oh boy. who's gonna tell him?

You should. I have no idea to what you're referring.

tell him what?

If I had to guess, it would probably be some revelation about Bill Gates being the biggest private owner of farmland in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-g...

I wish he would just grow trees on those properties. For all we know all that land will be used to deploy soylent/fake meat alternative/cricket meat a la "eat the bugs".

A proposal to stop the purchase of property by nameless numbered entities ("123 LLC") would have my full support.

It's not like foreign buyers put down "China Inc" on the purchase forms.

It seems to me like it might be a good idea to require citizenship to create an LLC.

What would that accomplish? Most LLCs are created (incorporated) by a lawyer who then cedes control to the intended owners. Even if you had a requirement for a US person, you'd just have figureheads collecting some nominal salary. Plenty of low-income folks would be eager to get an extra $500 a month for doing nothing.

For what it's worth, the formation of an LLC is a state affair, and every state has its own rules around requirements, reporting, transparency, etc. Most states keep the paperwork public; some states don't, but these are not the states where housing shortages are all that profound.

> Plenty of low-income folks would be eager to get an extra $500 a month for doing nothing.

If this hypothetical low income person owned the LLC so that others could operate it, nothing is stopping them from cleaning out the LLC's bank account whenever they want since they own it!

It doesn't work that way. An LLC is governed by an operating agreement, and that agreement can specify what actions needs approval from whom. You can have an LLC that is owned by one person and managed by another, and yet another party collects proceeds... sky's the limit, if it's not otherwise illegal, it's fair game.

so immigrants shouldnt be able to open restaurants? seems like a great plan...

You can just say that Chinese nationals without residency in the US can’t own land. Canada did something similar for foreigners and the legal defensibility of it seemed pretty good based on lawyers talking about it.

Basically, you can say (in legalese) that X group can’t be the controller of the land. They can open trusts or LLCs or whatever… but it’s transitive so their trust can’t name them as the beneficiaries and their LLCs can’t honor them as shareholders.

The legal term is "real party in interest (RPI) "

There are already laws regarding naming the RPI:

[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/real-party-in-interest/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_party_in_interest

[3] https://www.projectjurisprudence.com/2017/08/whos-real-party...

Same. Just don't give apps all of the permissions. TikTok doesn't have access to my camera, photo library, microphone, local network, location, etc. It's not that hard.

Do you also forbid giving TikTok access to your brain? That’s the main issue here.

Obviously that isn't the main issue here, since disabling TikTok on UT wifi does very little to stop people from actually using it.

So then what does disabling it accomplish?

Practically, nothing. It achieves geopolitical dick wagging, I guess. TikTok isn't a threat to networks. If it is any threat, it is a threat to users (and to a much lesser extent, to device managers). Disabling it on various networks is meaningless.

Dang, do you know how bad you sound? TikTok may be crack cocaine but it’s just media, protected expression, and beyond consideration for censorship. You let these bastards turn off this app and they will come back and do it again and again.

Mind cancer!

For the good of national security!

Save the children!

What a bunch of rubbish. Go back to school! Wait, you’re screwed there too!

Is your claim that all media is perfectly fungible so you don’t need to care about its content or origin and that media has no impact on your beliefs and psyche? That doesn’t sound reasonable to me.

No, I’m saying folks can choose what media they want. Are you suggesting that some media is so evil its availability shouldn’t be tolerated?

Yeah, no.

No, I'm not claiming that media is so evil it can't be tolerated. I'm claiming that there is a national security risk to letting an adversary control the information flow to the population. This has nothing to do with the contents of the media itself.

So run back to Facebook. Or Instagram. Or YouTube. Or Telegram. Or Discord. Or Reddit. Or …

How sure are you that it doesn't?

Because the operating system controls that and you can tell the operating system to deny these features.

But how do you know the OS is being honest? Or the hardware?

You can build an app and test it yourself. It also isn't terribly difficult to extract the java side of the platform code.

How can you trust that there isn't a backdoor that's not available to you?

Let me get this straight. You are saying that Google and Apple, in coordination with Bytedance, have introduced code into their operating systems to specifically permit apps signed with Bytedance's signing key to access these APIs without requesting permission. And that they must have done this in an especially sneaky way, given that, at least in the case of Android, the java layer of the code running on your device is trivial to inspect and the entire platform is available as open source. And absolutely nobody has noticed this, despite it being not an especially difficult thing for a security researcher to find (TikTok would need to be accessing an especially strange API since the ordinary APIs do checks in the java side on Android).

And Google and Apple are doing this because... why? Is Bytedance paying them a shitload of money? Are their CEOs secret CCP plants?

If you are concerned about this, how would even refusing to install TikTok protect you? After all, Google and Apple could simply collect the data directly in the OS and send it to Bytedance themselves.

It's for plausible deniability. They want to rally us against them, and they can stand on the sidelines smirking and raking in the cash that TikTok provides them.

I would recommend looking into some independent thinkers and doing your own research on the collusion between these big companies. There's definitely some out there, however they suspiciously get removed from HN as soon as they're posted.

Governor Abbott is supporting that bill at the moment

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bill-banning-texas-land-purch...

Yet, Aramco (Saudi Arabia) purchased the largest oil refinery in the US under his watch. https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/01/investing/saudi-arabia-buys...

Self deleted

It’s a not a contradiction.

Oil infrastructure does not do the same thing that land/housing does.

The USA does not have the same relationship with Saudi Arabia as it does with China (+ NK, Rus, Iran).

Why? They'll pay us to buy the land and if they fight us, we just take it. This is ideal: they give us money to own in name something that we will own in practice.

Why?

Worst comes to worst, anything physically in America owned by a hostile foreign power can be seized, pieces of paper be damned.