And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.
The CCP's protectionism is because China is going for a cultural victory. It wants Chinese products to be available and inexpensive and purchased around the world. It puts resources to that end.
The US's protectionism is for the enrichment of the CEO, board members, stockholders, and Executive Branch's family members. It wants to protect the domestic market from sending money somewhere other than the relatives of the people in power.
While they're both "protectionism" they're not the same policies.
It is just sad that commentary like this even exists.
I sincerely am curious of the education that produces sentences like this. On one hand it is articulate and educated, on the other hand its amazing that one can think China is doing this out of charity and not wiping out its competitors one after the other.
I fear you badly misunderstood my comment if you think I think China is doing anything at all out of charity.
China wants to supplant the US as the world hegemony and we'll all be worse off for it. The Chinese protectionism I described is China exercising an avenue they think will help them approach that goal. It certainly is not charity.
Hasn’t the US been equally so, including the auto company bailouts, government fleet purchases restricted to US-made vehicles, US national moves to secure supply chain inputs for the auto makers, etc.?
The main difference that I see isn’t protectionism, it’s that BYD took a direction the market wanted, whereas US auto makers have not produced vehicles that were appealing to consumers who had choices.
BYD's direction was largely at the behest of the Chinese government, who were willing to demand things of BYD in exchange for that protectionism, instead of wringing their hands and saying "nothing you can do about the market" while simultaneously propping up industries of national strategic significance.
No, it is not. From mass recalls to faking sales targets and finances, BYD is actually facing serious problems. As soon as their benefits stop they are going the way of Evergrande
These aren't things unknown to other car manufacturers. Tesla, in particular, has suffered from mass recalls and faking sales. It also only really exists as a company because of government investment.
I’m curious if this was built off the work Moxie did with them back in the day, but as I recall Facebook Messenger had E2EE built off Signal’s technology a decade or so back, and the zeitgeist back then was at least a little bit less user hostile.
I feel like Messenger was originally a new front-end for the send message feature of thefacebook.com's social network for college students. It was based on the PHP architecture where all the messages are in a database and you just render HTML to show them.
That grew into the Messenger mobile app. They eventually added private messaging, but it was never popular/defaulted because users expected the chat moles on facebook.com to be able to show the same messages as the mobile app. If facebook.com can't read your messages, it can't show them there.
That era of Facebook was the last shred of respect I had for them, but it was starting to die for me. Now I've noticed younger generations really don't seem to care about Facebook, and friends I grew up with who used to post on Facebook no longer do.
I feel like if e.g. Whatsapp were not end-to-end encrypted, it would have faced significantly more regulatory scrutiny in the EU and other places where it's effectively replaced phone calls and SMS.
Many of those countries have mechanisms by which one can express their preferences earlier in the process, ones which have been successfully used to pivot major political parties in new and unexpected directions, although those mechanisms are more complicated than just showing up at the end and whining about the results, so usually it's only motivated individuals and entities which leverage them.
> Just imagine if the us empire and its institutions, war machine parted ways with the country and its population.
I suspect we may not have to imagine this for long. The DOGEing of the federal government pulled a lot of the benefits of the union away from the people, and the recent political maneuvering around voting districts and other inter-state power contests suggest that the notion of the US as one nation and one people with a shared set of values is increasingly at odds with the facts on the ground. We have the most powerful military in the world (probably?), but in terms of the domestic situation, the federalized model is under incredible stress and the bargains that held it together seem to be failing or being intentionally broken. Your description of the empire leaving the country behind - or vice versa - feels less far-fetched than it would have a generation ago.
If there’s no reasonable alternative that satisfies their “something must be done” without creating massive negative consequences for the rest of society, then in fact something must not be done, and the large corporate entity will either have to settle for not making as much money as they think they’re entitled to or figure out some other way to recapture those viewers.
> massive negative consequences for the rest of society
What are these "massive negative consequences" you're talking about? Some IPs blocks from Cloudflare are blocked for ~90 minutes, some times a week. As repeated so many times, I agree it sucks, but it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week".
And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
> it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week"
A good chunk of the internet goes through Cloudflare. Something like 40% of the top 1000 websites use it.
Services depend on it (CI etc). SaaS companies are shut down. Businesses can't sell. Etc. It's a disaster. It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
> It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
I'm not, I don't know how I could, as every single time the blocks happen, I'm personally affected by it, since I live in Spain.
But, seemingly we have wildly different experiences. None of the companies I buy stuff from our down during those periods, it's not a disaster as far as I notice it, but clearly you do, so now I'm curious what exactly you're doing during these 2-3 hours a week when this happen that makes you so affected by this, while I'm not?
I'm genuinely curious, not a "gotcha" or anything, I just want to understand your situation better, since our experience differs so much. Which region are you in and with what ISP?
> And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
I can see their point of view. I understand they consider this a disaster. I understand they are insistent that something must be done. I am saying that the remedy they are proposing has too many negative consequences to the rest of society to be allowed. I am saying that their interests, sincerely held though they may be, do not trump the interests of the entire rest of the country, and therefore their injury is not satisfiable in the manner they wish it were. As the man once said, you can’t always get what you want, no matter how large an economic enterprise you’re running.
> I wonder what would be the military usefulness of such a drone
If you're talking about the cardboard drone specifically: it's incredibly cheap to manufacture, which means you can easily deploy a gazillion of them. They're bullet sponges - a modern day Zerg rush.
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