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Alibaba breaks itself up in six

economist.com

121–130 of 321 posts

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#121
post #72
post #7

Great move. This will increase local competition and wages, diversify ideas and design, and make shareholders more money than as a single entity. As with Standard Oil and AT&T. The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

No it won't. It will reduce competition. Are you going to now compete with the official government supported entity?

[deleted]

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#122
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely OT: > Over the next few months the government [...] disappeared Jack Ma. Huh, I've never seen "disappear" being used as a transitive verb. I kinda like it and I think I'll put it in my language toolbox.

Yeah, it's informal but it used mostly for when a government illegally detains someone, often incommunicado --though historically in Latin American countries "disappearances" were a euphemism for government paramilitary forces (or revolutionary forces) taking someone behind the shed and extrajudicially executing them or in lesser cases locking them up in secret prisons. The choice of word probably stems from the ster…

In Argentina, one of the countries (along with Chile) where the term "desaparecido" (disappeared) was coined in the 70s, it means specifically:

Government forces (not revolutionaries) which use either their official militaries/police (often) or their secret police (less often) to detain individuals without recourse to the law, then take them to illegal detention centers where they are tortured and eventually killed (in Argentina, some detainees were simply drugged and dropped alive to the Río de la Plata river, where they drowned -- our so called "flights of death" -- and others sometimes simply shot). The key thing that sets "disappeared" people aside from other ways of execution is that there is no official acknowledgement of their fate, and their friends and family are never truly sure of how they died unless their mortal remains are ever found by chance.

If this sounds horrifying, always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government, in things like the School of the Americas [1], under the guise of "learning how to fight insurgency".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#123
post #6

It’s always hard for me to understand the why when it comes to China’s government. “Investors cheer the move as signalling the end of China’s tech crackdown” If this is government action then why would this be the “end” of government involvement?

It will not "end" any government involvement. That's just the spin.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#124
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely OT: > Over the next few months the government [...] disappeared Jack Ma. Huh, I've never seen "disappear" being used as a transitive verb. I kinda like it and I think I'll put it in my language toolbox.

Yeah, it's informal but it used mostly for when a government illegally detains someone, often incommunicado --though historically in Latin American countries "disappearances" were a euphemism for government paramilitary forces (or revolutionary forces) taking someone behind the shed and extrajudicially executing them or in lesser cases locking them up in secret prisons. The choice of word probably stems from the ster…

To be even more specific the phrase is most associated with the dirty war and Argentina’s military dictatorship and their habit of taking people they didn’t like up in helicopters and pushing them out a few miles off shore into the ocean. They just vanished without a trace.

They were called los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and for years once a week their mothers would silently carry photos of them and walk in circles at the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#125
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why was this downvoted? To me it seems totally reasonable that: > The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

I disagree, and think it would be harmful. I think we’d be better off splitting up the US government into smaller pieces but everyone loses their mind when I suggest it.

The way to do that in a manner that doesn't simply empower multinational corporations, is to uncap the House of Representatives by repealing the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

https://twitter.com/UncapTheHouse

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#126
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, one of Ma’s last public appearances was at an American conference, maybe TechCrunch but I’m not sure, where he said in an on stage interview something to the effect of, “I’m not afraid of the CCP”, in relation to recent revelations he was a CCP member. Then he got disappeared shortly after. He was really clueless about what kind of org he was dealing with.

One doesn't need to be clueless in order to lose a power struggle. He might have been betrayed, he might have overestimated the resources he could fully count on, he might have simply been backing a faction in the party that ended up losing. Xi Jinping went as far as kicking out of the public congress a previous president, which was unprecedented; who knows what else he's capable of.

Correct, he is/was backed by a different faction.

Most startups of that era are.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#127
post #124
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's informal but it used mostly for when a government illegally detains someone, often incommunicado --though historically in Latin American countries "disappearances" were a euphemism for government paramilitary forces (or revolutionary forces) taking someone behind the shed and extrajudicially executing them or in lesser cases locking them up in secret prisons. The choice of word probably stems from the ster…

To be even more specific the phrase is most associated with the dirty war and Argentina’s military dictatorship and their habit of taking people they didn’t like up in helicopters and pushing them out a few miles off shore into the ocean. They just vanished without a trace. They were called los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and for years once a week their mothers would silently carry photos of them and walk in ci…

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo still do their walk today.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#128
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China can't print money and go in infinite debt mode like the US does? The government needs to recover from COVID. Perspective: As leader the in control, I see there's a company that has the largest payment network in the country. Well that can't happen. I need a slice of it. So let's "regulate" it.

China's public debt exceeds the US in several areas, private debt lags behind but is still substantial.

It isn’t clear if SOE debt should be considered public or private debt. On the one hand, these are often publicly traded companies, in the other hand everyone assumes their debt is implicitly guaranteed by the government. Localities will often load up local SOEs with debt when they need to do something for public interest, like build a subway or road. So China’s public debt situation is really murky.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#129
post #6

It’s always hard for me to understand the why when it comes to China’s government. “Investors cheer the move as signalling the end of China’s tech crackdown” If this is government action then why would this be the “end” of government involvement?

It’s usually just about maintaining and increasing power. And warning others by demonstrating it too.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please excuse my naïveté here, but communism is an economic system and not a form of government, no? My understanding is that economics and governance are largely - though not completely - orthogonal.

[flagged]

Communism was a political and economic system. When stalin and hitler dipping their toes in faith/religion/belief it all went wrong and collapsed-in on itself.

Ancient Rome had government and politics before religion.

The last two thousand years had state religions at some points and the churches have their beliefs on governance, which they do internally and influence the world externally to some degree.

They are separate concepts and communism never reached the level of an effective religion. It's not easy to wash away the distinction between concepts.

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