For months now, the company TikTok has been in the news, and not just because it is the preferred video sharing service of portly nurses. The company has been at the center of both a strange bidding war and a controversy over its ties to the Chinese communist party. TikTok is owned by a Chinese firm and like all Chinese firms that means it is controlled by the communist party. The American government has said the parent company is a national security threat.
It is the national security issue that has created the bidding war. The Trump administration said the parent company, ByteDance, must sell the service to an American firm or the company will be banned from the US. Trump has issued a couple of executive orders banning the app from phone stores. The claim is the Chinese communist party is using the videos of chubby nurses dancing in empty hospitals to undermine the American people’s faith in their rulers.
The national security issue is a bit ridiculous. China is spying like crazy on western companies and western governments. Nothing is too small or too trivial. They will steal anything not nailed down. It is not just industrial and military espionage. A New York City policeman has been arrested for spying on behalf of the Chinese. They say he was reporting to officials at the Chinese Consulate in New York on the activities of other ethnic Tibetans in the New York area.
The fact is, if the rulers really cared all that much about Chinese espionage, they would treat China the way they treated the Soviet Union. Travel would be highly restricted and business ties would be highly regulated. Instead, American firms are free to be plundered by China in exchange for a quick buck. Chinese nationals pour into America and every Western country. They are given free access to whatever they like. TikTok is a tiny issue compared to all the other problems.
In fairness, Trump is the first president to take the Chinese threat seriously and he has faced a wall of opposition from the usual suspects. While this TikTok deal is small potatoes, they may see it as a useful bit of symbolism. It brings the issue of Chinese spying into the public debate. It also touches on the immigration issue. Why are we importing people to work in American companies and research labs from a country actively engaged in wide-scale espionage against us?
Putting that aside, there is a bigger question. Why are the oligarchs fighting with one another over a chance to buy a piece of this company? So far, Oracle, Walmart, Microsoft and Twitter have been the most aggressive. Twitter makes some sense as the TikTok videos made by chubby nurses are usually posted on Twitter. Microsoft makes some sense, as it lets them get back onto people’s mobile devices. That way they can harvest their data and sell it like other social media firms.
What makes no sense is why Oracle or Walmart would be involved. What makes even less sense is why the price is $20 billion for a tiny slice of the firm and no access to their proprietary technology. What could Walmart gain from owning a piece of this company, other than a small return on the investment? What would Oracle need from a silly application like this? They make business applications like database systems and enterprise software. Why would they want this?
Then there is the media fascination with it. State run media in America is a bit different than in China, in that it represents the permanent ruling class and its servants in the bureaucracy, not the figurative leaders of government. They have been following this story like a pennant race. The New York Times has done hundreds of stories on this since it started. The same is true of the Washington Post. Even the Wall Street Journal has been obsessed with the bidding war for TikTok.
An added bit of mystery to this story is the fact that the proposed deal with Oracle does not include the company’s secret technology. Everyone understands that the app itself is worthless, but the secret technology has value. Supposedly, TikTok has cutting edge facial recognition technology and their behavioral analysis algorithm is better than anything Silicon Valley has created. That’s the real value, but the proposed deals with American firms excludes that technology.
As presented, nothing about this story makes a lot of sense. If this company was a serious national security concern, the government would just ban it from American mobile devices. Apple and Google have no trouble banning apps from their platforms for political reasons. Twitter could block all TikTok videos, thus collapsing the chubby nurse TikTok market. There’s no need for all of this drama if national security is the real reason behind this story.
A more likely reason is the Silicon Valley oligarchs see China as a threat to their interests around the world. Unlike American competitors, Apple and Google cannot just ban China from their devices. The Chinese would then flood the world with second copy phones and ban these companies from the Chinese market. What they are doing is getting the US government and allies like Walmart and Oracle to do their bidding for them, so they can keep their hands clean.
Then there is the Indian factor. Silicon Valley is slowly being taken over by South Asians, who have an ethnic interest in opposing Chinese tech. India would like to see the US reposition itself in Asia, by moving manufacturing and technology from China to India, so a cold war with China works for them. The people who put Kamala Harris on the Democrat ticket are certainly capable of engineering this TikTok story. This is how ethnic politics works in an empire.
The most salient issue is that nothing about this drama has anything to do with what is best for the American people. Trump makes some noises about Chinese espionage being bad for America, but what he really means is bad for the military industrial complex and the private sector oligarchs. If it was good for those interests, the American government would allow China to conduct human sacrifices on American college campuses. That’s another reality of the empire.
Of course, there is another angle here. Judges keep stepping in to block the government from banning this service from American phones. Yet, when it is American owned tech, like Gab, getting banned from phones, no one blinks. The political class falls all over themselves to explain why that form of censorship is good. The Chinese communist party has more first amendment protections than Americans. Maybe Gab should relocate to Beijing.
In the end, the TikTok story is mostly about China. On the one hand, social media players see China as a competitor and a partner. They want access to the market, but they don’t want to compete with Chinese tech in America. Walmart, Microsoft and Oracle get to play the white hat with this and curry favor with the Chinese. The Indians get to use the US government as a weapon against their competitor. This is now the great game in the late stages of the American empire.
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To the extent that it would be usable, the Tiktok app may be able to access the mic … even when the Tiktok is not running in the foreground. Some senators daughter has Tiktok installed and the Chinese could listen? Safari listens unless you explicitly turn it off.
Not 100% sure re TikTok, but if you take a course on cybersecurity and hacking, e.g. via your employer, typically one of the first hacks you’ll hear about is an IP scan, where a hacker methodically pings through a range of IP addresses thought to belong to some organization, looking for hits — once a computer (often a PC) responds, they show how it’s relatively simple to determine if there is a webcam, and if so to turn it on remotely.
Who are the usual suspects?
This is way off topic, but does anyone think that this site could benefit from a general forum for the exchange of ideas that do not exactly align with the daily message? I ask because I’m looking at something right now that pertains to the entry of the USA into WWI and I have some questions about it. I think that there’s probably someone in this comment section that is steeped in this history and can elucidate on this topic, amongst many others. But I feel that it’s not appropriate to post my question here … so, what do you guys think? Is a general forum useful?
Please, just ask it.
That’s my vote.
Alzaebo, appreciate your vote but it seems that, so far, it’s just you and I that’s taken to this suggestion. There’s probably some issues with having a forum that I haven’t considered, and the Z-Man is smart enough to know what they are, so it is what it is … kinda like what Parmenides said!
Z– It makes perfect sense that Oracle and Walmart want TikTok. Oracle needs some large tenant to anchor its cloud computing business. Walmart is going to insert their product recommendations into the app. Both see it as a way to compete with Amazon. Nobody wants anything to do with Chinese facial recognition technology because it’s radioactive. Hence the carve-out.
Sure I can see why Oracle might be interested. If it’s true, something like TikTok could be used to generate huge databases of human behavior. The goal would then be to detect anomalous behavior in these huge databases, and there’s the people you’re looking for.
Oracle or any database centered company like them could sell a system such as this for fantastic profits. For example, someone getting ready to sell company secrets will engage in certain behavior that could be detected, and the person then thwarted. Insider trading, corporate espionage, you name it.
Is knowing what teen girls are thinking worth billions?
Especially when they completely change in a few years?
I think there has to be something else going on
It’s not the chubby nurse videos that are the security problem. It’s what TikTok is recording in the background, and where it’s sending that data.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/totok_is_an_emi.html
[Bruce Schneier is THE go-to guy for info on security issues.]
ToTok != TikTok
Schneier addressed only the former.
The Chinese aren’t Communists, they’re Nationalists.
The whole political/social dialectic about Communists
and Socialists just obfuscates the actual dialectic. We are
conditioned to work within the intellectual framework of
the “left”. If we continue to discuss the world in terms of
ideology, the we are also ideologues.
Taiwan is Chinese, but not communist. Also (until recently) Hong Kong. The PRC wants them absorbed or gone.
When people call the Chinese “communists” they don’t necessarily mean they are Marxists. We just intuitively grasp that “communism” is a dirty word and a dirty word applies to them, regardless of its meaning or historical underpinnings.
It simply means “the bad guys”
“Why are we importing people to work in American companies and research labs from a country actively engaged in wide-scale espionage against us?”
Oh, I thought you meant Israel
This site downplays that. It’s about looking respectable to normie.
America is a whale fall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
China, India, BLM, the DNC and RNC — pulpy marine worms feeding on the bones.
And some grifters make a buck telling the whale’s ghost that it’ll get another crack at Captain Ahab any minute now.
The Nation magazine (as was) had a piece back in 1998 entited
“The Harvard boys do Russia”. It detailed the deliberate collapse and looting of the post Soviet economy and the rise of the oligarchs.
The Harvard boys have been doing the US for the past couple of decades.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-boys-do-russia/
The Harvard Boys did the same to America, Latin America, were interrupted by Putin doing the same to Ukraine. Aid money from the West was washed through Russia and back to their pockets.
Having nothing to do with today’s post, but much to do with what we discuss here, is a news item from Yahoo:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-wells-fargo-ceo-ruffles-164524292.html
Kudos to Mr. Scharf for being the perfect balance of Equal Opportunity and yet demanding standards. Apparently some Blacks are “shocked and puzzled” and claim there is no shortage of talented blacks. Actually there is a chronic shortage, so much so that in many professions a qualified Black actually commands a premium, just so the firm can “check the right boxes.”
While not mentioned in the article for obvious reasons, apparently it has escaped all involved that there are decades of IQ and other achievement tests that consistently show an achievement gap between Blacks and everyone else. The gap yawns ever wider, like Nietzsche’s abyss, with increasing specialization.
The world needs more leaders who are saying basically, “We don’t discirminate by race, indeed we are prohibited from doing so. But we will not lower our standards just to acheive someone’s ideal of racial parity.” In related news, still no word on why the NFL or NBA hasn’t hired enough White talent.
There is a middle way, commonly used, but less spoken about. You hire incompetent minorities—which are the bulk in high tech—and then put them into “positions” where they will not affect the company’s bottom line by producing inferior results where it counts. In short, a do nothing (of importance) job. That is the current acceptable way in many corporations, a cost of doing business so to speak, but a drag on the economy none-the-less.
If a SCOTUS could overturn disparate impact, that would go a long way to curing many issues.
That’s really so cute. SCOTUS will save us. SCOTUS would declare Whites 3/5 a person if we weren’t armed to F All.
Just here to say that there is no reason that could possibly make the adoption of two black kids (“niglets”) from Haiti by a white woman “less worrisome”, especially when she’s being considered for the Supreme Court.
It’s fucking disgusting.
Niglets are irrelevant unless you live near them. Even BLM is a front for J’s and Prog whites.
America has > 40m Blacks — if living near Blacks is a problem (and it is), why is being chained to them and their manifold dysfunction via the coercive tax system “irrelevant”?
And here it’s not about physical proximity, rather the mindset of a potential Supreme Court justice — there are far more kids awaiting adoption than families interested in adopting, and adoption is zero sum: when a kid is adopted, another is not — tens of thousands (if not more) of white kids in America are waiting to be adopted, but instead she and her cuck husband specifically decide against them and for a trendy, politically correct, virtue signaling adoption of black kids from a shithole like Haiti — their decision was anti-white, that’s what this is about.
Moron.
Social media apps are to China in the 21st century what opium was to Great Britain in the 19th century.
The people I deal with for business do seem to be addicted to WeChat.
Another angle is the government / Silicon Valley may be trying to manufacture another Sputnik moment as justification for massive federal investment into Silicon Valley so we can dominate the next frontier, which is AI
Today the American Conservative ran an article detailing the close relationships among: the Chinese Communist Party, the Ford Foundation, former FF VP Maya Harris (Kamala’s sister), Antifa and BLM.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-ford-foundation-is-helping-support-chinese-foreign-policy/
Deleted
Good gods, enough already
Tik Toc represents something Silicon Valley hasn’t had to deal with, which is hit product, in the western world, that’s not tied to Silicon Valley. And from the country with the most locked down ISPs on earth. A country that’s catching up with us on all kinds of tech, thanks to years of theft and piracy. It also represents a watershed event in SV. Those very companies, packed with South Asians, can no longer innovate. They can only buy what they see around them. At this rate SV will be as innovative as the Indian railway service. In tech that’s death, as investors don’t give failing utilities near as much money as innovators who are inventing the future. So like so many other industries in the USSA, they call their lobbyists in DC and yell, “do something!” The fact that this deal was watered down in my opinion, may be to avoid some errant 9th Circuit decision that respects the property rights of communists (surely not us) that would have to be backed out by the fully owned, fully corporatized Supreme Court.
I believe I’ve told this anecdote before, but it bears retelling:
A friend of mine makes crypto for SIM cards. Some years back he was in Singapore, taking beer with a bunch of colleagues, all engineers, and an American guy says that Asians can’t think in the abstract. A Chinese guy protests and the American says: “Tell me what a computer is.”
The Chinaman looks flustered, then points to his laptop: “That is a computer”.
But isn’t their vocabulary, as it were, a set of often pictorial abstractions?
I don’t know tbh but what I have always presumed
Sure, but the ability to innovate is a relative societal trait.
China and the other NE Asian countries are improving their ability to innovate, even though they may never match the US at it’s peak.
Meanwhile, the US is shooting its ability to innovate in the face and throwing the corpse in the woodchipper because it would rather waste its efforts on critical race theory and World War T.
But wait there’s more. The little lady asked me to pick up some boneless chicken breast on the way home from work yesterday. Was working in K town and ran into H MART. No breast out so I asked the little brown man if he had any in the back.” No speaking English “ he said, so I grabbed one of the Korean floor managers. “ no speaky engliss “ next thing you know their speaking fluent Spanish to each other. The alternative to H MART is the Ralfs down the street with 37 tents in front of it and kids with no shoes on and green snot coming out of their nose inside it. I removed my mask and walked slowly out (blue Manson lamps turned up high) eggs and rice for dinner. Going to put in for a inter country passport and do some civilized food shopping over the weekend. Tik Tok is the least of my troubles MR President.
Reminds of the chicken place I went to in Rhode Island: An Arab owner, staffed with hispanics of dubious legality, serving fried chicken and smokes to the local riff-raff. The only thing that made it feel remotely safe was the fact that no one there could trust anyone else. Our national future will be like the end showdown in the Good, Bad, and Ugly, forever.
I guarantee you that it’s not worth the money. Not even close.
Neglected to mention it on the RBG thread, but this is a hint of what a succession battle in a non-hereditary monarchy looks like.
“curry favor with the Chinese” – I see what you did here. 🙂
I can see Walmart wanting to get a piece of Tiktok because it offers a new advertising platform.
It might allow them to gather more unauthorized information on their customer base, too.
OT: rommney is going to support a vote for SCOTUS before the election. nice one, he really left the two hag senators out to dry!
Suspect a mucky muck in the LDS hierarchy spoke to Mitt (or he was visited in a dream by Joe Smith hisself) about the implications on the church should a Ginsburg acolyte be elevated to the supremes. In no way is this to show support for Trump.
I could still see him pull a McCain and give a thumbs down to Trumps nominee at the last second followed up by a middle finger salute.
also mitt’s son is as dirty as hunter biden; re: ukraine. the WH might have snt someone around with a dossier; maybe with pics 😛
Not exactly. He says he won’t BLOCK the vote on a SCOTUS nominee. He did not commit to voting FOR a nominee.
Prediction: He’ll pull a McCain and be the deciding vote against any Trump nominee. The guy is filled with envy against Trump.
with mitt, any and every petty treacherous move is possible. but he can be bought, too, so who knows. at least mccain is dead 😛
But does that mean he, Romney, will vote up/down or abstain? Romney is a back stabbing worm with profound TDS. Albeit, his position within the church is of great importance. Let’s hope.
The thing that really bothers me in this mess is Zoom.
Zoom also has China ties and was the talk of Wall Street a few short months ago.
Now? Crickets.
Even more disturbingly, my MIC firm has openly installed Zoom on everyone’s PC and positioned it as a Skype alternative for video conferences.
I wonder how much of our data is streamed to China on a daily basis?
During Corona a large percentage of courts are running on Zoom.
While they are technically public anyways, it’s clear they aren’t thinking through the daunting amounts of data channeled through Chinese AI Systems they can glean information from.
The NYC school system is using Google Meet for its remote classes (for everyone from 4 year old pre-k children and up). But is there really any difference whether it’s Chinese Intelligence spying on six year olds, or Google’s prying eyes?
Sounds like one needs to set up such on virtual machines and boot up only when necessary. Pretty trivial these days.
If I had that level of control over the IT system here Zoom wouldn’t be allowed on our corporate network.
That’s troubling. Around here the hacking of zoom classrooms, Town Meeting, etc., is a near-daily occurrence.
If we shared a land border with China I’d be nervous. If I had family in the Navy or Marines I’d be nervous. We don’t. The problem is Americans, and we’d better face the Americans are our American problem. The rest of them including the Js are simply a symptom.
We need to have this out, or they’ll have what’s left of us hanging from trees. If we let this happen we deserve it.
In the not too distant future our elections will in “the cloud.” Once “the democracy” is melded with “the cloud” all bets are off … it will make today’s accelerationism seem tortoise-like. I generally have zero interest in Big Tech but the pace of AI intrusiveness is alarming. And to know this intrusiveness and app-consumption is courtesy of America-haters is more alarming still.
Agreed. I like to think I can shield my progeny from the onslaught of intrusive AI, but the best that can be hoped for is training them in it’s responsible use. Viewed a property the other day, and from the corner of my eye I noticed that the owners had little Alexa sat there, just waiting to ‘help’ them.
Cloud hosting for cloud people. Lovely.
Why a father’s duty nowadays is to take the kids out into the wilderness every so often and let them figure out life without electronics. Hunt, fish, etc. This was always a tradition in the south as well. No wonder Yankees demonize the South as much as they do. An Updike comment always stuck with me; he said New Yorkers — and this was decades ago — are addicted to TV and learn life through it.
The empire has to keep it’s subjects happy.
With Germany and Japan the empire could hand over large pieces of its markets and sacrifice its own middle class jobs to keep the defeated subjects at bay. Everybody was happy and Japan and Germany in exchange did not rebuild their military.
With China it’s different. They want our markets and they want their own military power too.
And the usual suspects and the oligarchs have made tons of money on the China trade card so they hope to keep the game going but maybe expand to nations like Vietnam and other small Asian nations.
India wants a piece of the empire too.
india is not as adept militarily but they come to America and Canada now in droves. They will get their piece of the pie too.
Thanks, I hadn’t been following this since the whole thing didn’t make much sense (beyond the discussion of who gets to spy on whom).
Your comment on Oracle reminded me that I had seen that they had purchased DynDNS at some point. From a non-tech standpoint this would be like Archer-Daniels-Midland buying out the guy down at the farmer’s market that’s just selling cucumbers from his garden.
videos of chubby nurses dancing in empty hospitals…
OK, this really had me laughing. As a medical lab tech, I can always appreciate any jabs at nurses. My God, what an insufferable profession! I’ve known so many people who have become nurses, and ain’t one of them special. Like anything else, it is just a job. Some of them are great, some are bad, but most are just average.
Like teaching, most people pick the profession because the pay is good, the work is relatively easy, and the hours are agreeable. Also, like teaching, they have an incredible PR machine telling the rest of the world how wonderful they are. Alas, it is complete bullshit.
Nurses are quickly approaching teachers as the most “sunshine blown up their asses” profession.
in your mind, you’re better than everyone, aren’t you? not so much in the real world though…
I’ve read that only heart disease and cancer kill more than medical practice in the US— not failed treatments but actual negligence and malpractice.
You’d think medical professionals might stop and ask themselves if they’re doing a good job, or the public might ask why we spend ruinously on healthcare given the results.
Everybody is smoked up when it comes to medicine. It’s another case of what’s good for business being preferred over the general good.
About 1/4 million a year die from medical incompetence and iatrogenic complications. Makes obesity and DM2 look like pikers.
Have to agree with you. Also, I like to add that the majority, probably 2/3 or more, of illnesses and deaths in the USA are due to entirely preventable causes, such as poor lifestyle choices, diet, smoking, etc.
What is amazing to me is the incredible amount of health care resources going to extending the lives of people who have made, and continue to make many, many “poor choices”. We have frequent flyers that come in nearly weekly. Often they will get admitted for days. Long histories of chronic alcoholism, drug abuse, uncontrolled diabetes, HIV, hepatitis, you name it. Their testing can take many hours each visit, and that’s just the resources I’m aware of.
All to extend their miserable lives.
Of course, they won’t be paying for any of this, yet they account for a significant portion of healthcare resources. Honestly, health care rationing couldn’t come soon enough.
“frequent flyers” LOL
You know how you know a real hero? They constantly tell you how heroic they are. “Heroes work here.”
2 year degree and a willingness to do bad things.
Fitting that in Current Year, “I touch other people’s poop for money” qualifies someone as a hero.
My daughter’s hospital had a special day last week celebrating Surgical Technicians (once surgical nurses) as “heroes.” She was disgusted by the entire thing. Fortunately most of her co-workers regard the whole thing with similar disgust (except that there were cupcakes!). This kind of crap is thought up by the type of woman that works in marketing or HR.
@Outdoorspro I kept hearing for months about dancing TikTok nurses and wondered what the hell people were talking about. I finally watched some You Tube compilation videos. I am not a prude but these videos are truly disgraceful especially coming medical “professionals”. I am curious, when was pole dancing added to the nursing school curriculum?
There are many nurses out there who probably did a lot of pole dancing…
I’d say about half of the nursing profession (again, like teachers) are people who reached a point in their lives where they finally realized they need steady work and a steady paycheck, but didn’t really want to work very hard. If you’re that liberal arts major that’s tired of slinging coffee, then with a little bit more school, you can become a nurse (or teacher).
The big problem with nursing is a complete lack of accountability. They can always blame the providers above them, or the techs for any issues that come up. I have never encountered any profession that is so quick to throw anyone and everyone under the proverbial bus if it means avoiding admitting to mistakes, or even relaying bad news. It’s ALWAYS someone else’s fault. They are relentless liars.
My gripe with the nurses here in the UK doing dances on camera instead of working is that often use medical equipment as props. So I not only pay them to do nothing useful, pay for their ‘stage’ but also pay for their props.
I also have to remind myself that at the start of the COVID event on this side of the pond, the government’s cry was we all had to protect the NHS— to the point where people needing their services kept away.
In time even our supposedly conservative (hah!) Boris realised the message that helping the overweight nurses to have time to learn dance moves was not what a medical ‘safety net’ was all about. We did stop clapping for the NHS after a few weeks, though we haven’t yet quite stopped talking about our masked superheroes in hospitals: for a time we had commercials showing brave medical staff.
But like most advertisements, they were inaccurate. The ads showed nurses working, not dancing.
God. The clapping. Around my neck of the woods, like clockwork on Thursday at 20:00, a strange noise would arise – applause! Then the honking of car horns…
The hero worship is beyond comical – I don’t suppose many who work there actually think it is valuable at all, perhaps they hate it. It was interesting to note that many foreigners applauded. But then again, if you come from a country with Congo level corruption, perhaps you think that the UK government is sincere in it’s mission to protect us.
I agree, though my sister-in-law nurse has a special place in my regard since her work as a trauma nurse in an area full of drunken Mexican drivers and meth-head whites means she sees combat-level horror every day but somehow hasn’t lost her soul (you don’t want to press her to hard on how hard her day was, trust me).
Central valley of California? Taking a wild guess here.
Drunk driving is Mexico’s national sport. We’re training Olympic champions here.
Any respect I still had for the medical profession evaporated this year upon seeing almost all of them fall in line with the Covid narrative. Nurses have always seemed particularly ridiculous though since so many of them are obviously the same fat stupid cows who were probably standing in line at the welfare office before getting their certificate.
Consider the possibility this is nothing more than Trump brokering a mutually beneficial deal with the tech companies.
Oracle was started as a CIA-backed project. That was a very long time ago but it makes you wonder. Search oracle cia.
Wal-mart (China-mart) could be representing China’s interests in this performance.
please provide documentation for your ridiculous assertion. larry ellison was a programmer back in the day, and ran with the concept of relational databases. none of his products is remotely useful to the cia, except as a means to run office management software.
A commie from kalifornia is demanding somebody hand over their papers.
McHubris, you are a peach.
Just ignore him. That’s what the rest of us do.
Unfortunately, Karl has cried “wolf” too much. However poorly worded, his last post wrt Oracle has more truth to it than not.
Lol. I spent years working in big data collection and analysis for applications that were marketed to government. The idea that relational databases weren’t useful or interesting to government intelligence analysts back at the time Oracle was created is just hilariously naive.
CIA or other “front” companies is nothing new. I’m sure the best stories remain secret. One of my favorites is how USA started up and ran for decades, Crypto AG, a Swiss encryption device company that marketed communications privacy gear to businesses and countries worldwide. What better line of business for the NSA to run??? 😀
what’s hilariously naive is that you think serious data analysis is done with off the shelf rdbms. which of course is completely designed and built for a business environment. uproariously embarrassing for you.
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/tiktok-s-latest-suitor-is-oracle-a-company-with-close-1844759645
“Tiktok’s Latest Suitor Is Oracle, a Company With Close Ties To CIA and NSA”Lots more out there. It’s not a secret. Common knowledge among older IT nerds.
A lot of what intelligence agencies do was once quite novel and secret but isn’t now. If I’m trying to track down a dissident and all we know is that his first name is Charles and he drives an older model Toyota with a licence plate starting with “AY” just having something like a relational database of motor vehicle data that can be queried using SQL is a huge advantage if nobody else has it. The big computer companies, going all the way back to IBM and Data General and WWII, have had their greasy fingerprints all over classified government projects.
Oracle back in the day, Rand well before that, now a new company called Palantir. No doubt the private sector has always been co-opted for the Men in Black.
It’s equally plausible the other way around.
a thorough reading of the Palantir story is a massive black pill – and def justifies comparisons with big brother.
At a minimum, the cell phone is a highly effective vector of persuasion, and is therefore also useful as a platform for indoctrination (insidious manufacturing of mental habits). Cell phone video “works” very well for this purpose because it stimulates the visual and auditory centers of the brain, which can then be rewired using high repetition and syncopation. Rap is proof that this works and TikTok is a new weapon of propaganda and indoctrination warfare. Who will control the sheeple?
TikTok and KPop exploding in cultural popularity might actually be a good thing for whites. The culture has massively change for under 21s in a way that is not documented by the MSM.
Skincare routine, focus on committed relationships, focus on fashion, less focus on spectator sports, increased femininity and more equal gender roles (the Chinese way). This is all changing rapidly among young white people and is an improvement over idolizing rap and sports culture. Who ever heard of a skincare routine until recently? It’s all Asian influence.
The negatives are, low fertility, social liberalism (not the sjw kind), weaker men, less ethnocentrism, increased focus on status markets. The Asian influence is taking over upper middle class people, while middle class and lower are still falling prey to the Ooga Booga from H-wood.
But the culture is changing and it’s not all bad, but it is spearheaded by Asia. It’s certainly better than the degrading rap “culture” that everyone is expected to follow.
Who ever heard of a skincare routine until recently?
You’re a single man, aren’t you?
Nice catch, I much agree.
Since food is solved, status is the new game.
Oh, and Ice People Unite!
I am often pleasantly surprised by how “conservative” (i.e. traditional) my daughter’s peer group is (Gen Z) versus my son’s Millenial group.
Skin whitener, heh
I have somehow made it all the way to 2020 without a smart phone. Ditching smartphones is really the only answer. I can only hope smartphones are a fad and people will get bored of them. They have been one of the most destructive technologies ever unleashed on mankind as well as one of the most insidious. People have simply accepted they have zero privacy. They are even paying good money to put listening devices in their homes. They even pay even more good money so all traffic in and out of their house can be tracked complete with facial recognition. People actually ignore people they are physically with to pay careful attention to people they never met and never will.
I used to have a friend that even back in the late 90s would ignore people he was with to talk on the cell phone with other people.
Sad but true. I stopped into a fastfood place a few years ago and while eating noticed a new father and toddler son sitting at the next table. The kid was desperate for some attention because his Dad had his face planted in his cell phone. So I spent an extra 20 minutes there doing funny faces with the kid in order to let him know what humans were like. I still regret not having smacked the Dad upside his head.
One thing my dad taught me when we had our first kid, was simply to PLAY with him. That’s all the kids want. So simple but amazing how many young parents haven’t figured it out or been taught it.
You think Boomers tell us ANYTHING about raising kids? Heck, for the most part they didn’t have a clue themselves, but the parenting info I got was “here’s a (marginally useful, self-centered) book.” And my parents were exemplary compared to most.
It’s probably a good thing that Boomers aren’t handing out parenting advice.
How else do they get socialized?
Jordan Peterson reckons that between 2 and 4 is key. If they’re not “plays well with others” by 4, they’re fucked and you have a sociopath on your hands.
On this one, I trust him.
Same here. Any time I see a child vying with a “smart phone” for the parent’s attention it breaks my heart.
“…curry favor with the Chinese.”
Curry. Funny.
“To Serve Chinese”
I get your Sci-Fi allusion (Twilight Zone episode, also a story by Damon Knight). If author of Erectus is right, and I think he is on the whole, then your statement would be more accurate: “To Serve Africans”, apparently they are, in fact, sometimes on the copetitor’s menu 🙂
Apropos is the old joke (Carlin maybe): A cannibal eats a Chinese, but an hour later he’s hungry again.
In related news, apparently a judge has deemed WeChat a public square and has therefore stated the feds can’t shut it down.
Not even mad. If that’s the case, it only makes sense to nationalize Twitter and Facebook.
If it’s a public square, 1A rights should apply. It should not only be protected from being shut down, but also banning users should be prohibited. Was that the intent of the ruling, or a happy unintended consequence?
I think the intent was “Orange Man Bad”, and the unintended consequence is an Orange Man victory.
The Bill of Rights gives the author or speaker his right to write or speak freely. Alas, such freedom does not give the speaker/author the power to compel behavior of private entities such as printers, book shops, or their 21st century equivalents.
Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are not the “equivalents” of printers and book shops. Not even close; the logical fallacy is “apples and oranges”.
what if the secret sauce is just thousands and thousands of low paid workers in china evaluating videos by eye?
More analog than digital eh?
exactly.
Why pay? Surely the Uighurs can do it as part of their rehabilitation program?
Now there’s a win-win for ‘ya
The $5B “contribution” to patriotic education is a sign we’re learning from Obama’s tactics. Rather than ban off-budget shakedowns for the benefit of pet political causes, we can play the same game. A bad omen for principled losers.
When MAGA types get on boards and other high level positions, you’ll know things are changing.
Seeing that it is often said that all Chinese look alike, this truly must be an amazing piece of facial recognition software.
My thoughts exactly
Even face recognition software is “racist,” according to those whose job it is to find racism lurking behind every bush. The latest complaint was that Twitter’s image cropping algorithm wasn’t working as well with Black faces. Dead God, the Klan has even infiltrated computer software used by the most Woke corporations on Earth!
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/21/twitter-apologises-for-racist-image-cropping-algorithm
I was talking with a Japanese author and the topic of how to portray infidelity came up. Because Japan is so ethnically homogeneous, they can’t get away with the old black baby bit, so instead they rely on blood type testing as a quick way to determine paternity.
Yeah, knowing your own blood type is like knowing your name or knowing an important person’s blood type is a fetish in Japan. Also just about every Jap kid has a bluish spot on their rump until about ~20 or so, a genetic marker from ancient times. In fact, two of of my kids (who are all hafus) didn’t have that mark and the delivering doctor was concerned.
Yes, I’ve just read the part about race mixing in “Erectus Walks Amongst Us.” In homozygous populations (a “pure” race, long reproductively isolated), recessive alleles (traits) tend to dominate. These can be body features (blue eyes, blond hair) but also traits that enhance survival. The author does specifically note that in such a closed population, any out-of-group infidelity would be immediately obvious in the case of (usually) dominant alleles producing brown eyes, or that black baby, in extremis 🙂
A child of two mixed-race parents yields a more unpredictable mix of alleles, haphazardly mixed, in essence negating much of natural selection’s “work.” Not mentioned, however, are the potential advantages to the cuckolding woman: if you and your partners are multi-racial, then the baby can be blond, blue eyed to ace of spades and all shades in between. Mulatoo breeding is the scratch-off lottery ticket of genetics.
The law enforcement applications (esp after Covid masks go away) will be mind blowing.
Any city/state that has the balls to actually use it is going to be a law and order utopia. Or dystopian nightmare. Possibly both? (Singapore, perhaps?)
At least half the country (and not just whites) would flock en masse to move there.
That’s assuming they will use it to arrest Jameel for bad actions, rather than using it against us for our badthoughts…
In what will no doubt be an endless comedy and tragedy of the way our world may go, we might just end up with ‘white supremacist’ recognition software…
I just hope it’s developers don’t use the master and slave model.
Nah, the masks don’t protect you from facial recognition algos.
China uses one that recognizes your gait- your walk, steps, and posture.
The real story here is why Trump is doing the bidding of Silicon Valley when they publicly hate him so much.
Because it’s theater. Recall that one of Jared’s tasks was to modernize gov’t tech. His family already has extensive ties to Silicon Valley, and what company wouldn’t want that endless source of revenue? Also recall that Trump called Microsoft; Apple; Google; and Amazon the “MAGA” companies while he told his censored and deplatformed supporters to “just be good.”
Now we know what MAGA really stands for.
Somehow, I don’t foresee the Tribe taking the ascent of the Dot Indians lying down.
The Tribe has become China’s bitch. India will attempt to do the same.
I’ve read of a planned move to China that was rebuffed. I wonder if that’s true.
I’m seeing a lot of (((white male))) Chinese female marriages.
Perhaps their offspring are meant to infiltrate the Kingdom of Heaven?
It’s all those Chinese restaurants that are open on Christmas and Easter. 😉
If by “The Tribe” you mean Israel, that’s true. They severed ties with Taiwan in order to open up channels with the PRC. https://tinyurl.com/y4rouxor In 2013 Israel transferred secret US military tech to the PRC https://tinyurl.com/y6o4hrbo and their only consequence for their betrayal was to be given even more $$$. Feel free to explain that to me, because I don’t get it.
Indians pushed Jews out of the Amsterdam diamond market. They are muscling them out of the NYC market too. Indians are taking over the wholesale jewelry business. The Imperial capital is full of Indian owned IT companies that serve government and government contractors. South Asians are going to be a force in imperial politics over the next decades.
Even though these things are bad for us I enjoy the Indian pushing out the Jews and the Mexicans pushing out the blacks
Same here
In terms of relations, in my experience Mexicans >>>>> Blacks and Indians >>>> Jews
Not ideal, but certainly more amenable to the West than China. Caste system be damned though.
In everyday life the Chinese people I’ve known have been almost like us but a little more autistic, secretive, and determined. Their government is an eviler version of its people, as governments are, so while our sanity and ambition wane its strength as a rival grows. They’ll probably calmly eclipse (and maybe cage) us as we go feral.
Indians even at their high-caste H1B best are like stunningly ugly and foul-smelling Stürmer-cartoon Jews played by Jersey Italian rapists. I’m not convinced they’re meaningfully human. Losing our influence to them is like losing it to sewage.
We can do both, of course.
Good to have doubts. The high caste in India are the Brahmins. That is whom we speak of when we talk of Silicon Valley and high tech Indian oligarchs.
The average IQ in India has been pegged I believe by Lynn at 85 or so. I think that’s a bit low. The Brahmins are their “elite” and have been called the “Ashkenazi Jews” of India for what it’s worth, I don’t remember a current figure for IQ. However, the number of Brahmins is less that 5% of India’s current population of 1.35B.
My general thinking is that in a head to head comparison with China, China has overwhelmingly superior numbers wrt human capital. In a personal, social comparison, Indians of the Brahmin cast have impressed me. Most all I encountered were pretty good folk and interactions pleasant, but the such folk were always in a minority—not majority—in both numbers and positions of authority. So what do I know?
Pick your poison I guess.
In my experience, Chinese always test, Indians back off when they figure out you’re not a dupe.
Thank you for that. I literally Lolled as I started imagining The Sitch from Jersey Shore babbling about databases.
Neither are amenable at all. “The West” is only possible with European men.
We have no friends in this fight.
In a world where white Americans looked out for their interests, yes. In this world, I’d much rather deal with Indians.
Caste system be damned?
Heck, that means our conquering ancestors figured out darkyness 4500 years ago.
We are forming our own caste system here, only it’s known as assortive mating.
It’s the difference between Athens and Sparta.
The one thing that allowed the systems to keep going when Jews took them over and subverted them is that there are just not that many Jews. There is a virtually endless supply of Indians to further subvert the systems and bleed them completely dry. There are more Indians alone than the entire Occident combined.
What are they gonna do about it though? Indians are better at bullshitting, more arrogant, more nepotistic, and quicker negotiators. Unless the borders close they are going to keep overtaking the Jews. A Jew is just another cracker to non-whites.
Hollywood is bankrupt and producing crap, young people are flocking to KPop and TikTok. Sports are dying; eSports are in.
It seems to me that our fates are intertwined, and their decline will mirror our decline. We are the host, after all.
Another cracker with tiny hats and funny candlesticks.
I enjoyed the recent (((M$M))) stories bemoaning the lack of Holocaust knowledge among American youth.
I can’t wait for the wailing when (((they))) try and peddle their stories to Indians, a people who are just fine allowing their holiest river to be flooded with sewage and dead bodies.
Chairman Mao: 60 Million, slackers
Hollywood is bankrupt, producing garbage that nobody watches. Rap music is also garbage. Asian cinema and Kpop are becoming much more popular. Sports are dying.
Unless the borders are closed the Jews will keep losing. S.Asians are higher in every “Jewish” trait than Jews are. A Jewish man is just another cracker to non-whites.
The Jewish decline will follow the white gentile decline. We are their host.
S.Asians are higher in every “Jewish” trait than Jews are.
Every trait except one: mimicry
Asians can’t fool us so easily.
Truth.
Of course people watch it. Just not here. H’wood even has their own special accounting rules. When they start operating in the red, you’ll know.
Yes, but we will deliver the pain. Its not a decline, it’s an awakening.
tik tok ascension means youtube descent, that’s payback for all the white nationalists banned on youtube, chinese are doing trump’s job.
also, i sleep better at night knowing chinese spy on me, I use huawei.
Maybe. Google has never made money on YouTube. As much as people think their purges are purely political, in reality cost cutting plays a role too. Demonetized videos are nothing but expense. If they can get rid of those, then they close the gap on their income statement. I don’t see how TikTok threatens their business model. They would welcome the exit of the short video clip.
Bankrupting such companies is close to impossible considering who is behind them.
But existence of any alternative platform(that’s popular) means they can’t truly shut us up.
Now they have competition, sharing audiances means they don’t have total control over the narative.
The way I heard the market summed up is that Tik Tok is the new thing for the younger market demographic. Not only are the chubster nurses using it – all the kids are. They are bailing out of Bookface and Twatter en masse because their parents and grandparents are on them, and they don’t want their creepy elders looking in on them.
I suspect the war on Tik Tok is part of a larger, backroom clash with the chinks. Picture Trump paying a visit with the goons: “Dat’s a nice social media platform youse guys got, China. Be a shame if sumpin happened to it…”. The implication being that China has lots of nice things that something bad could happen to.
A conflict of sorts is inevitable, really. The Chinks have no use for jews, Globohomo, or the pozz that is currently undermining western civilization.
This makes sense given I’m told that Ben Shapiro is Facebook’s #1 influencer.
Say it ain’t so. I find it difficult to imagine wee Bennie influencing . . . well, anybody.
Google bought YT specifically to control it as the dominant online video platform rather than going to the trouble of developing their own.
Or they could, you know, keep them monetized.
exactly. no money to be made with (politically) demonetized videos
When the chips are down, the Chinese will roast us round eyes in soy sauce. They may be the enemy of your enemy now, but…
Yes, but the alternative though…
I am allergic to judeo liberal democracy where my country gets invaded by africans and muslims.
What a polyglot cluster F of a former country we’ve become. We’ve allowed all these different shades of s*** skins access for so many years now, they’ve become like buzzards or maggots feeding on what’s left of the rotting corpse – then the hyenas chase them off and finish the job.
I understand. I’m just not one to jump from the frying pan into the fire.
Why do you think you’re any different than “africans and muslims” in the eyes of the Chinese?
If you are useful to them, or viewed as high status (ie. High IQ university researcher), they will treat you well. The white trash will get on the back of the bus and fight with an African for the seat.
China is based AF but their main goal is to look out for the Chinese (Han) people – and fair play, no issues with that. As whites we need to do the same. We are alone in this fight and need to take our own side.
Hard to compete with every ethnic group on the planet and half of the White population (who are working against their own people).
But that is the job.
Uh, this is the standard behavior of any healthy culture, ethnicity, and nation.
In comparison, YT is an enormous mess.
Asians (both east and south) are not our “allies” and never will be. Just because they have a low crime rate doesn’t mean they are on our side. They actually really hate you for being white and are intelligent too. Massive inferiority complex and identity crisis issues to boot.
Blacks and Hispanics are, ironically, the least threatening groups to white interests. If we had any kind of brains, balls, or ethnic cohesion they would not be an issue. Once Silicon Valley goes Indian though, we might never get it back.
Agree but only with your “blacks and hispanics” comment: I can think of NO historical incidents where negroes or mestizos have launched a major offensive, especially naval, against a foreign (white) power. Plenty of “colonial” conflicts, where the European came to the indigenous’s own lands, of course, but never the opposite. Oh no, we (the West) brought this upon ourselves, by not just inviting, but actively paying and facilitating, the invasion of our lands by those who won’t necessarily conquer us, but will almost certainly be dead weight that will accelerate our downfall.
Except for that whole millenia of Muslim slave raiding and domination of southern and eastern Europe.
Z, my comment says waiting for approval, is that normal now? Never seen it before.
The spam system is a bit flaky. Certain words will trigger for it some reason.
Test: Jews
That took a few hours of moderation to post.
Next one: Italians
Test: Italians
lol
Edit / Verdict: Italians is not spam filtered
More like a few minutes, but “jews” throws a flag. I know “vox” does as well, which is amusing. Moldbug was another that always got flagged as spam, but that stopped for some reason. For a while, anytime someone mentioned anyone named Fred the comment was flagged as spam. That stopped after a while. Most epithets seem to get flagged.
It’s a free service, so I live with the weirdness. About 4,000 spam messages are blocked every day.
Test: Israel
Test: “Swedes.
Slant-eye never lectured me on my White Privilege or tore down a statue of someone my ancestors fought and died next to
Give them more time.
Yep. One should remember Tibet and the Chinese invasion. The country is currently being genocided via the resettlement of ethnic Chinese. Last I read there are now more Chinese than native Tibet’s.
Of course, Tibet is small, we are large. But the precedent… China would have no problem resettling their excess population here should they seize power in a crumbling nation.
It’s already happening.
I had such high hopes for China’s “belt and road” relations with
shitholeAfrican countries. Let them give the colonization thing a try. Good luck. If they’ve learnt anything from The West it should be don’t import any of the natives!I had my “africa wins again” post all ready to go for the belt & road thingy…
But it was and is OK for the Euros to take the New World from the natives and act like they invented the thing. There must be a statute of limitations on property theft and ethnic cleansing..
Whites just changed the social contract on the natives.
A marxist like you should appreciate that.
Pretty sure Xi was openly talking about colonizing Africa as little as 15 years ago.
One should remember that the Chinese had no problem murdering millions of their own people. They will have no problem raping and murdering whites.
I doubt they have forgotten the British forced the Chinese government to let the Chinese people buy opium from British merchants.
China will be ruthless to whites.
Welp, after they saw what a hackneyed cut-and-paste color-by-numbers job an Oppressed ‘artist’ did to Obama’s Presidential portrait, black America decided on a Chinese sculptor to do the MLK memorial statue.
Of course the Oppressed complained that MLK looked suspiciously like a harsh, brooding Khan.
Nonetheless, I seriously doubt the Chinese communists will advocate for inclusion and equality in response.
I would mount the before and after pix of a BLM riot at the Chinese embassy in a gilded frame.
I like that statue because it makes Martin Luther King look like a grumpy Chinaman.
And reminds everyone he was a commie!
Take it from me who has worked with Chinese and Koreans in the Los Angeles commercial real estate biz. They are RUTHLESS and hold us in contempt. They will smile to your face, though.
As a group, they are also extremely competent and law abiding. Their overall crime rate and other indexes of dysfunction compared to whites are like comparing ours to, well, you know, those people 🙂
Low testosterone levels only go so far. OK, so they won’t hit me over the head and steal my wallet. But in the more common aspect of trade and commerce, they are not a society that plays by the same rules as one finds in the West—except perhaps in a few Gypsy communities.
In all honesty, they are corrupt as hell. They cheat so much on their taxes, their income statements, they launder money, etc. The entire Garment District in Los Angeles was a giant laundering operation for years. Yes, they don’t commit violent crimes, but they are very very very underhanded in business.
Not like, say, Citibank or Wells Fargo. Ahem.
Look up the etimology of “sandbagging.” They are a fundamentally dishonest culture.
They like their crime like they like their society: organized.
It’s the same in Vancouver, BC. Property prices driven through the roof by Chinese made rich via Western Companies exploiting cheap Chinese (slave) labor setting up their exit strategy.
“That rattle snake 100 feet away has not bitten me yet, I should go pet it.” Maybe if we let another hostile culture invade our country, they will ignore us and fight with the other hostile culture. Or maybe we will just get beaten further and worse. If you’re upset by what the Tribe does to the shicksas, wait till you see what Ji Ping wants to do to the white devil women. At least the Chosen have never set up and run “comfort women” operations.
The adult film industry says, “Shalom!”
They ran the Middle Ages on comfort women.
No Chinese ever called me a cracker.
They don’t need pejoratives, as their default descriptors maje it clear you’re a barbarian.
Yep. People in small town White America have no idea how ruthless these people are. But they will soon find out as the population spreads into every nook and cranny.
I just think of America as a nation with AIDS. As the disease progresses ever more exotic infections appear often utilizing sores and injuries caused by previous ones. At the end stage the infections are battling each other more than what remains of the immune system is battling all of them.
Cuz they can’t say ‘r’, clacker.
No but he’d be happy to treat you like an honorary Uyghur as soon as he felt strong enough. Cosmopolitanism and toleration of foreigners make the rich, rich but it also is social and civic suicide.
Be intolerant, drive out rival tribes or they will end you. This is how it has ever been.
Thats just because you dont understand Manderin. Thry call you a lot worse than that, trust me.
In the UK, quite a big fuss was made over our 5G infrastructure being (as I understand) largely designed, installed and maintained by Huawei. My though at the time was: ‘What an excellent vector for espionage’, and it seems that many others in the country thought the same way. I believe that 5G installations in some instances have been set on fire.
In any case, the government here rarely mentions the issues with espionage, which must be one of the long list of obvious things that our governments like to pretend is not happening. I suppose seeing that even turning my coat inside out reveals a label that says ‘Made in China’, probably doesn’t really matter we’ve outsourced one more mega-entity. Horse has bolted and all that.
It is endlessly fascinating, as well as sad to see the West hoisted by it’s own petard. In the 1800s trans-oceanic cables were laid, Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism opened up the field to theoretical study, telegraph lines were set up. At this time, I would venture that Hong Kong was still the personal play area of Jardine and Matheson… And now, we’re dominated by those who have taken up the call and pushed forward – and they’ll not forget about how we treated them in the past. To echo another commenter, we’ll be roasted in soy sauce indeed.
idk, tiktok is even more full of sjws than youtube. and huawei can be cheap and lame, at least from past experience. so i rather be spied by no one… or at least, no one un-American…
of course, oracle would harvest data and try to get up there with microsoft and apple in the b2c end. walmart may try that, but then again it may just be trying to curry favor with its beloved chinese manufacturers. and speaking of curry, smelly bindis and their tugowar with the han also add another layer… as well as other eastern (((tribes)))…
all in all, tired of this eternal “pivot to Asia”…