Of course they are. But doesn't mean the home-grown rage isn't real. They probably are egging on the AI companies to build more data centers and waste resources and get into further debt.

Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

There is a grand conspiracy theory about imposing a sales tax to get rid of income tax but the numbers just don't work out. Especially when your sales tax is limited to imports.

In reality, the US deficit is 6% of GDP. If that doesn't change then there's going to be hell to pay, the only argument is about when. There are two ways to fix it: spend less or make more. Cutting taxes to stimulate an economy sounds great, and the voters love it, but it didn't work. Cutting spending is less politically acceptable but they tried that too and it also didn't work. The only thing left is raising taxes, which is political suicide, particularly when you ran on a platform of cutting them.

Fortunately there's a special kind of tax that you can convince people isn't a tax at all. It's even got a fancy name that is essentially medieval Arabic for tax. Even better, you can convince people that it's protecting their jobs from dirty foreigners! And bonus, US law provides a variety of emergency powers for the president, who is absolutely not supposed to be setting tax rates, to set the tax rate.

To be fair, tariffs are not math or science. They are business.

When I was an undergrad someone figured that the CS students would benefit from a compulsory business course. So we're all sitting there while a business professor explains supply, demand, and price optimization. He proceeded to walk us through very carefully drawing a graph, plotting lines (the course assumed they were linear) for supply and demand, and measuring with a ruler the location of the intersection point.

We all stared for a bit and then did it algebraically.

Tariffs are one of the things he is not supposed to do, at all. Trump is using emergency powers to usurp arguably one of the most important powers a government wields.

The US constitution, backed up by lots and lots of text from the authors of it, assign the power of taxation and allocating those funds to congress, specifically to balance the power of the executive. That wasn't their idea either, it's something England did and does, and a bunch of other European monarchies, going all the way back to the middle ages. They also didn't really think of it; even the Roman Republic assigned taxation to the legislature, not the executive.

Even when Rome assigned emergency powers to the executive, by appointing a dictator, they did not give that person power over taxation.

Wait... you're going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (founded in 2003, signed into law by George W. Bush) and you're shocked that there was - somewhere in the 400k square foot building - a chart of stereotypes about white people next to a chart of stereotypes about black people?

To be fair, I was also curious what Trump would do when he didn't have to worry about reelection or, indeed, living much past the end of his term. Curious in the way you see the edge of a cliff and wonder what it would be like to jump off.

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans—unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing" - Republican strategist Karl Rove

"It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant" - Maximilien de Robespierre

Is this just something fascist autocrats do?

Not just the fascist ones.

https://www.harvardmagazine.co...

I'm sure you'd be welcome if you ever wanted to - you're already ideologically highly aligned (and never really were with the US...) :) Honestly, economically and geopolitically it'd be a very strong alliance for both parties, as what Canada offers vs. what it needs is a good match for what the EU offers vs. what it needs. Though admittedly both parties need to rearm fast - but the EU has a lot more resources to do that than Canada has on its own. Canada has raw materials, EU needs them. Canadian automakers/parts suppliers need an alternative market, EU can provide it, etc.

Shifting eastward wouldn't be frictionless - for example, your oil infrastructure is designed to send it south, not to ports that can export it to the east, and European refineries would need to set up to process it, for example. But it's pretty clear that the current status quo can no longer be relied on, as the US is intent on extortion.

They're certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to "How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?") grumble about how they're afraid to use the phrase "diversity of exoplanets" in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word "diversity" will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was "Spell it 'divers' and throw in the occasional 'thou art' and 'exeunt' " ;) )

"another human - like me"

Serious Zalgon 26 McGee vibes there ;)

Yes, I'm sure children in poor countries who may or may not read English are desperate to get ahold of, say, an obscure 1993 book on VCR repair.

These are books that are unsold for a reason.

It's a testament to the interplay of words that forms the tapestry we call language!

But leaving out a comma can certainly make sentences more fun ;)

Anyway, let's eat Grandma.

Suppose your kids figure out that if they ask you permission you're likely to say no. So they just say "oh, it's an emergency, there's no time to ask permission, I need to make a decision right now" and go and do whatever they want.

That's why Trump keeps declaring emergencies. The US has so many emergency acts that the president can give himself most powers, including ones that are explicitly forbidden in the US constitution, just by saying "it's an emergency" in an executive order. It's also not just Trump. No president since Roosevelt has been able to resist using emergency powers.* Trump's currently got fifty some on the go.

* Ford, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower didn't make new emergencies, but they did continue their predecessors'.