Slightly off topic; My favorite clothing brand is made in India; Robert Graham. Allegedly, they were the only place that could make what the founders wanted. He'd been searching for nearly a decade till he found a manufacturer in India that showed/proved what he wanted could be done.
Sure, some of the clothing from RG can be a bit, gaudy, it's the more subdued stuff I'm into. Most importantly, build quality is literally off the charts. I have shirts from RG that I've had for 4 years that still look brand new, even the collar is still crisp and looks new.
Comparing U.S government to the Chinese government here is ridiculous. The Chinese government has absolute and total control of everything within its borders. It could dissolve a company tomorrow if it didn't like it -- or do the reverse and allow it to operate at a loss in order to hurt foreign competitors. The U.S has laws against such practices while China actively engages in those behaviors.
The downvotes agree, but the parent comment didn't try to argue against an equal propping - they argued against any propping. The US has quite clearly propped up specific private business in the past - banks that failed to responsibly offer loans were bailed out, the auto industry has been bailed out, defense contractors only exist due to the immense amount of the total tax revenue that gets funneled to them.
Amazon has past the point where vertical integration questions should be raised and a break up should be considered for the public interest - not pursuing it for them (or Walmart, or Google, or many other too-large-to-fail corporations) is another form of assistance the government offers them.
The US is not a free market and participates in private industry subsidization both with and against the public interest but, I agree, it's no where near China's levels - to keep it from getting to those levels we need to acknowledge how bad it has already gotten.
> Chinese culture of copy-catting freely doesn't help.
The problem with that, is that it's a vicious circle. Innovation is the foundation for future innovations. It builds on itself. It lays the groundwork and foundation for what comes next. By leapfrogging and cheating its way to the top (or near the top) they are sacrificing that crucial infrastructure for future discoveries and innovations.
China has to copy & steal IPs because it simply doesn't have the culture to compete. They're one of the least innovative countries on Earth, year after year. And the only way to change that is by allowing its citizens to think creatively, outside the box -- to be able to challenge authority. But China doesn't want that; they want conforming little worker bees who follow the party line.
> China has to copy & steal IPs because it simply doesn't have the culture to compete. They're one of the least innovative countries on Earth, year after year.
Funny thing, that's exactly what people used to say about Japan, and then about South Korea. (And the typical work environments in both countries do not exactly encourage creativity or challenging the status quo, either. So I'm not sure what difference that might make.)
I wonder if this comment is racist. China never was and is not the least innovative countries on Earth. The Chinese internet companies are micro-innovating at a speed no country in the world can compete.
Let's say this, the counterparts of Facebook and Twitter has already fallen or on its way to fall out of favor in China because people found more interesting ways to waste their time and find useless information. Soon, you will find Facebook and Twitter doing the same, and in that order.
Sites and apps surviving the Chinese market are the real winners, and those who cannot will fail in other countries too. That is the power of a large enough testbed.
It must exist because we still haven't reconciled quantum mechanics with relativity. That matters if we ever want to understand what happens inside black holes, or the moment of the big bang itself. As of right now, our physics literally breaks, it stops working. If a black hole was a computer program, we'd get a critical systems fault the moment it began running.
His book contains several factual inaccuracies that he either has failed to correct or refuses too (as of last year). It makes me think a lot less of him and his position on string theory. It makes me wonder what else has he misrepresented in his criticisms.
Keep in mind science is not free of "agendas"; people in competing areas love to bash the competition because they're competing for funding, aka their livelyhood.
Wouldn't it be even more true in China, given the big brother system they have in place? The government (and by extension, the banks) knows more about its citizens than say, the U.S government. Hell, they just issued a "social credit score" to every citizen - it's similar to a financial credit score and just goes to show just how many things they're keeping tabs on.
Given what I have heard about social credit I wouldn't be surprised one bit of one sector of shadow banking is perfectly creditworthy people whose only additional risk as a lender is lack of being repaid due to being disappeared or arrested on 'it means what we want it to mean' charges.
The whole concept of social credit is what I refer to as stupid-evil. For one its whole concept is obviously exploitable as a 'recruit the low credit and purge the high credit' list if anyone ever want to form an insurrection powered by their newly minted low caste. And that is without the obvious side effects of people reacting accordingly to the actual information like not trusting anyone with top-tier social credit as likely too powerful to be held accountable and will thus screw you over at the drop of a hat.
Unfortunately even the US has had a similar issue to a thankfully far lesser degree with the idiotic "Operation Choke Point" abuse of power. Such abuses should always be reigned in.
> pulled their search engine out of China, defying their censorship attempts
They didn't pull their search engine out of China because of censorship requests, they pulled their search engine because the government kept trying to hack them and steal their source code, which they eventually did. So Google up and left.
They like to cite censorship and free speech to look better, but they knew exactly what they were getting into before setting foot in China -- the government of China made specific requirements before they could do business in China and Google agreed to those requirements. In fact, Google was criticized heavily for doing so. So don't buy into their history revisionism, they were on board with censorship from day 1. They had to be, or the PRC wouldn't allow them in.
Fwiw I think you're being mildly too revisionist in the other direction. The major issue with the hacking wasn't stealing source code, but attempts to access user data. Certainly accessing source code is bad, but imo in general Google protects user data much moreso than source code.
How is storing and cataloging reams of private data 'protecting' it? If your significant other was constantly noting every friend you talked to, every purchase you made, videotaping your every move, would you call that protecting them?
To protect a user's data, it shouldn't even be collected in the first place. I think a better choice of words is that Google does a better job at monopolizing user data.
Sure, but the corollary to that is that security is complicated. Do you really expect the average user to have a more secure system than what they would otherwise have. In other words, is a Gmail account more or less secure than what you would have otherwise.
I think the answer depends, but it certainly isn't always "less". There's some information that you have to store somewhere, and is having a world class security team who works to actively mitigate things like phishing better than storing it yourself?
I'm just saying not saving data is simpler than saving data and avoids the complication. The average user doesn't need 99% of the data that google saves about them and would have no reason to store it themselves. You can have phishing protection and the world class security team while also not saving the unnecessary data resulting in an even more secure model. Protonmail seems to be just as secure without requiring data collection, for example.
Right. If google were just black hats trying to help everyone with their data security, then OK. But, since they aren't, the mere fact that they have the personal data stored to begin with undermines it's security from the moment of storing it.
I had my car stolen last year. If I had found a note left that informed me it is in a secure place, I'm not sure I would have felt any better. And I'm not sure I would appreciate someone expecting me to.
I think the parent meant that they are very vigilant about not giving access to this data to anybody who is not affiliated with Google. Which makes a lot of sense for both business and privacy reasons - you don't want to let others access your valuable assets, and the backlash for leaking out the data usually is much larger than for just having it. Nobody cared about Equifax knowing everything about everyone until it was hacked.
Google protects the user data from access by others. The data is valuable only if Google alone has access to this data and can sell it as a monopoly premium product.
If everyone had access to the user data the value would be 0.
Of course, Google doesn't give a shit about protecting the privacy of their users, they hoover up all they can and then bunker it.
Haven't you seen wildlife documentaries where, say, lion A protects a zebra carcass (killed or stolen from other predators) from lion B, in order to eat enough of it?
Whatever the case, as someone inside Google, I’d urge you to resist this effort like many of your colleagues did with Project Maven.
Helping the Chinese government consolidate power by censoring information and silencing dissidents (among whatever else they’ll end up doing within the context of this partnership), is a dark road to go down. It will also undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent that will be demanded by like-minded regimes outside China.
I don't know one way or the other, but this proves too much. You're talking about this like Google is the Borg and everyone always has the same opinions. It's certainly possible some of the people in the room at the time actually were motivated by free speech issues.
I agree about not trusting corporate PR, but the conclusion is that we don't know the company's motivations and it's probably a mistake to treat it as a consistent entity. Executives come and go. Sometimes they win arguments and sometimes they lose them. Sometimes they change their minds over the years.
Whether or not people at Google have different opinions is largely irrelevant, unless they’re going to engage in coordinated labor action like they did with the drone program.
Google, despite all its townhalls and Q&As, is not a democracy. It’s a corporation governed by an authoritarian command hierarchy who have seemingly chosen to get in bed with another authoritarian regime called the Chinese government.
There is a large middle ground between democracy and purely top-down command. I was actually talking about disagreement among executives. In an environment where people respect each others' opinions and areas of expertise, you don't need coordinated labor action for that to influence top-level decision-making.
The fact that this all has been kept secret (even from the rest of the organization) and that it leaked are both evidence for internal political divisions. Internal politics does matter, sometimes. I wonder what happens now that more Googlers know about it?
If my memory serves, they censored Google.cn, but did not block users in China from the un-censored Google.com. The PRC alternated between blocking and unblocking .com.
My understanding of the final straw was the hacking of gmail to steal the communications and network info of Chinese dissidents and activists.
I honestly don't understand why censorship is relevant. It's not like Google is going to change how China works, nor should it be in charge of that. Google being there or not has zero impact on how China treats its people, but at least some users may get access to services they find useful. Limited is better than nothing for many, especially Android users.
What DOES matter is Chinese government accessing data Google collects on users. If China takes over the data like with iCloud [0], then that actually puts user's life in danger. My understanding is that they left back then because they couldn't protect users, but they are back because they believe their security is better now.
> Chinese govt. could have given preferential treatment
How do we know they didn't? They could have just decided "Now that Taobao is up and running, we can get rid of ebay". They've done worse before, so it's not a stretch.
It's interesting that there are no massive web properties in China with the bulk market share (google, facebook, ebay, amazon, twitter, etc) that aren't Chinese owned. Yet, in the entire rest of the world, those same websites are #1. That's not just some coincidence or one-off, that's clearly governmental manipulation and control.
If it was just one or two web properties, I could understand. Like how it is with Yahoo! Japan. But all of them? Sorry, China doesn't want western companies running the show within their country. Articles like this are moot since there was no future with eBay in the #1 spot thanks to the CCP.
Those tech companies are the result of censorship and definitely Chinese preferential treatment and national security, etc.
Chinese preferential treatment by a Chinese govt is normal like the US prefers US companies such as US bailing out Ford and GM because of jobs. China would much prefer chinese companies and workers instead of international because it provides jobs and income.
US companies also dominate in China, see McDonalds or Starbucks or Apple in China. A lot of international companies dominate China, just not all of technology, also Apple is a tech company last time I checked. Even if it was a democratic Chinese govt, whats stopping it from supporting a Chinese company over a US one, whos to say that the democratic govt wont go China for the Chinese like Trump?
> You act like the US Government hasn't already banned Chinese companies
The U.S didn't ban ALL Chinese companies operating in the U.S. Try setting up a coffee shop or computer repair shop in China as a non-citizen and see how long you last. That's extremely illegal in China. Their government has to approve every foreign business and they rarely do (unless you're some multinational corporation who have made a whole host of concessions.
Starbucks is considered extremely high-end/luxury in China. It's not just an overpriced coffee shop like it is here in the U.S. It's considered 'exotic'.
Sure, some of the clothing from RG can be a bit, gaudy, it's the more subdued stuff I'm into. Most importantly, build quality is literally off the charts. I have shirts from RG that I've had for 4 years that still look brand new, even the collar is still crisp and looks new.