Not much, just smaller.

Committees deciding what counts as "art" doesn't have the glorious history that you seem to think it has.

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]

Wait... you're going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (founded in 2003, signed into law by George W. Bush) and you're shocked that there was - somewhere in the 400k square foot building - a chart of stereotypes about white people next to a chart of stereotypes about black people?

Because he is not (currently) a dictator, he can't make his own laws. He's limited in what he can do.

Tariffs are one of the few things in which he is mostly able to do unilaterally. When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

I'm sure you'd be welcome if you ever wanted to - you're already ideologically highly aligned (and never really were with the US...) :) Honestly, economically and geopolitically it'd be a very strong alliance for both parties, as what Canada offers vs. what it needs is a good match for what the EU offers vs. what it needs. Though admittedly both parties need to rearm fast - but the EU has a lot more resources to do that than Canada has on its own. Canada has raw materials, EU needs them. Canadian automakers/parts suppliers need an alternative market, EU can provide it, etc.

Shifting eastward wouldn't be frictionless - for example, your oil infrastructure is designed to send it south, not to ports that can export it to the east, and European refineries would need to set up to process it, for example. But it's pretty clear that the current status quo can no longer be relied on, as the US is intent on extortion.

They're certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to "How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?") grumble about how they're afraid to use the phrase "diversity of exoplanets" in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word "diversity" will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was "Spell it 'divers' and throw in the occasional 'thou art' and 'exeunt' " ;) )

"another human - like me"

Serious Zalgon 26 McGee vibes there ;)

Yes, I'm sure children in poor countries who may or may not read English are desperate to get ahold of, say, an obscure 1993 book on VCR repair.

These are books that are unsold for a reason.

It's a testament to the interplay of words that forms the tapestry we call language!

But leaving out a comma can certainly make sentences more fun ;)

Anyway, let's eat Grandma.

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.

I expect to see a bunch of foreign power companies staying at Trump properties, playing golf at Trump resorts, and buying a ton of Trump coin followed shortly by their equipment being said to be "safe" and allowed to be imported. We NEED this equipment because we don't make most of it here and definitely not enough of it, so it will have to be allowed in. This is just a way for Trump to get paid by them to be allowed in.

In case he does, I hope Bill Gates is learning to laugh at the irony my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in other words, as people were saying even in the 1960s:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
      "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."

How can we mitigate that risk? Like President John F. Kennedy quipped (echoed by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project):
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
        "There are three things which are real:
        God, human folly, and laughter.
        The first two are beyond our comprehension.
        So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)

Or, as I explain in more detail:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and economic] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Here is someone involved in AI who gets that our direction out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction and level of compassion going into it:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026."

I'm glad to see more AI and technology leaders starting to get that. Another example:
https://www.schmidtsciences.or...
        ""As AI systems advance, we face the risk that they will act in ways that contradict human values and interests--but this risk is not inevitable," said Eric Schmidt. "With efforts like the AI Safety Science program, we can help build a future in which AI benefits us all while maintaining safeguards that protect us from harm."
        The cohort of researchers--including "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, OpenAI board member Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, and "AI Snake Oil" author Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University--will focus their work on research that addresses the critical safety challenges that AI faces."

Ultimately though, guard rails can come off or be jumped -- so we really need AI with a sense of humor -- especially for irony. :-)

--------

And we also need AI developers and funders who root their work more in compassion as a guiding force more than competition.

Something I wrote to Ray Kuzweil on that back in 2000 (put up by someone else I sent a copy to):
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt."

And also in 2001:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
          "Beware that people (usually not well versed in E&E [Ecology & Evolution]) cite ecology and evolution all the time to support a belief, but that does not make it a scientifically valid thing to do. For example, it is common to cite competition as a given in nature, but Lewis Thomas in "Lives of a Cell" points out that most successful organisms participate in effectively collaborative efforts -- like the symbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells. Likewise, the fact that something is true in most species does not mean that humans (given intelligence and culture) should behave that way -- because if E&E teaches anything, it is that there is a lot of diversity out there."

And in 2007:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "Technologies designed to amplify and extend the scope of corporate greed likely just will not have the same positive basis as ones built out of joy and humor and love. If you ever watch the British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, greed seems much more likely to design "Queeg" than "Holly". Langdon Winner writes about related issues at length in his classic _Autonomous Technology_.
      In short, I feel it likely you are clinging to outdated disprove assumptions about motivation and creativity and economics. And I speculate that the reason is in part ironically from your past success. Those assumptions may be holding you back, and holding on to them may indeed help bring about a very negative side of the singularity you want to avoid."

Also on that theme: https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...
        "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.
        Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
        No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.