Comment by runako
4 days ago
> It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?
> it’s bad to run a country like a business
The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.
> level of freedom
The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.
Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.
Great points, but I think that banning open source databases would have been better not for employees, but for shareholders.
Aren't employees of US tech companies typically also shareholders, by virtue of part of their compensation being paid in company stock?
For private companies to an extent yes. In public companies that’s just a way to increase your employees compensation without harming your free cashflow. I don’t think tax wise it’s any different than them paying you more in cash and then you buying the same amount of shares.
Not really, they cannot vote so their shares are completely meaningless and can become worthless very easily.