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Comment by MomoXenosaga | Hacker News Reader

That is the downside of free trade: foreigners can fly in and buy up all your companies. Which is exactly why China protects their tech industry like a wolf her cubs. Capitalism favours the strong.

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You can be happy when your companies are bought and you can invest in a new round of (local) startups.

You can be even more happy if you use the money to buy a new yacht.

Even as a country, yes, if the yacht is bought from the local economy and fuels new maritime innovations.

I believe in Finland you mostly invest in walls and then whats left is for few angel rounds.

This should correlate with how much the founders net, and buying a house after your exit happens elsewhere too. Also, some of the profits go to the institutional investors and they definitely re-invest.

No by investing in walls I meant that in Finland typically it has been quite common that after successful exit the profits (mainly) go into property development. You start buying different kinds of real estate.

Yes I'm sure there will be a startup rival for Google any day now...

I'm not sure what kind of argument you want to make: Wolt could've been the first GAFAM to come from outside of US? Finland (GDP $271 billion) should grow and host a business such as Google (revenue $183 billion)?

and that isolationism is the most sure way to grow financially and not socially

People from China are not isolated though: they can study and spend time abroad, form social connections before returning to China if they so prefer.

Right, that’s why there’s a very large cultural crackdown on what can be shown, with pop stars being removed and wiped from the internet . With kids having their past times curfewed.

Happy to cite, and this might be a giant rabbit hole, but I would posit there’s massive disagreement (both for and against) your statement.

Sure, some directions of "growing socially" are strictly prohibited in China and perhaps also for those who ever want to go (back) to China. But does some directions mean all directions in practise? I don't know.

First of all, their policy is much more extensive, but lets ignore because it’s not in the spirit of HN to verge so much off topic.

Believing free speech is context dependent (outside of yelling fire in a movie theater) seems like a future worth avoiding no matter what the benefits are when viewed in a historical context. You can stretch the analogy and say the same thing about Iran. Sorry just not interested, we’re going to have to disagree here.

How did we go from isolationism to free speech? If the only context dependency you allow is the one you mention, your argument applies to e.g. European laws against hate speech as well. Is Europe isolationist too?

This isn’t productive. Let’s stop.

"Social growth" is a sufficiently fuzzy term that I'm sure that people can easily come up with definitions where isolationism is beneficial to social growth.

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