headsupftw

Wait a sec. When the products are sold by IKEA, they are cheap but they are "products that people actually need". But when they are from China, they are "cheap crap from china"?

$850MM relative to $2.85B is still a lot of money.

Because it's good for you? Even if it does absolutely nothing to help you defend against COVID-19.

Crime or not, NYC seems to be doing pretty well. Top dog in the entire country for the past decades and the foreseeable future.

I lived in Atlanta (starting from my GA Tech days) for over a decade and I've been in the South Bay for a few years. As much as I love Atlanta and the gigantic house I was able to afford, landscape-wise it doesn't even come close to what the bay area has to offer. Beltline is pretty neat but you will find it rather disappointing if you have ever been to one of the coastal trails in the bay. Not to mention the lack of skiing options (sorry but Gatlinburg ain't Lake Tahoe).

The most important thing is not the airports. All metros have them. The differentiator is the vast number of asian grocery stores, restaurants and other stores/businesses. In America the Bay Area is only behind Los Angeles in that regard.

"nature": beaches, mountains, ski resorts, redwood forests... Seattle is like that or even better but 9 months out of a year the weather is just a big no no.

Don't know about peninsula but in south bay tons of old homes have AC. And more importantly, dry hot feels very comfortable to me personally.

An A/B test requires all other factors to be the same. Can you imagine a bunch of Harvard kids quit school, rent a house in Cambridge and code/party all year round?

Maybe he meant to say micro-operations.

Then what's the point of hiring her and people like her to work for Google in the first place? So that Google could claim that they have Ethical AI researchers and Google's AI research is indeed ethical?

"stock valuation notwithstanding" Perhaps you were thinking of Samsung Electronics, not Samsung Group.

Which nobody does if she's not a healthcare worker.

One of my coworkers, who is a staunch supporter for wearing face masks to protect against coronavirus, wears an N95 the entire time he's in the office. Yesterday he claimed he's having chest discomfort (which is what some people will feel when they wear N95 24x7 awake) and went to a hospital to demand a test for coronavirus infection. Needless to say his request got declined and he's doing just fine but I am simply speechless at the irony.

And Sony Walkman/Discman! To me Sony in the 80s/90s was like today's Apple. In 2000s I bought a small Sony box that could stream Comcast cable TV from my house to my PSP when I was out and about so that I could watch my own TV while playing poker at my friend's house.

Oh please do. Why don't you start from the laptop or cell phone that you used to post this knee-jerk piece of gibberish?

Of course it's different but I fail to see how it is "completely" different given that the UK Royal family did actively loot ancient Britain. Tomeito tomato if you ask me.

Do you even know TikTok is not available in China? The brand was specifically created for western countries. In China the same company (ByteDance) owns a hugely popular short-video app called Douyin. These two apps do not share content for obvious reasons (yes, communist censorship and all that).

I think what boggles HN readers' mind (mine included and I'm Chinese btw), is that in a place that's purportedly Orwellian or at least bearing resemblance to it, creativity is supposed to be severely oppressed and virtually non-existent. Yet the reality is quite the opposite.

Oh please.

So are you saying that currently American companies are NOT allowed to acquire Chinese companies or operate in China?

There are a few instances where that's true (there are also a few instances where Chinese companies are not allowed to acquire U.S. companies or operate in the U.S.) but you said "I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies". So again are you insinuating that at this moment, no American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies or operate in China?

"plus more in stock options/RSUs (which despite the negative reaction to them here on HN, actually do often turn into real money at least at unicorns or public companies)"

I find that (the negative reaction to them here on HN) hilarious when it comes to RSUs of a publicly traded company such as Google and Facebook. They are absolutely unequivocally every bit as real as your salaries. Maybe it's just that people outside SV don't really understand the difference between options and RSUs. Before I came to SV I had never even heard of RSUs.

The United States doesn't officially recognize Taiwan as a country. Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations. Apple's revenue in Taiwan is peanuts compared to that of mainland China. The list goes on.

Please go to China and talk to people with no rights but lots and lots of dough because their land/houses got confiscated by the commies in order to build high rises, freeways, high-speed train tracks or whatever the Nazi government has conjured up. They are literally the envy of the young generation because they no longer have to work (that IMHO is indeed a problem). But alas they don't have rights whereas homeless people in San Francisco can defecate freely and indulge themselves in needles basking in the democratic sun.

Make no mistake I'm a staunch supporter of democracy and freedom and despise the fact that China is lacking in both probably as much as you do. But please get your facts straight and refrain from using your imagination to comment on a country you most likely have never been to.

"If it had been the other way around, the US would have done the same, no doubt."

No, the US would have bombed the shit out of the Chinese cruiser.

"HK only amounts to a small percentage of China's GDP now" Echoing this statement, HK accounted for 18% of China's GDP when it became part of China in 1997. Today its neighboring city Shenzhen alone generates more GDP than HK. Nobody saw this coming twenty years ago.

"In America ... I find it a drag that almost none are open past 10 or 11pm"

I used to live in Atlanta and there was a 24-hour Kroger right across the street from my townhome. One night at 2am, I bought a gas grill at that Kroger on a whim. Good times.

Now I live in Silicon Valley and there are quite a few 24-hour grocery stores according to google map.

It's not too hard but in the meantime it's not trivial, either. I worked for a multinational corporation in Beijing so in the office (or outside the office via corp vpn) we were allowed to access sites such as google.com.

I paid for a vpn service so for personal stuff I was able to access every single site on the Internet. I did this for over two years and never got into any trouble. My impression was that nobody cares if you find a way to browse facebook, twitter, wikipedia as long as you don't use that opportunity to incite subversion of the government or some similar shit.

Not really a good counter example as "Jack Ma" is his English name (i.e. not his legal name, not the one printed on his passport. more like a nickname that can be easily remembered by westerners).

If you google his legal Chinese name, you will find that it's never "Yun Ma" in English media. Instead it's always "Ma Yun"...because he is a big shot.

In terms of Chinese names, my observation is that in English media, if your name is printed as "first_name last_name" then you haven't made it yet. But if you are somebody, your name will appear as "last_name first_name". E.g. Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping. When was the last time you heard "Ming Yao the former Rockets center"?

"I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?"

Not at all. Nowadays there are hundreds of millions of people in Mainland China with a single-character given name. Case in point: former tennis player Li Na, former basketball player Yao Ming.

I say "Mainland China" because I notice people from Hongkong and Taiwan have mostly two-character given names.