Google, M$ and Amazon were not successful when they were not blocked in China.. Amazon China is still not blocked but far behind JD, Alibaba, etc. In some areas like fintech, drones, consumer apps and games China is clearly the leader. If FB is unblocked I doubt it can compete with Tencent at all. Tencent has a higher market cap than FB and understands the Chinese so much more..
I don't think this concedes how much a factor Chinese regionalism plays into the dominance of Chinese companies in China. The government has had a much stronger hand in shaping what technologies and companies flourish than in the rest of the developed world. How the market would have looked if the government was less heavy-handed is an open question, but I think it is misleading to omit this factor.
Also, there are things that foreign companies simply will not concede to Beijing. Tencent allows full access to their networks to the government. Ephemeral criticisms of the government can get you a warning from the state. This is unconscionable behavior in a lot of other countries, but it's a concession Chinese companies have made time and again.
> In some areas like fintech, drones, consumer apps and games China is clearly the leader
Maybe vaping/e-cigarette technology too.
> BIS Research estimates that the global electronic cigarette industry will exhibit a growth of over 22.36% (CAGR) from 2015 to 2025, to reach a total market value of $50 Billion by 2025
Didn't know Singapore has so many cams as well. But then it's one of the safest countries and in the US i dare not walking alone in many places not worrying about being robbed..
Singapore just looks/looked at Malaysia the last couple days because a man was killed in a rather spectacular fashion - and everything's on camera..
(I live in Singapore. I'm not a fan of CCTVs, not at all. Locals all seem to be fine with them so far, even happily quoting that they make life saver as a consequence and therefor are a Good Thing)
Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others.
Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing!
Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.
History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same?
We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”).
We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch.
The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.
How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.
Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like
select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’
This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.
People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.
Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions.
If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people got scared.
You know what also reduces gun-related incidents: denying people the ability to have guns. It won't eliminate them (there's always a black market for everything), but it'll damn well reduce them, probably to a point that reasonable people would believe is an acceptable number.
What's your point? I was specifically responding to a claim about gun-related robberies.
Knives are also short-range weapons and are arguably a ton less dangerous than guns. If someone brandishes a knife at me and doesn't have an accomplice to surround me, I've got pretty good odds if I simply turn around and run. The equation changes if they have a gun.
The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.
More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
I agree with your thoughts on this. In feudal India, landlords oppressed the common peasants out of which local Naxalism was formed. Today, these guys are effective and in many ways protect local forests and tribals depended on it through guns from local communities with political and economic power.
I'm honestly a little surprised this comment is so unpopular. My understanding is that this is the rationale behind the USA's second amendment, not personal safety, and not hunting.
Oh, it absolutely is one of the rationales behind the USA's second amendment. The problem is that rationale just isn't relevant today, and believing in it is the height of naivete. Even if you got every civilian gun owner in the US to secretly band together to overthrow the US government[0], the US military would pound them flat[1] before you could say "reload".
[0] Good luck with even that much.
[1] Without even touching the US's nuclear arsenal, though they might opt to level a city in clear, full rebellion as a deterrent. They'd still do fine without nukes, though, as devastating to the US population and infrastructure as it would be.
Yea, acknowledged, though I still think it would be harder than you might think for the US military to take over the civilian world. Though I still posit that just because your opposition is extraordinarily well equipped isn't a reason to give up the only advantages you do have.
> The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic.
The US military is far too well-trained and well-equipped for any local civilian militia to have even a remote chance of winning a fight with them. That probably wasn't the case in 1800, but that ship sailed long ago.
> To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.
So what? The public having guns won't stop that from happening. Having or not having guns makes it equally bad. Actually, civilian gun ownership might make it worse: you end up with a lot more deaths on both sides, but the US military still wins.
> I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own.
That's a pretty extraordinary claim that requires some research and evidence.
> Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check.
Even if we blithely ignore reality and assume that civilian gun ownership keeps the US government in check, what's keeping all those other democratic governments in check where civilian gun ownership is either not the norm or is mostly or completely outlawed? They seem to be doing just fine, and as a bonus have levels of gun violence that are much, much lower than that in the US.
> It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.
To whom? I don't see regular revolutions happening in the vast majority of present-day democracies. Even if it's the case that legal civilian gun ownership was necessary hundreds of years ago to get us to a point where those democracies were able to be formed (I don't really buy that, but let's just give you that for a second), clearly civilian gun ownership is not necessary to maintain those democracies today. We have clear empirical evidence that it's not necessary if you just look at (nearly?) every other (actual) democracy in the world.
But still, all of this presupposes that an organized, armed, civilian militia could realistically win against the US military and overthrow the US government. That's laughable.
I think stickfigure is trying to say that, with cameras above head, which will result in higher probability of being caught if someone commits a crime, the one who would commit a crime if there was no camera will refrain from committing a crime.
With cameras, the probability of losing life will be smaller than without them.
> Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death.
I submit that that statement is false, and removing someone's privacy rights can indeed result in their death.
And that's not even really the point: I am ok with there being a price to privacy, even if that is some amount of deaths that might otherwise be reduced.
I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.
None of the 3 links work for me. How difficult to save data from a form? I'm appalled by the technical capabilities of these crucial service providers..
They very clearly don't want these forms to work. All three fail for me too. Equifax fails with "Additional Information Required" and gives me a PDF form to mail in that has the exact same fields that I've already provided. Experian is stuck on a loading screen. And Transunion says it's unable to process my request based on the information provided.
You might recall California has a long history of employing Chinese immigrants for railroad construction.
In modern times, the biggest obstacle to new train routes tends to be acquiring the right of way. You generally have to buy up all the property in the path, or compensate people, and deal with the politics/lawsuits that generates. There are a number of public documents about programs for the high speed rail project: http://www.hsr.ca.gov/Programs/private_property.html
The Buy America Act is some of the problem, AFAIK. There's going to have to be a fair amount of training and construction of manufacturing sites for what is ultimately going to be relatively small orders, unless further HSR is built in the US.
But, vitally, they didn't want to deal with all the politics of the routeing. Large infrastructure projects are always in large part down to politics, potentially to their detriment (in this case, the business case being weakened by higher construction costs and slower end-to-end journeys leading to less keen private investors).
Another example is Brigatinib (AP26113) which I'm familiar with. It's only approved recently because ~1% patients may get a severe side effect. But desperate patients who heard the news and cannot get it have managed to make their own based on the formula and the powder they made has saved hundreds of people's lives with metastatic lung cancer in the past a few years.
People are not stupid..nowadays some villagers in China get ~10M USD to move away for real estate construction.. this is the average number for an entire village in Shenzhen.. you call this laughable money?
Have you read the article? It's not the pen. It's high quality steel. I think most countries probably still cannot do it now. China just successfully flew a big plane a few days ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919) and could automate package delivery like this https://twitter.com/kerotto/status/851055016928460800 There are many important areas where it has already been the leader of world (high speed trains, consumer software apps, etc)
China has built passenger airlines many times before, none of them have ever taken off in international markets. When the C919 is used regularly outside China I'll take note.
How is China the leader of the world in high speed trains? They're all based off of designs from Japan and Germany.
China is only the leader in consumer software apps inside of China, and only then because it outright bans foreign competition.
The fact is China is the worlds most populous country but leads the world in absolutely nothing. And please be clear - this is not a criticism of the Chinese people - of course they have the capacity. But central planning and top down directives will never lead to world beating results.
The context of this discussion is can china transition to high value manufacturing, and I don't think it can because despite the worlds largest population, it still struggles to produce things smaller countries are capable of.
#1 manufacturer is entirely due to a huge population and low costs - both advantages are disappearing.
What unique way forward does China have? Another 5 year plan?
India has the 2nd largest population. By your reasoning, they should also be huge at manufacturing. It's not just China's population that enabled them to overtake the USA at manufacturing. Average IQ is 105. Underestimate if you'd like. My family on the other hand will continue to do business with them because they have a lot to bring to the table.
India has the 2nd largest population. By your reasoning, they should also be huge at manufacturing. It's not just China's population that enabled them to overtake the USA at manufacturing.
Population and low cost are the two biggest reasons China has overtaken the US. There's nothing miraculous about Chinas position in the global economy - it's a huge country. If anything, it still underperforms. Much smaller nations are producing passenger aircraft and automobiles used all over the world.
Average IQ is 105.
Which just goes to show you the disastrous effects of socialism, even though it's been curtailed. A high IQ nation with no wars - it should by all rights be a first world country like its eastern neighbours, or indeed - like its Special Administrative Regions.
My family on the other hand will continue to do business with them because they have a lot to bring to the table.
Why would my thoughts on the economic outlook huge nation of over a billion affect who I do business with? Why would I assume a Chinese business or individual has nothing to bring to the table? The fact I don't think I'll be taking international flights on a Chinese made jet any time soon doesn't really affect my view of things like business relationships.
You said China is #1 at nothing. It is #1 at one of the most important sectors in the world. So you backpedal and try to explain how they should actually be uber #1 because of population and other factors. Meanwhile, my family have years of experience doing business with China, including being employed by Chinese companies and dealing directly with the Chinese government. Without meaning to be disrespectful or mean, you should really be trying to educate yourself, not educate me. China has plenty of problems. The "problem" of not being able to manufacture their own ballpoint pen was just a matter of pride, not capability. It's not symptomatic of anything.
> Much smaller nations are producing passenger aircraft and automobiles used all over the world.
China is the world's largest auto manufacturer. Vehicles are one of their top 10 exports. Please revisit my point above about educating yourself about what is really happening there.
I don't think I got it wrong. My point was only to correct the original claim that China leads the world in absolutely nothing. If you're not impressed with China being #1 at one of the most important economic sectors in the world, and you want to explain it away, then carry on. I'm not super interested in that convo because I do lots of business with China and already understand the situation intimately and have far better resources than HN comments for learning what's actually happening there. Not meant to be mean spirited, I'm just not interested unless you do business there and have contacts there up to the highest levels of government in which case, let's talk and I might even pay for good info.
Ran Asia for my last 2 startups. I know what I am talking about. I do 120k miles a year from SFO to around Asia. I can read ~1000 Hànzi. My comment was that they are number #1 because of timing and place in their development cycle and it like everything is subject to change. It is really that simple. I wish them all the luck.
Of course it's a fair point to say things will change... I just wouldn't write off their accomplishment of #1 as simply or only timing and place. There are many factors, and it's also accurate to say the Chinese are actually better than the rest of the world at some things.
