Senator faces backlash for asking TikTok CEO [Singaporean] if he’s a secret Chinese communist
I'm not a CCP apologist, if that's what you gathered. I believe all corporations in America should be held to the same security standards and requirements to protect consumer information.
I think you might be overlooking my main point: no government should be given American citizen data, including China. We deserve senators who can adequately solve these problems rather than attacking a person based on their vague ethnic associations with a country or countries.
Meta, Twitter/X, Reddit, etc. have been selling data to foreign governments for decades. Just because TikTok is Chinese owned doesn't mean they're the only ones guilty. And this senator is shifting the argument from a personal privacy one to a xenophobic one. He's wasting our time and hurting our ability to achieve material changes in our law that will protect us from the CCP, Russia, Iran, etc.
It was pretty fucking stupid to ask him those questions. In addition, being a member of the CCP isn't as big of a deal as this senator is making it out to be. We aren't living in McCarthyism are we? Are we afraid of ideas?
America is afraid of ideas though. We have a long history of banning ideas from within our borders. By way of example, ideological restrictions on naturalization. We basically didn't allow people to become citizens if they believed in communism as a valid government structure.
If the CEO of TikTok was born in China and moved to Singapore (or America for that matter), does that preclude him from doing business with America? Why? Are we so insecure as a nation that we must ban an entire country from our internet activity?
I'll be the first to admit that TikTok - and apps like it - are security vulnerabilities. However, this entire debate has nothing to do with national security. If it were, Meta or X would also be under fire for selling advertising/user data to foreign countries, no? Plenty of these social media companies have entire sectors of their organization providing APIs and SAAS solutions for consuming data. Twitter has something which is essentially a firehose of all tweets being posted in any country that match a search query of yours. Is that not a security risk? It comes with geo information, timestamps, hashtags, urls, etc.
If this is about security, focus on user protections. The EU has shown a lot of promise in this area. I was the first to say "you can't moderate the internet", but they've done it. If you've ever been to a country within the EU in the past 5 years, you'll notice those "accept/deny cookie" popups are far less spammy and easier to deny. In addition, most companies I've worked for in America have adhered to GDPR standards.
I believe we should protect locations, names, birthdays, emails, phone numbers, addresses, etc. Data should be opt-in and not opt-out. Is this hard to mandate? Yes. Of course there are going to be bad actors. But laws should not be written to catch all criminals. They should be written to promote what our society values. Do we value privacy or not?
I'd be far more impressed with a senator questioning tech companies about their data protections and their willingness to agree to not sell user data. But I somehow doubt that's going to happen in our Congress.
I use Starlink because I only have one other satellite competitor in my area, which I used to rely on. Previously, I had a 500GB limit and only 15-25mbps on any given day. Now, I have unlimited data and get 35mbps-70mpbs on any given day. Often above 50mbps.
It's cheaper, it's faster, and it's easier to manage/setup/move/etc.
I think Elon is an idiot. I don't even like that I have to use satellite internet. America used to have programs to build infrastructure like fiber optics across the nation for everyone. Our ability to service each other has diminished so greatly that it's easier for me to connect to a satellite than it is to crowd source laying cables in my area.
It's way faster, cheaper, and reliable to just dig trenches and lay cable. But Starlink provides me with something I can use for remote work, entertainment, and communication. It's a decent product. I just think it's like solving a drought by melting the ice caps.
Cause if you don't forget your own stainless steel, you can't be trained on proper defibrillator techniques?
Crunch wrap supreme.
I was comparing it to civil or mechanical engineering. I agree that programming/software is growing and "infiltrating" our lives. That's why I think it will become a licensed/certified term in the future. Software engineer will require a cert and some products will require certified engineers. Whereas web apps developers (most likely) will not use that title most of the time and we will just bifurcate those who work on "critical software" and those that do not.
Well that's my point. The term "engineer" is protected in a lot of other industries but not software.
Software engineering is just what any "engineering" field would be if they didn't have standards. We have some geniuses and we have some idiots.
Mechanical engineers, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc. are often forced to adhere to some sort of standard. It means something to say "I'm a civil engineer" (in most developed nations). You are genuinely liable in some instances for your work. You have to adhere to codes and policies and formats.
Software engineering is the wild west right now. No rules. No standards. And in most industries we may never need a standard because software rarely kills.
However, software is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives. There will likely come a day wherein similar standards take precedence and the name "software engineer" is only allowed to those who adhere to those standards and have the proper certs/licenses. I believe Canada already does this.
Software engineers would be responsible for critical software, e.g: ensuring phones connecting to an emergency operator don't fail, building pacemakers, securing medical records, etc. I know some of these tasks already have "experts" behind them. But I don't think software has any licensing/governing.
Directly opposed to "engineering" would be the grunt work which I do.
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These people are far and away the heaviest users of bank overdrafts. The Financial Health Network, a personal finance nonprofit, says the group most likely to overdraft includes “financially vulnerable” households that struggle to pay their bills every month and typically make less than $30,000 a year. Almost half of financially vulnerable households with checking accounts overdrafted in 2022, and of that group, two-thirds overdrafted at least three times, one-third did so six or more times, and one-fifth overdrafted 10 times or more. With an average overdraft fee of $26.61, hundreds of dollars in fees can land on the most cash-strapped customers. Capping those fees — possibly as low as $3 — would be a huge boon to families who really need the help. Who could oppose that?
Well, as with any nice-sounding policy, it’s important to consider the alternatives, both for the customer and for the banker.
For depositors, overdraft fees can be an expensive alternative to even worse options, such as payday loans or having their electricity shut off (and paying a reconnection fee to turn it back on). And “the best of bad alternatives” can also be sort of true for bankers, who must find some way to defray the cost of providing what is basically an unsecured loan to people who are, as we’ve seen, often financially struggling and might be unable to repay the money. The fees also help pay for “free” checking (which costs banks quite a bit of money to provide).
If we cap overdraft fees, how will banks make up the lost revenue?
From profits, you say, and fair enough, but Patrick McKenzie, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter, points out that the reason your bank is so obsessed with getting you to sign up for paperless statements is that the profit margins on checking accounts are so thin, they can be meaningfully improved by saving the cost of 12 stamps a year. “Margins on small bank accounts are very thin,” he wrote recently, and “credit losses can easily be larger than several years of them.”
Now the government wants to make those accounts even less profitable. It seems possible banks would look to limit their losses by getting rid of those customers or making up the revenue somewhere else — or possibly both. This seems to have happened in the past, judging from what we saw when federal regulators preempted some state fee caps in 2001. According to researchers from the New York Fed, the exempted banks both raised overdraft fees and expanded available overdraft credit, while lowering minimum balance requirements. The rate at which checks were returned for insufficient funds declined by 15 percent. And the share of low-income households with a bank account rose by 10 percent, suggesting that minimum balance requirements had kept those households from opening accounts.
That doesn’t mean that no one would benefit from this rule. High overdraft fees can also deter people from opening a bank account, and it’s possible that effect would outweigh any contraction of credit. The financial industry has also changed a lot since 2001, with nonbank alternatives, such as Cash App, that might offer the marginal bank customer a better replacement than an old-fashioned check-cashing store. But there would still likely be winners and losers, and I don’t know whether the former’s gains would outweigh the latter’s losses. I’m not sure the administration does, either.
There's got to be other tools though that could change the file permissions on chmod, right? Though I suppose you'd need permission to use them and/or download them.
Linux Mint: removed all taskbars from the desktop. I was hoping it would just allow me to reset them to the default. But in reality, it breaks the GUI and it's very hard to reset from the GUI. Suddenly my keystrokes weren't being detected and I couldn't open up applications with any sort of regularity. After a lot of dicking around, I got the terminal working so I could reset Cinnamon.
It's not the worst way I've broken a machine. But it was one of the most annoying.
No a penis.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was essentially just a common result of refactoring code. Rust might help compile to more efficient C than the stuff people write on their own? But my code is always more performant after a refactor. Surely writing this in another language would cause someone to look deeper at the choices being made during development. Even the scheduler might have some technical debt.
Who's the Boss?
I'm opposed to their ideology, I'm not afraid of it existing in my borders. This is just the argument of the tolerant of the intolerant and I frankly don't know where I land on that. I understand the premise, but intolerance seems like a paradoxical way to be tolerant.