True, but you can do a much richer set of transactions with Ethereum/Solana, like moving stablecoins and making collateralized borrows, including against real world (tokenized) assets.
I made a connection to this practice in the HN discussion about the court case over chalking tires for parking enforcement, and the extent to which we really regard your car as being sacrosanct against touching.
Separate comment because meta: wow. Just ... wow. It took rayiner forever to get an extremely basic point that was well-explained from the beginning. I still feel frustration from re-reading that. And even once he finally got the point, he just reiterated the same generalities. What a waste.
That wasn’t a political statement. Per your link, it was a belief that that could not continue the credit card payments while staying in compliance with the law.
>this doesn't get enough attention. ByteDance could have easily partitioned off the US environment and made bank selling it. but the influence potential was too juicy for CCP to let ByteDance sell it.
I think that's kind of trivializing the position they were in. Would you take the same tone if it were an American startup that were forced to sell a big chunk of itself pre-IPO? Would you roll your eyes at them for "being greedy" at any indication of pushback against such a requirement?
I don't think the law is necessarily bad, considering the national security implications, but it's a cop-out to dismiss the burden of being forced to sell a major part of an enterprise as no big deal and the owner as just stubborn.
> Would you take the same tone if it were an American startup that were forced to sell a big chunk of itself pre-IPO? Would you roll your eyes at them for "being greedy" at any indication of pushback against such a requirement?
to be clear, I don't think ByteDance was greedy. I suspect ByteDance would have been happy to cash out. but it wasn't up to them, they needed approval from the CCP.
if a US social media startup somehow got extremely popular in China, I'd understand and even empathize with China requiring it be sold. they'd be right to mistrust us.
No, we've seen this happen before in China, where some US company becomes popular, e.g. millions of people in China have bought iPhones.
Then China requires the company's operations in China to be more than 50% owned by China. The TikTok thing is very much "what's good for the goose", but it's also the US acting more like China the authoritarian country.
China had a longstanding requirement that companies operating there under certain conditions had to have majority domestic ownership. It appears they've relaxed it somewhat in recent years and now I'm not sure if it applied to Apple China or not.
But the distinction is somewhat redundant with their government structure anyway. If they want to force you to do something there, how much does it matter if they say "you have to because we have majority control of this company" or "you have to because we have a one-party system and control the law"?
If the US government e.g. orders a US company to censor criticism of the US, the company can sue them and plausibly win. If you can't do the same in China, you don't control that company, they do.
The question was whether you would roll your eyes at the startup and have no sympathy for that startup because of the "big chunk of change" they could have gotten selling it.
You can both believe that the requirement is justified and that it comes at a big cost for the org that would have to sell. They aren't mutually exclusive.
>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
It's not that I don't believe it, it's that this figure is completely unrelated to the damage and waste caused by the system of healthcare and health insurance we have in the US.
I mean, in a system of chattel slavery, you see above-normal profits competed away, but that in no way means the system isn't exploiting anyone, because that's not how the harm shows up! And yet still we'd see that argument get batted around in comments like yours:
"No, your owner can't possibly be exploiting you because, when you consider your purchase cost, he doesn't actually make much profit!"
>If the grocery store decides to remove the prices from everything, and require its shoppers to first call its billing department only open until 5pm to receive a set of numbers, then call their third party subscription service only open until 6pm to receive a non-binding estimate, for every item in their grocery list,
Good point (buying food would be a nightmare if it worked like American health care!) but that's a different argument from the one made above in the thread, that a profit motive in a vital good inherently creates perverse effects.
Exactly. Even if you forced doctor compensation down to the level of other countries, that's, what, a 6% overall reduction, at best? Wow, so now when you get a surprise bill for $5000, it'll instead be $4700 instead! Hooray! We did it, Reddit/HN!
Does anyone think American healthcare was thereby fixed? I don't!
Now, FWIW, I'm happy to accept that US doctors are overpaid, and that there are feasible ways to make progress on that front. It's an important conversation to have. But it has virtually nothing to do with what makes US healthcare so brutal and kafkaesque.
Does that include the artificially bloated cost of care (compared to e.g. Medicare), the costs of Medicare Part D fraud, and the costs of having care denied and delayed (2–3x the claim denial rate of Medicare) or just the premiums?
Last time we did this song and dance you doubled down on incorrect assumptions about how Medicare functions. So, no, it's not likely I'll come to the same conclusions as you.
Yes, it is pretty silly to think American healthcare would no longer be a global laughingstock if surprise bills of $5000 were replaced with surprise bills of $4700.
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