Mystery shoppers were often paid in cheaper groceries, one time payments, etc (at least in the early 2000s). Mystery shoppers wasn’t a full time hourly job.
It’s a toy. How is this making any buzz, headlines, etc. Go to any store, go to the toy aisle, and 99% of the toys are not AI generated, etc. Lazy clickbait from everyone.
Yea, it isn't a statement or anything it's just Nintendo just making a good product and you can see the industrial design that it is the selling point. Apple used to have people complaining their AI solutions are sub par but, now since they control the App Store where many AI apps live they are the only ones making money.
If this was a hackaday project that was open & extensible it would be a cool post on HN, but as a commercial product it feels like a paid endorsement on the Today Show would be a better fit.
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
I think it's difficult to turn around, unless the mud is cleansed -- but most likely the mud doesn't want to be cleansed so it would rather take the whole pond with it.
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of:
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
The american government pretends to care, but the moment you look deeper (snowden leaks), it's clear that they don't. But the fact still stands, the population is mostly against surveilance while chinese just keep their head down.
They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
> They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
I can't say I'm as knowledgeable of Chinese history as you seem to be, so I appreciate the information. And I may have used less than accurate phrasing when I said that I thought Chinese people are likely unhappy to be in a repressed state.
Perhaps my comment should have been more specific about the fact I was referring to not having any freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing the government.
But as a thought experiment, what happens once the government does something unpopular? Or once the economy is no longer thriving?
The masses tend to be pacified when their basic needs are met and the unspoken social contract is upheld. But I'd be curious to see how the people react if the fallout from the ongoing real estate crisis in China continues to persist and affect middle-class people as just one example.
China certainly has a long history of centralized bureaucratic governance. It also has a long history of silencing its critics. They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai). It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
So sure, quality of life has generally gotten better for many people living in China. I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
You've shifted the argument. "China restricts freedom of speech, especially criticism of the government" is true. But that is not the same claim as "most Chinese people are unhappy, living with their heads down in fear of being disappeared". China is authoritarian and heavily censors speech but broad support for the system can still exist in an illiberal state, especially when people feel their lives have improved materially. China lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 40 years. Independent long run survey work from (if I remember correctly it was Harvard's) found extremely high satisfaction with China's central government, including 95.5% in around 2016.
The real question is whether your picture of ordinary Chinese life is accurate. And IMO it mostly isn't. This is not North Korea. Mainland residents made 291 million exit/entry trips in 2024 alone. There was a survey that found many respondents were willing to complain to the government or even protest over concrete issues like pollution, which is not how people behave if society is defined mainly by universal terror. So the better description is that China has hard political red lines, but normal daily life for most people is not "stay silent or vanish".
> They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai).
The Peng Shuai case became a major Western media story, yet the controversy lasted only a few weeks before the international attention faded. Meanwhile, the WTA eventually backed down from its boycott threats. This illustrates how these incidents are often weaponized for geopolitical narratives rather than representing systematic policy.
More broadly, every country has mechanisms to deal with corruption, fraud, and abuse. China's anti corruption campaign has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of officials. The difference is that in China, accountability flows through Party mechanisms rather than Western style independent judiciaries.
> It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
That was over 35 years ago in 1989, so longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You're basicallt judging present day Germany by conditions in 1945. China's government, economy, and society have transformed fundamentally since then.
> I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
The assumption that 1.4 billion people live in constant terror is simply not consistent with what we observe. If the level of fear you describe were accurate, would we not expect to see mass emigration rather than the world's largest annual outbound tourism? Would we not see economic collapse? The voluntary return of over 100 million Chinese travelers annually many of whom have the means to stay abroad tells you something significant about where people actually want to live.
Predictions that Chinese society is one downturn away from revolt have been made for decades, and they have repeatedly been wrong.
An authoritarian system can be repressive and still enjoy genuine mass support. In China's case, the evidence strongly suggests that both things are true at once.
The CCP's legitimacy rests not merely on performance but on a coherent worldview that China's developmental challenges require a unified national direction rather than gridlocked partisan competition. For a country that experienced a century of humiliation, civil war, and famine, stability is existential.
You wrote that quality of life improvements "don't really negate" your fear based argument. But I'd ask: at what point does aggregate human welfare matter more than ideological purity? If a governance system has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while maintaining social order and national dignity, on what grounds do outsiders declare it illegitimate?
The Chinese people are not waiting for Western validation. They're building a civilization according to their own traditions and values.
What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
Being willing to fight for what you think is right even though there is no hope of winning is a choice you can make without being a tacticool yokel that doesn't understand the tech gap between the people and their masters.
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results.
People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams
- surveilled digital communications
- social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
It’s not even “falling behind”, it’s willfully jamming heads in sand and actively blocking innovation so the legacy US OEMs can fall further behind and become less relevant.
The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in backwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
>First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Anti-corruption pushes in the government are 100% purges, just under a different name. As for Jack Ma, wasn't he targeted because he said something that the censors really didn't like all while pushing some finance app? My memory is hazy as to why it happened, but it certainly wasn't because he was wealthy.
There were lots of red flags with Xi, and I’m afraid the world will learn the wrong lessons from his success. Maybe Democracy really is overrated, after all it gave us Trump…twice. The world looks at the USA and China as role models, and only the latter don’t look like a complete clown.
He did suffer from the cultural revolution but afterward he was elevated with strong preference. He even lost one of those Chinese “elections” where they take the top 20 out of 21 candidates, and they still let him through.
Jack Ma’s situation wasn’t corruption though. He simply made the mistake of publicly criticizing the government’s economic policy. He was disappeared shortly after. Then he reappeared a few months later and he has been on his best behavior since.
> First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.
Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality.
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world.
There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US.
The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda.
The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out
Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US?
Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
> you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes.
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
Many things are private but some of them are more private than others, the details can be quite intriguing.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
This is a comically uneducated take. Talk to a nurse and ask them how their week was. Then talk to someone at an insurance provider. The ask how much each makes.
Exactly, ask anyone in a job for the money how their week was.
Not saying nursing is stress free, or every nurse is bad, but like tech companies in 2021, it's full of directionless people who pushed through the cert program to get paid $50/hr with $100/hr weekend shifts and be disgruntled with you that you are making them do work.
I doubt that "directionless" people would put up with those working conditions, and many leave the sector after a few years, simply because they burn out. Nearly no one works 100% long-term, just because it's too much too.
Perhaps unlike Germany, in the US, people in those positions will not be able to come close to earning what they earn if they leave. Probably only half at best. A medical cert doesn't translate to much else besides the cert.
So like you mentioned, it's very difficult and grueling work, and people (in the US at least) get trapped because of the money. Passionless souls doing something they hate because they'll lose their upscale home and Mercedes if they quit.
I doubt that they hate what they do, it's just the shitty working conditions that render you unempathic and cynical.
Most of them care very much about what they do, and give everything they can for the patients. Otherwise they would have quit a long time ago.
(I've had to do a 3-month nursing internship as part of my medical studies, it's mandatory in Germany)
Better staffing makes a day and night difference. I've experienced it first-hand as a doctor. The more overworked you are, the more cynical and unempathic you get.
After a weekend or some time off, it's already much better
In other countries with better staffing (Switzerland or Austria), it's a also very noticeable how much better the mood and morale is of the staff.
Nurses in Germany could never afford a Mercedes or an upscale home, but they would also probably make less, switching jobs. It's not that they don't love their job, they just can't take it anymore. You also rarely see old nurses for that reason.
Well then, I am glad Germany figured out better pricing for healthcare. If the pay is middling and the work hard, you end up with mostly committed workers, because others don't enter the field with dollar signs in their eyes.
I hope you see that my point isn't that nursing is easy, my point is that (in the US) the pay is very high and the barrier to entry is moderate. So it becomes a magnet for people who just want to make money. This becomes even more true for med tech jobs, where you can blast through a cert in a year, and land a $30/hr job pretty quickly. That's about 50% more money than people typically in that education class earn.
This will do poorly with the HN crowd because they can write or understand code. This is an incredible tool for TikTok/nontechnical people who don’t know anything about ai, and want to see their random idea turned into a game. Really cool!
Just checked AMC - $18.50 in the app for a normal adult ticket. ($16 + $2.50 fee for using the app). An icee and popcorn would be ballpark $18 as well.
About the same where I am. A matinee used to be cheap, now it’s the price you said, and more like 20 for the full price show.
You don’t have to pay the app “convenience fee” but they added assigned seats to pressure you to do so. If you wait till the day of and buy on the big kiosk in the lobby, what if all the good seats are gone? (Hint: they won’t be, the theaters are always mostly empty)
Not even good seats, but if you're in a group you may not be all able to sit together. Or if you get your tickets and someone wants to join you later, there could be nothing left near you. I'm not a fan of assigned seating for those reasons.
Imagine opting to use Wordpress over a local or desktop app/tool. In theory this is kind of a cool idea, but the bloat of Wordpress is insanely not worth using over.. a .html file.
If collaborative blogging wasn't dying, this would be a cool way to write contributor articles and then share them with an editor. Though I don't know how you would pull out single articles instead of a whole backup.
Boulder is not a town you generally want to upset, I would expect this to have an outsized inverse impact compared to what the White House expects over the long term.
There’s a lot of different reasons that have nothing to do with this particular situation that has led to the saying that Boulder is “nine square miles surrounded by reality”…
In places with Asian grocery stores, or cities with larger Asian isles, yes - we have tons of options. But sriracha is widely loved, many people have never heard of sambal but use sriracha all day.
I agree many Americans wouldn't have a clue if you just asked them for sambal but if you said "that spicy chili paste in the jar at Asian restaurants" they'd know exactly what you're talking about.
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