That’s the neat thing… They don’t. Hershey can claim anything new is “generally recognized as safe” and skip all that. It was meant to grandfather in actual foodstuff, but it left a loophole that’s frequently used to put in all sorts of substances not proven to be harmful

Honestly, you’re probably better off without tiktok. Short form video is bad for humans, and it’s much worse if it’s not educational

I’m genuinely sorry for the potential friends you’ve lost, but tiktok was not a good thing… An American controlled version wouldn’t be better, I hope you double down on the fediverse

Let’s go way further with that. Companies are not people. Companies do not have rights. Companies exist to serve the public good, otherwise their charter gets revoked

That’s what companies were supposed to be, not unaligned AI running on distributed human hardware

Unless they just refuse to give into the pressure… Politically, it is creating a lot of anger, and if they don’t sell no one else gets the benefit

Let’s not forget, byte dance owns a large percentage of checks notes nearly everything digital. Forcing them to divest from all of corporate social media, gaming, and Disney is a bigger threat to them than losing tik tok

Whether it’s CCP influence or just business, it’s probably more strategic for them to take this loss kicking and screaming and solidify their overall position

Because you’re one of their leads, and you too could cold call people from a list if you pay now!

No but like… Even on lemmy, even left wing streamers, even my friends just kinda laugh and go “yeah, things are fucking crazy”

It’s like everyone just accepted it… Not the they like it, but that they’ve just accepted a billionaire has made a fake government department that is going to dictate terms to the rest of the government, and no one seems to really take a second to acknowledge that idea

Always was

Okay, I feel like I’m going crazy here.

Can someone please acknowledge the fact that Elon Musk, as a private citizen, just created his very own government department, and people seem to be just going along with it?

I too embrace deathklock as better dictators. I would also accept a dog or a sheep

Their name is literally pronounced “cocks”. It really says it all

Can we take a moment to acknowledge a few billionaires made their own government department, and people are just rolling with it?

They’re a random private company. Why are we just letting that fact slide???

When he announced it, there was a short pause with an expectant look

I can’t shake the thought that he was hoping for someone to yell out “let’s name it the gulf of Trump!”

Tencent is an investor there too

Greenland is largely populated by indigenous people, they really like their island the way it is, with nice cities along the coast and no roads cutting through the land

It seems unlikely… The vessel wasn’t up to the challenge of anywhere near that depth, and they intended to go that deep from the get go.

I mean, it could be, but Bluetooth shouldn’t work like that - it’s a digital signal with a bunch of failure modes in the spec. You’d have to code it particularly stupidly to have that kind of problem - it’s a very time-synched protocol, even a sudden disconnect with no disconnect signal is something a coder would have to confront explicitly if they were using off the shelf components

I’m not one to bet against bad code, but the decompression seemed to be pretty much instant and within the planned trip, it just seems like it doesn’t survive oscams razor

Good point. Here’s my pitch - Reboot America. Let’s turn it off and on again

Dismiss everyone. Hand out free food from strategic reserves, put a hold on all utility shutoffs and evictions, maybe cut some checks for people - let’s take some time, put everything on life support, and unfuck the system

How? Bottom up. Organize, take the local and state elections, call a constitutional convention. Let’s use the second to last option, the ripcord built into the Constitution for exactly this sort of situation

I don’t think it could happen fast enough to really matter, but I think it would get people moving in the right direction, and in the meantime apply pressure with a compelling but nonviolent threat

Nah, the shell cracked, pretty much instant death. Dodgy tech works until it doesn’t, only the first critical failure matters

No, you don’t understand… This isn’t a “the government is doing this to control people” kind of conspiracy

This is a “consulting firms like McKinsey have been quietly but openly pushing the idea of exploiting workers to keep them too busy to advocate for their interests for the last 50 years, using concepts such as corporate culture, surpressing wages, and most recently return to office” thing

It’s the investigative journalism kind of conspiracy

You forgot, it saves people 30 mins - 2 hours every day. What are they going to do with that time? Enjoy themselves? Advocate for their own interests?

No, clearly this cannot stand

I think it’s more that the natural emergent properties of a large number of agents interacting (like “the invisible hand of the market”) sounded a lot like “the hand of God”

It’s a pretty complex topic to put into words, and he was explaining self governing economic forces to people who had never heard of anything like that before… He was very carefully trying to avoid any religious or mystical implications, which makes everything come off awkwardly to an audience that understands these concepts already