I don’t see there being a sale at all. ByteDance isn’t gonna sell the world’s hottest social media platform simply because a foreign country demands it, and even if it were a lucrative enough offer to be tempting, the CPC wouldn’t allow it anyway. If something like this happened in the other direction, I think 1/4 of the US Senate would go into cardiac arrest on the spot, and there’s exactly a 0% chance it would be allowed to happen

There’s a decent chance you might not be missing anything, it’s just not for you. Minecraft and Terraria are beloved titles that people put thousands of hours into, but I never got into them myself.

A turn-based CRPG is a very old-fashioned thing (the C stands for Computer), and it’s a pretty faithful adaption of a TT (tabletop, so pen-and-paper) RPG, which is even older (though the current ruleset for DnD is pretty new). I can definitely understand how Skyrim appeals to you but something like BG3 doesn’t; they’re fundamentally different games, and Skyrim is much faster-paced

Check out the “Leviathan” album by Mastodon. A good number of bangers on there, one after another

So I recently listened to an episode of the Data over Dogma podcast specifically regarding angels and demons. It’s hosted by Dan Beecher (an atheist podcaster) and Dr. Dan McClellan (a Bible scholar), and they discuss how angels and demons are actually depicted/described in the Bible, compared to the extra-biblical descriptions of both that we’ve gotten over the millennia. It’s about an hour but should serve as a nice little primer on the subject, with some recommendations for further study.

Sure, it’s conventional explosive with radioactive markers to test the detection capabilities of their equipment. I was being polite with my earlier comment, in case I had missed something in the article, but I guess I didn’t.

The Wikipedia page on Explosives gives some reading on the differences between the two. Suffice it to say, chemical and nuclear explosions are fundamentally different things; breaking/reforming of molecular bonds to produce heat and energy, compared to splitting or fusing atoms themselves, which releases FAR more energy than those molecular reactions since the bonds holding atomic nuclei together are so much stronger. If we say that a nuclear explosion is literally any explosion + radioisotopes, then you could buy some uranium online, tape it to a brick of plastic explosive, and say you’ve got yourself a nuke. Maybe someone should tell Iran they don’t need to waste all that money on centrifuges.

You’re half right though, in that this probably is a response to Russia, but demonstrating your ability to detect underground nuclear tests is not at all the same thing as actually conducting one.

Where are you seeing that the US conducted a nuclear test? The article only mentions a chemical explosion

I believe those are total numbers, so that includes both operational warheads (ready to launch) and stored warheads. The article here is specifically referring to the number of operational warheads China has, which is still much lower than that of Russia and the US, but the gap isn’t quite as wide as 500-6,000

I mean I straight-up didn’t say any of that, nor is it reasonable to infer that I take those positions from what I did say. I’m not even talking about the article; I’m talking about your initial critique of OPs comment. Now if you think that their comment is wrong or misleading then ok, sure, but that’s not what you said (or at least it didn’t seem to be).

This seems like it would be better suited as a top-level response to the post rather than as a response to something that I never said. There are enough libs on the internet that excuse or ignore fascism/imperialism such that you don’t need to invent new ones to argue with.

That’s a false dichotomy, but honestly even if you granted it I don’t think it affects the validity of the original statement. People dying for one thing when they think they’re dying for another is sad, even if it happens everywhere all the time. I also don’t really get the contention, that saying “a particular aspect of Russian nationalism is bad” is not notable, when this is literally a post about a particular aspect of Russian nationalism?

How does the existence of military propaganda in the US make the observation that there’s military propaganda in Russia a weird comment?

I wonder how much sense that would actually make for them. All the major console makers subsidize their products through game sales and online subscriptions. Valve already does the former, but that’s because they’re a game marketplace and it’s how they make money to begin with. I’m not sure what a steam subscription service (that’s not a game pass) would look like, since Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo offer online play and cloud saves for the cost of a subscription, whereas Valve makes those available for free.

It’s essentially the lemmy version of Apollo for Reddit, which was an iOS only app (different devs though)

Oh shit, when they said “around the corner” they really meant it

But even if you grant the two premises there, that TikTok’s data collection is beyond that of other apps, and that said data is given to the PRC to access, this draft agreement’s solution to those problems is “let us access that collected data instead of them”. It implements measures that would affect future changes to TOS and policies, but I don’t see anything about scaling back what’s collected now. From what I can tell, this is just trying to replace who’s steering the ship. If the solution that “stops the Chinese government from spying on US citizens” just changes the government that’s doing the spying, I don’t see how that helps said US citizens in any way. The CPC isn’t the one who can put me on a no-fly list on a whim.

That’s my fundamental issue with this, as well as the relevant proposed legislation; it’s not a good-faith attempt to protect US citizens.

This is missing some pretty important context, in that CPC policy is generally more restrictive around social media and youth usage. This is a country that has legal limits on the amount of time minors can play video games (and I know that’s not unique to China). If you’re making the point, in good faith, that China has identified some specific evil in regards to TikTok, it’s not enough to merely show that they have restrictions on it; you would also need to show how this differs from the way they treat Weibo, bilibili, etc.

So these two provisions caught my eye; under the draft agreement, executive branch agencies (the article gives the example of the DOJ or DOD) would have the ability to (among other things)

Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,

In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.

In the case of the former, would that include user data? Given the general US gov approach to digital privacy I assume so, and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.

As far as the latter, I wonder how broadly “some circumstances” is defined. If the language is broad enough, that would open the door to de facto censorship if a certain trend or info around a certain event is spreading on the site right as the government magically decides it needs to pause TikTok due to, “uh, terrorism or something, don’t worry about it.”

I’m also curious how durable this agreement would be. How hard would it be for the next administration to decide to pitch a fit and renegotiate or throw out the deal pending a new, even harsher agreement?

It would seem to me that this is pretty nakedly an assertion of power over an entity based outside the US, and not an agreement meant to protect US citizens in any meaningful way. I think any defense of this agreement as a way to protect privacy or mental health or whatever won’t be able to honestly reconcile with the fact that these exact same concerns exist with domestic social media companies

It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees

Thanks for the correction! I still hear that usage fairly often and wasn’t up with the discourse around it. Like the other reply I’m also more partial to “folks” personally (as well as “y’all”), but I think I still use “guys” out of habit on occasion

I’ve noticed that “gay” is used as a more general term for members of the LGBTQ+ community, similar to how “guys” has a pretty common gender-neutral usage

EDIT: tweaked the wording a bit

To add on, this exact scenario illustrates why BMI is not always the best measure of health, because it only looks at height and weight. Measuring waist circumference and body fat percentage should give you a better-rounded picture of how you’re doing