Hacker News Reader

Comment by hopelite | Hacker News Reader

I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement.

It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.

View on HN

> resistance to growth at all costs is futile

humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)

the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang

we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.

we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)

“ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),”

Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.

China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.

Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?

Do you think that strategy is from their rulers? And do you think that when the rulers die, that strategy will live on?

I think it will pass like every other empire/business: ruined by future generations who did not toil for it and who will trade it for short term gain.

I don't think the obsession with the short-term is necessarily the natural state of people, especially not in leadership. There were buildings built in times past knowing full well that it would take decades and even centuries to complete.

But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.

> China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.

I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.

If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.

The west is very naive. A lot of the current state of the world is a result of western politicians believing the "end of history" theories of the 1980s - the idea that any country would naturally become a free market liberal democracy as it grew richer.

China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....

I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.

The limiting factor to Chinese soft power development is its need to remain authoritarian. Folks will accept living under one if that's all they know. But if you didn't grow up with the brainwashing nobody will trust you and everything is transactional. You see Chinese attempts to exert political control over its diaspora and it never works as well as they would like.

Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.

When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.

I don’t know man, I would have believed this wholeheartedly ten years ago. But people are choosing true authoritarianism in droves. People just keep voting for Trump, Orban, Erdogan, and Le Pen. Trump is extremely transactional.

All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.

They always have. The present isn’t super special, and I think Europeans (speaking as one) realize this a bit easier, because we see populist governments rise and fall again, over and over, in different countries.

Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.

But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.

In uni, my friends used the phrase “simple solutions for complex times” as an insult for political ideas. Cutting the Gordian Knot only works well if your father spent half his life perfecting a new military doctrine for you. Still, it’s amazing how many people have “how hard can it be?” attitudes about everything but their own career/field.

Yes, it will surely all end in calamity, whether anyone here experiences it themselves or not. Humans have a major (among many) flaw, in the nasty tendency to believe they not only have a sufficient understanding of sufficient enough things, but that they also know the effects their perceived perfect choices and actions will have on such a complex system. Many religions have stories capturing this folly, the most famous possibly being the Tower of Babel, which were are furiously building in spite of what many humans call God, while others believe they have no more need for a God greater than themselves.

I don't think authoritarian is the right term for critiques here. Try to define it in a way that one can't simply turn it around and apply it to people you probably don't want it to be applied to. For instance the actions taken during COVID, and against people during COVID, could easily be framed as extremely authoritarian. But then, like now, claims of authoritarianism were more of a proxy for 'I don't like the actions of this government' with authoritarianism just a framing of convenience.

In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.

Orban just tried to ban the yearly Pride parade and inadvertently turned it into the largest protest against his rule ever. Trump barely took the election and may have even stolen it, if recent news is to be believed.

meh, not like protests work

see Tblisi or Belgrade :(

Electing Trump and supporting Netanyahu doesn't help much with the soft power thing.

> Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”.

This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.

Growth is difficult when Apple is pushed out of the Chinese market because of geopolitics.

Decoupling was coined by Americans and enthusiastically embraced by the CCP.

Growth is awesome. We're incredibly fortunate to live in this high growth era!

What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.

This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.

> What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term.

Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.

That's a theoretical argument.

The empirically existing stock market does quite well long term. Apple itself is over half a century old, as are many other big companies.

Maybe. But future generations (like yours kids) will have to pay dearly for our „growth at all cost“ mentality that uses up limited resources disproportionately and unsustainably.

This stupidity isn't leading to growth though. I'm actually shorting them because their inability to produce products that actually add value to their customers lives is already manifesting in earnings/sales decay.

All you can do is be an executive, or failing that, be a shareholder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com