In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right.

When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal.

President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing.

Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside.

Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too.

When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out.

Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves.

Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.

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mmooss an hour ago | parent [-]

I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but

> China is demanding more.

I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

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reinitctxoffset 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry.

Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects.

They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off.

Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change?

Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits.

Real wages are going up.

The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people.

It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.

	▲	mmooss 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As I said, I have yet to see evidence. That's a bunch of words, but if we didn't know before LLMs and before the Internet, we know now: words are cheap and valueless without other properties. What distinguishes those words from propaganda? Why should someone believe it's true? Throwing insults at people who disagree or question you makes it less likely there is substance to the words.