dnomad
The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.
> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.
Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.
1. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your accusations.
2. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a court of law.
All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.
Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine. There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.
I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7 racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think it recovers.
The idea that the Chinese government subsidizes every Chinese company is nonsense. This is just something that Americans need to believe because they don't want to admit how extraordinarily inefficient their domestic industries were before 2000.
> and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
This is hilarious. Nobody forces foreign companies to give away their IP. These companies, which are supposedly the best in the world, analyze the trade and make it voluntarily or walk away. It's called the free market. Remember that?
> What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market
The irony here is that all the tariffs do is put America further and further behind. The tariffs don't help America at all eg [1]. This should be obvious to anybody who understands how solar works and knows that the real money is not in panel printing.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillbaker/2018/04/06/tariffs-on...
Though it is aways interesting to see people like you can rationalize your censorious actions. It's too bad HN doesn't require a text explanation for downvoting. It wouldn't decrease the hypocrisy but it would provide some further insight into the hypocrisy.
This is such complete nonsense. I think it's hilarious how totally and completely misguided about China that Westerners, and Americans in particular, actually are. It boggles the belief just how much complete nonsense is spouted here on reddit and in the Western press. This is the very essence of people being disconnected from reality and constructing a new reality in accordance with their ideology.
Reality check: go to China and actually talk to the Chinese themselves. Radical idea! Social credit is extremely popular in China [1]. The social credit system is also not new. Anybody who understands how Chinese society has always worked would understand that this is the application of new technology to ideas that are nearly three thousand years old.
Anyways resume your ideological freak-out.
[1] https://www.merics.org/en/blog/chinas-social-credit-systems-...
This sort of pure propaganda just undermines your case. The founder of Huawei was never more than a low level engineer in the military, was forbidden from joining the CCP for many years [1].
Now there is a legitimate national security concern about having the world's telecom equipment manufactured by a single company. But there's only so much can do under existing trade treaties. It's also really not a good look for the US and the West to be seen actively trying to disrupt the free market at work. And so we get this concocted story about spying. It's concocted because nobody, despite spending millions and millions of dollars investigating Huawei and studying its boxes, has ever shown the company participating in anything like espionage. Most people can see through this blatant protectionist hypocrisy [2]. Ironically all the security research on Huawei has only served to make their products much more secure than the competition.
[1] https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-03-19/huawei-now-worlds-la...
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/11/comment_huawei_usa/
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-security-britain-e...
What is really striking about the logic at work here is that you see the exact same thing happening in the most authoritarian countries. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, and America. The media pumps out the same endless propaganda designating some external entity. The same idiots lap it up and whip themselves into a frenzy in daily two minute hate sessions. The same paranoia, the same hatred, the same fear.
As I said before, we've reached the point where this sort of behavior is practiced openly and without shame. This is key. This story was quickly voted to the top of HN and the comments are full of similar nonsense or defenders of the nonsense. That says it all but, ironically, there's not much else to be said because you really think China is the problem here and there's no rational discussion to be had with such committed ideologues.
Elon Musk could announce the cure for cancer tomorrow and many would decry it as a "PR Stunt." Philosophers deploy the term "ressentiment" [1] to describe this complex behavior. This isn't exactly because they fear their own particular status falling, though that might've been the initial origin, by the time it reaches this stage you're talking about a cultural phenomenon, a "morality." Real "anti-social punishment" must occur because these people feel confident that others will not blame them for their anti-social behavior, indeed they likely believe that others will actually praise them for their anti-social behavior. It's misguided then to think this is a personal/economic or "rational" behavior and not an ideological one.
According to what evidence?
The entire story is based off remarks from an anonymous UN official on a random UN committee. [1] In classic style remarks from anonymous and highly partisan sources are repeated endlessly until they "become" true. There's absolutely zero concrete evidence that can be verified.
The deeper point is that Americans are trapped inside a propaganda bubble. Their outlandish understanding of the world is based on nothing more than gossip repeated over and over by their press. It's no better than Russia; the only difference is that most Russians know full well what's going on and are very skeptical of such claims.
On a deeper level I suspect Americans need to believe this nonsense, that there must be an external enemy to hate. It's not that they are deceived by the media, it's that they want to be deceived.
[1] https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...
This is a very common pattern. American media publishes outlandish stories and the only evidence is "anonymous sources" and highly partisan agents. Iraqi soldiers killed babies in incubators. Iraq has 10_000 aluminum tubes. Iran is arresting all its Jews. China has camps with millions of people imprisoned.
The only thing insane about the whole affair is that no matter how many times it happens, virtually every time, Americans are quick to believe these reports and display virtually no skepticism. The problem isn't Bloomberg by any stretch of the imagination.
> Musk is agreeing to step down as chairman of the board (while staying CEO) and Tesla is appointing two new independent directors. It's a significant curtailing of his power over Tesla. How was the coverage overplayed?
The obsession with Musk is way overplayed at this point. The idea that people care about Tesla at all is laughable. At this point it's all about the desire to see their betters brought low.
And there it is: the blind ideology that drives this madness. Any rational analysis of the last 50 years would show the US is far, far more dangerous than China, Russia and terrorism combined. The US has slaughtered millions of innocent people across the globe in the last twenty years. China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in that time.
The real lesson here of course is that true evil is absolutely convinced of its own righteousness and totally ignorant of real world facts. That evil is something many are all too happy to join.
But a person can read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days.
Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually needs trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance.
The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events.
TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if they want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.
Real estate will be virtualized like every other illiquid asset. This means:
* Ownership of real-estate gets rolled up into REITs. REITs are experts at building, buying and selling real-estate and they can do it at scale. "Home ownership" where small-time retail investors buy and sell real-estate will get selected away as its a grossly inefficient model.
* Real-estate property managers like Ziroom and WeWork and AirBNB will take out leases and resell highly customized and liquid packages. They provide not just access to the property but to a wide range of services and auxiliary services.
* The PMs now manage their inventory and pricing in real-time.
At this point you can start to think of real estate as any other "cloud service": acquired on demand, at fluctuating prices, and accessible through a whole clearly defined service/API layer.
We're starting to see this in China and SEA already in a big way [1]. Here again Asia is way ahead of the curve. Real-estate "on demand" means companies and even families are basically moving between different properties every month based on prices and needs. Office desks can be rented for as little as 15 minutes.
The key obstacle here has always been renter quality and the various housing legal regimes. In Asia at least the government seems primed to step in and vouch for renter quality which which will likely evolve into something like a credit rating for renters. The legal questions are still totally up in the air but that's not stopping people for now. Companies like Ziroom have been known to get up to some shady antics like evicting people in the middle of the night or hiring policemen to intimidate people.
[1] https://chinaeconomicreview.com/why-chinese-millennials-are-...
And how would the users do that? Do you imagine all the users getting together and taking a vote?
The vast majority of people will follow the mining power because the vast majority of people are not miners. This idea of a "popular revolt" against miners is fantasy.
> Miners can only generate revenue by mining a coin that people want to use. They want to use it because it is secured by a distribution of miners, such that no collaboration of miners can attack it.
Do you really think the miners would "attack" the chain? Isn't this just playing with words? The realistic scenario is that the miners will enforce their own rules. Whether this is an "attack" or not is pure sophistry.
> Total hash power is not the deciding factor. What matters is that honest participants have more hash power than dishonest ones.
This is a meaningless distinction in a world where it's very easy for malicious actors to quickly accumulate hashing power. BTC's success is a function of its hashing power, not the other way around.
On the media side we have an aggressive campaign by all the major media outlets against the tech company. Look at how many hit pieces about Facebook the NY Times have written in the last six months. I've noted this before [1] but in just this year the New York Times has written a constant stream of articles in which they accuse Facebook of destroying democracy, working with the Chinese, and collecting lots of "creepy" patents . This sort of targeted reporting against a single company that has, in fact, broken no actual laws is without precedent.
And absolutely none of these articles mention the extraordinary conflict of interest wherein Facebook is the primary driver of NYTimes readers and advertising.
And this is just one particular case. I don't think anybody has done the quantitative analysis yet but I suspect if you did gather the numbers the last two years would reveal an exponential increase of anti-Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc articles. It's a propaganda campaign that I think rivals the full-court press the media ran to push the Iraq War.
And now we have these endless meetings and threats of anti-trust investigations from the government. Every week brings a new meeting or some new initiative or a draft executive order. It's all bluster; nothing will come of it because the threats are the point.
The end game here is not to actually cut anybody down. The point here is to send a message. This is no different than what happens in China. The government doesn't need to use violence. Intimidate and threaten companies like Google and Facebook enough and they will fall in line. They will play ball.
And so the entire point of this exercise is the Media and the Government taking the gloves off and sending a clear message to certain Tech companies: WE CAN HURT YOU BACK.
* I say certain because this is not about money. Apple has all the money in the world. You don't see them being attacked though because Apple has little power. They make shiny widgets at the end of the day. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are extremely powerful. They shape reality. It's a power which was previously only held by the Media and the Government and they really resent having these new Tech-Media fusions step on their turf.