This is a point I think needs to made more often. Bad things get way more attention and I think people on both the left and the right, both social justice people and free speech people, have a bias to exaggerate the extent that these things are happening. Sometimes people just need to take a breath and relax.
I'm in BC and we definitely have identity politics and polarized parties. It's not as bad as the US today, but it's there. Comparable to the US in the 90s maybe. Also BC leans heavily left which I'm not such a fan of. Maybe it seems less ideological to leftist but that's just because it's their ideology.*
* Not saying this about OP, just that I've observed that bias generally.
Everything that you buy online, in a Walmart, or is otherwise manufactured a city away from where it's sold?
Trucking costs are built into most products. My grocery store sells apples from California. If the cost of trucking them to me goes down, those apples will decrease in cost and they will potentially sell more apples.
I don't actually think that sounds heavy handed at all. The reason being a puppet of the USSR is a bad thing is because of how bad the USSR was, not because it's inherently bad to be a puppet. I live in a country that's more or less a puppet of the USA and if someone wrote a sentence like that about my country I'd think it was humerous, not heavy handed.
American decisions can set precedents which other countries follow, and are often pushed by their trade policies. They also affect American IT companies, which are used by people all over the world.
There's good reason for non-Americans to care about the American Internet.
In my city it's common for large retailers to provide parking lots at a cost. If you buy something, the cashier gives you a stamp that nulls your parking charge. Anyone can park, but free for customers. There's ways to game it, but it seems a workable solution.
Thats true if we already had a way of knowing they would fail but we don't. Startups are how you try new ideas to find the good ones. Do having them work there and fail creates informational value.