Jack Ma retires as Alibaba’s chairman
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> The transition was announced a year ago.
People around here seem to have a very low impression of Ma (apparently based on one youtube video), but I can imagine running a huge e-commerce empire in China is non-trivial. I could imagine the personal management of relations with the senior Chinese politicians could be make or break for a Chinese company in a way that US companies simply don't face.
Also we have the issue of language barrier. Jack Ma was doing the interview in English, which for him is probably extremely difficult. I learned Chinese for 2-3 years and can barely order food. If you combine this language barrier with e.g. the cultural desire to save face, you may have someone saying something to say something, without being able to express themselves properly.
I'd say there are a lot of factors at play here and I would withhold judgment for now.
According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma:
> "Ma attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute (currently known as Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated in 1988 with a B.A. in English.[15][16] While at school, Ma was head of the student council.[17] After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and International Trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University."
I'm not judging either of them based on 1 interview; just saying language is not the reason his is good or bad.
On the other hand, Jack Ma seemed to very confidently say and dismiss a lot of things without evidence.
I don’t see a reason to compare Ma’s complete lack of reasoning skills to Musk’s absurd tweets. That’s whataboutism. Sure, Musk is all sorts of fucked up in his own way, but he’s no idiot; besides, that isn’t what we’re talking about here — unless for whatever reason you’re trying to defend Ma (which, again, seems like a pretty pointless exercise if you watch even a few minutes of that video), Musk’s weird ass behavior (which wasn’t exhibited in the video in question) has no bearing on this discussion.
I don’t have a dog in this race and would really prefer to never meet either of them, as they both seem pretty insufferable. My point is simply that Ma is damn near indefensibly stupid and (unfortunately, a trait that seems on the rise amongst prominent people in the world today) a poster child of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In Mainland China to get ahead you need to learn to say a bunch of stuff that nobody believes in, e.g. Maozedong Thought in high school/uni exams. Like political correctness in the West, except few people take it seriously. Ma's points were an example of this: focus on education, focus on AI helping us understand ourselves, focus on growing creativity, focus on what we can do to help the Earth, focus on automation freeing up more time for leisure. Non-controversial platitudes that nobody can really disagree with (at least not in China). Musk completely misses this, and goes out saying all kind of stuff about aliens, superintelligent robots and "biological bootloaders" that sounds completely bonkers to somebody not caught up in the hype (or somebody who actually works with ML). Ma catches on to this and has a field day hamming up his presentation, realising that this game is something Musk is completely incapable of playing. Just imagine how absurd it would be if somebody stood up at Party Congress and started talking about aliens; that person certainly wouldn't be presenting at the next Congress to say the least.
If you've only got a couple million, it's probably stupid to pay most of it to make a silly project (unless you can sell the results?)
Just a reminder that Amazon fails all the time at ventures. Amazon Handmade went nowhere. Amazon Register which was set to compete with Square shut down in 2015. They try all kinds of things, many of them very half-heartedly, and fail. Not everything Bezos touches turns to gold.
Very exciting and uncertain times we live in!
Edit: this isn’t an anti-China rant at all, just musings based on observations and incomplete data.
> The transition was announced a year ago.
Ousting to me doesn't mean getting thrown out of the building with your things in a box, it can happen peacefully and gradually. Jack almost certainly has ties to the CCP and a good dialogue with them--it's a necessity to grow a business in that country. My guess is that there was a good amount of pressure gracefully imposed by an outside group to step down.
But maybe he just wants to start a university/cure malaria and move on before China exports slow down.
My vague understanding is that the Chinese government now have more oversight of one of China's largest (the largest?) companies. Did they not before, or is this a significant indicator of something that has changed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_Department_of_the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Most_traded_currencie...
Once oil is sold in RMB, it would be vastly different.
Watching Elon control himself was amazing. the guy was trying so hard to not laugh or verbally slap the guy in public.
*edit for the lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKYWu-S2G0
Elon: ????
Often their disagreements are more cultural divides (remember Chinese culture and philosophy is radically different from the kind of ideologies held in Silicon Valley) rather than technical mismatches. However that doesn’t stop Musk poking fun at Jack.
I think it’s also worth remembering that Musk has a very high opinion of himself. Some of it is deserved but he is also wrong as often as he is right. So he’s in no position to be making fun of others on stage; let alone for their cultural differences. But I guess that’s always been Musks behaviour (if you take a look at some of the stuff he posts on a Twitter).
Reality of AI/ML in legal system: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/08/rise-of-t...
People won't die from what we build, but they can easily be denied medical insurance or get harsher sentences because an AI suggested it to a judge (especially those who aren't aware of the technology's limitations).
Building machines to make decisions should not be taken lightly. See: FAA(not N)G companies who ban people without human interaction.
I like Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for difficult problems, but I didn’t like his (what I perceived) lack of respect for Ma.
the anti china sentiment that has been driven up by US media and Hong Kong protests alike is irrational and is bordering xenophobia and bigotry.
just a small glance at r/HongKong and you can see images posted out of context with slogans against the police and government, most of which are targeted towards kids in school, sometimes by the same kids.
Are you saying the footage is faked or something else?
there are footage of protesters beating the police with equal brutality, but i guess you won't find it on reddit.
i'm ending my discussion here with you, you can choose to consume and believe whatever media you like.
my 2 cent was that reddit is a cesspool of propaganda now.
For a non american not interested in american politics or your cold war in China, the whole site is becoming a useless pile of noise.
Yes, it's quite bad but at least these days they can't be overtly racist. Look at the American anti-China campaign in the 50s and 60s, it was appalling.
I suppose the lesson I'm taking away is to not buy into a counter-reaction immediately. It's obvious in hindsight: SCMP is owned by Alibaba after all.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17940919
[2] https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20180907230109/https://www.nytim... (may need to turn off JS)
[4] http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.nytimes.co...
One particularly interesting subject to cover would be Bloomberg's alleged “Big Hack”[1]. Between the initial publication and the final denial by all the involved companies, a lot of different narratives have emerged and gained traction here—and most of them turned out to be incorrect.
Let's not be so dismissive of SCMP either. They're accurately reporting what an Alibaba spokesman said about Ma. The objection doesn't seem to be about the parts where the NYT says that he "planned to step down" and "Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba's board of directors and continue to mentor the company's management", which is accurate, but the other parts where they call it "retirement." Evidently he thinks that his plans for the future should still be considered active involvement with the company.
When it comes to America and the beloved companies, there is always justification. The other day it was privacy and ability to unsubscribe. HN was justifiably ranked really really terrible. Of course everyone came to its defense.
Then of course the tyranny of the majority on this beloved forum, though not any participant is willing to accept it.
HN needs Dave Chappelle.
China is literally one of the worst countries in the world at this current moment. Their ethnic cleansing, treatment of minorities, extreme censorship and state control does not make them a likable country.
If you want to know what the majority thinks, you need to find a top post that wasn't flagged and didn't attract so many comments it was downranked by the flamewar detector, because otherwise the majority won't even see it. Then wait a day or two for the ranking to stop changing and check the top comment. I think you'll find it much more reasonable than whatever appears at the bottom with "showdead" turned on.