A tariff is a tax. Its purpose is to protect domestic producers of a good from foreign producers of it who charge too little.

You probably know this already, but Trump has been abusing tariffs. Instead of for the above purpose, he has been using them as a weapon to effect foreign-policy leverage. To be fair, it appears he is not the only president to have done so. But I'm not aware of anyone who went to his extremes.

But more than that, he has been levying tariffs that make no freaking sense. For example, levying tariffs on an island with no humans -- just penguins and other animals. Tariffing smoke is yet another level of ludicrous.

Canada has 912 million acres of forest, the vast majority of which is inaccessible. Just like TFS says, there aren't enough Candians to rake all of that, nor could you even if you had enough people.

It may be too late for a solution. That would have been halting the rise in average temperature of the planet. Like TFA says, wildfires are probably here to say and we may just have to get used to them.

You know what would really help? American forestry firefighters going to Canada to help fight the blazes. (*)

That's what Canadians do when the USA has wildfires. Recently, one of those Canadian firefighters even died whild doing just that.

(*) Shout-out to firefighters from Michigan who actually have gone north to help out.

What exactly is the "product" when he tariffs smoke coming from Canada? It's not like anybody is buying the smoke.

That's already happening.

Roscosmos uses SpaceX also, to ferry cosmonauts back and forth on occasion. Crews are mixed, and so are the flights back-and-forth. Plus the multi-country redundancy adds to safety.

This. In fact, there are.

The Earth has thousands of lakes, and Google Gemini says about 53% of them have experienced significant water loss in the last 6 decades. So, that would make plausible the claim that drying lakes contribute amounts of greenhouse gas comparable to automobiles.

Agreed.

Too many variables? So, you think there are other variables that override political ideology that determine a predisposition towards starting wars? What are they? And why are such variables not at play today?

I think I'm on your side in this discussion for the most part. I didn't expect to be implicitly called a "moron." It seems to me that you have the weaker argument if you need to go to name-calling.

It has relevance if you consider which political ideologies appear to have more of a disposition to start wars.

But consider The Great Realignment: basically, Democrats and Republicans switched places ideologically after WWII, particularly during the Civil Rights era in the 1960s.

There are other countries in North America besides the USA. 22 others, to be precise. And I think you'd enjoy Canada as an alternative to the USA. Maybe Mexico too.

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.

To Trump, every non-military international conflict is a nail, and tariffs are his hammer. His sledge hammer.

He's putting tariffs on smoke from Canadian wildfires, ffs.

The EU isn't really a republic. It's more like something between a federation and a confederation.

But I got you: it's certainly not Republican. In fact, the member states have views all across the political spectrum, from strong left to strong right and everything in between.

That is fair enough. I've been trying out Kimi on the free model, and have subscriptions to Claude and ChatGPT. If Kimi is actually as good or better than ChatGPT, at the pro level, then it might be worth my while moving over as ChatGPT has become very disk-hungry of late and I'm pushing right to the very limits on what it can reliably process.