111–120 of 401 posts
I'll never understand why (a) Vine was shut down, and (b) So many Americans are eager to rush out and use a Chinese social network. I suspect (b) can be explained primarily through ignorance.
I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies until American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies (or otherwise operate in China). These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.
What about French companies buying strategically important companies in the US? That then gets bought by a Chinese company at a later date? Is it a French company still?
Although... now that I think about it... underage girls twerking in tight, skimpy halloween costumes to all the latest trap beats about getting blowjobs from hoes, while swerving at 90 into the fast lane is important.
I suppose Zuckerberg wants to kill it, just like Vines, but he can't this time, and it's a threat to the lamest social media company to ever have sucked the life out of all your important friendships.
I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies until American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies (or otherwise operate in China). These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.
Or are you claiming that foreign investment into local companies hurts local companies? If so, please justify our past three decades of policy towards Asia, Africa, South America, and the post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Foreign investment into those countries owns a lot of key businesses and infrastructure, but for some reason, very few firms originating in those countries have significant investments in the US.
If openness to foreign investment is a good thing, why do you care about making it quid-pro-quo? If it's a bad thing, why do we push so hard for it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other c…
What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet…
EDIT: Sources in-text since i'm already being downvoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
I highly recommend folks listen to recent episodes of Ben Thompson’s exponent podcast where he discusses TikTok and its influence in the USA. He makes the point that US consumers become subject to Chinese censorship policies when using the platform while China outright bans or heavily restricts American companies from operating (eg google search, Facebook).
US consumers become subject to Chinese censorship policies under services, media, and entertainment provided by US companies too.
Oct 14: "TikTok has moved into Facebook’s backyard and is starting to poach its employees" https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/tiktok-has-mountain-view-off...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other c…
What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet…
All American social media censors their users, most people just arent producing that type of content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What incentive do they have on their side to do that? Ignoring the moral argument, which I agree with, there isn't much financial benefit that comes from that, and very few people who make it that high up the chain seem to be influenced by moral arguments. Your argument veers unreasonably so into nationalism; there's no reason they shouldn't instead start investing money in Europe, or one of the dozens of other count…
Their incentive is History. Specifically Louis XVI. Good ol'Louis knew things were messed up and he tried to rectify things. But it was too late.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
...
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
...
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”
Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
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Why would they care if people were pissed off when they can afford not to care? Especially with enough Chinese and Saudi blood money that they could blow their noses with tissues made of hundred-dollar bills? They're above your problems, they're above everyone else's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't 1 side support globalism politically though?
"Both sides" have anti-globalists, and both have globalists, and despite an interesting few years globalism is still the establishment norm for most mainline parties in liberal democracies.
You can believe in geographical borders while also having foreign relations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other c…
What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet…
There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0].
It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect her identity.
Which is a pretty good example of how different cultures prioritize things differently. Scale that up to the reality of the tech space being dominated by US companies, and suddenly US cultural norms largely became established as global norms [1].
Before the Internet, US soldiers stationed in other countries had a very similar effect: They also brought their culture with them, which often was considered way more exotic than anything local. Decades later nobody even much cares or notices how US influenced much of our culture has become in Western Europe.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2f8xmd/nsfw_the_dif...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-29/the-cleaners-...