The best time may have been yesterday, but the second best time is today.

Or you know, the government could just match Chinese industry subsidies so they’re competing on level playing fields.

China’s government is using government power to invest in critical and necessary industries that benefits everyone, like renewables and EVs, driving down their costs.

The US instead spends it’s money investing in fossil fuel companies, and letting billionaires hoard it, and then complains when Chinese EVs are cheaper. You’re the richest fucking country in the world. Stop fucking whining and start using your wealth to produce competitive EVs. It’s not that fucking complicated.

The problem is that it specifies both a purpose

• To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

and a mechanism by which to do so

• by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The purpose is great, the mechanism is dogshit in the 21st century, as it just lazily crams information into capitalism rather than adapting capitalism to the realities of information.

The problem is that capitalism is a system entirely based around things that are scarce, and it only functions in that context. Air for instance is completely free and valueless, even though it’s wildly critical, just because it is abundant. In capitalism things don’t have value when they are useful or needed, just when they are scarce.

That works fine-ish when you mostly deal in physical goods, because the way that energy and mass scale means that they are somewhat inherently scarce, it takes just as much mass/energy to make a second copy as the first. Information blows this apart though, starting with the written word, escalating with the printing press, and being oblitered in the digital connected age, as information does not scale like energy / mass and as a result it has become trivial to infinitely copy and distribute information, making it abundant the moment it’s digitized.

So now you have the Constitution enshrining mechanisms that enforce scarcity where there is absolutely no need for scarcity.

Lmao, “Nothing can be done to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens”.

Try and be less American.

If it discourages people from owning guns or getting into guns as a hobby, then it makes society overal safer.