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China's pledge to stop respecting American IP-- and in particular copyright for hollywood movies-- is possibly the only silver lining of this tarrif business. The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism. Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.
The suggestion that China was ever respecting ip is absurd. As a movie-lover, market stalls full of high quality bootlegs used to be one of the perks of visiting Hong Kong.
As cannabis legalisation around the globe shows, even trivial inconveniences add up. Before legalisation, I thought legalizing was good but kind of pointless - it wasn't particularly hard to get nor did I expect to get into significant trouble even when caught (at least with the small amounts I had as a customer).
Now after legalisation, I actually lean towards it having been a mistake, bc consumption increased so much, especially in frequency, that it's both gotten really annoying to go over campus due to the smell and evidence is adding up that while occasional usage isn't problematic, daily usage is. At the very least, even assuming no long-term effects, a decent chunk of students is blasted out of their mind perpetually.
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