351–360 of 401 posts
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Yeah, I’m sure the Uyghurs would much prefer the US treatment, namely being murdered from safe distance, over the Chinese genocide, which is essentially a youth correction facility, but for adults.
Oh right, apologists for the sterilisation of women and the destruction of a culture, nice.
China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, h…
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I think that's the hubris China is currently having: as they've grown stricly because of the reliance of export-led growth, they are now dependent on the global economic order as much as the US is (for its import-led growth). And the ones that initially built the factories in China, can always pack up and move to a different country. So global corporations are now kind of "cycling through" a list of alternate underde…
Thats a good point I have started investing a small amount in Vietnam and other frontier countries. BFRI and VIEL for anyone whos interested.
China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, h…
I do agree that "power" is the issue here. It doesn't take much for China to look at how Bezos or Elon act and say "yeah, no, we're not going to have corporate leaders challenging the Party publicly".
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Communication has also been always around. The problem is the abundance - same with fat and sugar and cocaine. A little is fine, a lot is bad.
Entertainment on TV has been abundant for nearly 50 years, ever since the advent of cable.
> 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…
But regardless, China's downfall will be the fact it tries and picks to "winners and losers". It's a semi-planned economy. Many other countries have tried this and I'm not saying that China will collapse or won't continue to be an economic power, but even the mighty power of the CCP won't make consumers buy their products from you if they aren't what consumers want.
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You’re giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP assumed.
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This might have been true, but then Xi changed the law to be ruler for life.
He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered impeachment process. GTF outta here with your completely ignorant takes on Chinese politics, you clearly have never been there nor read much about it. Term limits are horrible for the working class in the U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC basically run our legislating process. Killing t…
Seems a very odd thing to complain about 'neutered impeachment processes' in Western democracies whilst claiming he can be 'voted out at any time'. The US President can be impeached at any time too and removed from office. You claim impeachment is neutered presumably because the power has never successfully removed anyone from office. How then do you manage to praise the Chinese system for its ability to remove leaders. They don't have democratic recall either despite the theatre of voting, their President has never been removed and is essentially selected by his predecessor, the worst performing president at election captured more than 90% of the vote and even with the addition of state sanctioned 'independents' the leader still captures 99% of the vote.
Secondly, I'm not sure exactly why you say 'Western democracies' when you really just mean the US. Just because you're unhappy with the most recent impeachment failures doesn't mean other 'Western democracies' lack the ability to remove the ruling party or the leader.
China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, h…
Now the thing about five year plans was that they worked rather well at the beginning, so approximately until 1960. Back then, the economic power of a country was measured by its heavy industry, and in a post-WWII world where there was war damage to be fixed, an entire eastern part of the country (Slovakia) to be modernized from its earlier rural state, and new housing stock to be built, concentration of our five year plans on heavy industry made sense.
But slowly the world development started to diverge from the coal-and-steel line. And our central planners didn't take notice, or rather underestimated the significance of that development. They had, after all, a lot of success earlier with coal and steel, so they continued to plan for more coal and steel. Also, a lot of workers in those industries were card-carrying members of the Communist party, so it made sense to reward them for their loyalty.
We slowly lost our development edge, fell behind the West in automation, computer technology, semiconductors. The overemphasis on industry led to major ecological problems and pollution, and the emerging ecological initiatives proved to be a fertile ground for opposition. In 1989, the regime fell, and we were left with a huge, absolutely bloated, but mostly obsolete coal and steel industry that could not compete anymore. And its subsequent collapse was a source of significant societal disruption.
I saw the collapse of that industry first hand, growing up in a coal and steel city (Ostrava; just take Google Maps and look at the enormous chunks of industrial structures located literally inside the city, with residential buildings right next to the factories).
Now China does not seem to fall behind yet, they also allow a lot more capitalism than Communist Czechoslovakia did (in our country, even a private café was a rare sight; the regime was so ideologically pure that it purged even most self-employed people from independence into formal jobs).
But I can see a similar "it-must-stay-the-same-itis" in their proclamations that the country must never deindustrialize. Never is a bad word in mortal's mouths. If they fixate on industry at the cost of all other developments, they may go down the same route as Czechoslovakia eventually.
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The argument I get from the article is that the video game industry will not strengthen the U.S. geopolitically versus China compared to investing into "hard" technology like better semiconductors or more advanced military hardware.
I don't understand why it has to be a choice. The Video Game industry seems like its doing just fine without Government assistance. The Government can focus on investing in creating manufacturing hubs in the US instead. Shortage of labor? Create a new Visa and citizenship pathway specifically for electronics engineers, while investing in US universities to expand the EE departments and scholarships related to EE. Its…
Which is why everyone capable tries to get into FAANG for AdTech. Nurturing people to think long term and to have a producer + explorer mentality will yield better results. Critical thinking with (endless) ambition is the key.
Even if the USA authorities subsidize EE study it is not certain that new grads will go into EE jobs and not into a bootcamp to respec. Get rich quick incentives like ones given by FAANG are really strong and it would take a lot to counter them. One solution, ironically, would be to do the same as China is doing. Dismantle FAANGs and the problem disappears. Smart people will flock to some other branch and maybe IT people will go to boot-camps to become EE on their own volition (free markets).