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“Well grandma was a little racist at times”

I honestly don’t know if this would be like letting toddlers run a daycare or if it would be paradise.

This shit can destroy companies and tank its value

Leaving hundreds of contacts in limbo with no resolution has the potential to cost more than $17 million in legal fees and termination clauses.

Where the fuck is the board of directors and why are none of the shareholders revolting?

We have plenty of things to be old grumpy grouches about.

“Those banks ruined the American dream and we bailed them out!”

“Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied the government to allow them to poison our planet in the name of profit!”

“Those Disney crooks consolidated all media and destroyed independent creative ventures!”

“Back in my day we could afford a house if we saved 10 years of earnings for a down payment and then took out a loan eventually totaling twice the value of the purchase price. You kids have it easy with your rental sleeping pods and low-monthly rate outdoors park subscriptions. You don’t even contribute to furniture or clothing industries because you don’t own a place to put any!”

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The bottom 20% of earners aren’t likely to make the same amount in CA vs TX.

California’s minimum wage is $16. Working 40 hours (hard on a minimum wage job for reasons) brings $640 a week. 10.5% of that is $67

Texas’s is $7.25. 40 hours of that job is $290. 13% of that is $38.

In this bad example, a minimum wage earner in California pays almost double the tax than a minimum wage worker in Texas. It’s a bad example for many reasons, including us not taking into account the extra spending power the California worker has after taxes.

I’ve lived in both. The average people don’t seem to care.

Older Texans might namedrop California at times when they’re airing political grievances, but older people everywhere seem to have some casual “product of the times” prejudices against something.

I’m not an economist but that makes sense to me.

What about a modified scenario:

A small island has three cupcake makers operating out of their homes: Meta, Alphabet, and Bytedance. Each has captured a section of the island’s market with cupcakes and at this point, there’s no real opportunity for growth. Meta can’t convince Bytedance’s customers to switch because they prefer other flavors. Meta would need to purchase one of the other cupcake companies in order to expand.

None of the cupcake makers are interested in selling their companies. They consider themselves elite and their successes feed into the CEO and shareholder perceptions of value and success.

Now, we consider that one of the cupcake companies is funded by a rich uncle from a different country. The island’s elders decide that the uncle’s influence is too great and orders Bytedance to sell its cupcake company or leave the island.

We’ve established earlier that people who like Bytedance cupcakes don’t necessarily want to eat Meta or Alphabet cupcakes, so if they leave the market, those customers may be gone for good. They may have a change of heart and decide that cupcakes of any flavor are fine, but they may also be angry that the government forced their favorite place out of business. In any case, Meta and Alphabet cannot rely capturing this segment of the market to grow.

Faced with the dilemma of possibly gaining customers organically or definitely gaining customers by purchasing their preferred product brand, I’d argue that the remaining companies may jump on the opportunity to purchase Bytedance before they are forced out. None of the cupcake companies were up for sale in a traditional sense before, so this was never a realistic path to achieve growth.

“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”

vs

“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”

The US government has been caught doing the same thing… poorly. You probably aren’t going to find a lot of sources showing that the US is fighting these fights on Facebook and twitter, but you can read between the lines with interviews. In general, these kinds of things aren’t performed out in the open.

Agree with you though. National security has trumped privacy. 9/11 changed a lot of things in a bad way.

I’m not arguing against them explaining their rationale. I originally argued that they shouldn’t be taken as experts.

Zuckerberg and Musk “get” to do these things because they are in the US, with majority US-based workers, running off US-based infrastructure. If any of these platforms are being used to facilitate attacks against the US, the government can choose any number of methods to step in and enforce compliance to mitigate the threat. That’s it. This is about free speech in that not all speech is protected. If somebody uses TikTok to perform the digital equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater, the government sees a need to control it.

If Facebook was run and operated out of Tunisia, I’d expect these same conversations to be happening with them as well.

They largely don’t write the legislation. Lobby groups draft the materials and if we’re lucky, the congressional aides make a pass and clean things up.

You can search for why TikTok is dangerous. There are plenty of examples of how the application and platform are not being forthright with how they collect your identifiers and weaponize them for information operations campaigns.

As I mentioned earlier, the powers that be aren’t as worried about Facebook and the like because they’re US-based and have working relationships with law enforcement. Facebook has been used for the very campaigns that TikTok is being used for now, but a large difference is that another nation has near complete control over the platform.

They can talk about it if they want to, but we shouldn’t be using them as our only source of information. Curious on why politicians voted X instead of Y? Look it up! See what experts in the field are saying.

You shouldn’t rely on them to tell you why TikTok is a threat the same way we shouldn’t rely on them to inform us on why weakening EPA standards is good for the environment, why taxing foreign trucks is good for the economy, or why drawing voting maps to concentrate demographics is good for democracy.

These politicians probably know enough to make an informed decision if they care to seek out information. They don’t always have the time or desire to do this. If you believe this to be true even one in a hundred times, that covers a handful of politicians for every single piece of legislation that comes out, every single time.

The same way you may care about many things but only know a lot about a few subjects, they legislate everything and people act like they are the experts. Why assume they know what they’re talking about for every single topic?

More referring to selling a device classified as a mobile phone that might not be able to connect to emergency services without any tinkering. My google-fu is failing me now, but I’m trying to see what the actual requirements are, if they exist at all, to sell a mobile phone. All I’m seeing is that the radio shall connect to any available base stations during an emergency call regardless of subscriber status.

I don’t know how the linux phone OS’s are handling these kind of interactions with their baseband processing, if at all.

I imagine the lack of voice support presents some compliance issues with emergency calls.

That hasn’t been the case for 50 years. Your rights are inalienable as long as there’s some enforcement mechanism. All three branches have walked back certain rights in various forms in modern times.

Be the change you want to see; work in Federal service, get yourself elected for any local or Federal positions, or draft policy for lawmakers

The US isn’t a straight simple democracy, so you win I guess.

Only way you’re voting yourself out of the US is with your feet. There are no mechanisms to relinquish citizenship (and your vote, barring convictions) while remaining in the country permanently.

Propaganda is effective. It’s at times silly, blatant, jingoistic, and offensive, but it has historically worked to influence public opinions.

I think you’re right, but saying the quiet part out loud. People don’t like to think they’re susceptible to scams and propaganda because they’re not that dumb or gullible. People still click on phishing emails…