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13/ Some numbers I'm going to make up: A company with 1M investment can make 100K gross and lose 50k in total. At 10M investment it can make 1M gross but lose 100k. If it decided to flip to profitability it could make 1K profit a day.

14/ As an investor you will notice that they 10x their growth! You want to give them 100M so that they can build more and more. If they wanted to bootstrap, at 1K profit a day, it'd take YEARS to get that kind of capital.

15/ Profitability should be ignored when there is growth potential. When there are lands to conquer, you want to give the generals more so that they can do more conquering. If you try to micro-manage the generals, you lose the war.

16/ This empire building mentality requires individuals with large appetites. People who can actually wield these giant streams of money. They're often very different people who want to manage razor thin margins of a factory or do social good. They're conquerors.

17/ In China's systems, these generals can be reigned in because there are fewer sources of easy debt. Generals run out of money faster. VS in the U.S. where they can access Saudi Arabia's money or a collectivized pool of dumbasses who overextended on credit-card/mortgage.

18/ In China, it's much harder to maintain your mandate of heaven and make it permanent by becoming a flywheel. E.g. tech companies have so much money that they don't NEED to print money, it just flows in. This erodes the influence of the central authority.

19/ Pawnbrokers are a source of debt in China but the market is small.https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1324392326580432897?s=20 …

20/ What Ant financial is doing is that it's providing an alternative source of capital that is not under control of the central government.https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1324392328207888384?s=20 …