Live data from Hacker News

Alibaba breaks itself up in six

economist.com

301–310 of 321 posts

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#301

It's interesting to contrast China's approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.

There's no bright, clear separation between governments and corporations in America. Corporate execs regularly get jobs in government, and often wind up "regulating" the very industries/companies they came from. It's also an open secret in Washington that when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs in the very companies they regulated or provided government contracts to. It's a revolving door betwe…

Dont forget the revolving door with intelligence agencies and social media...

Recall the FB head of security that was walked out of the building at MPW for sexually harrasing/inappropriate actions

Or the other head of security who came from NSA, then left FB to go back to NSA, to leave NSA and go back to FB?

Or the time that FB built a 'government liason office' in DC?

Or the time that zuck employed ex SS agents as his personal guard?

Or the time CNN admitted to having CIA handlers on the editing staff (remember the quashing of the epstein story by media, because the CIA told them to)

Or the time when Maxwell, who was media heiress' daughter of double mossad agent was convicted of trafficking kids to REDACTED

Or the time it was reported that the FBI and twitter had an open channel on what, who, when to censor information?

Or when Cisco was required by the NSA to incorporate backdoors in all routing devices for them...

Or when the CIA intercepted CISCO devices en-route to [FOREIGN ADVERSARY] to install physical back-doors into said routers? (mid 1990s)

Or when AT&T was required to install carnivore in SF IDF on Folsom (same building that served the nascient startup 'Twitter')

Or when NSA required Intel to install certain security instruction sets for monitoring code/exploits

Or when it was announced that Twitter had a 'firehose' of all tweets to the library of congress (NSA) for sentiment mining...

Or the time when the most public pedo, aside from BBC's Saville, MITs big donor Epstein was called out for having Marvin FN Minsky in his clientelle - and the fact that a podcast revealed the big BDSM culture of MIT. (I cant find this video for some reason)

Or the time that a c-founder of reddit was suicided for allegedly stealing reasearch papers, but really was going to reveal the ties to pedo elite via the grift at MIT...

Or the time that every session on netflix/prime is a PR campaign for how bad-ass and rogue an ex CIA/NSA/COP can be when he is pursuing the current narrative and constant movies about clandestine operations is made to emotionally drive you to sympathizing with our good looking, adept, secret agents who are saving society from raving lunatics... literally 50% of movies/shows on these platforms are pushing the PR narrative of just how bad-ass a single CIA/NSA/COP agent can be.... else, watch many of the shows that are literally called lucifer... so many weird evil shows....

Or the time when CERBERUS investment group bought MAE-WEST (1st street san jose) and forced them to install carnivor to monitor internet traffic

Or when they sold it after install

Or when they bought PAIX (the Palo Alto Internet Exchange) which convenietly routed all network traffic through that facility AND also had international fiber terminated there AND AND also was the primary IX on the west coast (not MAE-WEST) as it had international and secret lab traffic - so they monitored all out of Stanford...

There are so many data points, and if like data, then pay attention to the points that matter, such as the above.

Yeah - corp-gov is so intertwined in the US its nuts. Actually insane - as its a third-rail to even discuss in media.

https://www.wired.com/2006/04/whistle-blower-outs-nsa-spy-ro...

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#302
post #271

Earlier 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.

If this were the reason Ngo managed to get a lot of his critics banned you might have a point. But: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small. Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out. I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality t…

That statement is incredibly disconnected from reality. Are you suggesting that rockets fly through luck?

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small. Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out. I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality t…

That statement is incredibly disconnected from reality. Are you suggesting that rockets fly through luck?

Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That statement is incredibly disconnected from reality. Are you suggesting that rockets fly through luck?

Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.

> There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of.

What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much impossible to defend Elon's Twitter tenure. Can't think of a single thing he did that made that company more valuable.

What about laying off 75% of its workforce and open sourcing the twitter algorithm?

Is the company more valuable ?

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clueless in understanding the consequences of disagreeing with CCP policy. He should have known what would happen.

That is my exact point. I don't think it is reasonable to assume he wasn't aware that it was a risk. It takes a special kind of arrogance to conclude that people are idiots simply because you don't understand their actions after a moment of thought and with no information. Doubly so when you have someone who grew up through the cultural revolution, lived in China for 60 years, and is a Communist Party member.

Ma is no idiot, and he knows how the system works or Alibaba would never have become a titan, but I think when you get to a certain level of power / money I it warps your perception of what's risky and you overestimate how much you can get away with because of your own sense of invincibility. Musk is a pretty good example of this.

So yeah, I would retract what I said about him being clueless, more like careless and overconfident.

I can tell you that no one in China was surprised when Ma got smacked down; we've seen this same thing play out over the past decade.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.

> There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.

I think Musk is a bad person, but I don't carry any particular resentment or anger towards him.

However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#309
post #271
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer. See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022. Missing option (4). If you have bill…

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 doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)

Re: Alibaba breaks itself up in six

#310
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a organization the size of the Chinese government, that is impossible.
Post reply on HN