Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you split Apple? How would you split Meta (would you start charging for WhatsApp)?
How to split Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. Easy! Hard part: Who gets Occulus?
Occulus can be its own company
Alibaba breaks itself up in six
291–300 of 321 posts
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#292It’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?
China's government has been cracking down on its tech industry for some time now, and this has created uncertainty for investors. However, recent moves by the government, such as the approval of new video game titles and the easing of regulations for foreign investors, have been seen as positive signals for the industry. It's important to note that the Chinese government is not monolithic, and different factions with…
> It's important to note that the Chinese government is not monolithic, and different factions within it may have different goals and priorities.
Maybe the past. The factions have long been consolidated and eliminated.
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#293Earlier 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.
why can't that happen? why do you need a slice of it?
There's no point printing something useless? USD is the central currency.
> why do you need a slice of it?
Greed!
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#294Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Debt can only be debt if you believe there exists profits. There are companies that buy and sell off each other to produce "income". A lot of the numbers are inflated or completely cooked.
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely? 1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem worthwhile to him. Still, he miscalculated, but not out of sheer cluelessness. 2. You, HN commenter, understand Chinese politics and power better than Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese billionaire. He is clueless. Doesn't 2 seem a little arrogant to you?
Haha, you're not wrong. Though I would argue that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is not that Ma was being calculating and strategic, but that he just got cocky and said something dumb in the moment. He let all the global feting of his rise from schoolteacher to China's richest man go to his head, made an all-too-human mistake, and said something inadvisable. He may even have been trying to defend th…
>Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
No, you just get arrested by the authorities, and later committed suicide before the trial.
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks l…
It’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.
He suspended ADSBExchange and Elonjet. Accounts sharing open source and public data that he didn’t like. He went so far as to specifically ban the use of the link to his jet on Twitter.
FWIW I know it’s his right to do this as he owns the platform but it is relevant in the context of “but Elon didn’t do X”
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.
Musk could simultaneously be a numpty at Twitter and a superb engineer at SpaceX. You imply that skills are context-free black or white - that is a terrible way to think about people or the world IMHO. And you can’t ignore changes over time either.
Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have.
A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it.
Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it even possible to establish a monopoly market with airplanes considering you can operate both at the same time? https://www.quora.com/Can-an-airline-have-both-Boeing-and-Ai...
The same way Huawei sells 5G equipment as Ericsson, Nokia, et al.
Once you build a 5G system with Huawei, it's very hard and sometimes impossible to include other equipment. Huawei for this reason builds a "full-stack" 5G product that doesn't allow for anyone else's hardware but theirs.
And again, Ericsson and Nokia don't have nation states threatening countries if they don't use them in all their networks.
Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So people are hoping that now the worst of it is done What is the basis of this hope?
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.
Prosperity IS power, but the chinese have a bunch of evil morons (as do most governments) in place that are more concerned with personal wealth than long term prosperity -- however, ironically, they are succeeding in a long term plan to basically own manufacturing for the planet.
The USA is different in that the political fabric is myopically focused on personal individual wealth growth in a very short sighted obsession with only being re-elected usch that they can insider graft/trade and expand personal/familial wealth.
The fact that we dont even openly talk about this problem... is the problem.
Nancy pelosi (and family, dont think for a second she doesnt share her insidere trading info with her close circle, including her son who has also grifting business in ukraine.) is a prime example.