Looking at their stock performance and the amount of work they’ve put into features that aren’t Dropbox file sync, he appears to have been right. iCloud doc syncing is what DB offered at that time.
I think he was right - now you've got OneDrive automatically bundled into Windows, iCloud in MacOS, Google Cloud in the Google ecosystem and Dropbox down 25% from IPO with no growth. I get nagging emails from them every month or so asking me to upgrade to a paid plan because I'll definitely not regret it.
Why the false dichotomy? Does political freedom automatically contradict with economic prosperity for some reason now? Born and raised in China, I fail to see how the last 10 years of erosion in freedom has yielded any better results economically.
Please don’t buy the government propaganda that legitimizes everything from stupid to evil as a price that has to be paid to raise people out of poverty.
Nowhere did I say that economic freedom and political freedom are mutually exclusive. What I do protest however is the idea that only political freedom can be considered a legitimate form of freedom. I am making the case that:
- economic freedom is an equally valid form of freedom.
- societies can make up their own minds on what sort of freedoms they value most.
As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China": this is the mainstream western narrative, but the Chinese people don't view it that way. By and large, they view China as way better off now than 10 years ago. All the data and on the ground talks show this. What else is there it argue about?
It sounds like you are like me, born and raised in China but having lived in the west for a long time. If you live in the west and all you hear is liberal thought and western ideas on political freedom, then after a while it seems like that is all there is that matters.
But I am saying no: what we think here don't matter at all, what the people there think is all that matters. We here can consider China's government illegitimate for whatever reason, but that doesn't make them illegitimate. The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate, for whatever reason they want, even reasons that we don't agree with.
> As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China ... the Chinese people don't view it that way
Really? My girlfriend and her friends would strongly disagree with that statement. From my understanding they grew up in a time when internet in China was a lot younger and they actually had an ability to discuss political discussions, or items that highlight the government in a negative manner.
Now everything that isn't the government's view is incredibly censored/filtered online. It might hard to not see the erosion of freedom when it's being prevented from being communicated online.
Fwiw I'm not disagreeing with your statement on economic freedom and I find the amount of people lifted out of poverty and the growth China has gone through in the last few decades to be incredible but it seems a bit disingenuous to say certain "freedoms" haven't been eroded in the last 10 years comparatively.
What I'm arguing is not whether freedom of speech in China has changed. What I'm arguing is that Chinese people, by and large, value different kinds of freedoms, assigning different priorities. It's like telling an average social media user about the erosion of the freedom to self-host and the erosion of Free Software values. The average user cares about very different things.
The data from decades of research is very clear on this. People like your girlfriend and her social circle, who value freedom of speech the most, are a minority in China. A decreasing minority even. By and large, people are happy with the direction of China. Even if various groups may disagree with specific parts of policy, overall satisfaction is quite high. Freedom of speech is considered a nice to have, not a must, and ranks below many other things such as freedom from poverty, freedom to get quality education, freedom from disease, freedom from anarchy, freedom of security, etc.
The "economic freedom" you describe is not freedom. A better description is "bread and circuses", after the way Roman emperors supposedly kept people happy. The West is familiar with societies like that, because it also describes most of our history. When the elites try to keep the people they depend on prosperous and happy, it's not freedom. It's just common sense for them.
Freedom is not about the freedom of the well-off and the majority. It's always about the freedom of the minorities, the oppressed, and the different. Only their opinions matter. You can only determine the degree of freedom in the society by asking those who don't fit in.
I know many people who come from small towns and rural areas. Places where everyone knows everyone, everyone is part of the community, and everyone helps those in need. Places that are toxic to people who are different. For many of those people, freedom started when they moved to a big city. A city where nobody cares what you are and what you do, where you can safely be yourself, and where you can find other people like you.
I'm sorry, having a toilet instead of a hole in the ground, having proper housing, not having a high chance of dying from poverty, having free healthcare, not having every other street in the city be a huge dumpster, etc. are not "bread and circuses". They are very real, very tangible improvements in quality of life. Your comment boils down again to the tendency to consider political freedom to be the only valid form of freedom.
The hard data from a decade of research is very clear about the fact that Chinese people are overall very satisfied about the direction of their country. No matter what rhetoric you employ, you argue purely from your own perspective and your values. That is fine — for your own country. The Chinese people should have a right to disagree with you on what they value in their own country.
> The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate
The Chinese people have no right whatsoever to consider what sort of government is legitimate. The CCP deliberately, systematically deprives of them of exactly that right. Hence the total censorship of thought and expression and the repression of any group that might remotely offer an alternative to the CCP, even non-political religions.
The CCP is like the Model T of political parties - "You can have any government you want, as long as it's the CCP."
i disagree, there's absolute nothing preventing an ordinary Chinese from taking a exam and become someone that actually has influence over domestic policies. Elections aren't the only ways a legitimate government can be formed.
The world has only gone downhill ever since medieval, centralised power structures disintegrated right? Are you following what you preach, and living in a non-democratic country?
You wouldn't be able to make any real policy changes unless you made it all the way up into to the 25-member Politburu (or maybe even its 7-member Standing Committee) [1]. All the other ~90 million CCP members are tasked with implementing the policies made there.
You might be able to become a social policy research professor or something, or where you study Communist/Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Jinpingist/etc thought and try to develop new applications of it to the modern world. But you won't get to change anything from the Politburu, and could lose your career or worse if you try.
Correct that you have to climb up. But isn't it fine that the Chinese have a different philosophy on governance? They don't want just anyone to be able to make nationwide changes on a whim. They want leaders to prove themselves first by working for 30 years. This is meritocracy. They see the possibility of someone like Trump getting elected, as a huge risk. I think we should allow earth to have diversity in governance systems.
Should insurance companies also drop low income Americans with diets that trivially lead to heart disease? Shouldn't we, as a society, take care of those who don't know better?
Just record license plates at all fast food restaurants, probably most restaurants, really, average meal runs over 3/4ths of what an average adult male needs to maintain weight.
Liquor stores and bars, too. Ethanol is at least as bad for your body as straight sucrose/fructose.
Log time spent on Facebook, steam, Reddit, etc. Statistically inactivities.
Hell, we could probably reject 75% of Americans in the first three months without any sort of death panels being necessary, just let Google, Target, and walmart machine learn AI the rejection criteria and alert the insurers.
At what cost? If there were crazy people jaywalking onto the freeway, do you want to reduce speed limit nationally to accommodate that, or would you rather let it play out and people can realize certain things are just fatally stupid?
> In the US, they created this backdoor "Opt" work visa (which they're desperately trying to expand) that allows hundreds of thousands of foreign students to stay in the US once studies are finished and compete for jobs. Oh, and they don't pay various retirement taxes, so companies get an immediate 15% incentive to hire them over American students.
First, OPT is not a visa. Optional Practical Training participants are mostly F-1 visa holders. Per IRS rules[1], the social security tax exemption "does not apply to F-1,J-1,M-1, or Q-1/Q-2 nonimmigrants who become resident aliens." And per IRS rules [2], you are considered a resident aliens if you pass the Substantial Presence Test [3], which states, "31 days during the current year, and 183 days during the 3-year period that includes the current year and the 2 years immediately before that." Now how many students can get an OPT job and still fail this test?
The US immigration policy is not perfect and has holes. But attracting foreign talents to stay and work in the US is the baby, not the bath water.
Dominion the company uses SolarWinds or Orion does not mean the voting system it develops uses SolarWinds or Orion. I am pretty sure Dominion also uses MS Office, but that does not mean the voting system is vulnerable to MS Office hacks.
My visa was rejected twice before I gave up. One of my friend was rejected 3 or 4 times before he was granted a visa, in a span of less than 1 year. I don’t think it’s out of the ordinary to see someone’s visa rejected 8 times before one was granted. The F1 student visa requirements are quite ambiguous and leave a lot of room for “interpretation”. Most are rejected because they cannot demonstrate “strong ties” to the home country to prove they will return after graduation. Now tell me how do a senior in college with no asset and no job prove they will return to the home country after 5 years of graduate school.
Parent’s keyword is “allow to succeed”, not “succeed”. I always warn people about false equivalence when it comes to China. The laws and rules in China are not the same concept as laws and rules in the West. There are implicit rules or 潜规则. The rules and laws are only there to make things look legit. There are very few places on earth where you can be forced into citizenship so you can be deprived of consular access and be dealt with using the convenience of Chinese rules and tools[1].
China abducts a Swedish citizen; recognizes and prosecutes him as citizen of China, denying Sweden access to the trial (note that China does not even have double citizenship); when concerns are raised over violations of Vienna treaty on consular relations—and hey, by this logic China can abduct anyone anywhere—China declares that (I am not joking) consular relations are on hold until COVID-19 is resolved.
I cannot locate anything about the person you refer to, but that doesn’t matter. “Not wholly unrelated” is a very weak justification for an abduction of a foreign citizen (especially where “not unrelated” means “wrote about some country’s politics”), and unilaterally declaring international consular relations “suspended”. “What about Y” does not mean X should be tolerated.
Sorry mate, that got misspelled. Yes, I agree with you an all those points, but to totally disregard the fact that the person is of chinese origin and a former chinese citizen is not giving the whole picture.
In the case of Isaak, people in sweden seem to think he was some kind of stockholm journalist when he was merely swabbing the floors of a swedish news agency. Not to discredit him of course, I was actually a cleaner myself at one point ... But to simply refer to him as an "abducted swedish journalist" very much leaves the full picture unpainted. More accurately he was a political refugee in sweden and oppositional activist in eritrea, and I think he wrote a newsletter there as well or some kind of newspaper.
In any case, hope they all go free soon, poor people.
Abducted and prosecuted a Swedish citizen. The “journalist” part is not important is it?
A big difference between China and Eritrea is that one of those is a nuclear power, and it has just unilaterally declared consular relations as suspended when Sweden demanded access to its citizen. This is insane.
Global discourse about China mainland politics must be bias-corrected in a way that people with strong opinions and actual knowledge of how things work there will likely self-censor, unless they align with CCP.
If no one writes about some damning thing X in the US, there is a high likelihood that X doesn’t happen. If no one writes about damning thing Z in China, this tells us nothing. They could just fear for their lives—and it doesn’t matter where that person lives, which country’s citizen they are, whether they have been granted asylum, etc.
If the new regulation targets the root of the problem - which is lack of economic opportunities - then yes. Regulation targeting patchwork solution, then it's the definition of virtual signaling.
That is what they want you to believe, as everything in China must look reasonable. Google left because it decided censoring according to law was too much for them. Really? They suddenly got tired of censoring after doing it for years? Or is it [1]?
The timing of Uber leaving China - Aug 2016 - coincided suspiciously with the Chinese government legalizing ridesharing - announced in July 2016 to kick in November 2016. Isn’t that interesting? Per HBR:
> Under the new regulations, the data collected by Uber would come under the purview of the government. There would be no more subsidies. Market prices would prevail, the regulations state, “except when municipal government officials believe it is necessary to implement government-guided pricing.” According to Xinhua, ride-hailing companies would be urged to merge with taxi companies. (Many of those also happen to be owned by the local governments.) Uber would have to get both provincial and national regulatory approval for its activities anywhere in China. Online and offline services would be regulated separately.
> Moreover, foreign companies like Uber would be subject to even more regulation than their competitors.
This has always been the MO of Chinese government: blackmail though selective enforcement of broad-stroke laws. They tell you to leave without having to mouth it.
Didi has always been the target of local law enforcement to this day because local government collect taxes from taxi but not with Didi, as Didi pays tax to the city it's registered in. This shouldn't affects the national government because it collects taxes either way. This is similar to the issue with online sales tax.
Censorship laws became onerous after 2009 riots. FB/Twitter/Google didn't want to comply either due to politics or cost or combination. If they did, China wouldn't need Aurora to hack dissent gmail accounts, Google would just hand it over legally. Incidentally, after west started ML / mass human moderation Google and Facebook considered returning to Chinese market because it was now cost effective. Oh both companies kept ad sales open and were selling billions per year - they were free to operate in domains where they comply to local laws.
Uber was sponsored by Baidu in China. Baidu is much more resources than any competition / incumbents at the time. Your article suggest regulations killed the industry for everyone, i.e not biased against Uber (and Baidu).
>The country’s first nationwide regulation of the industry was truly bad news for Uber and, if followed to the letter, bad news for the entire industry.
...
>In selling its China business to Didi Chuxing, Uber is getting out of its China operations at the right time and at a reasonable price.
