Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 694 posts

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#621

Post by specialist »

pinkfoot wrote: post #538
specialist wrote: post #452

Earlier 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?

I have no opinion.

That's why I asked topicseed, accepting her/his argument that emerging markets need protection, when (and if) China should open up.

But apparently topicseed hasn't updated her/his thesis since 2005.

As for Tesla in China, I dimly recall that it's in partnership. SOP for BRICS economies. Quick search... Nope. I was wrong. This 2018 article states Tesla is the first foreign company allowed to operate in China without a domestic partner. https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/10/news/companies/tesla-china-...

Now I'm almost curious if there have been others since.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#622

Post by gorbypark »

tanilama wrote: post #182
euix wrote: post #48

Shows how far the balance of power has shifted in the last 20 years back when the Chinese government was banning western products to prevent "spiritual pollution" and "western influence". Now we got the reverse and it's also for ideological reasons (at least at face value). Wonder if WeChat is next. That would be fairly effective in prevent overseas Chinese from communicating with the mainland and a lot of mom and po…

No Westerners actually use Wechat. TikTok is getting mainstream in US. That is the difference

For what it’s worth, I’m a westerner and have used WeChat.... to order sketchy counterfeit stuff direct from China!

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#623

Post by coliveira »

dannyw wrote: post #445
xvector wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China can harm the US with trade regulations much, much more than the US can harm China. Trump is playing with fire here and it’s honestly not very smart. Not when the US has outsourced its industry to China.

The US also has guns.

The US cannot win a war against China. China can ramp up production of military equipment faster than the US can sign a war declaration.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#624

Post by throwaway894345 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #618
throwaway894345 wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not claiming that the ban is related to human rights, but rather that the US and China aren’t in the same moral ballpark. Banning TikTok isn’t equivalent to education camps, forced organ harvesting, sterilization, etc of ethnic minorities.

> that the US and China aren’t in the same moral ballpark. I am not saying that it's necessarily the same, but is probably a lot closer than one would hope. U.S. prison populations are basically forced labor, killing millions of civilians, not its own citizens but still, within living memory is also a thing, millions are without health insurance during a pandemic and still no universal healthcare in sight, police bru…

I don’t think US has killed millions of civilians in living memory. Further, I think there’s a vast moral difference between civilians dying over the course of war (especially when enemy combatants deliberately hide among civilians and the difficulty of perfectly controlling an enormous army of soldiers) and waging an ideological campaign on one’s own citizens. Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was awful, but I can appreciate that it brought a swift end to the war at very least—I see no such advantage to Mao’s cultural revolution.

School shootings and dearth of health insurance don’t remotely make up the moral gap between the US and China. As awful as those things are, they are but a drop in the bucket.

Further still, many of the other things you posit as uniquely American such as coups in foreign countries l, police brutality, dearth of healthcare, etc are not only present in China, but exist to a much more severe degree. The US has police brutality (lack of proper regulation of its police forces), China’s police will disappear people for political speech (actual institutional oppression).

I agree that the US is imperfect, but your attempts at drawing parallels between Chinese offenses and American offenses seems highly disingenuous. You seem to be flagrantly ignoring the different contexts when convenient (e.g., the difference between “civilians killed during war” and “killing one’s own civilians en masse as part of a political purge”) and listing offenses that are more egregious in China as uniquely American. I don’t really want to continue this conversation if you aren’t here in good faith.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#625

Post by ben_w »

eru wrote: post #583
TeMPOraL wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have any evidence for that? I doubt it. Last few decades are pretty much entirely made of evidence for that - private owners will, given insufficient barriers preventing it - move their manufacturing to the places with low labor costs. It's why almost everything you or I own has a label on it that says "made in China", and not "made in the USA". > That seems like a decision for customers to make? If customer…

The real output of the manufacturing sector in the US looks pretty robust. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS You are right that Chinese manufacturing has grown a lot. But what's the evidence that this growth has anything to do with a hypothetical decline of the US? More than a century ago the US and German industrial output growing didn't diminish British output, either. > Naively, yes. In pratcite, this i…

> But at the ballot box they can hurt the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

They can and they do.

In the first instance, this is why candidates are not allowed to literally bribe the electorate, and why constitutional change is harder than simply passing a new law.

In the second, it is why countries even bother trying to interfere in other countries’ elections.

Democracy is still better than the alternatives despite the failures. Oh so many failures.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#626

Post by AsyncAwait »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #624
AsyncAwait wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the US and China aren’t in the same moral ballpark. I am not saying that it's necessarily the same, but is probably a lot closer than one would hope. U.S. prison populations are basically forced labor, killing millions of civilians, not its own citizens but still, within living memory is also a thing, millions are without health insurance during a pandemic and still no universal healthcare in sight, police bru…

I don’t think US has killed millions of civilians in living memory. Further, I think there’s a vast moral difference between civilians dying over the course of war (especially when enemy combatants deliberately hide among civilians and the difficulty of perfectly controlling an enormous army of soldiers) and waging an ideological campaign on one’s own citizens. Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was awful, but I can…

As I said, I don't view them as morally equivalent, just not as far apart as I'd like them to be and people who experienced i.e. [1] probably view the U.S. as much worse, if you take the Korean War, Vietnam, Latin America, The Middle East, that's millions of civilians killed within living memory.

2003 Iraq alone is ~200,000, (up to 1mil per some), and that's discounting the first Gulf War or the sanctions following it that killed overwhelmingly civilians.

The difference between you and me is that I don't see killing foreign civilians as somehow less horrible than domestic ones.

When you say it's different during the "course of a war", worth noting that in many places no formal war was ever declared. In places like Pakistan, the drone warfare for example is more of a shadow war than anything.

As for people dying due to lack of healthcare and you not counting it, if we're going to attribute the evils of CCP to "communism", why discount deaths attributable to "capitalism" so easily?

My ideology disagrees strongly with the CCP, but I try to be as objective as possible when evaluating any actor, especially one that is subject to wast amounts of U.S. propaganda and is hard to ever get a more nuanced picture of.

Another issue is that the U.S. likes to present itself as a moral leader on the world stage, so it should be held to higher standards.

I am not even going into the issue of financial sanctions, where China has nowhere the amount of power the U.S. has. And the American government is willing to use that power to block shipments of food and medicine to countries it does not like, even during an unprecedented global pandemic.

I appreciate this is not discussed regularly on evening news, unlike China is, but it is very much real, this is why when you poll people from around the world, the U.S. usually comes #1 as a threat to world peace[2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

2 - https://www.axios.com/the-biggest-global-threats-us-russia-c...

P.S. I don't say this to try and paint the West negatively. I say this because I want us to actually be as morally correct as we'd claim we are instead of just diluting ourselves into thinking we are soo much better already.

In other words, I'd really like the propaganda to actually match the reality.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#628

Post by trasz »

dfee wrote: post #600
trasz wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that even work, exerting pressure by merely providing another pipeline?

Look up Ukraine and Nordstream 2. Also you need to look up the purpose of the pipeline. It’s supposed to become the primary pipeline, not a simple small supplement. Basically: grow dependence, extract concessions. The same way a crack dealer on a street corner does.

Ukraine is a different story altogether: yes, having a pipeline that goes around Ukraine makes it impossible for Ukraine to put pressure by shutting down the the pipeline.

Still, it's unrelated to Nord Stream 2. There is no risk to Germany there, simply because it's entirely voluntary mechanism.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#629

Post by trasz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #595
trasz wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so in theory maybe there could be checks and balances in place. In practice, however, there are instead secret court orders, subpoenas, or "national security letters".

> there are instead secret court orders, subpoenas, or "national security letters" None of which apply to this action, which has been publicly promulgated and will be publicly enforced and challenged. Also, secret courts and NSLs are an abomination. Subpoenas are legal demands for information.

None of which _are known to_ apply to this action. Sure. But it still doesn't change the root of the problem: the alleged security problems with Chinese products, caused by government being able to force manufacturers to do whatever their intelligence agencies require, are in fact real - but for US products, not Chinese ones.

Re: Trump says he will ban TikTok through executive action

#630

Post by finnthehuman »

anon9001 wrote: post #459
caymanjim wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want you to be right, but I don't think you are. He's likely to issue some kind of executive order forcing bytedance to divest tiktok to continue operations. We may see some DoJ or FCC enforcement action that's effectively a "ban" (for users) while only being legally a temporary disruption of service pending compliance (for lawmakers, judges, enforcement agencies, etc to be okay with it). As we have learned over th…

> As we have learned over the last 4 years, the president has near absolute control over all federal actions.

Maybe this period in history is a hint to stop electing legislators that are happier letting someone else do all the hard work of deciding what the government should do.

Post reply on HN