No, because the ban is based on TikTok coming from a geopolitical adversary, rather than being based on actual content (which is why the Supreme Court declined to stop the implementation of the law).
Huawei is also controlled, even more directly, by a geopolitical adversary, and is not banned for regular consumers in the USA.
The reason TikTok being owned by China is considered a problem is because it could allow China to control what American citizens see on their timelines - the content.
The US passes many laws about traffic safety, and yet much of US road design is actually deeply unsafe. Inconsistent sure, but that doesn't mean they were lying about the unsafe things they did ban.
> The reason TikTok being owned by China is considered a problem is because it could allow China to control what American citizens see on their timelines - the content.
It's the PRC control part that's the key here though. There's nothing banning even blatantly pro-PRC content on other platforms. You can find plenty of tankies praising China over the US to high heaven on places like Reddit.
> It's the PRC control part that's the key here though. There's nothing banning even blatantly pro-PRC content on other platforms. You can find plenty of tankies praising China over the US to high heaven on places like Reddit.
Then it's just virtue signaling. If the message is not a problem, then who says that message is irrelevant.
Note: to be clear, I'm neither a tankie nor in any other way supportive of PRC policies. They're a horrible genocidal dictatorial regime with imperialist tendencies who are propping up other similarly horrible regimes like Russia or North Korea.
The idea that the US government doesn't have the power to regulate trade, especially with geopolitical adversaries, has never been some bedrock principle of America.
Trade and speech are not the same thing, and this sort of conflation is really tiresome.
If we banned China from importing video games into the US, that would be a trade issue.
It's very ironic you bring this up though, since China is famously very strict about what foreign media it allows in, and really about how foreign businesses in general are allowed to operate there.
This constant conflation of speech rules and trade rules is tiresome.
If it was just about content then yes, it'd be unconstitutional.
But security/trade concerns about a geopolitical opponent are not the same thing, have never been the same thing, and it would be crazy to treat them as the same thing.
Not to mention that as a trade issue, China already bans basically all the popular American social media sites, and just a ton of popular US sites in general. Turnabout is entirely fair play and expected when it comes to trade.
Right now the issue is that the US mostly doesn't. The US market is far more open to China than the reverse, everyone knows this.
Free trade should also be fair trade.
Personally I wouldn't really give a shit about TikTok if the Chinese market was actually at all open to US companies for this area (and if there were reasonable protections about personal data in the US overall).
Tit for Tat. Mercantalism is quite effective in a world of Free Trade, but if everyone turns Mercantalistic it becomes unsustainable and burns out. Once the most Mercantalistic actors are wiped out and EVERYONE understands why such policies were bad, we can return to the principles of Free Trade.
I live in place known for its rainy weather, 15 km from work (because of the housing crisis). Being overweight, biking to work never crossed my mind for two years. Once I tried to commute during weekend, as a challenge. I realized a few things:
- same duration as the train
- it give me the exercise I needed
- it relaxes me
- it is free since I already have a bike
Yes, it still take me 50 min to commute, but now I enjoy it and even volunteerly go to the office more often. It have been 6 months.
My point is: those who complain about biking being terrible or impractical should give it a real try. It may fit you.
I've biked around in a bunch places in the US, and the reality is that it really is terrible. Bike infrastructure is F-tier almost everywhere, rising to D-Tier in supposedly bike friendly cities like Portland.
Bike infrastructure generally
* Is designed to be unsafe. Door zones are common, actual physical protection or segregation is rare, ESPECIALLY for intersections.
* Stops and starts randomly. Just look at Google maps for a city, you'll be able to see that the bike network is completely fragmented, with many bike lane suddenly disappearing on a road for no apparent reason.
* Randomly changes style/design principles even within the same city, so both you and drivers are constantly confused unless you're already used to a route.
* Is poorly enforced, with drivers routinely driving or parking in bike lanes with punishment being a rarity.
Now, some spots have good bike trails that work for their commute, and that's a great option when it's available. But I'm a bit tired of the "biking is actually okay in the US!" gaslighting.
Some people still manage, I do sometimes, but after getting hit by cars a couple times I tired of making excuses for it. There's a reason hardly anyone bikes for their commute in the states: overall, biking in the US is simply awful, and that's the truth.
Ebikes are really great and I often ride one to work. They do help with speed, range, motivation, and of course, hills.
They don't do anything about unsafe infrastructure though, which is by far the US' biggest problem for biking. To say that American bike infrastructure is garbage tier is an insult to garbage, that's how bad it typically is. It's extremely unsafe, and people can feel it, they can tell, hence why hardly anyone actually bikes to work.
I ride a bike, and doing so has saved me about $450k in transportation costs over 3 decades. The effort it takes to earn $450k is something to include amongst the unpleasantries and pathologies associated with driving.
Now, of course, I've had my whole life to set up my whole life the way I want it, and with a little foresight it really wasn't that difficult to set it up in a way that facilitates getting around on a bicycle. It involved making choices. Choices about where to work and live. If more people made such choices, there would be more options available to facilitate them.
450k tax-free, too, because it's a cost saving and those aren't taxable*.
Myself I've not driven at least since late 2017, thanks to excellent and cheap public transport; even before the Germany-wide €58/month ticket, the more expensive Berlin-AB ticket that I used to get was much much less than your $15k/year.
Do most people plan like that?
* usually, though IIRC buying a house in Switzerland gets you a tax equal to the money you saved from not renting it?
We also have a carbon tax where I’m from. Since I don’t own a car I don’t pay much into it. However I get a nice big rebate on my tax return. I basically get paid a small amount to not own a car.
I've ridden bikes for transportation in a handful of regions in the US. It is essentially always bad, it's just a matter of some people being able to look past or tolerate the awfulness.
Yes, some people are okay sharing a lane with cars, or using a strip of paint for protection, but accepting a poor status quo doesn't stop the status quo from being poor.
Occasionally there's a route that's legitimately good, almost always due to having an off street trail you can use for the bulk of the commute. Those can be great.
But once you hit bike lanes in an urban area, it's virtually always terrible. A lot of Americans are just used to the terribleness and don't notice it anymore, the same way they don't notice how almost every neighborhood is designed to be unwalkable (and how most are designed to be economically segregated besides).
But a lot of people are mentally stubborn, and seem to have inbuilt excuses of, "it wouldn't work here!" despite not spending even ten seconds thinking about it.
People already explained that's it's how much supply you have.
In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.
It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.
It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-specific sites as a business within China, from within China you can't even get to the foreign/international versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
