Comment by 0xbadcafebee
9 hours ago
The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.
Doesn't matter though. The big mistake was allowing manufacturing to be exported from the US to begin with. Nearly any advanced technology we use or wish to produce is now dependent on China. They control not only the advanced manufacturing process, but also the refinement of rare earths (we can mine it but not refine it) and have cheaper labor. Not only can't we make tech without them, we can't sell it at competitive prices. Things will soon get worse as robotics and vertical integration makes Chinese products even cheaper and better quality. And we can't compete on robots because China controls that production chain too.
The smart play would be to build up our own green energy sector to gain cost savings, while investing in its manufacturing, so we can eventually compete and support ourselves (which Biden and Obama passed funding for). Trump eliminated all that when he came back, because the oil companies wanted more profits, they literally don't believe climate change is real, and they have no idea how diplomacy works. We could've had cheap battery, wind, and solar manufacturing in the US. Not anymore.
You should visit the Tibet region and ask the locals. But:
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
Nor are civil rights, or civil litigation for that matter.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
Fun fact: there are huge government-sponsored posters proclaiming Freedom (自由) and Democracy (民主) through China, because they're two of the official twelve Core Socialist Values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Socialist_Values
1 reply →
>> The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.
As a child of immigrants from the Soviet Union, and also as someone who knows people still resident in authoritarian dictatorships: This is patently ridiculous. Everything else in your post is a spray of nonsensical policy points and predictions. You led off with the tell. Frankly, it makes everything you say afterward sound like what an authoritarian enemy government would want people in the US to think about their own country.
What you wrote in your first sentence is either (a) wildly misinformed (like, you have no idea what life is like in an authoritarian country with actual slave labor, which is an insult to the people who do currently live there), or (b) intentionally nefarious (like, you work for such a country, in a capacity to minimize the distinction between their system of autocracy and the United States' democracy). If it's (a), study at least a little bit of the history of mass murder in the 20th Century. If (b), well, we live in a free country so you can spew whatever garbage you want. Interestingly, we have not been overtaken by any of the dictatorships that have sprung up in Eurasia over the past hundred years, and I don't think we will be soon.