Pylimitics

From Cory Doctorow:
“Trump couldn’t have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment’s total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi’s “We’re capitalists and that’s the way it is” to Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic campaign slogan, “America is already great,” the Dems’ answer to workers’ fear and anger was, “You are wrong, everything is fine.” Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to “foam the runways” for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers’ homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you “America is already great”

The rise of the orange baby is a story of rage — the rage of the people abandoned by the repubs and the demos. Doctorow details a lot of it, and offers a strategy for the countries now being tariffed by the orange baby and its minions. The basic idea is adversarial interoperability. Over the past two or three decades the US has bullied most of its trading partners to adopt the wildly monopolistic and anti-equality policies we pioneered here. You can’t jailbreak your phone; you can’t repair your own car or tractor (and neither can your local shop); you can’t escape the 30% monopolist tax on the apps you need in the various app stores.

Those “trading partners” aren’t partners any more. So, says Doctorow, they should just jettison those anti-consumer rules the US forced on them. That would benefit us here at home too; an offshore App Store is just as accessible as the domestic ones. And the offshore versions could offer much better pricing. As for other products, from Teslas to John Deere tractors, those can be jailbroke too, in a place where things like that are no longer illegal.