There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705432

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

"Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants' High colony. It was the usual arrangement: We're carrying a one-third xor of the pad. Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three parts would be xor'd together. The result could supply a dozen worlds' crypto needs on the Net for --"

In Vernor Vinge's novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" one of the most valuable commodities were one time pads that are physically transported to communication nodes to enable unbreakable communication. The pads are split into three pieces that are XORed to create the actual pad to reduce risk of compromise.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370295

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

+ The simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically extraordinary evolution, as extended kinship networks weaken across the nation and close blood relatives disappear entirely for many.

+ In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic increases in survival, men and women in their 30s as of 2020 have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s kin increase may be a significant, previously overlooked factor explaining the Chinese economy’s astonishing performance since Mao Zedong’s death.

+ The kin explosion has reached its peak, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and relentless kin crash, driven by its sustained and progressively steep sub-replacement fertility relationships. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in the models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese annals.

+ Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost inevitably foretell lineage extinction for many Chinese families.

+ Researchers and decision makers in China and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their consequence. Among these are pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surpluses of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions.

+ Despite this, the looming macroeconomic consequences of old- age dependency burdens, the most significant economic impact of China’s coming revolution in the family, may actually concern the micro-fundamentals of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi/social & business networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as propagation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s extraordinary upswing, the severe coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.

+ The ability of China’s increasingly sparse younger working age cohorts to support many times their number of elders is very much in question.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302464

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186705

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

As for the strategic thinking elsewhere in the world, I think a secondary problem with all the cover stories and columns marveling at China’s overwhelming strength and infinite wisdom is that they not only mischaracterize Chinese motivations today, but they confuse the qualities that were the primary drivers of this story all along. China became a superpower not because of uniquely clever or patient industrial planning (which was tremendously successful, but not particularly novel), but first and foremost because of a political and corporate culture that was both entirely rational and absolutely relentless about understanding and capitalizing on Chinese advantages (winning on scale and service with a massive and unusually skilled workforce, leveraging a billion consumers to lure foreign investment, and offering the world lax environmental and labor laws that helped them grow their economies), while simultaneously exploiting a raft of weaknesses in the Western system. The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded, the PLA was modernized, and now here we are.