howlgarnish

Anxiety is complicated. For example, having airline crew on Ebola-grade hazmat suits emblazoned with biohazard logos would probably reduce COVID transmission by some fraction of a percent, but it would also increase anxiety for most of us. If you take the LA Blue Line (which goes through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city), the constant announcements about your safety being important and occasional patrols by jackbooted commandos are the opposite of reassuring.

Basically, it's difficult to show you care about a problem without making the problem appear worse.

I can't claim to be an expert, but this is likely correct. The native Japanese words for color (shiro, kuro, aka, ao, midori etc) don't use the -色/iro suffix.

In many languages the distinction is quite blurred. In Japanese, most color words like 茶色 chairo (brown), 灰色 hairo (gray), 黄色 kiiro (yellow), 紅色 beniiro (crimson/red) incorporate the word "iro" (color), but while the first two are tea-color and ash-color, ki 黄 and beni 紅 now just mean "yellow" and "red" respectively.

"Orange" is actually pronounced /oringe/, so "syringe" and "door hinge" sound like true rhymes to me?

No, we're not in agreement on that. It's clear that Ma's dress & appearance in the video was distinctly at odds with his own usual profile, no need for any stereotypes or comparisons to other people.

With all due respect, you are presumably also not the multibillionaire CEO of one of the world's largest Internet companies.

If I saw Zuck, Satya or Sundar do a video conference looking like they're chained to the radiator in somebody's basement, I'd also be kinda concerned. (At least for the latter two. Zuck, maybe not so much.)

The odd outbreak aside (and Shijiazhuang is nowhere near Hangzhou), lockdowns are long over in China, there's no need for Ma to cower in a basement.

That said, I actually agree with you that the "hurr durr CCP torture cell" comments are overblown. It's entirely plausible that he's keeping a low profile for a while, if likely in response to some rather heavy-handed advice.

Mainland China's growth has been much slower because the madness of Mao's misrule set the country back by several decades. If you compare the country's growth since Deng Xiaoping took over and started reforming in the early 1980s, it compares much more favorably.

Yes, China punches under its weight in software, and yes, China's services are not particularly visible in the US, but I assure you they're already making a huge impact, particularly in the developing world, and that impact is only going to growing in the next 5-10 years.

Alibaba/Aliexpress are massive for consumer online shopping, particularly in Russia & Eastern Europe. Alipay payments are increasingly accepted across SE Asia. JD.com (which nobody ever hears about, but is considerably larger than Ali) operates directly and indirectly in many SE Asian countries.

Tencent Games owns and operates a huge slew of globally popular games, including Fortnite, League of Legends, the Supercell suite (Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans etc). Yes, most of these games are still produced primarily in the West, but for long?

Trip.com has been run out of China since 2017 since it was acquired by Ctrip. Meituan/Dianping dominate food delivery in China and are started to branch out to other markets like Australia and Singapore.

That's not going to help a user in mainland China, because Singapore is a separate country and on the wrong side of the Great Firewall.