Their model is to provide a sales/ distribution platform for small- to medium enterprises who wish to sell in Asia:
After 18 years in China, Alibaba has almost 11 million SMEs on its platform and has created 30 million jobs, Evans said. “Those were created by SMEs actually growing, being online instead of just selling their products in their local community,” he explained. “We don’t believe that it should be materially different for U.S. SMEs that come onto our platform.”
In the future, a big part of Alibaba’s globalization strategy is to allow U.S. SMEs to eventually start selling to other Asian markets outside of China, Evans noted. “Jack’s long term vision is to connect millions of these SMEs to new consumer markets,” he said.
Competition for both E-Bay and Amazon, according to folks I know who’ve lived in Shanghai and other places in China and are involved in tech. Alibaba is actually a better platform for small business than either e-bay or Amazon, it combines payment processing, advertising and even shipping, distribution and warehousing in some cases. Wechat is another Chinese technology that’s arguably superior to the anything in the US.
Wars are bad, even trade wars. But this may even be neccessary, or not. I lack the required qualifications to have a opinion.
Idea #2.
Every talk of “free market” seems to be hypocrisy. To put in the pile with “family values” and others. Nobody believe in the free market, and everyone chanting that, was a liar or a confused idiot.
Idea #3
Maybe the idea here is “protect USA interest at any cost with short views and no imagination”. That… may even be fine? I mean, except is (it end being a) bad idea, is understandable.
There is certainly many of those but there is also plenty of Etsy types, artists and maybe even some services, like middle-age game critics :-).
Edit: I completely forget the most important point of Jack Ma’s goal. By using Alibaba’s platform, his dream was to allow Americans to sell products to the 1+ billion Chinese. This can’t happen in the middle of a trade war.
I think there is a clear case for trying to rein in China’s abusive trade behavior - particularly wrt intellectual property.
Like everything else this WH does, though, their attempted solution is just insanely stupid, and more likely to damage the US than bring about the required result. If the goal was to rein in Beijing, then an alliance with the EU and Japan (and ideally other Asian nations - like… you know… that thing Obama was trying to set up… whaTPP was it called?) would have allowed the US to bring an incredible amount of economic pressure to bear on China. Combined with some arm-twisting via the WTO, it would probably have been possible to win the war without ever a tariff.
Beijing isn’t happy about this trade war, but Trump has pretty much accelerated China’s path toward Asian hegemony by 20-30 years, so even if they blink first, they’re coming out ahead.
Besides, Trump is only interested in one thing. I fully expect that - once things are hurting enough - China and the US will negotiate a result whereby Trump is able to crow that he “won the trade war” and “hyuge jobs”, while gaining absolutely nothing of significant value.
The only thing you’re wrong about is dipshit fuckbox needing an actual event to declare victory.
More likely it’ll be the Tuesday of Jared’s indictment and he’ll hold a rally about how awesome tariffs are and how many jobs he’s created, in the absence of the tiniest bit of evidence.
Theres also a abuse of the intellectual property laws to gain marketshare.
Like companies using non-standard conectors so they are the only source of such connectors, only to find a chinese company make connectors with the same shape, because a plastic shape is not a discovery or a idea or a trade secret, is only a stupid abuse of the IP system.
This companie asking 200$ for a 4$ cable finds a chinese company selling the cable for 5$. And then goes “OH NOES, OH OUR IP”.
But has a consumer, I would happily apply a hammer on the hands the person that made the choice to sell the cable for 200$, and break his hands in a way that had to write using his mouth for the rest of his life.
And when Sony claims ownership of all Bash compositions[1]. I want to find a large tree and hang all Sony executives from the tree. Dead. So they die. And make the world a better place by killing these people.
I am with you on the finger-breaking thing, but I wonder if this isn’t just an unhappy side-effect of blind algorithms. Sony legitimately owns the copyright to some Bach performances and enters them in the system. But other performances are too close for the algorithms to distinguish, so they get flagged.
Probably there should be some meta-testing that compares submitted music to a library of publicly-domain music and does some reasoning based on that to prevent this sort of thing.
Certainly - I also agree there’s a clear case for reining in the absurdities of US IP laws - not least the USPTO’s tendencies to grant ridiculous patents. But that’s another discussion…
I completely agree with you and Teiman on some of the absurdities of IP law, (and the obscenities of Apple pricing) but last I looked Sony isn’t primarily a US company, and the link talked about the European parliament.
I think the fundamental problem is that basis for most IP laws predate the copy machine, and the tape recorder, much less a digital universe. Our attempts to patch them have been failure. I think they need to be re-written from scratch preferably by people under the age of 35.
And expanding our stupid IP laws was one of the main basis of my opposition to the TPA as it had existed. Not, I may note, as the concept. I was and am in favor of such an agreement, but not that text.
It’s been a while, but the way that this agreement, like many others, was being used to export our IP laws, such as the for all intents and purposes infinite copyright length, to other nations.
Especially how such systems are abused by many industries, particularly with things like code. Software patents should not exist, straight up. I say this as someone in the industry. So expanding our ass backwards IP laws is actively harmful. And the way those were being included in secret and without public input really irks me.
The concept of the agreement, however, I don’t recall specific objections.
But I really really hate US IP law, and vigorously oppose retrenching of our broken system.
The TPP sucked because it not only exported our IP laws and forced them onto other countries, but also meant that we (as US citizens) would be unable to get any change on some of the worst offenders (like DMCA stuff), because TPP would lock us into the global treaty requiring it.
The TPP was good in that it provided a good platform to get China in line and show that even the US leadership we could get them to fall in line, and mitigate their leadership role in the global system. We have lost that, both with the TPP falling through and with the general Trump administration actions.
Ah I ok, that’s a fair criticism of TPP. You said TPA and thought you might be referring Trade Promotion Authority also known as Fast track. Which I used to think is a good idea, but now under this president I am seeing my worse fears about Congress delegating their constitutional authority to the President. No single person should be able to declare either a shooting war or a trade war. While I appreciate it is impractical to have all 538 members of Congress handle trade negotiations. The current system where the administration does all the work only to get an up or down vote from Congress, which is now almost entirely partisan is clearly not working.
How is it that TPP failed, so apparently some kind of vote had to happen, yet the orange idiot can do whatever he wants to our economy via trade and tariffs?
