Does it make a difference if Microsoft buys Tik-Tok?

TikTok is a wildly successful Chinese company, specializing in (I think) swapping video clips between teenagers. They have been accused of gathering intelligence data for the Chinese government.  From what I hear, the Chinese government puts the arm on companies to do this and that, and it is pretty hard for a company to resist.  The government requests are backed up by the secret police and concentration camps.  And, I don't expect a Chinese company to have many scruples about spying on the Yankees.  Things have gotten so bad that the Trump Administration is talking about banning Tik Tok completely. 

  To avoid Trump's hammer, Tik-Tok is talking about selling itself to Microsoft, hoping that as a wholly owned subsidiary of a US company, they would avoid an open break with the Administration. 

  Perhaps.  But an internet company like Tik-Tok (or Facebook or Twitter or any of them) is largely software.  The software controls how much information is gathered, where it is stored on disk, and who has access to it.  And the software is controlled by just a few software programmers.  Presumably these guys are Chinese nationals, living somewhere in China.  And they work for the Chinese CEO of Tik-Tok.  Would Microsoft buying up all the stock give them control of the software heart of Tik-Tok?  Or would the Chinese software guys keep on doing what they please, or what pleases their boss regardless of what Microsoft might like?

   We might be better off just banning Tik-Tok completely.

I got a new laptop yesterday

Poor old laptop (Flatbeast) died.  Pressing the power button failed to start him up. So I did some Web crawling, looking at laptop ads.  There are a lot of 'em.  Judging from the ad volume you would think that industry has produced plenty of laptops. I decided I wanted to touch the product and check it's key feel.  So, off to Best Buy in Lebanon I go.  They are open on Sunday.  And they had some, but not many laptops in stock.  The salesman told me that they would sell out of everything within days.  So maybe laptops are not so plentiful.  Anyhow I get out of the store with a brand new Acer Nitro R5 1650, only $669.99.   Hmm.  Poor old deceased Flatbeast only cost $300 and change five years ago.  Progress.

   So I plug it in and power it up.  It does not boot up into Windows, it boots up into Curtana, a user hostile interface from Microsoft.  Curtana forces me into opening a Microsoft account, something I didn't want to do.  I have not figured out how to dump that.  After some fiddling around I managed to link up with my desktop and start transferring files.  I got one good file transfer and then the home networking broke.  It is now demanding passwords and hints but rejecting them after I enter them.  And refusing to transfer any more files.  Gotta work on  that.  Half the reason for getting the laptop is to backup my desktop. 

Herman Cain

I am very sorry to hear of Herman Cain’s death.  I heard him speak back in February of 2011.  He came up to Plymouth and spoke at our Lincoln Reagan dinner, held in the old Plymouth railroad station.  Since Plymouth no longer has passenger rail service, the railroad station is now a senior center.  Herman was a dynamite speaker; he got repeated standing ovations from the white, middle class, Republican, rural audience.  If we could have held the election that February night, we would have elected Herman right then and there by unanimous consent.  I heard Martin Luther King speak once, many years ago.  Herman was every bit as good a speaker, the best speaker I had heard since hearing MLK. 

   It was cold that February night.  I remember Herman standing in the parking lot, looking at the 12 foot high snow drifts all around the place.  He clearly felt he had traveled to the North Pole.

   I am sorry the Corona virus killed Herman.  He was one helova good guy.  He will be missed.

Grilling High Tech CEO's, medium rare

Congress hauled the CEO's of Google, Apple, Facebook, and a couple of others up in front of a Congressional committee today.  Questioning ran from hard to hostile.  Republicans accuse them of censoring conservative posts and advertisements.  Some Congresscritters want to regulate them.  I doubt that will work.  The only people who really know what the sites will do are the software guys who write the code.  Those people all work for the company management and will conceal anything that management wants concealed, and keep on doing in secret things the regulators want stopped, like gathering user data and selling it.  I don't see how any government regulators could ever understand what was happening and control what is going down.  Those regulators will come to work, put in 8 hours a day, draw their pay, and put out press releases telling how great they are doing, but they won't actually control anything important. 

More effective would be to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust act to break the big boys up into smaller pieces, like they did to Standard Oil better than 100 years ago.  The new pieces would have to compete with each other for users and advertisers.  If users and advertisers want a platform that does not censor them and does not sell their data to other advertisers, such a platform will emerge, rapidly.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle, 1883

This is the Ur-Robin Hood book.  It has all the Robin Hood stories that I ever heard of, Robin Hood’s quarterstaff bout with Little John on a log over a stream, Robin Hood winning the Sheriff’s archery contest, Meeting Friar Tuck, slaying Guy of Gisbourne.  The only story left out is Maid Marion, her name is mentioned once but that’s it.  The language is middle English, thee and thou, everything is merry, withal, and more.  Gives the stories some flavor.  This is a new edition that turned up at the good old Village Bookstore.  We had a copy of this in the family way back when.  I don’t remember (or never knew) what happened to it. 

   The book is a telling of the Robin Hood stories.  It just tells them without any attempt to discuss whether Robin Hood really lived or is he just an English legend.  It doesn’t really matter, the stories are good stories, be they legend or real history. 

The pilots should have gone around.

Pakistani International Airlines crashed an Airbus A320 (flight PK8303) back on 22 May of this year.  The aircrew got out of position on the approach to landing.  They should have gone around again to get themselves at the right altitude, but they did not.  Where they should have been at 3000 feet, they were actually at 7500 feet.  The tower suggested that they go around to loose some altitude but the aircrew did not want to.  They managed to get the plane on the ground, but it was doing 200 miles per hour, a dangerous and ridiculous landing speed for any sort of aircraft, especially a passenger carrying aircraft.  Hot jet fighters have a landing speed of only 180 mph, to land a transport at that speed is very dangerous.  What is worse, for some reason the crew had retracted the landing gear and forgotten about it, so they made a wheels up landing at 200 mph.  After which, the crew decided to try for a go around.  They got the plane back in the air, but the engines had been banged around so hard when the plane landed wheels up that both of them failed.  The plane clobbered into a residential area less than a mile from the airport.  All but two of the 99 passengers and crew died.  One person on the ground was killed too.

   During the investigation following this accident, it was discovered that 262 of Pakistan's licensed airline pilots were flying on bad licenses.  It seems that those 262 pilots had not taken the written exam, but had paid someone else to take the exam for them. 

Is your college offering on-campus instruction this year?

A lot of colleges, many in California, won't open classrooms on campus this fall.  They will expect students to watch videos online, read their textbooks, and absorb the necessary knowledge to pass the tests, assuming they bother to test, sitting at home and web surfing it.  And to pay full tuition for the privilege. 

Was it me, especially if I was an entering freshman, I would opt for an out of college year.  Take a job, enlist in the armed forces, hike the Appalachian trail, work on a ranch, rebuild a classic car, do a winter as a ski bum, ride a bike across the USA, sail around the world, anything rather than pay outrageous tuition for the privilege of watching U-tube videos. 

Assuming you have not sent in the tuition check yet, you can tell the college you are taking an off year, and will be back next year.  And the colleges will have to grin and bear it.