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China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

bloomberg.com

271–280 of 372 posts

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 2 major mistakes of mankind in the 20th century are fascism and communism. That's a bit misleading cause fascism is just inherently bad while communism has had some implementation problems.

I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system. See, for instance, Hayek's argument on information and economic decision-making. In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has ne…

> I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system.

All of those have been Leninism or its descendants, which break strongly from Marxism. Starting with the required starting conditions.

> In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has never happened.

It's happened in basically all of the countries that were capitalist at the time, where capitalism (that is, the 19th century system that Marx was pointing to) has been overthrown (largely, through democratic means) due to opposition from the working class and replaced with the modern mixed economy which retains some of the basic structures of capitalism, but many features of socialism applied to directly to mitigate the effects of capitalism which can critics from the time the system was named have targeted. (Many of those sytems even call themselves socialist, and the rest of them are labelled that way by their capitalist critics.)

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#272
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His father was not an immigrant, he was born in Queens. And the immigration laws are a much bigger obstacle now than they were even in the 80s.

I was referring to Obama Sr, who was born in Kenya.

He was never an immigrant. He just came on a student visa, studied, then went back to Kenya.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a book. There are of course extreme workloads from both the schools and the parents. But to me there is something worse - the public shaming culture. I live in the UK now. Something very odd to me at the beginning is that I can never know how good my kids are doing compare to their classmates. The teachers would politely refuse to answer such questions. And the 'parents meeting' is private to one pupil's…

> cruel def: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, feeling no concern about it. Shaming is undesirable, but I wouldn't say publicly knowing how you rank compared to others would constitute "cruel". Its really how the world works - in sports you see exact stats of how your do, publicly traded companies/CEOs are meticulously analysed publicly on how they perform etc. etc. There does need to be a balance btwn h…

Are you saying that a 'cruel' winter is being deliberately cold?

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In American English, a lot of vowels are gliding dipthongs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Gliding_vowel... For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly. Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sou…

Maybe theoretically Spanish has no diphthongs. But rapid speech definitely sees diphthongs develop as sounds merge together -- a very much Spanish thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Spanish Your example would be /kau̯.da/, with the a and u merging into a single syllable diphthong.

Sure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sounds to begin with).

No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#275
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the western game industry this is called slow week.

everyone forgets the usa has no labor laws or unions either. well there's a couple legacy unions that survived the smearing campaign over the decades trying to associate then with crime... but none in silicon valley, that's for sure.

You are only right the USA has no unions for tech. In other industries unions are still there (public sector and manufacturing mostly). The USA has labor laws, and they are enforced. And they affect Silicon Valley worker lives daily. Non-competes are near-unenforceable in California because of California labor law. There was also a thread a while back about how CA law allows you to retain IP over side-projects unrelated to your employer's business, regardless of what your contract says.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#276

As a Chinese I would say that the points in this article, though true, are not among the driving reasons. If you ask me, I would present this list: 1. Practically, there are only 4-5 cities suitable for 'tech talents' in China. The properties prices in these cities are comparable to the ones in NY and SF while the salary isn't. BTW: you have very little chance to be able to get married without a property under your n…

Another thing is that it's practically impossible for a non-chinese person to get citizenship or even permanent residency - even if you marry a chinese citizen. At the end of the day the Chinese government (and maybe its people as well) does not want foreigners living their long-term.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#277
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everyone forgets the usa has no labor laws or unions either. well there's a couple legacy unions that survived the smearing campaign over the decades trying to associate then with crime... but none in silicon valley, that's for sure.

You are only right the USA has no unions for tech . In other industries unions are still there (public sector and manufacturing mostly). The USA has labor laws, and they are enforced. And they affect Silicon Valley worker lives daily . Non-competes are near-unenforceable in California because of California labor law. There was also a thread a while back about how CA law allows you to retain IP over side-projects unre…

> The USA has labor laws, and they are enforced

Some of them. Lots of programmers are misclassified as FLSA exempt when they don't meet the standards for such exemption, but because of lack of organization and because of the status signalling that goes with FLSA exemption, they rarely challenge this, so it's poorly enforced.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)

All languages have tones. See how the 'a' sound is different in 'car' and 'can', or 'make'?

That's not a tone in the sense of how mandarin has them. A better approximation of tones in english is saying these phrases out loud:

"Yes!" "Yes?" "Yes..."

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#279
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with China's system. But let's not pretend a lottery based system, where the only thing that decides whether you can stay in the country or not, is random number generation, like H1-B is great.

China's system is basically just "No, you can't stay". As of 2010 exactly 1,448 living immigrants had managed to become citizens. In contrast, the US naturalizes 700,000 every year. The country actually has more billionaires than non-Vietnamese refugees.

Right. China is in the business of colonising other countries - not being colonised itself.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#280

The article doesn't mention that but another possible factor is that life is not that great over there either. If you are not Chinese, you'll always be a foreigner there, even if you spend ten years in the same city, so that makes it difficult to integrate. You'll also have to deal with the Chinese administration for the visa, residence permit, etc. which is quite a pain. It's definitely a great place to visit or eve…

I agree, having arrived in USA 7 years ago, I have seen that its much easier to integrate in United States, especially if you live on East Coast or SF/LA. Sure there are visa and green card hurdles, but as a society Americans are probably more accepting of immigrants than any other country, except maybe Canada. Of course my experience is as a relatively well-off indian studying in United States, other will have a dif…

> except maybe Canada...

... Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Spain...

The US immigration rate (immigrants/year/1000 pop) is significantly lower than all of the above. Norway and Spain are the top two in terms of rate. Australia is 21% foreign-born (excluding Brits and Kiwis), and NZ is not far behind. The US is only 14% (with no exclusions) - not much more than the UK's 12%.

I realise that these are 'just numbers', but the experience stacks up as well. NZ in particular is famous for its very welcoming attitude to migrants - they actually have a problem in that people use the easier-to-get NZ citizenship to 'hop' to Australia, where there's a better economy and hence jobs; thus NZ spends a lot of resources training new citizens in things like English skills, only to have them 'brain drain' away.

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