The 2024 social media landscape was a battlefield. TikTok solidified its dominance by becoming Gen Z’s go-to search engine, Instagram thrived as the ultimate discovery platform for shopping and entertainment. YouTube bucked the short-form video craze by doubling down on long-form content, proving there’s still space for deep storytelling in an era of shrinking attention spans.

On the other hand, X faced challenges related to user trust and ad revenue, while Meta’s Threads, despite initial excitement, faced difficulties in maintaining user engagement and navigating content moderation decisions during an election year.

The biggest learning for me, is that we’ve officially entered the age where social media is more about entertainment and education than one-to-one personal connections. Yes, some people are still meeting and making friends through social media, but most of what consumers are looking for, especially from brands or media companies, is to be entertained.

President-elect Donald Trump abruptly rejected a bipartisan plan Wednesday to prevent a Christmastime government shutdown, instead telling House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans to essentially renegotiate — days before federal funding runs out.

What to know:

• What’s in the government funding bill?: The massive 1,500-page bill at issue included $100.4 billion in disaster relief, economic assistance for struggling farmers, funding to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and a pay raise for lawmakers.
• When could the government shut down?: The deadline to keep the government open is Friday, Dec. 20.
• Elon Musk’s influence: Billionaires Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who spearhead the nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, criticized the budget legislation on social media and whipped up internet outrage over claims of excessive spending.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional leaders have unveiled a stopgap spending bill that will keep the federal government funded through March 14 and provide more than $100 billion in emergency aid to help states and local communities recover from Hurricanes Helene and Milton and other natural disasters.

The measure would prevent a partial government shutdown set to begin after midnight Friday. It would kick final decisions on this budget year’s spending levels to a new Republican-led Congress and President-elect Donald Trump. The continuing resolution generally continues current spending levels for agencies.

Passage of the measure is one of the final actions that lawmakers will consider this week before adjourning for the holidays and making way for the next Congress. It’s the second short-term funding measure the lawmakers have taken up this fall as they struggled to pass the dozen annual appropriations bills before the new fiscal year began Oct. 1, as they typically do.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Noah Smith discuss the rise of the YIMBY (“Yes, in my backyard!”) movement; why childcare, housing, and health care costs are so high in the United States; and what it would look like to embrace a genuine “abundance agenda.”

The real impact of this kind of neoliberalism, if you will, was not the things we did, but the things we didn’t do. There were a number of things we could have done to respond to the competitive threat from China. The People’s Bank of China bought a whole bunch of dollar-denominated bonds, which made the yuan very cheap, which made their exports artificially cheap. This exacerbated the so-called “China Shock” and caused manufacturing to leave America faster than would have been economically efficient. We should have said “No, we’ll brand you a currency manipulator under the WTO and we’ll use countervailing duties to force you to upvalue currency” in 2002. We could have done that and we didn’t do it because we were geopolitically distracted with the War on Terror and because we were ideologically committed to free trade.

So we really have a system in which taxpayers foot the bill for around 80 percent of health insurance. Yet much of that money flows through private insurance companies. In fact, a majority of Medicare recipients now have Medicare Advantage plans, which means that even Medicare passes through the private insurance industry:

Electrical technology isn’t just a climate thing. It’s about national power and prosperity.

But those digital technologies are not the only key emerging technologies that will determine national power — and to a lesser degree, economic prosperity — over the next half century. There is also a key nexus of physical technologies that will govern how well countries, companies, and militaries are able to transform software into physical reality. Those technologies are all related to electricity — they include batteries, electric motors, solar power, and various other instruments of electrification. And in pretty much all of these fields, the U.S. and all of its allies are rapidly losing ground to China.