After all its not hard to make a corporation in the US

…A US corporation is subject to US laws.

ByteDance is subject to Chinese laws.

If TikTok wants to do everything that it’s currently doing, but under US law and under US scrutiny, they’re more than welcome to do so. But they’re currently evading any serious scrutiny. Hence the reason to shut them down if they refuse gov’t oversight.

National security interests are the interests of the people though.

The fundamental issue is that, assuming I’m not leaking national security information, I can say nearly anything I want on Facebook, Twitter, etc. (as long as I’m not in violation of their terms of service). The US largely does not censor people using the power of the gov’t. If I am an authoritarian communist, I’m more than welcome to spread these views on any American social network that I choose without gov’t interference. I can spread anti-vax and Q nonsense if I wish, and the worst-case scenario is that my neighbors will stop talking to me. I can attack the very foundation of the country if I want, as long as I’m not spreading military secrets.

This is not the case in China. Spreading pro-capitalism and pro-democracy messages can quickly get you arrested. Trying to share accurate information about what really happened in Tianamen Square in 1989 can result in you disappearing. Words and phrases are actively censored by the gov’t on social media. The Chinese gov’t takes a direct role in shaping social media by what it promotes, and what it forbids. Anything that’s perceived as an attack on the political system of the country, the party, or any of the leaders (remember the internationally famous tennis player that abruptly disappeared when she accused a local party leader of sexual assault?) will put you at risk.

This isn’t a case of, “oh, both sides are the same”.

The Constitution doesn’t only protect American citizens, it protects everyone

Uh, no. It doesn’t protect everyone, not by a long shot. The US constitution doesn’t guarantee Chinese citizens, living in China, the right to freedom of the press.

…And this isn’t about which speech they’re allowing. This is about who controls the platform, and how they respond to gov’t inquiries. If TikTok is divested from ByteDance, so that they’re no longer based in China and subject to China’s laws and interference, then there’s no problem. There are two fundamental issues; first, TikTok appears to be a tool of the Chinese gov’t (this is the best guess, considering that large parts of the intelligence about it are highly classified), and may be currently being used to amplify Chinese-state propaganda as well as increase political division, and second, what ByteDance is doing with the enormous amounts of data it’s collection, esp. from people that may be in sensitive or classified locations.

As I stated, if TikTok is sold off so that they’re no longer connected to China, then they’re more than welcome to continue to operate. ByteDance is refusing to do that.

Calculators also say that dividing by 0 is an error, but logic says that the answer is infinite. (If i recall, it’s more correctly ‘undefined’, but I’m years out of math classes now.)

That is, as you divide a number by a smaller and smaller number, the product increases. 1/.1=10, 1/.01=100, 1/.001=1000, etc. As the denominator approaches 0, the product approaches infinity. But you can’t quantify infinity per se, which results in an undefined error.

If someone that’s a mathematician wants to explain this correctly, I’m all ears.

But the tree never makes a sound.

That depends on how you define ‘sound’. If it’s only perception and interpretation that creates sound, then sure, a tree falling with nothing to hear or perceive it makes no sound. But if you label sound as the vibration created independent of the perception of the phenomena, then sound happens regardless of whether it’s perceived or not. Since we label some sounds as imperceptible, or outside of human hearing ranges, my interpretation would be that the phenomena is the sound, rather than the perception of it.

That’s not entirely accurate. Yes, it was more than the GDP of the entire planet at the time, but that’s not the value of the entire planet. Unless they meant the amount of physical currency that existed, in which case the amount was considerably less than the 62T that the article cites, since most money is never physical.

It’s still patently ridiculous though.

You’re just like yeah I know windows and Adobe will profit off of every button I click

First - Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is not a consumer version. It’s about as locked down as you can get. It doesn’t even have drivers for the ethernet on your mobo out of the box; you better have already downloaded those. (Yes, I’m serious. It’s about Also, it’s pirated, since it’s not available to consumers at all; Microsoft doesn’t want to let consumers have the Enterprise versions of Windows because that’s no longer software-as-service. And the LTSC? That shit’s going to keep getting security updates–but no ‘feature’ updates, at all, ever–for at least 10 years.

Second - I don’t pay for Adobe, but I have to use it in my job. I’ve limited as much of it as I can, and CC doesn’t start up by default, but yeah, if you work in the commercial arts fields, you simply don’t have any serious options that aren’t Adobe, and yeah, they’re going to bleed you dry. But, as i said, i’m not the one paying. My workplace has a license that allows two seats, and I’m literally the only person there that knows how to use any of it–or even has the password to the Adobe account–so I just use the work license to put it on my home PC.

Once I finally got it installed, Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC has been fine. The only real hitch was that I had a terrible time getting the graphics card drivers instsalled; kept getting a BSOD. But everything is running quite nicely.

As soon as I remember to get my other hard drives installed, it will be time to put the Adobe Creative Suite and Corel Painter X on it, and see how happy it is with those.

I haven’t heard anything in particular about Kentucky Ballistics. His content doesn’t interest me, but I haven’t heard of anything objectionable. Demo Ranch (Matt?) is friends with a whoooooooooole lot of very questionable people. It seems to mostly stay out of his videos though.

There are a few that are decent people. Not a ton. But a few.

I like Ben Stoeger’s stuff, because he largely keeps out of any culture war shit, and focuses on shooting better, and whatever the current USPSA bullshit it.

I dunno, maybe look him up on Instagram? He did an interview with Adminstrative Results (I’ve got his real name written down somewhere; he’s a former cops) on YouTube where he came right out and said it, made a bunch of anti-semitic jokes, and then it went really downhill from there. He was at least smart enough to delete the comment where he was talking about the massive amounts of ILLEGAL ANABOLIC STEROIDS that he uses (since that’s admitting to both a felony, and being a ‘habitual illegal drug user’. both of which would ban him from owning firearms).

He’s a christian nationalist, has called all trans people pedophiles, is homophobic, and is generally a shitbag. He surrounds himself with people that are overtly fascists.

No Tails?

I’d have to check and see if I can access Netflix from my desktop at work, but my suspicion is that the lower quality has more to do with smaller screens in general. That is, you can get away with a lower bitrate when you’re viewing on a screen that’s 19", and that’s probably a fairly safe maximum size for most people watching on a desk- or laptop directly.

You can still get kopi luwak that’s solely from wild civets–rather than captive–but the price is astronomical. I think that the last time I looked it up–more than a decade ago–it was something like $150+/pound.

I use my PS5, TBH. I still get ads on Amazon Prime, but I’m not seeing Netflix ads. (I also don’t have Hulu, etc.) I pay for a VPN for my desktop–I’m using Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC–and with Firefox and uBlockOrigin I see pretty minimal ads online; if you’re able to open your streaming service in a browser rather than needing to download their application, then a VPN an uBlockOrigin might be sufficient.

Good point.

A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.

Don’t give your TV the wifi password, kids. No, you don’t need to ‘finish setting up’ your TV; it works just fine as a dumb display.

These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I’ve asked point-blank about it have said that they don’t care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.