[HN Gopher] Why is China smashing its tech industry?
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Why is China smashing its tech industry?
Author : exceptione
Score : 246 points
Date : 2021-08-02 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahpinion.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahpinion.substack.com)
| nobody0 wrote:
| More like smashing FAANG-like hegemony and K-12 riddle-solving
| army bootcamps.
|
| Given Internet companies are ubiquitous, we sort of equate tech
| firms to them...
| _448 wrote:
| The USA tech industry did start with hard-tech. The hint is in
| the name "Silicon Valley". The spur in innovation in the American
| tech industry started with companies working on projects from the
| defence and aerospace industry. Along the way they lost the plot,
| mostly during the dot-com bubble when the
| investment/banking/family-office industry(that does not
| understand tech) got heavily involved into it to make quick
| money! That diversion from hard-tech to click-bait tech has
| continued even today, because the investors want quick return
| whereas for hard-tech you have to have a lot of patience to see
| positive outcome.
|
| One country that, to some extent, successfully emulated the early
| Silicon Valley type strategy is Israel that has encouraged lot of
| personnel from defence and aerospace industry to form commercial
| ventures.
|
| Not many countries understand this point; many go by the PR bling
| that is spewed by the USA internet companies(mostly pushed by
| get-rich-quick minded VCs) and try to encourage this type of non-
| essential startups in the hope of being "successful similar to
| Silicon Valley". The definition of successful is obviously is
| being set by these get-rich-quick VCs rather than the country
| itself. It is not surprising that you see lot of the
| VCs/Accelerators/Incubators fund me-too type companies in other
| geographies in the hope that they will be acquired by companies
| in the US! It is all bait-and-switch game and not meant to
| develop R&D and innovation that benefits societies at large.
| Benefits to the society, if at all there is one, is the by-
| product or after-thought of this whole process.
| cbHXBY1D wrote:
| I'll never forget how an employee at a Silicon Valley VC tried
| to dissuade me from joining Microsoft Research because MSFT
| wasn't "really a 'tech' company." According to the VC, examples
| of tech companies were Airbnb or the million "Uber for X".
| ativzzz wrote:
| It's much easier for Israel to justify investing into "hard"
| tech that accelerates military power because they are
| surrounded by ideological enemies and are perpetually at war.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| It's illuminating (and equally harrowing) to see how much of
| the fundamental technology we have today has been researched
| and invented by the military (the Internet is one prime
| example), in stark contrast to the widespread belief among
| today's SV techies that free market innovation is what's
| driving the tech.
| papito wrote:
| China is "cooling" certain sectors, to spur growth in physical
| tech and manufacturing. This is where the future power is - not
| in social networks and ad sales, it's in _stuff_. Just look at
| what happens when we can 't manufacture our own chips. Car
| factories halt. Personal computing prices spike. Military tech
| sputters.
|
| China is doing what the U.S. would normally do in an effective
| anti-monopoly action, if our system was not broken and the
| government not bought with its guts by billionaires floating in
| tax-cut windfall.
|
| Now we have entities that have more legal resources than the
| government, which is a recipe for disaster (and runaway legalized
| corruption).
|
| China sees what happens when you let money run loose through
| power structures, and it does not want the same fate.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| > This is where the future power is - not in social networks
| and ad sales, it's in stuff.]
|
| I strongly disagree. The US was not able to win the Vietnam war
| with 100x the amount of military stuff. Stuxnet halted Iranian
| nuclear research. US elections were interfered with by foreign
| hackers. Microsoft's revenue is >$100B a year, and it's mostly
| software driven.
|
| Information, data, data-analysis, networking and intelligence
| is where power comes from.
| papito wrote:
| And how is your example even relevant to a war from a deep
| pre-Internet era? What about WWII? What about Desert Storm?
| There is absolutely no guarantee that your adversary does not
| outplay you in internet cat and mouse games right from the
| start, like this recent disastrous scenario shows:
| https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-
| miserabl...
|
| And then what? If we think future wars will be won by hackers
| in hoodies, it's _our_ funeral. An out-of-control hacking war
| _will_ have to escalate to bare metal war. People will want
| to see explosions on TV, as they lose power and are unable to
| gas up their cars.
| Animats wrote:
| China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on
| private Internet companies that acquired too much power through
| network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine.
| Anything that central has to be state-owned.
|
| Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, "we
| must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy...
| and never deindustrialize." Right. China, remember, has a
| national industrial policy. It's expressed in the national 5 year
| plan, which is taken seriously and used to set priorities.
|
| What those priorities are is no secret. The current 5 year plan,
| the 14th, lists them.[1] Specific technology goals are in blue
| boxes. Semiconductors, gas turbines, biotech, new energy
| vehicles, robotics, advanced agricultural equipment. Internet
| services are mentioned in the Plan. One key line section out
| here: _" We will strengthen the economic supervision of internet
| platforms in accordance with laws and regulations, clarify
| platform enterprise positioning and regulatory rules, improve the
| laws and regulations concerning the identification of monopolies,
| and crack down on monopolies and unfair competition. ... We will
| intensify anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition law
| enforcement and judicial efforts and prevent the disorderly
| expansion of capital."_
|
| If you think this isn't to be taken seriously, go back and look
| at the 13th 5 year plan and check off the completed items.
|
| [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/t0284_14th_Fi...
| vikiomega9 wrote:
| I'm still reading up so looking for resources. What's a good
| introduction that talks about how the Chinese state is looking
| at individual choices? 5 year planning makes sense but the
| implementation is key (India for example had similar planning
| processes). Is there writing on how Xi or the CCP thinks about
| incorrect choices in the planning or a fail-safe that prevents
| what happened to the Soviet Union? Have they ever talked about
| getting things wrong?
| itmayno wrote:
| " It's cracking down on private Internet companies that
| acquired too much power through network effects."
|
| Sounds like smashing to me. Smashing down on private companies
| and innovations. Smashing down on private wealth and power.
| Smashing down on freedom and growth. You can tell the dictator
| is getting desperate if he stops the train of innovation.
| mcguire wrote:
| That makes the assumption that "innovation" is consumer
| facing internet technology.
| itmayno wrote:
| Alibaba isn't just consumer facing internet technologies,
| look up the vast b2b stuff it does. And other types of
| companies have been smashed as well like evergrande or
| Wanda.
|
| Also, do you really think innovation will come from state
| companies? In that case, why didn't 1980 China or 1980
| Russia thrive?
| TheDong wrote:
| > Also, do you really think innovation will come from
| state companies? In that case, why didn't 1980 China or
| 1980 Russia thrive?
|
| You need a stronger argument to prove that state-
| associated companies can't innovate.
|
| There's also plenty of counter examples too. The internet
| itself was largely created via DARPA, a US state-
| sponsored research agency. Ditto for the space station
| and most other space-related achievements prior to
| SpaceX.
|
| I think the more nuanced, and boring, view is that a well
| functioning state can innovate, and so can well
| functioning private companies.
|
| This comment probably isn't the place for it, but I do
| think for-profit companies will tend towards different
| sorts of innovation than for-the-public-good government
| agencies... but yeah, not for this comment.
| vajrabum wrote:
| DARPA doesn't do research or development. They fund it.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Basically, its just antitrust which for a decade or two has not
| really been enforced in the US, which in turn might be a reason
| for many of the ills we see in economy and society today.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Wow, it's actually public... in hindsight, I should probably
| not be surprised, but it has the same eery feel to me like when
| I learned that Hitler had actually written down all of his
| plans around eradicating Jews and Germanic world dominance in
| his book ,,Mein Kampf" a decade before he put it into reality
| -- it was just that nobody took it seriously since they thought
| he was a lunatic.
|
| Maybe it's about time to read the Chinese 5 year plans in
| depth.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yea Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he hated Jews and
| Communism so it should've been taken very seriously since a
| person like him(German nationalist and fanatic) became
| chancellor. I don't who expected different behavior than what
| was written in Mein Kampf. Holocaust and WW2 War could've
| been prevented if Allies(US, UK and France) invaded Germany
| in 1933-1939 time period. But they expected Hitler to be
| European shield against Communism and geo-politic partner.
| majormajor wrote:
| > "we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real
| economy... and never deindustrialize."
|
| This hasn't been really put to the test yet, has it? What's the
| cost of labor delta compared to the places where outsourcing
| from China would be attractive currently?
| Theodores wrote:
| In the West the accounting means you can't invest in robots
| that take years to pay for themselves. It is therefore more
| profitable to outsource and not have the capital investment
| on the books.
|
| The Germans do it differently and can get a better return
| investing in themselves.
|
| In China they have invested heavily in the robots that make
| the robots. Sure they are playing catch up in some areas, for
| instance, chips where they don't have a TSMC yet.
|
| Even farming, where do those green and yellow tractors go?
| Cotton picking in China.
|
| Some China tech is way ahead of the rest of the world. The
| difficulty of competing is getting really hard hence
| sanctions against Huawei. They had got 5G and The West didn't
| even know what it was for.
|
| We have seen it before, Japan was way ahead with electronics
| and commodity cars. But China has a vast internal market and
| can proceed without making cheap goods for the West. If
| Western companies want to outsource to Burkina Faso then
| fine.
|
| Also into the mix is that Chinese brands are desirable in
| China and increasingly abroad. China has barely got started.
| walshemj wrote:
| Not in the experience of Harrods and Burberry in the UK
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| I think that's the hubris China is currently having: as
| they've grown stricly because of the reliance of export-led
| growth, they are now dependent on the global economic order
| as much as the US is (for its import-led growth). And the
| ones that initially built the factories in China, can always
| pack up and move to a different country. So global
| corporations are now kind of "cycling through" a list of
| alternate underdeveloped countries to build factories in, and
| keep going until the options are all exhausted. Some
| countries are quite receptive to this (like Vietnam, which is
| undergoing a similar transformation like South Korea and
| China had in the past), but some countries are not (like
| India, due to its complex cultural/political legacy it's hard
| for foreign companies to navigate through).
| walshemj wrote:
| Thats a good point I have started investing a small amount
| in Vietnam and other frontier countries.
|
| BFRI and VIEL for anyone whos interested.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I think that's the hubris China is currently having: as
| they've grown stricly because of the reliance of export-led
| growth, they are now dependent on the global economic order
| as much as the US is (for its import-led growth).
|
| Honestly, I think the PRC's hubris is more than matched by
| the US's (and Western world's). They're still overconfident
| from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and seem to think
| the chips will inevitably fall on their side, so they still
| engage with a large amount of wishful thinking.
|
| > And the ones that initially built the factories in China,
| can always pack up and move to a different country. So
| global corporations are now kind of "cycling through" a
| list of alternate underdeveloped countries to build
| factories in, and keep going until the options are all
| exhausted.
|
| I'm not so sure...
|
| 1) I think it's ultimately the PRC's goal to have domestic
| champions replace those global corporations in the global
| economy (e.g. Apple declines as Huawei ascends)
|
| 2) I don't think the PRC is as stupid as the US was, and
| will not allow those companies to "pack up and move" to the
| degree it's disruptive to their ability to provide an
| unmatched manufacturing supply chain.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| > Honestly, I think the PRC's hubris is more than matched
| by the US's (and Western world's).
|
| Yes, I still definitely agree with that one. US's hubris
| is the undeniably the largest in the world.
|
| > I think it's ultimately the PRC's goal to have domestic
| champions replace those global corporations in the global
| economy (e.g. Apple declines as Huawei ascends)
|
| Maybe, maybe not? We'll see if this goes well as planed.
| Easier said than done.
|
| > I don't think the PRC is as stupid as the US was, and
| will not allow those companies to "pack up and move" to
| the degree it's disruptive to their ability to provide an
| unmatched manufacturing supply chain.
|
| The point is, companies are already doing this. You'll be
| surprised how much conglomerates like Samsung has already
| taken production out of China.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Maybe, maybe not? We'll see if this goes well as
| planed. Easier said than done.
|
| My understanding is that China's manufacturing supply
| chain is so well-developed that companies like Apple
| don't think they even have a choice except build their
| stuff there. The only things they're missing are a few
| things at the very high end. If they lack a commitment to
| free markets, its conceivable that they could use that
| advantage to slowly strangle their global competitors
| (e.g. allow their domestic champions a
| price/quality/volume advantages, while keeping the value
| proposition for global companies just good enough that
| continued dependence makes economic sense). To counter
| that, the US would also have to take bold steps away from
| free market dogma, against the interests if its corporate
| sector, which has relatively more political power, and
| against its reigning ideologies [1].
|
| > The point is, companies are already doing this. You'll
| be surprised how much conglomerates like Samsung has
| already taken production out of China.
|
| I'd be interested to know how truly disentangled they
| are. My understanding is that even when companies move
| production away from China, they're still seriously
| dependent on China's manufacturing supply chain (e.g.
| they have to ship all the components from China to
| Vietnam for final assembly). I'm not aware of any efforts
| to replicate the range of capabilities elsewhere.
|
| [1] The right would have issues with stepping away from
| free market economics, and I think the left would be
| skeptical of the international competition aspect.
| vondur wrote:
| Funny thing I noticed that the last batch of iMac's I
| purchased were made in Thailand.
| adventured wrote:
| > This hasn't been really put to the test yet, has it?
|
| Yes. Their textile industry has been gradually leaving for
| much of the past decade, as cheaper production exists in
| several other countries at this point. Textile dominance by
| China peaked around 10-15 years ago. They will lose labor
| cost sensitive industries to their cheaper competitors as
| their economy continues to climb, as labor costs continue to
| climb. It took many decades for the US textile industry - the
| world's largest for a while in the 20th century - to be worn
| down by this same process. During the first 2/3 of the 20th
| century the US was often a leader in inventing new textile
| technology and manufacturing processes. Toward the waning
| days many US textile makers tried to modernize and or
| consolidate their domestic operations as a competitive
| advantage, it didn't stop the process. Most sent their
| manufacturing overseas ultimately. China is currently
| attempting to modernize, reduce labor in the manufacturing
| process, and that also won't stop the industry from leaving.
| Textiles are one of the first major industries that tend to
| leave due to being particularly labor cost sensitivity.
|
| China is still the world's largest textile exporter, and may
| retain that crown for a long time yet given their size. A
| large chunk of their market share is going to be gradually
| dispersed across two dozen other nations.
|
| Vietnam for example became the largest textile exporter to
| the US in 2019 (pre pandemic), overtaking China. Vietnam's
| GDP per capita is $3,600 versus $11,800 for China. Vietnam is
| in the position that China was 15 years ago in that regard.
| China will struggle to compete with labor that costs 1/2 or
| 1/3 what theirs does.
| pasabagi wrote:
| Isn't that just the plan of every developing country? You
| start with textiles, then move up the value chain until
| you're a developed country and can pay for socialism or
| aircraft carriers or whatever you want.
| adventured wrote:
| It's not the plan, it is probably an inevitability. If
| you could automate your textiles, with 1/100th the labor,
| while retaining it all, you'd still want to keep it even
| at a reduced labor benefit, rather than see it go to
| China or elsewhere. China would rather keep all of their
| textile industry and hyper automate it, than see it leave
| to countries like Vietnam. Keeping industry like that
| internally has vast benefits, in terms of profit/savings,
| capital, technology and economic eco-system, leverage,
| influence, and so on.
|
| If the US could automate low-value manufacturing through
| robotics and get a significant cost advantage over China
| and pull back much of the low-value manufacturing that it
| lost, while getting very little labor benefit in the
| process, it would still be ideal for numerous reason to
| achieve that outcome (tax base, deprive China of that
| value, onshore capital and technology investment, some
| construction & maintenance value, wider economic
| ecosystem, and so on).
|
| China's big problem with this process is of course that
| they have 1.4 billion people. High-value replacement jobs
| for so many of their low-value manufacturing workers is
| something beyond difficult (you don't need 100 million
| software developers to build China's tech infrastructure;
| you don't need 10x the workers to build as many planes as
| Boeing or Airbus do). High-value manufacturing for
| example doesn't absorb labor like low-value manufacturing
| does. Their social welfare costs over the next 30-40
| years will be extraordinary as their demographics rapidly
| shift toward being an older society. They're already into
| a workforce decline demographically, those aging &
| retiring workers begin to shift more to the liability
| column in terms of cost. They need their workforce
| employed and pumping tax dollars into the system.
| Automation is not China's friend, even if they're the
| ones doing it to themselves (if they had a critical
| national labor shortage, that would be a different
| matter).
|
| If China were to take over all of Germany's auto
| manufacturing (obviously we're talking a huge share of
| the global auto market), how many jobs is that worth to
| China and how does that scope to their 1.4 billion
| context (Germany has a mere 83m people)? What does
| something like that do for their context. That's the
| essential China labor and automation problem going
| forward. They could conquer a lot of high value
| manufacturing and be worse off overall than they are now,
| unless they can somehow keep all of their people
| employed, keep most of their low-value manufacturing
| employment simultaneously. And if China did use 4x the
| labor to build the equivalent of Germany's auto output
| (say they absorb their labor oversupply that way), that
| then caps the ability for that labor to rise
| economically, the margins won't be there to support far
| higher incomes, which has serious social consequences in
| terms of stability in China long-term. China would
| probably need to own all high-value manufacturing
| globally to both keep their people employed and keep
| incomes rising like they have been.
| [deleted]
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Maybe the headline's a bit misleading, but what you're saying
| is almost exactly what the article is talking about. (The
| article immediately refutes the notion of "smashing its tech
| industry" right away)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The article is mostly weird kremlinology of what the chinese
| leadership are up to. Which seems unnecessary if they're
| widely publishing 5 year plans that tell you what they're
| doing.
|
| Similar to Tesla's secret plan to produce cheaper and cheaper
| vehicles at larger scale, the boring truth isn't a big click
| winner.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most people, especially in the west, aren't reading Chinese
| 5 year plans very closely.
| viscanti wrote:
| What part of the 5 year plan outlined the strategy behind
| why the CCP went after DIDI? I'm genuinely curious and it
| might be more useful to link to the relevant parts. Some
| people might actually be interested in reading those and
| better understanding this.
| thujlife wrote:
| anti monopoly?
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. The 5 year plans contain a lot of verbiage, and sound
| like political speeches in part. But you look in there and
| find specific goals. Sometimes very specific: "We will
| accelerate the large-scale deployment of 5G networks,
| increase the user penetration rate to 56% ...
| comprehensively promote the commercial deployment of
| Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)."
|
| There's identification of very specific technologies that
| currently need to be imported: "high-purity electronic
| materials such as photoresists for ICs." There's realism
| rather than hype: "Promote the demonstration operation of
| the C919 large passenger aircraft and the serialized
| development of the ARJ2I regional passenger aircraft." The
| C919 project, to build an airliner comparable to the Airbus
| A320, hasn't been going well, although prototypes are
| flying. So the goal for this plan is merely "demonstration
| operation". The ARJ2I is a 90-seat or so regional airliner
| now in early production. So those goals should be met.
| "Dominate world aircraft industry" might be nice, but
| that's not in the 5 year plan.
|
| There's a longer range 2035 goals document, in which one
| goal is to get GDP per capita up into the middle of the
| developed country range.
| xchaotic wrote:
| but they're 'smashing' the likes of Ant Financial who were
| doing predatory, unsecured lending on an unprecedented scale.
| So IMO the thesis of smashing 'Internet' companies is
| incorrect - they're just making sure economy doesn't go into
| bubble territory (lending fuels spending) and the likes of
| Jack Ma, who are detached from the party don't get too much
| power/money.
| viscanti wrote:
| Or Didi who had the nerve to IPO outside of China on the
| NYSE on a date the CCP thought was too close to a party
| anniversary.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The Chinese central government was always really
| ambivalent about foreign IPOs. DiDi has too much control
| over domestic markets for the Chinese to be comfortable
| with foreign influence. I don't think it has anything to
| do with the anniversary.
|
| Actually, the CCP never formally accepted the foreign
| stock ownership structure, for example. It was always a
| grey area.
| polote wrote:
| >Maybe the headline's a bit misleading
|
| Nah, a lot of people just don't read the articles before
| commenting, whether it is on HN or anywhere else
| whatshisface wrote:
| Don't assume that there's a strategic explanation concerning
| externally visible factors when the true explanation may concern
| strategy, but only around internal factors.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| Here's a conspiracy theory...China is _not_ smashing its ' tech
| industry. The CCP could be repositioning [financially] within the
| sector. Step 1 is to add regulation - which depresses market
| prices and gives the state more power. Step 2 is to swoop in and
| buy as much as is available at the [newly] depressed prices.
|
| It's unlikely, but in their position it's what I would want to
| do.
| ilamont wrote:
| I believe we're seeing yet another example of an ossified and
| hierarchal Chinese Communist Party struggling to maintain control
| over real or imagined internal threats.
|
| Under the CCP, the "rights" pendulum swings wildly for society
| and the economy, alternating between openness and crackdowns.
| Some policies seem well thought out, and then you have edicts
| which seem impulsive and extreme with little regard to long-term
| consequences or the impact on China's people.
|
| 100 flowers/Great Leap Forward.
|
| Cultural Revolution/Deng reforms.
|
| Tiananmen/hypernationalism.
|
| Tech has enjoyed a relatively open hand for two decades. Now the
| fist is closed and comes smashing down.
| whydoibother wrote:
| Why do you have the same poorly informed take posted twice?
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27976920) Couldn't find
| any other anti-CCP talking points to use?
| zwieback wrote:
| I also think this much simpler explanation is at least worth
| considering.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| China's investment into hard-tech (semiconductors, etc) doesn't
| not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech. For
| instance, we subsidize farming to keep it state-side but we don't
| prevent food processing companies from growing and consolidating.
|
| Maybe the point here is that the government in china wants to
| always be between the consumer and the service, which makes a lot
| more sense. Maybe Alibaba and the like have a connection to every
| person and the gov'ment is threatened by that relationship.
|
| There are many possibilities but I don't necessarily agree with
| the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech
| industry, they have to punish consumer tech.
| japhib wrote:
| > doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of
| consumer tech
|
| I can't understand this sentence haha ... Too many "nots"
|
| > I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author:
| that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish
| consumer tech.
|
| I don't think the author is trying to argue that this strategy
| is true -- I think they're just trying to explain China's
| behavior.
| [deleted]
| caeril wrote:
| > China may simply see things differently. It's possible that the
| Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like
| Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value
| added
|
| Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is
| the reason.
|
| The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening
| when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-
| value-add activities like clicking heart icons on photos,
| repackaging financial securities into products with impossible-
| to-detangle risk profiles, advertisement and addiction
| optimization, and political outrage, will not remain any
| definition of "global superpower" for long.
|
| Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that
| contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining our
| reserves of _actual_ capital and mental health.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Alibaba and Tencent are hardly purely "get people addicted"
| companies.
|
| Together, they power nearly the entire retail transaction
| market in China. Alibaba heavily drives commercial transactions
| and Tencent powers the vast amount of personal communication
| (WeChat).
|
| They are quite profitable as effective monopolies, but are very
| valuable to society.
| rakmos wrote:
| You missed the giant gaping time sink that is the video game
| industry.
|
| I also think including this in the discussion will, perhaps,
| emphasize the nuance of what I believe you're indirectly
| referencing -- the economics of how humans choose to spend
| their time (sometimes referred to as the "Attention Economy").
|
| I believe literally optimizing for something such as GDP fails
| to take into account freedom / liberty which is likely
| something most on this website would agree is incredibly
| valuable in a society.
|
| I think the difficulty is in creating a consensus around what
| is acceptable relative to the "Attention Economy". It might
| even be impossible given that this seems almost
| indistinguishable from culture -- and there will likely never
| be a single unified culture if and until something as paradigm-
| shifting as a multi-planetary species is realized.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| I dunno man, you ever seen the genZs play fornite? Not sure
| it's a waste of time so much as training for some weird
| future in the computer
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKd2KpGkFJ4
| desert_boi wrote:
| Never felt quite as old as watching that.
| pm90 wrote:
| The video game industry is one of the key factors to the
| success of the US technology industry. Some of the most
| innovative software is written by game developers. As we move
| into a future where AR/VR and digital worlds will become
| commerce hubs, the US is arguably incredibly well set up to
| take advantage of it.
|
| Video game bashing seems like another moral panic to me.
| People are spending more time playing video games than
| slaving away flipping burgers. So what?
| ativzzz wrote:
| The argument I get from the article is that the video game
| industry will not strengthen the U.S. geopolitically versus
| China compared to investing into "hard" technology like
| better semiconductors or more advanced military hardware.
| pm90 wrote:
| I don't understand why it has to be a choice.
|
| The Video Game industry seems like its doing just fine
| without Government assistance. The Government can focus
| on investing in creating manufacturing hubs in the US
| instead.
|
| Shortage of labor? Create a new Visa and citizenship
| pathway specifically for electronics engineers, while
| investing in US universities to expand the EE departments
| and scholarships related to EE.
|
| Its all possible if the US Government wants to.
| rakmos wrote:
| Just to clarify, I brought up the gaming industry to
| highlight the nuance of the discussion and am in no way
| advocating for bashing it.
|
| As you have articulated, innovation tends to manifest when
| humans spend their attention on things that also further
| drive the demand for their attention.
|
| The point being that the context here is significantly more
| gray than black / white.
| mjol wrote:
| If you really believe that entertainment doesn't improve the
| human experience, I feel sorry for you.
| yarky wrote:
| The OP is probably talking about the psychological impact of
| washing Netflix restlessly during long periods of time. That
| generates GDP, but the net impact on society might not be
| positive. Same thing with the psychological issues associated
| with social media addiction.
| ub99 wrote:
| People watched TV for many hours daily for decades now. I
| agree that it's not healthy, but it's not purely a new
| technology's fault.
| freebuju wrote:
| The TV always has been a stationary device. But now you
| can carry it with you everywhere you go in the form of a
| Netflix-capable device ala smartphone/laptop.
| goodpoint wrote:
| There is the occasional bit of entertainment and there is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapism#Escapist_societies
|
| One thing is watching some dumb action movie once a week,
| another thing is filling one's free time with entertainment
| every day.
| nathias wrote:
| the US entertainment doesn't improve the human experience
| bordercases wrote:
| If you really believe that mass culture doesn't denigrate the
| human experience, I feel sorry for you.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > economy predicated on negative-value-add activities like
| clicking heart icons on photos
|
| I think you have this backwards. These social networks are
| predicated on the businesses that are generating enough
| revenues to spend on ads with them.
|
| EDIT: To add some more context USA GDP in 2019 was 21.4t .
| Facebook's revenue is 0.004 of that number.
| vikiomega9 wrote:
| Indeed, one of the more interesting ideas I've been considering
| is how does society think about the delayed effects on mental
| health and attention deficit. For example, one might argue
| maybe Netflix is easier to moderate at the level of a family or
| community, like having parental locks on time spent on quality
| content. But what do you do with Internet Porn? There is enough
| evidence that novelty stimulation has detrimental effects. For
| either scenario, the internet has made it easier to consume
| more and at a faster rate, but we don't have a quick and easy
| mechanism to talk about these things and develop cultural
| practices. One of the more interesting ideas for me is finding
| that balance between liberal individual right to choice and
| recognizing all systems including human society is a feedback
| loop and drifts into failure (either expanding freedoms or
| curbing them).
| will4274 wrote:
| > Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that
| contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining
| our reserves of actual capital and mental health.
|
| It's not so clear to me that this is true. The fundamental
| question is - if not this, then what? If you accept that people
| can only work a certain amount, then a "perfectly" "productive"
| society involves people working just that amount, and then
| going home and entertaining themselves the amount that is
| necessary to recharge, safely, and then repeating. If not
| Netflix, then what? Alcohol and drunk driving?
|
| I'm not saying watching Netflix is what we should aspire to,
| but compared to the alternatives, it seems reasonably likely to
| contribute to economic growth. A passive workforce works.
| aoleinik wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what _should_ the US be working on? The only
| two things I can think of that really needs more man hours is
| space travel and quantum computing, but those fields are
| generally far from being revenue generating and require
| mountains of initial investment.
|
| I agree that ad tech and social media are net negatives, but
| what are the alternatives? A dead economy, where most of the
| money circulates on necessities?
|
| Not asking this sarcastically or rhetorically - genuinely want
| some good insight on what people who say the current direction
| of the US is poor think the direction should be.
| TylerLives wrote:
| Medicine, robotics, social media that improves people's
| lives, maybe fix universities (or create an alternative. You
| can learn a lot on the internet, but social aspect of it can
| be improved), ...
| dnautics wrote:
| To some degrees with those two things if you do it wrong,
| "just adding man hours" to those endeavors can slow progress,
| not accelerate it
| billytetrud wrote:
| You have a rosy view of the oppressive actions of an
| authoritarian government. It should be noted that the author
| does _not_ think that is the reason China is doing what it 's
| doing.
|
| Netflix is not draining capitol and not sapping mental health.
| It was a massive innovation that saved people lots of time
| (wasted watching TV ads) and money ($10/mo rather than $100/mo
| for TV). It worked so well every other major media company has
| copied it's model.
|
| Facebook is often shit on, but it was useful in it's time. It's
| a tool people can decide to use oe not use, and how to use it
| if they do. We're learning as a society how to do this.
|
| But it's very clear the solution is not for a government to
| smash those companies. That is very clearly an evil action.
| dash2 wrote:
| Freemarket choices of what to spend money on can certainly have
| problems. It'd be bold to assume that the dictator's choices
| will be better for their people, though. The USSR spent its
| money on tanks: https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/
| the_soviet_ec.... Will China be different? Or sometimes, are
| tanks the right choice? Let's hope not.
| triceratops wrote:
| Facebook, sure. Why Netflix? TV and movies have always been
| around. The US owes its status as a cultural superpower to
| Hollywood. Too much TV and movie-watching isn't good for a
| nation, sure, but you could make that argument about any
| pastime.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| Communication has also been always around. The problem is the
| abundance - same with fat and sugar and cocaine. A little is
| fine, a lot is bad.
| triceratops wrote:
| Entertainment on TV has been abundant for nearly 50 years,
| ever since the advent of cable.
| jefftechentin wrote:
| Not sure how valid but I think a case from this hypothesized
| Chinese Government perspective can be made even without
| criticizing Netflix itself.
|
| When Hollywood was built in the 1920's it was not exactly the
| backbone of the economy. The article argues that the Chinese
| Government sees value in the economy beyond GDP goes up and
| cash flows good. Technology and manufacturing are important
| to national security.
|
| The article quote Xi Jinping saying "we must recognize the
| fundamental importance of the real economy... and never
| deindustrialize." I guess the national question for the other
| super power is how important is this "real economy" to
| itself. Is too much talent and labor sucked up in profitable
| activity that is suboptimal for a nation? Are these 21st
| century company's like Netflix good enough for our nation?
| triceratops wrote:
| > "we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real
| economy... and never deindustrialize."
|
| This is a valid point, and I tend to agree with it. However
| I see entertainment as part of the "real" economy. It's an
| incredibly old industry, provides real value to nearly
| every human being, creates high-, medium-, and low-skilled
| employment across a wide variety of disciplines, can allow
| your culture to punch above its weight, and produces art
| that endures across generations and centuries (for example,
| Shakespeare).
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| The real problem is that when the basic infrastructure
| that maintain the entertainment industry is gone, then
| the whole thing breaks down in shambles. For example,
| someday there might be a global shortage of electronics
| due to geo-political factors, and then you will have no
| chips to make those fancy consoles and PCs with.
| triceratops wrote:
| That's the thing about the entertainment industry though.
| It's been around since the amphitheater was the pinnacle
| of technology.
|
| Literally all you need to entertain people is talent and
| a space.
| mc32 wrote:
| Netflix provides on-demand all you can view content. It
| doesn't require any "cooling period" before the next episode.
| You don't have to engage with family, friends or work. You
| can stream all day and live in fantasyland.
| triceratops wrote:
| TV has been like that since the advent of cable.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > TV has been like that since the advent of cable.
|
| No, it hasn't. It has been somewhat since the much more
| recent introduction of "on demand" programming to cable,
| but that was basically just the introduction of streaming
| into cable in response to streaming services.
| triceratops wrote:
| Sorry, I meant once cable rolled around, there's always
| been something to watch on TV. It may not have been
| interesting to normal people, but to an addict that's not
| going to matter. There was also the option of buying or
| renting a ton of movies or DVDs and watching them one
| after the other. This honestly reeks of a moral panic to
| me.
|
| I think "on-demand" is a blessing. We are no longer tied
| to broadcaster schedules, have to remember to "program
| the DVR", writers don't have to write a cliffhanger every
| 12 minutes for an ad break.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That was the case with cable and, before that, radio.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You can stream all day and live in fantasyland.
|
| I tried that. It soon becomes utterly boring, no matter how
| good the show is.
| mc32 wrote:
| It probably depends on inner will and psychological stage
| of mind. Do you mind being unproductive and such.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Maybe I'm different. Passive entertainment is dull to me.
| I don't watch other people play sports, I want to play
| them myself. Traveling and looking at sights rapidly gets
| very dull.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| That's been the case with books before Netflix too...
|
| To be fair, the quantity and availability of
| novels/fictions was pretty low before the fifties, so I
| guess there is some truth to it... Though the timeframe is
| definitely longer then only Netflix's existence
| mc32 wrote:
| With books you have to actually read. It's an active
| thing. Vegging out on the couch or bed even, is passive.
| Often you don't even have to think because it's mostly
| action with lots of repetition and little mystery.
| senko wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts. Whether reading is better
| than watching is an interesting debate unrelated to the
| topic at hand.
|
| I'd happily veggie out on a couch with a favorite book
| series and live in fantasyland for days (alas, real world
| interferes...).
| mc32 wrote:
| I don't think so. Of course we can read pulp. Evenso, I
| doubt people would read as much pulp as they'd watch all
| you can stream programming.
|
| Given the option of gorging on books or gorging on
| Netflix over a long weekend dawn till dusk, I bet most
| people would choose Netflix. If you randomly divided the
| people into those two groups and made them read and the
| others watch, more readers would wash out than watchers.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Just wait until VR fulfills its hype.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Netflix has one of darkest UX patterns hidden in plain sight.
| Or not even hidden maybe.
| hiq wrote:
| Can you be more explicit? Are you talking about auto-play?
| epivosism wrote:
| Is there a name for the question of distinguishing useful
| economic activity from rent-seeking? It seems tied up in lots
| of other system/corruption/control related questions - cancer,
| budget spending, regulation etc.
|
| It feels like there can never be a trustable implementation of
| a "value or rentseeking?" oracle, since the system implementing
| it would also be under selection and pressure from the virtual
| gains to be had from corruption.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I don't think there is such a name. But you're on the right
| track about it being difficult to distinguish between value
| and rent-seeking.
|
| One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by
| definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a
| government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence
| within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a
| territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and if
| you _don 't_ extract enough you will be deposed by someone
| who does.
|
| Most governments also tend to encourage their own industries
| to rent-seek as well. If your country needs heavy industry or
| scientific research or cultural behemoths, it's far easier
| and politically defensible to construct new narrow property
| regimes (e.g. copyright, patents, PDOs, etc) for those
| companies to exploit rather than just paying them subsidies.
| These regimes can be selectively weakened when you need to
| build your industry domestically (what the US did to the UK,
| or what China did to the US) and then strengthened later when
| you need to protect it internationally (what the US forced
| into WIPO).
|
| Very little of capitalism is actually adding value, in the
| sense that you have a business that hires people, buys
| materials, and turns them into goods and services at a
| prevailing market rate. At the lowest rungs of the chain,
| sure - you might have, say, petite-borgeouis crustaceans
| hiring workers to cook food and sell it to people who need
| it. But that's not where most of the actual profit is.
| Compare that to, say, a fast-food franchise; which doesn't
| usually run any restaurants or sell any food. They instead
| sell trademark rights and supplier relationships. In
| particularly egregious systems like McDonalds, they even rent
| their franchisees the land that the restaurant must be housed
| in.
|
| Left-wing critiques of capitalism are typically extra-cynical
| about this, and would consider even the small profit Mr.
| Krabs makes on burgers to be rent, not value. This is usually
| in the context of the employee-business relationship,
| however; not the business-customer one. Small businesses
| generally don't extract a premium on the goods or services
| they sell just because they're the only company that
| _happens_ to own a stove or know some secret recipe. But in
| the context of employees, they _are_ getting paid less for
| their labor, albeit in exchange for not having to bear up-
| front capital costs or deal with inconsistent revenue.
| Whether or not this constitutes rent or value is most likely
| a political opinion, not something that you could actually
| devise some economic criteria for.
| epivosism wrote:
| Excluding the direct political arguments, is there hope for
| a clean way to distinguish these types of activities:
|
| * Someone who literally figures out a new, cheap way to
| make a drug which cures a real disease
|
| * Someone who, as soon as they get the right to, imposes
| license fees which serve no valid purpose, and profits in
| status & wealth from these new duties.
| alexashka wrote:
| Sure, it'd be a matter of simplifying the law code and
| posting everyone's financial information for everyone to
| have access to.
|
| In other words, once it becomes feasible to 'follow the
| money', it'll be somewhat trivial to see who's doing what
| and to what ends.
|
| Notice that this problem doesn't exist in smaller
| communities, because everyone knows what everyone else is
| up to.
|
| This is a data access problem that persists because it is
| profitable for people who have the power to keep everyone
| else in the dark regarding their machinations.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, because they're the same thing. We pay for inventions
| with rent seeking behavior. One person's justified
| license fees are another person's patent or copyright
| trolling.
|
| The original idea with these sorts of things, at least in
| the US, is that we'd have administrative procedures and
| court adjudication to limit the harm that could come from
| that behavior. In practice, the administrative procedures
| are only a bar to the least knowledgeable plaintiffs, and
| the mere threat of litigation over a marginally valid
| claim is often enough to coerce most defendants into a
| settlement. _Nobody_ wants to actually litigate whether
| or not a patent is obvious, or a copyright owner has been
| surreptitiously seeding their own works on BitTorrent.
|
| There's also a question about whether or not your two
| examples are, in practice, always different cases. What
| if the person in the first example decides to not license
| their drug at all, so they can do the manufacturing
| themselves and control the price? That would be identical
| behavior to the second example... but they still made a
| useful invention. They're the same person.
|
| You could legally restrict "non-practicing entities" from
| enforcing patent rights, but that's only a subset of all
| rent-seeking patent owners. Remember: the entire point of
| the system is to enable rent-seeking in lieu of up-front
| payments.
| exceptione wrote:
| I think you are looking for the term Real Economy?
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy
|
| "The real economy concerns the production, purchase and flow
| of goods and services (like oil, bread and labour) within an
| economy. It is contrasted with the financial economy, which
| concerns the aspects of the economy that deal purely in
| transactions of fiat money and other financial assets, which
| represent ownership or claims to ownership of real sector
| goods and services."
| epivosism wrote:
| Hmmm, that's an interesting distinction; But someone who
| intelligently evaluates startups and picks a more genuinely
| productive one (likely to discover new pure gains) to give
| money to seems to qualify as a valid outcome. Unlike things
| which are very hard to justify, like directly impeding such
| people for selfish reasons.
|
| Perhaps it's about selfishness?
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think one useful distinction might be "Imagine that the
| state collapsed and you could no longer count on guys
| with guns to defend your pieces of paper. What happens to
| your income?"
|
| The obvious losers would be landlords (the literal
| definition of "rent-seeking"), because without that piece
| of paper, there's just a tenant that lives in that
| apartment and you have no claim on any of their money. A
| carpenter who actively builds a house, however, is
| creating value: even without the state, people still need
| houses, and he has useful skills for things people want.
| Financial assets would crash, trademarks would become
| worthless, there'd be open season on patents. Medical
| care is still creating value. People who grow and prepare
| food would be very useful. Software engineering is in the
| middle: _new_ software that people use is creating value,
| but just sitting on a service that you own exclusive
| rights to because it 's protected by copyright & trade
| secret laws is rent-seeking.
|
| This also illustrates a lot of the confusion between the
| two. Without the state to enforce contracts, there's no
| way to tie "the value you create now" with "getting paid
| for it later". When a carpenter builds a house, he now
| owns a house that he can pay for later - but without the
| state to enforce his right to the deed of his house, he's
| got nothing to sell and no reason to invest the labor in
| the first place. Same with the service that the software
| engineer creates and the drug that the biologist
| discovers.
|
| You could look at rent-seeking as "property rights that
| have extended beyond the public's attention span".
| cryptica wrote:
| I was thinking along the same lines so it's interesting to see
| that others have come to the same conclusion.
|
| IMO, large parts of the tech industry are artificial and fueled
| entirely by monetary policy.
|
| If reserve banks in the west stopped expanding the money
| supply, large parts of the tech industry would be wiped out;
| they would quickly be revealed as negative-value industries.
|
| With limited autonomy over their own global monetary policies,
| this was the only way China could fix this problem.
| danjac wrote:
| I'll bet you could pick up a random op-ed from a 1960s Readers'
| Digest and someone would be making the argument that Americans
| spend too much time watching TV and pouring their creative
| energies into advertising, cosmetics and pop records while the
| Soviets are conquering outer space and South East Asia.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Yah, there is this incomprehensible gnawing notion that
| crushing oppression is somehow a great way to innovate, and
| that liberty and self-expression is no more than dalliance.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Thankfully our competition at the time were agricultural
| societies LARPing as industrial ones and then a big pile of
| ruins in Europe.
|
| Not so today
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And at least back then you could point to statistical trends
| indicating that American poverty, income inequality, and
| standard of living were all trending in a desirable
| trajectory.
|
| Also, the moon landing.
| dash2 wrote:
| Yes, but it was also a time when Paul Samuelson and other
| economists predicted that the USSR would overtake US GDP by
| 1984: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/201
| 0/01/so...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| The big difference here is that US manufacturing didn't over
| rely on the soviet back then, nor where they massively buying
| US bonds...
|
| What's the equivalent of Shenzen in US?
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Interestingly, despite not having large, obvious,
| centralized manufacturing hubs, the US is not far behind
| China in overall manufacturing output, despite putting far
| less effort into it.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-
| scor...
|
| US is at 18% of global manufacturing vs China's 20%, but
| the US only gets 12% of it's overall GDP from manufacturing
| compared to China's 27%, and with about half the percentage
| of it's workforce (with a much smaller workforce).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Only if you measure manufacturing in dollars, which is
| then artificially inflated by the military sector.
|
| If the US had to manufacture the products that are
| currently manufactured in China, the amount of dollars
| generated would be lower, or the share of people employed
| in manufacturing would explode. GDP would of course
| decrease.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I'm surprised you put Netflix in there with Facebook. Do they
| not have television in China?
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Yeah I agree with the FB part but Netflix? The chinese
| audience consumes huge amounts of video content.
| caeril wrote:
| Asia/Pacific region consumes, on average, 154 minutes per
| day of all media, compared to North America's 293.
|
| I'm old enough to remember the general optimism we in
| technology had about the unlocking of human productive
| potential as automation and globalization freed us from the
| constraints of scarcity. Marshall Brain, Clay Shirky, and
| many others write extensively on this zeitgeist.
|
| But that's not what ultimately happened. the zombification
| of our attention that began in the 1950s has accelerated in
| the last two decades. We're not volunteering our free time
| to space exploration collectives, life extension self-
| experimentation in biohacking hackerspaces, or even
| traditional enterprises like Habitat for Humanity.
|
| We're clicking heart icons on posts bemoaning billionaires
| conducting private space exploration, getting angry at
| CRISPR researchers on Twitter, and passively consuming
| "marathons" of Hollywood renditions of dystopian future
| worlds.
|
| This is to say nothing of the fact that we don't even have
| all that much more free time to begin with. Not because
| we're all working for SpaceX or in cancer research
| laboratories, but because the vast majority of the very
| people CAPABLE of doing so (IQ is in limited supply and not
| evenly distributed) are actively recruited to make iphone
| apps more addictive, make pornography engagement higher,
| and make front-running retail options order flow faster.
|
| Apropos of Netflix (or in this specific example, Amazon
| Prime Video): There are likely 40 million hours passively
| poured into marathons of The Expanse in North America, by
| people with an average IQ in excess of 115 (just by virtue
| of the type of audience). What if half (approximately the
| NA/Asia split) of those hours were instead poured into
| activities that actually got us closer to the technologies
| depicted?
|
| Well, the Chinese are doing it. We're not.
| coryrc wrote:
| The Expanse (and Star Trek before it, etc) provides the
| inspiration to make the effort. They aren't the problem.
| It gnaws at me daily that I'm not working for SpaceX, and
| only because of science fiction like that. I don't (yet)
| because of work/life balance first and money second.
| Maybe I should apply for BO.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| It seems you're just complaining that more people aren't
| doing work for free, in their free time away from work?
|
| But even there, you're wrong about the
| activities/technologies you're complaining about. HfH,
| food banks, shelters, and other non-profits with limited
| capacity for volunteer work have wait lists several
| months long in my area. Only billionaires can explore
| space right now, so why would the rest of us be forming
| space exploration collections for something that is still
| a decade or two away? Tons of people self-experiment or
| participate in bio-hacking; this simply isn't the forum
| for them to discuss their projects.
|
| _Well, the Chinese are doing it. We 're not. _
|
| Really? Citation needed that millions of Chinese are
| working in the free time on any of what you talked about.
| duxup wrote:
| The problem is making those predictions. I'm not sure anyone
| out there is able to decide 'this business is a net good only
| do that' and come out ahead without stumbling just as much.
|
| That's pretty much a game of predict the future, get it wrong
| on economy scale and you don't have anyone doing anything not
| according to plan... you can / will get a disaster even if you
| get it right here or there.
|
| And I'm not sure that's the point anyway. China could simply
| ban "clicking heart icons on photos" and wipe out domestic
| demand outright, and as far as risky financial deals ... China
| seems to have no problem with that.
| tablespoon wrote:
| Or even more succinctly: financial value != value to society.
| Sometimes there's alignment, but very frequently there is not.
| billytetrud wrote:
| When it's out of alignment, usually it's because of
| regulatory capture.
| triceratops wrote:
| Not always. Tobacco generated enormous profits even when
| there was no regulatory heat on it.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > When it's out of alignment, usually it's because of
| regulatory capture.
|
| No. The GGP's examples are a direct counterexample to that
| idea.
|
| Being a little more general: based on past experience, I
| interpret general complaints about "regulatory capture"
| without further clarification as complaints about
| regulation in general and advocacy for "market solutions"
| as an alternative. However, a poorly regulated market will
| almost certainly result in a great many monopolies and
| businesses that convert some negative externality into
| private profit, which are the apotheosis of the idea that
| financial value != value to society.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, the day I realized that the economic notion of value
| was weighted according to the wealth of those creating the
| demand, while the colloquial definition generally isn't, _a
| lot_ of mismatched puzzle pieces fell into place. It was
| probably the single most successful update to my worldview
| (measured in terms of predictive power) that I have ever
| made.
| techbio wrote:
| Can you expand on this insight about weighting value and
| its predictive power or share a source?
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Economists and markets define the value of something as
| whatever someone will pay for it today.
|
| Successful parents and sage founders define value
| differently.
|
| They don't see dollars. They see sense.
| techbio wrote:
| This is the definition of value I am familiar with--
| whatever the buyer will pay.
|
| I am unsure what colloquial definition GP refers to as
| the counterpoint. Surely you aren't both suggesting sense
| and dollars are non-overlapping?
| majormajor wrote:
| I have a similar but different take on the weighting
| around politics.
|
| Our politicians are influence (unavoidably!) by the
| people who have the most time and money to spend lobbying
| them. Even if you reformed lobbying, this would still be
| the case - even if it was all just letter-writing with no
| money attached. Wealthy people could send way more
| letters than harried poor ones.
|
| So the more you have, the more influence you get. BUT the
| more you have, the more you can fend for yourself, so
| also the less you need much of that influence! And then
| the government being unaligned with the needs of most
| people starts making a lot of sense, without even needing
| malicious conspiracies.
|
| There's neither profit for businesses nor politicians in
| giving poor people what they need.
| goodpoint wrote:
| This is economy "101": market are influenced my market
| forces. The stronger a player is, the more it can influence
| a market.
|
| AKA: you vote with your wallet but some people vote 0
| times, some 1, some can cast one million times - if you do
| the math.
| nostrademons wrote:
| With free capital markets, the stewards of that capital are
| ostensibly responsible to the consumers that generate its
| revenue. Jeff Bezos can afford to dally in space
| exploration, but if he fails to appoint a capable successor
| CEO for Amazon, then eventually consumers will go
| elsewhere, the value of Amazon stock will fall to zero, and
| he won't be able to afford his pet projects anymore. Hence
| there's an ultimate check on his ability to "vote with his
| dollars", even though he has hundreds of billions of them.
|
| A further productive update to your worldview might be "The
| degree of centralization of power is proportional to how
| far out of equilibrium a market can get." This doesn't just
| function at the macro level (i.e. Google/Facebook/Bezos
| being able to horribly misallocate capital based on their
| past successes). It also explains things like bad
| executives within a corporation: because decision-making is
| centralized and the results of a decision won't be seen for
| years, a bad executive can waste billions of dollars and
| thousands of man-years, but ultimately they're going to get
| kicked out (or the company goes bankrupt) and the
| organization will return to market norms. This is also one
| reason for the liquidity premium (and hence high
| compensation) for executives: since the consequences of a
| bad hire are so bad and so future-loaded, companies tend to
| be overcautious in their hiring, which means only people
| with excellent pedigrees are considered and they can demand
| a premium for it.
|
| Also very relevant to historical China, which had this
| habit of centralizing extreme power with the emperor.
| Things would go great if you had a good emperor. But
| occasionally they'd make a blunder (like the cessation of
| the Ming treasure fleets) that profoundly altered the
| course of human history. The European powers had much more
| decentralized decision-making. When Columbus was turned
| down by the kings of England, France, and Portugal, he
| tried Spain, and the rest is history.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Who's "value to society" people's values vary that's why we
| have markets so people can decide what they value by deciding
| to buy it.
| [deleted]
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Who's "value to society" people's values vary that's why
| we have markets so people can decide what they value by
| deciding to buy it.
|
| That's a difficult question to answer generally, however
| it's also clearly not one that markets "solve." That's easy
| to see with the example of addictive drugs (which the
| market shows can be very profitable), unless you're willing
| to argue there's social value in destroying many people's
| lives through addiction.
|
| That's not to say that financial value and social value
| aren't _sometimes_ aligned, it just that you can 't assume
| the former implies the latter.
| bennysomething wrote:
| The point I'm trying to make is people often use the term
| "value to society" like it's an answered question. We
| know it's not answered as that people's values vary.
| Centrally deciding what is useful has proven to be
| disastrous (see the Soviet Union and every other
| centrally planned economy). Free markets allow us to
| express our values at an individual level rather than
| having an authority deciding what to value.
| tablespoon wrote:
| I know the point you're trying to make; _it 's
| ubiquitous_. The point I'm making is that "free markets"
| won't answer the question either, and often result in
| things that are obviously against "value to society."
|
| One little thing I find annoying is that whenever someone
| points out some issue with free markets, someone always
| seems to reply with something that amounts to "have you
| considered free markets?" Whatever the problem, markets
| are the solution, even if the problem stems from markets
| themselves.
|
| The Soviet Union had serious problems, but it's a mistake
| to reason from that to the conclusion that markets are in
| some way ideal. They have their own problems, and we
| don't have access to an ideal system, so we have to try
| to deal with individual problems and make tradeoffs.
| neutronicus wrote:
| I also think it's wrong to assume that the example of the
| Soviet Union proves anything.
|
| Maybe Free Markets were the best you could do with the
| quantitative decision-making tools available to Stalin,
| and maybe central planning with modern AI/ML/Operations
| Research techniques would be more successful than a free-
| market approach.
|
| Or maybe, the Soviet Union would have done just fine if
| there were no United States trying to thwart it at every
| turn.
| bennysomething wrote:
| The violence and suppression in the Soviet union started
| immediately. Trying to control the economy from the
| centre requires individuals give up choice not just in
| what they buy, but where they work.
|
| As troksky said "In a country where the sole employer is
| the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The
| old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been
| replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."
|
| Who gets to decide what is allocated to whom? Giving
| these starting conditions it's no wonder in every single
| attempt at this has resulted in a death toll in the
| millions. Nothing the USA did from the outside forced
| these countries to starve, imprison and murder their own
| people. Why didn't this happen in the USA? Or the rest of
| the west? Why only in regimes that tried to control more
| aspects of an individuals life then ever attempted
| before? Most of the argument I am making is a poor rehash
| of "the road to serfdom".
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299215.The_Road_to_Se
| rfd...
|
| Blaming the west for the terrors of Soviet Russia is as
| mistaken as blaming the allies for what the Nazis did in
| Europe.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This is not really correct. There is no inherent reason
| to remove choice in what you buy or where you work.
| Individuals in the Soviet Union once they had access to
| an urban habitation and once they were done with their
| first job after university were actually allowed to
| change jobs as they wished. If you had no university
| education, then you could change jobs as often as you
| wanted. And then you could buy what you wanted with your
| money. If it didn't exist then yes, invention was
| complicated and bureaucratic.
|
| Beyond that, the argument of starvation is flawed,
| because Russia in the market system had worse famine than
| the USSR, and crucially, the USSR ended famine in the
| Russian Empire, not started it. You can argue there were
| unnecessary famines, and you'd be right, but saying that
| famine is an inevitable component of the Soviet system is
| wrong because there were one/two, at the beginning, and
| then none after.
|
| The actual limit to Central Control assuming that the
| people doing the central control are willing to let
| consumer goods follow what people want is data and the
| ability to process it. In the USSR this was very low -
| data collection was manual and plans were updated every 5
| years. The bureaucracy opposed every attempt to improve
| the situation as that would usurp their power. Beyond
| that the freedom that individuals can have as far as what
| to buy and which jobs to build is only limited by what
| others are willing to work for.
|
| It's also not true that they attempted to control more
| aspects of someone's life as ever before. Feudal states
| had much more control than the Soviet state on their
| inhabitants. Some capitalist states had more control.
|
| There are arguments to be made here. A poor rehash of a
| poor book written by an author who openly admitted that
| he started with conclusions and worked backwards from
| there is not one.
|
| The reality is much more complex than market=good
| everything else=bad. Heck, even the Soviet weren't always
| opposed to markets. Their ideology didn't even explicitly
| oppose markets, only class distinction in production.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Wasn't the rise of fascism in Germany directly caused by
| crippling and humiliating terms levied at Versailles
| bennysomething wrote:
| But hardly an excuse to try to exterminate an entire
| groups of people and invade other countries. Don't think
| anyone argues Hitler national socialism would have been
| fine if it wasn't for the allies. But they do argue
| communism might have worked of it wasnt for the USA.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Don't think anyone argues Hitler national socialism
| would have been fine if it wasn't for the allies.
|
| I'd be surprised if there aren't neo-Nazis that argue
| exactly that, just as modern Leninists argue that Soviet
| Communism might have worked out great for everyone if it
| wasn't for the USA.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Wasn't the rise of fascism in Germany directly caused
| by crippling and humiliating terms levied at Versailles
|
| No. That, along with the rise of Communism in Russia, the
| rise of Italian fascism, and...was among the _indirect_
| causes.
| andyzweb wrote:
| _What do you think the Russians talk about in their
| councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear
| programming charts, statistical decision theories,
| minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost
| probabilities of their transactions and investments, just
| like we do._
|
| - Arthur Jensen (Network, 1976)
| dash2 wrote:
| _Red Plenty_ is a fabulous book about exactly this
| attempt to develop tools to plan the economy. Not a
| success, in the end, but it gave rise to great advances
| in the maths of dynamic optimization.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Are you arguing that this worked? Their centrally planned
| economy was a disaster of ineffeciency compared to
| western price based systems.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It worked and it didn't. In large parts the bureaucrats
| actually opposed linear programming methods, but really
| the biggest issue was data, not planning. They had no
| automated data collection systems to speak of.
|
| Beyond that, the Soviet economy was solidly middling as
| far as the world was concerned.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Free markets allow us to express our values at an
| individual level rather than having an authority deciding
| what to value.
|
| This is not correct. The authority is there, it's just
| less visible.
|
| Market forces are extremely unequal: a small percentage
| of humanity, e.g. 0.1% influence 90% of the value of the
| housing market in all popular cities in developed
| countries.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Where is that figure from? What does influence mean in
| this context?
| powerapple wrote:
| Some personal opinion here: top Chinese internet companies
| makes most their money domestically, the top US companies are
| real international companies, and Facebook makes $5 billion of
| ad money from China, can you imagine that? It is other
| countries are losing money because their users contribute to
| the success of Facebook, YouTube but they are not making enough
| tax revenue from it. All these _like_ economy is not good for
| society, but the situation is different in US than China.
| mountainb wrote:
| China produces more steel in a month than the US does in an
| entire year of all types. US steel production is around 7% of
| Chinese steel production. Could the US ramp up steel production
| etc. on a crash basis under war conditions? Yes, but the
| overall picture is not great, given that China could also ramp
| up its production under the same constraints.
| [deleted]
| onepointsixC wrote:
| China could not ramp up steel production because it imports
| the raw materials from far away, mostly from Australia. Most
| of the raw materials, including energy and even food are
| imported into China. None of those supply chains would be
| left untouched in a war.
| adventured wrote:
| And the first thing the US should do in the case of a large
| scale war involving China, is hand Australia nuclear
| weapons for its self-defense. It would guarantee an
| extraordinary cost if China were to decide to destroy
| Australia to try to annex their land for resource
| extraction. In the coming decades China will have the
| military capability to invade Australia, given China's
| rapid naval expansion. It's not a sure thing that the US
| could stop them. If China is cut off from their required
| resources, they'll invade somewhere as a response.
| Australia needs a plan for if all else fails, an ultimate
| deterrence to invasion (which France and Britain possess
| for similar deterrence reasons).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| China is never going to attempt to do such a stupid thing
| as invade Australia thousands of kilometers away for
| resources.
|
| It's much simpler, cheaper and faster to simply import
| the ores via land from Asia. Which is one of the core
| reasons for the BRI.
| adventured wrote:
| Throughout all of recorded history there has yet to be a
| superpower or empire that didn't do incredibly stupid
| things, courtesy of over-estimating its position and
| power. Modern China will not be an exception. They'll
| overreach repeatedly just as every other prior great
| power has.
|
| China considers Australia to be within its primary sphere
| of influence (a rapidly expanding sphere as far as China
| is concerned, as they push outward militarily).
|
| Japan was willing to invade Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua
| New Guinea and Australia during its Empire days. China is
| a drastically more potent superpower than the Empire of
| Japan ever was and China's military reach will be far
| greater.
|
| In an Asia war scenario (which is what we're talking
| about here), Australia is absolutely on the table to be
| invaded by China. It's a prime candidate if China's foes
| attempt an inevitable resource blockade (which would see
| the BRI targeted early on). Invading Australia also
| disables a critical, reliable ally for the US side. The
| US & Co. would need vast regional resource supplies to
| sustain for long at all in a conflict with China in Asia;
| China would know that, and would understand that
| Australia is one of the most important resource suppliers
| both regionally and globally. At a minimum China would
| seek to cripple Australia functionally, and an invasion
| is ideal toward that ultimately (otherwise the
| Australians would just keep rebuilding and repairing
| damage).
|
| European empires would never seek to conquer territory in
| Asia, it's too far away. Britain would never seek to
| conquer India, it's too far away.
|
| China sends its vast fishing fleets to illegally plunder
| South American fishing waters. It has blanketed much of
| Africa for resource extraction purposes. It certainly
| considers Australia as a resource target within its
| reach. And it's more than that, China had already fallen
| into the mindset of considering Australia to be
| increasingly within its sphere of influence and control,
| which is why the CCP has gotten so angry at Australia in
| the recent political-economic conflict between the two.
| They had plans for Australia and assumed they would be
| dictating terms going forward.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| China has literally zero expeditionary abilities. 95% of
| their military is based on area denial, the remaining 5%
| on taking Taiwan, which they can barely do as of today.
|
| There is zero evidence that China is developing the
| capability of invading anyone except Taiwan for the next
| 25 years, and heaps of evidence to the contrary.
|
| There is stupid and then there is literally physically
| impossible.
|
| As far as Britain invading India, it's not like if they
| had just one day woke up and decided to do it. They built
| up the capability to invade colonies over _literally
| centuries_ before being able to start the invasion around
| 1760. Meanwhile China didn 't even start building that
| capability. They don't even plan to deploy stealth
| carrier craft, up until today their projects are for
| export only, nor blue water invasion craft, etc...
|
| Anyways, it's almost impossible to invade Australia in
| 2021. Even the US would seriously struggle.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well, no.
|
| China is food-safe in calories. Not in dollars, because
| China produces less expensive food than they import.
|
| While yes the raw materials are currently imported from
| Australia, in war-time they would be imported from Russia
| and Central Asia. Preparations are being made right now to
| facilitate this.
|
| China is also #4 in iron ore reserves, they just aren't as
| economical as Australia's. Of course that doesn't matter
| much in wartime.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Is it so impressive when you consider that the US has a
| population of about 20% China's? It's just one sector, of
| many many.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Agreed. Also, steel production is something that
| industrialized countries have been doing for over 100
| years. It isn't exactly high tech. It just requires lots of
| raw materials and lots of energy.
|
| It would not take any special creativity (merely an act of
| will, which would certainly be present in wartime) for the
| US to scale its steel and other raw materials production
| incredibly quickly. Sure, there might be a lag time before
| all the new capacity comes online, but that would not be
| happening at SF housing approval rates, instead at Liberty
| Ship construction rates.
| dufdudh wrote:
| I don't know how to tell you this but all of the things you
| listed are fine and wildly common both in China and SEA in
| general. I'm not sure if you were just attacking social media
| at large but that too is wildly popular. Facebook can only
| dream of having the social integration that Weechat enjoys.
| Mizza wrote:
| Hijacking this comment a bit, but I haven't watched real TV in
| a very long time but have been tuning in again because of the
| Olympics and Jeopardy.
|
| I'm seeing an incredible amount of ads for companies that let
| you gamble real money on your phone. Sometimes it's back to
| back to back to back commercials for online app casinos. This
| seems really dangerous and a sign of a tragically unhealthy and
| predatory economy - I can't think of anything more negative-
| value-add than gambling. Has there been a regulatory change
| that allows this, or has this been going on for some time?
| neutronicus wrote:
| I listen to a lot of basketball podcasts and they are _all_ ,
| even the biggest national ones, trying to get people to
| gamble
|
| It seems like it's gotten a lot worse after COVID, though
| subsubzero wrote:
| In the US its been crazy, before gambling was heavily
| frowned upon in the big four sports: Michael Jordan was
| heavily scrutinized for gambling, not on sports but just
| gambling for fun on his days off(when he was playing). The
| 49ers owner(Previous owner) Eddie DeBartolo Jr. was banned
| from the NFL as an owner due to trying to get a gambling
| license.
|
| Now the NBA is heavily pushing gambling and the revenue
| that comes with it, In addition the NFL is also pushing
| fantasy football which is veiled gambling, a few years ago
| every commerical for an NFL game had 50% of its ads set to
| either draftkings or fanduel which are both gambling sites.
| So I see a huge predatory gambling cloud enveloping all
| sports which is a really sad turn of affairs.
| lamontcg wrote:
| There was a court decision recently (2 years ago?) that
| started to open up online gambling in the US.
|
| I follow soccer, and right after that mlssoccer.com started
| publishing vegas betting odds for all the games, and ESPN
| FC started using UK betting odds for EPL and EUFA
| competitions.
|
| They're definitely warming up Americans to the idea of
| normalizing betting and sports betting in the mainstream.
| Sebguer wrote:
| If you look at Twitch there are plenty of big streamers
| spending their times on websites like Stake which is
| literally just an unregulated BTC casino.
| jurmous wrote:
| In the Netherlands gambling is either done by the state owned
| company with all profit going to state treasury or heavily
| regulated when done online. All to prevent gambling
| addiction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Casino
|
| It seems harmful to let gambling be unregulated...
|
| Even loot boxes in games are illegal
| https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/10/30/netherlands-
| rules-...
| xiaq wrote:
| I lived in Eindhoven for two years and passed by its
| Holland Casino every week. I never knew it was run by the
| Dutch state!
|
| There is a Chinese Internet slang "Zhi Shang Shui " ("IQ
| tax"), used to describe products with questionable actual
| value, like pseudoscience-based health products, luxurious
| goods with crazy price tags. The idea is that only people
| with poor judgement would buy such products, and in doing
| so are being taxed for low IQ.
|
| But a state-run casino... that's a literal IQ tax.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| We have a similar motto in French, "la taxe des cons"
|
| We also have state-run casinos in Quebec, as well as
| state-run lotteries. They have a legal monopoly on
| gambling, except for some exceptions for bars and online
| betting which is practically unregulated.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >It seems harmful to let gambling be unregulated...
|
| It seems barely any better make a state revenue stream out
| of it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| This view is predicated on whether you trust your
| government to do the right thing or not. The government
| is already trusted with policy and handling opiates,
| without going _Perdue pharma_
| allopp wrote:
| Realistically, your choices are:
|
| - corporation's primary revenue stream
|
| - local government's major revenue stream
|
| - state/federal government's minor revenue stream
|
| - criminal org's major revenue stream (prohibition)
|
| Given those choices, state+ size governments are least
| likely to paperclip-optimize for gambling "revenue", and
| federal/national government would care the most about
| negative externalities since they compete with other
| nations, on metrics removed from raw "tax" revenue.
|
| And the US has state lottos already.
| sydd wrote:
| It is. If it would be totally banned it would result in
| an emergence of a black market.
|
| We have the same thing on Hungary, there is one state
| controlled gambling company that's under heavy regulation
| (18+ only, full with warning signs against gambling,
| barely any advertisements, has only a few old-school
| products like scratch cards)
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Sure a black market would be worse, but why not just
| regulate it. Government shouldn't have an incentive to
| ensure that gambling exists and remains profitable which
| they do so long as they're running it. Government
| shouldn't be directly engaged in the business of any vice
| for that reason.
| dematz wrote:
| To add to the other reply, governments can be pretty good
| at unoptimizing the user's experience. As opposed to,
| like, game companies trying to make it really easy and
| tempting to pay for stuff on your phone, the specific
| government person in charge of this stuff is (hopefully)
| not walking home with pockets full of money if they get
| people to gamble.
|
| If it's something like a police officer whose funding
| comes from collecting fines, sure, there are really bad
| incentives there. But if the government casino department
| isn't eating what it kills then it doesn't seem like a
| problem.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Because the government is less prone to bouts of greed.
|
| No stockholders who expect infinite profit growth, no CxO
| with bonuses dependent on increasing revenue, and has
| public oversight by default: government should be the
| only entity trusted to directly engage in any vice
| business. They are the only entity I trust to put honest
| effort in _decreasing_ their user base.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| The government still has that incentive if it's taxing
| companies that profit from gambling.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've been getting a lot of gambling related ads from Google
| on YouTube, which is a bad look for an advertising company.
| Why can't Google find clients that run legitimate businesses?
| armadsen wrote:
| I'm in Southern Africa right now and was watching the
| Olympics on local TV and noticed the same thing. Some
| commercial breaks consisted of nothing but back to back ads
| for the same local-market (ie. southern African) sports
| betting app. It was weird.
| autokad wrote:
| I remember Jim Cramer on CNBC saying he wouldn't recommend
| fossil fuel, gun, and cigarette companies because of ethical
| reasons. then he went on to push one of those gambling
| companies, who on his show said it was their goal to get
| every family in America gambling on their platform.
|
| I'm like, you said that? are you trying to get banned?
| lucasyvas wrote:
| I live in Canada and noticed these same ads - what is this
| garbage? It seemed insanely predatory and unethical.
|
| I've never seen anything like this in my life and had the
| exact same reaction.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I realized these things must be heavily invested in and/or
| making a ton of money if they can afford so many Olympic ad
| spots. I hope it's investment money that's being pissed
| away on ad spots, but my fear is that these kinds of apps
| are very successful and really raking it in.
| whymauri wrote:
| >Has there been a regulatory change that allows this, or has
| this been going on for some time?
|
| It was actually less regulated. There were gambling sites for
| children based on electronic collectibles from video games.
| It was becoming a billion dollar industry before Steam put
| their foot down.
|
| A friend was close to launching a venture in the space and
| their first year revenue projections were around 600k
| assuming middling/unimpressive growth (he was a teenager at
| the time, didn't really register how fucked up the business
| was). Medium-sized ventures in this space raked in several
| million and the largest were definitely bringing in tens of
| millions of dollars. I know at some point there were concerns
| of money laundering...
|
| Playtika just IPO'd for 12B and they seem to mostly make
| gambling apps. I've seen people play them on planes and it's
| slightly disturbing. I took an SF -> Miami redeye once and a
| lady seemingly played it during the entire flight.
| JTbane wrote:
| There are still tons of games out there with gacha/loot box
| style elements, basically gambling for kids.
| smhost wrote:
| sports betting was legalized in 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...)
| bostonsre wrote:
| You watched real tv on your computer or real tv/cable tv? If
| on your computer... maybe jeaopardy viewers are more likely
| to gamble? I don't recall seeing any gambling commercials
| while watching the olympics on hulu live tv (am on the live
| tv and no ads bundle which for some reason includes lots of
| ads).
| itmayno wrote:
| The native citizens will come to HN and offer some
| rationalization. The non citizens will offer others. The reason
| is very simple. The dictator is paranoid about losing control
| and getting killed. Simple as that.
|
| Long version: when you are facing internal party conflicts,
| alliance between US-UK-Japan-Australia-India-Taiwan-South
| Korea-EU which accounts for 90% of worlds wealth and war power
| 10x the magnitude and is against you, floods that gets worse
| every year, extreme heatwave that will eventually make Shanghai
| unlivable, delta Covid lockdowns, capital flight, demographic
| crisis, supply chain moving out, internal resistance from Hong
| Kong and tibet and xinjiang, and young generation lying flat.
| You are paranoid as hell and afraid to lose control so as to
| not get killed.
| desert_boi wrote:
| Not quite the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-
| Nation_Alliance.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| And the alliance countries you've listed are also suffering
| from those exact same problems (climate change, Covid
| lockdowns, capital flight, demographic crisis,
| deindustrialization, widespread unrest, a hopeless young
| generation). And debatably, some of them have much worse on
| some fronts than China.
|
| I do think that every country in this world, whether it be
| the US, China, or my country, are experiencing the same
| effects from the current configuration of global capitalism
| (environmental destruction, extreme inequality, housing
| crisis, cutthroat job competition, long working hours,
| alienation, depression), and the only thing it's different is
| how state governments are responding to the crisis. Out of
| all the governments in the world, China seems ahead of some
| Western countries in a few aspects (as a one-party state
| being able to control and crack down on a lot of things and
| enable strict policies against over-financialization and
| deindustrialization). However, I still do think that China's
| strong state measures are only a stopgap measure for the more
| fundamental political and philosophical problems that the
| entire world has right now.
| itmayno wrote:
| Sure some countries have some of the same problems, I don't
| disagree. However, the magnitude of the problem is 10x
| worse for China. Remember that China is still extremely
| poor - 600M lives on $100/month. And another 500M lives on
| $1000/month. All this is the party's doing, and the people
| won't forget it. So when things goes bad like it is now for
| China, it will go really bad for its dictator.
|
| Also other countries prob don't have the problem of "what
| if the dictator was killed or dies early, and civil war and
| political struggle ensues"
| scarmig wrote:
| The 500M who live on $1k/month is a point of pride for
| the CCP; it's one of the legitimizers (probably the
| primary one) for its rule. China from 1980 onwards has
| produced the largest and most rapid wealth generation
| process in history.
|
| Now, you can come up with counterfactuals about why it
| would have happened anyway, and that's a pretty
| reasonable position to take. But acting like the
| $1k/month figure is somehow damning of the CCP totally
| misunderstands the domestic situation in China.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| In counterpoint, many people in the US will never forget
| when the political leaders have transformed an mainly
| industrial country which gave stable jobs for their
| households, into a deindustrialized husk of a country led
| by greedy bankers, rentiers, and scammers. All this is
| the two parties of the US's doing, and the people won't
| forget it.
|
| We've seen plenty how democratic countries can go through
| civil war and political struggle, this isn't something
| that only happens to dictatorships. And I am just so
| tired of the dichotomies most people have in their minds
| for the current form of state governments, both China and
| the US's political systems are complex and nuanced enough
| that you can't really call it communism/capitalism or
| dictatorship/democracy anymore. I was just comparing
| about which government is actually more competent than
| the other for dealing with the current problems in the
| world. One seems just a little bit more competent than
| the other, but that's as far as it can get.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > All this is the party's doing, and the people won't
| forget it.
|
| By at least one metric, the PRC has managed to eliminate
| 'extreme poverty' (even Brookings agrees:
| https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-
| development/2021/01/25...)
| dash2 wrote:
| This is the basic story that Acemoglu and Robinson tell:
| ultimately, inclusive political institutions (their rather
| fluffy term for liberal democracy) will win because they
| allow for creative destruction and renewal in the economy.
| Dictatorship never creates lasting economic growth, because
| the dictator is supported by the status quo elites, who
| eventually become dinosaurs.
|
| I'm not sure I believe it, but it's a bold prediction and
| worth thinking about.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I understand the facebook hate but is netflix included here
| because its... entertainment? I guess we should get rid of the
| arts as a whole.
| mc32 wrote:
| It would be quite interesting to see a cleaving between us in
| the "West" and those who follow China's model.
|
| I can see the disadvantage of the saccharine part of our
| economy and the advantages of focusing on nuts and bolts.
|
| It's the difference between letting people decide what's right
| for them and having a more planned society. Obviously planned
| societies have been a recurring theme in history, most notably
| socialism and its chronological counterpart national socialism.
| Neither made good faith efforts and both resulted in millions
| of deaths. But we also experienced unnecessary deaths from
| unregulated parts of the economy, though not as many deaths and
| at least it involved more free will.
| vikiomega9 wrote:
| One idea that seems to make sense to me is that social
| mobility is the equivalent of starvation in a socialist
| setup. What we see today with the poorer sections of society
| especially African Americans is a strong indicator that all
| systems of power should be viewed critically and with
| compassion. The vast majority of the poor in America for
| example are obese and that's one cost I can think of that we
| pay for the current system. Btw, I'm not saying poverty is
| the cause, just that the system is setup to maximize free
| market outcomes that are not good but we put up with them,
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-true-
| conne...
| mc32 wrote:
| It doesn't help that in much of the media and mainstream
| culture we admire slackers and dumbing things down. Get
| high, get drunk, watch dumb shows and have fun doing dumb
| things.
|
| It's less so in Asia. On the other hand we keep on shipping
| jobs overseas so people on the bottom keep on getting sold
| out for even lower prices.
|
| People used to be able to get by as a janitor or
| landscapers. Janitors and landscapers have been replaced by
| low cost labor. We can have foreign workers and have
| economic viability for people who don't go beyond high
| school. We still have mechanics, but not sure how long that
| will be an option with electrification of autos where there
| are diff requirements.
| cainxinth wrote:
| They want a big, powerful, capable tech industry... that will
| never even think of challenging the supremacy of the government.
|
| This is their way of reminding the tech sector of that latter
| part.
| deltasixeight wrote:
| This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making
| moves to solidify it's own power."
|
| The article claims the actions taken by China also represent
| real philosophies about what constitutes economic health. They
| don't want their greatest minds optimizing ad tech or finding
| tax loop holes.
| dotcommand wrote:
| > This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just
| making moves to solidify it's own power."
|
| "And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash."
|
| It's your standard state propaganda.
|
| At least he attempts to cover his bases: "China's leaders
| famously want to prevent the emergence of alternative centers
| of power, but is the West so different in this regard?"
|
| "For those outside China's byzantine, opaque nexus of party,
| government, and big business, it's very difficult to figure
| out what's going on." I guess Noah Smith is in the inside so
| he knows his stuff?
|
| It's your standard "CCP bad because CCP is friends with iran
| due to BRI" propaganda you find all over traditional and
| social media.
|
| The real question is who is noah smith and why was his
| article spammed on hn? That would be an interesting article.
| cainxinth wrote:
| There's some truth to that, but call me cynical, when asked
| to guess whether a nation's actions are primarily motivated
| by power seeking or philosophical principles, I usually
| assume power was the dominant factor.
| deltasixeight wrote:
| Power is an important factor, but to assume it's the only
| factor is irrational.
|
| Think about it like this, China built the biggest high
| speed rail network in the world and doing such a thing
| wasn't just about "power" it was done because the regime
| cares about it's people. Centralized governments aren't
| automatically evil. Like all people in general, more likely
| a central power has complicated motivations that span
| across many dimensions. Power solidification is just one
| dimension.
|
| Sort of a tangent but California can't even ring the shitty
| bart around the bay. Likely because not enough of the key
| people in critical places care.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Think about it like this, China built the biggest high
| speed rail network in the world and doing such a thing
| wasn't just about "power" it was done because the regime
| cares about it's people.
|
| The US built its massive interstate highway system for
| various reasons, including to enable more rapid movement
| of military assets in times; to enable rapid evacuation
| of cities in case of nuclear strikes; to promote better
| connectivity between major population centers; to enable
| white people to flee the cities; and to destroy prominent
| black neighborhoods. You'll note that by the latter
| elements, there is definitely a sense of punishing
| certain political outgroups that was sometimes pretty
| explicit in the designs. So did the US government care
| about its people or not?
|
| I don't know how the micropolitics of China affected the
| location of right-of-way choices to help or punish local
| residents within urban areas, but there are definitely
| areas of China's internal planning that are rather
| explicitly designed to punish political outgroups, such
| as encouraging Han migration to dilute the indigenous
| populations of Tibet and Xinjiang. And of course there's
| the Hukou system, designed to prevent rural people from
| moving to cities.
|
| > Sort of a tangent but California can't even ring the
| shitty bart around the bay. Likely because not enough of
| the key people in critical places care.
|
| The US planning process has a notorious effect in that it
| makes it very easy for local activists to block projects
| (NIMBY--Not In My Back Yard). This was adopted partly in
| response to projects like the Cross-Bronx Expressway that
| actively destroyed the local neighborhoods for the
| benefits of people who lived elsewhere.
|
| Is being responsive to the people who are going to bear
| the brunt of your development really a sign that you
| don't care about your people?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The Hukou system is not designed to punish rural people.
|
| It exists fundamentally to reduce rent-seeking, which is
| why it exists in some form or another in every economy
| where there is strong government control of housing. If
| you remove the Hukou system, everyone will flood to the
| cities, and you will have overpopulation. You can also
| liberalize housing, in which case people will pay around
| 30% of their income in rent which the CCP think is not
| economically productive. This happened in Beijing and Xi
| has been floating the idea of literally building another
| city and moving industries there to reduce rental
| pressures.
|
| Or you limit migration into the cities to the speed of
| new constructions, which enables you to set a low rent
| and, according to the CCP, have better economic outcomes.
| You limit migration by disincentivizing people who move
| to the cities without following the quota, hence the
| Hukou system.
|
| As far as incentivizing Han migration, I can't speak to
| recent efforts, but for a long time Han migration was
| incentivized because, well, there weren't much people in
| Xinjiang and there were a lot of resources and a border
| with the now-hostile USSR that needed to be exploited. So
| the CCP under Mao did everything they could to get as
| many people into Xinjiang. That included allowing Uyghurs
| to have 3 times as many children as the Han. But
| otherwise if you need more people into Xinjiang they're
| not going to be Uyghurs because, well, they're already in
| Xinjiang.
| bsder wrote:
| This breaks down when you consider that they are smashing
| Alibaba. Alibaba, like Amazon, is more about logistics than
| tech.
|
| It's hard to argue that shlepping stuff around efficiently
| isn't "economic health".
|
| As much as I hate Amazon and WalMart for being predatory, I
| applaud their logistics advances.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Tax loopholes would be accounting, not technology.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| _Fintech agrees and has motioned to change the subject_
| deltasixeight wrote:
| Finance is the more broader term here. China likely also
| doesn't want their greatest minds working on High Frequency
| Trading algorithms.
|
| The article is about tech, but from a broader perspective
| letting the free market completely decide allocation of
| resources in all sectors of the economy is something China
| never completely bought into. After all it is technically a
| communist.
| xmly wrote:
| "Fake-tech" industry, more precisely. If you can read Chinese,
| you know people in China percepts whether the company is a real-
| tech company based on whether they have been sanctioned by US.
| And most of Chinese think the fake-techs consumes too much
| resource and contributes too little, the more resources should be
| put on the real-tech companies.
| volta83 wrote:
| > There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook
| and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they
| rake in; maybe China's leaders, for reasons that will remain
| forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion.
|
| Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd
| salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges
| like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how
| to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be
| quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value.
|
| If China's crackdown on "consumer-facing tech" is about this,
| that could be a very good thing for China long term.
|
| I grew up wanting to work on NASA and putting stuff on space, and
| during university got offered 10x the NASA salaries at FAANG
| companies, and was to week to just say "no thanks".
|
| 10 years later I am starting to wonder what my legacy is going to
| be.
| adventured wrote:
| > Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with
| absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical
| challenges like... how to generate more revenue from
| advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as
| possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of
| negative value.
|
| And where is that happening? It's not happening in the US,
| China or Europe. The ad tech segment would be lucky to rank at
| the median on talent in the tech industry, much less the wider
| economy.
|
| What you're referring to is a myth, a slander that gets thrown
| around HN freely because it makes for a great, vicious
| soundbite to stab (primarily) the US with. It always goes
| entirely unsupported, nobody dares to even try to support the
| claim (because it's obviously false and won't stand up to even
| light scrutiny).
|
| The majority of the top US talent is working on ad tech? No,
| that's not actually happening. Not remotely close. The claim is
| off by far more than an order of magnitude. The best talent at
| Google are not even working on ad tech.
|
| Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Regeneron, Moderna, Biogen, Gilead,
| AbbVie, Abbott, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly, Illumina, Intuitive
| Surgical, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Texas
| Instruments, Cisco, Qualcomm, Micron, LAM, KLA, Applied
| Materials, SpaceX, Tesla, Caterpillar, Honeywell, DuPont,
| General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, 3M, Boston
| Scientific, Stryker, Edwards Lifesciences, Johnson & Johnson,
| Medtronic, Monsanto.
|
| That's a super short list that instantly destroys the claim and
| doesn't include the vast brilliance at work in US universities
| (which also outweighs the entire US ad tech industry all by
| itself). It also excludes the huge number of foreign industrial
| firms in the US filled full of brilliant persons that are also
| not concerned with ad tech.
|
| NASA has more elite minds in its employment than all of the US
| ad tech industry combined.
|
| There are probably more top minds working on just CRISPR right
| now in the US than in the entire ad tech field. Which is to
| say, the position of the ad tech field is drastically
| overstated.
|
| IBM is a debased giant, that has languished badly. And yet they
| have a top shelf quantum computing division. You think the best
| talent at IBM is working on ad tech? No.
|
| TI or Cisco's best talent is all dedicated to ad tech? No.
|
| The best engineering minds at Illinois Tool Works or John
| Deere, they're all working on ad tech? No.
|
| All the smartest minds at LAM, KLA and Applied Materials are
| working on ad tech? No.
|
| The great engineers at Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX or Caterpillar,
| they're all working on ad tech? Uh, no.
|
| The insurance industry has more top talent than the ad tech
| industry. The property/casualty segment all by itself is
| dramatically larger than the entire ad tech field, including
| all dollars spent on digital advertising in the US.
|
| Compensation != top talent. Otherwise all the smartest people
| in the world would be hedge fund managers and absolutely nobody
| would ever work for NASA or NSA. That's not actually how things
| work in reality.
| alexashka wrote:
| Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around -
| Vanilla Sky (the movie) :)
| atom_arranger wrote:
| I have a similar experience. I grew up wanting to work in
| robotics but found pure software work to be as enjoyable (maybe
| not as "meaningful", but as enjoyable), and much more
| lucrative.
|
| Not sure why coding CRUD pays so much more than what robotics
| tends to. I guess there's more material costs, costs to get a
| company started and profitable could be higher.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Another comment mentioned this, but I think Tencent and Alibaba
| are poor stand-ins for the sort of companies that aim to make
| phone-addicts.
| fksadfji12 wrote:
| Even if you get rid of FAANG companies, it's not like NASA is
| going to pay you more.
|
| You just lose the choice to work at a FAANG company for 10x the
| salary...
| jorblumesea wrote:
| It might actually have the opposite effect. Working for a
| highly bureaucratic government run firm might not appeal to
| many entrepreneurs and engineers. The CCP is not exactly known
| for ideological flexibility or just outsider thinking in
| general. Imagine working for the government, and that's the
| main engineering opportunities you have. Imagine your only
| opportunities being huge multi year hard engineering projects.
|
| There are many people who enjoy working in fast paced
| environments or building cutting edge experiences and products.
|
| You could see the US brain drain top Chinese technical talent
| because the US has diversity of opportunity. There's Space X
| and Tesla, but also Uber and Google.
| closeparen wrote:
| I think some zero-autonomy zero-respect enterprise IT drudgery
| is more likely than the space program, if we didn't have access
| to these "absurd" wages. Which are, coincidentally, just about
| enough to own homes for our families within range of our
| offices.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > 10 years later I am starting to wonder what my legacy is
| going to be.
|
| Isn't this a major reason people start families? Having kids
| and people and things to take care of gives life a lot of
| meaning to many people. So much so that the vapid trivialities
| of the everyday modern life are mere amusements we gratefully
| accept rather than the daily struggle most people that ever
| lived before us had to endure.
| f00zz wrote:
| > "That's just from EU consumers, never mind the rest of the
| world - spending so much on mobile netlink that companies can
| clear more than thirty billion in profit, in profit alone, over
| two years. Think of the gross! So you tell me - is that the
| best way of spending humanity's money, webbing friends, playing
| games on the bus? A fraction of a single percent of that money,
| we could have bases on Mars in five years. Destiny -
| possibility - glorious - but, no, we'll keep frittering our
| money on games, on cosmetics, on flim-flam, and we'll turn
| round in five hundred years and still be right here where we
| are now."
|
| - from Adam Roberts' sci-fi novel "Gradisil"
| dematz wrote:
| I mean, I can see the point. Maybe facebook is getting money
| but not actually creating value for people.
|
| ...but if we get Mars bases, so what? I'd rather play video
| games on earth than farm potatoes on Mars. Call it a lack of
| imagination but yeah.
| duxup wrote:
| Seems like this is just a typical kleptocracy or some
| authoritarian type system at work where ultimately if it doesn't
| benefit those in power it has a higher risk of running into
| trouble when someone is seen as a possible threat / or simply
| because it is convenient to make room for something those in
| power support.
| ffggvv wrote:
| american liberals really wish we could be china. you can sense it
| in how they talk. and some of that arrogance and desire for power
| seeps through their claims that it's for the best for everyone.
| and of course they should be in control because they know what's
| best for society. it's the same people that want to ban large
| soda containers
|
| their goal is likely the same as the ccp too. destroy any power
| that isnt the government.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Another perspective:
|
| https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era...
| mcguire wrote:
| Alternative hypothesis: This _is_ just another round in the
| infighting between China 's party, government, and big business,
| one that the party and government intends to win.
|
| China's big, customer-facing "tech industry" (I agree with that
| part of the argument) lives in the same environment as that of
| the rest of the world, with the same ability to generate the same
| large profits. Those large profits provide a power base that
| threatens the party, which in turn uses its governmental power to
| smack down anything threatening.
| citilife wrote:
| The U.S. has been in the process of delisting Chinese companies.
|
| I personally suspect that China wanted to get a jump on the
| effort and in turn force U.S. pension & hedge funds to lose
| $400B.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-af...
|
| That's a huge amount of money and will dramatically and
| negatively impact the public pension funds.
|
| It's not about the tech, it's about the economic war between
| China and the United States. At the same time, the CCP is
| exerting it's authority over these companies to tighten it's
| control.
| ffggvv wrote:
| a lot of chinese also hold baba and some of these stocks
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I don't think they are smashing tech industry per se, just those
| in it who grew bold enough they thought they can actually do/say
| what they want, and not remain forever in servitude to those
| wielding real power.
|
| Be a good boy and stay a good boy and you shall be rewarded, at
| least domestically. This doesn't foster international success so
| easily but that's another story.
| avmich wrote:
| Hard to judge this approach. On one hand, spartan approach to
| economy of USSR after WWII allowed the growth of 1960-s. On the
| other hand, it also helped with the collapse of 1980-s. Maybe
| China's trying to take that into account.
|
| I'd actually argue with the idea that China is doing this
| intentionally. Maybe it's not due to the centralized planning
| that tech sector gets smashed - maybe it's a much simpler reason
| behind that.
| djanogo wrote:
| I am not surprised after seeing how US tech companies created
| their own rules what public can discuss and undermined
| democratically elected leaders. They don't want Chinese versions
| of Jack D, MarkZ, and numerous MSM groups. No country would want
| social media companies that US now has.
| jeswin wrote:
| Asia is headed towards war - it almost seems inevitable. Xi has
| publicly committed to not leaving Taiwan invasion to the next
| generation.
|
| China is focused on building an industrial base that complements
| its military power while generating cash, and internet software
| startups aren't going to help.
|
| For the rest of Asia, they'd do well to militarize; for Japan and
| Australia to consider getting nuclear weapons or hosting them,
| and for India to rapidly increase stockpiles.
| paxys wrote:
| This is stupid. China is the last country in the world to want
| war, considering its 100% export-driven economy.
| deltasixeight wrote:
| War is unlikely.
|
| Globalization of all economies means everybody loses in a war.
| The devastation will harm everyone in a significant way.
|
| The most likely outcome is just perpetual political squabbling
| and the continuous feeling that war is omnipresent but
| realistically will never occur.
|
| China likely plans to dominate the US from a prestige
| standpoint. Better GDP, higher technology, that kind of thing
| and they already have the momentum for it.
| I-M-S wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why you think it seems inevitable?
|
| From my armchair, I can't see a benefit to China for kicking
| off a superpower war; they're already pulling ahead in STEM,
| their economy is fairly safe and not really that dependant on
| exports, quality of life is improving massively, infra is
| improving.. ?
| jeswin wrote:
| I don't mean imminent war, but that it's headed there. From
| articles in Chinese news sites, it seems Xi wants to attach
| reunification to his legacy. The thing with dictatorships is
| that ultimately it will depend on what one person wants to
| achieve.
|
| Xi is of course not going to risk a war that he won't win
| easily. So there's enough time for the rest of the world to
| reverse the wholesale shift of industrial capacity into
| China.
|
| Taiwan had nuclear program in the 70s which would have
| prevented war and invasion. That was nipped under pressure
| from everyone else, so I imho defending a democratic nation
| must be a shared responsibility.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| At this point, China could probably achieve reunification,
| even just de facto reunification, through economic control.
| No need for open combat, which would threaten economic
| stability.
| dotcommand wrote:
| > For the rest of Asia, they'd do well to militarize; for Japan
| and Australia to consider getting nuclear weapons or hosting
| them,
|
| The idea that we'd ever let Japan have a nuke is ludicrous. Do
| you really think we'd let a country we nuked twice have such
| weapons? There is a reason why we are still occupying Japan 75+
| years after ww2. And no, it isn't to "protect" japan.
|
| > and for India to rapidly increase stockpiles.
|
| I don't think china would mind one bit. After all, it wasn't
| china that sanctioned india when they developed nukes...
|
| http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9805/13/india.us/
|
| If there is a war in asia, it will be a war for liberation -
| not from china, but from the west. It's so funny how we truly
| deluded ourselves into thinking we are the good guys in asia
| and not the murderous colonial powers that we truly are. We
| really need to start seeing the world as it is rather than the
| disneyfied nonsense you read on "news". Or we are in for a rude
| awakening.
| jeswin wrote:
| > The idea that we'd ever let Japan have a nuke is ludicrous.
| Do you really think we'd let a country we nuked twice have
| such weapons?
|
| Not ludicrous at all - Trump was open to Japan and Korea
| acquiring nukes. [1]
|
| > After all, it wasn't china that sanctioned india when they
| developed nukes...
|
| That was at a time when India's wasn't clearly aligned to the
| US. Subsequently it was the US which drafted the Nuclear
| Suppliers Group (NSG) exemption for India.
|
| > If there is a war in asia, it will be a war for liberation
| - not from china, but from the west.
|
| What liberation? People hold favorable views of the West
| (compared to China) in East Asia, South East Asia, or India.
| Many of them are now in disputes with China, which often
| involve violence. The situation is different in West Asia -
| but it's always been that way.
|
| > It's so funny how we truly deluded ourselves into thinking
| we are the good guys in asia and not the murderous colonial
| powers that we truly are.
|
| Modern western influence is largely positive compared to the
| alternatives.
|
| 1: https://www.ft.com/content/c927017c-f398-11e5-9afe-
| dd2472ea2...
| dotcommand wrote:
| > Not ludicrous at all - Trump was open to Japan and Korea
| acquiring nukes. [1]
|
| Don't link to paywalls. Who is talking about Trump? I'm
| talking about the US. Also, Trump was open to a lot of
| things. Including Mexico paying for the wall.
|
| > That was at a time when India's wasn't clearly aligned to
| the US. Subsequently it was the US which drafted the
| Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) exemption for India.
|
| Countries like india, china, russia are never "clearly
| aligned" with anyone. They are too big for that.
|
| > What liberation? People hold favorable views of the West
| (compared to China) in East Asia, South East Asia, or
| India.
|
| That's because we are the dominant occupying power with
| dominant propaganda and wealth. The leaders of these
| "subjugated" nations could easily turn the propaganda
| against the US. Look how quickly our propaganda was able to
| turn the sentiment against china. How easily do you think
| Japan, Korea, Philippines, etc could turn their nations
| sentiment against the US.
|
| > Many of them are now in disputes with China, which often
| involve violence.
|
| What disputes, violence? The only real dispute seems to be
| with the US and the west ( aka china's and asia's former
| european colonizers ). That's another danger, that asians,
| africans, etc are going to pick up on.
|
| > The situation is different in West Asia - but it's always
| been that way.
|
| What violence? Is it china that invaded afghanistan, iraq
| and sanctioned iran?
|
| > Modern western influence is largely positive compared to
| the alternatives.
|
| No. It hasn't been. Not for the aborigines. Not for the
| natives. Not for the africans. Not for the indians. Etc.
| That's the point. It's actually modern chinese influence
| has even been more positive. Considering the wealth of
| japan, korea and much of asia has been due to trade with
| china. And that's why we are "pivoting to asia" - a place
| we do not belong. A place, btw, we caused the deaths of
| tens of millions of innocent people.
|
| But we shall see how history pans out.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Japan and the US are close allies based on common interests:
| Japan is one of the few countries that hates China more than
| the USA.
|
| The people of Japan and the US have very favorable opinions
| of each other[1]. Of the two, Japan has _more_ favorable
| views of the USA than the other way around.
|
| The US would love to station nukes in Japan, but this would
| cross a red line for China.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/04/07/americans-
| japa...
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/09/13/hostile-
| neighb...
| whydoibother wrote:
| "Japan and the US are close allies based on common
| interests:"
|
| Doing imperialism and committing war crimes?
|
| "Japan is one of the few countries that hates China more
| than the USA."
|
| Yeah, they made that obvious in WW2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
| ru552 wrote:
| I think it's because they want their best and brightest working
| on physics, materials, technological breakthroughs, etc., instead
| of ad tech.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I think a lot of western bright minds would be working on
| physics, materials, technological breakthroughs if the pay
| wasn't abysmal and working conditions exploitative.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| I know several people that got STEM degrees. One worked for
| Boeing, moved into progamming at an ad tech company. One had
| a math degree, got into programming at a real estate firm.
| One had a physics degree, is now an electrician.
|
| The ridiculously expensive college education can't even
| prepare us for our own workforce, which has very little
| demand for engineering, sadly.
| dicomdan wrote:
| You're giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the
| dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power
| structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
| deltasixeight wrote:
| This is a one sided view and also represents classic bias of
| the western viewpoint.
|
| Sure a "dictator" (more accurately "central power" for China)
| wants to consolidate power but to think the dictator is a one
| dimensional being and that all actions a dictator takes only
| serves that single minded motivation of power solidification
| is really not reasonable.
|
| Consolidating power is only one aspect of their motivation
| that much is true. However the article is not about this
| aspect of the CCP. The actions taken by the regime here
| represent broad views about what constitutes economic health.
| The OPs comment is spot on, and captures the main point of
| the article.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| We don't actually know why anyone in power does anything. One
| thing I do know is we as the West need to figure out how to
| come together and defend democratic and liberal values, as
| without them we are seriously lost. We should start by not
| giving any more money and technology to a Chinese state that
| clearly do not have our best interests at heart. I think the
| west is in real danger of just falling apart over the next 50
| years if we lose our reasons for existing and instead spend
| our time arguing about cultural issues. We spend so much time
| right now looking inward at our small differences we can't
| see the reason why our nations became worthwhile in the first
| place.
| papito wrote:
| What I do notice is that the Chinese "rulers" seem to be
| more concerned about long-term well-being of its people,
| rather than trolling and performative assholery on Twitter.
|
| You might describe it as a dictatorship, but it's more
| data-driven than you might suspect. The Chinese keep the
| pulse on decisions they make, and if it's unpopular - it's
| gone. Of course there is a line - you can't go head-on
| against the Party and call them out directly. Compare this
| situation here, where we are trying to patch up our
| infrastructure and instead have to deal with a collection
| of spectacular douches in _Congress_ , propagandizing
| against science to such an extent that our top
| epidemiologist has to get a security detail.
|
| Who would you bet on in this movie?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Pithy response: Tell that to the Uyghur Muslims? Are they
| not Chinese people?
|
| More serious response: I don't want to live under a
| dictatorship where a generational change could lead to
| corruption and suffering on a much bigger scale. I think
| America as a project might also be lost and we should
| consider if this crazy idea (democracy, freedom of
| religion, free speech etc.) is worth fighting for. I
| think it is and I believe in the values that the US has,
| despite some very obvious mistakes America isn't ethnic
| cleansing Muslims or having a press that can't criticise
| the government. I will bet on America not because China
| won't win but because I still believe the (relative)
| peace and prosperity of the post war period isn't worth
| throwing away as easily as some want. We need someone
| focused on this in a clear way and to get Americans stop
| arguing amongst themselves and look at the bigger
| picture.
| papito wrote:
| I by no means suggest that the Chinese system is
| superior. It's a sort of system that can descend into
| runaway corruption pretty easily.
|
| What I am saying is, given the decay of the western
| society, which is our fault entirely, our chances of
| staying ahead are slim.
|
| The problem is, the Chinese have a team. They do not
| easily sell out. We, however, have an entire layer of
| high-level government that will readily go to the highest
| bidder. This is not sustainable. The only way to fix this
| is a crisis that unites us, but if a global pandemic did
| not do it, what will?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| "We don't actually know why anyone in power does anything."
|
| This is a not true. Dictators do long speeches. Often quite
| explicitly stating why they do what they do.
|
| Funnily sometimes in democracies there is a bigger space
| betweeen what is done and what is communicated.
| simiones wrote:
| Those speeches usually contain about as much actual
| information as a corporate PR statement: they, at best,
| tell you why the dictator _wants others to think_ they
| are doing something.
|
| The only logical way to interpret the intentions of
| political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything
| else, even personal diaries, are likely full of
| interested reasoning and outright lies.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| If we are talking about the stuff here (regulation of
| internet companies) there plenty of speeches, 5-year
| plans, writings in party newspapers that explains the
| thinking behind the actions.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Okay so is the article right? It's not about smashing
| innovation but saying popularity is the wrong metric and
| (CCP) power should be the driving force behind technology
| development? Do the powerful really always state there
| objectives obviously like some dastardly Bond villain?
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a
| dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want
| their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP
| assumed.
| tablespoon wrote:
| It's an authoritarian oligarchy currently trending towards
| more autocracy. I think people often have an unfortunate
| lack of political vocabulary, and therefor loosely use
| terms like "dictatorship" for any system with a large
| amount of political repression.
| refenestrator wrote:
| I know this is just semantics but I actually like
| 'technocratic autocracy' better than any sort of
| oligopoly to describe China. There are no other poles of
| power, the army even reports directly to the party rather
| than the government. And, so far, they've been quite
| dynamic on the technocratic front, people get fired for
| incompetence despite having a political base.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > There are no other poles of power, the army even
| reports directly to the party rather than the government.
|
| I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic,"
| but it is an oligarchy. The party is the oligos.
| Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the
| leader, not the party. I think things are trending that
| way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at
| least for the last several decades).
| refenestrator wrote:
| You're right, I was thinking of oligopoly more in the
| terms where it's usually applied to Russia and the ruling
| 'set' all have different, separate power bases.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This might have been true, but then Xi changed the law to
| be ruler for life.
| 9999px wrote:
| He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies
| don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered
| impeachment process. GTF outta here with your completely
| ignorant takes on Chinese politics, you clearly have
| never been there nor read much about it.
|
| Term limits are horrible for the working class in the
| U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC
| basically run our legislating process. Killing term
| limits for certain offices means that as someone gains
| experience and competence, they continue to lead, whereas
| in the U.S. they'd arbitrarily have to leave office right
| when they're getting the lay of the land.
|
| It'd be like firing our senior dev and putting in a
| junior - no wonder shit never gets done in the States.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Western democracies don't even have democratic recall
| outside of the neutered impeachment process.
|
| Paging California. Paging California. Which is now in the
| process of its second recall of a governor.
| ugjka wrote:
| He who makes the hottest chips is he who rules
| bennysomething wrote:
| Google works on and tech so it can fund everything else it
| does, i.e. the services we actually use.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the best and brightest often also like money.
|
| This incentivizes said people to emigrate.
| jayd16 wrote:
| So what happens when non-Chinese software and service tech
| continues to dominate because China decided it wasn't
| important?
|
| Clearly these sectors are powerful or they wouldn't be
| targeted. Whats the plan to make them obsolete beyond taking
| Chinese software down a peg?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It will never dominate in China because of the Great
| Firewall, and Chinese ad-tech will never dominate abroad for
| similar reasons.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong, but to air the other side: people
| don't want breakthrough tech, they want cheaper mortgages.
| That's why we spent trillions on mortgage subsidies and haven't
| even tried to build a Mars colony.
|
| The USSR fell because people didn't care about space
| exploration and Opera, they wanted washing machines and pop
| music.
| rvn1045 wrote:
| The scale that these companies operate on requires huge
| innovations in software engineering and computer science. Think
| about all the distributed systems that have come out of places
| like Facebook and Google over the last 2 decades.
| infogulch wrote:
| Which they promptly keep to themselves and utilize to
| maximally exploit their users time and attention. Technology
| is a tool, not a generic force for good. Tools are agnostic
| to human value. If technology is being used exploitatively
| then it's a problem.
| jonfw wrote:
| They don't keep it all to themselves, giant technology
| companies have open sourced things like mapreduce,
| kubernetes, golang, react, kafka, and more.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| How many years did it take for Google to release
| MapReduce?
| dilap wrote:
| I think that's overstating. To be sure some real tech
| challenges in distributing work horizontally, but I don't
| think it's created anywhere _near_ the amount of value that
| 's come out of e.g. space race research.
| polynomial wrote:
| This is a really solid question with no clear cut answer on
| the surface. I wonder what sort of research is being done
| here?
| rvn1045 wrote:
| You don't think map reduce, tensorflow and the countless
| other systems that have been open sourced haven't had huge
| impact outside of their original use cases at these
| companies?
| japhib wrote:
| The tech is less visible and more boring but I'm doubtful
| that this is true:
|
| > I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of
| value that's come out of e.g. space race
|
| The space race gave us a lot of tangible,
| physics/materials/hard-engineering related tech. Software
| gives us a lot of internet infrastructure, communications,
| algorithms, etc. that are incredibly useful for the average
| consumer. Lots of people in this thread complaining about
| the negative value of ads and such, but the communications
| infrastructure, knowledge sharing, social change due to
| marginalized people being able to communicate things far
| and wide ... there's a lot of intangible benefits that have
| come as a direct result of focusing heavily on consumer
| internet.
| hvasilev wrote:
| vastly overrated compared to focusing on actual tech.
| drevil-v2 wrote:
| Distributed systems that, more or less, are only really
| needed to run similar social networks as Facebook or Google?
|
| That's like saying the Cook maybe fat and morbidly obese but
| look at how efficiently he consumes such a large number of
| calories every day.
| toss1 wrote:
| The Western financial elites thought they were exploiting cheap
| Chinese labor by promoting outsourcing of manufacturing - it
| would make for far greater profits.
|
| Meanwhile the Chinese were exploiting the West's myopic focus on
| quarterly profits to gain access to and experience in fabricating
| and designing the top western technology.
|
| The scale of this strategic blunder by the Western societies will
| be considered of historic importance.
|
| The analysis in this article brings that into focus as well as
| anything I've yet seen. If the West does not rapidly regain focus
| on the things that matter -- real manufacturing, engineering, and
| AI (not consumerist opiates for the masses) -- we are soooo
| screwed.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > The analysis in this article brings that into focus as well
| as anything I've yet seen. If the West does not rapidly regain
| focus on the things that matter -- real manufacturing,
| engineering, and AI (not consumerist opiates for the masses) --
| we are soooo screwed.
|
| When China can build a decent airplane then I'll be interested.
| Until then, they produce/replicate relatively simple tech and
| for whatever massive scale they have in their manufacturing,
| they lack sophistication and complexity in many ways. They're
| doing their thing and doing it well but they don't produce
| sophisticated, leading edge things or processes for the most
| part.
|
| The USA has never manufactured more than it does today. Don't
| confuse manufacturing labor force size with outputs. High tech
| manufacturing in the USA leads the world by a significant
| margin today. Much of what China is manufacturing is considered
| routine and trivial.
| toss1 wrote:
| Excellent points, about leadership in innovation - there are
| many ways in which the West still leads, and in many ways
| China is still merely a copycat - e.g., note how critical
| China sees it to get access to the tech and local ownership.
|
| But, China is advancing, making some genuine homegrown
| breakthroughs and is certainly much further along the
| learning curve than the West in many areas such as solar
| panels.
|
| Mostly, it is key to note that China recognizes this, has a
| long term strategic plan and is executing on the plan.
|
| Unless we make appropriate structural & strategic changes, at
| the very least, treating a far wider swath of tech as
| sufficiently strategic to require development & production at
| home or among allied countries, we are on a slippery slope.
|
| Edit: Plus, by the time we see them making stuff as good or
| better than in the West, it will be too late to catch up.
| Those growth curves tend to be exponential (compound interest
| on knowledge gains, network effects of multiple experts or
| multipl6field leadership, etc.).
| [deleted]
| clydethefrog wrote:
| Taking a quick look at the YC S21 offering that is posted here
| - it seems all this capital is still mostly based on software
| that stimulates more consuming.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, consume now, profit some this quarter. Nevermind putting
| in the effort to invent new technologies that could profit
| and dominate for decades.
|
| It is exactly the myopic financialist's approach. It works
| great for a while, juicing artificial growth. Meanwhile it
| starves the real growth engines, so when it stops working,
| there is no hope of recovery before failure (but the finance
| wizards have by then moved on).
|
| Normally this applies at the scale of companies, but here it
| applies on the scale of nations or societies.
|
| Ignore at our peril.
| orky56 wrote:
| Startup seeks to raise funding or generate profits as quickly
| as possible -> VCs invest and hope for 50x return within 10
| years -> Liquidity event may take startup public where they
| focus on quarterly profit
|
| This is a system of private funding that generates maximum
| profits within a 5-10 year horizon while China and its public
| funding and actions is focusing on generating foundational
| returns and innovation that will last well beyond that 10
| year horizon. The US approach of subsidies for loss leaders
| and laissez faire when it comes to regulation is kicking the
| can and optimized to pump out millionares/billionaires that
| can provide outsized returns to people in the market
| (employees/founders/congress/entrepreneurs) but less for
| people on the sideline.
| [deleted]
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| China saw how the tech companies in the USA have too much power
| to influence conversations. They want no part of that, they want
| absolute control and if they have to destroy part of their
| economy to make sure it happens then so be it.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I don't get it. Why wouldn't you just put them under your
| control? Now you have all that power.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| At what point do individual freedoms / economic freedoms (eg
| starting a company that builds addictive non-productive
| platforms) inhibit human progress? Perhaps China is right on this
| one.
| up_and_up wrote:
| How does this inspire founders to startup a company in China?
| Does this inspire me to invest more money in China?
| rektide wrote:
| > _Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh
| and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On
| behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone._
| [1]
|
| Because cyberspace is ascendant over the old powers. Alas, sure,
| it's a pretty sad capitalist shell of what cyberspace could be,
| but it's still striding past the encumbered old giants.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I miss being that optimistic. What happened?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| and down they forgot/as up they grew
| hosh wrote:
| Software ate the world.
|
| I also remember feeling that optimistic about technology. It
| wasn't until this past year, I am getting an inkling of what
| happened. It's a continuation of much longer trends that I
| didn't see until I started studying Carol Sanford's work on
| regenerative paradigms, responsible business, etc.
|
| The dominant worldview these days is that of the machine
| world view. It sees the world as complex machinery, with
| people as cogs. It denies the power of living systems to be
| able to live and grow on their own, instead, forcing them to
| intermediate through the machine.
|
| As such, software eating the world is a continuation of that
| worldview.
|
| I think perhaps, this is the "punk" in cyberpunk; that even
| though people become part of the machine, they can still
| change the world for the better against old powers. Old
| powers didn't understand how the emerging technology works,
| so there's a window of time. Perhaps, that, technologists
| will maintain a tech gap over old powers. But the old powers
| had been eaten by machines a long time ago, and when new tech
| companies arose, that machine world view became further
| entrenched.
|
| It didn't solve for the fundamental problem: living systems
| are not machines. We are capable of growing and changing on
| our own. We are not consumers. We are not users. Living
| systems are what makes software come alive; why would we want
| software to eat us?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I miss being that optimistic. What happened?
|
| The optimism turned out to be naive? I mean, regardless of
| whatever "cyberspace" was originally imagined to be, in
| actuality it turned out to be bunch of Facebooks. And more
| often than not it's allowed low-quality garbage to be spread
| with unprecedented effectiveness.
|
| Or to summarize in 1996 terminology: cyberspace turned out to
| be land of timecubes.
| distribot wrote:
| The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be
| spread with unprecedented effectiveness.
|
| I'm not convinced that previous systems of more centralized
| distribution of information (television networks and
| woodblock printing) were better than the ones that
| succeeded it.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to
| be spread with unprecedented effectiveness.
|
| I'd dispute that, after making one clarification to my
| original comment: I meant "unprecedented _relative_
| effectiveness. " At no other time has any rando with a
| batshit insane idea been able to spread it with near
| equal access to same the tools people use to spread real
| knowledge and understanding. To contrast it with the
| previous system, it's like hiring a bunch of incompetents
| and then getting rid of code review.
| creamytaco wrote:
| Cyberspace does not exist in isolation, it's a network
| reflecting to a large extent the sum of its parts. In the
| early / mid 90s, before the masses moved in, "cyberspace"
| was for the most part what Barlow imagined it to be.
|
| The race to the bottom, adtech, consumerist takeover only
| started when the "stupid" society at large became the
| majority, so for the west this process was really
| inevitable. China, being a dictatorship on top of a closed-
| feedback system and unwilling to let capitalism run
| unrestricted, has a much better chance of controlling the
| process and using it to shape society according to a
| central vision. We should be worried.
| rektide wrote:
| dismay is I think due but "turned out to be" is not at all
| how I see it. the conquest of massified consumerism over
| the frontier is a true story, but the frontier is still out
| there, still ready, still awaiting, still vast beyond our
| wildest imaginings. the excitement of a new liberation, out
| of corporate data centers & back in to power, back into
| freedom & exploration, building new connective mediums and
| places, is more compelling to me personally than ever. and
| increasingly more feasible, as we get better at developing
| systems and software.
|
| in the aughs Tim O'Reilly was talking about chasing the
| alpha geeks. by contrast we seem fixated on the muck & mire
| of the lowest experiences, these days, and we have few
| visible free radicals pushing the ascent. I believe the
| former to be not worthy of fixation, and the latter to be
| imminently close to rediscovering themselves, & they will
| be equipped with vastly better means to pioneer onward
| with.
| pierre wrote:
| I still believe the pendulum will swing back to something
| else... internet 2021 is not the final state of the
| cyberspace, and things will evolve as connectivity, cost of
| hosting and ubiquity of computer systems increase.
|
| What will be the web once we move to a new 3D / AR media or
| a metaverse platform? What id the internet become
| distributed again (I see some seed in blockchain / DAO), or
| if connectivity become ubiquitous (think smart dust).
|
| We are just at the beginning of this journey, and the GAFAM
| of today are the IBM of tomorrow.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| FAANG interviews.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| What happened was that the silly people who wrote that
| twaddle managed to forget (somehow) that the millions of
| miles of fiber optics and copper cabling, the millions of
| processors that go into servers and backbone routers, the
| thousands of satellites and microwave links, and so forth are
| all possible only because of the "Industrial World" and all
| the uncounted thousands of acres of land on which that
| infrastructure rests and the businesses that run them are
| under the jurisdiction of "Governments".
|
| There never was and can never be a cyberspace independent of
| the physical world. All there was was a brief moment of being
| ignored until the powers that be realized " _Oh, hmm, looks
| like that Internet thingamajig is kind of important now;
| better start ruling it._ "
| granularity wrote:
| > And of course you need firmware as well.
|
| Love this. It's like Obama's "the bubble sort would be the wrong
| way to go". Clearly Mr Smith has done his homework on the subject
| of military technology and has learned a Technical Fact:
| "firmware exists". He probably even knows that it goes between
| hardware and software!
| mrkramer wrote:
| Why is US smashing its tech industry that's the question.
| steve76 wrote:
| marxists and liberals don't believe in rules. Just power. Burn
| the world if you have to. That's why no one wants them around and
| wherever they go the smart nice rich people flee like a movie
| monster is attacking their village.
|
| There are rules, unavoidable ones. No one likes to be told what
| to do from far away. It's best to leave martial affairs for a
| return to civil life as fast as possible. Life and everything
| that comes with it is there for you. You're not there to act as
| some fuel source for a rapidly devolving, senile, incompetent
| auditor. With no principles to reign them in, no humanitarianism,
| marxists can never quit the conflict and always do themselves in.
|
| The world is much too big and complex to govern through brutality
| and bullying. Trying to qualify expertise is like trying to stop
| a flood. People are smart and adapt and work their way up and
| their shortcuts and mistakes are amplified to everyone instead of
| being siloed into their own lives.
|
| Laws are there to put a limit on the violence, not add to it. If
| you're making things worse, just go away. Governments are not
| there to turn self proclaimed intellectual progressives into
| movie stars.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| Another potential explanation is China is preparing for a
| possible cyberwar and after seeing the USA population manipulated
| by social networking during elections has decided they want their
| population to be less vulnerable to outside manipulation.
| magwa101 wrote:
| Power, that's why China is smashing it's tech industry. In the US
| the industry, as a whole, has a massive influence on politics,
| culture and society. In China that is a non starter for the
| government. It is about maintaining power and nothing else.
| ftr45 wrote:
| the question should be: ''why aren't any other governments doing
| that?''
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| I thought it was well known why Jack Ma/Ant were being crushed?
|
| He spoke out against and essentially insulted the government in a
| speech last year, and immediately disappeared from the limelight.
| [0]
|
| [0] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-speech-that-cost-
| jack-m...
| geodel wrote:
| Jack Ma was essentially engaging in payday loan type shady
| business. Being some kinda free speech warrior is western media
| POV.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| This probably isn't a popular opinion, but I think China may be
| genuinely right here. Innovation requires solving genuinely hard
| technical problems. Consumer Internet is, in general, not that.
|
| I genuinely hope that America makes a similar shift in it's own
| VC sector.
| fma wrote:
| Haven't read the article - but this is my sentiment for many
| years. I went to undergrad for computer engineering, then a
| masters in electrical engineering...hoping to do actual
| engineering work. And I end up having a career in web app
| development because that's where the money is at.
|
| I am surprised that those who continue to work on "genuinely
| hard technical problems" do so when web app/dev has so many
| jobs with pretty damn good pay.
|
| As an anecdote, my wife has a PhD in chemistry from a top
| program. Majority of her peers in grad school ended up taking
| classes in CS, Data Science, drop their program and work at a
| tech company.
|
| When she graduated...I remember sitting with her at a career
| website and just looking at the differences in quantity of jobs
| for hard sciences vs IT (my wife's career now has nothing w/
| her hard earned degree)
| salt-thrower wrote:
| You can broaden that statement and say that almost all the
| CRUD-app bullshit which devs get employed for these days isn't
| that, either. I've worked as a dev for insurance, B2B fintech,
| and athletic wear companies. They're all doing trivial CRUD
| problems behind the scenes, where the only real challenge is
| dealing with asinine management and organizational issues.
|
| And even if the consumer internet problems _are_ technically
| challenging, like problems of scale for Facebook, you can argue
| pretty easily that solving them to increase Facebook 's power
| and profitability is a net negative for society.
|
| For China to simply say "no" to that and invest more heavily in
| the physical economy is... a smart move, by my estimation. It
| tracks with what I'd do in my "king for a day" fantasy. Not
| that I think they're out there building a utopia - they're
| still a repressive regime - but they're wisely avoiding a class
| of problems that the West has jumped into headfirst.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| In discussions like this people will always call out how our
| smartest minds are being wasted on serving advertisements. While
| I despise advertisements and the economy around it, I wonder how
| accurate that assertion actually is.
|
| So much of the work done at Google and Facebook seems to be
| solving general computing problems. That's how we got things like
| React and k8s that aren't specific to advertisements at all. On
| top we constantly complain about app the projects cancelled by
| Google. All these projects were build by someone and rarely are
| directly related to serving advertisements. Not to mention all
| the very valuable products provided by Google many of us use
| every day that provide tremendous value despite Google's ultimate
| goal of serving ads. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Google
| Voice and probably many more. Not to mention products we ridicule
| for their unnecessary changes and internal competitors like
| Meet/Hangouts. Pie on the sky stuff like self driving cars. AI
| advancements like Tensor flow. They have a leading security
| project that slowed down all out CPUs ;)
|
| What percentage of work at Google is in fact directly "wasted" on
| advertisements?
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Is it just a big fu to investors of now delisted companies?
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