Let's take on face value that it was the Chinese, and that China is communist. I mean, "Kumar" and "Tan"? Maybe it wasn't, but it doesn't matter for my purposes:
They took an overworked peon of the capitalist enemy that provides a ...
... do I even need to expound? well it's fun ...
... collectively and idealistically produced common operating system "for the people"
... that is exploited and neglected by the rich and powerful, to a degree that society, not just computers, overall society operates on this operating system, and the profits from that are hoovered up by the powerful.
The communists attacked the exploited proletariat to get to the enemy. And they are forcing the enemy capitalists to either pay the proletariat properly (they won't) or continue to be vulnerable to the growing communist power in the far east.
That's what this distills so well, within a political/ideological conflict that has now spanned 100 years: capitalism vs communism.
To wit, a proper functioning capitalist system to reward market value for produced value would properly pass compensation to this poor soul, and incentivize others to help him. Barring that, a proper functioning government would recognize the public good of this and provide support to the core infrastructure software to enable other private enterprise to produce tax revenue.
THOSE AREN'T HAPPENING, so the Communists can attack this with impunity and in perpetuity.
"And yet they were never able to turn it into economic growth as the West did"
Is it really that much of a mystery? China has had different forms of totalitarianism over the last couple of centuries.
It's like putting a noose around the neck of economic growth and innovation.
The only reason they even saw growth is because the cost of living is still very low in many parts of the country (outside big cities like Beijing) and big businesses can utilize this plus their lax employment laws.
They now just copy our innovations (sometimes, rather poorly) and sell them to their much larger, closed market. Many of these hacking attacks we've seen in the last couple of years are done to steal corporate secrets and copy the business:
I know a guy that is a senior engineer at an automotive company. He's originally from China and will go back in a year or so because automotive companies in China are paying Chinese engineers that have worked in the US 3X what they are getting paid here. It won't last long, however. Once they get all of these corporate secrets, engineer wages will go down.
China is slowly stealing all of our corporate secrets through hacking, having Chinese students get educated here and then taking secrets back with them, and outright theft of manufacturing plans/molds.
There is a happy medium between outright fucking communism and outright corporate fascism.
The superrich acquired their wealth through illegitimate means: nepotism, cronyism, bribery, monopoly, oligopoly, war-mongering, and all sorts of predatory scams.
Money acquired through illegitimate means is illegitimate and anti-meritocratic. Property rights do not apply to those who distort markets for their own benefit or avoid competing in the marketplace by creating a cartel or bribing a politician.
Superrich who engage in this behaviour are making themselves bigger than the market and bigger than the state, they are making themselves into autocrats, aristocrats, plutocrats, tyrants, slave-holders.
China is a slave state dominated by unmeritorious Party cronies and their nepotism. Chinese workers are slaves.
The proper response to slavery is rebellion and liberation. Humans are obligated to provide for themselves, not to be enslaved by psychopathic businessmen and broken economic systems.
When CEOs award themselves $100million salaries and golden parachutes they are engaging in cronyism and oligopoly. The free market no longer holds sway and this is immoral. Money gained through these methods is not private property, it is stolen goods.
Anyone who distorts a market or corners a market is an enemy of the public and forfeits their property.
China is building the same thing. But communism is evil and so their version is bad. Capitalism and libertarianism and personal freedom are real concrete good things, so Peeple is good. Sarcasm obviously, but this is a great real world example of the ways in which technology is not ideologically neutral and that US capitalism and Chinese communism are not mutually exclusive.
>That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.
There isn't anything recognizably communist about the Chinese system aside from the name. And the big spurt of growth didn't start until Deng's market-based reforms of the '70s.
So a better way to put it would be "After its Marxist fantasy economics resulted in the starvation of more than forty million Chinese people, the government wisely switched to capitalism, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty."
It's not a personal attack, you're still calling China communist and don't seem to understand how things work there. They're something else.
There's more small business than america, by a lot, the biggest internet companies outside of America... I think you've redefined 'communist' into some sort of tautological catch-all.
I really don't understand what the Chinese gov't expects when they are trying to control damn near everything. I honestly believe they are convinced they've successfully hacked capitalism.
The Chinese Communists used capitalism to get their country filthy rich while the supposedly "capitalist" west turned into a bunch of socialist dictatorships with high taxes and regulations.
Nothing surprising, if not the fact the western citizens allowed it to happen without revolting. Most likely they were glued to their phones while it happened.
I always find ironic how the allegedly "communist" Chinese regime managed to create a system that basically has exploited workers for decades, in ways that are much worse than capitalistic countries. It really requires a lot of doublespeak to justify that.
China is communist. That's not exaggeration. That's not hyperbole. That's not based on bogus data. Etc.
If you want to fault the original post, please feel free. But to call stating the obvious flame-y is simply nonsense. It's head in the sand, history denying naivete.
Please don't fault me for the collective foolishness.
The Chinese gov't adopted capitalism? I'm not sure I can believe that anyone believes that, much less agree with it.
This is a very direct example of a communist government controlling the messaging of a company, which is antithetical to capitalism.
As I understand it, this is happening because Chinese corporations are coerced by the communist regime such that Intel would lose business if they didn't follow the rules coming thru their Chinese partner corporations. Intel is still very much capable of freely choosing to obey those demands or not, which makes them capitalists, but the Chinese corporations being coerced into doing PR for the CCP is not capitalism.
China is integrated into the world economy as another (massive) capitalist entity.[1]
One can raise the standards of living and make scientific advancements at the cost of destroying the planet with regards to human habitation and survival. But I see how any sane person would make that argument.
No one can argue against the fact that capitalism has brought about things like scientific advancements, AC and whatnot. So it is very good at the objective of expand-expand-expand. And now we see where that will lead us.
I hope you ideological handmaidens of this system will sleep well for the next decades. Probably you will since you will just make up excuses about how all other external factors were really the cause. Or: All good things in the world were caused by capitalism while all bad things were caused by some inherent human traits (greed, malice) that would have manifested themselves in any system or context.
[1] In before “but China is communist”: then, for the sake of consistency, all “made in China” products were in large part made possible by Communism. And I hear there are a lot of consumer products that are made in China.
I mean, they seem to win by simply throwing bodies on the pyre, working their own citizens to suicide in order to provide cheap labor to the rest of the world until they get valuable IP and steal it.
Capitalism thrives on cheap labor and cannot stop itself from being lead like a lamb to slaughter as long as China keeps pumping out all of those man hours of labor for the taking.
Got it wrong? That's over-stating it quite a bit. Sure, that was the spin to get a toe hold, but ultimately the West's Capitalists saw massive opportunity, and nothing else.
Long to short, 30 - 40 years ago the media ALWAYS referred to China as Communist China. I can't remember the last time I heard that phrase. That's no accident.
Perhaps the politicians got it wrong. That's no surprise. They're (pardon the editorial) just stupid hand puppets anyway. But the elite capitalist? They were spot on. Just look at how the income inequality gap has widened. Again, no accident.
p.s. If anything, China suckered the West, believing it could influence the West's structure, more than the other way around.
Let's take on face value that it was the Chinese, and that China is communist. I mean, "Kumar" and "Tan"? Maybe it wasn't, but it doesn't matter for my purposes:
They took an overworked peon of the capitalist enemy that provides a ...
... do I even need to expound? well it's fun ...
... collectively and idealistically produced common operating system "for the people"
... that is exploited and neglected by the rich and powerful, to a degree that society, not just computers, overall society operates on this operating system, and the profits from that are hoovered up by the powerful.
The communists attacked the exploited proletariat to get to the enemy. And they are forcing the enemy capitalists to either pay the proletariat properly (they won't) or continue to be vulnerable to the growing communist power in the far east.
That's what this distills so well, within a political/ideological conflict that has now spanned 100 years: capitalism vs communism.
To wit, a proper functioning capitalist system to reward market value for produced value would properly pass compensation to this poor soul, and incentivize others to help him. Barring that, a proper functioning government would recognize the public good of this and provide support to the core infrastructure software to enable other private enterprise to produce tax revenue.
THOSE AREN'T HAPPENING, so the Communists can attack this with impunity and in perpetuity.
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