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Chinese prisoner’s ID card apparently found in lining of Regatta coat
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Slave labor?
For all we know it could be the exact same thing the US does with our prisoner work programs.
So if we're going to call out China, can we please stop doing it here too?
B-but China bad
Both? Both. Both is good.
Sure, but the sheer number of warcrimes the US has committed in foreign countries, like the 1973 Chilean coup to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende and install a military dictatorship, or the 1965 Indonesian mass killings etc. aren't even comparable to China, or any other country for that matter.
Not to mention the Palestinian genocide they're funding right now. At least China handles extremist groups like the ETIM by 're-educating' them and assimilating them into the rest of the country. As fucked up as that is since it's cultural repression, at least they're not fucking bombing them.
I'm sure you can Google china warcrimes as well. Assuming you're not inside the great firewall of China, that is. Let's not pretend China is good just because US is bad.
Never said they were good. Just that it's absurd to compare China to the sheer amount of death and destruction the US has selfishly caused, and continues to cause, everywhere in the world for the profit of the ruling class.
as opposed to the exact same thing China does for the profit of their ruling class, but worse
Since Xiaoping's market reforms, China has nationalized numerous exploitative private companies, decreased working hours to 8 per day, improved working conditions, gotten rid of hundreds of thousands of corrupt officials, purged greedy billionaires like Jack Ma, and built the most extensive high-speed rail and public transport system in the world.
China, with 5x the population of the US, had 121k covid deaths, while the US had 1.2mil. Because the latter prioritizes capital/profit over human lives, while China does the opposite.
These are clearly in the interest of the Proletariat/working class, not the ruling class; China has actively punished the latter.
And all that without overthrowing foreign governments and causing genocides. So how is China even comparable to the US, aside from their economic growth? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe western media tries to show their geopolitical rivals in a bad light, even when they're objectively better?
wait, you are using the propaganda figures of an authoritarian shithole that openly genocides one ethnicity after the other as your source?
ya, if you go by that logic, I'd just use PraugerU and claim that America is a morally pure nation who's only problem is the existence of civil rights...
The Covid deaths are from WHO, what the fuck are you talking about?
The irony of saying that in context of the US where 0.7% of the population is in jail, lmao.
There is an actual genocide happening in Palestine. Even the US State department says there are no mass killings in Xinjiang, likely because the US can't infiltrate and cause one like they did in Indonesia.
Remind me: Who's doing the reporting?
Lmao, if you refuse to accept even sources like WHO, there's no discussion to be had here.
If you don't understand how a country self-reporting a statistic like that is unreliable then you're right, there is no discussion to be had. It would be a waste of anyone's time (including the time it just took me to write this comment).
But the source isn't WHO, it's the Chinese government...
How's Evergrande doing? What about Chinese property in general? All that ghost housing the population have sunk their savings into is appreciating nicely, yes? What's the birth rate like in China now vs 60 years ago by the way? How's that compare to other powers? What's the average age of the Chinese population, again? And boy howdy the Uighurs are going to be glad the CCP aren't into genocide.
It's not a good idea to trust the numbers the CCP provides (if you can even get recent ones). I don't pretend the US is good, but I'm not about to suck the dick of any country like you are just because they're not America.
Funny how everyone complains about US investors sitting on property makes housing unaffordable and also complains that surplus housing in China makes housing a bad investment.
Everyone hates everything.
Are you trying to imply that everywhere is the same? Different places, different problems, different causes.
Surplus housing was built in China because the population needed a safe investment for their savings. The stock market is too volatile, and investing overseas is tightly controlled, so housing has been the choice because it lasts.
In the US, there's a conflux of factors that's led to a housing shortage, then the pandemic exacerbated that situation, and now spiking interest rates are making it unaffordable to move for the few who did manage to buy a home with their meagre resources. Then, of course, there's institutional investment buying up single-family homes and driving up prices even more.
The point is that China is not some perfect übermensch, even compared to the US, and anyone claiming otherwise needs to be corrected.
I didn't claim they were.
Whatever the cause, the surplus of housing in China can't be seen as a negative for the same reason a lack of housing is a negative in the US.
You can't have it both ways.
The trains ran on time under Mussolini. Just because a dictatorship does bad things doesn't mean absolutely everything must be bad. Just because a democracy does good things doesn't mean everything is perfect.
The person I originally responded to was, and you replied to me defending their point, so yeah, you're taking it up. If you didn't mean to, fine. The rest of my post stands. To wit:
What the hell are you talking about? Too much of anything is bad, just like too little is bad. Americans don't have their entire life savings sunk into investment properties nobody wants. The Chinese population does. If nobody wants those properties they own, nobody buys them, and the value tanks. If the construction of those properties had been funded by the government you might have a point, but when it's funded by the life savings of 900 million people or more, that's a major fucking problem, and it's not related in any way shape or form to the American housing market.
No I didn't. I specifically ended with, "Everyone hates everything."
Just like too little of anything is also bad.
If the value tanks, homes are affordable.
You can't have it both ways.
So when I said "just like too little is bad", which you even actually quoted, you just decided to ignore that and the rest of my words to restate your prior, addressed, and wrong point.
Affordable housing does not depend on bankrupting your entire populace, as in China, nor is it possible in a system like that in the US that refuses to build more housing to sate the demand of the existing populace (let alone population expansion).
They. Are. Different. Problems. They. Have. Different. Causes. And. Solutions.
I was highlighting that you see the problem without acknowledging the hypocrisy.
One is oversupply causing lower prices. This helps new families at the expense of investors. The other is under supply. This hurts new families and helps investors. When housing crashed in 2008, new home buyers were happy while the media lamented the home owner investors who lost value. You can't have lower prices without oversupply.
It doesn't matter if we don't like China's government. The math of supply and demand is the same.
If this was 1935, you'd be posting that trains on time in Italy is bad but late trains in the US is different because "reasons".
Hypocrisy? Your point so far has been
As though one is bad and one isn't. It's the most braindead take I've ever heard, like you don't understand that supply and demand can intersect without bankrupting the populace or putting them on the street. Like you don't understand that the government in China has created this problem by stopping people from sending their money overseas and failing to regulate stability into their stock market.
I'll tell you what. If the above quote doesn't describe your position, why don't you quote yourself and explain in more detail for the class.
That China created the oversupply doesn't change that it keeps housing cheap.
You argue as if the reason for the oversupply supply is only thing that's important. "Your honor, I murdered the victim using my democratic free market philosophy so the death is actually good. But that other murderer was a communist dictator so they should get the death penalty."
An oversupply keeps housing cheap. The US directly regulates the price of food by subsidizing farmers to maintain an oversupply that keeps food cheap. This hurts investors in futures markets but benefits all Americans. The Fed regulates interest rates to control inflation. This hurt stock market investors but benefits American consumers.
Do you mock all regulation or only when it's not the US?
So you simply will not explain your prior argument that if an oversupply is bad then an undersupply must be good, otherwise I am somehow a hypocrite.
My argument is that to say China is doing something better than America with regard to the well-being of it's citizenry is patently false. My examples included Evergrande, which is bankrupt, and the extreme overexposure of the Chinese citizenry to one type of asset which has every reason to tank into the ground because there are fewer and fewer new families being created to buy those properties at the original prices or higher. There is not now and will never be enough demand to keep those properties from depreciating massively.
Undersupply of housing in America is causing problems for new families, BUT:
the US government does not limit the financial freedoms of it's populace to the same degree, not even close, so
overbuilding in the US would not be done with the money of retail investors, but likely with a combination of federal incentives/grants/tax write-offs and private investment funds
therefore, a sudden oversupply of housing in the US would not pose the same problems as it does in China right now
Go ahead and strawman my arguments some more, you're only telling on yourself at this point.
My first statement was "everyone hates everything"
That is people criticize oversupply and undersupply. But it's one of the other. Markets aren't stable. It's why the US subsidizes food to keep the market at oversupply.
You criticized China's oversupply and ignored US's undersupply. Even after you mentioned US's undersupply in a reply, you still only criticized China's oversupply.
The 2008 real estate crash was not planned by the US government. The overbuilding was done with the money of retail investors.
Low income housing projects are subsidized by the government all the time.
My personal hot take is that oversupply is good for workers at the expense of investors. Investors are excess capital looking to make money without producing anything. Workers actually produce. Shifting excess capital from investors to workers is a good thing in the long term.
This is the post I was responding to when you decided to jump in with your spicy bullshit take:
I'm not ignoring American undersupply, it's not relevant in this thread, but I have explicitly mentioned it being bad, and you even quoted me that it's bad. You are now being blocked, if not for being a troll then for being so irredeemably stupid there's no point interacting further. Good fucking day.
I didn't defend that op. I criticized one part of your reply. But you are so angry at China, that they could cure cancer and you'd say it's horrible and America should not do it because all the Pharma investors would lose their money.
Last I heard, Evergrade's chairman was selling their luxury property to pay for the debt. And you guys are still calling planned cities 'ghost housing'? Lmao. Cool name though. I'd say the US could learn from it, but they're unlikely to do something that's not profitable.
You do realize you can google things yourself, right? China's demographics are similar to the US, though, afaik.
Like I said in another comment, even the US State department says there are no mass killings in Xinjiang, and those guys would love to report otherwise. It's probably not good there, though. Bad Empanada looked into it, and there seems to be cultural repression going on. He has sources in the video's description.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Bad Empenada
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If by assimilating them, you mean castrating the men and raping their women, sure
Have to pay the prisoners a prevailing wage in the USA when working for private businesses.
Edit: You don't need to pay them the prevailing wage when they are not working for private companies so. If they are cooking or cleaning in the prison or making license plates they make peanuts.
Seems China underpays their prison labourers but they should get paid. Should.
That prevailing wage? Most prison laborers in America make less than $0.50 an hour If they're even paid at all, and are severely punished if they try to take a sick day.
I can't find anything that specifically says that Walmart, Wendy's, McDonald's or any of the other ones pays even minimum wage to prison laborers, but these businesses do get a $2,400 tax credit for each work release inmate they employ. The work release inmates are probably paid a real wage because they count as real people but I have trouble believing they would ever pay more than they absolutely had to for an inmate's labor.
Thats correct when it's not private industry. So if they make license plates as that's government owned they can pay them whatever they want.
I'll throw an edit in my comment. Thought I made it clear enough.
I suggest you update your information, because there are plenty of inmates working for less than prevailing wage in the US.
It came out a couple years ago that inmates in my state were raising goats and making goat cheese for Whole Foods. The wage for prisoners here is $2/day. There’s a state somewhere to my east where prisoners work at Burger King for similar wages.