At this point I'd rather see something like CANZUK but that idea's not without its problems either.

Before the 100% tariff that Canada imposed, almost all Tesla vehicles sold in Canada were manufactured in China, so Tesla was the brand most impacted. I believe that the new deal for 49,000 will end up allowing a lot of Tesla vehicles, and a few EVs that other existing brands make over in Chinese factories, and we're not going to see so many BYD vehicles, as I don't think it's worth setting up dealerships, etc. I suppose BYD might create a partnership with another brand for a few years and use those dealerships. In exchange for the EV deal, China agreed to lower tariffs on canola exports from Canada, which was a big deal for farmers in western Canada.

If China wants larger numbers of EVs, then I suspect the Canadian government will require that BYD or whoever setup a manufacturing plant in Canada as a stipulation. That's similar to Japanese manufacturers.

As a Canadian I'd prefer we avoid too many "deals" with China, but the fact is that the North American free trade agreement is probably not going to get renewed this year (even though Canada is the largest buyer of American-made cars and trucks by far), and we need to rapidly expand our trade with countries other than the US because the US has made it clear that they're going to use trade as leverage to exploit any country that trades with them. That's they're choice, but it means countries are incentivized to diversify away from buying American.

It blows my mind that you would claim that "America's breadbasket is really not great farmland absent supplementation" when it's well-known that this is some of the highest farmland quality in the world. But be careful of using the word "breadbasket" because wheat is typically grown on marginal farmland because it's so good at growing in marginal conditions. You don't grow wheat in super-fertile soil because it's a waste.

It's a little weird to me that the people who advocate for vaccines to save lives (I would count myself among them) are often the ones who also perpetuate the myth that the human population is continuing to explode into some kind of Malthusian standing-room-only overpopulated future. While vaccinations improve quality of life substantially, rapid population decline due to very low birth rates will drastically reduce wellbeing. This is just basic logic. The specialization needed to maintain a high tech society requires a lot of people. If you drop the population size, then we have to move our skillsets back towards being generalists. While that's not the end of the world, it will certainly drop our standard of living substantially. And before anyone says we'll just use automation to make up the difference... that's exactly the type of high tech solution that requires extreme specialization.

I'm curious, if anyone here is taking it for weight loss, what are the side effects you experience, and do you think it's worth it?

> ...to fool people with a low IQ such as yourself.

What is the point of this childish comment? Aside from it being an ad-hominem attack and therefore irrelevant to whether or not my argument is correct, it just reeks of being something a snotty 17-year old kid would say while sitting in his mom's basement, and you've been around here long enough that I know you're not 17.

If you want a seat at the big boy table, you need to talk like a grown-up. Until that happens, you're not worthy of my time.

I agree that increasing immigration is more about supporting large companies, who lobby for it in order to increase the low wage labor pool. However, there's also been significant research which indicates that immigration is usually a net benefit for the democrat party, and a negative for the republican party, and this fact is often cited by political strategists, so the parties do believe this idea.

That argument falls apart when you consider that the US has the highest (or next to highest) consumer spending per capita of any country on Earth. Even more per capita than Switzerland and Luxembourg. I think you underestimate what life is like in most other countries. Almost everyone who moves abroad from the US returns in a few years with their eyes opened.

I think if you read more carefully, he's not talking about why people migrate, but rather why countries allow migration into their country.

I'm not American, and I'm sure the Chinese think it's a race, but to me it looks like a race that the US already won over 50 years ago. Are the Chinese really justified in feeling like they "won" if they get there before Artemis lands?

I agree it's a great deal for the US as a country, but the average high school graduate is unhappy because they can't afford a house, even when the government can somehow afford 13 (!) supercarriers and stealth bombers that look like spaceships, etc. And oddly the educated masses are unhappy too because... I dunno... I don't really know what a kid whose mommy and daddy paid for their super-expensive education to become one of the elite really has to complain about, and yet those trust fund kids are the ones who protest the most. I mean seriously, the ground state of being human is to be unsatisfied, even when your state of being is way better than the the vast majority of people who ever existed. It's possible that humans just can't be happy.

It's not stupid to the average American voter who cares more about their own immediate welfare than what's going on in the larger world. The world order is just reverting to the way it was prior to WWII. Instead of super-powers you have large regional hegemons that control and dominate their own neighborhoods and clash with the larger powers at the fringes. Globalization, multi-lateralism (the UN), and trade were all products of the post-WWII order that came out of the Bretton Woods agreements, and later the IMF and World Bank. But this cost money for the US to bankroll all these systems, and the fact is that the voters in the US are increasingly disillusioned with this system and they voted in a guy who's going to break it all up (starting with NATO, apparently). History is full of stuff like this happening over, and over, and over again. Be thankful you got to live in a little bit of the golden age where it was a little less "stupid" for a while.

I appreciate that you enjoyed growing up in a city. That's great. But the fact is that when you pack people into cities, they empirically have fewer kids.

> This entire culture of having only boys and aborting girls if they don't have a boy, is why their population is declining.

This is a reason, but it's not the main reason. China industrialized extremely fast, which means moving people to the city. When people move to the city they have far fewer kids. Also, most people live in apartments in China, not houses with back yards, which further decreases the willingness to have kids. Who wants to raise a kid in a concrete jungle? China *does* have a lot of space, so if they focused on creating nice places to live with back yards, I suspect they'd make a dent in the birthrate. But the good old "give women more money and time off" has been tried and by itself barely moves the needle.

Well, we've been making software engineers more productive for decades by making much faster CPUs and higher level languages, and lots of pre-defined libraries. If making people more efficient just meant you could do the same amount of work with less people, then we would have fired all but 3 software engineers decades ago, but in reality the demand for software engineers has generally trended much higher over that timespan. The reason for this is Jevon's Paradox... when you make some resource more efficient, then usage of that resource will increase, not decrease (assuming elastic demand). So if AI really makes developers more efficient, then we should be seeing an explosion of demand for software developers. The reason we're not isn't because everyone is replacing software engineers with AI, but because AI isn't living up to the hype, and the overall demand for developers is down because most were employed by silicon valley, and that place ran on very very cheap capital, and the cheap capital has dried up. This was an inevitable result of demographic trends, and many people predicted it. Silicon valley didn't know what to do about it because the share prices were based on absurd growth rates funded by cheap capital. They jumped on AI as an excuse... don't sell your shares: we're not down-sizing; we're just going to continue growing by using AI! As I said, it's bull.