I have been spending time playing a game called Family Farm Seaside for a little over a year. They just released a major version that is buggy and not well thought out. Up until now, I was not curious about the company that made it. But I was motivated and surprised what I found and the implications if President Trump ramps up the trade wars.
So the company is named FunPlus and they do have a coherent web site Here.
So it turns out the company is located in Beijing China! The company was founded by and is led by a man named Andy Zhong. He claims Silicon Valley roots and his LinkedIn profile lists as a young man (he is 30) he was working for AT&T Bell Labs and ask.com.
So that is pretty boring. Then I decided to see who owns the funplus.com website. It is a GoDaddy registration that comes back to Qi Lu, who claims an address in Union City, California. Now he and what he represents is seriously interesting.
Qi Lu was raised in rural China, where his parents hid from Mao’s cultural revolution. He came to America and got his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He wound up at Microsoft being the EVP over Bing, Skype and Microsoft Office.
He left Baidu to run an entity with the curious name of Y Combinator.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
So here is the gold at the end of the rainbow.
Y Combinator finds and funds software companies and cultivates them. Some fail, but many are a success. For the guidance, they get a minority ownership in those businesses. They have around 1,700 clients now. Some of the ones I recognize include Doordash, AirBnB, Dropbox, Disqus, Justin.tv, Weebly, Scribd, and Reddit.
Funsoft sold its gaming business in 2014 to an entity called DianDian which was acquired by Shanghai Zhongji Investment Holding, since renamed Shanghai Fukong Interactive Entertainment
countess and I have observed a few things on YouTube. Our buddy Indiana Jack made a delivery to a Costco warehouse and was shocked at the lack of activity. Watching trains, the containers from Asia vanished. Countess has noticed strange dumping of out of season mechandise that seems illogical.
This is not the 1980s – we actively encourage the growth of China and much of our technology is dependent on Chinese entrepreneurs. You can’t just sever those ties. The coming empty store shelves may have nothing to do with hurricanes.
A danger is the entities owned by the Chicoms buying into nascent Silicon Valley firms that are extending key strategic technology – so that the Chinese communists get an edge over the US military.
http://news-edition.com/china-targets-u-s-tech-startups-in-investment-loophole/
I don’t expect to see many empty store shelves. As Wilbur Ross succinctly said a few months ago, if China stops buying soybeans from the US, they will have to buy them from somewhere else. If that somewhere else sells to China at a higher price than we were selling to China, then we will have somewhere else’s former customers looking to the US for soybeans.
The same can be said for HD TVs. Korea and Japan come to mind immediately.
As an occasional reader of Tom Clancy, I had formulated a WW3 strategy that isn’t on anybody’s radar. My original theory involved VCRs, but internet connected TVs or IoT devices are more effective for this assignment.
Everything is now controlled with very sophisticated software, and to the best of my knowledge nobody screens it to look for undocumented capabilitues.
So let’s hypothesize that the devices have a way to cause themselves to catch on fire. Now add in a techique using some digital sequence in the data stream or the over the air signal that will trigger the device to catch itself on fire. Let’s keep it modest and suggest 1 million devices simultaneously catch on fire. A few will be put out by people who have right fire extinguisher and think quickly.
Fire responses are based on normal statistics, not acts of war. At any given moment, Charlotte might be dealing with 5 fires. What if at the same instant 5,000 buildings (including some fire stations) catch on fire, including every skyscaper in Uptown? The Nationwide firestorm would make Dresden look like amateur night.
We are now returning to our regularly scheduled paranoia.
Possible. Also, cause self-driving cars to crash, or batteries in laptops, cell phones, and cars to overheat and catch fire.
I can see a terrorist doing this or a nation-state that naively thinks they won’t be tracked. The source of the trigger will be tracked – maybe to a wrongly accused innocent party and the public will support another 30-year war like we have with Iraq (1991 is not quite 30 years ago).
The only way a nation-state would do this is if they can blame someone who is innocent… or “lone wolf” like Lee Harvey Oswald.
The best reason China would not do that is the same reason threatening to dump Treasuries is a hollow threat. If you succeed in burning down every building in America, you lost your customer base.
Dumping treasuries is meaningless. That is basically what happened systemically in 2008 and the Fed printed money and bought them as people sold and/or refused to buy the new issues.
People are not connecting the dots, the Fed’s action in 2008 turbo charged the expanding gap between the haves and the have-nots. If you owned stocks or real estate, you saw your assets double or triple while renters saw their dreams dissapear in the rear-view mirror as the homes they wanted became more and more unaffordable with increasing rents and home deposit requirements while wages fell do to outsourcing to the third world.
The Bush/Obama QE plan created the socialist movement of today.
The real issue never discussed regarding QE wasn’t that the money was printed, but who received it and who did not receive it. Call it crony socialism if you are a conservative, or call it crony capitalism is you are a liberal, but never all it capitalism or the rule of law.
Exactly ! and then you have ‘Boltneck’ Herman munster-Kerry out there meeting with the Iranians, behind everyones back. telling them to wait till the
‘Dipshit-Democrats’ are back in power, and were back in business making plutonium bombs and suppressing the freedom movement in Iran.
I loath self-driving cars. at least those fools running the self driving truck ‘otto’ they were using a lot of computer power on a self-driving truck which should be on rails . PTC Positive Train Control, we already have it. ( or will very soon.)
Yeah. Sleeper cell TV’s that burn up, I can see that. wouldn’t be too hard to do. more unintended consequences, Nancy Peloci –> Botox. Unintended consequence. Dead from neck up.
A lot of those going around. Meth and Wasp spray is
the ‘New IN thing’ to snort.
can’t fix stupid
parrott
Snorting wasp spray is the new bee’s knees!
😉
Go with your gut
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies