Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has a billion people and produces vast and rapidly growing numbers of highly skilled academics, both in their local universities and by sending students abroad. Many of the smartest people I know are Chinese and have returned to China after completing their degrees and collecting experience in western companies.
I don’t want to take a side but the parent is almost certainly going to point out that academic papers != innovation (especially with the news that lots of papers from China have falsified data, paper mills, etc). What are actual innovations made by China in the past 20 years? On demand bikes comes to mind as one example.
China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
191–200 of 228 posts
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tencent Holdings Ltd., with nearly 1 billion users Sounds reasonable. I would start wondering if they claim 20 Billion users, but hey, you never now. Alibaba is also an outstanding company: http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/10/alibaba-yeah-right-... http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/09/job-interview-quest...
Well taobao pretty much is the majority of buying for many people. The blog posts are roughly as baseless as what it claims Jack Ma is.
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Central planning has always proven to be an inefficient way to allocate resources, so I’m not sure why free markets would be worried about China implementing more central planning.
The age old liberal hymn. I’m not going to say this is wrong, but it’s a very black and white stance in the matter. Plenty of succesful economies have been centrally planned and/or protectionist. Likewise speculative booms in unregulated markets have produced massive amounts of deadweight loss. Not to mention the administrative overheads of running large scale free(ish) markets we observe in all first world countries…
Although I would like to see a sample of a single lean and mean organization in USSR...
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you don’t know what central planning means. It refers to a centrally planned economy, which has many problems to overcome that a single entity like Amazon doesn’t. Once a company gets large enough, some of it’s inefficiencies can be caused by similar issues that centrally planned economies face, however the two are very different. Amazon still has to contend with market forces, and its resource allocation dec…
A centrally planned economy is still subject to market forces. They manifest as the effort required to implement the central plan. The difference between centrally planning your household finances, a company or a whole country is really just one of scale. Because the plan can allocate internal resources arbitrarily so long as the external forces are matched out, it's possible for this internal allocation to be wildly…
This doesn’t scale up from a household scale to an economy-wide scale for numerous reasons, but probably the most significant ones are:
1. The non-existence or competition means that inefficient enterprises cannot fail.
2. The mind-boggling complexity of centrally planning the supply chain of an entire economy unavoidably introduce massive inefficiencies.
If a household wants more bread, they can just allocate more resources to buying bread. But if I want to plan for an economy to produce more bread, I need to individually allocate more resources to every single element of the bread supply chain. There’s no way a central planner could be expected to do that with the same efficiency as market forces could.
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone with parents who experienced the USSR, this is what really terrifies me about China's rise, and the reason I can't say I'm against a trade war if it hinders them more than us. Imagine a world in which China holds more control... a country with little legal or social respect for individualism, where your fate is 'centrally planned' by how impressive your maths skills are. By contrast, ~30% of American billi…
arent's you romanticizing the US a bit much? the country was built by slaves. "the US will self-select for the ambitious and the inspired and those who desire freedom" this is just hogwash
Only the agrarian south. The industry was in the North.
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am puzzled by the reasoning. If your claimed good mechanism cannot reach a good outcome, what's the use or value of them. Op said, AFAIK, is that China is doing seemingly bad thing, but if the outcome is not worse than others doing, what's the ground of criticizing? You cannot argue that something should be citicized just because itself not from their effects...
You can shoot yourself in the head today. You’re going to die anyways. Why do you continue to live? It’s the same outcome right?
Shooting to die == eventually will die...
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come to South Asia -- Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. Weak institutions and governments concerned solely with infighting mean that your IP is probably safe from marauding governments. All your clothes are already made there, why not your electronics?
Terrible vocational education system. Everyone wants to do a BCom or BTech and be a manager.
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well taobao pretty much is the majority of buying for many people. The blog posts are roughly as baseless as what it claims Jack Ma is.
44% of income? Wow. I think total online sales in the US are something like 7%
You cannot derive 40% from that.
Also there is obviously a fraud transaction business to boost the number. Alibaba, by not cracking down them, acting to benefit from that too.
As I said, data are not accurate. But that should be be drawn from wrong facts.
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Stalin's inability to put food on tables = cause for USSR's failure I need to clarify something on this point. Stalin's famine was deliberately engineered to kill Ukrainians. It was not a failure of central economic planning, but actually, shockingly, a triumph. Stalin confiscated Ukrainian citizens' guns and land, and forced them to work 180 days per year on centrally planned crop attempts. The product of their lab…
This is pretty much how the Irish potato famine happened, too - they grew enough food, it was just exported - along with the wealth it generated. The English justified it by invoking the divine right of the free market. In the Soviet Union's case the money derived from exporting the grain abroad supposed to be to help industrialize - which it did. It's a bit hazy whether or not it was deliberately engineered to kill…
Once the famine killed the potato crop, as it had 6 times before in the 1700s and 1800s, the English deliberately blocked grain imports and relief efforts for the Irish Catholics. It would be intellectually lazy to suggest that this was not a terror famine- the English government greatly desired to see 2 million Irish starve or emigrate abroad. The English only wanted Irish land for grazing, not Irish labor or Irish voters to contend with.
However I must insist that the famine in Ukraine was man made. Stalin deliberately, once again, blockaded Ukraine from sea and land. Shipments of grain left Ukraine- shipments of food into Ukraine were blocked. Moscow deliberately engineered news and propaganda to convince the Ukrainians that there was not a famine in Ukraine, and that in fact there was a famine in Germany and the USA instead! This is all documented on film.
In Ukraine, Moscow would feed a horse before it fed a Ukrainian. One horse carriage operator told the local Western journalist, "Moscow gives us the grain to feed the horses. We need the horses to cart away the dead from the streets before anyone sees."
Re: China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a severe misrepresentation of China. They're communist in name, but extremely capitalist in practice. Jack Ma is the man behind Alibaba and now one of the richest people alive, let alone Chinese alive. Check out his background [1]. In my opinion, the main difference between China and the US is nationalism. And that's also what I think that slogan is indicative of. It also, I think, explains their gover…
> In my opinion, the main difference between China and the US is nationalism. And that's also what I think that slogan is indicative of. It also, I think, explains their government actions. Supporting their companies is not about nationalizing them, which implies a motivation of state driven control, but growing and improving Chinese companies on the national scene. I've noticed that a few times recently when compari…
They do what is best for themselves, which at times means doing what's best for the Communist Party. Suppressing dissent, denying Chinese people freedom and self-determination is only good for the people in power.
In case someone wants to argue that authoritarianism provides better governance (which is BS anyway - if it's so great, then hold an election and people will vote for you; who are you to decide that it's so great for everyone else?), all the most wealthy, most stable countries in the world have those freedoms (Europe, the U.S.), including the most wealthy and stable parts of China (Taiwan and Hong Kong).