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I'm sorry? You said Canada.

If any president, regardless of party, declares a national emergency and that the only way to stop it is to block imports of something that we critically must have and cannot produce in adequate quantities for our country to not fall apart horribly, we will question that president's judgment, intellect, and/or character, because at least one of the three almost certainly must be compromised in some way to reach such a flawed decision.

Look, it's really simple. The word emergency means that something A. is sudden and unexpected, and B. must be dealt with right now, or else the consequences will be immediate and severe. This is not an emergency.

The U.S. power grid requires large quantities this hardware continually, both for expansion and repairs, on an ongoing basis. Not having adequate quantities is a national emergency with immediate implications for the country. Not having the manufacturing infrastructure to build critical power infrastructure hardware in this country could *eventually* be a national emergency if, for example, China decides to declare war on the U.S., but right now, it is just a long-term *risk* of *future* national emergency, not an actual emergency, because doing nothing will not necessarily cause immediate harm to the country.

You can't solve a long-term and likely mostly hypothetical risk to the country by creating an *immediate* national emergency. You can't put the entire country in *more* short-term, medium-term, and potentially long-term peril in the hopes that it somehow causes people to reduce some future risk that might never even materialize.

Basically, this policy is the import/export equivalent of saying, "My neighbor might steal my car someday, so I'm going to push my car off a cliff so he can't take it away from me in the future. Sure, I'll lose my job because I can't get to work, but having a car that he can steal is an emergency." See how stupid that is?

Worse, if this were an actual emergency (e.g. if China invaded Taiwan and the U.S. decided to shut down all imports from China in retaliation), there would still be a bigger problem, which is that it will take years to build the infrastructure to make the hardware needed in the United States.

What this means is that unless the emergency is so severe that every party agrees to maintain the ban, the minute the next president takes office, the policy will immediately be overturned in the name of national security, and it will no longer be financially viable to keep building those plants, and they won't ever get finished. Moreover, in the absence of such an exigent threat, the companies know that this is the case, and will drag their heels as much as possible before they even start building anything, so at best, all he will get in the next two years are a bunch of promises that will be soon broken.

So a policy like this cannot realistically have a positive impact on anything. If he had done it in the first year of his first term in office, it might have produced some success, but at this point, it's almost a decade too late.

That said, if he doesn't stop those imports, then companies might build wind turbines off the coast that he'll have to look at, so I can see why banning those imports could be an emergency for the president, and thus a "national emergency". [rolls eyes]

The Finish Line is getting listed in the NASDAQ quickly. The game is to force pension funds to buy shares, so the original investors and share holders can sell their stakes in the sinking ship at a stupendous profit, before the price completely tanks and ordinary people are left holding worthless retirement nest-eggs.

Exactly. They are projecting their own failures onto others.

It's ok when American LLMs encourage kids to kill themselves, that's just business and what can you expect from dumb machine systems, but if foreign operators use American LLMs to exploit security weaknesses in American businesses, then suddenly it's evil rogue AIs and spies.

Nothing to do with our restrained efforts m'am, please sign the dotted line for a donation, we need your help to defend *you*.

If they are "excluding" certain items from it, then they aren't doing their job.

I feel they should allow sandwiches in the charts because, if they are "excluding" ham and cheese on toast from the charts they aren't doing their job.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Of course you'd support non "W" in the WNBA. But only the non "W" from your team.

What is this s***?
Do you know how many non-W players there have been in the WNBA? Want to take a guess?
Here's a clue, the number is an integer less than one.

no end to the Iran war in sight

Oh come on, the Iran war is going to end soon, it will be followed by some negotiations which will break down, at that point the counter will reset and there will be a new Iran war (totally unrelated to the previous two).
The Iran wars will end when Benji Netanyahu says so, and that is not about to happen.

Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?

But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.

The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).

IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.

What's this education? If Polish people who reside at the northernmost tip of the country radiate more heat we should definitely know about it! (Winter is coming and heating oil is getting expensive...)

lol you're stupid. Kids without parents or guardians have no-one to file a lawsuit for them!

The economics you are working under is broken, when books that are destined for recycling aren't sent to poor countries where children have nothing to read, instead.

Lies and Statistics:

The loom made old tradespeople (30+) permanently unemployed, but employed children (4-8) to replace them. Total jobs increased, total wages lower, more garments sold at cheaper prices, lots of people in permanent poverty, lots of kids with crippling injuries.

He's not involved in AI. Why should he have an opinion on it? Only slashdotters should have an opinion on AI.