You're not wrong. It was very clearly illegal for TikTok to maintain operations in the US since the law started applying, and yet the US government ordered everyone to disregard the law and they just went along with it.
This is another sign of the US' decline. The refusal to follow inconvenient laws.
Technically, the law did allow the president to approve a one-time extension if there was a deal under negotiation. But every subsequent extension (I think we’re on number 3 or 4 now) had no legal basis in the text of the legislation and both Apple and Google are clearly in violation of the law for not banning it from their app stores after the 1st extension
This is a bug in the system that should be corrected. The fourteenth amendment guarantees everyone equal protection under the law.
Allowing the executive branch sway over the enforcement of laws that they're ostensibly beholden to prevents enforcement at all, which robs the citizens of the United States of the protection they've been afforded.
Your president can disregard laws to favour outcomes he prefers. How do you not see that if the president can willfully ignore laws, you have no justice at all anymore?
Even this is too charitable. A short timeline of January 2025 would be something like this:
- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.
- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".
- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.
- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.
However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:
> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.
Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
I will die on an adjacent hill: when the details had washed away with time leaving behind merely the sturdier and ugly base, people removed the garish base coat cause that thing is uuugggo! Our ancestors were thinking what we're thinking: It looks better white than with only a base.
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
My knowledge of dinosaurs is a few decades old really - any good sources for a summary of T-rex developments in particular or dinosaurs more generally?
I could imagine there's some great videos out there? I'd be keen to have scientific basis given rather than speculative artwork.
If you want a small claims court to certify that Apple owes you $500 because they didn’t honor your gift card, that probably exists everywhere that Apple does business. If you want a court to certify that Apple must reinstate your account because they incorrectly classified your use as fraudulent, small claims court lacks that authority, at least in the US.
My impression (possibly wrong) is that in Germany, there is just "court" and trying to enforce a $500 judgement will be difficult because every lawyer will tell you to just eat the cost rather than taking the case, and the case would cost thousands to litigate (to be reimbursed by the company if you eventually won, 5 years later).
What's infuriating is that Amazon has finally announced they're getting rid of co-mingling and have never had to massively pay for their misguided policy that has killed people.
On a fundamental level you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, you're complaining about a model that has existed for decades at this point: the cable model. You pay an arm and a leg for cable, and yet you get ads.
Companies seem incapable of imagining a world where they don't double dip, since they've built the whole house of cards on the cable model and they want nothing else than to recreate it.
Cable still has one thing going for it: it tends to be cheaper for sports. Watching hockey games online requires subscriptions to 3 different streaming services just to follow a single local team, which is ridiculous.
That's not what was happening there. They weren't hiding the identity, it's that they had not positively identified the victims. The cops talked to journalists very fast.
They hadn't positively identified them, but they knew exactly how old they were?
It seems much more likely that they had identified them, but they hadn't gone through the full set of procedures (notifying family members, etc.) that are required before officially releasing names.
If that's the case, that's really just dumb side-skirting of compliance rules, how much difference does it make for a yet-notified family member to read "Persons aged [dad's age] and [mom's age] found dead at residence of [their last name]" compared to "Mr. and Mrs. [their last name] found dead."?
In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
It's because they don't want to be wrong, while at the same time having to rush to publish because if they want clicks they need to be first. So they publish only what the cops initially tell them, even before they had time to inquire that the couple killed were indeed the residents.
That's a telltale sign of a news organization that doesn't have access to backroom sources.
