Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough.
But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.
perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.
Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.
It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!
It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.
At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.
The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back.
Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
>But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
I think we're so far down the discussion thread, that we've forgotten that we're skeptical about whether Apple will be held accountable to their American investment promises...
As an intermediate alternative between a hardware keyboard and a graphical symbol picker, I use an .XCompose file with contents that look like this:
# GREEK
<Multi_key> <g> <A> : "Α" U0391 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA
<Multi_key> <g> <a> : "α" U03B1 # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
<Multi_key> <g> <B> : "Β" U0392 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA
<Multi_key> <g> <b> : "β" U03B2 # GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA
<Multi_key> <g> <D> : "Δ" U0394 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA
<Multi_key> <g> <d> : "δ" U03B4 # GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA
<Multi_key> <g> <E> : "Ε" U0395 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
<Multi_key> <g> <e> : "ε" U03B5 # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON
...
# Math Symbols
<Multi_key> <i> <n> : "∈" U2208 # IN
<Multi_key> <f> <a> : "∀" U2200 # FOR ALL
<Multi_key> <t> <e> : "∃" U2203 # THERE EXISTS
<Multi_key> <a> <n> <d> : "∧" U2227 # AND
<Multi_key> <o> <r> : "∨" U2228 # OR
<Multi_key> <less> <parenleft> : "⟨" U27E8 # MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET
<Multi_key> <greater> <parenright>: "⟩" U27E9 # MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
<Multi_key> <d> <d> : "∂" U8706 # DEL
<Multi_key> <n> <b> : "∇" U8711 # NABLA
I've used this for perhaps the last 10 years now and I don't think I could go back to working on a machine without configurable compose key functionality at this point.
This. Using a Compose key [0] covers a vast range of input use cases and is eminently customizable. For Windows there is WinCompose [1]. For macOS there is [2].
Compose functionality is absolutely awesome. I don't understand why it's not more widespread. I use it for all sorts of stuff, from emojis, to symbols, to diacretics. It's great!
why is this downvoted? the specific cities (notably in Arizona) that have taken deliberate action on this are exceptions proving the general rule that light pollution is demonstrably less of a policy concern even compared to the notorious American disdain for walkable infrastructure.
Because the goods made will be sold to American consumers directly and indirectly and are priced to reflect all kinds of costs including EPA compliance in domestic markets.
European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
Ammonia and hydrogen are essentially energy export mechanisms. They'll be exported to energy poor places, aka Asia, not America. they can and are made in America without fanfare. You wouldn't have states fighting to exlude green hydrogen or ammonia plants, you'd have states competing on how many subsidies they could give them.
Arguably, very likely true. But the fertiliser (the other ammonia product, the one we do mostly now the others being somewhat futurological) will I am sure sell worldwide. I'm personally sceptical about the hydrogen economy I can't see it working. It's biggish in some Australian circles, both because of IPR around the processes and people in related fields looking at uses for surplus solar power. Twiggy Forrest was big in it, wanted the sun cable proposal to pivot over, its partly why the JV with Cannon Brookes fell apart.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
I know the crowd here (mostly from USA) hates this kind of comment, but as a SOUTH AMERICAN, can I point out the absurdity of this kind of sentence? Chile is a South American country, in the American continent, and is 8000 miles south of America somehow. I know the why's and the meaning intented, no need to explain. Wont stop pointing this out though, as it will always feel to me as a example of the general disregard USA has for its neighbours.
I think it's worth pointing out that "the American continent" is not how geography is taught in the US. There's seven continents, one of which is North America and one of which is South America.
So you're making a point which only makes sense in Spanish, in the context of your own education. There's no ambiguity in the US since the only thing "America" can refer to is the USA.
I'm curious how it's taught for you about Europe and Asia. We learn those as separate continents, too, even though it's one land mass. For that matter, Africa is as connected to Asia as South America is to North America, but I'm almost certain you consider Africa its own continent, right?
Despite not asking for an explanation, I’ll give one anyway since you seem not to have resolved your grievance.
“American” is the correct adjective in English to describe the United States’ people and government. There is simply no equivalent to the Spanish “estadounidense.”
Furthermore, North America and South America are considered to be separate continents, and if you want to refer to them both together, you say “the Americas”, plural.
this is not a conclusion that he jumps to! all that is stated is that there is a mapping from every pair of points on a curve to a set of 3D coordinates specified by their midpoints and distances. there is no requirement for uniqueness here. in fact, the whole point of this is to turn the search for an inscribed rectangle into the search for two pairs of points on the curve that have the same midpoint and distance --- this is stated just 1 min 15 seconds after the timestamp that you point out.
> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem
That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.
but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.
It just sounds like a way for people to try showing how smart they are while in reality it just adds confusion to completely irrelevant discussions, such as this one.
I think the campaign does opposite of what it says. Using 5 digits limits your dates to dates to a maximum of year 99999. While not giving a fuck, using the digits needed to represent a year, works for all years. No one is clamping their years to 4 digits when they say '2024', they are just using the necessary digits needed for that year
> a way for people to try showing how smart they are
given the choice between trying to demonstrate intelligence, and trying to demonstrate viciousness, i prefer the former. i guess your preference is different
Why start counting 02024 years ago then? is pretty much a small scale arbitrary starting point. Humans have existed for longer than that, they could say we are in the year 300000.
How does promotion by a single non-profit talking shop, however celebrated or intellectual were its founders, make it a "valid notation"?
Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.
There's healthy skepticism about vaccine side effects, and then there are these antics:
> On 11 January 2023, Bridgen had the Conservative whip suspended after tweeting about COVID-19 vaccines: "As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust." Bridgen claimed the tweet had been moderated by staff members, which was denied by a Conservative Party spokesman.[84] Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the comparison "utterly unacceptable".[5] Two days later, Bridgen issued a statement saying his tweet was not antisemitic, and apologised "for any offence caused". He said he was taking legal advice about action against those who had labelled him as antisemitic. Bridgen further contended that he asked "reasonable questions" about the side-effects of mRNA vaccines, and had "received huge support from ordinary people, medical workers [and] those who have experienced vaccine harms themselves".[85]
> In March 2023, Bridgen posted tweets promoting a conspiracy theory claiming that COVID-19 originated at Fort Detrick.[86]
> On 29 February 2024, Bridgen referenced capital punishment as an appropriate response to "crimes against humanity" regarding the vaccine rollout.[87]
It doesn't seem to matter, there's another post alleging Bridgen said vaccine = holocaust 2.0. They've been radicalized to attack when they hear trigger words.
No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction.
When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed -- then I'm less worried.
Demanding mental assent to questionable claims to avoid punishment, regardless of questions about the predictive failure or successful outcomes of testing the hypotheses underlying those claims seems ... culty.
And, there's a lot of that in modern public schooling.
The first thing I ask my daughter whenever someone tells her to believe something, is "how could you know?". Quite often, the claimant has assiduously avoided informing her about how they "know" their claim is true. It's astonishing.
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
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