schuke

Is the book in public domain now?

From a Leninist bureaucratic perspective, a paper trail is exactly what someone wants as a mid-level official: if something goes wrong a paper trail transfers responsibility to her higher-ups, reducing the chance this person becoming a scapegoat. Especially useful if someone's caught in a intra-party power struggle, in an area dealing with foreign entities where waters are muddier. Trust is very rare in the Leninist party. Not sure if the same logic works in other governments though.

My two cents: I enjoyed reading Johnny Ryan's A History of the Internet and the Digital Future

I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

The business that Amazon, Facebook, Google have in China is tiny relative to their size. Amazon has a few machine-translated pages that relay their US, UK, DE, JP sites' goods to China. Kindle's shut down. FB & Google sell some ads to local exporters.

No. 1. China's constitution protects free speech. Rendering many 'laws' unconstitutional. This may be too philosophical, so there is 2. Many 'laws' are intentionally vague so their application can be as arbitrary as possible: anything can 'disturb public order' or 'violate social morale'. Who's to decide? Of course it's the Party, not the law. 3. If you look carefully, even those catch-all regulations aren't there in many cases. Chen Yun, one of the Deng Xiaoping-era elders famously argued against making a News Law, saying "When the KMT was in power, we [the Communists] studied their news laws very carefully and exploited loopholes. Now that we're in power, it's better there is no law at all." In China, laws are "made strictly, violated widely, and enforced selectively." This is the real world Constitution.

Hasn't China been preemptively retaliating since 2000? Among FAANG only Apple still works. And FANG is actually the surname of the father of the Great Firewall. (Fang Binxing)

Chinese IT was a wild west at its very inception. Companies with connections with the police framed competitors as early as the 90s IIRC. Android (de-Googled by law) is fraught with malware-ish apps. Luckily we still have Apple but I'm a bit terrified of the prospect that Apple may one day be forced to leave China leaving me only domestic Android.

I went from Apple Watch/Fitbit to Casios and mechanical watches, too. I remember when Microsoft Band first came out their commercial was showing people checking notifications in many scenarios, including with friends and family. I was like, yuck, I absolutely don't want to be distracted in these situations. A truly smart watch should actually do the opposite: block notifications when it can tell you're with family.

Very true. I started down the rabbit hole of Casio, Timex and Seiko after borrowing my wife's 1st-gen Apple Watch for a few days.

Apple Watch was much less than 90% baked on launch IMO. But old-fashioned iterations obviously has work very well for it.

Seems more realistic when the K is put on the other end of the equation?

The book does also say some people with certain gene only need 4 hours of sleep. She could be in this category and is only sleep more.

In China it’s not even a matter of money. People already need VPN for accessing the free internet. Books are invaluable against censorship.

While I agree a business should have something higher and valuable, business is usually so competitive that mere breathing is hard enough. Most die before even mastering that.