https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-prefers-tiktok-shutdown-us-if-legal-options-fail-sources-say-2024-04-25/
Alienate a literal entire generation from voting for you lol, lmao.
Outside of presiding over massive inflation, the loss of women’s right to choose, genocide of the Palestinians, the arming of Nazis in a proxy war, increasing terror at the US border, increasing warrantless surveillance on Americans who aren’t in Congress, increasing police budgets everywhere, killing free speech, and making criticism of Israel a hate crime, what mistakes can you point to that Biden has made? We’re actually lucky if you think of all the bad stuff throughout history that he hasn’t presided over.
don't forget abandoning covid guidelines and caving to the rightwing's policies and stiffing us on our promised stimulus checks and debt forgiveness.
Oh yeah, and betraying the BLM bloc you just coopted by saying "defund the police is a rightwing idea"
If you have student loans, he owes you more cause he had that as a plank of his platform
He fucked so many things it's actually kind of remarkable
I think they asserted he was speaking about funding research more
Which is definitely what everyone thinks of when they hear "we're gonna cure cancer"
I think it has, but NCI (the national cancer institute) has been getting funding increases in some form or another since 2013 (which is still good)
It's also currently at around 7 billion total though, so...not exactly big dollar relative to govt spending, and increases under Biden are just likely nominal increases that would've happened anyway lol
Ed: I think I am right (in that neither Trump or Biden actually gave a shit), but lmao funding under Trump increased by more than Biden
Funding for NCI as of 2015: 5.215 billion
Funding as of 2020: 6.245 billion, increase of a little over a billion from 2016
Funding as of 2024: 7.22 billion, increase of less than a billion from 2020
It's close, but when you say "we're gonna cure cancer", have everyone kiss your ass saying you actually meant "we're going to ratchet up spending for cancer research", and then fund it less than your predecessor...
Great post! But just as I suspected. The Biden administration is yet again using the cover of a former super Republican presidency to not restore things to their previous trajectory
Good comment. Even if you argue, as Democratic partisans will, that few of these were things that Biden had any control over (e.g. inflation and Dobbs), the fact is that he was the sitting president while they happened. That will make him unpopular, even if that's "not fair". And people will vote against him (or not vote) because he's unpopular, even if "the alternative is worse". If you specifically argue that he didn't have any control over these things, he looks weak, and that makes the problem worse. And no amount of lecturing people about how they're wrong to react in natural, perfectly predictable ways is going to change that.
I remember early in his term he appointed a special committee to tell him whether to pack the courts and they decided no
This is what I am being told by every lib on the Discord servers I am in.
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EDIT: They like to repeat the gotcha of when it takes place like its some sort of master move.
Oh thank god, it won't affect the next election, the most important election of our lives. But I fear the consequences of alienating the youth for the election after, the most important election of our lives
I clearly remember Dems parading the youth vote as key for Obama winning, and for 2018's marginal D wins. They really must think people forget within 2 years.
If Trump wins the election I'd bet my left toe that he drops the ban. It's literally free political points in the young demographic, which keeps the GOP off his back.
but presidents aren't kings! They can't just do things people want. It would take an act of Congress. What's that? Congress is friendly to the trump administration? What's that? Trump unbanned tiktok thirty seconds after taking the oath of office? Obviously he's double mecha Hitler because he did this very popular thing!
Alienating one of the the only demographics that overwhelmingly votes liberal seems wise
They already banned juuls.
It just seems so obviously gerontocratic that the only things that get stunning bipartisan support (other than genocide) are banning the things the kids like.
In a couple of years, the only laws passed in the US will be laws saying it's illegal to not have dinner with Meemaw and Pep Pep.
Good. China should also retaliate and start forcing American companies in China to hand over ownership
Overheard in The Great Hall of the People after the Hexbear post: “They got me,” Xi said of Hexbear's dunk on him. "That fucking Hexbear boomed me." Xi added, “They're so good at posting,” repeating it four times. Xi then said he wanted to add Hexbear to the list of liberal revisionists he dislikes this summer.
edit: need a better joke for the last sentence
Luckily for us the PRC isn't as easy to manipulate as marty mcfly in back to the future (oh you called me chicken? Guess I'll do whatever you want me to do now). They ain't taking the bait.
They already do....
Almost everything foreign in China is 51% state owned. McDonald's franchises, Costcos, Gucci stores, etc.
Those places entered into China while agreeing to those restrictions. That’s different than the US allowing foreign investment then rugpulling it and stealing the Chinese owned portion of a business after the fact.
In order to retaliate, China needs to seize or steal American capital.
In addition to that:
60% of ownership is by global hedge funds
so effectively half of bytedance is owned by westoids anyway
CPC has something called a golden share in a lot of companies. It's a 1% equity stake that allows for overruling voting power in certain elections
They are just doing it wrong, it should be:
Give us your company
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I feel like they've got a strong constitutional case. One BBC article I read said that 60% of their company ownership is by global hedge funds so they just plainly aren't a Chinese company. Singling them out for having dissident information through an act of congress is precisely what the 1st Amendment is supposed to protect against. With the sale supposed to happen in November at the earliest, the red scare will either fade by then or become a much larger issue they can capitalise on.
The constitution means jack shit, it wouldn’t matter if it explicitly stated “TikTok shall not be banned”, the state does whatever the fuck it wants and the hardest part is coming up with the weasel words in the judgement that explains how it’s perfectly constitutional, ackshually.
The American Empire is bigger. And probably has more extrajudicial ways of dealing with noncompliant persons than TikTok does.
a bunch of freaks think the constitution only applies to us citizens.
i can't predict confidently whether business rights or foreign no rights will win out here.
a bunch of freaks think the constitution only applies to us citizens.
Supreme Court did say companies that operate in America are still allowed to use slave labor abroad.
constitution only applies to us citizens
But also granted by God and has metaphysical power beyond the paper its written on and the willingness to enforce it
Don't worry, if this somehow gets subverted by a court it will somehow be to make things worse (i.e. granting corporations at large more rights)
I'm not an expert on US law, but singling them out like this via legislation smells a whole lot like a bill of attainder, which is banned under Article 1 (not the First Amendment, though that's definitely relevant also) of the Constitution.
Don't US courts normally roll over whenever the regime says "but muh national security!"?
Really at this point I am just impressed by how hard they are fighting against both bread and circuses
The Circus is anti-semetic because the gladiators called for a ceasefire.
They hate it when they do not have total control over both. While demanding that others should be fine with their bread and circuses. Classical preaching water and drinking wine.
I think they know they can steal bread as much as they want until people get angry. People will just elect another person expecting them to fix it or anything
I mean Argentinians electing Milei speaks basically everything about that system, and US is even worse because it is the source and keeper of it globally.
The big difference here is that if your competition can out-compete you using Chinese infrastructure, you will be forced into at least figuring out a way to dual-use it.
Ultimately, this is a Microsoft/Apple situation. It's just who will be Microsoft and who will be Apple. I think that, over time, most of the cutting edge tech will migrate over to Chinese tech, even if the rest of the world doesn't exactly. That said, Africa and Asia (outside of the colonial outposts) will mostly be in the Chinese tech sphere.
For consumers yes people are locked into google or apple ecosystems, but for large scale businesses often they either have their own infrastructure or they do multicloud. Sometimes they even use different vendor mixes per region because there may be local providers who can compete locally with the big boys. What I think would stop large businesses from using Chinese vendors is the US government saying they are not allowed to use Chinese vendors. Their lawyers at that point will simply not allow them to buy Huawei equipment or use Tencent cloud. I dont think these shell games are strictly necessary when it comes to companies doing business in the US. Politically though it may be problematic for them to do that right now.
If you don't allow the political and invsstment oligarchs control your media outlet, they will either force you to shut down or surrender to an investment oligarch.This might be sincere, but as someone who worked in M&A in a past life, it’s pretty standard to say “I’m not interested in selling” to bluff the price up a bit.
Thing is, it's only the US that would be threatening to ban it. And if they sell, this FreedumbTok would be available in most other countries. It would create a world-class competitor overnight, exactly equivalent to their product, that would also have a gigantic competitive advantage- access to US consumers and businesses. FreedumbTok would likely eat away at TikTok in the rest of the world. They won't sell
My understanding is that the algorithm at the core of TikTok cannot be ecported from China without the approval of Chinese regulators, and it seems pretty likely that they'll not approve a sale at gunpoint.
It also makes sense to me that they'd rather just amputate their US operations to preserve their IP and prevent an American competitor from fighting over their market share everywhere else.
it seems pretty likely that they'll not approve a sale at gunpoint
This seems like the issue to me: if the U.S. can force this sale at a deadline-discounted price, what would stop the U.S. from doing this to every Chinese company that has success in the U.S.?
The US already banned Huawei when they started competing with the big US flagship phone brands
I might be wrong but I think their data centers are in the US and there's not really that complicated of an algorithm, just a lot of raw data on what each user likes/watches
Yeah, I don't think the algorithms are the valuable part of social media sites. It's the active users that make up the network effects. Meta has likely already figured out the algorithms already, Instagram reels is struggling because creators go where the viewers are and viewers spend the most time on the platform that has their favorite creators.
Yeah tech companies all want to present themselves as having created a very clever and scientific "algorithm" when really they're just hoarding personal data and exploiting the network effect to entrench themselves. Google web search is actually one of the more complicated algorithms because of the variety of types of results on the open internet, but even they are completely reliant on just troves and troves of user behavior data. If 80 people Google something and 2 people Bing it, Google has way better information on what results should be on top.
I can't imagine there's that many suitors for this thing, it's a big bite
Does FB, Insta, Zitter, Google, MicroShit, Discord, Github, etc. all have to divest as well? No? So they can just keep harvesting our data?
Waiting for the spike in searches for VPN to dwarf all the state porn ban ones.
Isn’t it tiresome for the people in power to be in conflict with like 4 billion people globally at all hours of the day?
No, because they are obviously smarter and betterer at running things than us poors or else they wouldn't be so very rich.
dammit they're PUNKING me on hexbear. I have to act
