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Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

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Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#381

Post by yomly »

peteretep wrote: post #349
justinzollars wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the West and China is that China has been able to maintain its civilization state and it has a continuous history. The West's history is discontinuous

> China has been able to maintain its civilization state and it has a continuous history I'm baffled by what this means. Could you compare it to the United Kingdom for me? Are you conflating written history with continuous history?

While as an island the UK means its borders have mostly been fixed, it has definitely had quite a fluid culture and language history. The romans came and left their mark. Then the Vikings and the normans. We've had a strange love hate relationship with the French forever, branding them frogs while learning French so we can seem sophisticated. So in my mind it does lack that continuity that China has:

For instance the sunzi bingfa (art of war) was written in 500BC and still is mostly understandable today.

On the other hand if I were to drop a reference from Vergil or Homer in latin/greek. I would be branded of being in cahoots with Boris Johnson and very few people would understand it.

Edit: And even that - I don't think Italians really would understand Latin texts (tho will have a better chance than brits). I think ancient greek is a little easier for modern greek speakers tho.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#382

Post by xvector »

rydre wrote: post #53

If there is any rule of law in the country, this should be against the constitution. If the US does this, they'll be losing a lot of goodwill founders from other countries have about the US. The US is uniquely thought of as a part of every country for business. If you're from third world country but you'd like to do a tech business in the US, you're free to do so without much hurdles by the government. Open competiti…

I hope to god that China halts trade with the US to show it what a real trade war looks like. It would put an end to the bullshit US exceptionalism of our country, and maybe we’d become more civilized players in the world stage as we learn some humility.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#383

Post by moksly »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #106

Not even getting into the CCP ties, it's always struck me as unfair that Western social media companies are banned in China, while Chinese ones have been able to compete Worldwide. In a way this gives Chinese apps an immediate advantage (as some are indirectly calling out in this comment section). If you want to reach out to someone in China, you have to use a Chinese company's app. Since social media is mostly a win…

This is a good point and it’s easy to get caught up in it. Because it makes perfect sense. One of the reasons the west has graduated toward freedom and a more free society is because it worked better in the long run. You can go back and look at how the government letting people do business rather than banning them lead to rises and falls of empires because rich families would simply relocate to the free countries rather than stay a place where the king might decide not to pay or perhaps even to seize their wealth. You see it to day as well to some extent, with rich Chinese and Russian oligarchs not in favour of the regime trying to move to the west.

Of course things have changed a lot since the East Indian Trading company, kings and what not. So maybe protectionism works better in a global market interconnected. Maybe the Chinese model is simply the future for us, but probably not.

Personally I hope for a more GDPR styles approach to social media in general. There is no doubt China is spying through TikTok, and that’s bad, but I don’t really want Facebook or Google to sell my information either.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#384

Post by miracle2k »

ethanbond wrote: post #346
kjksf wrote: post #322

Earlier 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…

> If you claim that this app is a national security threat then any app is. How so? Not every app is 1. Owned and controlled by an adversarial state, 2. In the hands of every American youth, and 3. Providing opaquely generated/sorted content. So explain how every app is an equivalent security threat.

The US used to claim a higher moral when others blocked, filtered, or enacted bans by executive fiat. It did so with some justification.

Banning an app because you are worried about external cultural influence on your youth ends any such claim.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#385

Post by nfc_ »

siruncledrew wrote: post #231

If I had to guess, there’s 2 sides to this coin. On one side, there is the concern over China’s connection with Tiktok and their foreign influence on the US. On the other side, shutting off access to Tiktok allows more domestic control over what mass communication options people have to interact with each other. There’s something to be gained for someone(s) in both cases.

The thing is other countries can now use the this precedent to demand domestic control of US social media companies.

France may have a the same foreign influence concerns issue with the non-transparency of the FB news feed algo.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#387

Post by Barrin92 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #352
Barrin92 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because not giving someone access to your market is stupid, in particular if you're not a developing country because there's nothing to be gained from protectionism, other than enabling the increasingly authoritarian tnedencies of the American government against its own citizens. Why does something need to be proposed at all, is the US threatened by zoomers doing funny dances on a smartphone app?

No, they’re threatened by two things: 1. Equipping the CCP with a sensor placed in the pockets of millions of American citizens. This is already a problem when American companies are doing it for ad targeting purposes. But to do the same and funnel the data to an increasingly militaristic near-peer adversary? It in fact makes it qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different. 2. Tiktok opaquely selects which conte…

There is no evidence at all that China puts the thumbs on the scale when it comes to content being served in the US, TikTok has kept US data out of China, and now is actually willing to open source key parts of its code base to auditors, which is a ridiculous double standard anyway given the disinformation campaigns on domestic platforms who are under no such obligations.

That aside, the US is a free country. Everyone can spread propaganda. I was under the impression that American citizens of voting age are able to discern information themselves and distinguish between hoax and reality.

Since when is it the task of the US government to police media companies?

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#388

Post by xvector »

wtracy wrote: post #38
onetimemanytime wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess: National security as in Huawei https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18216988/white-house-huaw... Let's be realistic, if an app was doing what is alleged here, they should be banned and I'm sure they are provisions to do so without a vote of Congress. Biden campaign was also told to delete TikTok from phones, maybe NSA knows something.

So, there federal government will not be allowed to use TikTok? That's not much of a "ban".

If TikTok is put on the Entities List (doesn’t require congressional review), then Apple and Google will be banned from doing business with TikTok. This forces TikTok off the App Store and Play Store, effectively killing the app globally.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#389

Post by xvector »

nfc_ wrote: post #362
creato wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that you even talk about retaliation in a post where you acknowledge that anything that would be a worthy retaliation is already banned !

Apple makes $50 billion in revenues a year from the China market. Would people still buy it's phones if the App store or mobile data was shut-off?

Huh, now that would be some fantastic retaliation from China!

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#390

Post by keiferski »

georgeburdell wrote: post #338
keiferski wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an extremely simplistic explanation with, I suspect, very little predictive power. A fitting note for every idea Taleb has ever had.

Is it? In his book, Black Swan, he mentions his hedge fund, which did quite well during the peak of Covid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...

Not quite sure that COVID counts as a Black Swan event, at least according to his own definition. From Wikipedia:

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.

2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).

3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.

From your article:

Taleb, in a March 30 interview on Bloomberg Television, said a pandemic like the coronavirus outbreak was predictable and investors who weren’t hedged paid the price with steep losses. What’s impossible to predict is the timing of such an event, he said, which is why insurance must be in place at all times.

So essentially his "big idea" is the concept of insurance? That doesn't quite qualify as intellectually significant to me.

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