Even dictators in other countries don't make it so obvious because they're worried their populations would revolt, which says a lot about the American voter today.
None of Tiktok's executives were present, and China has not confirmed the sale. So, I don't think clown's EO means anything. He's living in his own la la land :-)
Before people jump to conclusions, if you look at the details there seems to be a plan for a major profit sharing and licensing agreement with Bytedance. The numbers floated around are that 50% of the profit would go to Bytedance plus.
This would significantly impact its valuation to outside investors.
IIRC previous talk for TikTok US valuations / buyout was ~40B. But Tiktok was at ~20% Bytedance / PRC ownership before and after. US ownership to boost from 60-80%. So not really sure who this is boning more.
It's all a grift. The cynic in me says that if you looked close enough, you'd find some large deposits into Trump coin or World Liberty Finacial shortly before this announcement.
If you think anyone has "forgotten" the issues you're deeply mistaken.
Apple essentially has a monopoly on iOS so just because people have adapted to their decisions doesn't make their decisions correct, or at the very least, painless.
If a headphone jack existed people would still be using it.
The USB-C example is particularly ironic given that it was Apple that was fighting switching over to USB-C on the iPhone until forced to do so by the EU. For years you could carry an Android and Macbook with a single charger, but needed 2 chargers for a Macbook and an iPhone. When Apple dropped USB-A completely it was painful for years, and people still have trouble with it. Most competitors still include at least 1 USB-A port.
Which wasn't the case for the CDRom or the floppy drive examples, showing that those decisions were correct in a way the USB-A removal one wasnt.
Further, even when Apple dropped the CD-Rom, it was a phased removal starting with teh Macbook Air, which made complete sense. People who bought the MacBook Pro still had CD Roms (except for 1 of the cheapest models). That was the correct way to approach this. Remove it from a device where it made sense to remove it, while keeping it for the Pros who needed it, but also signaling that it was going away giving people time to transition their workflows.
The USB-A port was signaled for 1 year at best (and even then it really wasn't signaled...it was simply removed from the cheapest model, which could have been seen as cost cutting more than anything else), and then a year later all the PRO laptops lost their USB-A ports completely. This was the opposite of the kind of transition they did earlier (such as keeping Firewire on the Pro laptops for years after they were removed from their no Pro versions).
I absolutely loved the Google Windows search app, and even went as far as fighting for our org to install the google appliance, only for Google to pull the rug out from under us.
They have Exchange solutions working for over 2 decades but the Google Appliance barely lasted 5 years.
I thought the US approach to biofuels was always understood as a Republican head fake towards climate change action during Bush without doing anything that would threaten oil interests while simultaneously enriching their donor and voting base with all our tax dollars.
The party is defined as being composed of the people who are already elected. So the priority of the Democratic Party ends up reflecting the priorities of those who are already in office, which is to make sure the incumbents get reelected.
This means there's very little incentive to expand the electorate (which would mean younger voters, who are likely to vote younger candidates, so that threatens the aging incumbents), or spend resources in expanding the map (because by definition there are no incumbents there whose interests are represented in the party).
For as advanced as the US political system is, it's incredibly backwards when it comes to professionalization of the political parties. A good comparison is the BJP in India. Setting aside policy, ideological issues for a moment, what they're really good at is being professional. The head of the party is not elected, and constantly rotates the party representative in each election, keeping their bench deep. They also have a soft age limit.
In a way, Donald Trump's greatest contribution to the Republican Party was destroying the incumbency advantage for Republicans. As a result the Republican slate was completely refreshed with younger (although generally worse) candidates, but while it may have made the party significantly worse from a policy/ideology perspective, it has made it politically stronger.
To be fair, a lot of people were fooled by the first term.
In the first term Trump hired a lot of retired or retiring generals. They may not have been subject matter experts, but that's fine, since they had subject matter experts within their departments, and they had the ability to organize, lead and execute.
But most importantly, most of them had a pretty strong sense of ethics and loyalty to the country and constitution.
The generals, and the people they hired, and even the Trump lackeys who were nonetheless being watched by the generals, helped keep Trump's worst impulses in check.
In Term 2, on the other hand, Trump has explicitly picked people who are completely unqualified (this is a mafia tactic to ensure the individual's loyalty is entirely to you since they know they would never have got the job they did on merit) and their primary skills lie in right wing TV and Podcasts. So these people prioritize effect and show for their followers, and are loyal to no one but Trump. And they've been selected primarily because they're incapable of doing the jobs they've been hired for well, so it's a stark 180 from the first term.
I can't speak to whether the 6 applications is the correct number, but it seems like a reasonable first pass to apply some limit as long as the NIH is closely monitoring this and modifying the restrictions as needed.
Who is advising Apple on these actions? Is it a team out of California? Because their approach to working with the EU seems pretty obviously unproductive and will (as it has in the past) hurt Apple, leading them to give up even more than they may have wanted, where if they worked collaboratively in good faith, they'd probably be able to negotiate the EU into a position more favorable to their preferences.
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes
This is a straight up giveaway to friends.
Even dictators in other countries don't make it so obvious because they're worried their populations would revolt, which says a lot about the American voter today.
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