I guess this mentality makes sense if your products’ failures may lead to actual people dying. And in VW’s case it’s the correct culture working as it is supposed to? My Toyota sometimes feels like it was designed by a lawyer. But I somewhat understand given their history of being badly sued.
That being said, at this day and age they probably need to evolve to accommodate some UE principles from the consumer electronics industry. Especially given how cars are getting more computer centric. Hitting a good balance between the old compliance/safety mentality and UE mentality will be hard.
My first visit to the Berkshire Hathaway website a few years ago literally changed my life. I was immediately attracted. I went to search Buffett and went down the rabbit hole of shareholder meetings clips and value investing and index investing. I am so much richer mentally and financially now thanks to the random visit to this website.
I've always thought that the American individualist/China familial is looking at things absolutely upside down. For the Chinese, the family mimics the tyrannical nature of the government (and/or the other way around). The keyboard social observer of me find the American family value of equality, respect for autonomy, unconditional love and support more conducive to forming stronger bonds. Anyone who's lived in a typical Chinese family should wonder why the hell there's the stereotype that Americans are more individualistic?
Eastern culture seems too big a term. What do you think is cooperative in Chinese culture? The whole point of the Chinese imperial ruling system post-Qin is to make sure people don’t cooperate to secure the emperor’s rule. It worked wonders for two millennia. Then the totalitarian Leninist system perfected it with modern technology, party organization and propaganda. The modern mainland Chinese people cooperate because there is a powerful central government pushing. Random people have minimal trust towards one another for cooperation. Yes we build power plants and highspeed rails. But we also quarantine cities and abort fetuses en mass and engineer famines with the same system. It’s cooperation with totalitarian characteristics.
Over the years it feels like Federighi’s pleasantness and enthusiasm in those fun videos just don’t translate into the work he oversees. The software mostly work fine but they don’t make me feel “aha” or “this is how it should be done” anymore.
berkshirehathaway.com is a great text-only site, containing troves of buffett's letters with much wisdom. though the actual text mostly end up in pdf formats.
This has been said of the internet itself in China. But even with such heavy censorship, there seem to have been many more internet heavy weights in China than even Europe?
I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.
Maybe Yahoo owns TechCrunch. Perhaps they’re detecting access from China based on more than just IP address. Since Yahoo was grilled for handing over dissidents’ info to the Party they really went the extra mile to distance itself from China. They even blocked Engadget from China.