China rates its own citizens - including online behaviour
The Chinese government is currently implementing a nationwide electronic system, called the Social Credit System, attributing to each of its 1,3 billion citizens a score for his or her behavior. The system will be based on various criteria, ranging from financial credibility and criminal record to social media behavior. From 2020 onwards each adult citizen should, besides his identity card, have such a credit code
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” — General Mao
… and grows and grows and grows … until there is no room left for anyone to be free.
Maybe systems like SAFE will overturn that nonsense before it sees the light of day. Its a precisely backwards system. Individuals define systems not systems defining individuals. This was Deming when he said we fit systems to people not people to systems.
Its China’s tyrrany of the database. Its no coincidence that one of the first uses of the electronic database was on mainframes accounting for Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The Chinese state appears to be viewing its people as chattel and live stock. Maybe the same people that sold the USG on PRISM sold the Chinese State on a more extroverted version of the automated surveilance state.
You have peaked my interest. What mainframes existed in the 1940’s
There was a book and expose done on IBM and that came out. But as to accuracy of my use of the term "mainframe’ Id have to imagine they were large machines and punch card driven. If not tecnically mainframes then precursors. To me heyday mainframes evoke tape reels, magnetic core memories, some fault tollerance with redundant processor modules, and text terminals. Tennis court sized machines. These IBM units may not even have had vacuum tubes but mainframes in the 70 and 80s were a generation beyond tubes and of course the mini and PC had come out. Regardless these IBM units were big iron capital investment type machines. Was IBM playing both sides with equipment that could have been adapted to code cracking and did it approve of the use? Some appatently think yes in both cases.
They were Card Sort Machines, no computation involved. Simple detection of which holes punched and I seem to remember counters on the collection slots. The book that person wrote is promoted heavily on the net and almost any article about the use of those machines during the war quotes directly or indirectly that book. Simply put it is a self promoted book that has plenty of factual information in it, a degree of assumptions and its conclusions are very much based on the author’s view of the world.
Yes mainframes also invoke those things, I even had a 1024 bit core memory board from the mainframe I used to work on. 1960 era computer, still in use in the 70’s. The board measured some 12 or 14" by 2 and a half feet.
IBM was international and would seem to have been playing both sides of the war, best way to back the winning side. 
Good points. Awesome about the core memories and the hands on experience. Days so full of possibility and hope and challenge.
I saw some fact checkers taking him to task, but I like where he was trying to go with claiming they were attempting to profile a demographic even if what they had weren’t much more than fancy slide rules and partially automated notation systems.
A census is surely not a bad thing but intent is crucial as in this case. Unwanted measurement can be a kind of violence. Remember the nose calipers? Its not just privacy it seems like trying to drive consensus foreclosure by collapsing wave functions on people, ‘can’t manage what you don’t measure’ mentality to spread and justify that violence and big data. Its more than just taking stuff out of context, although people get mesmerized by claims of meticulous measurement i.e., “mainframes.” But we dont necessarily accept their intent to meddle or manage.
I read an article about how the US census had only 5 basic questions until the introduction of the sorting machine. After which it jumped to many hundreds.
And yes the card sorting machine certainly played its part to racially sort the people in Germany and occupied regions.
If China ever succeeds in their attempt to category their population on how “good”/“useful” they are, it will be a sad day indeed for the Chinese people. Then all the government will need to do is install cameras in each house & room and create a government department to act as revolutionaries, to become a functional 1984
Its the Chinese state against the Chinese people. Can the people create a prison so strong that even a billion strong they can’t break out?
This should be dubbed the: threat to the state number.
It reminds me of negative interest rates.