Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
You'll note that I praised SpaceX. My denigration was reserved for Musk in particular.
Comment · 8 years ago
Your class warfare demagoguery is entertaining. The entirety of notable human civilization is defined by exploitation, and nobody who matters will ever care. Except politicians who will use your whining and vote to do whatever they were planning to do anyways. Vast inequality is, and always has been, the mark of a great civilization.
Comment · 8 years ago
Precisely. Why does Apple run an operation in Ireland instead of Illinois or California? It isn't the result of some sense of corporate generosity. It is pure fantasy to imagine capital will not flee the state when burdened with anticompetitive taxation.
Comment · 8 years ago
The parent is attempting to 'teach the controversy', by trying to convince others that there -even is- reasonable debate among informed people on this subject (that government policy creates cultural norms, and these norms are suppressed creativity and intellectual conformity). The lie then becomes a kind of half-truth, automagically. These accusations aren't exclusively associated with race (the same was said of the Japanese, Soviets before them, Americans circa 1800s, etc), but that is merely cover when you accuse China of IP theft and the very concept is an intellectually deficient product of trade protectionism.

Deriding culture on the basis of tenuous claims is a deceptive way to evade accusations of racism.

Comment · 8 years ago
You must have the funds to borrow. Shorting is risky, even more so going naked. Which is why its been illegal since 2008. In practice, professionals use covered call options to manage their risk.
Comment · 8 years ago
You do not have much life experience outside of the west, or professional experience in China, but you feel some kind of cultural superiority that roused you to suggest that democratic traditions encourage creativity and authoritarian government discourages it.

Your priors are wrong. I work in the US, public and private grants are shrinking year over year, and anti-intellectualism is rampant. Meanwhile my Chinese colleagues, at the same place in their career, are practically local celebrities and receive unprecedented (in the US) resources to do decade longitudinal research and increase headcount. In reality, China is on the bleeding edge in AI because their government and private industry has the social cohesion to focus on scientific advancement. Besides the vast intellectual capital at their disposal, they can cheaply afford to iterate quickly as the means of manufacturing and production are local.

Comment · 8 years ago
"Short selling" is the process of selling something you don't have, promising to deliver later, on the basis that you expect the price to go down.

Finance 101: You've just described a naked short, which is illegal in the US. You are required to cover the position.

Comment · 8 years ago
Conflating culture with race was, incidentally, a classic rhetorical device used by American South proponents of slavery.

There are certainly elements of jingoism at work here, too.

Comment · 8 years ago
The natural order of human civilization derides IP. In the absence of a supremely powerful, globe-spanning government, enforcement is impossible. In the presence of honest intellectuals, it is impossible to deny that all progress is gained by standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday's Nobel is today's homework. Attempts to embargo knowledge are not just backwards, but thermodynamically futile.

Intellectual property management is archaic. And your other claims are borderline racist.

Comment · 8 years ago
When you remove accountability, incentives to keep the system performing as intended become distorted. This is basic game theory. It is dangerous to imagine a human engineered item can be infallible.
Comment · 8 years ago
Let's dissect this misplaced moral superiority by comparison.

Trump's USA imprisons more people per capita than any other nation. And a disproportionately large number of those people are black men. For five decades, it has increasingly walked back checks and balances on the executive branch. NSA, on behalf of USG, has demonstrated the most complete surveillance of telecommunications on the planet. The Homan Square facility was used by CPD to disappear six thousand people. This is on a tiny scale compared to the work of the Chinese state apparatus, and it was eventually shut down. But it persisted for a decade.

The USA isn't better than China by very much. Arguably, it is worse. In any case, it is a far bigger hypocrite.

Comment · 8 years ago
Outside of the west, democracy is generally held in contempt. This can be dated at least as far back as Plato. Trump isn't misinformed, he believes that democracy is contemptible. And whether he is wrong is arguable.
Comment · 8 years ago
Why do you have to physically meet to exchange cash? Parties that trust each other can trade BTC for SWIFT or SEPA payment.

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