As Michael Jordan didn't say... "Republicans buy sneakers too." Billionaires didn't get to be billionaires by leaving money on the table. We need large scale political action against China.
Let's look at some large scale political action in the past:
1. Invade Iraq. 4000+ Americans dead, over 1 million Iraqi died.
2. Bombed Libya, it is now a $democratic_wonderland.
I'm not putting Afghanistan here because I think it's justified, but then why are we still there after Bin Laden's dead?
How about just minding our own business. If China don't want to watch NBA, then so be it. If you don't want to buy shit made in China, then don't buy it.
I mean, its only because the company let's them isn't it? The NBA, and pretty much every company, has could totally ignore China telling them what to do, but they would rather take the money.
I think that's a false equivalence, China has no power telling you what to do and you know it. And any customer would have the power to not buy your product and its their right.
You can say whatever you want, but they might not want to throw money at you if you start shit talking their regime and it's values. Is that not free speech?
Benefit #1: Make a top list of billionaires and have people gossip about it.
#2 Sell regular folks the idea that they _may_ one day become billionaires too, convince them that they should vote down any tax increase on the 1%; Continue brainwashing them that there's plenty of room at the top, maybe, just maybe room opens up for them as well.
#3 Monetize on the image of billionaires and sell luxury goods and billionaire lifestyle to poor cretins
The benefit of billionaires existing is that they made extraordinarily valuable businesses. Take Steve Jobs or Bill Gates - if they didn’t exist then Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t either. If Notch didn’t exist then neither would Minecraft.
If you create something (a company, a video game, other IP), and people value that thing at a billion dollars, then you’re a billionaire. Notch became a billionaire after selling Minecraft because almost 100 million people play it.
What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars? Do you not want these things to be created? Do you not want them to be sold? (Ownership has to change hands eventually; people don’t live forever). How are you expecting society would work?
> What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars?
Let them have 50 or 100 million, then put the rest in the hands of the other people that worked to make it happen. If all of those people are now rich, then use the excess money to help the impoverished.
> Reaping what you sow provides the incentive to work hard in our society.
It's not binary. People don't get all the money or none of it. You can still have ridiculously large amounts of monetary incentive without it being possible to hit a billion dollars.
> The benefit of billionaires existing is that they made extraordinarily valuable businesses.
Debatable depending which business, and also highly subjective. Amazon is valuable to Wall Street, yes most certainly. It also generates massive amounts of garbage, pollution, and human suffering. Are we including those in the value statement or are we going by the capitalist axiom that as long as the number went upward, the non-financial cost doesn't matter?
> If you create something (a company, a video game, other IP), and people value that thing at a billion dollars, then you’re a billionaire. Notch became a billionaire after selling Minecraft because almost 100 million people play it.
So the system works because the system is working? This is circular logic at it's finest. I don't care what Microsoft decided Minecraft was worth, they're an equally diseased part of a diseased system. It's like saying "this cancerous tumor isn't a problem, because the other cancerous tumor vouched for it." So what? I don't place value on the opinions of capitalists on the value of the capitalist system. Can you justify it without citing a capitalist?
> What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars? Do you not want these things to be created? Do you not want them to be sold? (Ownership has to change hands eventually; people don’t live forever). How are you expecting society would work?
You're working all of this from the viewpoint that markets, capitalism, and competition are the only ways to generate stuff. Not only is that not the case, and I would cite the entire open source community as evidence to that fact, but I reject outright the assertions that:
1) The only things that have value are the ones where the value is expressed in currency
2) That the only arbiters of value are those who place values in the form of currency
There are tons of examples of things created with no monetization plan that are great. There are tons more things created with a monetization plan out of necessity, because without one they could not exist.
Again and again criticism of capitalism is met with this assertion that "well things have value and therefore we need to respect the market" and I flatly reject that. We're all locked in the same prison, every idea, every concept rung through this machine that decides whether or not something deserves to exist by it's ability to contribute to a market. A market built by people, allegedly for people, that is for some reason simply beyond reproach. Capitalism has ballooned to practically another religion, and you are a follower of it, so dedicated to it's holy texts you've entirely forgotten that human civilization existed for THOUSANDS of years before we had a bloody market.
Yes because I’m sure you know what's best for billions of Chinese. They must be all dying to overthrow their government.
Your rhetoric is naive at best and racist at worst. It’s racist because you are disenfranchising the potential voice and sovereignty of a whole ethnicity and country because private interests in your own country can’t get their way over there.
The hong kong protestors have started getting their way. They don’t need poorly informed observers to fan the flames (on either side).
There is a difference between the Chinese government and the Chinese people. The parent is (presumably) calling for action against the Chinese government, because what the Chinese government wants is harmful to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and other basic rights. This is not an attack on the Chinese people.
In general, one has to be careful about conflating the interests of the Chinese government and the Chinese people. They're not the same thing, although the Chinese government tries to portray it as such. Speaking out against the Chinese government is not the same as speaking out against Chinese people.
This is the second time I think I've seen this on hackernews in two days, no one is conflating the two anymore or less than when someone says, "America runs terrorist campaigns in the Middle East." People understand that the meaning is the state, nothing is a monolith although everybody must step up to the table and own up to the fact that we are all in part responsible for the actions of our comminutes.
We know who the dictator is, it isn't billions of people, it is one man.
What's being conflated is that somehow the government there does not represent the people. They do, maybe not in the way Americans like, but Americans don't pay taxes to China, and Americans do not take care of the Chinese. The Chinese government takes care of the Chinese there. Whether they do it effectively is another matter, but one thing's for certain is that a Chinese person has more agency within the Chinese government than they do with the American government (or any foreign government/interests for that matter). So to impose the values of one culture on another without taking in their input is racism.
Yes there are other Chinese in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, but that's not the point here. Just because the racism doesn't target those Chinese doesn't mean there is a sense of cultural and moral superiority being levied on a different culture here.
Keep in mind that Singapore is also very authoritarian, but does not get as much flak for whatever reason (probably because they are not rivaling the US).
Yes and I'm saying it's presumptuous to say that the Chinese (people) do not support their own government and want them out as much as a foreigner who is not subject to the life outside the comforts of The United States (or whatever other Western democracy).
Might seem persnickety, but criticism of mainland China can't be racism because Taiwanese are the same race and people aren't criticising them for this kind of thing (because they don't do it). It's really not even criticism of the Chinese people, who have no say in the matter either way and tend to be harshly punished for disagreeing.
In the end it's all just criticism of a specific government. Doesn't need to go further than that.
And the vast majority of Chinese people in China do support the government, for doing, among other things, bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty. The primary beneficiary of the Chinese government is the Chinese people there, and attacking the government is an indirect attack on the people there because The USA government, Australia, or any other non China government is not going to take after Chinese citizens.
Uh, do they? How do you know? The opinions of mainland Chinese about their government are completely worthless; they simply aren't allowed to disagree or learn about the world in a neutral manner.
For example, the Chinese government has not "lifted millions out of poverty", that's pure propaganda. Human society lifts itself out of poverty when not prevented from doing so by totalitarian governments. Japan was destroyed by war and became a rich first world nation within decades. South Korea became fully developed in also just a few decades. Plenty of other examples of that.
China is behind the rest of the world because of its government. If it weren't for the Great Leap Forward and then decades of economically devastating communism, China would be as developed as the USA or South Korea is by now. The fact that its people are still so poor can be laid squarely at the feet of its government.
But how many Chinese will think that? Probably not many. They are stuck in a system designed to mould them into loyal subjects from birth.
You'd be surprised how much support the government has in China, among Chinese people, even if they oppress some of their people. But just because they don't hold public elections doesn't mean they do not draw their legitimacy from the people. And furthermore, if they did not have a legitimate claim to power the people of China can overthrow them, not a foreigner. They don't need the US to install a leader for them.
They do have elections... you just have to join the communist party. Much like how you would have to join one of two political parties here to have a practical vote, and even then you have to navigate the tricky electoral college that disenfranchises some voters.
It is “impossible” by your definition everywhere then. There is misinformation and propaganda everywhere. Spin is propaganda, advertising is propaganda, and FOX News is propaganda.
You gauge by whoever takes political action, whether or not you think they are properly informed.
