Every economy has a plateau then a fall, then a pull back up again. I think the aggressive trade stance and hard line politics by China might have played a major role. As it’s frightened both the local businesses and foreign businesses and lead to all global powers starting to put tariffs and trade barriers up, all due to China wanting to get away with pretty blatant violations of fair trade, huge import taxes on foreign goods, great firewall blocking any foreign purchase easily, hugely subsidised mail, forced ownership sharing, lowered safety regulations, lack of pollutant regulation etc. chuck in a house market with terrible quality at a high price and you’ve got a balloon waiting to pop. I don’t blame the Chinese for wanting to buy any house outside of China. But they’ve taken their “build junk make bank” mentality to the world and it can’t last much longer.
> blatant violations of fair trade, huge import taxes on foreign goods, great firewall blocking any foreign purchase easily, hugely subsidised mail, forced ownership sharing, lowered safety regulations, lack of pollutant regulation
'Free' trade benefits industrialized nations, while mercantilism benefits developing nations. Every currently industrialized nation has, at some point in its past, been incredible protectionist, blatantly violated IP laws, had atrocious safety, employment, and pollution regulations, and large taxes on foreign imports.
China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through.
Are you expecting them to look at the history of how the United States, and Europe developed, and go: "Well, gee, protectionism, lax safety regulations, and access to foreign resource markets worked really well for all these other countries... But we shouldn't repeat their success!"
>China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through
in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it
I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses
If "pulling the ladder up" includes things like "not allowing the world climate to be destroyed" or "preventing disregarding human rights violations and worker quality of life" then, yeah, probably.
Giving each country a fair shot at developing even if they didn't happen to get on that ramp at the same time as some Western countries is a good goal.
At the same time, that's not such a vital principle that we should sacrifice other moral or pragmatic imperatives to get it. China may have gotten a late start, but that doesn't give them the right to ignore everything we've learned since then about a country's obligations to its people and the world.
I'm talking about all the other 'unfair' trade practices that have been cited.
If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them? Would that be a more palpable alternative?
Earlier today, a study was posted on HN about how the British Empire plundered ~$50T (inflation-adjusted) of wealth from India over it's colonial history. If you want to even the playing field with the developing world, we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.
> If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them?
We are, it's called the global economy, and it has performed a wealth transfer of unprecedented scale these last decades.
> we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.
Colonial reparations are complete crock, because they are based on counterfactual history speculations, and there are absolutely no concrete limits on those.
The Roman empire obviously plundered the British isles for inflation-adjusted astronomical amounts during its colonial history, should modern-day Italians pay reparations to England?
Arguably, had the Romans not invaded and expanded, much of the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe would have remained 'barbarian' for quite a while. They arguably brought civilization with them into the far-reaches of Europe (obviously at a great toll to the local populations)..
Arguably, the British brought a lot of things with them to India as well, infrastructure, medicine, industry, language. All these things benefit Indians living today, and many millions of Indians living today wouldn't be alive if the course of history hadn't been changed.
How do you put a value on that?
Also, many Indians were killed resisting the colonial invasion, and their descendants are not living today as a result, but would have if the course of history hadn't changed.
How do you put a value on that?
You can twist yourself silly arguing these things back and forth, because there are no physical limits. There are no principles to fall back on, there's only human imagination, you're free to dream up whatever pricetag you want on them.
And that is why colonial reparations are ridiculous.
> Arguably, the British brought a lot of things with them to India as well, infrastructure, medicine, industry, language. All these things benefit Indians living today, and many millions of Indians living today wouldn't be alive if the course of history hadn't been changed.
India's share of the world economy went from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India's GDP (PPP) per capita was stagnant during the Mughal Empire and began to decline prior to the onset of British rule.
Well, African Americans were enslaved, but were also taught valuable skills in cotton agriculture. Having carefully weighed the pros and cons of the two, we've concluded that slavery in the United States was a net wash, and, if we were to repeat the experiment again, slaveowners should not owe their slaves any reparations.
> infrastructure
Infrastructure that was paid for, and built by the people of India.
> medicine
Then why did life expectancy in British India go down during the colonial period? And why were millions of people dying in famines, all the while British India was a net exporter of food, to the rest of the empire?
> industry
How did countries that did not get colonised ever manage to industrialize?
> language
What, did Indians communicate with eachother through chest-thumping, and grunts, before someone had the bright idea of teaching them how to speak English? Christ on crutches... This reads a bit like satire.
Thank you for that link, I am somewhat that it hasn’t become a political issue given the current environment. Do you know if anyone is trying to address this issue?
Trump has complained about it publicly and is working to withdraw us while the Democrats spin it as Trump trying to withdraw from a 200-year old treaty - we should fix it instead (but we also tried that once and failed in 2016).
I haven't followed it closely but it is a political issue, albeit a minor one that neither side for whatever reason wants to escalate into a major talking point.
It's amuzing how people feel forced to add the "I didn't vote for Trump" when defending his actions that they like. Lest someone think they're monsters. The reality is that business-wise he's actually working hard for America's economy, addressing structural nonsense like the mail post treaty. Why can't that be simply something you support, regardless of who you voted for. Why is it implied that the other party decides whether a position is right or wrong by simply choosing the opposite of what a politician they hate chooses?
“Business-wise”, he’s taking a series of random, poorly reasoned actions, some of which happen to be good. Even a stopped clock is right twice
a day.
The parent is saying that Trump is bad on most things, but good on one particular thing. You’re trying to claim that he’s good on most things in a category.
People do this all the time for everything because it's a cheap way to supposedly increase the value of your commentary since you're otherwise allegedly unpleased by the subject. It also lets you pander to the audience with "I'm not one of those people, but...".
For example, you can see "I don't like {Javascript,PHP,Apple,Google,Facebook,$tech,$website,$thing}, but..." right here on HN, frequently.
Your first sentence was alright. Afterwards you injected a political opinion into your comment.
"The reality is that business-wise he's actually working hard for America's economy, addressing structural nonsense like the mail post treaty." is a statement that a majority of the people in the U.S would disagree with.
If you want to make your comment unbiased to one political party or the other, then you should remove that sentence.
That's an unwarranted statement. I'm just pointing out that you make comments under the guise of being "impartial" and supporting rational debate, when in reality you're clearly biased towards one political party.
Your comment was framed as "why can't people freely talk about which politician they support", which is a fairly neutral statement. But, afterwards, you proceeded to say that Trump has been beneficial for the U.S, which is a partisan statement (that most people in the U.S disagree with as per a variety of polls), and furthermore, you claimed that a vast majority of the people in the U.S would support Trump if it were not for their bias against Trump/conservatives, which is an incredibly subjective and partisan statement (and also plain wrong - because many people just dislike Trump's policies).
I mean, just look at this sentence:
>Why is it implied that the other party decides whether a position is right or wrong by simply choosing the opposite of what a politician they hate chooses?
You claim that people who don't support Trump's policies do so solely because they dislike Trump, instead of considering the fact that many people just dislike Trump's policies because they are just intrinsically bad.
People need to do that for fear of losing their jobs or damaging their career prospects I think. Is it possible to be a Trump supporter at any of these big bay area tech firms? Many of my friends tell me they pretend to be apolitical for fear of being fired, but I don't know how exaggerated their stories are.
US filed paperwork announcing withdrawal. There's, I believe, a two year period that kicks in for renegotiation. So the process of moving as fast as it can right now.
> I think the aggressive trade stance and hard line politics by China might have played a major role.
It's a nice distraction to attack China when the source of such things, in this tale, is a U.S. that has taken those stances to extremes unimagined before Trump took office. The U.S. fetishizes "hard line" and "aggressive", and has underminedh norms stretching back generations and has destroyed the U.S.'s reputation on trade and international relations. And all those consequences are intentional, a nationalist goal.
> China wanting to get away with pretty blatant violations of fair trade
I don't know that they have done more than other countries similarly situated, beyond allegations by the current U.S. administration as a justification for nationalist policies. Some things on this list of allegations are insubstantial, and we could make a similar lists for other countries. Is there any independent basis that China is worse than other developing countries or than other economic powers (they are both)?
> they’ve taken their “build junk make bank” mentality to the world and it can’t last much longer
This is just an empty stereotype unless you can back it up. Many high quality goods are made in China, including some that you may be using. There is nothing wrong with making cheaper, low-quality goods either.
One might say that U.S. financial industry is the leading proponent of "build junk make bank", with by far the most serious consequences.
> Every economy has a plateau then a fall, then a pull back up again
That's not actually how economics works at all. In the real world, perhaps outside the wealthy country you live in that has had good economic management (though the U.S. and others seem to be losing their way), countries do fall and never recover.
Well, the consequences of this aren't really known yet, so let's be slightly more careful with the cynicism...
I'll also add that you would usually want this to be a civil matter. First, because the standard of proof is far lower ("preponderance of evidence" vs "beyond reasonable doubt", i. e. 50% vs, say, 95%), making actual consequences far more likely.
Secondly, you are more likely to get whistleblowers if you focus on punishing organisations and not individuals.
Thirdly, these really are, almost always, actions by organisations undertaken in a sort of collective delusion, where everyone believes their actions are ok because they see so many others participating in it. None of these people would ever murder someone outright. That they happily do so as a group, thousand times over, needs to inform our reaction: it is a systemic failure, a group dynamic gone awry. Treating it as anything else only diminishes our chances to prevent future cases.
Chinese is a great language until you realise without someone constantly telling you what each character is. You’re never going to understand. The tones and characters need to go the way of the dodo before I take more interest.
Even if Firefox were an objectively worse browser than Chrome(which I don't think it is these days) there is still an argument to be made to use it anyways to ensure the freedom of the web.
> there is still an argument to be made to use [firefox] anyways to ensure the freedom of the web.
Definitely. Remember when Google wanted to buy Wikipedia but promised to keep it a free resource? So happy that didn't happen, it would have been the end of Wikipedia. Services like Firefox and Wikipedia are the last vestiges we have of the original intent of the internet, an place to congregate with the user in mind.
Most of everything else is walled gardens with the hope to create a monopoly via network effects.
And that argument is stupid. If Firefox had the dominant browser market share, they'd be the ones stripping your freedom and spying on your crap for money instead. Their history makes that pretty clear.
Wikipedia is a static delivery website. Of course it’s easy if all you’re delivering is static content. Try that with an ecommerce site where dynamic information is sent from sometimes multiple sources. It’s better to load it once and have a reactive site call just the necessary apis after. Calling everything over and over again in eCommerce is a pain for users. Unless you can afford a database and servers to be distributed globally to counter the added latency of downloading everything again and again. PWA is the next step for that. But, yeah, ok, for Wikipedia you can be static as you want.
Unless you have a very active community commenting and interacting around the items, you can definitely go almost entirely static, even in ecommerce.
Regenerate pages after changes happen and you'll be fine. You'll still need dynamic search most likely, but even those can be pre-generated for many terms. (Your admin / content management part needs to be dynamic of course, but that's not customer-visible)
If your catalogue is so large that constant regeneration is impractical, you can generate on-demand and cache long-term a few layers above for anything not requested recently.
> You'll still need dynamic search most likely, but even those can be pre-generated for many terms.
Have you ever worked on a high scale e-commerce site? I have and what you are talking about is impractical and pretty much impossible.
Products have multiple variants, photos for each variant. Various companion products that depend on what you already selected. Pricing options that can depend on quantities or packages. And search? Spend 5 minutes on any serious e-commerce search system and there is no such thing as “common search terms.” Of course there are common searches, but on any non-trivial e-commerce system, you have potentially thousands of distinct common searches.
I was one of the original engineers for https://www.matalan.co.uk and you can’t just “regenerate” pages after changes. You can regenerate the cache for images or product descriptions, but e-commerce isn’t like a printed catalog. We put exceptional engineering into that application and to trivialize that sort of application like it was some kind of blog site kind of demonstrates a lack of experience in building something that serves millions of visitors per month — visitors that all have different paths based on what they want to buy.
They’re Australian but have offices in other countries. I believe they would move for the right reasons. This seems like a pretty big reason, considering they’re targeted at enterprise. But move where? UK will have this next, America does this without any laws at much greater effect and scale.
They'd need the system admins, CI infrastructure and code review team to be in a jurisdiction free of this kind of thing, and then treat all changes subject to laws like these as hostile
The alternative is sell software that everyone knows has backdoors. Pretty hard business case to make
California. I had to agree to some changes to their ToS the other day (for Bitbucket) in which I agreed to dispute resolution under California law. I suppose that's a pretty good indication of their thinking. It's not like this legislation is unexpected or sudden.
No, the new law has no judicial review and has a few other things that wouldn't fly in the US. It's markedly worse (though don't get me wrong, the US definitely has it pretty bad in this area too).
You say that like FISA Courts are actually judicial review and not rubbing stamps... where you win is that you have a stronger set of rights and case law about it.
The difference is that there isn't even fake judicial review. And I disagree that we have a stronger set of rights -- the difference is that the NSA explicitly ignores your constitutional rights.
All of our rights (other than the right to a jury for certain criminal trials, freedom of religion, the aquisition of property must be 'on just terms', the right to be a senator if you can vote, and the right to vote in federal elections) are in common law. This means that any new law can overturn those interpretations.
Personally I think Australia needs to push for a constitutional bill of rights. Unfortunately this is going to be a very hard battle to win, given the enormous requirements to get a constitutional amendment passed.
