The owner of the Nets is an executive at Alibaba. He will follow the party line and has (calling Hong Kong protestors “separatists”, etc.)

The jersey sponsor of the LA Lakers is Wish.com, a company doing drop shipping from China.

LeBron James is sponsored by Nike (as are all of the jerseys) and Nike has significant interest in keeping the Chinese market open. LeBron is leading production of Space Jam 2. He won’t jeopardize international acclaim and box office revenue for this.

This is the same for every other player. Sponsorship deals with apparel companies are a huge source of income. Few stars are untouchable and the ones who are wont risk other business interests.

Disney owns ESPN, and also has had to deal with recent censorship of Winnie the Pooh in China (which is a different story altogether).

I'm suspecting there are quite a number of other business dealings between China and those who sit on boards of American companies. That would create an enormous tangle of conflict of interest. China doesn't need a military to conquer, as these business relationships seem to be doing the job well enough.

I know that your point might be "there's too much to give up", but I believe OP's point is why can't these people give them up?

Quick google search for NBA stars' pay: https://www.shmoop.com/careers/basketball-player/salary.html

At the top you have folks with $30m in salary and $30m in endorsements. Even if they lose all endorsements (and they won't), there's still $30m in salary left. Average stars make $5m/year for 5 years. That's certainly enough money for a lifetime of pretty good living. These are the folks who can afford to take a stand, is what OP means. In contrast, if the average office worker takes a stand and loses their $60k/year job, life would be really difficult for them.

The counterpoint is that LeBron James already makes over $35 million per year (not counting endorsements -- his net worth is in the hundreds of millions) and therefore is actually in an excellent position to take a stand against a dictatorship. After some threshold, ludicrously rich people aligning themselves with dictators just so they can become even more rich makes them just as bad and worthy of denigration.

And provide a powerful lesson for the children in his sponsored school, there is more to life that money and standing up to bullies is the right thing to do even if you must have consequences.

As Michael Jordan didn't say... "Republicans buy sneakers too." Billionaires didn't get to be billionaires by leaving money on the table. We need large scale political action against China.

We need to adopt an economic system that doesn't prize currency above human dignity.

Isn't that what communism/Marxism is supposed to be? "Each according to his ability to each according to his needs?"

"supposed to be" is the key part of the sentence.

So we should be like the Chinese and prize power over human dignity instead?

False dilemma much?

Let's look at some large scale political action in the past:

1. Invade Iraq. 4000+ Americans dead, over 1 million Iraqi died.

2. Bombed Libya, it is now a $democratic_wonderland.

I'm not putting Afghanistan here because I think it's justified, but then why are we still there after Bin Laden's dead?

How about just minding our own business. If China don't want to watch NBA, then so be it. If you don't want to buy shit made in China, then don't buy it.

> How about just minding our own business

A foreign country telling Americans what they can and cannot say very much is my business.

I mean, its only because the company let's them isn't it? The NBA, and pretty much every company, has could totally ignore China telling them what to do, but they would rather take the money.

I think that's a false equivalence, China has no power telling you what to do and you know it. And any customer would have the power to not buy your product and its their right.

You can say whatever you want, but they might not want to throw money at you if you start shit talking their regime and it's values. Is that not free speech?

why would afghanistan be justified?

he said political, not military

Billionaire's shouldn't exist. Name literally one benefit of having a billionaire in our society. Any one thing we wouldn't otherwise have.

Benefit #1: Make a top list of billionaires and have people gossip about it.

#2 Sell regular folks the idea that they _may_ one day become billionaires too, convince them that they should vote down any tax increase on the 1%; Continue brainwashing them that there's plenty of room at the top, maybe, just maybe room opens up for them as well.

#3 Monetize on the image of billionaires and sell luxury goods and billionaire lifestyle to poor cretins

Are these supposed to be benefits?

The benefit of billionaires existing is that they made extraordinarily valuable businesses. Take Steve Jobs or Bill Gates - if they didn’t exist then Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t either. If Notch didn’t exist then neither would Minecraft.

If you create something (a company, a video game, other IP), and people value that thing at a billion dollars, then you’re a billionaire. Notch became a billionaire after selling Minecraft because almost 100 million people play it.

What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars? Do you not want these things to be created? Do you not want them to be sold? (Ownership has to change hands eventually; people don’t live forever). How are you expecting society would work?

Reaping what you sow provides the incentive to work hard in our society. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html

> What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars?

Let them have 50 or 100 million, then put the rest in the hands of the other people that worked to make it happen. If all of those people are now rich, then use the excess money to help the impoverished.

> Reaping what you sow provides the incentive to work hard in our society.

It's not binary. People don't get all the money or none of it. You can still have ridiculously large amounts of monetary incentive without it being possible to hit a billion dollars.

> The benefit of billionaires existing is that they made extraordinarily valuable businesses.

Debatable depending which business, and also highly subjective. Amazon is valuable to Wall Street, yes most certainly. It also generates massive amounts of garbage, pollution, and human suffering. Are we including those in the value statement or are we going by the capitalist axiom that as long as the number went upward, the non-financial cost doesn't matter?

> If you create something (a company, a video game, other IP), and people value that thing at a billion dollars, then you’re a billionaire. Notch became a billionaire after selling Minecraft because almost 100 million people play it.

So the system works because the system is working? This is circular logic at it's finest. I don't care what Microsoft decided Minecraft was worth, they're an equally diseased part of a diseased system. It's like saying "this cancerous tumor isn't a problem, because the other cancerous tumor vouched for it." So what? I don't place value on the opinions of capitalists on the value of the capitalist system. Can you justify it without citing a capitalist?

> What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars? Do you not want these things to be created? Do you not want them to be sold? (Ownership has to change hands eventually; people don’t live forever). How are you expecting society would work?

You're working all of this from the viewpoint that markets, capitalism, and competition are the only ways to generate stuff. Not only is that not the case, and I would cite the entire open source community as evidence to that fact, but I reject outright the assertions that:

1) The only things that have value are the ones where the value is expressed in currency

2) That the only arbiters of value are those who place values in the form of currency

There are tons of examples of things created with no monetization plan that are great. There are tons more things created with a monetization plan out of necessity, because without one they could not exist.

Again and again criticism of capitalism is met with this assertion that "well things have value and therefore we need to respect the market" and I flatly reject that. We're all locked in the same prison, every idea, every concept rung through this machine that decides whether or not something deserves to exist by it's ability to contribute to a market. A market built by people, allegedly for people, that is for some reason simply beyond reproach. Capitalism has ballooned to practically another religion, and you are a follower of it, so dedicated to it's holy texts you've entirely forgotten that human civilization existed for THOUSANDS of years before we had a bloody market.

Sod your market.

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Tesla, SpaceX, and ending polio?

Yes because I’m sure you know what's best for billions of Chinese. They must be all dying to overthrow their government.

Your rhetoric is naive at best and racist at worst. It’s racist because you are disenfranchising the potential voice and sovereignty of a whole ethnicity and country because private interests in your own country can’t get their way over there.

The hong kong protestors have started getting their way. They don’t need poorly informed observers to fan the flames (on either side).

There is a difference between the Chinese government and the Chinese people. The parent is (presumably) calling for action against the Chinese government, because what the Chinese government wants is harmful to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and other basic rights. This is not an attack on the Chinese people.

In general, one has to be careful about conflating the interests of the Chinese government and the Chinese people. They're not the same thing, although the Chinese government tries to portray it as such. Speaking out against the Chinese government is not the same as speaking out against Chinese people.

This is the second time I think I've seen this on hackernews in two days, no one is conflating the two anymore or less than when someone says, "America runs terrorist campaigns in the Middle East." People understand that the meaning is the state, nothing is a monolith although everybody must step up to the table and own up to the fact that we are all in part responsible for the actions of our comminutes.

We know who the dictator is, it isn't billions of people, it is one man.

I think the parent (chrischen's comment) was conflating the two.

What's being conflated is that somehow the government there does not represent the people. They do, maybe not in the way Americans like, but Americans don't pay taxes to China, and Americans do not take care of the Chinese. The Chinese government takes care of the Chinese there. Whether they do it effectively is another matter, but one thing's for certain is that a Chinese person has more agency within the Chinese government than they do with the American government (or any foreign government/interests for that matter). So to impose the values of one culture on another without taking in their input is racism.

Yes there are other Chinese in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, but that's not the point here. Just because the racism doesn't target those Chinese doesn't mean there is a sense of cultural and moral superiority being levied on a different culture here.

Keep in mind that Singapore is also very authoritarian, but does not get as much flak for whatever reason (probably because they are not rivaling the US).

Yes and I'm saying it's presumptuous to say that the Chinese (people) do not support their own government and want them out as much as a foreigner who is not subject to the life outside the comforts of The United States (or whatever other Western democracy).

Might seem persnickety, but criticism of mainland China can't be racism because Taiwanese are the same race and people aren't criticising them for this kind of thing (because they don't do it). It's really not even criticism of the Chinese people, who have no say in the matter either way and tend to be harshly punished for disagreeing.

In the end it's all just criticism of a specific government. Doesn't need to go further than that.

And the vast majority of Chinese people in China do support the government, for doing, among other things, bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty. The primary beneficiary of the Chinese government is the Chinese people there, and attacking the government is an indirect attack on the people there because The USA government, Australia, or any other non China government is not going to take after Chinese citizens.

Uh, do they? How do you know? The opinions of mainland Chinese about their government are completely worthless; they simply aren't allowed to disagree or learn about the world in a neutral manner.

For example, the Chinese government has not "lifted millions out of poverty", that's pure propaganda. Human society lifts itself out of poverty when not prevented from doing so by totalitarian governments. Japan was destroyed by war and became a rich first world nation within decades. South Korea became fully developed in also just a few decades. Plenty of other examples of that.

China is behind the rest of the world because of its government. If it weren't for the Great Leap Forward and then decades of economically devastating communism, China would be as developed as the USA or South Korea is by now. The fact that its people are still so poor can be laid squarely at the feet of its government.

But how many Chinese will think that? Probably not many. They are stuck in a system designed to mould them into loyal subjects from birth.

It's weird to hear you describe Xi Jinping's dictatorship as the voice and sovereignty of the people.

You'd be surprised how much support the government has in China, among Chinese people, even if they oppress some of their people. But just because they don't hold public elections doesn't mean they do not draw their legitimacy from the people. And furthermore, if they did not have a legitimate claim to power the people of China can overthrow them, not a foreigner. They don't need the US to install a leader for them.

> But just because they don't hold public elections doesn't mean they do not draw their legitimacy from the people

Got any other zingers you want to tell me with a straight face?

They do have elections... you just have to join the communist party. Much like how you would have to join one of two political parties here to have a practical vote, and even then you have to navigate the tricky electoral college that disenfranchises some voters.

This is impossible to know because of how censorship works.

It is “impossible” by your definition everywhere then. There is misinformation and propaganda everywhere. Spin is propaganda, advertising is propaganda, and FOX News is propaganda.

You gauge by whoever takes political action, whether or not you think they are properly informed.

> He will follow the party line and has (calling Hong Kong protestors “separatists”, etc.)

Is 'Hong Kong separatist' any different to 'Ulster unionist' in acceptability to each side? It sounds like a neutral description to me.

I don't know if it's neutral or not, but it's just factually incorrect. The five demands of the protestors (now six actually) do not include anything about separatism/independent state. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_protests#Object...)

The fact that someone as prominent as Joe Tsai made such a factually incorrect public statement is a bit bothersome; and seems to suggest that there's truth in that Chinese media really wants to portray the protests as separatists movements (which is not true) to its people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2019_Hong_Kon...)

The thing is, Joe is right in the rest of his post -- everything about China's sensitivity to territories and separatists movements. It's that his categorization of Hong Kong's movement is wrong, which makes the whole argument invalid.

>calling Hong Kong protesters “separatists”, etc.

Devil's advocate here...Are they not separatist? If not, shouldn't they be?

It's hard to imagine your "country" working on a death clock. In 2047 it all ends. So, what is the point of fighting the good fight at this point? Why not face the inevitable and leave while you can? Or fight for a final independence now, while you can?

Well, they have five demands and the most "radical" of them is being able to vote for your own representatives. Being represented in your own government is a far cry from being a separatist.

Most separatists are probably protestors, but that does not imply most protestors are separatists.

the most radical part about them isn't their formal demands, it's viciously assaulting pedestrians while screaming slurs

Actually, I don't think that's radical at all.

It's to stop calling it a riot and release anybody who is arrested because of it.

Just because you're rioting for democracy, doesn't mean it's not a riot, and it doesn't grant those who used it as an opportunity to vandalize shops and destroy subways a free pass. That directly conflicts with the rule of law.

> Devil's advocate here...Are they not separatist? If not, shouldn't they be?

These are their demands (more or less):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_protests#Object...

Full-on separatism would give the PLA a more plausible reason to declare an insurrection and go full Tiananmen Square. Also, a lot of HKers who support the existing demands would not be on board with it.

> So, what is the point of fighting the good fight at this point? Why not face the inevitable and leave while you can? Or fight for a final independence now, while you can?

Because there's still 28 years to go, and a lot can happen in 28 years.

Thanks for hitting the heart of the matter.

A lot can happen in that time. Given the direction of things, do you think it will be better? I guess I don't.

When HK is supposed to hand itself over to China's rule in 2047, do you think there will be ANY international support for their independence? I don't. That would be directly against the deal that was struck.

Wouldn't it be better to use China's interference as a pretext for independence, claiming it was China who has broken the bargain?

American independence wasn't about a tea tax or a few soldiers defending themselves in Boston. It was about inevitability and using those events to propel it.

> When HK is supposed to hand itself over to China's rule in 2047

In 1982, pretty much everyone assumed the Soviet Union was still going to be around in 1992, but it wasn't.

Who knows what China will look like in 2047. A lot can happen in 28 years.

"can afford to" doesn't overlap much with "is likely to".

hell, the rockets ownership allegedly discussed removing "one of the best GMs in the league": https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/10/6/20901828/daryl-morey...

and give me a break about the giving pledge. when people are dead, access to their money doesn't matter. if they want to earn some sort of altruistic "cred", they can donate 90% of their net worth, today, and still be in the 100 millionaire club.

go ahead and let me know when any one of these people does that.

> "one of the best GMs in the league"

I suppose China has no small part of the greatness. Maybe removing that part actually make him removable and far from "one of the greatest"?

The part-owner of the Lakers tried to sell his major entertainment empire of American icons to the government of Qatar. He canceled the deal because the offer was too low.

This is the same guy who has two former employees, one is a newer Supreme Court Justice that he allegedly spent $10 million in dark money helping and the other is a US Senator whose running for President. He also happens to own Coachella despite fighting legal weed and donating to anti-gay groups in the past.

> I believe most of them are self-made and have signed the giving pledge

Why do you believe this? As far as I can tell Dan Gilbert is the only one I see on that list.

NBA team owners are self-made billionaires ... in what universe is this again?