China • Hacker News Board

Re: China

#41

Post by api » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

sama wrote: post #13

akavi wrote: post #7

> One thing that I’ve found puzzling over the last ten or so years is the anger directed towards people who choose to work hard That feels somewhat disingenuous. If 'sama is referring to the sentiments expressed on this board, from what I've seen, it's not anger towards people choosing to work hard, but anger towards demands of hard work of others from those who stand to benefit at their expense. Ie, the anger is tow…

Certainly working really hard without an expectation of being compensated it (either with equity or cash) is dumb. I've argued a lot that startups should give employees more equity, and I think that's shifting. Also, most startups I'm aware of, at least in the bay area, pay large salaries at this point.

"Also, most startups I'm aware of, at least in the bay area, pay large salaries at this point."

... which is all soaked up by real estate hyperinflation.

Re: China

#42

Post by ojbyrne » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

Clearly sama is preparing for a career in politics, because this is the standard canard of politicians everywhere. If we don't work harder, more efficiently, we'll be overtaken by country X, and be destitute.

It's a well known economic axiom, that long-term economic health of a country is directly proportional to productivity. It is not in any way true that its affected by the productivity of another country. Both countries can prosper, there's no zero-sum game here.

Re: China

#43

Post by samtp » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

rememberlenny wrote: post #6

I lived in Shanghai and worked at a startup for a year after college. The startup expat and startup local communities are surprisingly developed. There are a lot of co-working spaces, hacker spaces, and start up events. For anyone interested in China, you can live in Shanghai without speaking Mandarin. Western training in programing, design and product is highly valued. Salary offerings are lower by a factor of 10. R…

They've also started to block Gmail and seriously block most VPNs. A good number of expats are looking into leaving recently because of the recent restrictions.

Re: China

#44

Post by harryh » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #32

harryh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it a lottery is silly. I know some people who would have close to a 100% chance of getting into YC if they applied. I know other people who would have close to a 0% chance. It's not random.

Getting in isn't the same thing as a successful exit . The lottery is more about which of those YC folks wind up with a Dropbox rather than a Leaky.

Ya, that's not a lottery either. I'm not saying luck isn't involved. It certainly helps. But if you think that's all that matters you're crazy.

Re: China

#45

Post by rifung » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #19

pen2l wrote: post #11

> “It’s so stupid that these people play the startup lottery. What idiots. They should just consult.” or “Startups need to stop glorifying young workers that can work all day and night” No-one quite says that working hard is stupid (well, except the few misguided ones we should all ignore anyway). What people go tsk, tsk, tsk at is working really hard and giving up responsibilities at home, not being with you family,…

Calling it a lottery is silly. I know some people who would have close to a 100% chance of getting into YC if they applied. I know other people who would have close to a 0% chance. It's not random.

Maybe so but I thought the lottery wasn't getting into YC but working for a start up that becomes successful. In that sense it's very much like a lottery: you have a tiny probability of succeeding, but if you succeed you get an extremely large sum of money.

I'm not entirely sure it's like a lottery in terms of the expected value being negative though (if you consider the opportunity cost as a negative).

Re: China

#46

Post by NiftyFifty » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

The knee jerk for me, is the absence of regulatory control of industry standards that make US based companies grow for the benefit of the US economy. As far as being 2nd to China on overall economic power, that's just find in my book. We aren't racing for space here. It's the ethical challenges that present themselves by OTHER countries that provide hot beds for US business. I can just lean back on the banana republics of Latin America, as an example of economic explosion on the backs of others through brutality and instability of regional nations partners. From observation, if I'm not wrong, China has done exactly this to advance it's own economy via Africa endeavors. Am I wrong?

Re: China

#47

Post by tdees40 » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

I don't mean to eye-roll, but Sam on economics tends to be, well, meh. The thing I always remind people when they say that China will take over the world is that everyone said the same thing about Japan in the 1980s (remember the movie/novel Rising Sun?). What happened?

Well, the mercantilist economic toolkit has an endgame. Neither Sam nor I knows when it's going to let them down, but building an entire economy on cheap labor and radical amounts of investment is hard to sustain. Eventually you need things like domestic demand and that requires wages, which short-circuits the export machine. Japan got caught in that trap, and China will eventually too.

Re: China

#48

Post by bayesianhorse » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

One major point often overlooked in this discussion is, that nobody trusts the Chinese government. In foreign policy, China has to pay dearly for very little trust/support in return. Therefore I don't see the dollar getting dethroned any time soon.

I also don't believe that China is getting risk management right. Corruption in government and industry, extreme growth rates and untrackable webs of debts will sooner or later stop Chinese growth unless it transforms into a much more liberal or democratic form of government.

For China, it's still a long way to the top.

Re: China

#49

Post by Yhippa » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

mercurialshark wrote: post #31

Regarding exceptionalism, I had a course in law school taught by Justice Scalia. His first words were, "I believe in American exceptionalism and if you don't, you can find the door." His intentions were to provoke us and he was baiting a brave law student to disagree with him. Required reading for the course included De Tocqueville's - Democracy in America - as to "leave it to a Frenchman to explain America to Americ…

Did anybody take the bait?

Re: China

#50

Post by epicureanideal » Wed, Feb 11, 2015, 7:14 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #22

[deleted]

It sounds like we need a new metric. Something like "military purchasing power parity" (MPPP). A conversion factor C would be determined for each country based on how expensive it is to locally produce tanks, aircraft, etc., train and maintain troops, etc. Then their nominal GDP would be multiplied by C to get MPPP GDP.

For example, just looking at troops, if it costs $100,000 per year in overhead-included costs to maintain one US soldier but only $10,000 to maintain a Chinese soldier, then that would help their MPPP. Large defense contractors with cost-plus contracts would influence the US's MPPP, but so would corruption in China.

An even better metric might be WMPPP (wartime military purchasing power parity), which is probably the real metric that counts and determines which country is a superpower. This is what the MPPP would be in wartime. For example, the US spends a lot on troops and equipment in peacetime, but in wartime it could operate much more efficiently. See World War II.

Another interesting metric would be how quickly a country could ramp up its military production within 1-2 years assuming a major war broke out, because a war against another superpower probably wouldn't last very long.