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Alibaba To Train a Million Youngsters In E-commerce (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Alibaba has announced its plans to train a million teenagers and graduates living in rural areas of China to kick-start their own businesses. The Chinese e-commerce giant reached an agreement today with the China Communist Youth League to support the teenagers with funding, training and partnerships. The company's internet financing branch Ant Financial will set aside 1 billion yuan to invest in the training of recent college graduates who want to return to their home-towns and launch businesses.
More emails from Nigerian princes asking for help to transfer money.
...is supporting grass roots capitalism.
Somewhere in the afterlife she didn't believe in, Ayn Rand must be smiling...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
a million new sources of spam to flood email boxes.
Greetings fellow Americans. I would like to take this opportunity to salute our leader, the great glowing pond duck, and to restate the proposition that America is a special, peaceful, and God-blessed place that only annihilates cities with nucular weapons when there is no other option. And most of the people who died were Asians and don't we have enough of them to go around anyway? Life is cheap in the Orient. Capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. We live in a Democracy and the international community is calling on us to stop the war by BOMBING BOMBING BOMBING BOMBGING KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL FOR PEACE AND GOD!!!!!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Sounds like what uber does to drivers. Well jim, paying for drivers/warehouses is expensive. Let's get a million idiots to do it for us... we'll call it innovation.
All this will do is get a million people with a bunch of crap in rural areas with nobody to buy it....
Why is there a need for people to do this work? How many online shops selling the same thing using images and advertising materials ripped off each other do we need? Call me cynical but this really just looks like party insiders finding yet another way to bleed millions out of a "plump pig" and the flow of money will mostly go into far fewer pockets than people imagine.
Now if only there were some enterprising companies like that in North America, I'm sure I could get my business off the ground for $153.
(1billion yuan, 153,000,000 USD, 1 million students...)
Alibaba is a company based on the concept of cheating the American devil of as much as they can. Now they are going to train 1,000,000 more Chinese in "E-commerce". What could go wrong?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Actually a lot of the posters here should be rejoicing. In my experience Chinese youngsters in general are extremely good at selling stuff online, this could be a great boon for American companies/brands as export of American goods and good news for any other country as well. A lot of young Chinese today are engaged in selling to the ever growing Chinese middle class, and you might just find that export of your product might as well happen to small players as to a few big corporations that won't pay you more that nickel for your product making them the winners not you. Realize that Chinese youngsters and Chinese in general, no longer want copies, they want the real deal. So why don't you find those old worn jeans, or whatever product you can research your way to, is in demand over there and find yourself a collaboration partner and then start bringing in a new stream of revenue for yourself. The Chinese are hungry for interesting foreign goods, and no they do generally not use SPAM, I have never ever received a SPAM mail from a company pedding Chinese goods, in fact your fear of SPAM is unfounded if you look at the Chinese online marked and social media usage, you see they don't have to use SPAM, people scour over services like taobao, and use WeChat constantly looking for products they desire and if you have it you're more or less certainly going to sell it money is not a problem in China. Social media platforms such as WeChat from Tencent that have everything built in, from social networking to shopping modules and online payment processing systems and APPS are far superior in comparison to our traditional western social media / trade platforms. I think people should stop whimpering about the communist threat, that is so last century thinking and they really should start living in the present, please try to realize this is one world populated with people that more or less all have the same goal - A good prosperous life in peace! Start collaborating instead of bickering, seriously, I have spent a fair amount in China over the past few years and trust me if market forces are at work at the moment anywhere it is in China, and if you want to tap into the good life, now is your opportunity, that is if you can see through the smoke and mirrors. And that this hits the news is kind of interesting as the Chinese government despite contrary beliefs, actually encourages private entrepreneurs and have for years done so. In fact I wish the government where I live would ease restrictions on start-ups as they are in China tax wise, a trusted source non government affiliated business person explained that as a small timer i.e. personal entrepreneur, you don't even need to pay tax of anything till you hit something like a turnover of about 300000 Yuan (roughly 46-47000 US$ in todays value 2016-03-16) and they were free to even start multiple businesses if they were willing to lay down a deposit per business etc. So stop fearing the Chinese and start collaborating with them, you will find they are more like you than you possibly think. Grab this opportunity by the horns - It is a chance unlike any you've seen in many years - Seize the moment!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
So, at that age, ivory integrity is at it's most gleaming for a well brought up child. Any decent poor Chinese rural child will not want to be a capitalist pawn at that age and an armada of rug rats, quick to be disciples of Alibaba (because of the inevitable preferential treatment they will get in job interviews et. later with their Alibaba connections), will capitalize, hence screwing the decent kids over for life of any opportunities they might have had, ad infinitum, in China as it has been anywhere else, nothing new.
50 cents for you, comrade, but with a formal warning for not using Western style paragraph breaks.
Geez, was that unreadable post supposed to be The Great Textwall of China?
Encouraging startups is just good business. Eventually something will turn out that will revolutionize things, and this project might just move the world technical design mantle from the US to China, similar to how in the 1990s, so many startups popped up, most failed... but a lot still remained which gave useful products.
One of the biggest problems in the US is that there is a failure to understand that eating your seed corn is stupid. You have to plant crops in order to expect a meaningful harvest later on... and with China getting entrepreneurship off the ground, they will have new and cool stuff, eclipsing Silicon Valley.
out with offshore Indian developers in with offshore Chinese developers
This is one of the few cogent comment in the entire discussion (at least when I loaded the page). We're conditioned from birth in the West to believe that the Chinese aren't capable of doing anything right. Depending on which generation you were born into, either it was starving children, the red scare, or Chinese knock-offs and their own mistakes as they begin to figure out how to build their own cars and infrastructure.
That hubris is good and all--that the West is pinnacle of human civilization and that China can't do anything right--for now, but I feel that things will very quickly change, probably in the next 10 to 20 years. Remember that scene from Back to the Future when Marty tells the Doc in 1955 that all the best stuff's made in Japan after the Doc scoffs at, what was it, the camcorder being made in Japan? China is very nearly ready to join the developed world.
One of the biggest problems in the US is that there is a failure to understand that eating your seed corn is stupid.
I know you're talking about macroeconomics, but I wanted to throw out there one of the most incredibly stupid things I see parents do on a regular basis. They'll throw their kids out of home the moment they turn 18. Children aren't little birds that benefit from being thrown out of the nest at 18. I mean, it's romantic idea, that, like the bird, the child will either begin to fly or... well... learn some kind of "lesson" about the "real world."
I mean, here's the thing. You throw your kid out of home at 18, and then what? They get a job making minimum wage, living paycheck to paycheck, and worst of all in my book, renting. I make about the median income where I live--I could make more but I will never have a job more secure than this current one--, certainly not minimum wage, and I can barely escape living paycheck to paycheck. (Granted, I do have some excesses I am cutting back as I get ready to flee flyover country before there actually is a Christian Daesh.) At least I own a house.
Instead, let the kid stay at home for a few years. Let him build up a savings account. Let him buy his first car with cash even if that isn't as easy as it was in 1960 when it was a couple paychecks from a summer job. When he's ready, let him buy a home with a decent down payment.
They say buying a home "ties you down" or is at least a sign you've "settled down." I look at it this way. I can rent, and in that case my option to move to another city only comes up once per year when the lease is up. 6 month leases are even more expensive. And what do you have to show after renting somewhere, say, 5 years? Nothing. That's right, absolutely nothing. On the other hand, owning a home, even if at the mercy of a bank that gave a mortgage means that while I have no precise date I could know 6 months from now when I want to move somewhere else, I can put it up for sale any time I want. How quickly I find a buyer is up to how eager I am to move vs. how much more I might make by holding out. And that's the real trick. What do I have to show after paying a mortgage, say, 5 years? Quite a few thousands of dollars! (depending on market etc)
I mean, in this scenario, I'm not even considering that the kid is going to create the next Google or Apple. To me this just seems to be a very basic thing that families could to do increase their generational wealth. Instead they send it straight to the 0.1% by guaranteeing their kids will be wage slaves throwing over half their income away every month at a rent check.
I've written rants in favor of a universal basic income before, and I honestly do believe it's what needs to happen eventually even if we're not there yet. However, I can only feel so sorry for the working class renting their residences who ensure their children will remain wage slaves who also have to rent their residences. As we're beginning to find, capitalism and communism are both fine systems on paper. Neither works in the real world over a long enough timel
How many online shops selling the same thing using images and advertising materials ripped off each other do we need?
The Chinese do the same thing in the off-line world. It is common to see an entire street of tiny shops, all selling the exact same merchandise. Since the shops are tiny, they can only offer a very limited selection. Since the neighboring shops are all selling the exact same selection, they can only compete on price, so they are all selling for a few cents over their cost, and making almost no profit.
Of course it would make sense for them to consolidate into a single large shop, with higher prices and much better selection, benefiting themselves as well as their customers. But they can't do that, because they don't trust each other. Chinese businesses seldom grow beyond hiring family members, and with the one-child-policy, that means they stay very small.
Funny... But don't quit your day job you are not quite ready for prime time comedy yet !
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
Would be nice to see who was throwing accusations in the air, but I suppose when flinging unfounded mud and sowing fear uncertainty and doubt it is difficult to show your true face hence people may see you for what you truly are. I have never given a hoot for rules and regulation in writing, so your paragraph grammar fudding is completely off the mark, sorry that you live with such a limited world view that you can't see an opportunity staring you right in the face! I have mentioned nothing political pro or con a specific type of rule in my post so where you get off bringing in politics to the discussion is beyond me, I have stated facts as of what I have actually seen and experienced a government in a specific country do with regards to encouraging business initiatives. Have you ever been there, how many Chinese do you know that live there ? I am in daily contact with people in China and looking into possibilities there, what are you doing to help your economy and thus the economy of your country ?
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com