Most governments operate their own web sites for official publications. I'm fine with them making announcements on commercial social media, after all that's where the eyeballs are. As long as it's not only Facebook, but all the other major platforms as well. By the same token, I'd have a real problem with the government ignoring a particular platform for the wrong reasons, for instance Twitter / X "because Elon Musk". Dropping Facebook over data privacy concerns is understandable, but on the other hand the people there ought to know by now what happens to their data.

It's a bit of a non-issue... as long as the social media posts don't become the official publications rather than just links to them.

Does the fact that it's propellantless necessarily make it a perpetual motion machine? The thing still needs power, and presumably you'll have to put in as much (or more) energy to make it go than any kinetic or potential energy it'll gain. Compare it to an electric coil levitating in an electric field, except this thing pushes against... I don't know, invisible unicorns maybe. Seems improbable, but not because it somehow has to be a perpetual motion machine. Unless I am missing something in the lack of conservation of momentum.

Step 1. Build a Reddit search solution so utterly useless absolutely no-one uses it
Step 2. Wait for Google to realise Reddit's solution is so rubbish that everyone's using Google for it instead.
Step 3. Profit...

Ernie name has been taken for years - it's the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment that has powered the UK's Premium Bonds prize drawing for 68 years.

1. Bare minimum, we should definitely hold Chinese vehicles (electric or otherwise) to the same safety-testing standards as domestic vehicles, and enforce it absolutely relentlessly (like we haven't been doing with Boeing until very recently, but we should have been). There will be huge pressure to relax this, but we dare not, because any loopholes will be abused in the worst possible way and people will die. This one shouldn't be negotiable at all.

2. Tariffs and sanctions remain an option, to be used correctively whenever a foreign company receives inherently unfair advantages resulting from things like government subsidies, currency manipulation, and so on. The details here are potentially negotiable, but...

3. There's no point negotiating *anything* with the CCP until the keep a few of the promises they've already made. Send them an open letter that says "Do some of the stuff you already said you were going to do. We'll wait." When they call to try to negotiate a better (for them) deal, have an intern put them on hold and go to lunch.

Decent-quality aluminum ore is still abundant. In the first place, it was more common than e.g. high-quality iron ore; but the real reason is, we didn't really start mining it in earnest until we figured out an affordable way to refine it, in the late nineteenth century. So compared to just about any other metal you care to name, there's significantly more of the good ore left still accessible, for aluminum.

> Even with that, you're still not going to the stars, i think.

Nobody's going to the stars, regardless of technology level. They're much too far away, and the incentives are much too weak. Staying on a planet in a nice comfy habitable-zone orbit around a star, is just *overwhelmingly* more convenient, than setting out on a multi-generational voyage to a distant location that probably offers you nothing you don't already have closer to home.

We're going to continue to explore the system we're in, and we're probably going to put telescopes in a few more places (perhaps at a couple of the earth-sun lagrange points, for instance) in an attempt to *see* a bit further out. Maybe we'll even send probes. But actually going ourselves, is a total non-starter. It's fun to write stories about, for entertainment purposes, when you don't have to be realistic. But it's not even remotely practicable.

People underestimate how far away the stars are, and think things like "Oh, if we could go maybe a tenth of light speed, then a trip to the nearest star could be 40 years." But it couldn't, because you're assuming instant acceleration, and nothing can survive that. Spreading the aceleration out means you can't do most of it with the slingshot effect, so it becomes very expensive to achieve. Using thrusters, for example, the amount of reaction mass needed to handle a voyage that long in a comfortable way (acelerate for the first half, then decelerate for the second half) is prohibitive, even if the energy is free. The only *practical* way to do it is with laws-of-physics-optional sci-fi propulsion technology. Hyperspace or warp drive or wormhole generators or space folding tech or some jazz like that. None of which is consistent with what we think we know about physics. So unless we find out that the standard model is very very wrong in some fundamental way, going to the stars is not happening.

Ask the Germans or the French how to do it; their dubbing of big productions is pretty good. In fact some people commented on how the Star Wars prequels sounded better in German; the movie's actors were unused to doing what amounted to voice acting in front of a green screen. Some of the actors sounded like they were reading lines off a teleprompter. In contrast, the German dubbers do voice acting for a living; they are used to that kind of work.

> I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling
> wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have
> the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

And furthermore, if they did, some of the treaties we've made at
the ends of wars, would be violations of our constitution. The
agreement we made with Japan at the end of WWII, and the
constitution we forced them to adopt (certain points of which we
later regretted due to the Cold War), are a prominent example.
But no, the German inter-war and Japanese post-war governments
don't have second-amendment rights. If foreign governments had
fourth-amendment rights, most of what the CIA does would be
unconstitutional.

If you don't understand the constitutional basis for who has rights,
maybe look at the wording in the ninth and tenth amendments.
Maybe you will find a clue there.

I will say it again: the Chinese Communist Party does not have
rights under the US constitution. They have certain rights under
international law, but running propaganda companies in other
countries isn't one of those rights.

> I don't see any "except for foreign corporations" clause in there,

The word "corporation" here is disengenuous. We're talking about a genocidal government that has materially subsidized the platform's growth specifically so they can use it for propaganda purposes, not some kind of normal for-profit company. (In fact, converting TikTok _into_ a normal for-profit company is the entire point of the bill. That's why the Chinese government hates it so much. They don't want to give up control.)

And I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

> not to mention all the users who are going to have their speech unconstitutionally
> abridged by this bill if it becomes law.

How does requiring a foreign government to divest their controlling share in a company, abridge the free speech rights of individuals? Have you even read a short *summary* of what the bill does? The bill does not in any way shape or form attempt to limit what opinions can be published. (It's the other side in the debate that wants to do that, by having the executive branch tell tech companies what "misinformation" they need to curtail.) It just requires ByteDance to sell the platform to a genuinely private company that's *not* run by the CCP. That's all.

But they really, really, really don't want to do that, because as far as they're concerned that would defeat the whole entire purpose of developing the thing in the first place.

Forcing ByteDance out doesn't violate the first amendment because ByteDance isn't the American public; it's part of the narrative-shaping aparatus of a hostile foreign power, which has no legal rights at all under US law. We should've had them on an entity list ten years ago.

> And yet, how many people who have served in the military or one of the
> three letter intelligence services, or administrations, or anything similar,
> have been prevented from telling what they know when writing a book?

That's different. Keeping secrets internally is not the same thing as preventing
political rivals from expressing their opinions.

The problem with the "free speech" argument is that it's completely totally
irrelevant. Foreign governments don't have a right to free speech in America,
and they never have had. The people who are in America, have the right to
free speech. Stopping the narrative-shaping branch of a hostile foreign
government from doing business in your county doesn't have anything to
do with whether your own people have free speech or not. It's just basic
counter-espionage procedure.

Let them publish their propaganda on their own websites, hosted in their
own country. (Which they also do, of course. Lots of them. The Global
Times is the most entertaining of the lot.) They don't have the right to
operate their narrative-shaping business over here.

Yeah, that argument is nonsense.

But forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok isn't a violation of free speech. If you think speech on TikTok is anything resembling free, I have a bridge to sell you. What we should be doing (about ten years ago by preference) is putting ByteDance on an entity list and making it illegal to do business with them because of their ties to the PLA.

In terms of free speech, the TikTok platform was already yanked out from under you before you ever tried to stand on it. It is easily the *most* heavily narrative-shaped social media platform ever to gain widespread adoption in the West. (Douyin and Weibo and WeChat are even worse, but nobody in America uses those platforms except to talk to family members who are located in countries with extreme levels of government censorship, where everything else is blocked.)

What we should've done, about ten years ago, is put ByteDance on the entity list and make it illegal to conduct financial transactions with them, block their access to Swift, etc. That wouldn't have had much impact on the platform's growth, but it *would* have made TikTok's main source of funding far more obvious to the casual observer, which would simplify certain aspects of this argument.

Web developers have no problem with the less-well-known browsers. We never have to do anything to support them, *they* support the relevant standards and everything just works. It's consistently whatever browser has the most market share that is a perpetual thorn in our collective sides (or to a lesser extent the browsers in the #2 and #3 slots), and that's been true ever since the #1 browser was Netscape Navigator. The people who make the leading browser never think they need to do things in the standard way, because everyone will bend over backwards to make websites work with their browser *anyway* and unfortunately most of the time they're right.

I used to test in half a dozen browsers. I stopped bothering, because I never found any problems with the lesser ones. Ever.