https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

i don't disagree though, maybe for differing reasons

Allowing a rocket to fall on land like that shows extreme contempt for public safety.

Unlike other minority groups, it appears to be relatively common for universities to discount their score by that amount.

Yes. As a guest or visitor. I am granted a lot of deference. Especially in someone's home. Chinese are very friendly.

But China is modernizing, progressing, very rapidly, and much of that has a human cost. So think it still is correct, that OP was implying, that China will not be as worried about controlling AI. As many fear, China will use AI for surveillance and control.

From to the Range Commanders Council Range Safety Group, 2010, summary of FTS requirements:

2. produce a small number of pieces, all of which are unstable and impact within a small footprint;

And also another requirement relevant to this particular video where the spent booster clearly had uncombusted carcinogenic hypergolic fuel when it hit the ground:

3. control disposition of hazardous materials (burning propellant, toxic materials, radioactive materials, ordnance, etc.);

I think that's a ideology thing that goes across borders, as it's a problem on both sides of the pacific.

Other countries seem to be very careful with their reentry plans.

- American AI “safety” practices have little or nothing in common with best practices in other fields of engineering, to the extent they can be said to exist at all (most AI safety work focuses on making sure the AI doesn’t say anything that might offend someone).

- When a rocket blows up, people die but we learn from the mistake. When an AI seriously “threatens humanity”, humanity dies and we very possibly don’t get a second chance.

AI taking over the world is, as yet, an imagined threat.

When AI proves it will take over the world and China builds theirs without the "don't take over the world" code mandated by every other country, let's talk more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Disadvan...

Maxim 43

https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_...

We have no possible way of knowing that, given this is Communist China with a press-freedom index of approximately -∞, and a *documented history* [0] of concealing and covering up politically-inconvenient mass casualty events, including, very specifically, government rocket boosters landing on civilians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

- "The nature and extent of the damage remain a subject of dispute. The Chinese government, through its official Xinhua news agency, reported that six people were killed and 57 injured. Western media speculated that between a few dozen and 500 people might have been killed in the crash; "dozens, if not hundreds", of people were seen to gather outside the centre's main gate near the crash site the night before launch.[4] When reporters were being taken away from the site, they found that most buildings had sustained serious damage or had been flattened completely.[4] Some eyewitnesses were noted as having seen dozens of ambulances and many flatbed trucks, loaded with what could have been human remains, being taken to the local hospital.[4]"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apparently the sites were established inland for security reasons in the 1970s. One could call that paranoid but they had just had all their coastal cities occupied a few decades prior.

Philippines - Taiwan - Japan kind of limit options, for diplomatic (oops), military (it looks like you're launching a missile at us), and national security (still boosting and interceptable over another country's territory) reasons.

I’m surprised they don’t launch from Hainan or the coast nearby to get farther south.

""China’s first three launch sites were established during the Cold War. Sites deep inland were thus selected to provide a measure of protection amid tensions with the U.S. and Soviet Union.

This means launches result in rocket boosters—which separate from the main stage once they have performed their task—falling to ground downrange rather than in the oceans, as is the case with U.S. and European launches.

Authorities are understood to issue warnings and evacuation notices for areas calculated to be at risk from launch debris, reducing the risk of injuries.""

That's why they were prevented from leaving the old soviet bloc, and why things like this happen in China.

No government wants to lose all its people - since without people, there is nobody to tax.

In fact, giving up US citizenship is already made rather difficult - you typically have a huge tax bill to pay, and many people cannot afford to pay it, so cannot leave.

Trying to restrict the free movement of citizens here would throw the country into hellish anarchy, why would any “power that be” attempt that? The cost would wildly exceed any benefit.

If anybody in such a society wants to get anything done, they have to build a coalition and sell others on the thing they want to do. This is a very, very good thing.

Plenty of reasons people might want to leave a country en-mass, and some of them can't be fixed with a new government.

Aside from “privatizing profits socialize losses”, why would the government care about fewer people paying the same percentage of their taxes? That makes no sense. Their budgets would contract with the demands.

This is already somewhat of an issue for American immigrants moving to Europe. Some banks just refuse to open accounts for them.

Isn’t labour having most of a stake a more communist leaning system?

These are people with real power in the system, and even if it's not a majority, it's really almost impossible to be a tyrant when there's lots of minor centers of power spread very wide throughout society.

Even for "the rich" who own the majority of assets - there are millions upon millions of such rich people in the US. They will never all agree on everything.

When you say most people have a stake, are you saying 51% or above of people have a stake? Can you quantify that to clarify your point?

40% of Americans rent. Do they have a stake?

Seems like a pretty simple statement to back up. Weird that you won’t.

A whole bunch of people sharing power near the top is good for avoiding tyrrany yes, but it doesn't stop normal people from being treated as assets, which was the claim being made.

No, under a democratic system, citizens are not assets. Whose assets would they be?

Surely someone who has gotten rich won't want to tolerate the state's complete control and will find ways around it. I suspect it's not sustainable.

China is so far a counterpoint. And the terrifying thing is that this is not at all a settled question. If you throw enough technology at surveillance and social control, as the Chinese do, the state might be able to become an actual Big Brother state with pervasive control over the daily life of its citizens. The Chinese government is working _hard_ on this.

The Chinese undoing will probably come from more mundane reasons, such as Xi becoming a dictator and the usual decline that comes from these types of governments.

> Surely someone who has gotten rich won't want to tolerate the state's complete control and will find ways around it. I suspect it's not sustainable.

Jack Ma...

> Jack Ma

I think once you have lots of people like this guy (and much less rich people than him) bribing and elbowing their way to special treatment, it might undermine the concept of a totalitarian state to the point where it loses it's credibility with the bulk of the population. Even the strongest government needs people to believe in their power for it all to work.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just to say: this is real bad. Very hazardous to their own people both long and short term. There are historical reasons why they do it, but they could do things differently if they would want to. The underlying reason is that the system does not value the life of the people living in that area.

> we are good

The US has many systemic problems. But in this particular regard they are absolutely the good ones. The US exhibits a lot of systematic disregard toward the health of its population and select subsects of it. This particular kind of careless disregard would not be acceptable in the US.

All in all, you might be right about your point. But this is the worst example to bring it up under.

These are not accidents. Sometimes in the US, or elsewere, an airplane falls on your house. This is not that case. The rocket in these videos didn’t “go wrong”. (Altough sometimes they do go wrong and then they cause even more devasation.)

Some engineer in some non-descript office did a briefing. It went something like this “We will launch the rocket at X. The first stage will land somewhere in the indicated area on the map. It will contain Y kg nitrogen tetroxide, and Z kg hydrazine. Ok?” And their bosses said: “ok”. That is the problem.

> The effort they have put in to reduce pollution in their cities.

I know nothing about that and therefore i will not comment on it. I know about rockets, that is why i commented on that. But do post when you have sources so we can all learn.

Yeah, let's not go there

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They keep using inland launch sites when this is a known significant risk, so objectively they are not trying very hard.

Do you know why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html