Tweak

Thank you, this is something I've been screaming from the rooftops.

Trump doesn't care about the American people who will pay his tariffs. China doesn't care about Chinese people paying their tariffs on US goods (although there are probably fewer US imports to China anyway). The EU does care about its people, and shouldn't tax them with tariffs.

Tariffs only work if you can prevent the local harm (eg Canada were going to tax electricity exports, the US can't stop buying electricity so Canadian businesses wouldn't lose sales) or to at least have a plan beforehand to reinvest in local businesses that can replace the imported good.

No, blind retaliatory tariffs would be stupid. When someone is punching themselves in the face, the correct thing to do is not to also punch yourself in the face.

Tariffs have 3 effects:

• The buyer pays more.
• Because the buyer pays more, the seller makes fewer sales.
• The government collects tariff tax revenue.

Whichever way the tariff goes, export or import, it will negatively affect that nation's people. An import tariff, like this, would negatively affect local consumers. An export tariff (eg Canada tariffing electricity exports to the US) would negatively affect local businesses through lost sales (the genius with Canada is the US can't stop buying electricity, so sales local sales would stay the same).

The only way a tariff makes sense for a country is if the tariff tax revenue is reinvested into the local economy. For example, if you tariff imports, you should use that revenue to incentivise local businesses to grow to replace that import.

Trump is not doing that. He's just collecting tax money from American people. He's almost certainly going to spaff that away on some scam, probably crypto, and basically bankrupt the American taxpayer and fuck up everyone's livelihoods.

EU countries should not copy Trump and blanket tax their citizens for American imports. If the EU were to implement tariffs (and I argue this isn't necessary or worthwhile), they should only be done with a plan to reinvest, such that there is a net benefit. Blunt tariffs with no plan will almost certainly have a net negative effect.

China is like Trump, in that neither of them care much about the negative effects on their people. That's why China went hard with retaliatory tariffs. The EU does not need to emulate that behaviour.

The EU never really had much in terms of American products, ie food stuffs. The kind of American products the EU has is primarily internet services where there aren't always alternatives (or at least ones that are as polished as the big US ones). Then there's the fact that most people don't even consider a lot of things as American - WhatsApp isn't even recognised as owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta, for example, for many people in spite of it being overwhelmingly the most popular messaging app in many countries.

Solar is so cheap and the margins paper thin you quite easily get fly by night installers that underrate cables.

Aaron Banks (now currently a Reform politican, thankfully he didn't win a seat) and Cambridge Analytica wrangled the vote with illegal campaign spending and manipulation through targeted Facebook advertising (you can tell whatever lies you like if you only tell them to people who don't question) in 2016. Then they assisted Trump in his 2016 election. Then Cambridge Analytica was disbanded, but the same people were in the background in the 2019 UK election, and again in the 2024 US election. It's all the same backers, employing the same tactics both sides of the pond - like how they accused Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism, then shortly afterwards tried to pull the same stunt on Bernie Sanders.

Butbutbut the tankies told me that Foundations of Geopolitics was written by a crackpot and it didn't hold any weight with Putin and the Russian government??

B&J are suing Unilever over this, so your implication against B&J is off the mark. If anything, this is perhaps the last chance to get involved with their activism efforts before Unilever fully take over.

Well they would say this when countries like Sweden are literally giving them land for free to build like 50 data centres there.

The article author has clearly never been to Bristol, either. "Picturesque streets" my arse.

The title is misleading, this isn't anything new. The credits system for developers requires them to acquire credits from somewhere else, and this typically isn't in the local area. Eg, a solar farm developer might have various solar farms across the country, some with more space kept natural and others that don't have the viability for it. The natural space in one area will offset the lack in another.

I'm not saying this is really the right way of doing it, nor am I arguing against maintaining natural spaces more locally, but the point is the article is making out that this is a new idea rather than an evolution of existing practices - practices that themselves are relatively new. Hell, any requirement to maintain natural spaces is better than it was 10-20 years ago. Things are moving in the right direction, even if they aren't yet where they should be.

I was actually surprised by how many bug splats I had on my car during this week's heat wave. Seems like they've come out in force this season, or at least this initial wave.

The equive now would be

More soost it working for Brexit.

I find this vague and confusing.