BE already is in the EU. They are one of the OG members. ;-)

Yeah self-centred self-righteous arseholes just hate being called out as self-centred self-righteous arseholes because it means they need to put effort into trying to ignore their self-centred self-righteousness. The easiest way of doing that is for them to cut funding to researchers showing them they are self-centred self-righteous arseholes.

I'm not surprised most Americans are glad to see the back of any researchers pointing this out.

I know right? So why did 70 million people vote for a person who promised no new wars, while an international agreement that was preventing Iran from having nukes was in place?

One of the first things Trump did was make it easier for Iran to get nukes by tearing up the protections in place. The second thing he did was legitimise their reason for wanting nukes. If your reasoning is the only reason, then there's 70million fucking stupid people in the USA.

Yeah but would you take the risk? You don't trust the zombies are dead without double tapping the brain, so why trust your computer to open a webpage. Click twice, just to be sure.

There's nothing ethical or unethical about this. The reality is that tariffs are a cost to a business paid by the business. They are not passed on to consumers directly unless you are a drop-shipping company. The costs may be spread around specific products, all products, none of the products (absorbed by business), or may even be spread around the entire world.

There's neither anything legal or ethical which would provide a precedence for a refund to a consumer. The consumer has not been wronged. A product was advertised at a price, the consumer paid that price, and received the product. The price of products are relatively fixed compared to business expenses which go into making them, and people are not normally discounted post sale if one of those expenses is reversed.

In many cases the companies you list weren't even impacted by tariffs or responsible for the sale price.

Unless you imported something directly either through an international purchase or via a drop-shipment seller, you didn't pay a tariff, you paid the advertised fee for a product.

Why? Customers are irrelevant here. Tariffs are paid exclusively by the importer of a product. How they pass those costs on to their customers is entirely their own business. You're not entitled to audit the expenses of Walmart just because you bought a mobile phone charger from them. They advertised a product at a price, you paid the price, they delivered the product, and that is the sum total of the entire transaction.

Your only rights as a consumer are based around performance of the contract, that the product works the way you expect to. That's it. There is zero legal mechanism for you to discuss the price post purchase as your contractual obligations are closed when you make the first part of the payment (consideration in legal terms, it is what binds any contract including the sale of a product).

If the cost of the product changes post purchase, either directly, or indirectly as a change to the cost of business, tough break kid. Maybe ask the company really really nicely if they'll give you a refund, but there is zero legal mechanism or precedent for you to be refunded a tariff which you didn't directly pay to the government yourself.

There are. There's a whole series of ISA and IEC standards for cybersecurity which are mandatory in such installations.

I'm not sure if you've ever been in a substation, but that's not even remotely a concern. There's nothing at all wrong with "outdated" equipment. Even 30 year old purely mechanical protection relays work just fine. Outdated firmware isn't an issue (in all my years I've *NEVER* seen firmware upgraded on protection relays, EVER, even fancy intelligent ones, even as the engineering workstations they connect to come and go and get upgraded over and over again, relays are largely set and forget). Typically when a problem is identified it's a case of swapping out the entire relay, what the vendor does with it is their business after it is returned.

But for the most part relays regardless of age or firmware revision are installed once, and run until they are EOL. The exception being a change in substation layout, e.g. converting a motor feeder to a transformer feeder, or installing a different protection scheme elsewhere may result in relays being upgraded, but for the most part they are entirely untouched for the life of the board.

It literally did. Or are you still confused why he wasn't on the voting ballot in the last election?

All of that stuff is bespoke. Transformers and their cores are made to order for anything beyond the last mile of consumer connections, and depending on the size of the consumer, maybe even the consumer connection.

Switchgear is *ALL* bespoke. There's literally nothing off the shelf. It may be assembled from off the shelf components, but it is universally assembled for the customer on demand based on customer specifications, and this includes even for the smallest 3phase boards to say nothing of gas-insulated switchgear.

It means the AI is hallucinating more than usual when using that Slashdot account.

The president can't pardon himself, but a future one can. Maybe that will be his play.

Its worse than that. Tariffs are not directly applied to the product, they are paid for by business at the time of import. The time of purchase to the consumer may not even be the time of purchase for the business so the tariff may or may not apply to any given consumer transaction, you would need to be able to track individual inventory sent to individual consumers.

Furthermore that assumes that tariffs were passed on directly to consumers. That isn't necessarily the case either. Some businesses absorbed some or all of the tariffs, others spread the price across the world to prevent loss of sales in any particular market (e.g. Sony raised the price of Playstations in Europe as well as the USA despite Europe not imposing any tariffs on China. They did that so they didn't need to pass on the full tariff just to the USA). Do Europeans now get a refund too? No of course not.

Tracking the cost of business to individual sales is impossible for all but the smallest and simplest of businesses. For most companies refunding tariffs correctly would be impossible.

No one is buying or selling a file server here. They are buying and selling a customer base.

Its a website that any regular Slashdot visitor would know, having been the subject of numerous stories over the past few years. You should tell whomever is paying you to jump online and post comments anonymously to update the knowledge manual they provide you.