It's weird. I do have a King, and in theory He is above the law, or rather He is the law. Yet I'm not aware of any laws he has broken. His mother, the Queen did do things like not licensing her dogs, cars or Herself when it came to a drivers license, pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and as far as I'm aware, it has been similar since at least the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and maybe the Tudors (Bloody Mary). Might have been some gay stuff at some point when it was illegal, along with adultery.
Shit, he even pays his taxes, something he doesn't have to do as he is the taxman.
My Prime Minister, who actually runs things, was investigated for trying to influence the Attorney General/Minister of Justice in a criminal case. He was her superior, yet it was investigated by the cops and the opposition argues he should have been charged. It was a grey area. My Provincial Premier was busted in Hawaii for impaired driving and lost his license similar to if it happened to me.
It is just so fucking weird that 1st, your Department of Justice had a policy of not investigating crimes committed by your President and now, your Supreme Court has given him immunity.
Shouldn't he be treated as any citizen? Which in your system, it seems it is all he is. it is supposed to be a Republic.

And yet Canada, a country also with a Federal system, did much better with 3-4X less deaths even with the fuckups the Federal government did. The Feds did put the army in the nursing homes where we had our own scandals and closed the borders, otherwise it was the Provinces running their jurisdictions. My Province did particularly well as the government did what it was supposed to do. Declared an emergency and let the Provincial Healthcare Officer run things. With no lock downs, minimal business closures, minimal mask mandates and keeping the kids in school we had one of the lowest per capita death rates. Mostly due to the politicians staying out of the way besides financial support and leaving the experts in charge in my opinion. Along with having a good expert in Dr Bonny Henry.
The Provinces where the politicians over rode the medical people did much worse and the stories out of America were horrendous, in both directions. States with insane lock downs to States with minimal precautions.
Our Federal government did set a good tone and example with the Prime Minister masking and social isolating like the rest of us. Did Trump ever appear in public with a mask on? Or set other examples? IIRC, no.

So pretty good. 4 times the population, supplying the world with manufactured stuff and just over twice the CO2 output as America.

Well, besides the AC's comment, is any medium to major economy on course to meet its carbon targets? Shit some are purposely doing the opposite, simply out of spite.

GDP is also a terrible metric. How much of America's GDP is generated by the healthcare system? Bribing, I mean donating to politicians. Locking people up along with the LEO's to do it. And various other unproductive economic activity. China probably also has BS wealth generation too and I"m not knowledgeable enough to compare.

Where I am, last time I looked at a bottle of round-up in the consumer store, the active ingredient had changed to iron sulfate (sulfide?), which does a quick job of burning the leaves of weeds and kills the young ones but you'd have to do a lot of applications to kill things like established dandelions.
And yes, glyphosate takes a week or two to kill the weeds. It's partially temperature dependent from my observation.

I've heard the argument that it is the surfactants that are unhealthy, rather then the glyphosate. I believe the surfactants used are a trade secret.

With a Trillion dollars in the bank (well maybe not the bank as banks don't pay much interest but same idea). Compare to Alberta, who has sold more oil in the same time frame, has a couple of billion stashed away, and a 9 billion deficit this year. They also basically illegalized wind and solar because it spoils their view of the abandoned oil wells which someone is going to have to pay to clean up. And that someone will be the tax payers because it is not fair to businesses to expect them to clean up their mess.

Probably illegal to fire workers doing job action as long as the rules were followed.
Similar happened here. Bus drivers took a strike vote, gave notice and took steps.
1st step was work to rule, no overtime, not wearing uniforms, etc. 2nd step was refusing to enforce charging costumers their fare. 3rd step was stopping most work, the handicap buses kept taking people to the hospital etc.
In civilized countries, it is illegal to fire strikers. Your Starbucks example (if they were unionized) would have resulted in Starbucks locking out the employees, something the bus company could have done as well.
For non-unionized employees, refusing to charge customers would still be a firing offence.

Should tell all the professional sports teams that they're doing it wrong.

Well, if we still had inspections, it wouldn't have happened for half a year when my insurance gets renewed. Still point taken. I'll also add that I went into the upgrade eyes open and willing to chance this stuff as I had to make a night run in the pissing rain and between my aged eyes and how shitty the 28 year old stock head lights were, I still think I made the right choice. The only surprise was my high beam indicator on the dash stopped working. Lucky it is easy to feel the stalk to know high vs low beam.

The Roman's often debased their currency, starting with Nero with not much different results as printing fiat money. Interesting article on it, https://www.unrv.com/economy/c.... To quote part of the article,

For centuries, Roman coins were struck from gold, silver and bronze of relatively high purity, ensuring that merchants, soldiers and citizens alike had confidence in their intrinsic value. Over time, however, external pressures - from military expenditures to dwindling mineral resources - drove the imperial government to reduce the precious metal content in coinage.

This currency debasement served as a quick financial fix but contributed to rampant inflation, economic fragmentation and a deterioration of trust in the empire's monetary system.

Mostly agree, and yes the debt had grown too large. Borrowing for things like infrastructure can be a good move, especially if the infrastructure generates more wealth then the interest on the debt. I'm not an economist and generally run my life debt free so can't really comment on how much debt is acceptable. I do think when times are good, debt should be paid down, rather then more tax breaks.

Canada ran a surplus for 8 years a couple of decades back. All the Conservatives did was bitch that the Liberals weren't lowering taxes instead of paying down the debt and when they finally formed government, it was a C$65 billion deficit, though in 2008, it was hard to avoid a deficit and perhaps the tax cuts helped the economy.
Note that the reason for the austerity was the governments credit rating being lowered and we're still haven't recovered from that austerity.

So what you are saying is that all wages paid by corporations should go up so the workers can pay their newly increased taxes. That would of course include new businesses that aren't yet profitable making it harder for them to become profitable as they can no longer write wages off.
Or perhaps you mean the debt should be increased to save corporations more money.
I don't think lowering peoples take home pay would be positive.