Full protectionism does cause problems with inflation and degrading the competitiveness of firms, but full neoliberal globalism leads to a race to the bottom on wages and working conditions.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, we shouldn’t be putting blanket tariffs on a country or the entire world. But we also shouldn’t turn away from possibly helpful protectionist policies.

Tarriffs can help in new and developing industries to make sure they aren’t strangled in the crib by foreign competition. A large reason for the success of the development of south Korean and Taiwanese economies was due to initial protectionist policies . The tariffs have to be understood to be temporary though but they can help in getting an industry off the ground.

I’d argue electric vehicles are an emerging industry that will be very important if the world shifts to a greener economy. Letting China take over that market and dominate it would be detrimental to the strength of our economy long term.

One of the main supporters for this was the UAW. Real rich people don’t care about this, if this hadn’t passed they wouldve just sold there shares in American auto companies and invested in Chinese companies, or moved manufacturing to China for higher subsidies, lower labor costs and even bigger profits, or use that as a threat to lower wages here. Under globalism capital is free to move to wherever there is the most profit.

This isn’t a rich vs poor situation, it’s a worker vs consumer situation.

On one hand this will slow the ev transition.

On the other car manufacturing is one of the few industries left in America with some union density and decent wages and having to compete with subsidized Chinese evs that are made with a fraction of the labor costs would destroy that industry.

Globalism hurts workers and helps consumers. One of the triumphs of neoliberalism is to get people to identify as consumers first and workers second.

Implying that the Democrats are now “the party of big business” is arguably true (and very boring)

While true in some scenarios, in anti-trust Lina khan’s ftc has done significantly more than trump ever did. Biden keeping her over the protest of countless business execs and daily articles in the wall street journal on how she’s ruining America shows some commitment to prosecuting big tech.

Meanwhile, trump’s anti-trust moves were mostly based off petty issues he had with the ceos or the platforms having a “liberal bias”. Now that every big tech ceo has fallen in line and given him $1 million for his inauguration I doubt we’ll see much movement on that front.

Biggest shock on here is Israel isn’t blue. I guess this as much of a fuck you for ruining my presidency Biden could muster on his way out.

That’s French guiana which is part of France. Not even some weird colonial situation like Puerto Rico, it’s a full department (province) with all the rights of mainland French departments.

Better get ready soon, looks like round 1 is about to happen with u.s. vs Canada once trump gets in.

This is what the tik tok ban should’ve been. If a foreign power is using algorithms to influence the public then the solution should be to open up the algorithms. This is one thing i think bluesky did right, algorithmic choice is important. That way if some crank like Elon gets control over one of these companies people can just switch and ignore his nazi propaganda algorithm.

They open sourced it a while ago when Elon first took over, looks like they abandoned that initiative though since there’s been no commits in 2 years. Maybe they’ll tell them to actually follow through and keep it up to date with there current internal branch.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

To be fair, Norway and those states rely heavily on hydro, which is great if you have the geography for it, but it’s not a route that can work for every region.

Excluding hydro renewable sources tend to cost more if you include storage currently, though that premium has been and is coming down.