News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment and ... by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday August 30, 2022 @07:06PM (#32656334)
Good reply, thanks.

But I notice the very first sentence of that link: "The People's Republic of China is a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."

So, yes, there are other parties that are allowed to exist. (If you want one that doesn't include "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" as part of the platform, you're out of luck, though.)

But some of those parties actually have people who have won elections and have seats, which is more than I thought was the case. That's slightly less "one-party state" than I thought.

Still... there's also a list of banned parties. I'm trying to remember when the last time was that the US banned a political party. So China lets there be alternate parties, as long as they don't stray very far from the CCP orthodoxy. That's more than I thought, but it's considerably less than political freedom.

Re:SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment and ... by radu_floricica on Friday September 02, 2022 @02:32AM (#32687293)
At the process level, I don't think it's a good idea to work on particular implementation traits when comparing very different systems. One will complain that in China parties are banned, the other will complain that in US third parties can't win anything anyways and so on.

I think it's better to look at more broad goals. Can ideas or people get represented in each system? The actual mechanisms may be very different, but I think comparing the end results would be more interesting.

An anecdote from my country. We have a left-leaning party that constantly wins the poorer areas. At first glance, this means they're popular. In practice, it's a bit different - since they already have a stable majority, and they have an old tradition of only supporting their own people when it's their turn to govern, what happens is that each individual potential candidate simply decides to go with this party instead of swimming against the current. So the real election is inside the party, then their candidate wins in 70-80% of the cases.

Is this a good system? Well, this strongly depends on the process to select the party candidates. It's surprisingly non-shitty on average, in that it tends to select competent people. It's shockingly shitty on occasion, when it fails basic integrity checks. Judging the end results is far from straightforward.

Btw, I'm definitely not advocating for more of this inside the existing western democracies. It's definitely a horrible idea, because we definitely do NOT have the institutional processes to select consistently good candidates inside each party. China is not mixing them.

Re:SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment and ... by trasz on Wednesday August 31, 2022 @12:04PM (#32664170)
Banned parties - eg those promoting fascism - are a thing in Europe. We've learned the hard way what happens if you don't do that.
Re:SMIC reaches 7nm without access to western equipment and ... by HyperSane on Thursday September 01, 2022 @02:01AM (#32672555)
I doubt that is the reason they are banned.