The price may not have been a check. The government was telling them who the boss is. It is morally suspect to shake down business like this; however, maybe Dario really was a pain in the a**. It's hard to know what really happened here.

China is a famously closed ecosystem. Li Keqiang -- a CPP provincial secretary -- candidly said in 2007 that CCP numbers are "man-made and therefore unreliable". on. People interested in measuring China's economy use proxies, which has become an academic cottage industry. In 2020, China famously cut its population by 200 million (!!!) people.

Anyone who takes Chinese numbers at face value is foolish, because the CCP doesn't do that themselves.

Almost all GM cars are built in China. GM basically gave all their technology away for the privilege of doing this. My guess is that these new Chinese cars will be reliable.

The CCPs model is "State Capitalism", which is a far cry from free markets. It's really a variant of socialism; however, that term is overloaded, so we use the term "State Capitalism" for the variant of socialism where the government has the "commanding heights".

The West does massive of amount of government funded R&D. Eg., the NIH, and the NSF.

Precisely. The CCP has relied on widespread financial repression of its citizens to build an impressive industrial base. The key question is this: if Chinese citizens do not exchange exports for imports, then what is the point? It is economically incoherent. China will accrue a massive amount of foreign currency, and then what? Bathe in it while it deflates away?

Economic imbalances have a funny way of correcting themselves eventually. When this happens, China will discover that foreigners can moderate their appetites or find alternatives. The same cannot be said for factories and their workers.

Excellent analysis from economics professor Patrick Boyle.

You were lied to. It's a fun lie, but still a lie. Companies are made of people and reflect the values of those people Mostly top-down. Some companies are villainous. Some are fine. Some are great.

Disney always believed in changing the world for the better. And I think they've done some great work. That's a top-down corporate value. Straight from the head.

The problem with trying to change the world for the better is that sometimes -- often -- we just don't know enough. It's the "fatal conceit", that our imaginations are somehow more powerful than billions of individual decision makers. Kennedy had an ideology. She believed in it. A lot of people believed in it. It was a lemon. The Star Wars IP was trashed. (And same with every Lucas Films IP.)

Corporate values are the values of the humans that work there -- mostly the leadership.

It sure was beautifully shot. If only they put 1/10th as much work into the characters and their motivations.

They are "ideological qualified", which is what DEI was always about anyway.

Sounds like psychological projection to me.

I care, and I wasn't "slapped in the face". You care -- were you "slapped in the face"?

Your problem is with "tribal knowledge", not with "face slapping". And tribal knowledge is a universal problem -- at least, that's what the science says. As stupid as MAGA is -- AND IT IS STUPID -- every tribe is equally stupid. If your particular tribe is correct on some issue, it's mostly likely because of lady fortuna.

Alas, thus it is, has been, and always will be.

This is too black and white. Nobody wants the government wasting money. And maybe the government shouldn't be doing some of the things that it does. For example, every state has a dept of education, and the federal dept merely serves as a way to strong-arm states of political issues, like ruining the lives of college men on hearsay because politicized moral panic from epistemologically challenged feminists.

Thankfully the US government is relatively efficient -- as these things go.

And you're factually incorrect as well. Trump cannot "take it all away". Congress has to do that. Trump is an ineffectual blow hard would-be dictator. It seems his only true talents are as a cult leader, and a kleptocrat.

I don't think people wanted Trump to do "terrible things". The American public chose "getting into a car with a drunk driver" over reifying grievance politics. Trump1 was relatively benign compared to the sh*tshow of the last year. Turns out the American public see that they made a mistake.

Harris was a weak candidate. Trump is graded on a curve. The Dems were corrupt. MAGA has created a world where corruption doesn't exist. It's plausible that Hunter Biden got millions to gain access to his dad. Trump's crypto scheme allows billions in corrupt donations with no paper trail. The Dems ran ashore on the ship of grievance politics. And now we're being punished for our sins. The punishment is, of course, way out of proportion to the crime.

This is all true -- for some loose definition of "Nazi". Oh how I wish more people knew what National Socialism was about. For fscks sake.