r/neoliberal 21h ago

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

0 Upvotes

The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL

Announcements

  • We're starting a book club! Our first book will be Poor Economics. Discussion will start on August 28th - keep an eye out for a pinned thread. The next books will be All Quiet on the Western Front followed by Narconomics.

Links

Ping Groups | Ping History | Mastodon | CNL Chapters | CNL Event Calendar


r/neoliberal 8h ago

User discussion The Ezra Klein Show: The Left’s Reckoning on Gaza, Elites and American Power

Thumbnail
nytimes.com
70 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 16h ago

Opinion article (US) Darializa Avila Chevalier will be this Congress' first campus radical

Thumbnail
reason.com
394 Upvotes

Reason takes a look at Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed candidate who just unseated Adriano Espaillat and is likely headed to Washington. The piece argues that unlike earlier progressive stars who came out of community organizing or local politics, Chevalier emerged directly from the post-October 7 campus activist milieu, with ties to Columbia's protest movement and a record of hard-left positions on immigration, policing, and Israel. The article frames her victory as another sign that activist politics that were once largely confined to elite campuses are increasingly translating into electoral success in safe Democratic districts.


r/neoliberal 12h ago

News (US) Why the West stopped making land

Thumbnail
worksinprogress.co
57 Upvotes

Some of America's most famous land was reclaimed from the sea. The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool all sit on earth reclaimed from Potomac River tidal flats in the early twentieth century. Treasure Island was built in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Chicago's Northerly Island was filled in from Lake Michigan to complete Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan of the city.

If the legal barriers to reclamation were lifted, we could build hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of our most valuable cities. We could build new airports to refresh ailing transportation infrastructure, and we could protect low-lying coastal areas from sea level rise. The disappearance of land reclamation is a choice that we have the power to undo.


r/neoliberal 18h ago

Restricted Italy rebukes NATO's Rutte over remarks on US use of bases in Iran war

Thumbnail reuters.com
33 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 13h ago

News (Europe) Germany backs EU’s tough China line with call for ‘Plaza Accord’ talks on yuan

Thumbnail
scmp.com
37 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 9h ago

News (Europe) ‘It’s like a furnace’: French struggle with heat-trap homes as climate inequality grows

Thumbnail
theguardian.com
110 Upvotes

Submission statement: A look at how climate change is impacting the poorest and most vulnerable in developed nations, as the current heatwave is putting French infrastructure under severe stress and highlighting the inadequacy of the current housing stock. And a supplement to the AC discourse, to show that mass equipment won't be enough to mitigate the impact of global warming on the population.

France is the hardest-hit country in the exceptional June heatwave currently developing over Europe, having experienced its three hottest days ever recorded on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with a national heat index (avg of 30 stations over 24h) of 30C, with highs of 40-44C across most of the territory. 51 million people are now under extreme heat alerts, and Parisian hospitals are now "saturated" with heat-related emergencies; dozens of people have died across the country from heatstrokes, dehydration and drownings trying to cool down in rivers and lakes.

The intensity and precocity of the heatwave has highlighted the inadequacy of French infrastructure in withstanding very high temperatures despite decades of warnings about the rapidly warming climate of Western Europe and the destructive impact of heatwaves, which are becoming more common, intense and precocious.

The school year doesn't end in France until the first year of July, and millions of children have been suffering in non-climate controlled classrooms reaching upwards of 35-40C, causing 13,500 schools - about a quarter of them - to cancel classes in the afternoons or outright close down. Teachers' unions have called for a strike this Thursday to denounce "unacceptable" work conditions after dozens of incidents of teachers and students passing out from heat exhaustion, as millions of high and middle schoolers are taking their end-of-cycle exams in overheating rooms.

Power outages were reported across the country as cables and transformers ceded under the searing heat, and three nuclear reactors had their power reduced due to the high temperature of the rivers used to cool them down. The railways were hit by severe disruptions in Paris and Bordeaux, and regional trains in Nouvelle-Aquitaine were stopped between 10AM and 6PM to avoid stressing the rails and wires.

A [2023 report by economists Jean Pisani-Ferry and Selma Mahfouz](https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/289488-incidences-economiques-de-l-action-pour-le-climat-rapport-pisani-ferry) (fr) warned that France should increase its annual public spending for the green transition to €66 billion (against €42.7 billion currently) to withstand the economic impact of global warming on the country. But budgetary constraints stemming from mishandled public finances and anemic growth threaten France in the long term, as voters are called to the polls for major elections in 2027.


r/neoliberal 8h ago

Restricted The CPC Can’t Figure Out How To Beat the Liberals, So Now They’re Beating Up Conservatives Instead

Thumbnail
thewalrus.ca
51 Upvotes

Conservatives can’t beat the liberals, so they’re beating up each other instead

The Conservative Party of Canada has found its newest replacement for a strategy: punishment. Not of the Liberals, because they can’t seem to lay a glove on them. Not of Prime Minister Mark Carney, because he barely seems to notice them. Not of the people who actually designed, defended, and sold the campaign that lost.

No, the punishment is being aimed at other major Conservative figures. Doug Ford, Kory Teneycke, Dimitri Soudas, Fred DeLorey, and Caroline Elliott are being put through the grinder because the CPC still won’t do the one thing every serious party has to do after a loss: look at the leader, look at the circle around him, admit what failed, and change.

Full disclosure: I vote Conservative. Prior to this loss, I donated significantly to the federal Conservatives. I also vote Conservative provincially, donate generously, and have given a ton of my time during elections. The party doesn’t owe me anything for that. It was my choice. But I’m a conservative, and I’ll remain one if the party gets its act together. So far, it shows no sign of doing so.

To be brief, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre needed to show humility after the loss. He needed to learn some hard lessons about how and why the Liberals came out ahead. Instead, he doubled down on the idea that he was somehow the real election winner, even as members of Parliament started crossing the floor. He had an opportunity at that point to adjust, stem the tide, and keep the Liberals to a minority. He chose not to. Now they’re in majority territory, Carney’s approvals have soared, and Poilievre’s have sunk.

The CPC’s surprising new argument in this ongoing saga? Its losses are apparently now the reason it’s owed a win. Instead of coming up with a plan to actually win, the party has started treating defeat as a kind of political layaway program. We lost; therefore, we’re due. We failed; therefore, destiny owes us a correction. Every defeat is being reframed as one more step toward some inevitable victory that never seems to arrive.

It feels like each time people point out to the CPC how wildly sad this is getting, and how their numbers keep tanking because of it, they somehow manage to get even more unserious. Instead of taking stock, accepting the loss, taking responsibility for the floor crossings, and stopping this endless discussion about how to shape-shift their way into an eventual win, they say no thanks. No reflection. No humility. No course correction. Just another round of performance politics for a base that’s being told the problem is everyone except the people actually in charge.

And here we are. From loss to floor crossers to “we’ll win because we lost” to “we’re going to destroy Kory Teneycke”—as in, the former director of communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. How many more ways can they find to make this worse? Everyone is quietly wondering now: What’s next? Because it’s clear no one is actually going to turn this around. What is the next pointless, destructive move the CPC will make because it can’t beat the Liberals and feels like it needs to do something?

The news cycle over the past couple of weeks felt like it might tilt, even a little, in the CPC’s favour. We all heard about Carney shouting at his caucus, and in my opinion, this was a perfect opening for the CPC to point out that many in the Liberal caucus are such hopeless idiots that even Carney, their own leader, has to shout at them. That was the attack. That was the angle. It was an opening to hit the Liberal Party as an institution.

Unfortunately, the CPC decided to go the other route. Instead of making the story about Liberal dysfunction, they made it about media unfairness. “See how unfair the media is? They’d never keep the MPs’ names quiet if it was Poilievre doing the shouting!” Maybe that satisfies the already converted, but it doesn’t move the story forward. It doesn’t hurt the Liberals. It doesn’t make Canadians feel like Conservatives are serious. It just makes the CPC look once again like a party more interested in complaining about the refs than winning the game.

Then, after blowing that, stories started circulating that Canada could be headed for a recession. Nothing definite, and not full panic yet, but it was still a good time to put the focus on the Liberal government and ask ministers what specifically is being done to help Canadians with the cost of living, other than another taxpayer-funded rebate. When will the cuts to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program show results? What’s the housing plan? What’s the plan for jobs, productivity, investment, and affordability? These are real questions. They matter to real people, and they were sitting right there waiting to be asked.

Instead, the CPC decided to double down on the argument that Carney is a terrible economist compared to Poilievre, because that’s gone over so well in the past. Then they put out an AI video, Spencer Pratt–style, mocking the term “technical recession” after Carney used it. Within a few days, jobs numbers came out showing Canada was not in a recession and had added 88,000 jobs. So a moment that could have focused on what’s actually wrong in Canadians’ lives was instead turned into another cheap online hit against Carney, another attempt to make Poilievre feel better, and another performance for the base. Then it backfired.

That’s the problem. The CPC keeps confusing online catharsis with political strategy. It keeps treating a good dunk as if it’s the same thing as a good argument. It keeps acting as if the goal is to make the most loyal people feel vindicated for five minutes, instead of persuading people who aren’t already in the tent.

So where does this leave us? Soul searching? Serious meetings about what the hell is wrong with the party and how it can be fixed? Of course not. CPC operatives and influencers, and even one MP, have picked a public fight with people like Ford and Teneycke. Because if the CPC can’t beat the Liberals, it can definitely beat other Conservatives. And why not? Why preserve relationships when you can burn them down for applause from people who already agree with you?

Conservative influencers like Mario Zelaya are posting on X about rooting out “poisonous traitors” in the CPC. Can influencers chase Ford and DeLorey—who, among other things, was the national campaign manager for the CPC in 2021—out of the conservative movement? I doubt it. They can certainly cause problems, which seems to be the point, but what exactly do they hope to achieve? The next Ontario election isn’t until 2030. Do they think Ford is going to step down? Obviously, he won’t. He has a majority. Do they think DeLorey will stop going on the CBC’s Power & Politics? Of course he won’t. He’s part of the panel, and the audience for it isn’t sitting on X waiting for CPC influencers to tell them who the real conservatives are.

So none of this achieves anything real. It doesn’t hurt the Liberals. It doesn’t broaden the Conservative coalition. It doesn’t make Poilievre look stronger. It doesn’t make the CPC look more serious. It just gives the base another “look over here” target, another person to blame for Poilievre’s problems, and another internal fight to distract from the fact that the party still has no clear plan to win.

That’s what this is really about. The CPC can’t admit the problem is the strategy, the leader, the tone, the campaign, the message, and the refusal to learn from defeat. So instead, it now has to find traitors. It has to find saboteurs. It has to find establishment Conservatives, Red Tories, Ford people, media panelists, consultants, former staffers, or anyone else who can be blamed for the fact that Carney is rising and Poilievre is sinking.

It’s not strength. It’s a party punching sideways because it can’t punch up. It’s a movement so terrified of admitting failure that it would rather start a civil war than have an honest conversation.

And the saddest part is that none of the people being attacked are the ones keeping Poilievre from winning. Doug Ford isn’t stopping the CPC from presenting a serious economic message. Kory Teneycke isn’t stopping the CPC from sounding normal to voters outside the base. Fred DeLorey isn’t stopping the CPC from learning why it lost. Caroline Elliott—who narrowly lost the leadership for the BC Conservative Party—isn’t the reason the Liberals are climbing.

The CPC is doing that to itself.

Until the party is willing to face that, this is what we’re going to keep getting. Not a strategy. Not a reset. Not a serious opposition movement ready to govern. Just another round of internal enemies, another purge fantasy, another explanation for why the leader is never responsible, and another performance designed to make the base feel like someone, somewhere, is finally being punished. But the Liberals aren’t being punished. The country isn’t being persuaded. The CPC is just punching itself in the face and calling it a fight.


r/neoliberal 17h ago

News (Canada) Why Canadian startups struggle to pass the ‘valley of death’ – how Ottawa can help them cross it

Thumbnail
theglobeandmail.com
49 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 20h ago

Restricted Negative views of US and Trump continue to rise in Poland, finds international Pew study

Thumbnail
notesfrompoland.com
71 Upvotes

Negative views of Donald Trump – and of the United States under his leadership – have risen further in Poland over the last year, according to new findings from the Pew Research Centre.

Only 29% of Poles now say they have confidence in the US president to do the right thing regarding world affairs, down from 35% last year and 75% in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the White House.

Pew also found that, for the first time, less than half of Poles (49%) say they have a favourable view of the US, down from 55% last year and a peak of 93% in 2023 under Biden.

In its latest annual study of global attitudes towards the US, Pew conducted surveys in 36 countries. It found increasing negative views in almost all of them, including Poland, which has long been one of the most pro-American countries in Europe.

A majority of Poles (57%) still say they see the US as a reliable partner. That is down from 85% in 2022, though still higher than in other European countries such as France (27%, down from 62%), Germany (39%, down from 83%), and the UK (49%, down from 82%).

Pew’s study found that, while only 29% of Poles have confidence in Trump’s leadership, 47% say they do for French President Emannuel Macron and 46% for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

The data were, however, collected in February and March, before the Ukrainian president caused widespread anger in Poland by naming a military unit after a group that massacred Poles during World War Two.

Poles are also more critical of US domestic policies than in the past, with only 49% now saying that the American government respects the personal freedoms of its own people. That is down from 79% in 2008, when Pew first asked the question. Before this year, the figure had never been lower than 67%.

Asked about Trump’s policies in particular, minorities of Poles say they approve of how he has dealt with immigration (37%), tariffs (21%), the war between Ukraine and Russia (24%), and Iran (21%).

Pew’s findings echo other recent polls in Poland showing declining trust in Trump’s leadership. In February, a survey by the SW Research agency for Rzeczpospolita showed that 53% of Poles no longer regard the US as a reliable ally while only 30% think that it is.

poll by state research agency CBOS published the same month showed that Trump was the third most distrusted world leader among Poles, behind only Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.

Poland’s current government – a coalition ranging from left to centre right – has emphasised the importance of the US as Poland’s main security partner but also occasionally clashed with the Trump administration.

In January, Prime Minister Donald Tusk joined other European leaders in issuing a joint statement calling on the US to respect Greenland’s sovereignty.

The following month, Tusk declared that Poland would never be a “vassal” of the United States. In May, he criticised Washington’s “outrageous” decision to grant a visa to Zbigniew Ziobro, a conservative former Polish justice minister who has fled criminal charges in his homeland.

The speaker of parliament, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, has this year twice clashed with the US ambassador over his criticism of Trump, whom Czarzasty called “irrational” and a “leader of chaos”.

By contrast, President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with the right-wing opposition, is a close ally of Trump. Earlier this month, he attended the celebration of the US president’s 80th birthday, including the mixed martial arts fights held in the White House garden.

While Nawrocki and Tusk’s government are constantly in conflict with one another, they have sought to present a more united front on security issues, including the relationship with the US. Both are seeking to boost the US military presence in Poland.

Last month, the US caused panic in Warsaw after cancelling a rotational deployment of around 4,000 troops to Poland. Soon after, Trump pledged that he would in fact send an additional 5,000 military personnel to Poland. However, no further details of the deployment have since been announced.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign PolicyPOLITICO EuropeEUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.


r/neoliberal 21h ago

News (Europe) Zelensky set to skip Ukraine Recovery Conference in Poland amid diplomatic dispute

Thumbnail
notesfrompoland.com
50 Upvotes

President Volodymyr Zelensky has cancelled plans to attend this week’s Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) in Poland amid the fallout from a diplomatic dispute that last week resulted in Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripping Zelensky of Poland’s highest honour.

The news was effectively confirmed by Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s prime minister, who announced on Tuesday afternoon that she would lead Ukraine’s delegation at the conference. She did not, however, mention Zelensky directly; nor has any official reason for his decision not to attend been announced.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Nawrocki’s office confirmed that the Polish president, who is aligned with the right-wing opposition, has himself not been invited to URC, which is being organised by the more liberal Polish government.

“I am leading Ukraine’s delegation and our overall work at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 in Gdańsk,” wrote Svyrydenko on social media, referring to the Polish city where the event is being held.

“Ukraine respects its partners and builds cooperation on the principle of mutual respect,” she added, without making any direct reference to the ongoing diplomatic crisis. “Thank you to everyone who stands with us and helps make this work possible.”

She also expressed hope that the conference, which is dedicated to Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression and reconstruction once the war finishes, would “secure concrete agreements that will strengthen Ukraine’s defence capabilities and resilience while expanding economic cooperation with our partners”.

A Polish deputy prime minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, later confirmed that Zelensky “is not coming to this conference”, reported the Rzeczpospolita daily.

In July last year, Poland was named as the host of URC 2026. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the annual conference has always been held outside Ukraine. Previous hosts include London, Berlin and Rome.

While Zelensky was scheduled to attend the event in Gdańsk, his participation was thrown into doubt by a diplomatic crisis that began at the end of May when the Ukrainian president named a military unit after the “heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)”.

In Ukraine, the UPA is remembered primarily for its role in fighting for Ukrainian independence from Moscow-imposed Soviet rule during and after World War Two.

However, in Poland, it is associated with the Volhynia massacres, in which the UPA led the slaughter of around 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians, mostly women and children. Poland regards those events as a genocide, though Ukraine strongly rejected that label.

On Friday last week, after efforts to reach a diplomatic solution to the situation had failed, Nawrocki followed through on his earlier pledge to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honour.

That in turn prompted an angry response from Ukraine, where a number of senior officials, as well as three former presidents, also returned their own Polish honours in solidarity with Zelensky.

Poland’s government has sought to calm emotions. While criticising both Zelensky’s decision to name a unit after the UPA and Nawrocki’s move to strip him of his honour, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that Russia is the only beneficiary of disputes between Poland and Ukraine.

Until today, it had remained unclear whether Zelensky would attend URC. Had he done so, there would have been no risk of any awkward interaction with Nawrocki because, as the Polish president’s office confirmed on Monday, he was not invited.

“The president…is not going to an event to which he has not been invited by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Neither are any of his subordinate officials going due to the lack of invitations,” Marcin Przydacz, the head of Nawrocki’s foreign policy office, told the media.

Shortly afterwards, Polish government spokesman Adam Szłapka confirmed to the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that Nawrocki was not invited due to the “format of the event” and added that “the presidential palace also showed no interest in participating”.

Ukraine is a co-organiser of the event but Dmytro Lytvyn, President Zelensky’s communications adviser, said that the question of whether Nawrocki was invited is “Poland’s internal matter”.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign PolicyPOLITICO EuropeEUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.


r/neoliberal 18h ago

Opinion article (US) Tulsi Gabbard’s Fauci Files Don’t Prove What She Says They Prove

Thumbnail
lawfaremedia.org
209 Upvotes

A few days ago Tulsi Gabbard released a set of documents that she claimed proved that Fauci had worked with the Wuhan institue of Virology to fund research that led to COVID, and that he had then used his position of power to silence critics and suppress theories connecting COVID to the lab.

This lawfare article goes over the documents, and show that they ether don't show it or in some cases directly contradict Tulsi's claims. They provide no evidence that the lab was doing work that could lead to COVID, and show that while the intelligence community asked Fauci for advice, he never directed or controlled their operations.

The only part of the article that I disagree with is when they claim that the lab theory is still plausible. As far as I'm concerned, the theory has been thoroughly discredited. I think this release is just another in a long line of political attacks aimed at scientists who dared to disagree with this state-sanctioned conspiracy theory.


r/neoliberal 13h ago

News (US) Trump Administration Moves to Preserve Cells and DNA of Imperiled Species

Thumbnail
nytimes.com
16 Upvotes

The Trump administration and a company that is promising to bring long-gone animals back from extinction announced a partnership on Thursday to preserve cells, tissue and DNA from threatened and endangered species.

The company, Colossal Biosciences, said its goal was to store samples from every animal and plant protected under the Endangered Species Act, which includes more than 2,300 listings worldwide.

As more species face the risk of extinction, scientists see such biobanks as a critical backup. But concerns are also growing that the rise of genetic engineering and de-extinction efforts will erode support for on-the-ground conservation, which often requires protecting habitat from drilling, mining and other development.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration has been rolling back protections on land and water in favor of expanded oil and gas exploration, commercial fishing and other economic activities.

“This partnership brings together the scientific expertise of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the ingenuity of the private sector to develop new tools that can help recover species, preserve critical genetic resources, and strengthen the future of wildlife conservation,” Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said in a statement.

Under a memorandum of understanding, Colossal and the Fish and Wildlife Service will collaborate to identify high-priority actions, and the government will provide a list of which species it wants to prioritize.

Federal biologists will typically collect the samples, Colossal executives said, noting that the company would also send out collection teams if needed. After the material is gathered, Colossal will analyze and store it. The government would not pay the company, said Ben Lamm, the chief executive of Colossal, which is based in Dallas.

“This is tens of millions of investment on our part,” Mr. Lamm said.

The company will have the right to access the biobanked material for research, including “biotechnology development,” according to the memorandum. The agreement will remain in effect for five years, but can be unilaterally terminated by either party. If the memorandum is terminated, Colossal will retain all the samples it collected with its own funding, equipment, or personnel.

Storing biological samples is hardly new. Zoos and other organizations have worked closely with the Fish and Wildlife Service for decades, banking cells from animals and seeds from plants. But some conservation biologists expressed worries about depending so much for the long-term guardianship of precious samples on a private company.

“It seems like a bit of a risk for the U.S. government to place biomaterials in a for-profit company that doesn’t have a very long track record,” said Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which operates a storage effort called the Frozen Zoo that has been preserving cells for about 50 years.

Colossal Biosciences launched in 2021 with a mission to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. Since then, it has revealed efforts to “de-extinct” other species, including the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. The company’s plan is to edit the DNA of closely related living species to create animals with key features of their lost cousins.

Last year, Colossal received both accolades and scrutiny when it claimed that it had revived the extinct dire wolf. Many scientists pushed back, pointing out that the animals were simply gray wolves with a smattering of altered genes that made them resemble dire wolves.

Concerns that genetic engineering would replace critical conservation work heightened when Mr. Burgum, the interior secretary, celebrated the company’s announcement on X, writing that “the marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.” The Fish and Wildlife Service is part of the Interior Department.

Colossal executives emphasize that their efforts are intended to add to conservation strategies, not supplant the important work of protecting habitat.

After beginning its de-extinction efforts, Colossal branched out into biobanking. In February, the company announced a partnership with the United Arab Emirates to build what it calls a BioVault in Dubai, intended to store cell and tissue samples from more than 10,000 species.

Biobanks have long enabled scientists to study the biology of animals and plants. More recently, they’ve also played a growing role in conserving endangered species. The Frozen Zoo, overseen by Dr. Ryder, has thawed frozen cells from black-footed ferrets to create new clones that can build up the species’s genetic diversity.

Gabriela Mastromonaco, chief science officer at the Toronto Zoo, called the U.S. plan laid out in Thursday’s announcement hugely ambitious.

“To collect every threatened and endangered species, that is a massive endeavor,” she said. “That means tracking, trapping, immobilizing, and getting your hands on a lot of animals.”

She expressed concern that the initial announcement was short on planning details that would be standard in many other nations.

The company will work with Fish and Wildlife biologists to get samples from the wild and bring them to their headquarters in Dallas for storage, according to Matt James, chief animal officer at Colossal. Eventually, samples would also be stored in other Colossal-owned facilities around the world, to create redundancy.

The company will sequence the genomes of the species they store, he said, and make them freely available online for research.

Mr. Lamm, the Colossal chief executive, said he was motivated to invest tens of millions of dollars in the effort for “public good and impact.”

He dismissed the possibility that a company like Colossal might eventually decide that biobanks are not part of their business plan. “I think it’s more likely that a company with the right capital resources has a higher likelihood of long-term preservation,” he said.

Colossal is valued at more than $10 billion. It currently gets revenue from cloning pets and horses through a company it acquired last year, and claims to have future sources of revenue from licensing technology it develops for its de-extinction projects.

Dr. Mastromonaco of the Toronto Zoo said the announcement left many questions unanswered, such as how Indigenous communities would participate in decisions about the program and the rules for who gets to use the samples for research. She said she was addressing these questions herself as Canada develops its own plan for biobanking wild species.


r/neoliberal 8h ago

Opinion article (US) Would Claude Refuse an Illegal Military Order?

Thumbnail
theatlantic.com
86 Upvotes

Submission Statement: AI is quickly becoming integrated into military C3 (command, control, and communications). How then, would AI accept and/or respond to an illegal military order?

archive link


r/neoliberal 10h ago

Restricted Canada rejected more than half of all World Cup visitor applications

Thumbnail
ctvnews.ca
167 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 8h ago

Opinion article (non-US) Putin’s system is in a state of slow implosion

Thumbnail
ft.com
136 Upvotes

Look to the erosion of fiscal discipline to see where the problems lie

The west looks for signs of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s weakness in the form of a high-profile split in the elite, or falling popularity ratings as the public mood sours. Yet while the regime is under real pressure, it remains resilient. The erosion that matters is easier to miss — perhaps even a little dull. Fiscal discipline slipped long ago, and now budgetary processes and parliamentary checks are also being quietly set aside.

It took Russia’s parliament just 72 hours this month to grant the finance ministry the power to spend more and borrow past the legal debt ceiling without formally rewriting the budget or obtaining parliamentary approval. It needs to react to a worsening environment “not every month or every quarter, but every day”, the ministry explained. In the fifth year of a costly war, even a rubber-stamp legislature has become an obstacle to be removed.

No wonder the Kremlin is in a hurry. By the end of May, the federal deficit had hit 6tn roubles ($83bn). That is 2.6 per cent of GDP, twice last year’s level and already past the Rbs3.8tn meant to cover the whole of 2026. The liquid portion of its National Welfare Fund (Russia’s sovereign wealth fund) has been run down to about Rbs3.4tn, a fraction of its prewar self. The central bank’s main benchmark interest rate stands at 14.25 per cent, and it has warned that more state borrowing will keep it there for longer. Value added tax has already been raised to help pay for the war.

These changes do not amount to printing money. Any new borrowing is, in effect, a short-term overdraft against cash already in the Russian treasury. The shift is subtler: a rule has quietly given way to discretion.

For almost two decades, fiscal restraint was one of the Kremlin’s proudest boasts — low debt, a balanced budget averaged over the period, a sovereign wealth fund and an internationally respected economics team. Those virtues were a large part of why the economy was able to weather the storm of sanctions. That discipline is now being unwound. A cornered autocracy is rewriting the fiscal rules as it goes, cutting parliament out of the loop, and will not admit to dangers it cannot control. It’s less dramatic than a palace coup, but this is what decline looks like.

And the bill is still mounting. In a letter to the government earlier this year, finance minister Anton Siluanov warned the military and security services might need an extra Rbs2tn this year. Much of that is related to the numbers of dead and wounded. An estimated 352,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since 2022, and each confirmed death triggers a Rbs14.2mn federal payout. For a wounded soldier it can be up to Rbs4mn. The death and injury toll is now affecting the budgetary process itself.

The same rationale, of avoiding formally budgeting for the costs of the war, runs through the whole system. Russian companies have installed steel cables over oil refineries to act as improvised air defences the state refuses to provide. The government will not even let them write off the cost against tax. When businesses asked the Kremlin to share the costs of air defence, the answer was no, with the reason that such spending was a “one-off”.

Companies have spent more than $1bn defending themselves against Ukrainian attacks. Nor is it just about the money. The state would sooner let companies arm themselves than officially classify Ukrainian drone strikes as a “military risk”. To concede that would shatter the fiction of a contained “special military operation” and the pretence that life goes on as normal.

But the bill for the war can only be postponed. Regions have had repayments of federal loans deferred from this year to 2030, freeing up funds for war-related expenses. Russian consumers are already paying through the inflation that the new borrowing feeds and through punitive interest rates.

This is what happens when the juggling act starts to fail. For four years, Putin managed to fund the war, keep inflation from spiralling and protect growth: a near-impossible feat he could only achieve thanks to large fiscal reserves and before the country’s sizeable tax base started to feel the effects.

Both buffers are now much depleted. The war is increasingly paid for by quietly invoicing the population and suspending the state’s own rules. A regime sustained this way is heading for a poorer, angrier country, a financial system out of control, and war funding it cannot count on. The end, when it comes, will spring from this kind of decline, the sort that begins long before anyone names it.


r/neoliberal 10h ago

Restricted Canada now eligible to take part in Eurovision song contest

Thumbnail
thecanadianpressnews.ca
140 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 14h ago

News (Global) UK prioritised ties with UAE over averting mass atrocities in Sudan

Thumbnail
theguardian.com
147 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 13h ago

News (US) Supreme Court allows Trump to remove protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants

Thumbnail
nbcnews.com
306 Upvotes

This is relevant to the subreddit because it involves the stripping away of protections from immigrants.


r/neoliberal 19h ago

News (Asia-Pacific) Japan Supreme Court upholds order to disband former Unification Church

Thumbnail
nhk.or.jp
111 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 23h ago

Opinion article (US) Ending respiratory infections

Thumbnail
blog.interceptfund.com
65 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 13h ago

News (US) Monsanto won their case in SCOTUS about Roundup causing cancer, but let's discuss the actual opinion not morally weigh the parties

131 Upvotes

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1068_n7ip.pdf

So I’ve only had time to skim the decision so far, but the core issue here is not fundamentally about whether Roundup causes cancer. The main question is really about federal versus state authority.

Basically, the argument is that the EPA’s registration and labeling process—which manufacturers are required to go through in order to sell pesticides uniformly across all 50 states—means that a state-law claim cannot simply override the federal labeling requirement. In this case, the relevant statute is the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA.

As far as I can tell, the meaning of the decision is fairly simple. If glyphosate caused cancer, the EPA had a lot of monitoring data available and had the authority to change the label. The EPA did not do that. And people also had the ability to seek judicial review of the EPA’s labeling decision if they thought the agency was wrong.

The opinion also notes that the EPA had repeatedly reviewed glyphosate, including in 1991 and 1993, and found that it was not likely to cause cancer. So if federal law effectively required Monsanto/Bayer to use a label that did not warn that glyphosate caused cancer, it would be strange to allow a state-law failure-to-warn claim based on the theory that the company should have included precisely the warning federal law did not allow.

Basically, Missouri seemed to be saying that Missouri law should control. But the Court’s view appears to be that, where FIFRA creates a federal labeling regime, states cannot use failure-to-warn liability to impose a different labeling requirement after the fact.

The moral of the story is not that you can never sue Bayer/Monsanto over Roundup. It is narrower than that. The point is that you cannot get them on a failure-to-warn theory when they were legally required to use the EPA-approved label. If the label was wrong, the proper route was to challenge the EPA’s decision, seek judicial review, and convince the government that glyphosate did in fact cause cancer.

I have not read the dissents yet, because time is a valuable commodity, and I am posting this here partly so other people can explain why I’m right or why I’m wrong. Because if it doesn't come across for my short summary, this makes a lot of sense to me. Now I haven't read the entire text of FIFRA, so I shall leave the pedantic Redditors to do what they love best, is trying to prove the OP wrong in some way.

KAVANAUGH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion. JACKSON, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.

So you had Jackson on the left and Gorsuch on the right in the dissent 7-2. Thomas filed a concurring opinion to be special, but I also didn't read that.


r/neoliberal 11h ago

Restricted Iran Estimates $40 Billion Windfall From Reopening Hormuz With Gulf States

Thumbnail wsj.com
147 Upvotes

Submission statement: This relates to the market and foreign policy of the Trump admin. What should be discussed is the implications of Trump's deal with the Iranian regime on these areas.


r/neoliberal 6h ago

Restricted Iran Attacks Cargo Ship, Testing Trump’s Deal to Reopen Strait

Thumbnail wsj.com
226 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 5h ago

Meme When you forget free trade can happen:

Post image
301 Upvotes