If your hypothetical happens, yes.
China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.
* The Shanghai and Hong Kong stock market seems to have improved regulatory enforcement. I have no way of measuring this...just stories from others.
* Over the past 10 years the China gov pressed on with building more housing in part to dilute value. Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history. Expectation is the next two years will see realized losses in property. It would be a huge mistake if the gov hasn't ensured regulatory enforcement of other segments have not reached maturity for the retail investor. We'll see...
* As for civil courts, over the past 20 years I've run into quite a few stories from friends and business colleagues that needed to go to China court. The stories are similar to what you may hear in the US. No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
for civil disputes, i am sure they are.
For disputes between the gov't and you, i highly doubt it. Is there a single instance of the gov't being sued for a policy that was meant to be political in nature affecting the supplicant?
Even someone like jack ma is unable to use the courts to obtain any justice - his Ant Financials IPO was shut down for political reasons, and he was reeducated. There's no such thing as due process in china.
Name me a single country where a rich person goes against the government and wins? You just don’t see it happen much in the US because the government is run by rich capitalists, but pretty much every country is the same.
It happens all the time here. Wealth isn't even a precondition, but indeed, one needs time and/or money. It helps being organized with other people to share the burden. Over here we have also got the ombudsman.
It is a matter of degrees. The harder it is for a poor individual to be done justice against the government, the weaker the rule of law. On a tangent, parties that play the horn about "law and order" usually mean "rules for thee but not for me".
Not sure where here is for you. But anyway, even if you can win a battle you can’t win a war. If a government wants to do something, it will regardless of how any individual person, rich or not, feels about it.
It just so happens that most western “democracies” are run by rich people, so they can avoid all that unpleasant business by just running the government in the first place.
I would say that’s an extension of the idea that rich people run the US government, which runs global organizations such as the world bank, which runs these ISDS courts.
China is just big enough to be able to ignore these global orgs.
Now try to win a case against the interests or connections of a high ranking official in China.
"Law and order" is not equal to "the rule of law". Both China and the US ascribe to the idea of "might makes right", which is in essence an organized form of lawless state. It is conceptually the same as in criminal gangs, only with vastly better optics. That is why anyone not in power should strive for a rules-based order, for their own best interest at least.
Not sure why you think China is Orwellian and the US isn’t when ICE is literally kidnapping people off the streets. Wake up mate, the Orwellian is coming from inside the house.
European governments regularly lose cases brought by individuals in both domestic and European courts; below are some well-known examples across different countries and legal issues.
E.g.
Broniowski v. Poland (ECtHR, 2004)
Doğan and Others v. Turkey (ECtHR, 2004)
Hirst v. United Kingdom (No. 2) (ECtHR, 2005)
Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3) (ECtHR, 2012)
KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland (ECtHR, 2024)
These judgments show that individuals and civil society groups can hold European states accountable for violations involving property, voting, asylum, climate, and broader rule‑of‑law issues.
They often lead to legislative change, financial compensation, or policy reversal, and many are used as precedent by lawyers and activists in new cases across Europe.
I’m not a lawyer, and many of these cases are not famous enough to be reported on in a format easily understandable to a layperson. I’m also not going to read through case resolutions to respond to a hacker news comment. I did take a cursory look at the examples you wrote though.
I will admit that my original statement lacks nuance, which makes it easy to nitpick.
Having read some of your cases though, a pattern emerged: it’s usually supra national organizations adjudicating these cases, and the nations are not bound by the rulings.
For example, in Hirst vs UK it was ruled that it’s a violation of human rights to deny prisoners the vote, and yet the UK government deliberately ignored that ruling and as a result prisoners still can’t vote in the UK. Not to mention that when this case was brought up in a UK court it was dismissed.
Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2) (2005) ECHR 681 is a European Court of Human Rights case, where the court ruled that a blanket ban on British prisoners exercising the right to vote is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. The court did not state that all prisoners should be given voting rights. Rather, it held that if the franchise was to be removed, then the measure needed to be compatible with Article 3 of the First Protocol, thus putting the onus upon the UK to justify its departure from the principle of universal suffrage.
There are numerous examples of citizens winning court cases against the government.
Take the just the uk, three examples:
Anti‑protest regulations (Liberty v Home Secretary)
Air pollution litigation (ClientEarth v UK Government)
Rwanda asylum plan (AAA & Others v Secretary of State
Windrush - Members of the Windrush have repeatedly challenged the Home Office over wrongful detention, removal, and denial of rights, leading to government admissions of unlawfulness and an official apology in 2018.
Your claim is false. The world is not the same the world over, civil liberties are better in some places than in others.
Prisoners still can’t vote, people are getting arrested for peacefully protesting holding signs, and the Rwanda ruling was overruled by parliament and the only reason the plan was stopped is because the PM changed.
> Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history.
Perhaps one of a few genuinely positive policies which only China can do. Meanwhile western countries will rather stab their economies to death than accept even just stagnating real estate prices.
>> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
Not sure where this is coming from. The EU recently just won a WTO dispute[1] against China that prohibited patent holders (often EU companies) from pursuing or enforcing patent infringement cases in non-Chinese courts -- it violated several provisions of the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), including Articles 1.1, 28.1, and 28.2.
Foreigners generally view the Chinese court system with significant skepticism, primarily due to a perceived lack of judicial independence from the ruling Communist Party (CCP), opacity, and the use of the judiciary to serve political goals.
1. DS611: China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
The high level description for Tokyo's management could apply to Shanghai. Replace Tokyo's "elected mayor/assembly" with "party member administrators". Each Shanghai district has its own management structure.
The vague description "run by the central government as a province rather than a city" is uninformative.
Lived in Shanghai 10 years. The city is well run for something of its magnitude. Mostly competent leadership and cultural alignment.
Shanghai usually gets the CPC members running it who will lead the country in the future. So...the future president of China is likely to be a party secretary of Shanghai at some point (like Xi in 2007). Any cadre who is favored and wants to be seen making modern impacts will be sent to SH.
Southern Chinese cities are better run than Northern Chinese cities. Not just Shanghai, but Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wenzhou...heck, even Kunming has better drivers and traffic than you'll see in Beijing.
> heck, even Kunming has better drivers and traffic than you'll see in Beijing.
But, conversely, a poor farmer in Yunnan was less likely to choose to become a migrant worker in Kunming instead of a Tier 1 metro.
IMO, Beijing's craziness can be attributed to the fact that it is the economic center for much of Northern China - and a number of migrants from large neighboring laggard states like Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and others ended up gravitating to Beijing.
> Shanghai usually gets the CPC members running it who will lead the country in the future
Not anymore. That was more of a Jiang- and Hu-era bias.
> a party secretary of Shanghai at some point (like Xi in 2007)
Xi's tenure in Shanghai was transitory (less than a year from what I remember) and imo was due to his previous role in Zhejiang.
> Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wenzhou...
Those are all closely connected with Shanghai economically speaking, and all part of Zhejiang or Jiangsu.
> IMO, Beijing's craziness can be attributed to the fact that it is the economic center for much of Northern China - and a number of migrants from large neighboring laggard states like Hebei, Shanxi, Henan, and others ended up gravitating to Beijing.
The problem in Beijing that everyone on the road was an official or related to an official, so the police couldn't do traffic stops without risking their careers. That has changed a bit, and they invested heavily in the Black Audi police (CPC police who are allowed to police official and their families) to counterbalance the chaos that everyone being connected caused.
> Xi's tenure in Shanghai was transitory (less than a year from what I remember) and imo was due to his previous role in Zhejiang.
Not that we have much to go on since Xi is president for life now, but I bet the next leader of China does their time in Shanghai like the previous ones.
> Those are all closely connected with Shanghai economically speaking, and all part of Zhejiang or Jiangsu.
Wenzhou is more a Fujian extension, Zhejiang and Jiangsu are China's richests provinces, and I think Hangzhou has left Shanghai's shadow by now.
We can also throw in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but in general even the poorer southern cities (Kunming, Guiyang, I kind of want to say even Changsha and definitely Wuhan/Chongqing) are and have been well organized.
It's a broad statement but the fact that Shanghai is a 直辖市 (and imo Tokyo is in a similar position) is a major difference from other megacities in Asia.
It gives Shanghai (and Tokyo) a munucipal budget and fiscal autonomy that most other megacities in Asia tend to lack.
I use a modern Lisp everyday...Clojure.
My dev environment is VS Code using the most excellent Calva extension which give me REPL-everywhere in my editing experience.
Yes, that 70's experience was better...and it's still here, refined and built on modern tooling and runtimes.
I love clojure with CIDER but I have heard as a REPL experience it doesn't compare to CL with SLIME. I like emacs as a lisp machine but I know that a big ball of mutable state and functions with side effects on a single thread really doesn't live up to a proper lisp machine.
Clojure REPL experience is pretty primitive though, you don’t have a step debugger or something like the conditions system, being a hosted language you only get stacktraces from the VM.
They're not really capable of producing varying answers based on load.
But they are capable of producing different answers because they feel like behaving differently if the current date is a holiday, and things like that. They're basically just little guys.
I’d guess a matter of control - Apple wants full control of the products and services that it owns and maintains - buying WB/HBO comes with a bunch of baggage around IP stewardship, international contracts around IP that restrict Apple in ways they’d never do with their own content, a ton of employees outside of the Apple corporate structure, etc.
I spent a few years leading dev on decentralized exchanges, building bridges to other chains and building a sophisticated margin system on top of the trading pools.
A few things I think I've learned:
In its current state, most retail investors are simply supplying to the sophisticated investor.
Although some DeFi projects make a genuine effort to provide analysis tools to level the playing field, it's not nearly enough.
The safest least volatile yields in DeFi are lending your stable coins into a system such as aave. The yield is not far from a high yield USD savings account.
Exchanges such as Uniswap may be the most important legit tool in DeFi. The biggest problem is the liquidity provider's ability to protect their downside...so the investor adds on more sophisticated monitoring/hedging schemes. This gets us back to the retail investor being at a severe disadvantage.
Yes if you start doing analysis on DeFi and a lot of cryptocurrency markets, you can see very quickly that retail investors ("dumb money") are just providing liquidity to the smart money. There's a lot of unsophisticated money in these markets which makes it pretty fun to compete as someone trying to be smart.
It's even more brutal in the more established, traditional markets though. Obviously if you're going long and managing a portfolio that's a different perspective, but it's very hard as an outsider to compete with the smart funds in the world. You might be smart but most of those funds are very smart, well capitalized, and have a very deep understanding of market structure.
Is there a terminal AI assistant that doesn't have heaps of depenedancies and preferably no node?
Claude and codex both require node. I'm a fan of the lightweight octofriend. But also node.
I do not like installing node on systems that otherwise would not require it.
You can install codex without npm if you build it yourself, they have migrated to rust in June and npm is just a convenient install wrapper it seems.
Just `git clone git@github.com:openai/codex.git`, `cd codex-rs`, `cargo build --release` (If you have many cores and not much RAM, use `-j n`, where n is 1 to 4 to decrease RAM requirements)
Does it have a terminal assistant that I have not heard of? Otherwise, the parent asks about an assistant that is able to run various tools and stuff, not just talk.
Yep. This is what I do. I edit and run my code in a container. That container cannot access my ssh keys or publish to GitHub. I review all changes, and manually commit / publish on my host. It’s not perfect, but that plus vendoring my dependencies goes a long way towards mitigating these kinds of things.
If your hypothetical happens, yes. China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.
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