Great action, I fully support!
US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the ban will just be on the monetization. So they can keep TikTok and WeChat, but will not be able to profit from them.
Monetization is also the reason China banned every US Internet service.
Funny enough, it is not. Of course, one of the reason Google got banned was because Baidu, its competitor watches it all the time, and every time it is not following the law, Baidu will file a complaint for it. Foreign businesses make good money in China.
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats how world wars break out.
I dismissed it as mere hyperbole in 2016 when people suggested this to me. Now I feel it has a significant probability of actually happening. Also, I recently watched a documentary on the start of Nazi Germany. The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
> The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
I'm just listening to the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" audiobook; a bit dated now (written in the '70s) but also written by someone who was in Germany during the whole time. There are a lot of parallels, but according to him, there are a lot of key differences (caveat -- haven't independently checked these characterizations):
* Germany did not have a strong democratic history; unlike both England and France, which had strong movements towards democracy hundreds of years before, Germany was a functional military dictatorship up until the end of WW I. Hitler could openly say that democracy was a bad idea, and lots of rank-and-file Germans agreed with him.
* Germany had a very strong army that was authoritarian, more or less an independent political entity, and sympathetic to Hitler's aims
* Germany had a very biased judiciary. While leftists were sentenced to death for treason for simply reporting violations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ended up spending only 9 months in jail for actually attempting a violent coup. This wasn't just because Hitler was popular or charimatic: loads of nationalists / authoritarian rightists had similarly soft punishments.
The US has a strong cultural affinity for democracy; the military is not, at the moment, sympathetic to a dictatorship; and while according to some reports, some police departments are more sympathetic towards right-wing demonstrators than left-wing demonstrators, the judiciary is not.
In other words, we have a lot more institutions that would need to be subverted before we were in the kind of danger Germany was in the 1920s. Still, better to be aware of the dangers and do what we can to oppose them sooner rather than later.
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's stopping Volkswagen from lobbying Germany to ban Teslas because all the cameras in it pose a "national security risk"? This is, by all account, a shortsighted move
The understanding that the US would respond in kind by banning the import of VW Group vehicles or putting a very high tariff on them. In any case it wouldn’t be in Germany’s interest with the new Tesla factory going up there.
What a brittle and fragile peace. If one country gets a nationalist leader in power, I'll lose access to all their goods because my leader is an idiot. Awesome
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#565Instagram Reels is launching at a "convenient" time.. . . ..
AFAIK , tiktok's demographic (teenagers) is no way going to do the same things on facebook . It's probably going to be a new company (Franken-Vine maybe)
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#566I agree 100% with this. I mean, there are other developing economies with serious tech sectors like India which operate according to the rules based open market system we have in place. If the US doesn't take action against Chinese protectionism, why should other countries abide by the rules and give US access to their markets? The US provides China it's market even though China closes it down for everyone. I think U…
Hahahahaha, India operates according to open market system?
India was well known for silly electronics tariffs, government overregulation and favoritism, and tit for tat retaliation and mercantilism well before the US and China started their economic war.
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only reciprocity if you divide the world into two tribes, the "China tribe" and the "US tribe". Someone from the "China tribe" did something bad to the "US tribe", so now we're going to grab a random member of the "China tribe" and punish them for it, even if they're not the one responsible. I used to think the Western world had abandoned that kind of collective punishment, but apparently not. It ceases to be re…
> But having the president order arbitrary punishment without proof of guilt (what happened to presumption of innocence?) looks like a dictatorship to me. It is. There's a faction in the US that believes the US has to have a dictatorship to compete with China. We've been here before. The USSR looked like an unstoppable juggernaut until the late 1960s / early 1970s. Like China they started from a state of relative bac…
> The real answer is to encourage and protect our ability to innovate while waiting for China to run out of things to copy.
When did you last visit China? That train has long left the station :-)
Advanced materials research, Aerospace and Chip Fabs are pretty much the only areas where technological areas where I currently see US having a lead
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's stopping Volkswagen from lobbying Germany to ban Teslas because all the cameras in it pose a "national security risk"? This is, by all account, a shortsighted move
But if Chinese social media firms are freely operating in the USA why can't the likes of FB and Twitter be allowed same free access in their market. Let's not see this as harming anybody but this is one of the ways to force China to open up and allow foreign businesses(social media) to spread in their domain. Imagine being forced to open a WeChat account just to chat with someone in China. If this kind of business mo…
This is nonsensical. Even if China bans American social media apps for no reason, that's no reason for us to copy their authoritarian, speech-suppressing tactics.
That being said, China levies rules on foreign companies that are levied across all companies, and some foreign companies don't want to play by those rules. That's totally different from an outright ban based on "national security." Just think about it, how is Wechat/TikTok supposed to even comply with US demands? It's clearly a political move. Plus, Wechat users in American know they're being watched by the communist party, whereas Facebook users don't even know how much they're being watched by the US government...
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels unequal after this was called censorship and anti-democratic, being used as a basis for propaganda against China, for years?
I suspect the ban will just be on the monetization. So they can keep TikTok and WeChat, but will not be able to profit from them.
Trump's set an ultimatum whereby tiktok's American operations will have to be sold to Microsoft or it gets banned.
Re: US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But having the president order arbitrary punishment without proof of guilt (what happened to presumption of innocence?) looks like a dictatorship to me. It is. There's a faction in the US that believes the US has to have a dictatorship to compete with China. We've been here before. The USSR looked like an unstoppable juggernaut until the late 1960s / early 1970s. Like China they started from a state of relative bac…
> The real answer is to encourage and protect our ability to innovate while waiting for China to run out of things to copy. When did you last visit China? That train has long left the station :-) Advanced materials research, Aerospace and Chip Fabs are pretty much the only areas where technological areas where I currently see US having a lead
Those are innovative fields. The US has a clear lead in aerospace and is among the leaders in materials. We've lost our lead in chips not to China but to Taiwan, a comparatively more liberal Asian country. The gap is not huge (yet) so it's possible that the US will regain its fab lead... if we want it. I think it's more likely in the short term that the US will make deals to get TSMC to build high-end fabs here for strategic reasons.
I'm sure China will manage to copy a Boeing 737 pretty soon, which is 1960s technology. Meanwhile we are doing:
... and who-knows-what at places like Area 51. :)
Last I checked China's most advanced fabs were doing 28nm, but that was in 2019. By now they've probably started to get EUV working as they feverishly race to copy TSMC. I would not be surprised if Chinese fabs are literal exact copies of prior generation TSMC and Intel fabs, since it takes time to steal inside information.