This is just pressure to ensure Bytedance sells to Microsoft
Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
571–580 of 694 posts
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#572Not US citizen here. Can someone explain how in a democracy the chief executive can singlehandedly decide to ban a media only a few month before elections? I can't make any sense of that, it seems wrong at so many levels...
The short answer is that he can't. The president has no power to ban TikTok. The president also has no control over how the app is distributed or its connectivity. He can say whatever he wants, and he can strongarm the agencies he has some control over (like the FCC), but there's simply no mechanism by which a ban can be enforced, legal or technical. Unless Google and Apple decide to voluntarily remove it from their…
I guess you never heard about what happened with Huawei?
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#573This makes complete sense, I guess it’s hard to suppress Epstein and black lives matter content when it’s on tiktok. We need to go back to communicating on the tedious YouTube experience and getting 2 views a month if we aren’t linking to a amazing baby stroller that our video unboxing is about. All hail FAANG.
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue here is that it's a president arbitrarily destroying a company. If the Congress (the actual body meant to crate laws) decides to create a reasoned, comprehensive law to level the playing field with Chinese companies, then they should do it. What shouldn't happen is this kind of impulsive decision making that arguably abuses the emergency powers of the presidency to block an app that allows people to film th…
I disagree. The definition of "arbitrarily" states: "on the basis of random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system". I think the President's decision is based on reason and is not a random choice or a personal whim as much as it might seem to some. Now, why is that? Well, it became public yesterday that Microsoft was in talks with TikTok to acquire them. Though every business decision by big player…
> The definition of "arbitrarily" states: "on the basis of random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system".
Here's what OED says. (b) looks interesting, especially with the 1st amendment complications.
(Unless I'm missing something and arbitrarily is defined in US constitutional documents??)
---begin---
arbitrarily, adv. (ˈɑːbɪtrərɪlɪ)[f. arbitrary + -ly 2.]
arbitrarily, adv. In an arbitrary manner, at will;
arbitrarily, adv. a. merely at will, without sufficient reason, capriciously;
arbitrarily, adv. b. unconstitutionally, despotically.
a1626: Davies Quest. Impositions 131 “This power of laying on arbitrarily new impositions.”
1656: Hobbes Six Less. Wks. 1845 VII. 394 “The point F is not to be taken arbitrarily.”
1754: Edwards Freed. Will iv. 2 (ed. 4) 279 “The meaning that they arbitrarily affix to a word.”
1769: Junius Lett. xxxv, “Their rights have been arbitrarily invaded by the present House of Commons.”
1849: Macaulay Hist. Eng. II. 126 “The Bishop of Dunkeld..was arbitrarily ejected from his see.”
1882: A. Macfarlane Consanguin. 1 “The arbitrarily chosen names of substances.”
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. This ban is against something that's controlled by it. Bans per se aren't antidemocratic, we already have plenty of banned stuff. The only thing that can be antidemocratic is their purpose.
> This is less so because they ban anything that isn't controlled by the authoritarian and antidemocratic regime. Really? So why are there Apple stores in China? It seems like a rationalization to always see ourselves as the "good guys" no matter what. Every empire ever did. Playing devil's advocate, I can see the Chinese rationalizing their bans as defending their sovereignty against Western dominance since we have…
Come on. China’s communist regime killed tens of millions of its own people within living memory. It presently commits egregious human rights abuses against its Uighur Muslim population. It prohibits its citizens from accessing media which might possibly negatively portray The Party. Banning TikTok may be a bad idea and the US certainly has its own troubled history, but this executive order isn’t “hypocrisy” and it certainly doesn’t put the US in the same moral ballpark as China.
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
When should China open their domestic markets to foreign competition?
Is Telsa, never mind Buick and VW not at least some evidence that they have?
No, unless and until there is a domestic chinese Luxury Car maker of note. This is the exception which proves the rule. They don't make directly competing products; so these come in. Watch what happens when they do.
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#577They should change the name of the app. The kids would figure it out in 10 minutes and reinstall. Trump would take a couple years to sort that one out.
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bytedance was ordered to suspend its most popular product, a news-aggregator app called Jinri Toutiao (Today’s Headlines). The next day, regulators yanked Neihan Duanzi, the company’s social-media platform, where users share jokes and videos. If ByteDance really was an extension of the state, surely they wouldn't even have launched a product that violates the regulations of the state they're supposedly an extension…
They are now as Bytedance for the message and will now do whatever they ask
If a company apologizes for violating regulations and promises to do better, it usually means they made the minimum changes necessary to signal compliance, not that they suddenly changed their ways and will always do as told from then on...
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, if you don’t believe in the western systems of checks and balances despite the long, long track record of it performing with greater regard for human dignity than any regime without checks and balances, we’re just not going to be able to have a conversation here. No sensible person would suggest the American system is perfect. But to suggest that an imperfect system of checks and balances is tantamount to an ac…
Thing is, there are no checks and balances for this area of government activity. Otherwise why would american companies include government backdoors in their products?
Companies tend to fight back when it's profitable to fight back; and do their best to ignore the government otherwise. See: this week's tech CEO house hearing. I can't recall this example of the backdoors; and if you say "Clipper Chips" I'm going home.
Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to get into a debate, but Traditional Chinese characters are only really used in Hong Kong and Taiwan these days.
Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandarin speaker. And when in doubt using a dictionary is trivial. If the text is digital you can pretty much get a 1-1 mapping 99% of the time. Especially if it is putonghua (as opposed to dialect) Obviously something as big as the introduction of jianti is quite ra…
And the ancient characters are different still, they're all wavy and it's a lot of guesswork for people who haven't specifically studied them.
But it's clearly a continuous culture. We don't use a bunch of wacky f's in our writing anymore in America, doesn't mean we're not a continuous culture on our timeframe.