What I've come to love about Linux is not its profitability (though many find its knowledge to be lucrative), but that it doesn't judge its users to be stupid by default.
> "The country also passed a new law earlier this year that would allow the police to control the bank accounts of individuals who they suspect to be scam targets and limit what transactions they can do."
This is crazy to me. How far are we willing to go in terms of restricting freedoms for safety?
But this is just part of how Singapore is different than America and Europe. China has even stricter controls in terms of limiting what individuals can do with their bank accounts (you can't transfer money to non-Chinese-citizens at all!).
Western countries put enormous value on personal liberty — America probably the most so, but even EU countries are extremely liberal in a liberty sense compared to historical norms, and even compared to some well-functioning economies today like China and Singapore. It's interesting, since I think the idea of personal liberty is so deeply engrained in many of our consciousnesses that we couldn't conceive of living like that. But... plenty of people do, and they're happy about it.
Plenty of people seem to be quite supportive of the idea that visa holders (ie not citizens), or simply brown people, should NOT be allowed to criticize the standing president, so I don't know that the idea of personal liberty is as strong as I believed it was growing up.
you can't transfer money to non-Chinese-citizens at all!
that's not true. you just have to document and explain the transfer, if it is a foreign bank account. if it is a local one then the citizenship of the account holder does not even matter.
Western countries put enormous value on personal liberty
in everyday life the limits on personal liberty in china are hardly noticeable. and they are contrasted with safety even when walking through dark neighborhoods at 3am in the morning.
in everyday life the limits on personal liberty in china are hardly noticeable. and they are contrasted with safety even when walking through dark neighborhoods at 3am in the morning.
The everyday life aspects aren't noticeable because everyone has adapted to not having the liberty to e.g. rally to protest the government, shut down major infrastructure in opposition to the government, do drugs in public and buy them off the Dark Web, etc. There's quite a famous rally in the late 80s where the "shut down major city sites" difference was proven... starkly. Contrast that to last year in America, where it was quite common for protests to shut down entire highways, and not even a single tank rolled over them.
I'm not arguing that America's system is necessarily better. But it's definitely different, and Americans find the restrictions of Chinese and Singaporean-style governance baffling, as per many comments in this thread.
I personally have used the "liberty to walk home alone at night" point in discussions to point out the benefits of China's system with friends and family too, so I'm not unsympathetic to the idea. It's just a different way of thinking than many Americans have, where the ability to oppose the government and do whatever you want with your money is considered sacrosanct, and giving up personal security is culturally viewed as so clearly worth it that alternatives aren't even considered.
A democratically elected government is demanding to see papers on the street, and this is celebrated by millions, so your claim about putting "enormous value on personal liberty" has been proven false.
FWIW, you're nearly doubling the actual prison incarceration rate. There were about 1.25 million people in prison as of the most recent federal data (which covers up until 2023). 2MM is the number of people who were ever in a prison or jail in 2023 (including e.g. holding cells for drunk drivers), but there wasn't a point in which 2MM were in prison at a single point in time.
Nonetheless, America has >10x the number of murders per capita than China, so it's no surprise that it has nearly 10x the people in prison for murder per capita than China (in fact, it's surprising it's not >10x, to match the murder rate). Ditto for basically any crime rate you can think of.
The downside of America's system includes much higher crime rates, which ends up in higher incarceration rates. That doesn't discount that in America, much more is legal than in China: people in America commit a lot more crime, but also do a lot more things that are legal in America but illegal in China (e.g. mass rallies to protest the government). In the security/liberty tradeoff, America and China are pretty much opposite ends of the spectrum. There are downsides to both, and upsides; China is a much safer place than America.
It’s practically a one party state, no? And I’ve heard lots of stories of protesters getting disappeared after the police arrest them. Easy to say these things.
They are a one party state, but not for lack of trying. It just turns out that turning a country from a fishing village to a world-class economy in a couple decades buys you a lot of good will from the voters.
a one party state is not the problem. you don't need multiple parties to allow multiple opinions and dissent. all they would need to do is to allow dissenting votes within the party (which, as another commenter noted, the don't, so that's hardly lack of trying), and allow everyone to join the party without requiring any allegiance to party rules that go beyond allegiance to the country itself.
china could do the same btw. china also, as far as i heard, does allow dissent within the party.
I did indeed have exactly these sorts of things in mind - but I should have spent more time iterating on my comment, the end result possibly being not to post any comment at all, because it didn't end up coming out as intended. I'll refer you to my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818568
The erosion of freedom is everyone's problem. Normalizing government control over personal bank accounts is a dangerous precedent. Today it's scam prevention, tomorrow it's freezing accounts of political opponents.
Thank you for this good response to my shit comment. It was intended to make some point along these lines, but, reading it again, it completely didn't.
reply