It's an unequal relationship. Free trade would mean that Google and Amazon and Ford get a level playing field in China as well. But that's not the case.
The mainstream media has become a terrible place for any sort of rational discussion. They're too busy criticizing Trump to analyze the impact of these moves.
I have zero love for the man, but it's clear that the US has the upper hand in this trade war and should be able to squeeze China for better deals.
You really have to love Wikipedia. It's barely a week old and you already have a page with so many references and detailed information. Thank you, all the anonymous contributors.
I strongly disagree about current events. The Merrick Garland wikipedia page was a mess immediately after he was nominated, and I've just checked and the word "unprecedented" appears 7 times, in spite of the fact that it is by-no-means unprecedented for the senate to not consider a nomination [1]. There are a lot of partisan editors that wish to astroturf for their own political convictions, and because Wikipedia articles are generally so nonpartisan after they've had some time to mature, I think it's especially problematic because readers don't realize that a fast-moving article is nowhere near up to standards.
[1]: "During the 1852 campaign between Democrat Franklin Pierce and Whig Winfield Scott, Justice John McKinley died in July. President Millard Fillmore, a Whig who was not running for reelection, nominated three candidates — one in August, one in January and one in February. The Democratic-controlled Senate took no action on two candidates and the third withdrew after the Senate postponed a vote until after inauguration. One of Fillmore’s nominations was never even considered by the Senate, while the other was simply tabled." from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.
> Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.
Similar to a pocket veto, not acting upon a nomination is a form of action. It's an indirect mechanism to reject a nominee.
I'm pretty sure changing this to mandate a hearing within a fixed number of days would require a constitutional amendment, not just a regular law, so is essentially impossible.
+1. I have felt this as well. I personally consider the "Lock" icon as a sign that the article is controversial and then I am extra skeptical about it. Might be a good idea for Wikipedia to highlight controversial articles prominently using some other iconography like big bold text telling that the current article is under rapid contradictory edits, or even highlight parts of the text that have been recently edited multiple times and therefore are likely to be controversial.
True. When I was starting out, I was tasked with editing the Wikipedia page of one of our clients to add more information. Wasn't anything sinister; the company just wanted to ensure the page had up to date information.
When I ventured to the 'Talk' page, I was surprised to see so many edits and comments from editors.
This was for a little known company in a niche field with little traffic or chance to profit. Yet the editors were as diligent as ever.
I find it even good for medical conditions, condensed history of major events, understanding geography and biography of actors, sportspersons and politicians.
Actually, isn't it the * best * first website to learn about anything?
Please don't try to learn about controversial political topics there. The amount of editorial wars going on is stuggering - and the worst of it, you won't be able to tell when you're looking at a propaganda piece instead of an objective article because you need prior knowledge for that, and Wikipedia is exactly the place where people get their prior knowledge.
I trust Wikipedia for basic historical information, biographies etc. I feel sad that encylopedias and their peer reviews have been obliterated as a definitive source of knowledge and replaced by something which has a questionable editorial model. I use Wikipedia a lot but don't see it as a 'gold standard' of verified information. It seems a lot people do...
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...
The editorial model seems to work pretty well for things which aren't controversial, and unlike old-style encyclopedias, you can see the edits made and the discussions behind them. With Britannica, you basically just had to trust them.
The same is true for non-Wikipedia sources too, right? If you learn about political topics from, say, a newspaper article, you will not be able to tell if you're looking at a propaganda piece because the newspaper is exactly where you get your prior knowledge.
I think there's a difference: you know that newspaper won't offer you an objective prior knowledge. But with Wikipedia, too many people have such assumption.
Have you tried simple Wikipedia? I find it way easier to conceptualization the topics there and then move onto the main Wikipedia to get more detail, as needed.
I also agree, and would further that any relatively technically involved concept tends to contain the most complicated form of that topic, for example the wikipedia page on lift goes into some pretty intense detail.
This is the natural result for a website written by users (those with lots of knowledge write it for others who have lots of knowledge). Even simple wikipedia is not immune to this, due to explaining the concept theoretically instead of taking example problems.
I do not mean to say that I think wikipedia is bad or that others do better. I'm not even sure such a problem is solvable at all (making it useful for both beginners and experts)
On the other hand, articles written by experts with full detail is much more useful to those already well versed in a given field. To use myself as an example: I would look elsewhere for computing or linguistics information if the articles were all written for beginners.
I don't disagree with you - the articles are not at all useless in topics for which I am well versed. Like I say, the issue that is perhaps unsolvable is some intuative way to have the article useful to everyone at once while not bogging them down in useless info
That's all true. I'm making a stronger claim. I believe Wikipedia is the best website for the two things I mentioned. There isn't a second competitor that comes even close to the breadth, depth and convenience provided by Wikipedia.
As in you read several books about a medical condition, and then see what Wikipedia says about it? Because if you just start by reading the Wikipedia article, you'd have no idea whether it's wrong or not. (It's usually wrong.)
Is it? Why on earth don't you fix it when you see that? You don't even need an account, if that's what your worried about.
I'm surprised at the idea though, and pretty skeptical that it's actually the case since I would have assumed many others with medical knowledge would also have noticed, and one of them would have corrected things eventually.
It's what happens when profit is not your primary (or even secondary) goal. That's why my personal company will never go public. From what I understand it would force me to put profit as my primary goal, even if I value quality more than profit.
In theory, you can incorporate as a Benefit Corp[1], which "includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals." I'm not sure if that works in practice, though.
Yet there are still people claiming the site is not good for anything. Of course, you shouldn't base your phd paper on it, but I'll use it for any information first checkpoint, all the time.
In India, Flipkart is often criticized for "copying" Amazon's idea (not that "sell stuff online" was revolutionary to begin with).
But the thing is, Flipkart entered the Indian market before Amazon.
As a consumer, I derived more value from Flipkart's "copy" that served me than from Amazon's "originality".
Same with Android. As a consumer, Android may have copied iOS, but Android's copy was far more affordable to me, and hence, I derived far more value from it than the original.
> Businesses live and die by cash flow. What if cash flows instantly 24/7?
Business payments are delayed not because there is an underlying fault in the payment systems (wire transfers are nearly instantaneous, at least within the country), but because businesses sit on payments.
A new technology isn't going to solve this problem. Businesses like to hold onto invoices as long as they can get away with it.
Not really. Liquidity is a major problem. Properties sit n the market for years sometimes (as my dad's) before finding a buyer at supposed market valuation (which, in my view, is highly inflated)
> Politicians spend the money to fund campaigns, but also on handing out favours, jobs and cash to constituents. “It’s sort of an unholy nexus,” as Raghuram Rajan put it to me during his tenure as head of India’s central bank. “Poor public services? Politician fills the gap; politician gets the resources from the businessman; politician gets re-elected by the electorate for whom he’s filling the gap.”
I know this will never be popular opinion, but as a citizen of a poor, developing country with widespread corruption, I sometimes have to wonder: is democracy really the best model for poor nations that don't have the foundations to foster it?
You want a layered, federated, representative democracy. Not just a democracy.
By layering and federating, you introduce noise into the system. One layer may be controlled by one party, another by another. You are purposefully introducing noise and isolating possible corruption vectors. With enough noise and isolation, each time power switches over at a node or layer, there's widespread "corruption cleaning" that mostly involves running out all the corrupt guys from the other party and setting up your own corruption that works in a different way.
Looked at another way, the system has to have a way to be wrong. If one person or one party controls everything from top to bottom (or the system stops being layered and federated), then there's no feedback loop -- and there's your unholy nexus.
Personally I'd add term limits to the mix, mainly because I think whatever the government is, it should be understandable and controllable by an average citizen. Also if you're in for a long time, it's doubtful you'll change your ways -- and there goes the feedback loop again.
You never eliminate corruption. That's a fool's game. Instead what you want is to isolate it in such a way that over time it's easy to identify and remedy.
The government at federal level is still a very "noisy" affair. The ruling coalition though enjoying significant majority in lower house is far from simple majority in the upper house which holds elections once in 6 years. You only need to watch a few minutes of a session in action to realize it is well and truly a very noisy affair.
India saw the rise of regional parties with the parallel fall of the Congress party since the 90s. There are many states now where Congress has only namesake presence. This resulted in coalition rule at the federal level which was finally reversed in 2014 when BJP came to power with simple majority (though also as part of the NDA coalition). Subsequently it won most state elections, effectively gaining power in 19/31 states/union territories. But due to the bicameral nature of Indian parliament, it is far from majority in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House, where the MPs are indirectly elected). Because of this they have not been able to introduce many legislations.
The government at federal level is still a very "noisy" affair.
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. I suspect we have different definitions of "noisy". There's also a tremendous gap between what you see in the media and how things actually work. That's one of the cornerstones of a corrupt system, sadly: the impenetrable nature of trying to observe it from the outside.
I wish you the best of luck. My advice is to acknowledge human nature and create systems that work with it. These systems tend to be the ones that are able to adapt and thrive over time.
I completely agree with your POV. Hoping corruption will go away is a fool's game indeed. Just trying to highlight that compared to US system of 2 party rule, India is a true multi party system since the 90s (from a faux one earlier when Congress dominated). The BJP lead coalition appears to be reversing this but its dominance is still far below the levels enjoyed by Congress from 1947 to late 80s. And there is good possibility of its dominance reducing starting from the state elections scheduled later this year.
I think you've got a fair point. But democracy is the least worst system of government that we know of. This idea has been around for a long time. I know the Churchill quote 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.' Apparently he said this in the 1940s but he attributed it to some earlier source.
Modern well established democracies have just had a longer time to refine the system to a slightly less shitty version of the democracy that come before them.
So you might be right, but I wonder if it's the journey that matters? Ie is it that countries have to go through the process in order to get to a better place? So you can't just drop a democracy system from another country in place somewhere, and hope that it works. That of course doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from the mistakes of others.
I dislike the term "democracy". The correct term that characterizes the western systems (such as the US) is "checks and balances". Having multiple check and balances is the best way to limit corruption, having general elections is a very poor proxy. Just see how many countries have general elections (and so can call themselves "democracies") and are ruled by a president for life.
>I know this will never be popular opinion,but as a citizen of a poor, developing country with widespread corruption, I sometimes have to wonder: is democracy really the best model for poor nations that don't have the foundations to foster it?
I actually think you have a very valid concern. As Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." ( I know it isn't Churchill who said it first, but let not derail the topic )
As someone who has lived in Representative Democracy, Direct Democracy, and Authoritarian countries, My only conclusion is, none of the above form of government matters as much. What is much more fundamental, in every form of government is well educated, and well informed people. They need to be taught to think independently, and critically, to make values of things, to make a judgement, and (much) more importantly, to learn from the mistakes if they did make a wrong judgement. Education is the key and possibly the only key to political and society progress. Once we have that, any form of Government will work, as ultimately the power of Government comes from People, even Authoritarian.
That is of course ignoring capitalism sneaking through, where human greed are maximised. Where Education isn't about teaching the basics of thinking and values, but skills set that you are required to get a job.
Democracy depends on the knowledge and understanding of the people (demos).
General mistrust regarding the media and politicians is required. E.g. the weird behavior of the top UK politicians in the Skripal case, the lies related to the war in Iraq, the war in Libya, the war in Syria.
Understanding the basics of science is important too. If you believe in working cars then you should believe in climate warming and the need for urgent change too because the involved science is basically the same.
Understanding of non-classic or modern or progressive economics is important too.
What's the alternative? Enlightened dictatorships are even worse. Sure, they work for a while, but at some point family ties override everything and you end up with Dumbo as chief of state when his brilliant parent dies.
Singapore might be a flawed democracy, but it still is one. The ruling party does fear losing vote share in elections and adapts its policies to win public support (e.g. in the 2011 elections when the opposition won 40% of the vote).
Even Singapore's founder/dictator said that Singapore style government wont work in huge country like India with its different religions, languages, cultures etc.
I do know about Singapore. Feel free to point out another 5 examples from the entire history of mankind, all 5000 years of it, all across the world.
Oh, to clarify, I want a longer time frame. I want a autocratic regime which didn't hit the "Dumbo peak" within 1 century, +/- 20 years. Heck, even Singapore doesn't qualify, their system has been up for only about 60 years. They still have about as many years to hit a dud.
This is a silly argument. Every regime has an arch and succumbs to corruption eventually. "Works for a while" describes every regime in history of mankind.
Why would it be silly? The whole point of democracy is to prevent that decay...
Or are you assuming that democracy naturally devolves into a corrupt regime? I doubt it. It seems to be the exact opposite: stable, long term democracies are the most resilient ones.
>Or are you assuming that democracy naturally devolves into a corrupt regime?
All governments regardless of their nature or intent devolve into corrupt regimes over time. The nature of government - authority through a monopoly on violence and coercive taxation - makes corruption, authoritarianism and collapse inevitable.
But what happens when your children inherit the garden, or their children? Maybe after a couple of generations, they no longer think a garden is worth the effort, and don't bother pulling the weeds. Maybe they hire someone to manage the garden for them, or maybe they just pave the whole thing over altogether.
Checks and balances only work when both the people insist on them and the government recognizes them. But in a democracy, people can be convinced to vote against their own interests, to vote out checks and balances or vote in autocrats or extremists, or to simply not care to stop power concentrating or collaborating where it shouldn't.
>I think democracies are our best option. What's your alternative?
Given a choice between statism (a monopoly on violence) and anarchy (a free market of violence), I would more trust a democratic form of a monopoly on violence, so I would agree... at least that democracy is the least worse option, depending on what you want.
But I also believe democracies tend to devolve into autocracies the larger and more complex they become and the more abstracted the machinery of power becomes from the voters, so I would add a caveat that democracies when limited in their scope and power are the best option, and that one should expect that, inevitably, the entire thing will rot on the vine and have to be done away with entirely.
Although I wouldn't go as far as Thomas Jefferson and say a democracy should have a revolution every 20 years, I think the concept of a regular (nonviolent) "reset" in order to keep government from growing too removed from the will of the people is worth considering.
How many long term democracies are there? If you mean US and not see corruption (which is only getting worse) then you are paying very poor attention. The US is an oligarchy at best and a fascist state (and no I do not mean Trump) at worst.
Democracies are not only direct, they're also representative. Also, no plan survives contact with the enemy, I'm not talking about Utopia here. The US is absolutely a democracy, as one manifests itself in real life. So is the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.
All of which are young. Saying singapore does not count while they do is cherry picking. The US if you count the time of slaves and when only white men could vote as a democracy is the oldest and arguably one of the most devolved and corrupted. So your argument for better stability is weak. The case for the US such as it is to be in its last days is quite strong.
Yes? I think it’s the habits of being a democracy, checks and balances, informed citizens, independent police and judiciary - that make a working system.
But if you are never allowed to build that, then what ?
I hold an even more unpopular opinion - socialism doesn't help the poor which it actually tries to. Take a look at how China, Russia and even India's elite have amassed wealth. Purely through a socialistic system which is supposed to help everyone by giving too much power to a handful of people.
To paraphrase someone on HN - laws tend to made for David to fight Goliath. But with time Goliath comes to understand the rules and uses it to shut down the Davids.
This is an evergreen story. Regulations sold as weapons for davids to defend against goliaths are instead used by goliaths to fend off davids. It turns out that Goliath can learn to use a sling too, and can hurl bigger stones with it. This is why goliaths like regulations so much, and why patents may be more disease than cure.
It depends on how you define and view "socialism". It seems to me most US citizens have a vert different view on socialism then everyone else from CommonWealth countries.
Even I have thought this for a while and India in it's current state has been a good example of a failed democratic state. While dictatorship cannot be the answer, I wonder if we should have some other alternatives mode of ruling too.
When votes can be easily bought by the politicians, the power resides with wealthy and few. Religion and caste still play very important role in politics.
Outsides won't understand and insiders fail to accept the truth. Because democracy is considered to be "untouchable" just like religion.
Even more absurd is their confidence that they can leash up hyper-masculine private security contractors - the men who hold the guns and kill for a living.
Depends. An actual leader able to convince them and strategize, plus handle logistics would probably do reasonably well. Especially a military commander.
Most of CEOs and managers aren't leaders of this sort - they have to pay people to follow them. The second the deal is bad and they cannot rely on contacts and politics, they are left in a ditch.
