And presumably they also have doctors and even lawyers in the CCP! Come to think of it, I wonder if China is not actually run by lawyers as well...
See: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/all-eyes-beijings-ann...
jack ma got a modern day "re-education" tailored to his specific circumstsnces, but as always in these situations the offer is "lead? or gold? your choice!"
As I understand it, the cultural revolution was mainly about young people running amok and victimizing teachers and authority figures. All orchestrated by Mao so he could cling to power. What did it have to do with technology?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticize_Lin%2C_Criticize_Con...
It's always good to learn how other cultures govern themselves. China learned a lot from the US and other countries, adapted, and then benefitted immensely. In the US, we can learn a lot too.
Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.
On the other hand, DOGE didn't go a great job running America.
The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.
Even if they had taken an extra month to learn the systems they were cutting into, would've saved many months of wasted employee-hours with what happened.
Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.
Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.
Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.
that's too much of a blanket statement.
as bushbaba said in a sibling comment, (paraphrasing), engineers can be both builders and cost cutters. and engineering is about tradeoffs of various kinds, even if they don't involve cost cutting.
ever heard of:
- value engineering
or
- frugal engineering
?
google them.
my dad was an engineer. not a software one, but a mechanical and electrical engineer. he did a double degree, from a well known US university. and worked for a few years in the US. then he came back to India and work for a single US multinational for the rest of his career.
once when I was a teenager, I saw him reading a book titled "value engineering". a us publication.
i think he mentioned it to me and said it was a good book.
I also read parts of it and found it interesting.
edited for grammar.
I said anyone can be a cost cutter, and that includes engineers.
Where engineers are unique is in their ability and training to be efficiency and value creators. They are productivity increasers.
Their value comes from productivity increases - not their ability to cut budgets. Cutting a budget might be a side effect of a productivity increase, but the profitability increases that finance first leaders push for is often at the expense of long term productivity rather than because of it.
Hope that makes more sense!
So I guess they’re doing something right.
And when you understand that the american government is controlled by corporations, given the above logic that really means it is controlled by their lawyers. Most politicians in representative government come from law backgrounds as well.
Trump in fact acts contrary to most recommendations from Chicago economists, even though both are “conservative”.
Chicago School is the conservative view of economics, not the dominant view.
Leftists don’t generally like mainstream economics and subscribe to more niche segments. That’s ok - and there is a lot to criticize. But it’s also wrong that freakeconomics is peddling “conservative ideas” unless you do agree economics itself as an academic field is conservative coded.
I like to think that the job of the president is to take care of the nation’s business so most of the rest of us can get on with our lives, but Trump demands constant attention, and he continually invents emergencies which prevent us from being able to just go about our existence in peace.
The never-ending narcissistic distraction is exhausting.
The people responsible for taking those options and making the choices they do... business and finance.
Most MBAs know too that wanking to quarterlies doesn't make a good long term strategy. Most companies just forget to do any long term strategy as long as such basic controlling data points look decent.
Most MBA don't know shit because they have not built hundreds of companies.
This is kind of the criticism that’s provided in Abundance. American Progressives intentionally made it extremely difficult to build anything by giving everyone a veto to block anything they don’t like.
There’s a lot of people on the Left (Center Left, at least) who want to revisit this approach and make it easier to build things again.
I also want to note that they point out that the current administration has a policy of scarcity. Even if we get rid of a lot of regulation, tariffs, deportations, and high government deficits make it hard to buy materials, hire labor, and finance projects.
Great, I guess then it won’t be too difficult to name ..say.. five prominent politicians who have made this stance clear?
Good luck with your purity tests of course, and hope you like the Trumps of the world instead!
(Curious though - what parts of homeless encampments are leftist? Supporting them would seem to be more of a libertarian POV vs a collective solution to provide something better?)
"hope you like the Trumps of the world instead!"
Newsom is not a presidential candidate, so this is not the only option. Instead, the Dems should run candidates with real convictions and better policies. Newsom believes in nothing, same as Buttigieg, Harris and Clinton. There is no one they wouldn't sell out for a taste of power. The Dem reaction to Bernie, years ago, and Zohran now tells us everything we need to know about how they feel about 'vote blue no matter who' when an actual SocDem wins a primary.
It is not a 'purity test' to demand politicians respond to public pressure with the understanding that, if they don't, they will lose votes. The sooner you tell them your terms, the better.
Harris chose to ignore the genocide and lost votes to Trump, who lied and promised to 'end wars'. She muzzled Walz in favor of her SV weirdos. She has the political instincts of a cabbage, which is why she dropped out first in the last primary.
"what parts of homeless encampments are leftist?"
Homeless encampments are not an ideology, they are an externality of the housing market requiring 'number go up'. A market means someone (the poor and disabled) won't be able to afford what is on offer.
Dismantling homeless encampments is a violent act. That's everything they have in the world. This kind of sociopathy has no wide constituency. Even if the staunchest NIMBYs don't want to see the homeless (it feels like crime!), they also don't want to see them abused on camera. Newsom is a demon for doing it live.
The Left 'solution', such as is, is to provide housing. This is also the economical solution. If you have a stable address and shelter, you don't waste money on ER visits and jail time, which cost more money from the same purse.
It's not rocket science, but it is politically untenable because the private housing market is load bearing for American middle class wealth.
Also, folks feel like if you are poor, you should be punished for it and housing feels like a reward. The gut reaction of too many Americans is they'd rather jail the homeless at twice the price than provide them an apartment free from sun and rain.
This same principle explains the immigration 'policy' on display in American cities. The recent ICE allocations could revive medicaid, end child hunger, raise classroom salaries, alleviate homelessness, create a federal public works program, and subsidize drug prices... but instead we get defunct concentration camps in swamps that cost billions and roaming masked kidnappers that have a daily bounty on the heads of uber drivers.
(Not coincidentally, those are all less dense places, with less public transit and infrastructure, than the well-known progressive states and cities.)
Unpopular plans to dramatically reshape urban cities led to “freeway revolts” (organized, grassroots opposition to freeway projects, which sometimes succeeded) and increased local input over planning. The second was brought on by environmental crises in the 1960s, such as badly polluted rivers and the famous oil spill near Santa Barbara. California, especially its coastal areas, was quite affected by both drivers of NIMBYism, and this became the dominant way of thinking from the 1970s onward.
Local control over neighborhoods sounds reasonable, but unfortunately it’s led to neighborhoods being museum pieces that do not scale upwards to meet demand, thus incentivizing urban sprawl. Restricting development had also significantly boosted the property values in those areas. However, urban sprawl directly conflicts with environmental goals, since it requires more transportation infrastructure and more energy to move people across longer distances than across shorter distances. Thus, we end up with situations where homes get built in far-flung exurbs whose politicians support growth (until the towns get large enough to where some residents want to halt growth to “preserve our quality of life,” thus pushing development to the next closest area friendly to development), environmentalists blocking road-widening and other infrastructure-improving efforts in an attempt to stop/discourage the sprawl, and NIMBYs blocking the construction of denser housing near job centers that could have provided affordable alternatives to exurban housing.
This has been the story of California since the 1970s, and the obscene housing prices and unsustainable mega-commutes are a result of this. Thankfully more people are seeing the consequences of 50 years of broken housing policy, and we’re finally seeing some efforts, even if they’re baby steps, to address this.
Take some kind of government procurement, say to buy a truck. The truck ends up being a pretense for all sorts of political things like regional development or righting some perceived historical inequality, doing an environmental study, subsidising some industry that's not doing well. Nobody cares about actually getting the truck.
I can imagine a world where they just buy the best truck and don't try to make it a pretext for wealth redistribution and solving all the worlds problem, but I've never seen it.
Multiply this by every single things the government spends money on (and in canada the oligopolies as well) and you see why nothing happens.
It is reaction to the old situation when interests of a small guy were completely tramped by the big guys - ie. the situation of private profits, public losses. And we can't go back to it.
The first step to move forward is to give everybody, whose interests are negatively impacted by a project, a stake in the project's benefits/profits. Ie. private profits - private losses, and public losses - public profits.
If you're speaking of the Democrats, they've been following the Neoliberalist playbook to the letter for decades: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes. This (the housing crisis) is the direct result of their half-competent technocratic stewardship of the economy. (And let's not spare the actually malevolent Republicans from sharing the blame in turning this land from an actual country into a billionaire's playground).
This "Abundance" movement is to be taken as a rebranding of the same tired and destructive Neoliberalist policies, and nothing else. It is ported by the same old people and politicians that have been slowly running this country to the ground. There is absolutely nothing new to be found in their manifestos: deregulate businesses, defund social programs, reduce taxes.
Housing can either be affordable or an investment vehicle, but not both at the same time. Actual leftists understand this very basic premise, but the astroturfed Abundance "movement" remains blind to it. Left-wing populism is slowly gaining ground in the face of an extremely complacent and ineffective Democratic establishment, and Abundance is a last-ditch effort to sold democratic voters on the same garbage they've been eating since the 1980s.
To the Republicans, Progressives are a political force they might actually have to try winning elections against, if the latters are ever able to muster a modicum of power inside of the party that is supposed to house them. A progressive Democratic party with populist messaging would certainly mean they can't rely on the absolute ineptitude of their opponents campaigning anymore.
Their proximate goals are to break the remaining unions and environmental protections we have, in service of the 'free market' which definitely is real and important. They want to give up on 'social issues' like access to reproductive care, medicare for all, and supporting the marginalized.
The speaker list includes the AEI, The Manhatten Institute, R street, Niskanen Center, etc...
American Leftists and Progressives do not hold power and the 'barriers' that abundance claims exist were put in place by those with power, not AOC or Zohran or whatever local cabal they point to in the book. Cherry-picking Austin as their exemplar is worth its own comment, but the book is frustrating across the board.
Klein has missed every moment of late and I expect the trend to continue.
Regardless, if your primary critique on a lawless and deeply authoritarian administration is their 'policy of scarcity', then you have utterly lost the plot. Mussolini made Italians grow and eat rice to induce a feeling of scarcity, there is no doubt, but that is not anyone's primary critique of his tyranny.
But it's quite possible that the rule of law, capitalism, freedom, democracy, western institutions, etc. is what allows engineers to build stuff.
Technology advances when it is financed.
(For instance, China wants to build best-in-world industry and infra, which they didn't have before, but they are not running their government in a growth- or building- engineering-driven sense. Not a lot of move-fast-and-break-things iteration there! Lots of people comfortable and protective of that system.)
The West is run by finance capital, which employs the lawyers (and buys the politicians).
There was a post here a while back about engineering grads in the UK who couldn't get engineering jobs. So they ended up working for quant firms and banks instead.
Under neoliberalism the economy ends up oriented away from productive activity and toward rent-seeking and wealth transfers. Hence the growing gambling "industry", the pump and dump crypto scams (run by heads of state, no less), the legally protected private cartels like banking and medicine. We get people like Vivek Ramaswamy who became a billionaire while producing nothing of value.
Pinning these massive systemic issues on lawyers is frankly stupid. They are just one piece of the puzzle.
https://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140515737/california-turns-to...
immediately comes to mind
You can make a lot of arguments in this debate, but in terms of speed and execution, there’s a clear winner.
But as I understand it China has been famous for “nail houses” - homes from which the owner refuses to move out, causing all kinds of headaches.
It isn’t a lawless place and the Party / local government doesn’t have carte blanche. There is nuance that’s worth considering before making blanket statements.
Sometimes it's also the opposite, the local government fight for the new build ups, so they can get the money and investments in. Or block development through their areas when there is no real reason to allow it (think of rails but with no stops there).
On the same note, if we only talk about high speed rails, Spain has built up quite a network as well. Not as fast as China, but still. Labour isn't cheap over there at all, but seems like they figured some stuff out.
Every 6 months of US health spending above OECD baseline i.e. ~8% of GDP, aka ~2T/y buys you the entire HSR network in China, stations included. How inefficient is PRC capital allocation really? A few 10s of millions of extra housing units when they have 200-300m more people to urbanize? The point is PRC over allocates but quickly readjusts, i.e. even housing allocation basically capped in 2010s when new floor space peaked. The even more important point is PRC thinks it's important to over allocate and have in abundance than to have not enough. I argue most would prefer problems of over allocated abundance over under allocated scarcity.
Like US has plenty of cheap labour (mexicans), they just choose to exploit it maximally in some sectors (like agriculture), and partially (like construction), vs maybe maximally exploiting cheap labours in the latter would do US some good.
Public transit fucking sucks even in countries where it's supposed to be good, because it's inherently sucky. Most of America is car-centric and it's pretty good once you buy into that model of living. Not everyone is a childless 25-year-old healthy able person who doesn't mind living in some 350 sqft box in the middle of a loud downtown hellscape and take public transit to almost-get-to everywhere they need to go before walking the last mile.
When you go to someplace like the Netherlands and see "everyone" riding a bicycle, just keep in mind that what you're seeing isn't actually "everyone".
Is it though? I'm for public transit because one day I'll be of an age where I probably shouldn't be driving but am still able and independent enough to get around.
In a car-centric culture, what's the solution? Making the elderly take taxis or rideshares everywhere (assuming there is taxi services or Uber available where you live)? That feels like an ageist tax unless those services are heavily subsidized somehow. Or allowing the elderly to drive, which in my experience can be its own hazard both to drivers and everyone else.
When my mom was dying of cancer she was lucky our small town has a public shuttle bus system. She was not able to drive herself to her cancer support group at the end.
When my very poor grandparents came to visit in Santa Cruz they could not afford a rental car. We took the bus everywhere. I have so many memories with them thanks to public transportation. My grandfather had a very very painful artificial hip.
But I would probably say America is run by mbas, not lawyers.
The U.S. has this loop at the company level. China has this loop at the local government level.
In China, the central government decides what the goals are and how they are measured, and then the local governments carry out the implementation. Local officials who perform well against those measures get promoted; those who don’t are demoted.
If the U.S. really wants to build this kind of feedback loop at the government level, voters need to judge election candidates based on their track record, not just campaign rhetoric. And for that to happen, the country needs a well-educated population with strong critical thinking skills.
I should also add that China has been operating this way for thousands of years. It’s not without problems, though—like the old saying goes: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
For example, GDP used to be the main measure of success. That pushed local governments to chase higher GDP numbers at all costs—regardless of whether the projects were actually practical or useful. This led to overbuilding, unnecessary construction, and even ghost towns.
Yeah, that's a really good point. Chinese "democracy" is not one from our viewpoint, but from their, an oligarchy this large (10% of the population vote) is the perfect balance between democracy and their old imperial system.
When they coined "Communism with Chinese characteristics", in the west most people focused on "Communism", on all side of the political spectrum, but what's really important was "with Chinese characteristics".
I share the article's interviewee's opinion that Americans and Chinese are similar, I came to the same conclusion. I think China has so much to offer the world, and Americans could easily think of it sort of how we see the UK. The reactions I get from Americans when I mention I lived in China makes me think that Americans want to love China. Kind of the way that the "otherness" between men and women acts to attract. (And also to make relating difficult.) Unfortunately, the Communist engineering the human soul is completely at odds both with flourishing humanity and American's rampantly individualistic culture.
I think we have this already. Sure, if you go looking for it you can find any brand of stupidity you want—and if you want to sell a narrative when you find it you put a camera in front of them. But on the whole we have this. The problem is that the two dominant political parties have fundamentally incompatible visions for the country's future. And, at the national level, that's what we end up voting for. One of these visions has to win and both candidates need to share it before voters can evaluate the individuals. Even in primaries the metric for success isn't the best candidate but who has the best chance of winning in the general.
Pulling back the curtain winning the vision for the new US Right is likely to be a long drawn out fight because for many issues the opposition is a kind of person, e.g. the gays, women, who won't ever "move on" or accept defeat and so will require ongoing active suppression. It's why I'm sad to see Moderate Republicans pushed into obscurity because it seemed for a while there they were within spitting distance of a unified vision.
China is very decentralized though, Beijing has the ultimate say but their attention span limited. So they maybe set targets, or step in when a huge scandal happens, but most localities are fairly far away from Beijing’s attention. While China doesn’t have America’s federalism, it basically has it by default to deal with its huge size. Every city has different rules, taxes, they have their own local champions, imagine if every big city in the USA had their own auto producer, for example. Hukou means china’s illegal immigration is mostly internal. If you become homeless in Beijing or Shanghai, they will just deport you to whatever village your hukou is in (well, free train/bus ticket at least, but you probably came to the big city because you couldn’t make it in your village in the first place).
Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.
Chinese leaders can allocate whatever money they want to a project. They can order their citizens, in mass, to move away from an area. They can ignore labour rights and force workers to work in hostile conditions. They can ignore their own laws, or quickly change it when they want, if it impedes some project they have deemed important. They can ignore any ecological concerns. And so on ... India and the USA cannot do all this, because of the constraints their democratic system places on their governing leaders.
This is why Rahul Gandhi (India's current opposition leader) says that the biggest challenge that both the US and India face today is to figure out how to revive domestic manufacturing without sacrificing our democratic values.
The economy is always what it boils down to. Americans see factory work as hazard duty, and you can't exactly take untrained vagrants and put them on the construction site. If you want Americans to build you things, you have to pay them an American wage. Otherwise the market economy doesn't work. China isn't burdened by any of this, not because they're authoritarian but because their economy is planned. If they want to make cars domestically, it doesn't matter what Mexico charges for labor - whatever the state says, goes.
So instead of making some grand technocratic beneficial decisions, the decisions are mostly oriented towards keeping you in power. A power that is very fragile. At times that still might net sensible policies, but the same is true for democracies who have to deal with public opinion. Democracies have the benefit that even a mob (the public) has some capabilities for learning.
The solutions to domestic manufacturing would be solved completely differently in both countries because the problems are different. A large factor is simply labor costs for developed nations for example.
I don't think there is a solution aside from import/export taxes. If that is true, is Trump secretly a good president? Perhaps not, but you would need to come up with solutions yourself. A democracy where a public just demands solutions is ineffective, but so are most if not all more autocratically governed nations.
It really is very easy to figure out who is going to come out on top.
massively fund the industry as a political / social objective, set (artificial) demand and create a local market by restricting import / competition for a while, then cut funding gradually when there's a sprawling eco system of startups, letting them brutally cannibalize each other leading to consolidation (such as BYD) to create global leaders.
Is not uniquely Chinese but are just tactics out of Japan, Korea and even Germany (historically).
I can kinda understand the point that this process works better when there are some technical people in power, such as engineers. They can probably reason timing and industry a little better: Solar was pioneered by US but industrialized by Germany but then out competed by China.
Yesterday at a conference I came to know the history of bipedal/quadrupedal robot development by a MIT professor, claiming most of the Chinese robots are just descendant of that technological choices made by MIT research.
Humanoid robotics seems to just be in that process of "massively fund the industry" in industrial policies (I saw so many humanoid robot companies at the conference, Chinese, that I haven't even heard of). To me I guess the "why now?" is the question, and I guess some technical person must've been in the process of making that decision.
We can't really emulate the political system of China, but that mindset of having technical/expertise close to power is probably something we shouldn't forget. Especially in a era where political positions seems to be handed out based on loyalty than merit
This topic runs the risk of being reduced to the same "Humanities v STEM" binary that so much of US public discourse has been reduced to. The real point of discussion should be that an engineering background may instill a political culture more focused on risk aversion, efficiency and longevity. A lawyer-heavy political culture may end up in the arena of "let's see what we can get away with".
Do these highly simplified stereoptypes apply to contemporary America? I'm not sure if an America led by the likes of Zuck, Ellison, Andreessen etc would end up differently from the one we see today. Whatever particularly genius they were able to leverage into massive wealth, they are all ultimately subservient to the same national culture of short-term gains, popularity contests and superficial macho posturing that afflict the political class.
What goes unsaid in this podcast is that a large number of CCP officials have a military background as well which inherently instills a a long-term view of governance, whereas the most successful American politicians with a pro-military stance (GWB, DT) have routinely denigrated rival politicians who served their country (John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth) while maintaining, not coincidentally, a low profile while in public office.
[0]:https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/penn-statim/dont-be-silly...
[1]: https://www.heritage.org/commentary/congress-read-it-voting
----------
I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.
Collapse? People need to know and understand Adam Smith's remark that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".
> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.
Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.
Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.
For my fellow westerners.
而对于一直生活在这里的人们，这是两回事。有句笑话说，我可以捐款100万，因为我没有，但是我不能捐一头牛，因为我真的有。
----
I think many hackers on HN are overly naive, holding a dreamlike view of authoritarian states because they're so far away from them. Therefore, articles like these appear on the front page regularly.
But for people who have lived here their entire lives, it's a different story. There's a joke that goes, "I can donate 1 million yuan because I don't have it, but I can't donate a cow because I actually do have it."
It’s a lot easier to agree what should get built when
a) you can point to wealthy nations and say “lets try to have what they have”
and
b) you’ve seen projects go fast and deliver big in your own country done by people just like you.
By contrast in the US it’s often a debate over which incremental improvement to make and why; without unilateral clarity on outcomes or value.
This “run by lawyers” / “run by engineers” claim is a symptom of that difference - it’s a byproduct, it’s not the core problem needing solving.
As much as I think of his background and his authoritarianism (getting rid of the two term rubber stamp for the presidency), he has actually delivered for China. This is the most dangerous part: imagine if Trump was actually smart, if he actually delivered, we would be really confused about democracy.
FWIW, Brezhnev was a metallurgical engineer.
While I think the Soviet Union comparison would be relevant to the article, the only connections I could find are:
> At various points in China’s recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering, and this was engineering of a very Soviet sort.
and
> ... what the Chinese are interested in is being an engineer of the soul, which is a phrase from Joseph Stalin that Xi Jinping has recently repeated.
Note that Stalin's phrase is, more fully, "As comrade Olesha aptly expressed himself, writers are engineers of human souls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_of_the_human_soul
and Xi Jinping's is:
"In 2018, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, stated that “Teachers are the engineers of the human soul and the inheritors of human civilization. They carry the important task of spreading knowledge, spreading ideas, spreading truth, shaping soul, shaping life, and shaping newcomers. The fundamental task of education must be nurturing capable young people well-prepared to join the socialist cause. Better education and guidance are needed to build the noble ideal of Communism and the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics among the students.”"
That comes across as less top-down or state-controlled than implied in the text, and more metaphorical.
That's how China is now. Any decent city will have machine shops and plastic injection molders and electronics makers, everything you need to get a new idea off the ground. They spent the last few decades stealing every good idea from the West, just like the US stole every good idea from Britain and Europe 120 years ago, and now they're well into the transition of being the innovation hub of the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/china-amer...
bearjaws•4mo ago
I learned today Chuck Grassley plans to run again and would be 95 years old in congress. This is insane.
If you've worked retail you know many above 75 are not all there, plain and simple.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
bdangubic•4mo ago
delusional•4mo ago
nomadygnt•4mo ago
metabagel•4mo ago
bearjaws•4mo ago
femiagbabiaka•4mo ago
vladms•4mo ago
Not sure what is the solution, but if people say they would prefer younger "options" and they don't materialize on the ballots, that is a sign that the system does not work as intended.
bushbaba•4mo ago
bdangubic•4mo ago
ricardobeat•4mo ago
rusk•4mo ago
Had to double check the dates on Churchill - very impressive
ricardobeat•4mo ago
- started her first charity/hospice in India at 40 years old
- real expansion of her work started after 60 years old
- received a Nobel Prize at 69
- brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine at 72
- continued working until death at 87
hermitcrab•4mo ago
"In 1953, during his second stint as prime minister, Winston Churchill had a stroke after dinner. “No one seemed alarmed by [his] slurred speech and unsteadiness on his feet, one of the advantages of having a reputation for enjoying alcohol,” writes Andrew Roberts, a historian. For several weeks, as Churchill was incapable of governing, his son-in-law and private secretary in effect ran the country. He never fully recovered, yet refused to stand down until 1955, when he was 80. " https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/07/03/senility-in-hi...
regularization•4mo ago
Picasso's output in his last 20 years is not considered in the same way as his previous work.
roenxi•4mo ago
If the plan is to reduce the reach of Washington to Virginia and DC then Churchill would be a great choice of leader and if that is the explicit goal then ok sure. If the plan is to maintain a peaceful status quo as a powerful and successful country people like Churchill in the leadership are a very bad sign indeed.
You have to assume the UK had no power to influence its internal or world affairs to conclude that its political class were competent through the last century. Which is a crazy stance given where they were in the early 1900s.
ecshafer•4mo ago
When their empire was then faltering aftet world war ii, they then let them go. They set them up to be independent and had peaceful transfers of power instead of bloody civil wars like France and Portugal did. They didnt do it perfect. But they gave them independence, in democracies, with books of laws, and set them up in international organizations.
Britain took the losing hand and tried to set up a situation that a rules based world order could thrive in, and churchill was amongst the men in charge for that.
orwin•4mo ago
LexiMax•4mo ago
Let's not go that far. They joined the war because of literal decades of politicking done beforehand in order to secure an alliance with France and Russia. Germany wanted more prestige, more colonies and a Navy. Britain, being the preeminent colonial and naval power, would prefer that didn't happen.
Your view on if the allies were justified in wanting to contain the ambitions of Germany probably depends on if you see Germany as justified in wanting a bigger slice of the pie that the other powers of the time were currently taking up, or if you see Germany as a buffoon that upset the existing balance of power for selfish reasons. But Britain entering into those alliances made conflict inevitable, and I find it hard to see any selflessness in desiring or preserving empire. They all paid dearly in the end.
ecshafer•4mo ago
orwin•4mo ago
bdangubic•4mo ago
bdangubic•4mo ago
jordanb•4mo ago
Parts of the Republican party are too of course (hence Grassley) but it's been the target of several successful insurgencies. First the tea party and then Trump. Now it's turning into something completely different.. a cult of personalty for a dictator.
But the intact machine is the reason why the Democrats can not rise to the occasion. Their whole system is one designed to produce dour grey apparatchiks.
regularization•4mo ago
regularization•4mo ago
AnimalMuppet•4mo ago
ourmandave•4mo ago
Yeesh, ageism, plain and simple.
But yeah, Grassley needs to hang up the spurs.
lm28469•4mo ago
Just look at Trump and Biden speeches VS Bush or Obama
lazide•4mo ago
It’s in the definition. Words have meaning.
navbaker•4mo ago
lazide•4mo ago
Either way, those same old folks are the ones who’d need to sign off on the rules banning their existence and I don’t see them doing that.
So who are the idiots exactly?
Personally, I think it’s the folks who think more rules will make a difference against someone who is explicitly great at violating rules and getting away with it. While pretending to be a moron.
lm28469•4mo ago
lazide•4mo ago
CamperBob2•4mo ago
(Or rather make them take responsibility, in the case of voters who insist on electing Trumps, Reagans, Bidens, and Feinsteins simply because those are the candidates they've heard about, due to their having been around the longest.)
lazide•4mo ago
If no one can unseat the king, they’re still the king.
And after all, if they really are as dumb and incompetent as you say that should be easy eh?
CamperBob2•4mo ago
Well, in theory, we weren't supposed to have kings here, but it appears that the voters are going to insist on one.
And after all, if they really are as dumb and incompetent as you say that should be easy eh?
That's my usual response to Trumpers complaining about Democrats in my own state's legislature. I have to say, though, that it doesn't work any better for me than it will for you.
seanmcdirmid•4mo ago
leptons•4mo ago
frmersdog•4mo ago
leptons•4mo ago
All of them? No. But I also could introduce you to plenty of 25 year old's that aren't "agile and flexible enough, mentally to perform these positions". And it's often not even "mental agility" that is the problem with people in power, it's corruption, greed, and just plain old hate that is the problem. Those things don't have any age limits except maybe below 6 years old, and even then I've met some pretty nasty, spoiled toddlers.
frmersdog•4mo ago
There are vanishingly-few 25-year-olds in national office, certainly not in proportion to their chunk of the overall population. But bringing them up at all is beside the point. The contention at hand is that there are too many elderly people, who are beyond their ability to perform adequately, in positions of power. If you would like to address that, feel free. But please stay on topic.
leptons•4mo ago
Well thank [deity] for that, because many of them aren't fit for it. Neither are 75 year olds, but age doesn't really play that much of a factor - it's the people voting to put shitheads in positions of power no matter their age that are causing this damage in the first place.
>> "Muh ageism" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for these kinds of conversations.
>There are vanishingly-few 25-year-olds in national office, certainly not in proportion to their chunk of the overall population. But bringing them up at all is beside the point.
Yes, it is the point - you made it the point with your "muh ageism" quip. I simply pointed out that age doesn't make a difference, but greed, corruption, and hate do.
>The contention at hand is that there are too many elderly people, who are beyond their ability to perform adequately, in positions of power.
There are also old people in power that are not "beyond their ability to perform adequately", and that's also a very subjective goalpost you're setting. Some of those shitty old politicians are doing exactly what their shitty constituents want them to, even if they are just holding the pen while someone younger moves their hand.
>But please stay on topic.
You made this about "muh ageism" not me, so all ages are fair to comment about. Shitty 25 year olds are actually worse than shitty 75 year olds, because shitty 25 year olds will be around much longer doing much more harm than a shitty 75 year old politician could. And again, it has nothing to do with age, and everything to do about corruption, greed, and hate. Those things are ageless.
navane•4mo ago
bearjaws•4mo ago
daveguy•4mo ago
serf•4mo ago
we take it for granted that someone below the age of 15-ish in the United States shouldn't be behind the wheel of an automobile, but that's not universally true. We try 18 year olds as adults, and that's not universally true, either.
It isn't a far leap to presume that people past a certain age meets the same psychological and mental/cognitive decline as the average person that age without testing.
You wouldn't expect a 95 year old to be eagle-eyed and athletic, to presume that their age isn't a deficit whatsoever is ageist from another perspective.
If I saw a person using a wheelchair I wouldn't wait for them to tell me that they needed a ramp for the staircase at the restaurant -- this too is -ist, but I see no real problem with it as a wheelchair user myself.
Somewhat similarly : the amount of 'with-it' and sober 95 year olds that I have met in real life makes me really question their fitness as an important member of a government group. Just like the presidency, these roles should probably be qualified into by participants with more than just votes.
If you're a 95 year old that passes the mental health and physical health examinations, more power to you , welcome to <government group>.
CamperBob2•4mo ago
Not just because your faculties aren't what they once were, but because you have no stake in the outcome of your decisionmaking.
linhns•4mo ago
master_crab•4mo ago
The cruft that has built up (from the 2nd amendment, to the electoral college) over 250ish years is a serious problem.
shakna•4mo ago
The UK would easily disagree, with their founding codification in 1215.
jrflowers•4mo ago
defrost•4mo ago
Clauses of both are still part of the basis of English Common Law (the Common Law cited in the US Constitution) and the Magna Carta is still being cited in recent times by politicians and lawyers in support of (UK) constitutional positions, and still, albeit rarely, cited in UK courts
It's firmly a part of the continuously evolving history of UK law: suggesting that what the UK lacks is the stagnation of US law which hasn't yet evolved past the errors of scale that have crept in since its foundation; the US electoral could also do with a revamp to better serve the people.* two quotes above sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
jowea•4mo ago
shakna•4mo ago
I'd suggest the US' adoption of a 2-party system likely leads to far more of that stagnation.
jowea•4mo ago
shakna•4mo ago
jowea•4mo ago
shakna•4mo ago
jowea•4mo ago
DSingularity•4mo ago
Old so competent senators barely matter. It’s all about unelected corporate boards and secret groups within influential government agencies.
AtlasBarfed•4mo ago
Thuggery•4mo ago
I don't know, it seems like it's a weird argument but it's definitely a thought I've had too. When I was eyeballing the Egyptian dynasties I was bit shocked to notice how short lived they all are, compared to what I expected. The majority struggle to get to 150 years, no one gets past 300. In fact old man America will soon be an older polity than all of them except the much maligned Ptolemies (275 years). Same deal for the (well documented) Chinese dynasties. People think kingdoms and states are long enduring, measured in multiple centuries, but they're actually pretty unstable.
It seems like a weird unexamined law of the universe. Dynasties/polities struggle to make it past 300~ without some major interruption or something going wrong, if they haven't imploded earlier. There are exceptions. The Korean Joseon managed an eye watering 500+ years. And the Catholic Papacy has been going on continuously for closer to 2 millenia. But still, 249 years is pretty long in the tooth.
prewett•4mo ago
Which surprises me; the US is doing really well.
smsm42•4mo ago
hermitcrab•4mo ago
hermitcrab•4mo ago
saubeidl•4mo ago
San Marino has you beat, but obviously quite different scale.
t-3•4mo ago
jacquesm•4mo ago
The fact that the supreme court even exists shows that this is far from the whole truth. Besides that, and even if it were the case, there is a pretty clear effort underway to do an end-run around large chunks of that constitution.
snapplebobapple•4mo ago
mattmanser•4mo ago
1215, still a few parts left as enforceable law today. If you think US institutions are old, try European ones. We're still supposed to practice longbow on Sundays.
America is middle aged, at best. You haven't even changed regime yet. Only every been a republic. Never changed religion.
How cute. Poor old Spain has been back and forth with absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republics and even a fascist dictatorship thrown in the mix.
dmoy•4mo ago
> You haven't even changed regime yet. Only every been a republic
Right I think that's literally the point that GP was making? The US main legal framework is the same one from 250 years ago, which is not the case for the vast majority of Europe et al. Which leads to some weird interactions, and in some people's minds a lot of anachronisms. Like you gotta deal with the law written by armed revolutionaries protecting the right to own cannons and warships and whatnot (which continued pretty well into the 1800s), with the modern day of like.... maybe not allowing private ownership of 127mm naval guns or JDAMs.
ponector•4mo ago
Though no practice for Europeans.
jowea•4mo ago
smsm42•4mo ago
teddy-smith•4mo ago
She's smarter than me.
What you just said is agist.
rileymat2•4mo ago
general1465•4mo ago
teddy-smith•4mo ago
You see how stupid you sound?
rileymat2•4mo ago
But pragmatism plays a role in the pervasive ageism in our culture, as we have decided it is largely legal.
teddy-smith•4mo ago
Also, Discriminating based on age is largely legal.
Are you sure about that?
bjourne•4mo ago
g42gregory•4mo ago
I don't think the age is the problem. It's corruption.
AndroTux•4mo ago
t-3•4mo ago
jacquesm•4mo ago
t-3•4mo ago
jacquesm•4mo ago
hermitcrab•4mo ago
ciupicri•4mo ago
t-3•4mo ago
ciupicri•4mo ago
> Death sentence with reprieve is a criminal punishment found in chapter 5 (death penalty), sections 48, 50 and 51 of the criminal law of the People's Republic of China. It is a two-year suspended sentence where the execution is only carried out if the convicted commits further crimes during the suspension period. After the period the sentence is automatically reduced to life imprisonment, or to a fixed-term based on meritorious behavior. The reprieve is integrated into the sentence, unlike a pardon which occurs after the sentence.
londons_explore•4mo ago
Pretty hard to commit many crimes from there...
Or are you free, which seems a little odd...
smelendez•4mo ago
Eddy_Viscosity2•4mo ago
defrost•4mo ago
Woodi•4mo ago
And somehow sentence from "The good, the bad and ugly" movie (state by Italy born actor) fit on that subject: "If you want freedom you become a priest or a bandit"...
And remember to all the time stick a smile to your face and, internet even, conversations. That is sure fire way to have everything look positive.
tokioyoyo•4mo ago
The incentives for policy making are much different in both countries.
horns4lyfe•4mo ago
johnisgood•4mo ago
jasonsb•4mo ago
FpUser•4mo ago
But yeah allowing Chuck Grassley to run at this young </s> age is pure insanity.
micromacrofoot•4mo ago
atmavatar•4mo ago
A bigger concern to me is that many of them are old enough that any long-term impacts resulting from bills they pass simply won't happen until they're gone.
And, I would expand that to include more than just Congress - I think major executive offices (e.g., President, VP, cabinet members, etc.) and the Supreme Court should have an age limit for the very same reason. Anyone in government office whose decisions can have long-lasting effects should be young enough they need to keep that in mind.
Anyone who (statistically) has only a few years left to live and especially anyone past the average life expectancy are welcome to hang around in advisory roles, but they should have limited (if any) power to directly affect future policy because they simply don't have any real skin in the game any longer.
xyzzy123•4mo ago
People don't come from nowhere, they have families, affiliations, communities etc. Politicians in particular are selected for this.
jackstraw42•4mo ago
It is as long as the person really cares about their family. You sure they all do?
CamperBob2•4mo ago
ugh123•4mo ago
general1465•4mo ago
Gibbon1•4mo ago
fathermarz•4mo ago
mcphage•4mo ago
ajross•4mo ago
The age of the senior senator from Iowa is like 537th on the list of major problems this country is facing.
I mean, let's be real. Would a bunch of spry 30-somethings in the senate have prevented the Assault on Tylenol or the coming invasion of Portland? Seems beyond dubious.
smsm42•4mo ago