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Re: China

#81

Post by mercurialshark »

Yhippa wrote: post #49
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?

Nope, not on that gem. But they tried later to answer some of the others. For example, a historically relevant case was being discussed, where SCOTUS found a rather significant law passed by Congress as unconstitutional (effective immediately). A student said "isn't the idea to gradually change a major law, to do minimal damage, like bringing a ship into port." He retorted with, "Heaven forbid we actually held Congress accountable for doing their job and passing good laws. There are many bad laws that are constitutional and good laws that are not. They have the ability to revisit and modify existing law, but they never do and choose to leave it to the Court to decide its constitutionality."

Re: China

#82

Post by desdiv »

Mentioning China's lack of environmental regulations is just a red herring that distracts people from the real solution. Consider the following:

It's illegal for me to build a cruise missile in the US. Likewise, it's illegal for me to import a cruise missile into the US.

It's illegal for my startup to pollute when I produce a Gizmo in the US. However, it's totally legal for for me to import said Gizmo from China after I paid someone there to pollute for me.

Any sane environmental regulation must be applied at the point of sale as well. The problem here is our environmental regulation. We can't change what China does but we can change our broken laws.

Re: China

#83

Post by blocktuw »

Shivetya wrote: post #29

the US's government is finally becoming too burdensome to do business under. The taxation of American business is one of the larger handicaps they operate under. however the biggest issue facing the US is this message that excelling isn't to aspired too, acceptance of who you are and who someone else is is all that matters. It is a self defeating mindset. Don't worry if you fail, you had no choice, you just can't do…

How do you square this self-defeating mindset against the described millennial sensitivity where everybody expects a trophy and considers themselves special? Seems like you might be referring to older works who are already jaded by the system and not the new class of workers who will be taking over their jobs.

Re: China

#84

Post by bernardom »

fchollet wrote: post #54

I wish I was a high-profile VC. Then I too would be writing essays exhorting people to take on high amounts of risk and to spend their 20s and 30s grinding through 60 hour workweeks, so I could grow my portfolio. Because, we're losing to China! Honestly, it has never been clear to me why "growth" was the metric that we, as a society, have been optimizing for. Who stands to benefit? You? The middle class? Everyone? Or…

Who stands to benefit from growth? Everyone. The population is increasing, so we need economic growth to at least maintain employment.

This reminds me of something a friend mentioned when we were talking about American exceptionalism and the disproportionate number of inventions made relative to the population.

He saw a documentary where they interviewed a couple that owned an ice cream cart in Paris. The couple said that they take the month of August off for vacation. This perplexed the interviewer- but how? Isn't August the best sales month for ice cream?

The family said, essentially- we were born in this class, we'll die in this class, and the government more or less guarantees that. Why work any harder?

Re: China

#85

Post by mikeg8 »

> The other stark contrast is how much harder people in China seem to work than people here, and how working hard is considered a good thing, not a bad thing.

If continued growth is dependent on working harder (more hours), I'm completely fine with being over passed. If you have to give up more of your life to "grow" you have less time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. While America's growth is enviable, our work-life balance is not and many people outside the US think our labor and vacation policies are a joke.

I don't think the solution to growth is working harder or changing our attitude towards hard work, we're already at the top (excluding China) – it's about working smarter and with better legislation to support risk takers.

Re: China

#87

Post by ideal0227 »

LiweiZ wrote: post #57

As a native Chinese (I'm tired to claim this every time when commenting on China related topics.), I think the op needs to do a lot more homework on China. It's not an easy task to know something you are not familiar with with just numbers, even if one has more than enough numbers.

As a native Chinese, I doubt anyone in Chine knows China good enough.

But as a native Chinese, what you should have known is China is growing faster and better in the recent 10 years.

Re: China

#88

Post by kirse »

Afforess wrote: post #55

I disagree with a lot of this. The Chinese value the appearance of working hard, not actual hard work. Cheating among Chinese students is pandemic. Chinese companies regularly publish misleading or outright fraudulent earning statements and quarterly reports. While the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to reverse these trends, it will take a long time to undo their culture of corruption. Contrast this with…

China's growth has long since been an organism that feeds on the back of the gorilla of US growth. If the US economy would hit a major recession, China would come crashing down with it. On the other hand, if the Chinese economy would have a major collapse, the US would suffer, but still be able to re-route core-value manufacturing processes to new countries (or back home).

I agree with your cheating note, many of the Chinese take great pride in stealing innovation and ripping off US intellectual property, to the point where anyone well-informed on the matter knows that they have their fingers in the networks of almost every major US Corporation, siphoning away hard-earned gains by our workers. I have further exposure to this through product manufacturing, where Chinese companies are well-known for ripping off blueprints from the US companies that outsource their manufacturing. Tools like Alibaba have only increased this sort of misbehavior exponentially.

What the US has that China often doesn't demonstrate are the intangibles in regards to honest work-ethic that produce genuine "value", rather than "value" based on a manipulated currency and outright lazy copy-catting. Once they demonstrate their self-sufficiency by doing honest innovation, then I'll credit them for a job well done. There's a lot of value in US-China relations, but they still have yet to prove that they could "hop off the back of the gorilla" and stand alone.

Re: China

#89

Post by chrischen »

rifung wrote: post #45
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.

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).

Its a lottery if you blind folded yourself and pointed at the startup you work at.

You can always mitigate the risk by researching and making an educated decision about where you work. Different startups have different degrees of risk.

Re: China

#90

Post by superobserver »

fchollet wrote: post #54

I wish I was a high-profile VC. Then I too would be writing essays exhorting people to take on high amounts of risk and to spend their 20s and 30s grinding through 60 hour workweeks, so I could grow my portfolio. Because, we're losing to China! Honestly, it has never been clear to me why "growth" was the metric that we, as a society, have been optimizing for. Who stands to benefit? You? The middle class? Everyone? Or…

Much of what you say seems reminiscent of The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement. Although both projects leave much to be desired in actual execution, their purported aims for moving away from our current societal framework (based on artificial scarcity, money-market economics, etc.) is rather commendable.
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