Have you spent any time in China, interacting with anything other than tourist traps?
The "law" in China is mostly an idea that is enforced or ignored at the whim of local officials. Hu Jintao is the leader of China, but if you want to get anything done - whether its to comply with or flout the law - it all comes down to who you know locally.
They have laws covering everything in China. Consquently, everyone ignores them.
FWIW I have VOIP on Comcast from a provider in China and have had no problems. The provider is iTalkbb.com, but don't use them unless someone in your household speaks Mandarin. Their English customer service is limited at best.
Unfortunately that's the way life is sometimes. I started my first company with a partner who was the sole breadwinner in a family with three kids. I was still in my twenties and had no obligations. I had to go without pay for six months and then a low salary for two years before it ultimately paid off. He couldn't afford to take that kind of risk, so he dropped out early on and I had to find someone else.
That said, this Y Combinator thing is just one of dozens of avenues to get going. The single most important thing you can do at this stage is talk to as many people as possible. Have coffee with potential investors, co-founders, partners, marketing types, whatever. Then start doing things. Even if it's just drafting the business plan, you have to maintain forward motion.
> Regarding China's cultural taboo
I think "taboo" is too strong a word, but IME Chinese people have no problem asking you about things we consider private such as how much money you make, what your monthly rent is etc.
I, too, look forward to the day when a billion obese Chinese are driving around in SUVs...
Sadly, the obesity part happening now. My wife is from China and our niece and nephew are both quite chubby, as are many kids there. Their favorite restaurant is McDonald's. The adults are almost uniformly slim, though some have a slight paunch common to middle-age.
SUV's are another story. If they adopt cars at anywhere close to the rate of the US, they'll need to level Mongolia just to park.
Just look at the campaign contributions from the last few election cycles. Most major businesses & their leaders would give heavily to both parties.
[snip]
They own both parties, less a few hardcore partisans and maybe a couple idealists.
Actually, the trend is opposite, what you suggest. This "give money to both parties" strategy was the modus operandi pre-1994. But Tom Delay, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich and others specifically set out to undermine the status quo with the K Street project, which seeks to get Republicans hired at (and Democrats fired from) lobbying firms, and punish those that try to play both sides. The result is that corporate giving to Republicans has steadily grown relative to that given to Democrats.
Jack Abramoff is the epitome of this. His clients generally radically reduced their giving to Democrats as soon as they signed on with his firm.
No. Free will is the ability to differentiate between good and evi
I agree in principle, but I also believe that people who do the most evil, especially on a mass scale (the Holocaust, Maoism, Pol Pot) do it because they believe they are doing good. A torturer who believe he is working for a cause that good will practice his craft with zeal. Witness the Inquisition. Or, for that matter, the masses who persecuted Christ. They believed with all their hearts that they were on the side of good.
Israel will take the threat seriously and bomb the hell out of Iran's caches of missiles and nuclear weapons facilities.
Unfortunately that probably won't work, as was detailed in this war game simulation put on by the Atlantic last year. Here's the salient quote:
What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The problem is that Iran's nuclear program is now much more advanced than Iraq's was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse, it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran's attainment of its goal--but at the cost of further embittering the regime and its people. Iran's intentions when it did get the bomb would be all the more hostile.
Iran is run by kooks, but surely they're smart enough not to put everything in one place like Iraq did.
They're throwing cash into this black pit because everyone says to, but how many companies are actually experiences increased sales from onling ads?
A friend of mine makes lots - and I mean LOTS - of money advertising on Google and redirecting the traffic to affiliate programs. It's just him and two partners, yet they do enough business that Google brought them to Google Zeitgeist all-expenses-paid.
His biggest problem is definitely NOT increasing sales from ads. Rather, it's keeping enough credit cards with big enough lines of credit so that Google doesn't turn off the ads in the middle of the night when he hits his credit ceiling. I kid you not, he regularly pre-pays as much as $100,000 on his cards so he'll have $200,000 of running room.
3.5 years ago he was broke and looking for a job, so he tried this as a desperation move. Within a month he was paying his mortgage with it. Google is a godsend to him and to the companies he's an affiliate for.
"Decoupled" is a strong word. Technically, the Chinese claim the Yuan now floats against the dollar, but it's kept inside a tight trading band and the government can intervene and revalue by fiat anytime it wants. As a result, currency traders don't bother to speculate in the Yuan. That's why China didn't get hit with the Asian currency crisis of the late 90s.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you spent any time in China, interacting with anything other than tourist traps?
The "law" in China is mostly an idea that is enforced or ignored at the whim of local officials. Hu Jintao is the leader of China, but if you want to get anything done - whether its to comply with or flout the law - it all comes down to who you know locally.
They have laws covering everything in China. Consquently, everyone ignores them.
FWIW I have VOIP on Comcast from a provider in China and have had no problems. The provider is iTalkbb.com, but don't use them unless someone in your household speaks Mandarin. Their English customer service is limited at best.
Unfortunately that's the way life is sometimes. I started my first company with a partner who was the sole breadwinner in a family with three kids. I was still in my twenties and had no obligations. I had to go without pay for six months and then a low salary for two years before it ultimately paid off. He couldn't afford to take that kind of risk, so he dropped out early on and I had to find someone else.
That said, this Y Combinator thing is just one of dozens of avenues to get going. The single most important thing you can do at this stage is talk to as many people as possible. Have coffee with potential investors, co-founders, partners, marketing types, whatever. Then start doing things. Even if it's just drafting the business plan, you have to maintain forward motion.
> Regarding China's cultural taboo I think "taboo" is too strong a word, but IME Chinese people have no problem asking you about things we consider private such as how much money you make, what your monthly rent is etc.
On Space Giants they turned into rockets!
Let's say I'm a telco executive. And let's say I don't have a clue. But I repeat myself...
There's one in western Colorado that's been burning for something like 90 years. Apparently this is a pretty common problem.
Actually, the trend is opposite, what you suggest. This "give money to both parties" strategy was the modus operandi pre-1994. But Tom Delay, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich and others specifically set out to undermine the status quo with the K Street project, which seeks to get Republicans hired at (and Democrats fired from) lobbying firms, and punish those that try to play both sides. The result is that corporate giving to Republicans has steadily grown relative to that given to Democrats.
Jack Abramoff is the epitome of this. His clients generally radically reduced their giving to Democrats as soon as they signed on with his firm.
Israel will take the threat seriously and bomb the hell out of Iran's caches of missiles and nuclear weapons facilities.
Unfortunately that probably won't work, as was detailed in this war game simulation put on by the Atlantic last year. Here's the salient quote:
Iran is run by kooks, but surely they're smart enough not to put everything in one place like Iraq did.
A friend of mine makes lots - and I mean LOTS - of money advertising on Google and redirecting the traffic to affiliate programs. It's just him and two partners, yet they do enough business that Google brought them to Google Zeitgeist all-expenses-paid.
His biggest problem is definitely NOT increasing sales from ads. Rather, it's keeping enough credit cards with big enough lines of credit so that Google doesn't turn off the ads in the middle of the night when he hits his credit ceiling. I kid you not, he regularly pre-pays as much as $100,000 on his cards so he'll have $200,000 of running room.
3.5 years ago he was broke and looking for a job, so he tried this as a desperation move. Within a month he was paying his mortgage with it. Google is a godsend to him and to the companies he's an affiliate for.
"Decoupled" is a strong word. Technically, the Chinese claim the Yuan now floats against the dollar, but it's kept inside a tight trading band and the government can intervene and revalue by fiat anytime it wants. As a result, currency traders don't bother to speculate in the Yuan. That's why China didn't get hit with the Asian currency crisis of the late 90s.
But I otherwise agree with everything you say.