Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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1) Industrial processes are stupidly hard to duplicate.

It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task.

2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress

American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.

A not insubstantial part of China's economy involves private corporations that compete with each other. The image of China as a command economy hasn't been true since Deng's reforms of the early 1980's. At the higher levels, sure, a lot of executives will be beholden to the CCP, but there are few places China places a single bet on a single state venture. Even their fully government-owned ventures are often companies that compete with each other or have corporate subsidiaries that compete with each other, and so while you might be tempted to just deliver good news, you face the risk that your competitors will deliver better news backed with results.

This is not an attempt to suggest China's government is good, because it's not, but it's also not a carbon copy of the worst sides of the Soviet Union - for all of Deng's brutal authoritarianism, he did recognise and address a lot of the worst mistakes of Mao and the Soviets in terms of the economy.

It also still doesn't necessarily mean employees in a private company in China will be as open to reporting issues as they might have been elsewhere, but it does mean there are incentives in play that at least make many executives want to put effort into identifying and addressing issues.

What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question. I’ve always been under the assumption they operate similarly.

Well there are a lot more corporations than dictators, and usually shit doesn't go sideways when a corporation falls.

As an employee of a corporation, I often speak my mind. The most I risk is being fired, and I believe I can find another job relatively easy. I sometimes do keep my mouth shut, because saying the truth would get me some sour looks, and I don't feel like dealing with that right now.

I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous.

From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.

Corporations usually can't just murder people in the streets if they don't like them.

>What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question.

/r/redditmoment

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