I don’t really see how these are related, could you elaborate?
Edit: Nevermind I get it.
Sooo, yeah. A lot has been written and even more has been said about this, but in snort, it’s the perverse incentives of capitalism. Nobody want’s climate change, or boatloads of people to starve, etc. But if that stuff doesn’t happen you don’t make as much profit and lose in the competition.
Another Hong Kong related incident over the weekend involving the NBA:
" the instigator was Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who on Friday tweeted an image with the caption, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” It was a small gesture of support for the protesters fighting China’s incursion into the semi-autonomous region, and the post was perfectly in line with the NBA’s official stance regarding freedom of expression…"
It’s notable that this is happening to the Rockets, who have been one of the most popular NBA teams in China ever since Houston drafted Yao Ming with the No. 1 overall pick in 2002. Yao is now the chairman of the Chinese Basketball Association, yet another organization that has elected to cut ties with the Rockets…
China has tremendous leverage here. The country is by far the NBA’s biggest international market, and the league has planned its long-term growth around the basketball-mad Chinese audience. Nearly half a billion people watched NBA games in China last season. Tencent, the league’s main digital partner in the country, extended its partnership in July with a five-year contract that is worth a reported $1.5 billion. As of right now, Houston games won’t be part of Tencent’s coverage. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company “took the extraordinary step of suspending its Rockets broadcasts and effectively blacklisted one of the NBA’s most popular teams in China.”
On Sunday night, Morey attempted to walk back his initial tweet, writing a pair of bothsidesish messages that read as though they were vetted by a small army of crisis managers, diplomats, and NBA executives…"
Doing so could violate their fiduciary duty to their investors. It would benefit society, but harm the investors and the company…
(IANAL, this is not investment advice, etc…)
Spoken like a man who does not want SEC on him!
In all seriousness you basically need to be running a family business to make carte blanche decisions that exclude a major market. Entertainment-wise china will probably continue to exert this influence until the market is settled there and unlike manufacturing or tech I do not see federal intervention for NatSec reasons to prevent American companies in this industry from being beholden to the Chinese market (film is already in this state).
Rym: Officially smarter than Elon Musk.
Duty to what. Ask IBM about doing your duty to shareholders.
Fucking fiduciary duty. I want a system where individuals and corporations alike are encouraged to do the right thing, even if it tanks shareholder value. Fuck the money. Those shareholders don’t deserve to be rewarded one cent if it’s on the back of promoting bad policy.
Take it up with the taft-hartley act of the 1940s. This shit has sucked from the start.
All companies must be non-profit. All profit goes back into the company for development and operating costs, employee compensation, or taxes. A minimum percentage that MUST go to compensation, with management having a limit on how much of the overall percentage of that they may take. This is of course on top of normal hourly/salaried pay. Also laws about the ratio between lowest paid and highest paid employee; The CEO can’t make more than X times what the janitor makes. Any profit that is not used for those two things within a certain time frame is taxed at 100% in addition to regular taxes. Basically outlaw publicly traded companies.
I mean, I see the logic of this, but I’m not against companies being for-profit. I just want a system that makes it so the only legitimate way to earn profits is by making sure everything else is A-1 first, and if a decision makes others better but hurts the bottom line, it’s obvious which decision gets made, at whatever cost.
If you have done the most within your reasonable means to help others, paid everyone well (at least following some kind of market rate guidelines) not hurt the environment, not bent to the whims of the political desires of some regime, not reduced the quality of your product to dangerous levels, not kicked your tenants onto the street, etc etc etc… paid taxes, not given the CEO a massive bonus; then, and only then, those who took a risk to invest money into your operation so that it had working capital can then make some return on that investment. But they are last to be paid, and any issues or non-compliance, the money comes out of the investor’s pool first.
In such a world most investment would end up making very minimal returns. Which is fine. I’m not against profit but I don’t think investing should be about profit as much as for-all-mankind. The reward is the kudos and knowledge of what was accomplished. The social perks and benefits of being one of the cool people who helped make it all possible. Something closer to a Patreon model?
Anyway that doesn’t relate to Hong Kong much, but, maybe they’ll figure out some new system in the aftermath of all this, if they aren’t completely subsumed into the Chinese system.
Guess I’m done with Blizzard games.
Related
MTG Arena is a great replacement for Hearthstone.
Long ago I replaced it with nothing. Been all about Switch games lately.
It’s funny, I’ve been having a nostalgia trip with wow classic and I just did the thing where you basically finish the game. You hit max level and you quested in all the zones you remember and did all the instances.
The next step is theoretically replace your social life with a social life consisting entirely of people from in the game… which I don’t think I wanna do and absent that I don’t think I wanna play.
That handles warcraft and I haven’t played hearthstone in years… Problem is starcraft was always my game. I don’t know if I could ever let that one go.
Imagine if the reverse happened.
NBA says, China, stop being evil or no more basketball for you.
Blizzard says, sorry China. We’re not going to allow anyone in China to play Blizzard games unless you stop being evil.
s/Blizzard/all/g
Every AAA studio and most mid-sized studios follow Chinese censorship rules even if they don’t say it out loud. China has a stranglehold on the global gaming industry. There’s a reason you don’t see Taiwanese flags in games, even small ones.
Board games are the same. Remember where they are mostly manufactured. You can’t break China’s rules in a tabletop game even if you don’t do business in China. They’ll seize your components.
Tabletop publishers, even small ones, avoid any topics or subject matter that would break Chinese censorship rules.
I’m pretty sure GMT sources all of their components (cards etc) from factories in China. If they don’t that would be a surprise, honestly. They’re currently printing a game called Flashpoint: South China Sea.
… and the old China Card / Formosan Resolution from Twilight Struggle.
You can slip through the cracks. China turns a blind eye or the factory is below the radar, pays bribes, etc…
But they can crack down any time.
The rules are also hyper specific. Alternate history is usually fine, as is fiction. What you can’t do is imply that Taiwan, in the real world today, is independent.
The smaller you are, the less likely they pay attention. But seizures have happened. And with this news, I would expect them to happen more often.
