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AFAIK it was by design, the US policy makers actively worked for it. Also, I think the US will have something similar in reverse: Some of the brightest people

by mrtksn 2y ago

AFAIK it was by design, the US policy makers actively worked for it. Also, I think the US will have something similar in reverse: Some of the brightest people educated in the US are going back to their home countries because they have visa troubles, social problems or simply better opportunities due to simple things like housing or structural things like the industry moved there. Also, judging by the enormous hate stream on the social media, many can be nudged to move out of the US to have some piece of mind. After Brexit, many EU citizens choose not to stay in UK even if they had that option because they have become a political subject and since they are not desperate why stay and risk it? China appear to be the next frontrunner in this. Many times, if you venture outside of the angloshpere you find out that somewhere(often in China) somebody is already doing it at the same level or better. There probably is going to be a correction at valuations. Cool stuff is happening in China and elsewhere and the USA is in a disarray with idelogies so extreme that are not too far of from the stuff that ruined Europe in the first half of the 1900s. Coup attempts, assassination attempts, election denial, mainstream targeting of group of people, rich looking into capitalising on all that when social disparity is so large that some live like kings others teetering - this is not a healthy society.

drivebyhooting 2y ago
Are you familiar with Chinese politics and society? It’s not a great Sino melting pot. The language barrier alone will stop Chinese cultural hegemony.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  They have a lot of problems I'm reading about but there will be a void with the fall of the US from global superpower status and that void wouldn't be left unattended. Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed. Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that. US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people. EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).
  - COGlory 2y ago
    The US has been embargoing industries since its Independence. I doubt TikTok will be a remotely meaningful event in the history of the nation.
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      The things don't stay the same outside of the US, therefore you can't expect that doing the same thing will always result in the way. There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that. In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point. The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products. I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.
      - hmmmcurious1 2y ago
        Why are you giving a free hand to China to do as it likes and then blame the west for following its interest? Why do you give China a pass at forcing any western business to always enter a joint enterprise with chinese firms if it wants to do business in China? Seeing a lot of critique about the blunders of the west for trying to have more leverage and no critique for chinese practices.
        mrtksn 2y ago
        I'm not giving China a free pass for anything. The stuff you are talking about paved the way for Chinese catching up and eventually surpassing the west but that doesn't change the outcome. I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.
inglor_cz 2y ago
"Cool stuff is happening in China" Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades. He said that under Xi, the country has become superparanoid. Before Xi's term, people would talk to journalists mostly freely, and even foreign journalists would get a pass in their daily activities unless they touched something really sensitive (Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghur unrest). After Xi came to power, the situation started to worsen, police started to follow journalists around and harass them for banal reasons, regular Chinese started being afraid of talking even about trivial topics. The former Overton window narrowed to a "compulsory vs. banned" dichotomy. One of his last experiences was that he went to a tomato processing factory to report on tomato harvest and was immediately arrested by the police because how dare you record something about a tomato factory. I don't think this environment is going to be particularly conductive to economic growth, and the latest trends seem to concur. China is strangling its future growth in the name of National Security.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Yeah, dictators eventually fail because they make the wrong decision at such a large scale the system can’t heal itself.

by mrtksn 2y ago

drivebyhooting 2y ago

Are you familiar with Chinese politics and society? It’s not a great Sino melting pot. The language barrier alone will stop Chinese cultural hegemony.

mrtksn 2y ago
They have a lot of problems I'm reading about but there will be a void with the fall of the US from global superpower status and that void wouldn't be left unattended. Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed. Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that. US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people. EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).
- COGlory 2y ago
  The US has been embargoing industries since its Independence. I doubt TikTok will be a remotely meaningful event in the history of the nation.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    The things don't stay the same outside of the US, therefore you can't expect that doing the same thing will always result in the way. There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that. In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point. The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products. I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.
    - hmmmcurious1 2y ago
      Why are you giving a free hand to China to do as it likes and then blame the west for following its interest? Why do you give China a pass at forcing any western business to always enter a joint enterprise with chinese firms if it wants to do business in China? Seeing a lot of critique about the blunders of the west for trying to have more leverage and no critique for chinese practices.
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        I'm not giving China a free pass for anything. The stuff you are talking about paved the way for Chinese catching up and eventually surpassing the west but that doesn't change the outcome. I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.

inglor_cz 2y ago

"Cool stuff is happening in China" Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades. He said that under Xi, the country has become superparanoid. Before Xi's term, people would talk to journalists mostly freely, and even foreign journalists would get a pass in their daily activities unless they touched something really sensitive (Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghur unrest). After Xi came to power, the situation started to worsen, police started to follow journalists around and harass them for banal reasons, regular Chinese started being afraid of talking even about trivial topics. The former Overton window narrowed to a "compulsory vs. banned" dichotomy. One of his last experiences was that he went to a tomato processing factory to report on tomato harvest and was immediately arrested by the police because how dare you record something about a tomato factory. I don't think this environment is going to be particularly conductive to economic growth, and the latest trends seem to concur. China is strangling its future growth in the name of National Security.

mensetmanusman 2y ago
Yeah, dictators eventually fail because they make the wrong decision at such a large scale the system can’t heal itself.