And of course, the best behavior will be the behavior that poses zero threat to the people in power. What a great future we have ahead of us, my colleagues.
2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
This post has an 80% chance of being satire, and 20% chance of being from someone who honestly thinks not being able to afford a new iPhone every six weeks is literally like starving to death. Honestly, I can't tell.
Patrick Star, in response to SpongeBob asking him to refrain from eating a candy bar, following a closeup pan of Patrick's extremely overweight body, "what do you want me to do, starve???"
Something children can understand the humor in. Being used to excuse marching us into totalitarian dystopia.
> 2) I make 600k per year building surveillance systems for whoever wants them (as long as they're aligned with Peter Thiels and/or government interests)
"I was just doing my job. ... I was just following orders".
I want to believe that you got downvoted by the Oracle employees making 600k a year, rather than by people that couldn't tell you were being sarcastic.
Fear works only if delivered occasionally in byte sized quantities, too much of it and people not only stop fearing, they will also likely be indifferent to it, worse case even out right rebel.
If you had a weapon which is powerful, you better use it sparingly. Fear of the weapon is more important than the weapon itself.
Of course recordings are to be used against those that threaten the people in power, while those in power enjoy a cone of silence. Same as it ever was.
Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".
What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.
And that's what the Larry Ellisons of the world want.
One of the bigger lies ever told is that free-market economies help democratize nations. They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there. Instead we decided to invest in China and, later, Vietnam, among others. These are two very non-democratic nations.
Why did we do that, especially after the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Because it better fit the needs of capital. The last thing they wanted was to set up shop in a bunch of countries where the people had organized against authoritarian regimes for change. If they can get rid of the likes of Ceaușescu and Honecker despite their brutality, they could certainly do things like strike for better working conditions and a greater share of their employers' earnings.
Ellison's just another in a long line of guys with far too much money and far too little empathy. If you get out-of-line in a way that financially or politically inconveniences him, he wants you dealt with as severely as possible. China does that, and now he wants that in the US and other Western countries.
That's the problem: we take that story and use it as an excuse to act like he's not a human. "Oh, ol' Larry, he's just a lawnmower". No, he's a person, one who doesn't get enough in the way of negative consequences for the harm he brings to society.
My former employer was bought out by Oracle. I didn't stick my hand in the lawn mower, the lawn mower drove over my hand.
According to GPT, Poland (my pick because its GDP per cap is about the average for the former Warsaw Pact) received about $10,000 per person in foreign direct investment in recent years whereas during the same period, China received only about $1,900 per person.
You could look it up yourself. The figures I gave are the total current value of equities (stocks) held by foreign investors (divided by population). Since the value was zero in Poland in 1989 and very very low in China in 1989, GPT thought this would be a good way to estimate cumulative investment from then to now, but GPT also said there are figures available for investment inflows per year going back to 1989 that it could add up if I asked, but it guessed that such a calculation would only show investment into Poland in an even more comparatively favorable light.
> They don't. If they did, we would have made massive investments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist governments there.
Ummm, what? Have you been to Eastern Europe lately (minus Ukraine, Belarus and Russia)? They're basically the west, except cleaner and less crime-ridden.
Those countries are all significantly richer per capita than China. Especially somewhere like Czechia, which has already passed several Western European countries in wealth.
How much richer do you think Czechia and Poland would be if they received more FDI in the 90's versus the 00's?
They received way higher investment per person than China did as well.
Also, China has some natural advantages, like being able to employ a ton of ultra cheap labour to engage in nation building projects. While the appearance of China is that of a rich country, they remain significantly poorer per capita than Europe.
Except China has a well defined culture and millenia of experience with this and has learned how to have an autocratic society that still somewhat serves its people (until it doesn't). The US has been captured by a foreign power that has no interest in the welfare of the people so the expectation is that an autocratic society would be much worse in the US.
They don’t have millennia of experience with a surveillance state. But so far people are accepting it because their economic situation is generally improving. And crime is low. It may change once they have reached the same level of prosperity as the West and growth slows.
Uh, are you sure about that claim regarding surveillance over human history? Just because the technology has advanced does not entail the methods or concepts are novel. Quite the contrary in my view: the modern versions are natural evolutions of long traditions and customs. Having “rats” and “moles” reporting on behavior is, I mean, it predates written records of I’m not mistaken.
Today is a totally different scale. The German stasi needed a huge amount of people to handle all the incoming data and a lot of it fell through anyways l. Today you just throw a lot of compute at it and nothing can escape.
Yes you always had people snitching on each other but it was inefficient and hard to centralize. Today is different.
"oh yeah we're developing something super fucked up but you know what the problem is? cHiNA", every single fucking time
And I bet all of you clowns wouldn't even be able to name three living Chinese people. The greatest threat to the west right now, and especially the US, is the American government, not China
It's subjective. When I was a kid, "best behavior" didn't include assaulting law enforcement and smearing feces on the walls of Congress, but these days that behavior is acceptable, even officially celebrated.