yes Mao's China did stupid things but post Mao China has done well economically atleast. They had an enviable job of bringing so many people out of extreme poverty and have done well.

>They had an enviable job of bringing so many people out of extreme poverty and have done well.

Literally zero work is required for this. You just need to stop keeping people in extreme poverty - and that's it.

China had an empire lasting about 2000 years, truly something different

Central planning has an extremely bad record in China, especially when it comes to famine.

During the Great Leap forward, the central planners demanded the implementation of new Lysenkoist farming practices that were reportedly a great success and on track to deliver a record harvest. The central planners then dispensed generous daily rations from the granaries, so that everyone could eat their fill, causing farmers to spend less effort on the side crops they had been growing in addition to working on the state farms. The central planners decided that they didn't need quite so many agricultural workers, so they redirected the labor surplus to increasing steel production in order to catch up with the British Empire and overtake the United States. And they also increased food exports to other countries.

Then it all came crashing down: the reports of huge productivity increases were made up, the record harvest was a record low, the surplus was a deficit, tens of millions of people starved. (Steel production did not meaningfully increase either.)

You could argue that it was just a very expensive beginner's mistake because they'd only been doing the central planning thing for about a decade at that point, but then after Mao's death less than two decades later, the first big economic reform was the Household Responsibility System where farmers would decide for themselves what to grow, and the state would just buy it from them.

So I think the verdict from the world's greatest experts in agricultural central planning is clear: don't do it.

I have mentioned this elsewhere as well, no kind of planning saves one from bad economic policy. Post Deng China has a very very good record of bringing prosperity (and China still central planning).

> and China still central planning

Every country has some central planning, China doesn't have much more central planning today than your average European country. Or do you believe some CCP central planner decided to put in scantily clad anime girls in games from China?

China today is very capitalist, they lack democracy, not capitalism.

I would probably focus on the government-mandated construction of new cities and control over which citizens go to university and where they can live, and that there is a wide spectrum of control between the USA and central planners managing the graphics in video game production.

> control over which citizens go to university and where they can live

I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to live where they can afford and they are allowed to go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.

If you are talking about the random arrests that happens in China, that is due to the undemocratic authoritarian regime and corruption, not due to central planning.

No, they aren’t. Look up the hukou residence permit system.

That has already ended, there is no such discrimination any longer, the Hokou now is just a way to track people. Loosening that up is a big contributor to the Chinese miracle.

Edit: Also class based societies are typically not called central planning, it is lack of human rights.

Western nations do similar levels of planning just by deciding how many new houses are allowed to be built, you need a permit for every business to ensure you don't take too much electricity etc, tons of central planning everywhere.

Having worked at a school in China in which a large number of the students were there because their nonlocal hukou didn't entitle them to attend local public schools, it's pretty surreal to see someone claiming that the hukou controls where people are allowed to live. How are you imagining that happens?

> I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to [...] go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.

China implements a comprehensive system of geographic affirmative action to prevent universities from being taken over by southerners. A school participating in this system will publish a plan stating how many students it will enroll on a province-by-province basis. (It's also divided by whether the students will major in science or humanities.)

Once the tests are scored, the students in a particular province are assigned in top-down order of score to the school of their choice, as long as that school's quota for accepting students from that province is not yet full. If your school of choice has filled its quota, technically you can have listed a second-choice school, but this is widely viewed as a disaster for the student. You need to get in to your first-choice school, or take a year off and try again next year.

What's happening in admissions cells for other provinces at the school you apply to is not relevant to you. You can outscore 90% of students who get admitted that way and it won't matter.

And this is not an especially unlikely scenario, because Chinese policy is that schools have much larger quotas for local students than otherwise. I think you need to score at about the 1 in 60 level, top 1.66%, to get into a top Shanghai university from Shanghai; you need to do a lot better than that to get in from outside Shanghai.

Sanity checking that, the admission table for Fudan University in 2018 is here: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/a7/19/c36333a435993/page.htm . This contains some annotations that I don't understand, but let's say you want to be admitted as a math major. The score threshold if you're coming from Shanghai appears to be 586 ("选考科目999"?); 586 on the Shanghai 2017 gaokao is top 1.1%, or in perfect detail the top 473 people out of 43,103 who took the test. ( https://news.koolearn.com/20170623/1127786.html )

The score threshold if you're coming from Fujian appears to be 680 on the science test. A 680 on the 2017 science test in Fujian means you were one of the top 72 scorers out of 86,368 people who took the test, or the top 0.00083%. ( https://max.book118.com/html/2021/0817/8104004033003135.shtm )

That admissions table for Fudan is divided into two categories, 提前批 ("advance admission"?) and 本一批 ("freshman admission"??). I'm not sure what they mean; I used the 本一批 numbers, which are stricter.

Relevant here, I knew someone who attended a high school affiliated with Fudan (a lot of Chinese universities have these), and she informed me that before taking the gaokao, she had an interview with someone at Fudan, and their approval of her meant that she needed a lower score for admission to Fudan than would otherwise have been necessary. I suspect that this may be related to the difference between "advance admission" and "freshman admission".

(There is also affirmative action given for non-geographic reasons. Sometimes they combine in interesting ways. A friend of mine who was admitted to 上海财经大学 benefited from a program for minorities. She was a Mongol, and would have been given a direct bonus to her gaokao score for that reason, but this program additionally involved (1) attending a special high school in Beijing, and (2) counting as a resident of Beijing, and therefore also benefiting from the geographic scheme, for admissions purposes.)

You do know that Europe and USA has similar systems, just more spots? Local students are prioritized almost everywhere, in Europe it is by country, in USA it is by state.

More spots? The threshold for attending college in general tends to be a score at the 40th percentile.

Other countries such as some middle-eastern states and Russia are already intervening in the conflict, often not entirely with the more purest of intentions, or with the interests of the Sudanese people at heart.

So "let the chaos develop on its own" reasons from a situation that simply does not exist.

In practice that becomes, "they are genociding themselves, how convenient".

Because humans feel compassion for their fellow human beings and if we don’t then what’s the point? It doesn’t cost that much to feed a famine to be honest, much less than blowing up the same country when it’s starts hosting a terrorist org that makes you the next great Satan to blow up because you exist?

Have they asked you for help? Mind your own business

Maybe that's something. Maybe goodwill would be more effective when laundered through existing family connections. Surely someone in the midst of the famine has family in the US. Maybe support groups should be working directly with family members in wealthier countries, and then resources hand delivered to family members living in impoverished areas who can then distribute the resources through their local networks. Rather than just drop shipping a bunch of boxes full of food or whatever.

Let the heroes be local heroes, not just some abstract alien organization that no one has any social connection to.

https://mutualaidsudan.org/

Yes. https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/08/02/food-k...

https://mutualaidsudan.org/

This has a diagram showing the funding structure with 5 layers of bureaucracy between donors and the recipients of aid. This organization reduces that to 3 (The “coalition” that owns the website -> financial service providers -> mutual aid societies -> actual people in need).

So I ask again, have these people actually requested your help? How do you know what they actually need? Maybe the best solution is a way to gtfo of Sudan and let it collapse. Maybe they want weapons or chickens. I don’t know!

"Security" as provided by the Pentagon/MIL complex is an evolution of what the Brits used to do to maintain order across the Empire. After the Empire fell, the Americans basically cut and paste that policy, where the goal is mainly about protecting the flows of capital and trade. Colonial legacy and thinking needs a total reboot. Will die out naturally as boomers trained in that kind of thinking pre-globalization die out.

> Will die out naturally as boomers trained in that kind of thinking pre-globalization die out.

I don't think it will. There will always be powerful people who want to maintain that power, and wannabe powerful people who want to get that power.

So long as that way of thinking leads to power, there will be people who will follow it.

The problem is not that people are tainted by colonial thinking - its that humans are tainted by ambition.

Look at the Brits. The current gen can't play the same games their grand parents did even if they are well programmed and super ambitious. They have to invent new games. And agree mindless ambition is a big issue.

Cultures that were colonized may have other ways of conceptualizing power, for example as multigenerational stewardship. Because I am unable to think outside colonial ways doesn't mean other ways don't exist.

That's what the world tried with Germany after World War I.

There's a reason we stopped believing "just let sovereign nations sort themselves out" is the best approach. It's a pretty selfish reason.

that's too wrong to even behind to address.

Other countries didn’t exactly stay out of their business - the WW1 allies were demanding unsustainably large war reparations paid in gold, rather than a currency they had control over the supply of. My understanding is that this directly led to their hyperinflation, massive amounts of resentment, and the eventual fall of the Weimar Republic. And everyone knows the rest.

Correct.

But that's my point. "Here's the obligations, sort out how to meet them yourselves" was the old model. It doesn't work out.

And no obligations is impossible in an increasingly interconnected world.

Ah I see, you meant that the other governments weren't being considerate of the consequences of selfish demands and it ended badly.

Right. *let whatever emerges from the chaos develop on its own" is an opportunity that strongmen have exploited over and over again.

> Completely stay out of their business and let whatever emerges from the chaos develop on its own?

This simply never happens. The developed world is constantly putting its nose into everyone else’s business, and through globalization and industrialization, there’s nothing on this world that the Western economy doesn’t touch.

> This simply never happens.

China did well after their cultural revolution. Took time but the page has been turned on that episode.

It did well because of Kissinger and relationship with US.

"episode"? You're casually dismissing the Cultural Revolution to argue for non-interference. I don't think you're making the point you hope to make.

Absolutely somebody should have intervened if possible to halt that madness.

Things got so bad that people actually ate human flesh, not because they were starving, but to demonstrate unquestionable loyalty to the party. Students literally ate their teachers.

Or China or Russia or …..?

I’m not actually sure which universe you’re referring to, in which the West does not constantly try to interfere with China/Russia and their activities.

He meant China and Russia are meddling with the world as well.

This is an excellent option if you are willing to accept hundreds of millions of people will die in the process and that it will take a hundred years or more for that to happen. Development does not happen overnight and it takes a toll.

That being said, my impression is that the people leaning left in politics are strongly against non-interventionism. This means it will become a political issue in the countries that can help (or intervene), especially because most of these countries have a very strong left leaning. Sudan will become ammunition in electoral fights in elections, politics will win and interventions will happen just because of that, not because the interventionists care in any way about people of Sudan, they are just simple pawns on their chess board.

I think you’ll find it is the right wing who find themselves invariably attracted to war.

Unless you’re using “the left” to mean “neoliberals”, as seems to be common among the American right, in which case let me refer you to the first paragraph (since the American Democratic Party is by all measures a right wing party).

> since the American Democratic Party is by all measures a right wing party

Only fiscally, if you look at social issues they are very left.

I find the left wing in general (not just US) to be etatist. That makes it interventionist in everyone's life by definition.

Interventionism refers to foreign policy. The right wing is also statist, they’d just prefer to use the power of the state to hammer others down rather than lift them up.

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