They are a supervillain from the Green Lantern comics

Perhaps the idea is to stimulate local manufacturing? But I don’t really see a reason why they wouldn’t just explicitly tell us that if that is the case.

The thing is, that billion dollar is worth a billion dollars of stuff. A weak currency is not the same as inflation. It’s just the value of your currency compared to all the other currencies.

If you are doing manufacturing, then having a weak currency is good. You buy raw materials locally, you take those abroad and sell them, and then you have more US dollars to buy raw materials again.

If you’re importing, though, then the opposite is true. You prefer a strong currency. The USA currently imports more than it exports.

Giving the boffins in the White House the benefit of the doubt, maybe they want to strengthen the manufacturing industry within the USA? They are losing pretty badly to China on that front. (China intentionally keeps its currency weak for this purpose, BTW). It’s pretty clear that the USA wants a war with China, but that’s pretty difficult to supply if you can’t actually make anything locally.

“Knowledge is power” is an expression at least hundreds of years old. Whether these data collectors were specifically thinking of adverts or not, they realised that this information had value, and so they collected it. I don’t think we can know the true motivations of the data collectors and brokers, but we can know that there is (and always has been) a market for data.

The message is nice, but “being nice” is straight up not a good way to achieve immortality. The people you’ve affected will remember you but one generation out and you’re forgotten. And that assumes people ruminate on the kind acts they’ve experienced a lot.

The people we remember are mostly remembered for doing grand things. Maybe that’s not a convenient truth, but it is true.

The question isn’t whether he was committing treason. The question is why would the author of the article omit this information. It’s highly relevant, even if you don’t believe it’s true.

Again, the article’s title (“Nobody is safe”) is expressly written to invoke fear. The article’s author could’ve written “… And he is accused of leaking information to the west; a flimsy excuse.” or something, but they chose not to included that information.

You’re missing the point.

China might use your data and hurt you in some far future, whereas the USA will use your data right now in a direct and violent way.

I can explain how the US government having access to the database of all of TikTok’s data might directly result in a visit from ICE. The path to damage caused by China may exist too, but is much more nebulous, and much more difficult for China to execute on.

Yes, if you are in a government position, or in the army, you probably shouldn’t use TikTok under China’s management. But Joe Schmoe from California has little to materially fear from them. But he does have reason to fear the USA government who might well come over and arrest him.

The quality of the search depends on which app you use and how it prioritizes search results, right? I know this is a bit of a tired argument, bit since CoMaps is open-source, you could submit a patch, or at least a bug report.

I’ve encountered the same behaviour on Google Maps on occasion, too.