So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That’s a weird way to punish America! It’s like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “Ouch!”

And it’s indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company’s shareholders mad.

  • zaphod@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    Moving HQ to murica is usually done because of venture capitalists having it as a requirement for funding. If EU based startups want to be successful without it they require either funding from european VCs or figure out how to do compete without VC money.

    • FishFace@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      3 days ago

      Competition and markets authorities are empowered to block acquisitions and it’s often high profile when it’s done due to an unfriendly power like china trying to do it. The USA is now a more aggressive power than china so acquisitions by US companies ought to be blocked by default.

      This may mean less money flows from the US into the European acquired companies, but tough shit, this is too important.

      We need to realise that the status quo is not what we had two years ago, because Trump changed it. He’s making the whole world poorer, and we can choose whether that poverty affects us monetarily (because we need to put money into replacing US tech) or more fundamentally - e.g. if he uses dependence on US tech to exert political control over European nations.

      • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        We need to realise that the status quo is not what we had two years ago

        We need to realise that the status quo is what we had two years ago!