There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.
Taleb made a lot of money trading, his firm failed but running a successful business is not trivial and his ideas ended up working when he took up an advisory role rather than an executive role. Unlike other financial "influencers", he actually seems to understand mathematics to a high degree.
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
There likely isn't a Canadian Alex Karp. Karp is a unique byproduct of American culture. The specific brand of arrogance, hunger for war, and callous disregard for human life, all in service of a right wing ideological project, is simply not as present in Canada because Canada is a middle power with more liberal values who prefer diplomacy over war.
We barely have a space industry, how are we meant to compete with starlink? We need foreign investment. We also need protections against foreign investment. We also need to uplift south africans left behind by apartheid. That is the purpose of the law.
You are just wrong, the law says the local partner must be economically productive, and starlink is allowed to choose them, so if they don't contribute to starlink's business, that is starlink's fault. This is now the second time I have told you this, so you are wilfully misunderstanding me. Conversation over.
Again, I never said it was zero sum, but thanks for being condescending. I said it was close to zero sum. Black south africans may get some jobs, maybe some internet, but the profit entirely goes to foreign entities and white south africans (in a theoretical model).
The law's intent was never to be racist, and while outcomes vary, the effect does not actually harm white south africans on average. So both the intent and the effect is non-racist.
It hedges national security risk by having 30% of the profits stay within South Africa, so that if the foreign company decides to use their company to, say, spy on South Africans, they at least have to fund our key industries to do so. That is why B-BBEE applies to Telecomms and other key industries.
Why don't you guys ever acknowledge that the law is an attempt to correct the racism of the apartheid government by distributing economic opportunities to those who never had them?
Starlink is allowed to choose who they partner with. They will go through a lengthy process to pick partners that align with their business, including value propositions.
The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.
Problem of course is that a lot of this information is junk even at scale, which is how you get people "deciding" to pollute, destroy their own health, start wars, etc.
B-BEEE exists as a kind of "national security risk insurance", that is why it is only applied to sectors like Telecomms and Mining. So my statement is not incorrect.