I see we've moved from the 'he's just meme'ing, he/we know it's stupid, it's not real' to 'here's why this is 4d chess and actually good'.

Edit: Since I'm throttled... Trump has been talking about Greenland since 2019, before he was surrounded with the current crop. Good try at keeping the 4D chess con going though.

Honestly, the reason that North Korea is embargoed probably has less to do with the way they treat their own citizens, and more to do with them constantly threatening to turn South Korea into a "sea of fire" while lobbing ever-longer-range ballistic missiles over Japan.

Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. You can't even leave North Korea without special permission, which only certain workers get.

I've been to China, and I'm going again this year, I'm from the EU. The funniest thing is that China's Tier 1 cities are more developed than EU cities and offer a better quality of life.

NK and China are not at the same level lol - NK is almost an inescapable dictatorship, with routine mistreatment and indoctrination. If that were true, you can claim the current US is 1930s Nazi Germany, with a right wing government using media manipulation and “othering”, in a pseudo dictatorship.

Not to mention the US and China use similar “low level” indoctrination strategies (like swearing allegiance to the flag in schools)

I think you misunderstood my earlier point. I mean for most EU or Canadian citizens, the odds of being negative about Xi having actual impact are near 0 (not many travel to China), whilst many do travel to the US.. and rely on US tech.

Didn’t they make it so that citizens of 75 countries can’t emigrate to the US just yesterday?

The US has had two faces for the last generation. Bush jr. dragged the British into Iraq and generally angered the EU. That the next republican president was overtly hostile to the EU is a continuation of the theme.

It’s hard to build an alliance when one of the partners flips their fundamental goals every 4 years.

Both are not friend of EU/Canada right now. But China at least never pretended (or we never saw them like that). The US however was a factual savior, then a close ally and a partner for 85 years! That is roughly 60 years longer than China was a relevant factor in the world order. It is the loss of trust / change which tortures the world. Not the amount of current trust.

Both are equally bad in theory. But my point is that (currently) the US would, in practice, negatively impact Canadians and EU more.

Do we know China’s goal better? They seemed quite willing to punt on Hong Kong democracy until 2049, as they originally agreed to, until one day they decided that it was time for democracy to be over.

But now it will be much easier for the Mercosur block to finance the infrastructure needed to become agricultural export powerhouses. Death by a thousand cuts for the USA is just as bad a one fatal blow.

Mercosur has been on ice for more than two decades because the US wasn’t a huge fan.

Now that we’ve shredded the relationship with both areas, they signed on the dotted line.

It passing does

Why are you not happy about Mercosur? I'm from EU and I think it's a great deal!

The US doesn't have Chat Control. They use blanket mandates to ask FAANG for your whereabouts.

Yes, of course, that is what I’m saying you need to change.

I'd expect quite a few consumers would still want them. Canada has cheap electricity and expensive gasoline. For those who don't live in some part of Canada so cold that the efficiency of an EV drops massively due to heating an EV can save quite a bit on energy costs.

Around 65-75% of Canadians live in parts of Canada that have winter temperatures similar to those of Norway's major cities and EVs perform fine in Norway so will probably also be fine in Canada.

The US and Japanese and Korean car companies are putting most of their EV effort, at least in the US and Canada, into the more expensive models. They don't have much that is the EV equivalent of a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic for non-SUVs, or the equivalent of a RAV4 or CR-V for EVs.

Honda for example only has the Prologue, which is built on top of GM's Equinox EV platform and starts at about $15k more than an Equinox EV.

The Chinese EV companies seem more willing to address that segment. Even if they have to pay union wages to build them there will be demand because it will still be cheaper than the EVs that are aimed at a more upscale market the other companies are mostly making.

Or you just setup lower price limits for cars like Europe did with China. So that state support is not affecting the market. Because guess what: producing a car in far far away land and then ship it around the world and pay some 10% tariff is also not that cheap.

The deal allows up to 70,000 cars a year by 2030 to be imported at the reduced tariff. Canadians buy 1.5-2 million cars per year, and roughly a quarter million EVs per year.

If this deal as reported somehow manages to doom the Canadian auto industry, then our auto industry was probably somehow doomed anyways.

I don’t see how. Chinese manufacturers aren’t going to setup multi billion dollar plants without some market presence, that comes after.

Letting in some small amount of Chinese EVs for so they can test the waters seems sensible all around. If they are popular then negotiate on local manufacturing to allow a larger market share.

Baked in ?

Yeah.

Spain in the 1500s, the Netherlands in the 1600s and the British empire in the 1800s are good examples of countries considered too big to fail that they eventually crashed and burned and lost their world leader statuses rather fast.

In all three cases over reliance on new debt to fund stuff, disappearance of the middle class, and abusing their dominance (military and/or economic) made them crumble as other countries steered away from dealing with them.

To foreign holders of US bonds: Molon Labe.

Except, apart from tech, there is no good place to invest in the US, especially given the headwinds in the current macro environment. And tech is super overvalued now.

There's a lot of investor capital moving to traditional industries in China, India, Brazil, Korea and Europe, simply because there's better returns to be made with more resilience to American problems.

That will not be that easy this time. Too direct is the elemination of any international collaboration a result of the Trump / Project 2025 leadership.

We find out on Tuesday if the Supreme Court will enforce those tariffs.

No. You can see this on what happened to a recent bill for a drinking water project in Colorado.

It was so uncontroversial that it passed the House by unanimous consent. That doesn't mean 100% were for it, but it means any who were not didn't think it was worth making even a token effort to stop it.

In the Senate they passed it on a voice vote, which is what they use for routine and completely non-controversial bills. They are all asked to say yea or nay, and the presiding officer calls it for whichever they think they heard the most of and if no one objects that they misheard it passes.

Trump vetoed it. The official reason given was some bullshit about costs, but no one believes that. The leading theories are that it is because it is important to Lauren Boebert's district and because Colorado won't release Tina Peters from prison.

Boebert upset Trump by being one of the Republican House votes to force the release of the Epstein files.

Tina Peters was an election official who did various illegal and shady things [1] that Trump approves of.

The House failed to override the veto. They are so afraid of angering Trump that they couldn't get 1/3 of Republican House members to to go against Trump on something that they themselves had just recently found completely uncontroversial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Peters_(politician)

There was a "Never Trump" movement of Republican leaders. It's dead.[1] By now, most of the Never Trumpers are either out of power or have groveled to Trump. The National Review, a conservative publication, wrote: "At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers." It was all leaders, or former leaders, or people who thought they should be leaders. The article says Never Trump was composed of "1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law ... 2) campaign professionals ... and 3) public intellectuals ..." Not Republican governors and members of Congress. Not big donors. Those people only matter when they're in power. There are small conservative journals in which they still write. Few read them. They're not on Fox News.

It's not at all clear what the GOP looks like after Trump. The most likely Republican successors are said to be Vance, Rubio, and DeSantis. The last two have failed badly at presidential bids before.

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-end-of-never-trump...

I wonder how many will simply become "Trump Republicans" and follow some other leader when he's gone? Or will some simply pretend to wake up and have realized they had Trump Derangement Syndrome the whole time and are ready to come back to reality?

My Chinese friends refer to Trump as the "Builder of the Nation" (the nation being China)

I wonder how wide spread drug abuse is among the moneyed elite and how paranoia and other related factors are affecting their decisions

This is a negative-sum choice being made by everyone but China. Chinese cars will decimate the European motor industry. Volvo is already gone. BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen will follow. This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.

The pressures of a democratic society will force Western governments to extract money from their productive sectors and redirect them to their comparatively unproductive auto sectors.

Watching an increasingly aging Europe try to sustain its expensive welfare state while losing its biggest industries and facing a war citizens don't have the heart to prosecute is going to be interesting. Already French retirees make more than the average working man there.

They won't fight. They won't work. They won't provide children. To retirees, replacing local industry with Chinese manufacturing is a no-brainer: everything gets cheaper. With the resulting loss of well-paying jobs, healthcare for the elderly and wait staff will get even cheaper. A bonanza for a generation soon to disappear leaving the bits to be picked up by their most ardent fans.

> What happens if NATO doesn't exist? No more bases to support Middle East operations and no more intelligence sharing.

if it uses its base in Greenland to annex it, the US military will be promptly evicted from every base in the world

at which point it returns to being a regional power

Cheaper foreign vehicles will also hurt the automotive industry in Ontario, Canada. So, this is an interesting move from the Canadian fed govt.

https://www.investontario.ca/automotive

>Imagine what the United States economy will be like if Stellantis, Ford, or GM or all of them go bankrupt. 3-4 million in lost jobs alone.

They wouldn't go bankrupt. They will be saved and protected by government bailouts and tariffs, and the situation will become similar to say Russia car industry. Though, naturally, the situation with Russian cars has become so bad that even they are forced to massively open market to Chinese cars (and even "Russian cars" become more and more just simple rebadge of Chinese cars).

In short - if you don't compete by increasing productivity, efficiency, quality, you will be overtaken by the ones who do. The government actions may prolong your complacency time, yet ultimately such prolongation is just the time you actually lose falling more and more behind.

The whole world by now, 20 years after Tesla roadster, should have been driving American EVs, yet instead we have classic paradigm shift there US is Sun Microsystems and EVs/solar/wind/batteries is Linux/x86.

they better not be holding dollars

Thinking more than a week out is already a challenge for the current administration. A month would be a Herculean task.

> So they're like, buying into a depreciating asset

Part of the issue is that the average age of the House is ~55 and for the senate it's above 60. So they have a lot less incentive to care about that, or about climate change.

Personal power. Specifically winning elections at any cost, including the cost of more important forms of power.

Reminds me of Russia post-Soviet collapse when all of the SSRs rushed to form their own blocs or align with the West, while the Russians thought they would continue to align with their former overlords in Moscow.

USA will definitely turn into the new Russia if it continues to go on this path. It has already exhausted most of its cultural and moral capital, and its tech sector is already under threat in its major allies. It will continue to stay relevant for maybe a generation or two but it will turn largely irrelevant by the turn of the century, just like the British Empire or Russia today. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't correct course.

Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.

They don't share Trump's message, or not exactly. They share an edited version of it. That seems to be why Trump has started insisting he's serious repeatedly. The conservative media is ignoring or toning down the least popular ideas.

It matters to me, because they were not powerless to stop this scenario. The point of a representative democracy.

After January 6th, Mitch McConnell could have whipped up the votes to impeach Trump. Forever banishing him from office. Or over the past four years, when asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election" instead of equivocating, every Congressperson could have said, "Of course he did. Donald Trump is a loser who lost a fair election, but threw a tantrum when the result did not go his way."

Liz Cheney took a stand, and the party punished her for it. Trump was too popular, Republicans preferred to latch onto that energy, despite the consequences.

No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood. These leaders enabled this scenario, because they (correctly!) predicted it could help them hold onto power. Now we watch the results unfold as the world does everything to extricate itself from the USA.

The high prices due to Donnie's policies absolutely impact me. I paid $5 for a piece of plastic that before used to cost $2. I paid $55 / fire alarm - this used to be under $30. I paid $55 for 2 dishes at a "cheap" Chinese take-out. At these prices I balked at buying some Chinese food for myself - I only bought these dishes for my son to eat.

So yeah, it's bad.

A few weeks before the tariff idiocy, I paid $320 including shipping for an ebike battery from the EU. When it arrived, it included a bill for an additional $350 from US Customs. That's insane, I refused.

When returning to sender, the package disappeared, presumably into Customs. I'm out $320 and still no battery.

True. But the US want to remain the country everyone relies on if it wants to preserve the dollar as the world's primary trade, reserve and settlement currency.

Dollar dominance gives the US disproportionate leverage over global finance and allows it to shape the rules of the system. Absent this asymmetry, it is difficult to imagine US tariffs or financial pressure (or any kind of pressure) would carry comparable global impact.

Totally - it is the best outcome for the world. As an American, it is sad to see the loss of status, power, everything that is coming our way in the near future.

What are you talking about? The US navy protects the commercial shipment routes around the world.

I do not believe that. Project 2025 was a documented plan and is executed. Someone is profiting of that. So the outcomes are what was the plan. Question is: will it suck for the general population. Answer is yes

"Fuck you, I've got mine" I think is the only thought any US politician with a modicum of power is thinking at this moment.

Yes, and not all Asians are chinese