When making a claim like that, consider supplying a source. You could look it up, and tell us exactly what you've got in mind. Or you could make every one of us look it up, and even if we found something, we'd wonder if it was the same thing that you found convincing.
You not only stated an unsupported claim, you were also willing to waste many peoples' time to avoid wasting your own.
> Maybe we are seeing the effect of monopolies stifling innovation.
American's will only wake up when it's too late. Zuck will bribe the government in the meanwhile. Corrupt countries become less competitive over time. America is trending on the path of corruption and it's visible to every outsider now, except for unfortunately American's themselves.
I'm sorry, did you just allude to America being more corrupt than China?
Granted, I'm American, and thus biased. I do see corruption in my government, but from what I can tell it's a small drop in the bucket compared to what goes on in China. Although I guess there could be debate on what defines corruption. But I still hear tales of basically needing to openly bribe officials to get contracts through manufacturing.
How do you think you get environmental assessments fast tracked? (Except we call it a "political donation" and "lobbying")
What do you think happens when a place like ALEC flies politicians on jaunts to get them to accept pre-written legislation?
Outside of political applications, what do you think happens when pharma reps take doctors to "conferences" in the Caribbean to get them to use their new meds?
On an individual level: What do you think that 'fraternal order of police' donation buys you, and what that car sticker is for?
It might be a bit more dressed up than a naked bribe, but it's still a bribe.
> As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate from about 2020. Global population begins to fall from about 2030, by about half a billion people per decade. Living conditions fall to levels similar to the early 1900s.
This article is from 2014, so the 2020 bit struck me.
> It’s probably easier to buy the whole thing than to buy 30% of it. ‘Cause I say how do you do 30%? Who’s going to get the name? The name is hot, the brand is hot. And who’s going to get the name? How do you do that if it’s owned by two different companies? So, my personal opinion was, you are probably better off buying the whole thing rather than buying 30% of it. I think buying 30% is complicated.
... I did say that if you buy it, whatever the price is, that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it’s China, essentially, but more than anything else, I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States. Because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. Right now they don’t have any rights, unless we give it to ’em. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then it has to come into, it has to come into this country.
It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant [relationship]. Uh, without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what is called “key money” or they pay something. But the United States should be reimbursed, or should be paid a substantial amount of money because without the United States they don’t have anything, at least having to do with the 30%.
This could also be interpreted as something akin to extortion.
American social media app's dominate my country. Google 99% market share. Facebook/Instagram 95% market share in social. 5eyes/PRISM (they're not gonna forgive snowden, he ruined their reputation) monitors my country (not part of the anglospehere) and I never consented.
Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds? Because this is the trend American's will see. And if Zuck is reading this, you're shooting your own foot. What do you think is gonna happen? You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly. You think you'll win like this? Your Facebook/Instagram will get banned in future by other democratic countries in future because of the precedent you're going to be setting.
Let China do it's thing. It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better. Losers stick to old ways, if it turns out it's the superior system, they'll clearly be better.
But for a system to be proven takes decades/centuries. As long as China does not force it's system, it's fine in my eyes.
>Am I supposed to tell my government to block American apps so that I can compete with American apps or on "national security" grounds?
The primary motive is to curb propaganda. If all the countries in the world blocked data collection, businesses all over would stop data collection.
>You're pitting the government against TikTok because your company cannot compete fairly
Perhaps. But if the new competing app also collects data, the govt. ought to shut it down. Ultimately, I want data collection to stop.
>It may very well turn out that their way of governance is better
Governance is different from protecting basic human rights. An authoritarian government is a danger to the whole world. You can see that already happening with Turkey.
It is actually a very interesting example to set that Microsoft is buying English speaking TikTok regions. I wonder how many other unions or countries are considering forcing Facebook, Google, etc to sell their local operations to a local company?
4chan. He wrote it there, afaik from a Twitter comment with screenshot posted many days ago before the Feds announced the kid.
Then bragged about it and went for more accounts. His friends left him when he went for the high profile accounts. I think it was organized on discord.
>Better to throw away the US TikTok company at this point. It's clear the American general public, Trump and US government does not like dominant foreign social media companies in the US.
This would not be happening were TikTok German, French, British, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, etc. Just Chinese and Russian.
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 competition. No other country is like that.
This is what separated the US from the rest of countries like China. You'd dream that in case your startup got big, you'd move to the US, and hire quality engineers/researchers there. You'd like American protection on free speech to protect your company. Your company would not be banned for 'hurting' people. Rule of law. This is increasingly no longer the case.
Now the US is starting to feel like China and the EU more and more. Even if China's economy was bigger than the US, the US would still be in a good position because of their appearance and rule of law. When it's going to be similar to China, why not just do business with China first altogether since they're going to be the bigger economy? China is slowly becoming more liberal to founders from 3rd world countries now. While America seems to not notice this right now, China is slowly becoming more open to competition from poorer countries. The difference is stark even compared to 5 years ago.
Maybe China might not be so much fair right now to American companies because of a power imbalance where the US is too far ahead on certain things that they feel like after their companies catch up, they want to allow open competition. And they seem to progressing to this trajectory.
India has banned it through possible dubious legal means wouldn't pass muster in most western countries, which I think ByteDance expects will be lifted sometime in the future, since they haven't gone to court over it, and seemingly engaging in some sort of dialogue with the government over it. India had earlier banned it for sometime over allegations of 'pornography', but that was lifted.
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.
There's nothing preventing the news from alternative models now. It just turns out employing a bunch of people to repost tweets isn't a profitable business and forcing other companies to pay them via the law doesn't work any better.
