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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

They are between a rock and hard place.

It's a total no-win for them now.

(Queue morbid curiosity.)

Cue, as in it’s your cue to speak rather than queue as in line up to wait for something. Truly English spelling is a delight for historical linguists.

Ah, I thought it was "queue" as in "put in line to do next"

> Truly English spelling is a delight for historical linguists.

The worst part to me is that many (often older) loan words have anglicized pronunciation, while other loan words keep their original pronunciation.

Sometimes we borrow a word multiple times!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)

e.g.

> chief, chef, cape, capo, caput and head (French (twice), Latin via French, Italian, Latin, and Germanic, all from the same Indo-European word *ka(u)put "head")

It's definitely not no-win. They can completely exit the Chinese market. The company will still survive if they do so. Earlier in this thread it was pointed out China generates only 10% of their revenue.

This.

Fire some people, make hongkong-protestor-Mei a skin [0], declare "we screwed up" in big letters, at that point the press this has generated for them would probably be a net win in the non-PRC market.

[0] end of this video https://old.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/dibrb0/overwatch...

You’re correct that there’s a clear winning move, but you’re wrong about what that move is. Blizzard’s stock price hasn’t budged much since the scandal unfolded. Clearly the market doesn’t think there are going to be any long term repercussions from this. Every few week the gaming internet gets really mad about something or the (loot boxes, micro transactions, DRM, etc) and kicks up a huge fuss and then everyone immediately forgets about it and keeps buying games.

Why on earth would Blizzard feel compelled to exit the Chinese market right now (which would definitely tank the stock price)?

Agreed. This is Facebook-level outrage and Facebook-level market consequences (little to none).

I actually see it the other way around. This action to appease China is extremely cynical and they only reason they are emboldened to take it is because Blizzard have immense financial security.

Most normal corporations would be way too scared of exactly this kind of backlash to so brazenly crack down on behalf of a totalitarian state.

Well, let's hope the kowtow to genocidal fascist dictatorship option is clearly the more painful of two painful paths.

How did this sort of thing work out for the NFL, in terms of kneeling players? Pretty well, all things considered.

The NFL never took Colin's entire NFL earnings away from him on top of firing anyone commenting on the initial sitting. I'm pretty sure if they did this, there would be much more uproar than letting him do it and quietly not signing him onto any more teams.

He also didn't start talking about police brutality against African Americans in post game interviews to the media, IIRC.

He absolutely did lots of interviews on the matter.

1. Kaepernick kneeled during game ceremonies.

2. He talked to the media about this as much as possible. 18 minute interview with ESPN: https://www.espn.com/blog/san-francisco-49ers/post/_/id/1895...

3. And he launched an entire campaign around it https://www.knowyourrightscamp.com/

Have you seen Blizzard's official Weibo account apology to China? It seems like kowtowing still seems to be their plan to get into that sweet sweet mobile game market.

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