Comment by flossly
9 days ago
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
Can you explain? What sort of surveillance that affects a casual visitor?!
Here is my experience in the center of Shanghai, very subjective of course:
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
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Finland and Taiwan has all of that with the added bonus of no Great Firewall of the Internet.
Social credit bonus for wild unfounded claims online is probably nice if you live in the top 5 megacities.
Social credit does not exist the way you think it does
>Social credit bonus
People does still believe this shit?
There are many places in the West with clean streets and low crime that don't use China's economic or political model.
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Texas at least disagrees with you - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
Do you have statistics to back your assertions that disagree with this data?
I do in fact.
Germany: https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol...
Total N = ~2.2M Germans = ~1.2M (~58%) Non-Germans = ~900k (~42%)
Population: Germans ~71M (~85%), foreign ~12M (~15%)
Per-capita, non-Germans show up ~2.8x more.
Approximate rates:
Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline) All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate) Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×) Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×) Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×) Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×) Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×) Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×)
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Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same.
The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.
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https://www.scup.com/doi/10.1080/14043858.2014.926062
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08862605241311611
Are the foreign born in Germany excluding EU nationals?
No, they are included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
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