Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?

You're crossing streams here.

Government backed financing for equipment sales, and government procurement for defence or large projects ... these are activities are miles apart in terms of operational realities.

The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade' because it's a huge strategic advantage for any competitor wishing to completely dominate a market and flush out competitors.

The CCP controls their national commercial banks and controls the central bank - they can direct financing to happen directly for what they perceive to the benefit of the state and make no mistake this is a lot of firepower.

Imagine if the head of he Federal Reserve, and the head of Morgan Stanley were directed to make strategic loans to Cisco's customers at he behest of the President.

Cash-strapped Western companies, getting really sweet financing and credit terms and 'one stop one shop vendor' from Huawei is enough to really spook everyone.

Neither is it really a 'side show' issue - it's quite a fundamental thing. The financing is as important part of the equation as the product itself. Much like the financial terms on your car loan or mortgage are fundamental aspects of your terms of ownership.

..and it is illegal to attempt.

As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).

I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)

PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.

I've heard about the nortel hack from other sources, with the link to china being mentioned many times I've seen it. For example, here's some CBC reporting form 2012 that at least somewhat outside the current climate (https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-c...).

The big problem I have with the Bloomberg article, is it seems to really be trying to stretch the underlying information to draw the conclusion that Chinese Government or Chinese Hackers or Huawei are solely or the most responsible for the fall of Nortel.

Did Huawei benefit and get it's start from stolen IP is likely a compelling story to explore, with lots of compelling underlying facts. Does Huawei or China still do this, is probably another good question. To try and link these questions to the fall of nortel, while glossing over other massive contributors to nortel's fall leaves me skeptical of the narrative also.

It's disappointing, because I do believe there is plenty of compelling evidence around about Chinese IP theft, but reporting like this allows lots of noise to be mixed in, and for consumers of the information to reasonably be sceptical.

> Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?

As a US citizen, reading HN for a year has downgraded me from being extremely patriotic, to considering my options if I get expelled from the country in the next 20 years on the basis of my ethnicity. These folks would cheer that on, and they're my neighbors.

I gave away 10+ bitcoins on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. lol (on a different account... I was an early adopter of this website, too)

They would have been worth almost $200,000 at the peak of bitcoin's value, but I don't feel bad about it because there's no way I would have held them until that point. I mined them myself when they were worth like $12 each, and I definitely would have sold them when it hit $100.