Let's take one at a time: show me one respectable or even semi-respectable economist whose model shows protectionism improves the average economy of a nation.

caught Sheldon Cooper.

Rupublicans seem jealous of the Taliban. They might not have much, but they have more than the people they oppress, and that strokes their fragile egos.

Before they only fucked your ass. Now they fuck your ass and your phone.

There are too many companies vying for the auto-drive business already. It's a long learning curve with the potential for glorious PR disasters. Ya don't want to go there.

Maybe Rivian are afraid China is commoditizing EV's such that they have to find a value-added niche or die.

Couldn't shareholders sue their pants off for such a lie...if caught? Enough companies seem to be hiding slumps behind AI bs that the first successful legal team will have to skill to quickly slap the others.

Wells Fargo has been losing sales for a while now because their ghost-service-add-on scam gave them a bad reputation.

PhbGPT

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them read it.

That's on the horse, of course.

That's more of a matter of budget than technology. We don't have to send the return-fuel on a single big ship, we can send multiple that dock up in orbit over Mars.

No handful of local universities can cover all needed topics. Being able to shop the world for products and skills gives an economy more options and better options.

Protectionism and isolationism is economically stupid, almost every economic model shows this. There are ways to improve supplies of critical components without trying to make everything local.

Whether such "protects culture" is another matter. I personally believe such is tribalistic ego in action, but I've hesitantly come to conclude that one must respect xenophobics to a degree, humans are highly imperfect.

There an interesting, little-known new tool called "Google" that can help you with such questions.

Heaven forbid, you might have to show them your Slashdot account!

These days, the market is more trusting of the statement that better tools and processes require fewer employees to serve the same customers if you call that AI. If you get more of your customers to succeed in using your website or app to do what they need without having a human do anything for them individually, you don't need as many employees doing it. But the market doesn't want to hear that you can cut jobs because your website doesn't suck as much any more, so you say AI and they think you've done something futuristic when you've actually done something practical, and you're vague enough about it that the SEC can't say that you claimed to be doing something you're not.

Musk's real "innovation" in the category is paying shitposters for engagement, thereby outsourcing the gaslighting. He's literally paying people in developing countries to pretend to be US Americans ranting about keeping out people from developing countries.

Americans can't even go on our own frothing racist diatribes anymore, we just pay someone else to do it.

launch you to Mars one way without a helmet if you fuck with his IP