>there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then: >1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason >2. there's corruption > Less incompetency

You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility.

Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US.

You analysis is valid, but inconclusive.

>furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. >I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.

First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that.

That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it.

>this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. >you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.

You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about.

The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.

> one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally.

Is that true?

There is a relationship here. It is not a perfect one, but it is real, and pretending otherwise just avoids the tradeoff.

Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.

The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible.

Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation.

That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground.

You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.

Freedom Theater

Any freedom. For example you don't have the freedom to own guns in China.

The U.S. doesn't have that much real freedom. It is nearly completely controlled by a concentrated oligarchy of people and corporations. Sure, there are rights, but these are almost entirely enforced via a massively beauractic and expensive judicial system. So if your rights are violated, it can take months and perhaps thousands or millions of dollars to prove and correct such violations. A cop murders someone? That takes like two years or more of trials and appeals if it even escapes internal affairs and the district attorney's office.

As an example, Texas is a state that prides itself on freedom but is incredibly privatized. There's hardly any public land. The entire electricity grid is privately owned. Toll roads abound in every major city. Over 20% of homes have an HOA, so those Texans have people (basically a small corporation) telling them how to cut their lawn. Women can't get medically suggested abortions. Universities are told what to teach by donors and politicans. For a while, the Texas DMV was collecting fingerprints just to get a license. Is that really freedom?

I'm specifically talking about Chinas' lack of freedoms... which is entirely different then Brasil or Argentina.

I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.

Calling something “insane” is not an argument. It is a way to terminate a line of reasoning before it forces you to confront tradeoffs you would rather not look at. Once you label a position as madness, you no longer have to examine whether it explains real outcomes in the world. That move shortens the discussion, but it does not strengthen your position.

You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale.

This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy.

The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened.

Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes.

Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan.

You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot.

The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all.

If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.

That’s a joke right?

Science demands rigour and repeatability.

This will kill most future investment in offshore wind even if those projects are sucessful.

The US president just today said that Republicans should "nationalize the voting" in future elections.

Is that especially simpler than e.g. an attack on the above ground cabling systems by firing carbon fibre conducting wires over them, as the US is said to have done in the Iraq war? Not that I don't think underwater drones are a future risk, but the belief its a risk which can't be mitigated, or a worse risk than ones which exist onshore, seems a bit weak.

But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?

Say that it is .. it's still hard to near simultaneously take out all wind generators than to mass swarm (with a smaller number) a single platform, well head grouping, or onshore processing facility.

Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.

Ropes are strong because of many strands.

That would seem like either an excellent way to start a new war, or a galactically stupid way to try to end one.

Don't wind turbines get serviced a few times a year? I would bet that on any given day there will be people at the farms.

Yes, I think thats very plausible. "inshore defense operations in an area of strategic importance will be excessively impeded by both development of this site, and future operations in ways which <REDACTED>" type thing.

Wind is the worst of all, otherwise the UK would have the cheapest energy in the West, instead of the highest