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When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

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Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#21

Articles like these never fail to drive home just how much of a US patsy the EU has always been.

Unlike the EU, China has the capability to build companies that could rival top US players. So it's unsurprising that China takes the uncompromising approach to foreign investment that they do. I'd love to see an American's reaction to a speech where Xi Jinping exclaims that he will ensure that all Americans start using Baidu as their search engine.

Europeans had been promised and conditioned that their countries would give a shit about privacy. It would have seemed unlikely to European founders that they'd be allowed to run a blatant commercial spyware operation like Google or Facebook; and in fact I'd bet that they would have met fierce regulatory resistance... until Google and Facebook waltzed in from the US and surprise, nobody put up any resistance until the war was won. Yeah, sure, long after the war was lost, some EU regulatory theater.

I actually bought a N900 back in the day. It was good. Nokia smartphones could have been a thing, not just because they were good, but they'd taken off just a few years later especially on privacy grounds. There's not nearly enough conspiracy theorizing about Elop blatantly Osborning Maemo...

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#22
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources.

At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#23

According to reports on the ground, Didi used its local knowledge to act more nimbly in satisfying Chinese customers. But my guess is that if the American ride-sharing company had been more successful, China would have put a Mao-sized thumb on the scales. So Didi was actually better; it's a bit unfair to say that otherwise the game would have been rigged.

That's true, and I think this article was just using Uber as a jumping-off point to talk about doing business in China. I worked for a company not long ago that did business there, and the hoops they had to jump through were enormous.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#25
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

I hold a similar view. My nation now is heavily incentivized by shallow copy with little for deep copy. I just want to know what would happen next. Perhaps the context change on the global stage would break the balance and force a player to seek risky actions and...

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, coolin…

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#28
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin.

For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. I think this was a combination of fear that isolating China vs creating a high degree of economic interdependence could lead to war down the line, and a lack of control over Western companies who sought to break into China.

The situation today is deeply concerning. I think Western nations need to take dramatic action to curb / disincent China's protectionist policies and let their market open up to the rest of the world. If they won't truly do so, then the West needs to respond in kind.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#29
post #7

The West and China are playing a global chess game and have been for some time. An impoverished China was not in the West's interests and so they agreed to buy all kinds of lowish tech Chinese made goods. In return most jurisdictions enforced a balance of trade with China, with the exception of the US. On their end China insisted on joint ventures and technology transfer to the extent Western companies would comply.…

I'm hoping a genuine, knock-down drag-out economic competition will get an American president back up on the podium saying stuff more like "We choose to go to the moon" instead of this useless, vague "great again" nonsense.

Re: When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All

#30
> Uber felt it was treated fairly by a government

> my guess is that if [...] had been more successful, China would have put a Mao-sized thumb on the scales.

This is how it lost me, it shows how light he is on facts.

I do agree with the 2 statements "China is protectionist" and "protectionism is bad".

But I am cynical enough to see that everyone carefully pics which protectionism they complain about.

As a Brazilian I am still waiting to hear Americans, Japanese and Europeans complaining about their own farming protectionism, at least as loudly as they complain about other countries.

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