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Alibaba breaks itself up in six

economist.com

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Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#151

Post by flangola7 »

midasuni wrote: post #144
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech…

I seriously doubt his engineering abilities, but I'll ignore that.

One thing he's demonstrated from the beginning is a stark undersupply of emotional intelligence. There are noises that come out of his mouth that my 15yr old would roll her eyes at for being too self-centered and immature.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#152

Post by pedrosorio »

midasuni wrote: post #144
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels. However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech…

> business accuumin

I am guessing this couldn't have been just luck either.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#153

Post by the_af »

mistrial9 wrote: post #149
the_af wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

nice try to pin the blame on the USA - of course USA is guilty, but also, who chooses this path.. You cannot say that the people who do this themselves, to their own, are not responsible.

So you basically understand the US is guilty, but somehow assumed I was saying the people on Latin America who used this training to murder their own people are innocent?

Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them.

PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#154

Post by bobthepanda »

toyg wrote: post #109
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think on some level people implicitly believe that the Chinese govt will choose prosperity over power because that's what they imagine they would do. I suspect that will never happen.

No, it's because that's what the previous generation of Chinese leaders did. Post-Mao, party elites have largely chosen wealth over power at critical junctures, maintaining an overall equilibrium. Xi Jinping broke that setup: there is no elite anymore, only himself; and he's made a point that wealth cannot be used as a shield from his power.

It’s interesting because the other contender for general secretary at the time, Bo Xilai, was even more outwardly Maoist. So I suppose something was bound to happen to that equilibrium.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#155

Post by andy_ppp »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #145
andy_ppp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.

The Twitter purchase really just shows how rich and apathetic Elon Musk is. A Ferrari is a difficult to impossible purchase for almost all of us, but rappers buy them for no reason and then trash them all the time. Twitter is that on a much larger scale, and Musk is treating it the same way because he doesn’t care. You don’t build the first successful auto startup in 70 years and revitalize the space industry by bein…

Both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt multiple times, we could just as easily be talking about an Elon Musk who had every advantage (government contracts, huge tax breaks and a fantastically wealthy family) and still failed. Maybe this is a case of fortune favoring the bold and I admire his perseverance/grit/marketing ability a lot. I've never heard him explain anything technical in any interview he's ever given and instead just starts behaving autistic if he's asked any detail about things. When he does stray into technical subjects like Twitter code he seems to talk nonsense that any engineer who has worked at a Twitter scale company would laugh at.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#156

Post by rejectfinite »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140
bioemerl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of windows laptops with quality hardware. There are cheap ones too, but that's the whole point of choice.

Then why don’t people buy those over apple products? If you change Apple into that, I would be sad because now you’ve taken away a choice I had before.

>Then why don’t people buy those over apple products?

But they do lil bro/sis

Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Presicion/Latitude or HP Elitebook for companies aint cheap. Gaming laptops. Android phones, the top ones.

etc

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#157

Post by iforgotpassword »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #136
hatsunearu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jack Ma truly is clueless in general. There was a talk involving him and Elon Musk and it somehow was Elon coming out as the eloquent one in that conversation.

I don't think very highly of Jack Ma, but eloquence for non-native speakers should be judged very differently, especially for someone coming from a language very far away linguistically.

Exactly, Ma was kinda struggling to get a train of thought across linguistically and half the time when Musk interrupted him he was rather making fun of some poor choice of words and being like "lol whatever" than trying to actually engage in a conversation.

And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#158

Post by mistrial9 »

the_af wrote: post #153
mistrial9 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nice try to pin the blame on the USA - of course USA is guilty, but also, who chooses this path.. You cannot say that the people who do this themselves, to their own, are not responsible.

So you basically understand the US is guilty, but somehow assumed I was saying the people on Latin America who used this training to murder their own people are innocent? Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them. PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.

I apologize if I offended you or others, it is an upsetting chapter in history yes.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#159

Post by contravariant »

maxwell wrote: post #110
contravariant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you could split Google into at least , cloud, ads, search and workspace (including mail).

Don't those all lose a lot of money, except ads?

All except search are paid services so you wouldn't think so.

And search would probably make more money if they could sell ad space to other companies. And by selling information on popular search terms for particular links.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#160

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140
bioemerl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of windows laptops with quality hardware. There are cheap ones too, but that's the whole point of choice.

Then why don’t people buy those over apple products? If you change Apple into that, I would be sad because now you’ve taken away a choice I had before.

it's an interesting question (whether Apple's monopolistic behavior has produced any good), but entirely orthogonal to the underlying question, whether Apple is behaving monopolistically (they are).
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