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Why is China smashing its tech industry?

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Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#131

Post by jszymborski »

danjac wrote: post #123
caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

I'll bet you could pick up a random op-ed from a 1960s Readers' Digest and someone would be making the argument that Americans spend too much time watching TV and pouring their creative energies into advertising, cosmetics and pop records while the Soviets are conquering outer space and South East Asia.

Yah, there is this incomprehensible gnawing notion that crushing oppression is somehow a great way to innovate, and that liberty and self-expression is no more than dalliance.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#132

Post by ethanbond »

danjac wrote: post #123
caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

I'll bet you could pick up a random op-ed from a 1960s Readers' Digest and someone would be making the argument that Americans spend too much time watching TV and pouring their creative energies into advertising, cosmetics and pop records while the Soviets are conquering outer space and South East Asia.

Thankfully our competition at the time were agricultural societies LARPing as industrial ones and then a big pile of ruins in Europe.

Not so today

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#133

Post by epivosism »

kmeisthax wrote: post #107
epivosism wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a name for the question of distinguishing useful economic activity from rent-seeking? It seems tied up in lots of other system/corruption/control related questions - cancer, budget spending, regulation etc. It feels like there can never be a trustable implementation of a "value or rentseeking?" oracle, since the system implementing it would also be under selection and pressure from the virtual gains to be ha…

I don't think there is such a name. But you're on the right track about it being difficult to distinguish between value and rent-seeking. One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and i…

Excluding the direct political arguments, is there hope for a clean way to distinguish these types of activities:

* Someone who literally figures out a new, cheap way to make a drug which cures a real disease

* Someone who, as soon as they get the right to, imposes license fees which serve no valid purpose, and profits in status & wealth from these new duties.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#134

Post by rakmos »

caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

You missed the giant gaping time sink that is the video game industry.

I also think including this in the discussion will, perhaps, emphasize the nuance of what I believe you're indirectly referencing -- the economics of how humans choose to spend their time (sometimes referred to as the "Attention Economy").

I believe literally optimizing for something such as GDP fails to take into account freedom / liberty which is likely something most on this website would agree is incredibly valuable in a society.

I think the difficulty is in creating a consensus around what is acceptable relative to the "Attention Economy". It might even be impossible given that this seems almost indistinguishable from culture -- and there will likely never be a single unified culture if and until something as paradigm-shifting as a multi-planetary species is realized.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#135

Post by jefftechentin »

triceratops wrote: post #64
caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

Facebook, sure. Why Netflix? TV and movies have always been around. The US owes its status as a cultural superpower to Hollywood. Too much TV and movie-watching isn't good for a nation, sure, but you could make that argument about any pastime.

Not sure how valid but I think a case from this hypothesized Chinese Government perspective can be made even without criticizing Netflix itself.

When Hollywood was built in the 1920's it was not exactly the backbone of the economy. The article argues that the Chinese Government sees value in the economy beyond GDP goes up and cash flows good. Technology and manufacturing are important to national security.

The article quote Xi Jinping saying “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” I guess the national question for the other super power is how important is this "real economy" to itself. Is too much talent and labor sucked up in profitable activity that is suboptimal for a nation? Are these 21st century company's like Netflix good enough for our nation?

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#136

Post by jszymborski »

volta83 wrote: post #40

> There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in; maybe China’s leaders, for reasons that will remain forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion. Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue fr…

Another comment mentioned this, but I think Tencent and Alibaba are poor stand-ins for the sort of companies that aim to make phone-addicts.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#137

Post by thedudeabides5 »

rakmos wrote: post #134
caeril wrote: post #11

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…

You missed the giant gaping time sink that is the video game industry. I also think including this in the discussion will, perhaps, emphasize the nuance of what I believe you're indirectly referencing -- the economics of how humans choose to spend their time (sometimes referred to as the "Attention Economy"). I believe literally optimizing for something such as GDP fails to take into account freedom / liberty which i…

I dunno man, you ever seen the genZs play fornite? Not sure it's a waste of time so much as training for some weird future in the computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKd2KpGkFJ4

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#139

Post by JTbane »

whymauri wrote: post #125
Mizza wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hijacking this comment a bit, but I haven't watched real TV in a very long time but have been tuning in again because of the Olympics and Jeopardy. I'm seeing an incredible amount of ads for companies that let you gamble real money on your phone. Sometimes it's back to back to back to back commercials for online app casinos. This seems really dangerous and a sign of a tragically unhealthy and predatory economy - I ca…

>Has there been a regulatory change that allows this, or has this been going on for some time? It was actually less regulated. There were gambling sites for children based on electronic collectibles from video games. It was becoming a billion dollar industry before Steam put their foot down. A friend was close to launching a venture in the space and their first year revenue projections were around 600k assuming middl…

There are still tons of games out there with gacha/loot box style elements, basically gambling for kids.

Re: Why is China smashing its tech industry?

#140

Post by jonfw »

infogulch wrote: post #59
rvn1045 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale that these companies operate on requires huge innovations in software engineering and computer science. Think about all the distributed systems that have come out of places like Facebook and Google over the last 2 decades.

Which they promptly keep to themselves and utilize to maximally exploit their users time and attention. Technology is a tool, not a generic force for good. Tools are agnostic to human value. If technology is being used exploitatively then it's a problem.

They don't keep it all to themselves, giant technology companies have open sourced things like mapreduce, kubernetes, golang, react, kafka, and more.
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