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China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

nytimes.com

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Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#361

Post by learc83 »

cuboidGoat wrote: post #359
learc83 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Linguistically and culturally, the US has massive differences within it. Culturally: Compared to a small European country--yes. Compared to the EU-- not at all. Linguistically: 92% of the US speaks English. Within that group, dialectical differences are relatively small even compared with much smaller countries like the UK. African American vernacular english is the only major dialect that is different enough to rea…

Although many of them are only represented by relatively small populations, the US has a much wider range of languages and language groups than Europe, as it has the languages brought from Europe, the creole languages from the slave trade, as well as the remaining native languages.

>relatively small populations

That's the relevant part for the purpose of calling it a single market.

>the US has a much wider range of languages and language groups than Europe

Unless you're talking about Indigenous languages with less than 10k speakers, that's not true because Europe has experienced significant immigration over the past decades.

If you are talking about those languages, it's irrelevant because fewer than 150k people speak them, and only a few thousand aren't also fluent in English.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#362

Post by TACIXAT »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #298
pathseeker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the favouring of US IP holders (as incumbents and head starters) You mean favoring the people that actually invented these things? I understand there isn't much of a notion of IP in China, but are you suggesting that it's unfair to not be able to copy IP and just manufacture without paying?

"but are you suggesting that it's unfair to not be able to copy IP and just manufacture without paying?" It's a perfectly legitimate approach for some situations. In the 1980's , 1990's it was actually a positive strategy for China to pay no mind to IP. And it was better for us as well because it was the easiest way to move them along at a quick pace. It's better for the 'rest of the world' to have a prosperous China…

Why can't you catch up to major players without IP?

I am of the opinion that any IP is antithetical to societal progress. If people are free to copy that means we get to remove the monopolistic pricing of goods. If people are free to improve then our ideas and products become better and better, rather than having a single player guard an antiquated model and prevent others from iterating on the idea. If information flowed more freely people interested in making money would have to continue to innovate and while it may hurt a few individuals who could run with a single idea for 20+ years, it would bring up society as a whole.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#363

Post by chillacy »

TACIXAT wrote: post #362
sonnyblarney wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but are you suggesting that it's unfair to not be able to copy IP and just manufacture without paying?" It's a perfectly legitimate approach for some situations. In the 1980's , 1990's it was actually a positive strategy for China to pay no mind to IP. And it was better for us as well because it was the easiest way to move them along at a quick pace. It's better for the 'rest of the world' to have a prosperous China…

Why can't you catch up to major players without IP? I am of the opinion that any IP is antithetical to societal progress. If people are free to copy that means we get to remove the monopolistic pricing of goods. If people are free to improve then our ideas and products become better and better, rather than having a single player guard an antiquated model and prevent others from iterating on the idea. If information f…

Case in point, software has been growing every year, just take a look at newly invented algorithms on Wikipedia, and they end up in new systems too. Especially in distributed systems where we have innovations like consistent hashing, paxos, etc. Imagine if those algorithms had to be licensed. Want a load balancer? Pay license fees. Want horizontal scaling? License it. Watchdog process? License that. Etc. After all, somebody or some company invented those things and it wasn’t really that obvious beforehand. Should they not be entitled to some share of the profits if it benefits other companies? Yet I’d argue that we’re all better off learning from each other’s work.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#364

Post by TACIXAT »

teknologist wrote: post #335
age_of_stone wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huawei would like to participate in "forced" partnership and open their servers to the US government in exchange US market access. But still, it's banned by national security. laughable?

Well I guess they shouldn't have put a backdoor in their products then. You're conflating two unrelated things.

>Well I guess they shouldn't have put a backdoor in their products then.

Citation needed. I've yet to see any evidence against Huawei and ZTE. Just FUD from the USG.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#365

Post by chillacy »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #274
gonvaled wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has been cheating, bigger, better and longer. We seem to agree that this is not about fair trade, but that is what Trump is calling the whole thing.

Name one thing where US is cheating? US invents china steals that the only truth. Name one thing chinese have invented? Dont tell me gun powder, something latest.

That’s funny, the British used to say the same thing about the US during the industrial revolution where America didn’t respect British IP.

Hollywood exists because California didn’t respect IP from eastern states.

So, stealing is the winning strategy it seems.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#366

Post by chillacy »

teknologist wrote: post #336
iforgotpassword wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, what? it has many more features than any western messenger. what makes it appeal less to western audiences is that it is precisely tailored to chinese taste/lifestyle, which is distinctively different.

Which derails the parent's vision that it would be a popular messenger in the US. Uh, what?

Your post said it’s the worst from a technical standpoint, but I’d argue it failed from a feature standpoint: half assed localization, features tailored for the Chinese market (for instance push to talk is huge there), and regarding the stickers thing, non-western friendly UI (east Asia is used to higher density designs, see any webpage in Chinese or Japanese)..

Even things like lack of encryption are missing features that we care about but Chinese users don’t, not a technical evaluation.

One feature that WeChat nailed is performance in low bandwidth connections common in China in 2010, but it’s not like that’s something we in the west care about on 3G+ connections.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#367

Post by lacker »

avcdsuia wrote: post #254
lacker wrote: post #144

One of the things that seems the most unfair to me about global trade is that for many American internet companies, China just totally bans them. Everything from Facebook and Google to smaller players gets hit by the great firewall. That is way more impactful than a tariff of 5% or 25%. With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there…

China just marks parts of the Internet as a territory and introduces laws that meet the authority's satisfaction. Since free information and speech make people call in questions about the legitimacy of ‘the party leads everything’ and dark past, this situation won't get changed unless we distribute everything(but decentralization violates tech giants‘ interest) or a regime change happened. Otherwise, progress US and…

I still think there is a good chance that China will allow more individual freedoms over time. Their people will get richer, get more familiar with the rights allowed in the rest of the world, and demand more individual liberties. The dark past will become more distant and irrelevant. And after enough time, if things go well, economic success and stability will be the source of the legitimacy of the regime, rather than a whitewashed history, so the ruling party will have less to worry about.

I could certainly be wrong. But I don't think it's right to just take it for granted that the Chinese internet will always be censored, especially when there is a discussion about whether China treats companies from other countries fairly where it is very relevant.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#368

Post by lacker »

dis-sys wrote: post #252
lacker wrote: post #144

One of the things that seems the most unfair to me about global trade is that for many American internet companies, China just totally bans them. Everything from Facebook and Google to smaller players gets hit by the great firewall. That is way more impactful than a tariff of 5% or 25%. With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there…

> With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there was more pressure to play fairly there. In a fair environment, you'd be seeing Facebook/Google/Twitter used by hundreds of millions Chinese when most Americans paying their bills using Alipay and talk to their friends using WeChat. US dominance in tech is _NOT_ something called fair.

WeChat works just fine in the US. Facebook Messenger, a very similar product, is completely banned in China. In a fair environment, people could try out both of these apps and pick the one they liked better.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#369

Post by En_gr_Student »

Irony: In trying to win, the Chinese leaders are enforcing a death spiral. History judges with brutal honesty, and not on intentions.

Play it through: - they can't back down --> means they can't not lose half a trillion per year in current revenue --> means they don't get to spend that money on "Chinese advancement", but they might foolishly think they look "tough".

I can think of five ways out of this where they win. If they are too stupid to do so, then they don't really deserve to be in power, do they. One of the big arguments for the authoritarian structure is that they get fewer pretty faces, and 3/4 the way up the chain of command they should get higher levels of actual capability.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#370

Post by chowchowchow »

sheepmullet wrote: post #296
chowchowchow wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but I thought the issue we were talking about was whether global winner-take-all, IE most votes cast in the country determines the winner, is disenfranchising compared to our current electoral college system.

> is disenfranchising compared to our current electoral college system. I guess my point is we can enfranchise significantly more people than today without moving away from the electoral college. Yet no state is seriously considering assigning their electoral votes proportionally. I think that shows the people calling for the removal of the electoral college are playing politics and are only interested in it if it he…

To me your point of view reads as superficially civil but deeply cynical underneath. The current system is unfair, and you criticize people who want to fix it because they won't take a local action which is nominally aligned with the goal but in reality will just tilt the unfairness further.

It's a bit like tritely declaring that people should just opt in to pay more taxes individually if they think tax rates on the wealthy are too low.

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