> 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.

Yeah.

Windows should probably also have a VM system that isn't total pants. I'm sure Microsoft will get right on that and have a fix ready any day now.

> Why would I want to sacrifice performance by restricting how much memory my browser is using?

Your question presupposes a couple of things:

1. You are actually using Edge as your web browser. For a lot of people this is not the case.

2. Your computer actually has the necessary amount of physical RAM. On a lot of low-end systems (especially cheap laptops) this is not the case.

There are people out there who were scammed into trying to run Windows Ten on a system with 16GB of RAM. (I've even seen one system that had Windows Ten and only 8GB of physical RAM. I was appalled.) Used-computer sellers have been refurbishing/renewing secondhand computers that are appropriate for running Windows Seven, and of course they've been putting Ten on them instead, and a lot of budget-minded people are buying them like that. This results in a LOT of page swapping. Like, really a lot, even by nineties standards. Under these circumstances, a simple action like trying to access the Start menu, can easily lead to a 10-minute wait while virtual memory is shuffled around. It doesn't help that the virtual memory system in Windows Phone/Eight/Ten/Eleven is even more pants than the one in NT/XP/Vista/Seven. But when even the OS itself won't fit in physical RAM and then you're trying to run memory-hungry things like Edge, while simultanously there are endless system updates downloading and data indexing and whatnot forever happening in the background, a better VM system would only help so much; there's going to be a lot of swapping regardless. The only way to make performance any worse than that, would be to put the swap file in the cloud.

Eleven has somewhat more realistic specs for what your computer should have in order to run it, and it refuses to install if the system is too low-end. As near as I can tell, Eleven doesn't actually need more RAM than Ten needs; but it *knows* that it needs it, and so it is more realistic about telling people their systems don't have enough system resources and can't upgrade to the new version. If Ten had been similarly realistic about this, a lot more people would still be using Seven, or else they'd have spent more on their computers and got ones that could handle Ten better.

They're afraid of becoming irrelevant, and it makes them do stupid irrational things.

The best example is Eight. Nobody was using Windows Phone, and they were afraid that (with smartphones gaining popularity) if everyone kept not using it, Microsoft would become irrelevant, so they used their majority market share on the desktop to force everyone to use their phone OS, by porting over some stuff and turning it into the next version of MS Windows. This was a terrible idea (Eight was so much worse than Seven you can't even really compare them), and as far as I know, it also hasn't resulted in anyone buying a smartphone with a Microsoft OS on it, so as a strategy, it completely failed to mitigate in any way the risk that inspired it. But that didn't stop them from doing it. Actions inspired by fear don't have to be rational.

Web browsers are a similar situation. Everybody uses web browsers, so if everybody doesn't use *Microsoft's* web browser, they feel like they're in danger of becoming irrelevant. So they think they have to stop that from happening, at all costs, and it makes them do stupid counterproductive stuff that annoys and alienates users.

I mean, the stock is almost certainly overvalued, so at *some* point its price will experience a "market correction". But when you take up a short position, the inevitability of that ultimate outcome won't save you.

When you're short, you need the price to stay level or drop, and you need that to happen *right now* not some time later after you go bankrupt. If the price correction happens somewhat later than you expected, you lose, and the amount you lose depends on the unpredictable amount by which that stock price goes up in the short term. Fundamentally, you're handing the market the right to demand *any* amount of additional money from you (limited only by bankruptcy law), to cover the short if your timing is bad. You don't even have to be wrong about the company being overvalued. If you take up the short position too soon, and the price goes up for a while longer before crashing, it sucks to be you.

Short positions are dangerous.

> Shorts have the potential to lose a lot of money if the stock goes up.

Not just a lot, but an *unpredictable* amount. It isn't just that you can lose money if things don't go your way. That's always true with investments, especially ones that are famous for having a lot of price-motion, like stocks. But a short position is special because the amount you can lose is unbounded, and this makes it risky to hold *even* as part of a diverse portfolio. If you invest 5% of your portfolio in a normal stock, and it tanks, you can lose up to 5% of your portfolio. But if you put 5% of your investment portfolio into a short position, and the stock increases to e.g. 200 times its former value, you could lose 1000% of your investment portfolio, which is probably significantly more than your entire net worth. The 200x increase isn't especially likely, but the possibility of something like that happening is always there with a short position.

The Trump stock is more unlikely than most to have a very very large increase, because the company doesn't do any significant R&D and is already valued at a relatively high level. But it's probably *more* likely than the average stock to have a more moderate increase that would make a short position, not completely ruinous, but decidedly uncomfortable. All it would take would be for a couple more of Trump's political enemies to file yet more lawsuits against him (which does *not* seem unlikely), and his popularity would probably go up again (like it has done the last half dozen times that happened), and the stock price would probably increase as a result. So honestly, I think shorting the Trump stock is probably a somewhat more manageable risk (as part of a diverse portfolio) than a typical short position (but that's not a high bar) but also less likely to pay off. It's not an investment strategy I would particularly recommend.

I expect people are going "This is overvalued; if its bubble pops while I have it shorted, I make money." And that's true, as far as it goes, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Honestly, right now the research currently being done is all incremental tweaking focused on getting things like ChatGPT and its ilk to be slightly less embarrassingly bad at doing the limited range of things they do. None of that research has *any* chance of leading to human-like intelligence, in a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. It's like expecting to make a breakthrough in space travel by engineering a slightly more aerodynamic bicycle. The more aerodynamic bicycle may be valuable, but it isn't *ever* going to fly through space under its own power at a significant fraction of light speed, sorry, that's just not what it's going to do. Such an advance wouldn't come from that approach. If it comes at all, it will come from someone trying something new that hasn't already had millions of man-hours poured into it.

By 1998, hard drives were either IDE or SCSI, and most new computers also had (usually ATAPI) CD-ROM drives.

Admittedly, floppy disks were also still in widespread use; but it wasn't for lack of hard drives. It was for lack of USB 2.0 and the (flash-EEPROM-based) mass storage devices that it enabled.

Or they are still in the room but paused the movie for some quiet; for instance to take a phone call or to hear someone calling from another room. What an awesome idea to play loud ads during that time.