eagleislandsong

Whether they do so with labeled accounts or not seems more of an implementation detail.

I think this is an implementation detail of huge significance.

In the CPF system, your current contributions pay for your own future retirement. In the Social Security system, your current contributions pay for current retirees' retirement.

The CPF system is sustainable, because it truly is a savings scheme. The U.S. Social Security system is not, because it relies on having a tax base that never diminishes.

only Singaporeans wouldn't consider that a tax

Both forced savings and taxes are legally mandated by the government, but that does not mean that forced savings are taxes. Implementation details matter.

Your money in your own CPF account accumulates interest (at decent/attractive interest rates that generally exceed inflation rates), and is then paid out tax-free to you after retirement.

Additionally CPF funds are managed separately from the government's consolidated revenue. They are administered by the CPF Board and are not used for government expenses in its yearly budget.

force foreign manufacturers

Is it accurate to say that these companies are "forced"? Shareholders make cold, unfeeling, selfish calculations all the time. The shareholders of these companies could simply elect not to do business in China and accept the consequences of diminishing their access to the Chinese market.

Using the word "force" suggests that the largest shareholders of these corporations are victims acting under duress, which they most certainly aren't.

Seems like U.S. healthcare spending is 17.5%-19.5% of its GDP: "Overall, health spending was 17.6% of GDP in 2023, similar to pre-pandemic shares (17.5% in 2019) after an uptick in 2020 (19.5%) and 2021 (18.3%)." (https://www.ama-assn.org/about/ama-research/trends-health-ca...)

Yes, they do. They accept Monero too.

The real movement is the mfg flocking out of China and into our allies countries.

If Trump cared so much about America's allies, why has he also imposed tariffs on Canada and repeatedly threatened to annex it? Why has he repeatedly talked about annexing Greenland?

Well, as I mentioned, many (or most) Europeans believe that they have arrived at the end of history, the peak of enlightenment. So according to their belief, Europeans are absolutely qualified to be the arbiter.

We should all watch and criticize other countries so humanity can improve.

Many (if not most) Europeans think it is perfectly fine when they criticise other countries; but when people from other countries criticise Europe, these very same Europeans tend to agitatedly accuse these critics of interference in their domestic affairs.

From these Europeans' point of view, humanity progresses in pre-ordained stages, and Europe has already reached the end of history, the pinnacle of human development, and other countries just need to catch up.

because we've seen what happens when Europe has more power than the rest of the world. It wasn't pretty for the rest of the world.

Indeed. At the height of their power, the Europeans and the Americans colonised, pillaged, plundered, murdered, started wars, and enslaved. This isn't ancient history either; e.g. after World War 2 the French tried to re-colonise Vietnam, fought in a war against the Algerians to prevent them from declaring independence, and has continued meddling in the Sahel States up to the present day, among other atrocities.

And don't get me started about how the IMF has frequently been wielded as an extractive tool by Western nations to exploit impoverished countries in times of desperation. So when the West falsely accuses [0][1] China of debt trap diplomacy, the hypocrisy is palpable.

[0] https://yawboadu.substack.com/i/142330715/is-debt-trap-diplo... [1] https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/the-hambantota-port-deal-myt...

I wouldn't call it a dictatorship -- no label neatly applies to Singapore, but calling it a dictatorship (even if benevolent) is quite incorrect. Describing it as a soft authoritarian country is much more appropriate.

I never understood why libertarians/free market proponents think that Singapore is the paragon of laissez-faire economics. Try studying the country's housing market policies, for example, and you'll quickly realise that the government is extremely interventionist.

The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.

point to the region inhabited by only pengins and suggest they should bomb them back into the stone age

Or levy tariffs on the penguins.

can’t find anything that agrees

That's because many people allow their (completely warranted) distrust of the CCP to justify all sorts of other spurious, baseless accusations of the CCP.

The CCP has done many things that deserve criticism; let's not invent new ones.

卖血记 by 许三观

The book is called 《许三观卖血记》, and its author is 余华.

许三观 is not the author's name.

if I lived in a society that never had such a norm, I imagine I would regard the advocates for introducing such a norm into my society to have the burden of proof that doing so would be worth it.

Thank you for being open-minded and for having empathy.

I stopped reading him ~10 years ago, so I didn't keep up with what he wrote about ivermectin.

Thanks for sharing that blog post. I think it illustrates very well what I meant by employing argumentative sleights of hand to hide hollow ideas.

Personally I think Scott Alexander is overrated. His writing style is extraordinarily verbose, which lends itself well to argumentative sleights of hand that make his ideas come across as much more substantive than they really are.

President Biden (or rather, someone with control of President Biden’s autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon backdated to 2014.

This merely proved that President Biden believed that President Trump will prosecute and imprison Dr Fauci if given the opportunity.

NPR was wrong

Maybe they were wrong, or maybe they weren't. Trump changes his mind every single day. What was true yesterday might no longer be true today.

17% ... When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we were at 20%.

Where did you get these figures from? According to OECD, the US' tax revenue-to-GDP ratio was 27.6% in 2022 and 25.2% in 2023: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i... It was 28.3% in 2000, when Clinton was still President.

cares much about democracy anymore

Anymore? Arguably, the US never did. Ask, for example, the people living in Caribbean or Latin American countries what happened when they elected leaders that the US disliked.

Or Iran. Or Italy. Or Congo. And so on.

Or ask the Indonesians about the mass killings in their country in 1965-1966, supported by the US. Around 500,000 people died, though some estimates put the number of deaths at 1,000,000. Ask the Filipinos about how the US propped up their military dictatorship back in the 1970s-1980s.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The US has never been sincerely interested in democracy -- only strategically. The illusion that the US cared about democracy was a primarily Western luxury.

In implementing it the USA would simply be doing what they have for years accused China of doing

It's bad only when other people/countries do it (small businesses, students, China, and so on).

at the cost of... welfare

If politicians no longer care about winning elections, then they might campaign on this.

They have difficulty paying $3K

$9k, actually. He wrote that the unit price increased from $6 to $15. But your point stands nonetheless.

When Taiwan operated in one party rule under the Chiang family they did not make significant economic progress

This is objectively wrong.

Taiwan made tremendous economic progress during the period of one-party rule under Chiang Kai-shek and later his son Chiang Ching-kuo. During the KMT's authoritarian rule from the late 1940s through the 1980s, Taiwan experienced the "Taiwan Miracle". Land reforms in the 1950s boosted agricultural productivity and created a rural middle class. In the 1960s Taiwan shifted from an agriculture-based economy to an export-oriented industrial economy, and by the 1980s Taiwan had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, with GDP growth rates often exceeding 8-10% annually. Chiang pursued an export-led growth model, encouraging foreign investment and industrial development, supporting industries like semiconductors, which is why you have TSMC today.

The KMT government also made major investments in education, particularly in science and engineering, hugely increasing literacy rates. All these strategic initiatives and policies meant that Taiwan became one of the Four Asian Tigers by the 1980s.

On a slightly related note, on Taiwanese social media today it is not uncommon to come across Taiwanese people lamenting that the KMT built the TSMC, and the DPP is selling it out. Whether this is a fair and accurate assessment of the DPP is another discussion, but this seems to be the sentiment among many Taiwanese these days.

China's use of social reputation scores in denying government services

Be skeptical of what you read in Western media when it comes to non-Western countries (especially China).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

"There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.[4][7] According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit "score" is a myth as there is "no score that dictates citizen's place in society".[4] ...

There has been a degree of misreporting and misconceptions in English-language mass media due to translation errors, sensationalism, conflicting information and lack of comprehensive analysis.[6][43][111][44][119] Examples of such popular misconceptions include a widespread misassumption that Chinese citizens are rewarded and punished based on a numerical score (social credit score) assigned by the system, that its decisions are taken by AI and that it constantly monitors Chinese citizens.[7][111][39][120][4][5] ... Academic Vincent Brussee writes that as of 2023, "hundreds of headlines have discussed the system, but few have systematically broken down what the [social credit system] is and how it works. Some studies refer to the 'breathtaking' ambition of the system and the 'massive quantities of behavioural data' going into the system without substantiating these claims in any way. Others rely on assumptions of what the system will look like, erroneously speculating that everyone will receive a social credit score, that this score will be publicly available, and that a bad rating will have far-reaching consequences. It is like a game of Chinese Whispers gone wrong."[16]: 40"

While it is true that Vance did not literally refer to all Chinese people as peasants, I do worry that such rhetoric will stoke the flames of racially motivated anti-Asian/anti-Chinese attacks.

I don't want to discuss whether he is genuinely racist; I think that's besides the point. Words can have a lot of impact, especially when uttered by a public figure in such a powerful position. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the Vice President of the United States to carefully weigh the consequences of his words before speaking.

Link: https://archive.vn/9bjz2

Immigration will take a nosedive under Trump.

for reasons beyond me

It might help to understand that the resistance you have faced is probably driven by deep-seated biases and stubbornness.

a decade

You're quite optimistic. With the current administration and its purge of federal workers (including those in NIST), it will likely take much longer than that.