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Alibaba has potential trade consequences that go beyond social media apps, and would be a much harder sell. It could also significantly impact the viability of Amazon, Walmart, and other large businesses that mostly derive inventories from China.
WeChat and Weibo are, outside of a handful of Chinese nationals with friends and family in the mainland, effectively already banned from the west - by China itself. These apps are crippled and uncompetitive in their neutered western forms. The Chinese experience on both platforms is widely understood to be dramatically different.
In all of the cases above, no one is targeting the median American teenager with pro-CCP messaging and anti-western memes. TikTok is.
To your point about electronics in China: if it were feasible, we'd consider it. But I think you underestimate the sheer size and cost competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing. Between their massive volumes, government subsidies, decades of manufacturing expertise built up on other people's goods, and the utterly anemic and perpetually consolidating western semiconductor market, you're talking about a trillion dollar decades-long pivot that would plunge the US supply chain into prolonged chaos.
And frankly, I already know what Trump and Biden would say in any such debate. Trump has been making his case for decades, and you'd have to be sleeping under a rock for the last eight years to know exactly what he wants to do with respect to China. And Biden doesn't really have anything to say about China - his administration can and does take reasonable steps to protect government and military supply chains from foreign powers, but clearly they aren't too concerned about the nature of our remaining trade relationships. I don't know what we'd gain from this or frankly any debate between the two sides - I think people made up their minds on Trump v Biden years ago.
Sure, that's a good answer, as is @TIRM's . I just want to hear Biden make that case explicitly, with Trump getting a chance to respond. Instead we just have to guess at the motives, while the candidates talk in vague campaign slogans.
I get it now, and sorry for missing your point initially - my big lesson from interacting on this forum is that I tend to respond to the thing I know how to talk about, instead of the thing actually under discussion. Working on it.
Maybe the political parties could have a more productive dialogue with different candidates - I don't think any campaign with Trump in the mix can host meaningful debates, especially after the disastrous 2016 Republican primaries; and I'm less than confident that Biden is still firing on all cylinders. There's surely still some debate left in the downballot races, but between gerrymandering and party infighting, this year is less about debating issues and more about who should even get to speak.
I've worried for a while that the private sector has been absorbing competence on both sides of the aisle, ever since tech took off in the late 80s and early 90s. I think the kind of people you'd want to see in political contests, who'd be willing and able to actively engage in debates about relevant current issues, are pursuing more lucrative and less risky careers making targeted advertising platforms or whatever. So even if we had different candidates today, I'm doubtful we'd get quality debates.
Do you think there's an opportunity for productive debate with the state of US politics in 2024? With Trump v Biden? Someone else (who?)? Any downballot races you could point to as examples of what you want?
a productive debate, probably not. FWIW I thought Biden's state of the Union address was pretty good. He got a big block of time to speak, uninterrupted, with lots of eyes on him. He seemed very articulate and well-prepared. He just didn't really say anything of substance.
I thought the recent election in Argentina was interesting. I don't speak Spanish so I don't exactly know what was said, but it seemed like the new president, Javier Milei, was able to speak very frankly about how their country was facing serious problems and needed a massive change in their economic system in order to fix it. And it's not just lip service, he's pushed austerity and deregulation in a big way.
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