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Interesting comparison of Mayoral powers between India and China.

Yes, I think it’s highly unlikely the Chief Ministers will devolve powers to mayors.


As with all addictive goods, the evidence will show that socio-economic factors influence the degree of psychological healthy/unhealthy or growth focused use of a medium/substance.

Smart phones are ubiquitous, and influencer is a key path for many to try and move out of their economic bracket.


The number of players in the field is sufficient to coordinate prices effectively.

You can also introduce ads to the model.

Amazon eventually started selling Amazon versions of popular cheap items, I can see the GenAI platforms doing the same.

Meme bots for example.


We haven’t uploaded brains to the cloud, so at least the living today, get to rest when they are dead?

The $ from people paying for subscriptions and the $$$$$$ from ad revenue, is too much of a bridge to cross.

Why not choose GDP? Or meat consumption? You could choose any pair of correlated variables.

Using “The invention of the single mother” is a poor way of explaining away Bad Marriages and relationships.

Also, there was a UN report which came out that showed that a major factor behind people choosing not to have children, globally, is money.


Money has been shown convincingly to not be an important factor. Please read about it for a while and you will quickly see that it’s a discredited argument, not least because poor people everywhere have always had more children. Also, fertility rates are falling everywhere, especially in countries that are becoming wealthier.

Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.

More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.

Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.

Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.


Eh?

> Money not infertility, UN report says: Why birth rates are plummeting

> Roughly 40 percent of respondents cited economic barriers – such as the costs of raising children, job insecurity and expensive housing – as the main reason for having fewer children than they would like

> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/10/money-not-infertili...


That’s what I am saying: this is just utter bullshit that almost every other study disproves, as well as a quick check of the reality around the world! Hence why I suggested to read more on the topic.

Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior. People almost always say what they think is right not what they really feel. I suspect a lot of people don’t have kids because they are afraid of having ugly or stupid or sick children… would you say it out loud if that was the case for you? I am sure you would not and you would rationalize it as being about money somehow.


> Notice that the sentence you wrote says this is the reason people give. People are very unreliable when trying to explain their own behavior

1) The surveys are designed to figure out these things

2) Even if the surveys are not, the shift y-o-y, from previous statements, providing trend data. Respondents can always choose different masking reasons for their choices. Pricing becoming a standout reason speaks volumes.,

3) If you reject both those points, you can postulate any theory you like, and there will never been current data to back it up. At this point we can assume any reason, as a matter of preference not as a matter of fact.


Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment.

In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match.

This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output.

Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.


Do you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?

I don't know if it supports their particular point, but Machine Decision is Not Final seems like a very cool and interesting look at China's culture around AI:

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...


In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55".

Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.


Citation? Not saying you’re wrong but my time in defense left me very much with the opposite opinion (radar target acquisitions had to be approved by a human, always)


I’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI.

Sadly, the search for that link continues.

I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there.

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout...

- https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...


I’m not seeing the dichotomy as much as you do.

Are they not going to build a “skynet” in China? Second, building skynet doesn’t imply eviscerating youth employment.

On the other hand, automation of menial tasks does eviscerate all kinds of employment, not only youth emoloyment.


Well at least DeepMind is doing nifty things like solving the protein folding problem.

> In July of this year, EFF published a two-part report on how Axon designed Draft One to defy transparency. Police upload their body-worn camera’s audio into the system, the system generates a report that the officer is expected to edit, and then the officer exports the report. But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that.” Draft One is designed to make it hard to disprove that.

> Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI is asked (at the 49:47 mark) whether or not it’s possible to see after-the-fact which parts of the report were suggested by the AI and which were edited by the officer. His response (bold and definition of RMS added):

“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.

Policing and Hallucinations. Can’t wait to see this replicated globally.


Does the officer not take full ownership of the report once they edit it? If they got an intern to write a report and then they signed off on it, they’d be responsible, right?

Political will doesn’t emerge from the heavens fully formed.

There is a process, which can be twisted, stalled or perverted.


> Under DSA, you can effectively remove content without providing burden of proof regarding the identity of the poster. Platforms must provide a "statement of reasons" (Article 17) to affected users for any removal, including appeal rights, but this does not impose pre-removal identity checks on posters.

Unlike any other legislation, globally, the DSA actually has tools to contest this.

Take a look at out of court dispute settlement bodies.

Hell - you have more power to gain accountability under the DSA than you do under the US system.


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