You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.

The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.

We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.

I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.

Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.

Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.

In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.

Daily life can also be fine in fascism if you don't belong to any "unpopular" groups and don't care about any. Until the customary war starts, that is...

I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.

That's... Sufficiently concerning, don't you think?

That affects everyone.

That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.

Or god forbid you want to have some say in policy ... are concerned about opportunities.

Let alone the fact that how authoritarian varies wildly, just like how free ... but they're not the same.

And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?

There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.

They are less prepared for problems. And so suddenly problems happen all the time.

But when there are no problems... Things are going well for the average person.

At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.

Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.

Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.

It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.

Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.

However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.

That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.

This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.

All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.

Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.

That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.

Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.

This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.

If you call it what it actually is, too many Americans might actually connect the dots.

In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.

Or that's how it used to be.

The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.

This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.

The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.

When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.

Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.

If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.

What I took from the experience (especially after going through various iterations of it in several other countries) is that most communities are biased against migrants/newcomers. Egalitarianism would be nice, but in practice nepotism and chauvinism are encoded in policy.

Requested a personal card with no credit score and that somehow went through fine despite friends in similar circumstances getting rejected. Best guess is because I had a company issued Amex already they could use that as history

Duly noted. I might be in your position one day in the far future. Will prep for it.

Thanks :)

Seems to me to be dependent on how the incentives line up.

A credit bureau WANTS you to part with any money you might have for a car. So it works out when they control the issuance of your loan.

But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?

Social credit would be like if the government didn't let people lend to you for being a commie or trans. Social credit is not something you can just sort out on the phone.

Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.

That bartender most likely has 3 to 5 worse assholes every shift and dozen usual assholes . He is not going to remember he doesn’t care.

Local non profit after 2 years most likely won’t have the same people and top guys won’t remember all one off volunteers.

Believing any of it having more significance would be attributed to “spotlight effect” in my opinion.

Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.

The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.

So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.

In large, dense cities you’re pretty much anonymous; I could dance naked in a main street today and (provided no one’s recording) carry on with my life with zero repercussions.

Some people make a living out of that fact. Tourist traps do not exactly engage recurring customers, every purchase is a customer’s first.

One is more distributed and not controlled by any single entity, the other puts all the power over your life into the hands of a few oligarchs.

and people don't just remember. sometimes they set you up to test you and or to give you a chance.

some other times they set someone else up to test you and or to give you a chance.

and sometimes people poison others to increase their and or your social credit.

as Austin Powers (or was it Ali G?) said quite eloquently: "behave".

Although Meta is trying to "fix" that last part of course.

> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.

In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.

Quite a difference.

The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.

But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.

I think, at least from my interpretation of it from being in China and having Chinese family, that something like underage drinking is seen more as a family issue, than a legal issue. What stops the 16 year old from drinking? The fact that their friends / family will see them being drunk, and think less of the person and their family. A 16 year old being drunk in public is family issue. Sure, the cops will intervene at some point, but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does.

What if I want to buy copious amounts for a party? Or there was a discount so you want to stock up? This seems a bit shortsighted, it is not always the case that if you buy something then you need to consume it right away.

Plenty of cops have shot/executed innocent people, and were declared not guilty due to qualified immunity.

Plus, a phone in China can't execute you either. It'd be the police goons who do that.

It's popular because it solves the problem (not ALL problems, but the one they're trying to solve) and it's easy and low-barrier to implement and use.

That supports the original argument if anything. If "Here's how I did X" generates interest on HN, it's quite likely that X is very challenging for the average person.

There's no sure thing to be an alternative that is actually different.

I'm reminded of the SCOTUS arguments about cellphones and tracking, or just technology in general (the actual case(s) aren't so relevant as the arguments).

The argument at one point was that since you're carrying a cellphone or using a computer in some way that tracks your location you made a choice and that end result might be to just give up your right to privacy / location data because you chose to carry a cellphone.

Fortunately a few judges recognized that cell phones aren't just an accessory you pick and choose, they're part of daily life now, to operate in society you generally will need / want one, accordingly you should be able to do so without giving up some rights.

Unfortunately, the same arguments didn't carry over into topics like binding arbitration and so on ...

Specifically all of the parts about commenting. Looking at your posts it seemed like you had no idea these exist.

I think here is the difference between your and authors optics. You count businesses (does this include large corporations/organizations?) as individuals.

On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.

If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.

While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).

The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.

No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.

We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.

> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.

The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.

Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.

Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.

The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.

> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.

> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.

I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.

the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC

there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons

It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.

This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.

> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.

It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**

-----

[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.

[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.

"the only difference between your phone and china's social credit system is that your phone is real"

One day you'll be denied care or your insurance premiums will quadruple because you buy too much sweets in Amazon, or because you once said you fell off a chair while drunk in a party in Instagram. Then you'll care.

Well, delivery addresses can be somehow anonymized by the use of PO boxes; names on credit cards, not so much.

use the same phone number, email address or credit card and they know you are the same person, use the same wifi spot or IP address with the same behaviour and they can intimate you are the same.. Even badly written data analysis can do this and a VPN from another country and different username wont convince any system with an ounce of sense.

Instaban. Every. Time.