It's really interesting how states are willing to spend billions in public funds to help huge companies set up factories, but those companies keep taking the money and leaving because they don't see the value of investing there. I feel like there might be a solution that's being overlooked here.

On a maybe similar topic, I've learned that many people assess how much tax they paid solely by how much refund they get..

Some people are annoyed here that so many factories are popping up because they say we don't have the workforce here and it's just bringing more people and making traffic and infrastructure demands worse. It could also be that this area needs to import people that actually work for a living as it's pretty full of people that don't or are military. I don't know, just thinking out loud but, yea, these companies get lots of breaks to come here. Google is building a big facility pretty much literally next door to me in what was a disaster of a failed solar panel factory that never really opened.



Not really but, yea, their stupid derision was meant for people like me. Well, more accurately, I think it's meant for more mainstream Republican voters but I don't think they have any problem including others like me in it.



No, not really. I actually really appreciated your post, I read it yesterday but didn't want to reply on phone, and I really enjoy it when I see where we have similar views on things. I like that you really fleshed that out which you may not have intended to do for my benefit but I do think it's pretty cool. I hope to get back to some of this later.

So in today's episode of "In Which Ways are Redditors Stupid and Wrong", our brave commenters discover that Tencent is buying a large stake in Reddit. How will they react??

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/aoiw1y/****_tencent_****_censorship_****_china_heres_to/

Oh. So apparently Reddit has it in mind that, somehow, a multinational holdings company based in China buying a portion of Reddit means that Reddit will be censored, or something. Apparently, in the Redditor's mind, the Chinese are the Borg, and every company will pursue the interests of their government. Not only are the Chinese not individuals, they're gonna suppress our internet from talking about Tiananmen square! Oh no!

I mean seriously, Tencent 100% owns Riot Games, and League of Legends has no censorship. Hell, China has been making moves to ban esports and League of Legends is among the games mentioned! It looks far more like Tencent has to battle the government to keep their business than that they're about to proactively censor Westerners for no reason.

That's not to say there's nothing to be concerned about when Chinese investors keep buying up American companies, but Jesus Christ these people have no concept of how anything works. Tencent is just a corporation, they're just trying to make money. They aren't keen to upset the world stage and damage their businesses for no reason at all.

In reality though, people see how powerful China is economically and the continued destruction of American manufacturing. They know the world is changing and leaving them behind, and they're scared of it. They see Chinese corporations buying something and it invokes fear of the foreign. So in some sense it does tangentially relate to things people ought to care about. But they lack any of the knowledge or language to describe their fears. Instead we get Trump.

Isn't that sort of the problem though? It's not like corporations will hesitate to



if it helps them mess around with their balance sheet.

I mean there's a reason why they're making the toxic subredits inconvenient enough to use for all but the most dedicated of fanatics.

Really in my mind there are at least two Reddits: there's the social media-esque homepage, and there are the smaller, organic communities. The more headquarters tightens its grip on those communities (for example, by replacing useful homepages with ugly ass, space wasting empty stretches of padding), the more will slip through their fingers.

We don't know what the next platform will be for those communities, but if management wants to find out faster...

Ultra-post

So yeah, I mean Tencent is still a corporation and everything which comes with that, but that's not what they're complaining about. They're acting as if Tencent and the Chinese government are the same entity and care about what Americans say online, which is confusing nonsense.

They probably don't care what Americans say online.

They probably care a lot about how the CCP feels about their stewardship of a large platform for voicing political opinions--vis-a-vis Chinese nationals. I would actually be surprised if China isn't blocking Reddit altogether already.

Guanxi

Of course it is. Tencent has lots of holdings that are blocked by the Chinese government. Doesn't mean they're about to start trying to censor westerners.

profiteering off censorship vs actively wanting to censor. tencent are clearly amoral profiteers, but that doesn't mean they're gonna start censoring the internet for no reason.

So let's be clear here.

A prerequisite for doing "business" is China is satisfying the egos of every middling bureaucrat to which you are subject. Any one of them has the power to make business or even life too inconvenient for you to continue, unless you exchange favors or otherwise make them feel important. Even if this isn't specifically enshrined in Chinese law, it's the custom, and it's the way business is done in China in practice (I imagine it would be this way, whether they were ruled by a Stalinist tyrant or not).

This is an... um, well, a super different set of ethics than we have, to say the least. Imagine if you had a business in the United States. You had to wine and dine everybody from your local mayor up through the President of the United States just to stay in control of your company, and boy oh boy, if your business even sniffs at the outside world, you'd better make damn sure your company doesn't make the Secretary of State lose face. This sort of arrangement sounds super duper corrupt to us, but in their culture it's just how a business is supposed to behave as a good element of society.

Of course the result is that it's, like, super duper corrupt. Is it literally, legally correct to say that every Chinese business is directly owned and controlled by the Chinese government? No, but... like... that doesn't change the fact that in practice it's exactly what's happening, so splitting hairs about this kinda dumb.


Edit: Going back to the above scenario. Let's say Alphabet buys a controlling interest in the Edmonton Journal. Will the Journal publish an article smearing Larry Page? No, probably not - it's not a good way to stay employed, right? Now imagine if we lived in a world where Alphabet's CEO had to have daily lunches with the Secretary of State to discuss responsibly portraying the American government overseas. See where I'm going with this? If Tencent has enough of a stake in Reddit, and if the Chinese government decides that they need to be represented better on Reddit even if it risks Tencent's foreign reputation, this will change. The alternative is corporate death.

Yeah, but this is a criticism much different from the one I linked above and one which reflects, you know, reality a little bit. Anyone who's not a toddler can see the amount of paid content disguised on Reddit, and with different ownership different content will be pushed. That much seems obvious.

Just because Chinese business is corrupt and centered around the party doesn't mean everyone's going to do anything the Chinese government wants. There's inertia against bad changes in even the most totalitarian of regimes. ****ing with Reddit in a really obvious way would almost certainly not happen. The Chinese government would know better than to force through the worst PR blunder ever and Tencent would be murdering the value of a holding. Silently manipulating content is a more realistic concern, surely, but even then if enough people in China are profiting I doubt they're going to push it too hard.

would you say then that the TL;DR is "Reddit / social media overreacts"?

yes

Ah, wow, the rare Youtuber who isn't politically terrible and talks about cool things.

Love AM/FM: Actual Machines vs ****ing Magic, and how everything Elon Musk promises is FM.

This is ****ing amazing

Hell yes it is.

BTW, Trump is declaring the national emergency. We authoritarian now. Any tips for surviving under a fascist regime?

The actual quote from Sanders:



Notice how the official statement mentions the campaign promises? Yeah, I'm sure they're really concerned about the "humanitarian crisis".

Remember when "principled conservatives" used to get mad that Obama was overstepping with the affordable care act? lol

ummm hello: we've been living under a fascism since 9/11. The state of emergency that George W. Bush declared is still in effect: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/09/12/2018-19945/continuation-of-the-national-emergency-with-respect-to-certain-terrorist-attacks

but I guess the fact that Trump is a teetotaler and because you can make a bunch of other superficial comparisons to Hitler makes all the difference in this case

I haven't made a favorable comparison of Trump to Hitler in whole, but what a great way to welcome you back!

Yeah, I'm well aware how national emergencies work. The difference is previous emergencies were never done so a president could rob money from other parts of the government to fund campaign promises.

It seems like an over simplification to dismiss securing the border as a "campaign promise". Is this being referred to in that manner in other places/media?

Just to be clear here, the issue isn't declaring a national emergency per se. A national emergency can be ongoing and, as pointed out, can affect little.

It matters how and why Trump is doing this. Trump has been fighting congress (who are, by the Constitution, in control of spending) to secure funding for the border wall. They basically said no, they will not set aside billions for your project.

Trump wants to abuse his constitutional authority to declare an emergency and divert funds from the normal operation of the government to build the wall. There is clearly no emergency and his and Sarah Sanders' speeches have made it clear that the intent is simply to fulfill the campaign promises (thinly veiled, but it's obvious). He's trying to override the balance of power laid out by the constitution in a very simple way.

The issue is much less about the wall or national emergencies in themselves, but in what this means for the functioning of the government and long-term stability of our institutions. At best we're going to have a constitutional struggle between the supreme court and Trump. This is obviously bad, and bad in a new and disturbing way.

The official statement claimed it was for "the humanitarian crisis". Most don't comment on the reasons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/us/politics/national-emergency-trump.html

Just listen to Trump's statement. Trump says he "didn't have to do this", and blamed the Democrats for not going along with him. He also believes the Supreme Court will not overrule him, and he might be right. That's what happens when you play dirty to stack the courts with loyalists instead of obeying the tradition of nonpartisan appointment of judges.

If the Supreme Court fails to knock it down America is in serious trouble politically. Even in the best-case scenario where Trump loses in 2020, if this isn't stopped then he's establishing a very dangerous precedence.

I can't help but feel we are witnessing a historic moment. The kind you don't look fondly on.

Man, I agree with Reid. I hate it when that happens. IDGAF about the wall, but I really don't like the precedent being set. Both parties unwilling to work together, so a president side-stepping the whole process to get things done. Not cool.

[Welcome back Eversor]

Fascism is your fault. If you didn’t want to live under a bloodthirsty nativist tyrant then you shouldn’t have terrified the billionaires with your calm request to vote on a candidate who supports slight decreases on the private jet subsidy.

Wow, Bernie really took a hard turn to the right, didn't he.

Something to think about: even if Bush wasn't the bloodthirsty fascist people said he was, doesn't mean that later presidents who invoke the exact same powers are going to be similarly restrained in scope.

In some ways, perhaps this is just Trump testing the waters to see how much he can get away with, perhaps now with his shiny new toady in place on the Supreme Court.

lol

A thing we have to remember, is that authoritarians build off of each other and learn from each other. Trump has been friendly with the authoritarians in Hungary and Poland who are grabbing power, and they feed off of each other's successes and learn. Every authoritarian who wants to topple the powers against them is watching in glee right now.

Like how Bush learned from Putin’s apartment bombings when he did 9/11

Putin and Bush got those ideas from watching the beginning and end of Fight Club (respectively)

Precisel- hey.

**** off with that bull**** when im high

Speaking of bourgie government bull****, anybody hear about this SNC-Lavalin scandal in Canada?

TL;DR: SNC-Lavalin is a mob-connected Quebecois construction conglomerate. They've been caught bribing officials in Canada, making illegal campaign contributions to the federal Liberal party, general nefarious things. Currently they are facing criminal prosecution for bribing the Gaddafi government of Libya. Followers of US news may remember hearing the name SNC-Lavalin from around the same time Muammar was sodomized to death, because they were caught red handed trying to smuggle one of his sons out of the country.

After aggressive lobbying from SNC-Lavalin, last year the Liberal and Conservative Parties worked together to slip legislation into the budget to allow deferred prosecution agreements for corporations. (This directly contradicted a Liberal campaign promise about omnibus bills, so god help you if you call it on omnibus bill around a Liberal supporter because they will ****ing knife you.) Being entitled criminal ****heads, SNC-Lavalin wrote their prosecutor to demand a negotiated deferred prosecution within hours of the new budget bill passing. But since they are, you know, entitled criminal ****heads, the prosecutor declined.

This is where the story should have ended, but as you can guess it didn't.

SNC-Lavalin went crying to the Prime Minister. Worried about job losses in Quebec that might cost him the next election, the Prime Minister then summoned the Attorney General and strongly suggested but did not instruct her to order the prosecutor to negotiate. It's very important that the Prime Minister didn't require her to do anything, because that would be an indictable offense. Anyway, the Attorney General declined to follow the Prime Minister's recommendation, and then the Prime Minister fired her as Attorney General. But that's definitely not why he fired her. There were other reasons. Lots of them. New ones every day.

Anyway, the Prime Minister's new Attorney General seems to have much less problem following orders. Er, I mean, has a different but independently acquired opinion about protecting SNC-Lavalin from consequences. So it's all going to work out.





Some day I hope Canada gets a federal government that keeps it together more than 4 years before being implicated in some crimes involving a Quebec/Montreal based company.