devoply

Western governments are covert about surveillance. China is overt about it, you continuously feel insecure and watched... and much like US's security theatre in airports that's the aim. So anyone who might wish harm to the communist party's agenda to feel threatened. How much are people willing to tolerate this sort of behavior? Hitler showed us all the way. In fact from a social development point of view China is going through what the world went through when it experimented with Fascism. So how does this end? Well, probably with some sort of war, likely a cold war of sorts.

It's also obvious that just like in WW2, American business will align itself with business interests even if those interests seem to be outright wrong. No matter, money is money. You would think we'd learned but we have learned nothing.

I don't mean currently no one talks about China, I mean there was a period after 2009 where there were a number of hacking incidents that no one talked about until much later.

As for a Smith refusing, yes, that could be the case. But there was no consolidation of power and industry as there is in Capitalism. So you could easily find many other Smiths to help you with whatever you needed. Going forward there are many specialized industries many of which are extremely consolidated. So you can't just go to someone else they own a whole spectrum. And that also makes it much easier for China to shut down things, as they could blacklist a whole set of businesses not just one.

What if on the other hand this is the fundamental aspect of Capitalism... Where the people with capital are always telling other people who might want access to whatever they are holding, money, markets, production, whatever, that if they don't kowtow they won't do business with them. And no one talks about it, just like no one talked about all the Chinese hacking so as not to ruin their reputation and anger China.

Looks like though this is the future. It's Capitalism where you love a product, say freedom of speech or democracy, but the company that supplies it gets bought out. And now you can't get that product anymore because it's not a part of the new company's corporate strategy. It's the same thing really. All these companies get bought out by the Chinese. Same thing goes for natural resources and the environment. They are just being bought out. Get things you need while supplies last.

It would be interesting to see Trump pass a law prohibiting any US company from doing this... from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

Seems like a rip-off. Not only do you get to live in sub-standard housing you're making rent-seekers some serious profit margins for nothing. These places should be $250/mo. and everyone should be able to afford them if they need a place but don't have the cash.

To quote dumb and dumber, so you mean there's a chance?

One interesting rule might be to keep people with a certain amount of money from meddling in politics. Like you track all the money, and rich people are not allowed to influence politics at all. That would destroy the strangle hold that various groups with a lot of money have on American or hell global politics. Trump should not be allowed to be President. There should be an inverse relationship between money and power. The more money you have, the less power you have to do anything political with that money.

Maybe like we make a new category of money that can only do certain things and is heavily regulated and watched. And that's the sort of money that you can have way up there in the clouds, you can't have regular people money which is the money we have right now.

That then would move the discussion from how much they have, to what they can do with it.

Well when America vacuums up power if you are a European nation without any ammo you better watch out.

> liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control

Saddam was willing to leave.

> Both were successful by the metrics set out for it.

Because they were beat downs.

> Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, and the various "police actions" undertaken since then, have objectives that are unclear or are metric-based and do not easily translate to a simple objective that can be reasoned to be a stable endpoint.

i.e. not beat downs. America is good at beat downs, any idiot with a gun is good at a beat down because as the Beastie Boys said it takes a second to wreck. It takes time to build.

Remote wars then are bad because they facilitate beat downs. Because America has big guns, lots of money, and little actual intelligence of how to fix or change anything.

It's funny all these people saying oh well the CIA doesn't do anything it's those stupid people who are fighting with each other because of their ideology. And then look at how Russia with a bit of money screwed up American politics and how badly they reacted to this little bit of interference.

You really want to make a must to punish children? If you get in there early there shouldn't be an in addition to.

Prison is a final measure when all other measures have failed. Even with prison, first time offenders of non-serious crimes usually do not do time or are diverted to other programs to help them avoid this fate. I just love how all the nerds here are going crazy over letting bullies off the hook initially to try to reform them -- it's as if they all want to bully the bullies.

Not only that, they will have wives, girlfriends, and children; they may eventually have employees. You can not stop them period. They are a part of the human population. They can not be weeded out.

Maybe if you counselled them and taught them how to manage their own needs and emotions many of them would not become criminals saving society many ills.

You can not eliminate the personality that needs bullying to validate themselves from the population. You can however hep them channel those needs into other things like entrepreneurship and leadership. To productively shape their needs for power over people rather than harassing and harming them.