Comment by _aavaa_
1 day ago
Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.
1 day ago
Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.
There's a difference between state sponsored and private dumping.
Give me a break.
Yeah, in this case it's the USA side that's on the losing end. Just because the US government wants small government and no intervention (expect when it comes to the donor class, or their voting base, or their own financial interests) doesn't make it a universal truth.
We're happy to prop up companies that should have failed after they get big an dominant, but having an industrial policy to invest in a field as a whole is somehow a big problem.
You see this crying and threatening to take their toys and go home on every issue as soon as someone else is in the lead. Just look at TVs and solar panels; China invested in growing that sector since they saw it was important for the future; the USA does their best to deny climate change and demonize anything not running on fossil fuel. And now that nobody wants to buy American's overpriced and uncompetitive cars, it's the fault of other companies for planning ahead. But the same politicians complaining about it are very happy to set up their own protectionist tariffs and eventually bail out the laggards, again; all while touting the "free market"
weird, I'm pretty sure there was some american that made electric cars a thing. I'm not a fan of state sponsorship or bailouts. but if you're trying to equivocate, it's just not really true. also anti-tarriff. I guess I don't know who you're arguing with.
edit-- and re industrial policy, I'm ok with demand side stuff like government contracts in the early chip days. Less so but kind of ok with some supply stuff like EV credit, but of course in that case would've preferred the politically impossible carbon tax.
3 replies →
It's state-backed, or at least state-directed, scaling to capture market share, standard CCP playbook since the 80s.
Whether dumping is a loaded term of not is irrelevant; it's a specific term of art in economics and policy, it fits with the context of past national actions there, and fits what's currently happening here perfectly. They put money into these models, then give them away for nothing (below cost).
How does releasing open weight models to FOSS communities help capture market share for subscription-based cloud services?
The US AI vendors are also baked and controlled by the state, as we’ve seen over the past half year. AI is pretty much everywhere baked by state actors
I think the comment above you is saying that it is called dumping when done by state but not when done by vcs
It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's scary China it's suddenly a problem.
American startups flood markets with below-cost loss-leader products explicitly to kill competition and create network effects, and then jack the prices just as high, if not higher, for the service in question after the fact, oftentimes while making it so those providing the service earn even less money than they did before. Commentators: "Free market great"
China does the exact same thing: "Communists wanna kill the West"
If you believe in some kind of competition-free objective set of market morals, then yes, this is a strange contradiction.
If you believe that humans are locked in a productive struggle against each other at the organizational level, and that the knife-edge balance is a feature, not a bug, then it's not so weird to think about.
It is simultaneously true that it is in my best interest for prices to sink (as a consumer), for US companies to succeed (as a US citizen), and for my company to win over competitors regardless of whether those competitors are from US, EU, China, or Antarctica.
Oh I don't think it's either of those things, I think it's good old fashioned Racism/Xenophobia. We did the same shit to Japan and Korea when they were coming up out of their respective post-war periods, and we still do, to a degree. With China's ruling party also being "communist" (in massive, massive air-quotes) it also lets political actors dust off the McCarthyism to boot.
This is, to be clear, not meant as a ringing endorsement of China, China's policies, or to absolve China of it's wrongdoings, of which there are MANY. It's just to say that it's remarkable to watch the pearl clutching of the privateer capitalist class as state-sponsored capitalism levels their own game up against them and starts taking them to the cleaners instead.
A real Godzilla "let them fight" situation as far as I'm concerned.
6 replies →
It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's glorious China it's suddenly not a problem.
I thought it was evil late-stage capitalism? Suddenly it's a friendly panda bear that just wants to spread love and technology?
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