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Beijing To Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020 (bloomberg.com)
China's plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident. From a report: The capital city will pool data from several departments to reward and punish some 22 million citizens based on their actions and reputations by the end of 2020, according to a plan posted on the Beijing municipal government's website this week. Those with better so-called social credit will get "green channel" benefits while those who violate laws will find life more difficult. The Beijing project will improve blacklist systems so that those deemed untrustworthy will be "unable to move even a single step," according to the government's plan. Xinhua reported on the proposal Tuesday, while the report posted on the municipal government's website is dated July 18.
BM did an episode on this.
Sounds like a great fucking system.
Remind me why we're doing business with these people again?
"A state where uniformity of purpose has been established for one year, will be strong for ten years; where uniformity of purpose has been established for ten years, it will be strong for a hundred years, where uniformity of purpose has been established for a hundred years, it will be strong for a thousand years; and a state which has been strong for a thousand years will attain supremacy."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Dude, why go there? I happen to be trans and liberal and I'm horrified by this. This something right out of 1984 and it has nothing to do with "liberals". I'm quite sure I enjoy my freedoms and privacy as much as you do. I have no idea what you have against trans people but that doesn't mean we don't want the same things in life. The last place I would ever want to live is in a totalitarian state.
Good thing bureaucrats are incorruptible and would never abuse the system for a bribe or petty revenge. /s
This will be one of the greatest hacking targets in the world. Not to mention that putting the wellbeing of 1.4 billion people into a database means that even a small error in an edge case in the code can screw millions of people.
Creating an entire subset of your society that is so locked out of daily life that they can't even function is a very, very quick way to incite organized resistance - not just out of ideological opposition, but from pure survival necessity. Blacklisted people will band together with blacklisted people to set up a parallel society so they can simply function day to day. Food? Housing? Transportation? You can't freeze out even 5% of the population from that and keep it contained.
If they were just making life difficult, that would be one thing, but it sounds like the Chicoms have gone so overboard that they won't be able to even eat or sleep under a roof. Watch it blow up.
Obviously this is like a dystopian dream and will stifle the feeling of freedom. But we should keep in mind Beijing (and China in general) has some a lot of the sort of petty problems which more rarely happen in the west: Rampant littering. People encourage their children to urinate in the street. Scammers take advantage of tourists, brazenly acting in public places in broad daylight. Taxi drivers lie about the fare, or refuse to use the meter so they can set whatever rate they choose, depending on the passenger's skin color and accent. People get to the front of a queue not by waiting, but by walking to the front of the queue.
The questions that come to mind are whether it will work, whether this is temporary (until the above cultural problems are solved), and whether it's worth the loss in feeling of freedom.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
What happens in China is definitely a nightmare, but before we laugh at those stupid Chinese we ought to take stock of what is happening right here in the West.
We are being monitored too. 24/7.
What we do online.
Who our friends are/were.
Where we go shopping.
What kinds of item we usually buy.
The types of association / club we have membership in.
Whom we met last Wednesday.
Which TV / online streaming programs we consume.
And so on. And so forth.
Who is to say what's happening in China won't happen here?
Know how we solved it? Mostly cops giving out tickets. The scammers got arrested. Same results, maybe better, and no massive and terrifying misuse of government power.
China's problem is they treat their working class like crap. This is the kind of crap you have to resort to when you need to keep people from Unionizing.
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any day now. Yep. Any day now. Right after we stop selling bombs to the Saudis...
In other news, I can buy a 50" TV for $200 bucks this Black Friday. And the new iPhone is _sweet_.
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Same shit happened under McCarthy, which is ironic given your words. Could happen again in the US in a few years, only it would be an App that measured your Patriotism. It's not a left/right thing, it's a totalitarian thing.
The Chinese government already has this information. The difference now is the information is more open, more publicly available, it's actually a good thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Give me your tired
Your poor
Your huddled masses
With a good social credit score
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Blacklisted people will band together with blacklisted people to set up a parallel society
Yep! And then they will either be sent to re-education camps, or "disappeared".
China in fact would find it very HANDY for such people to band together, it would save them a lot of time.
If you want a 100% effective Panopticon, I can think of no better state on Earth that can make that happen by sweeping the undesirables under the rug.
So what everyone has to decide in the end is, do they want a model like that or a model like America? I'm not really sure there are any other workable models left.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People invest in protecting what's important to them; that's why banks invest in vaults and rich people have guards for their families and properties.
The USA has a huge military budget because:
[1] it values its freedom and independence
[2] it values its allies and trade routes
[3] it costs the USA a lot more to get any measure of military might since it does not have a conscripted military and its materiel is not made by government suppliers.
The USA has not, historically, HAD a "health service" because we traditionally left health to the people themselves, the private sectore, and communities and states (The US Constitution says nothing about healthcare, and it explicitly says that anything it does not assign to the federal government belongs to the people and to the states).
A little knowledge is dangerous --- and by your posting I judge you "mostly harmless"
Only difference is in the US private companies keep scores on you instead of the government.
Well in China it is US companies, ex Google, helping to keep track of people on behalf of the Chinese government. Its only the US government that Google/Amazon/etc employees refuse to work for.
We all know that Orwell would say "OK, I give up. I was totally wrong, this is way more sophisticated a totalitarian system than I could dream up." We all happly carry our dobbleplusgood portable televisor around with us. Add a super-controlling engieered gouvernment to that, and you're way past 1984. Big time.
Maybe next time around I'll really ditch my regular smartphone for something else. I've allready considered stocking up on older Blackberrys. They're pretty cheap now.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Has similarity. A serious penalty, ex judicial, no right of appeal.
Only in the USA. No other democracy. It is very strange that the USA has the best constitution concerning rights and the worst record of actually providing them.
That said, it is still nothing like what China is proposing. And has already imposed on the Uyghurs. China is becoming very grim. Nobody there will dare to criticize the government on anything.
If Emperor Xi goes bad, he cannot be stopped domestically. And he can drag the whole world down with him.
They do not need mandatory GPS in cars. They already have number plate readers everywhere. Plus they can track your phone.
Which—even if true—has nothing to do with the topic at hand, since China isn't really a Communist country in any way other than in the name of the ruling party.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You just have to report on your neighbors, and they report about you. Crowd-sourcing worked very well under the soviet communism.
This system will be heaven for people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder because they will be able to extend their abuse onto anybody they meet in a meaningful way. They will be able to charm and connive all of the social goodwill they need while causing serious damage to the people they abuse.
Social media is the vehicle for personality disorders to spread.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Dude literally stated that he's opposed to all of this as a liberal and you went and argued the exact opposite point because apparently either you cannot read or just enjoy building massive strawmen. How 'fun'. I can do this too, watch me:
"What's the big deal, China's just making sure no-one can openly criticize the Dear Leader or his party, and those who dissent too hard or belong to the wrong religion/ethnicity/political movement will be taken to 're-education camps' where if need be they can be killed and their organs harvested if some Good Loyal Citizens(tm) are in need of them, isn't that your ultra-conservative Trumpian end-game; to have the government be able to operate with impunity, above the rule of law and get rid of the pesky media that Trump calls 'the enemy'?"
See how easy this is? Now Is this productive for the discussion at large in any way? Nope. It's just 'ooh I'm so right they're so wrong aah' -partisan ego jerk off for cunts like you. Grow the fuck up man.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Hack the thing. The hack could come from a government, or a private organization like WikiLeaks with an interest in causing chaos. Don't destroy it, just start slightly altering people's credit.
Just start lowering the credit of people with military training and access to guns a fractional amount. Veterans, police, military, etc. Make them slightly more angry and frustrated. Then start fractionally increasing the credit of people with borderline anti-government views. Create an angry underclass with military training and access to weapons while helping some of the people who will radicalize them do their thing.
The Beijing project will improve blacklist systems so that those deemed untrustworthy will be "unable to move even a single step,"
So basically they will create a group of people who have nothing left to lose. Well done. That's going to work out great.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
of how to create an underclass in a country that is increasingly homogeneous.
See, in order for a ruling class to keep a working class in line they need to divide the working class. In America we do this along racial lines (Black/White/Latino). India uses a caste system. Japan got creative and declared some professions "unclean" and forced families into them, then kept lists of those families.
The goal here is to get you "kicking down". e.g. to direct your rage at the poor lot in life you got at a group below you, until you get to a small enough and low group that they're easily controlled. Like I said above, the pattern repeats again and again.
There's two problems with this in 2018.
1. Education. Well educated people don't see the point of hating on someone without reason; and China's been doing a massive education push.
2. Interbreeding. Folks don't enforce apartheid like they used to. So there's a gradual intermixing until the groups aren't distinct enough anymore. Japan made this work with their caste system, but that needed Buddhism to work, and even then education eventually broke it down. China's facing the same problem.
Giving everyone a "score" is a prefect way to create a new caste system and once again get everyone "kicking down".
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For a while there, I thought China had figured out how to apply the Nash Equilibrium to society via big data and the cognitive neuroscience of behavior.
Then I thought, it's China, dude. What's really going on is probably more of a game of "Fuck You, Buddy", where somebody's got to win, and if it isn't you, it might be me.
Oh, wait... that's us.
Never mind.
Everyone is quick to talk shit about McCarthy, but nobody seems to remember that he ended up being right about communist infiltration in our government, particularly in the state department.