https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...

> Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report.

> The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

> “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row.

Are they MAGA?

Even the MAGA folks I have to deal with are bitter about it. They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect. I think they'd still vote for Trump though. I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

It's funny... laugh.

"Just find US suppliers."

It's not that simple. There are a lot of things that simply aren't made in the US. (The majority of tool steels, all titanium alloys, everything made of tungsten, and I could go on all day.)

Besides, dealing with the Chinese is like life on easy mode. Handshake agreements are always respected. In most cases service and support are 24/7. Importantly for QoL, they never make you fill out a dozen forms, pay for a D&B report, "let's get on a Zoom call to touch base," and all of that nonsense. American B2B firms aren't really into customer service, as a general rule, I think.

https://youtu.be/as2KoDtsS_0?is=3H1TVc2PZPbGLdPK

The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.

Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.

The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.

This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.

Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.

And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.

-Independent..

The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.

Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks.

If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files”

I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain.

They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back.

The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.

The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class.

Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating

clearly they are smartening up

Socialism (to contrast with social-democrats like some European nations which are primarily democracies, free markets, with a social component) is not a democracy those are opposing ideas.

That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself.

The US process is far from ideal. I agree with that. I'm not American and looking from the outside there's a lot of head scratching I can do.

But- It's worked pretty well over the last few hundred years. You can't just take that and throw it in the garbage and replace it with some "workers will decide" socialist mumbo-jumbo.

Seriously. It doesn't work. You can't say let's take Germany's process and apply it in the US. It won't work. We should know better. There is a delicate balance of power (arguably already somewhat disrupted) and there is a culture and a history. That's why we also can't just bring "democracy" to non-democratic countries that easily.

The DSA are saying let's break everything and then figure it out. It won't work. We need responsible adults not revolutionaries to fix things with care.

Except form the million of black people living in the south of the US. For them, the USA is a democracy only since 1964.

And if you argue "yes but it got better", the Republicans are making everything to get back to before 1964.

Isn't it clear to you that you're misrepresenting DSA's position?

"Defund the police" was a campaign slogan at last election.

I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are. If it's not socialism, it sure shares the same conclusions. And yet "The most extreme left in the US is the most extreme right wing for Europe" is a common belief.

And sure, there are also ideas like healthcare for all which I think are similar but that isn't really what the DSA is about. It's definitely not about transforming the USA to have a better social network like healthcare or protection for employees. It's a lot more radical than that.

Yes, they are center-left at best, and your frenzied rebuttal against regular people trying to improve their lives and the country they live in is alarming. Free public transportation..the horror.

Wouldn't you recognize that bad faith characterizes the DSA lines?

Bernie is probably the most well-known democratic socialist in the US, but he is not a member of DSA. By his political positions he would be either in the left wing of Finnish Social Democratic Party or in the mainstream of the Left Alliance. He would probably choose the Left Alliance, since it is more like a coalition of like-minded activists, while the party is the primary actor for the Social Democrats.

AOC, another well-known democratic socialist, would also fit in the Left Alliance. She is part of the moderate wing of DSA. But if you start looking into the ideological wing, you find plenty of actual socialists who would make Finnish mainstream leftists uncomfortable.

> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.

So, getting into elected office by winning elections is wanting to abolish the democratic process?

I think I'm beginning to understand why the hardcore MAGA folks loves Trump so much.

You misspelled "Trump".

There is only one party making it harder for people to vote, and it is the Republican party.

As for their agenda, you are wrong.

https://www.dsausa.org/

"The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters in all 50 states. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few."

"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."

"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. socialism conflicts directly with democratic values. At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side. All previous socialist "experiments" were not democracies.

No it's not, check out Europe, mostly northern countries, it's working just fine.

> At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side.

Again, northern europe screaming at you.

So you're wrong...

Also, you're Canadian, maybe it's not your business

I feeel those topics are a bit of my business.

In other words, Social Democrat != Democratic Socialist

Scandinavian model relies on competitive private enterprise to create wealth, combined with strong labor union collective bargaining, universal public services, and high consumption/income taxes that apply broadly across society.

DSA seeks to move past or dismantle the capitalist economic system, advocating for social, public, or worker ownership of the means of production.[1]

[1] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism...

In socialism with supposed democracy, where the state owns the means of production and supposedly the workers supposedly have a say about everything, they actually end up with a say about nothing (at least not without greasing the right palms in the inevitably corrupt system that arises).

In Social Democracy, capitalism is the underlying system, where corporations and workers can own means of production, but it operates under sufficient regulation that the excesses and systemic failures of captialism (e.g., failure to prevent Tragedies Of The Commons, tendency towards monopoly and excess concentration of power, consistent tendency to abuse and impoverish workers, etc.), you end up with successful systems like Northern Europe.

The two are very different, and we need to hold the DSA people to the latter and not let them sneak in the former.

Leading but honest question: Are those candidates the same as Trump? I do not see how they share anything other than strategy and spin, and those things don't make policy.

However, I also highly doubt Schumer would be in Epstein files. People seem stuck on the meme that being in Epstein files is the main reason why someone acts one way or another. This degenerate over-simplification has to stop.

If Chuck Schumer is asked about the weather, he'll first check with Netanyahu.

Just look at what Senatorial campaigns Schumer supports and doesn't. There's a lot of suspicion that Schumer (and the DSCC) is going to leave Abdul El-Sayed out to dry because he's anti-Israel, basically. Mandela Barnes got similar treatment in 2022. And yet you have blockbuster challenges like Jaime Harrison's, which spent $130M to oust Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10. Trump won by 12 so I guess he gained 2? Well done, everybody, the system works.

Oh and what did the DNC do with Jaime Harrison after he spent $130M to lose by 10? They made him the DNC Chair. The Democratic Party loves a loser. Just like Howard Dean.

The DSCC funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall funding in these races, and they have their own goals which may or may not be aligned with the party as a whole.

If your single issue is Israel funding (which it probably shouldn’t be but that is your choice), the Democratic Party and presidents did far more to reign in Israel’s behavior than republicans.

Support for Israel's current government (elections in October 2026) being but one example.

Republicans do this too. Two of the seats they're at most risk of losing are Maine and Alaska held by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (respectively). They currently have 53 votes (well, 52 with Mitch McConnell MIA). That means they can pass things with 50 votes (and JD Vance's tie break) on anything that can get past or doesn't require cloture (eg approving judicial nominations, reconcilation). So, every time you have a controversial nomination or bill, you'll often find Collins and Murkowski vote no because their votes aren't needed. The leadership is insulating them from attack. But when their votes are needed, they're there (eg Collins's required vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh).

As for the number of Democratic senators who voted against weapons for Israel, it is significant because it never would've happened 5 years ago, but it's also mostly performative because there's no way it was going to pass.

As another example, Democrats did a rare move to invoke the filibuster last year to stop ICE funding. This resulted in a government shutdown and important programs being punitively defunded (eg there was a reserve fund for food stamps that was intentionally not tapped). What happened? The Republicans needed 60 votes to force a vote. There were 52 votes. 8 Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with Republicans. That's so weird. It's the exact number required. What a coincidence. Whatever that number was, 1, 5, 8, 12, it doesn't matter. There will most of the time be that number of exact senators requried. This, by the way, is part of the rotating villain role within the Democratic Party.

This is how calculated it was. All 8 of those who crossed the floor were either retiring or they weren't up for re-election in 2026 so the voters couldn't punish them. John Ossoff, the current liberal darling, was going to be one of the 8 but he's facing re-election this year so Chuck Schumer whipped another vote to replace him.

Another classic example was the Epstein transparency act. Trump threatened members who signed the discharge petition. Mike Johnson actually shut down the House for 7 weeks to try and get those that did to change their vote. yet when the discharge petition got 218 votes (the minimum required), suddenly the votes in the House and Senate were almost unanimous. Well, if support was almost unanimous, why not just have a vote to begin with?

Mitch McConnell can really be credited with pioneering a new era of obstruction in the Senate. He realized there was a political cost to some votes. Some things were popular and he didn't want to pass them so he'd just make sure they never made it to the floor for a vote.

So my point is that imagine the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2029 and that same Israel funding bill came up. Will all those Senators and House representatives vote for it when it might pass and become law? Nope.

Honestly wild opinions to have. Watch 30 seconds of fox news. A significant chunk of their coverage is about protecting women and children from migrants/pedos/trans people. They want a tough on crime executive branch almost as much as they want low taxes.

Taxes are good! China, which is run by some of the smartest technocrats in the world, has a very strong system for controlling the flow of foreign products into the country. Because of the nature of their government, they have more tools at their disposal than just tariffs, e.g., requiring foreign companies to establish joint-ventures with Chinese companies. But the purpose is the same.

> a man who could not run casinos successfully

Trump didn't invent tariffs. The political thread in favor of strong tariffs started with Alexander Hamilton: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-pr.... Strong tariffs were a core plank of the Lincoln GOP: https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-....

"Tariff" didn't become a naughty word until the Cato folks took over the GOP in the 1980s.

Not all taxes are equal. Regressive ones suck.

1. Security. You make your own bullets. You're able to make and maintain your own military hardware. When another country cuts supply lines in their own self interest, you have options to advocate for yours, either through trade, making it yourself, or, yes, even force.

2. Economic opportunity for your children and grandchildren. And no, not just "factory jobs" as is commonly sneered, but a community of experience and expertise. An engineer that gets to interact with the products they design in that kind of environment is a better engineer. A country that gets to see and interact with the products it makes has a sense of pride and better social cohesion.

3. Social buy-in and consequences for companies. A Chinese car manufacturer doesn't give a shit if cutting costs killed your grandfather. A local company has to, because the executives and workers are all members of the community. I was in Germany during dieselgate, and the sense of disgust at the company was obvious. They felt that.

These things are, imo, important to the health of any country, but they can only really be valued in retrospect. So yeah, tariffs are a tax, but some things are worth paying for even if what's being purchased isn't necessarily obvious or easy to quantify.

I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I also don't think we ever had a free market. Implementation details always matter. My standing policy is basically small informed perturbations around free trade, included targeted tariffs. Everything has tradeoffs. Restricting lumber from canada and fucking Americans? Not smart. Letting China openly steal from us? Asymmetric trade policies hurting the US? Also not smart.

The US could theoretically start doing things again, but it is never clear how to make that happen. The people much prefer to get free stuff (who wouldn't!?). Even if you can convince them otherwise, a lot of the institutional knowledge required to do things is gone. As capital moves to where it is most economically useful, the 'free stuff' economic structure has shaped where the capital is found. To move to a 'do things' economy would require turning the capital allocation upside down. To have all the pieces fall into place to see all that align just right requires great upheaval.

Maybe tariffs really are trying to be the catalyst to convince the people that free stuff isn't the way to bring on the revolution, but even if that's the case, that's a different environment to how tariffs were used historically.

Edit- but I would be shocked if the net effect of Trump's tariffs weren't regressive.

Add that to the list of things I thought I'd never hear a conservative say.

Say what you will about the man, but Trump's takeover of the mainstream conservertive movement has been thorough, and eerily cordyceps-like.

Rayiner is a bad-faith troll who thinks he is being clever by doing the whole “oh, I thought you wanted to raise taxes, liberal??” thing. He does not actually think taxes are good.

In any other normal sane world stuff would get called out, greyed out, and ultimately shot down. In THIS world, the responses (I bet, like this one) are the "greys."

It's a scary world we live in where the Left turns into the Right of the past.

Instead, the Europeans caved, Japanese caved (PM resigned after doing so), Republic of Korea caved (PM resigned after doing so), India of course caved and so on, shattering any prospect of collective action which might pull the rogue hegemon back into line.

Now, the US is simply able to renege or renegotiate the bilateral deals whenever he feels like it, forcing the other party to face down the US by themselves - not many can do this, maybe only China. Anyways, I wish the Canadians well and I hope they gain global support

The world needs leadership. And Canada is helping with that.

I do not think that reciprocal tariffs are actually the answer though. They hurt both sides and the US is not a rational enough actor to respond like you hope they will. The answer is in shifting trade away from the US and isolating their economy. It takes longer but it is what will work. And even if their behaviour does not change, their power will fade with their economy.

We can't afford to cut all ties with United States due to our geography and history, however it would be prudent for us to reduce our dependency.

I don't think majority of Canadians wish to see the nation in such a vulnerable position again with regards to US. Banking on a single player in terms of security and trade has proven to be a risky endeavor.

I have much love for the American people, but I support the actions of our government.

When a Canadian new grad is faced with an option of going to work in SV or in China which do they prefer? Between Chinese values and American values which do we prefer? A society with no freedom of speech? Where people are arbitrarily jailed if they voice an opinion against the government? Where the government places citizens in concentration and re-education camps and runs them over with tanks? I mean to me the choice is clear.

How many large American companies have offices in Canada? How many people and what slice of the economy does this support? Lots.

So yes, the US has drifted and is drifting from the ideal. And maybe it was never the ideal. But it's much closer to us than China in every imaginable facet and will likely remain so for the next many decades. We need to filter the noise out, definitely stand firmly for what we believe in, but also compromise and look at the longer term.

Beyond that societies can change quickly. Germany, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Peru, Chili, South Africa, every country in the USSR, and China too have changed values dramatically in short periods of time in the past 100 yrs.

Also, China is not putting out videos that say they will dominate any country in the Americas. I'd urge us to take people seriously when they say what they value: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V359k45CBY0

Learn from what they did well and what they did poorly, copy the good parts.

there's plenty of barriers without tariffs holding up trade between blocks and countries.

What the Trump Administration does not get is that the US is no longer central to the world economy. Everyone else has a lot more productive capacity now. Trump is running on a 1980s world view.

Most people do not realize how much of a shift that is.

In the past there was always a ton of EU countries helping the US out, in whatever crap the US started. And a lot of European soldiers died. Those soldiers did not help Europe but the US, because of being allies.

Even when some European countries got called names for not helping in Iraq because they called out that the whole Weapons Of Mass destruction was a load of bull** . It did not stop others from helping the US.

Yet, now, what we see as "help" is so minimal, and even countries like Spain not just refusing but active blocking. It shows how much relationships have deteriorated.

Trump thinks of Europa like a vassal state, and every time we say no or delay, it drives him nuts. Or our best "yes", if often a "well, we need to have agreement in all the countries, see you in a few years". Do not think its coincidence, its done deliberately.

In the past when the US said something, beyond maybe France, most countries quickly followed. This is gone ... We know the world has changed, and the old order is finished.

Pre-Trump, some European countries might've let themselves be dragged into another one of America's pointless unwinnable no-reason wars. But with America itself all but declaring war on its European "allies"? Not a chance. Unless Iran starts sending rockets to Europe (and why would they?), they'll just stay out of it and let America clean up its own mess.

If anything, the Ukraine situation has made Europe more pro-war, with countries significantly increasing their defense budgets. If Iran had been a "post-9/11 Afghanistan invasion" scenario under another President, 2026 Europe would happily jump in to help.

europe wanted to keep the jcpoa after the US left it

I still agree that everyone is pulling away and for good reasons, prominent among which is being pushed/shoved, but I also can't stand to see Trump's victim narrative gain traction when he chose to go it alone for the dumbest possible reason.

One, US has been the largest buyer of imported goods. As much as people think turning away is difficult and needs planning.

Two, turning away requires time and planning. Supply chain isn't built in one day. People need time for that.

In the short term - like next 3-4 years - it is going to look like countries caved. But in the long term Liberation Day will be remembered as one of the days which put a nail into the American exceptionalism.

ultimately the US is buying stuff, but its the stuff thats actually valuable and not the USD you get from it. its even easier to move when you cant even buy oil from the gulf anymore, whether in USD or otherwise.

the supply chain problem arrived in trump 1's covid disaster, and hasnt exactly been solved for getting stuff to the US again

This won't last. There are consequences for behavior on all scales. If you prove yourself untrustworthy and treacherous, people will treat you as such. International politics don't move very quickly, especially if coordination is required. But it will eventually move.

"Winning" at all costs has never ever been sustainable and I don't think see why this time will be different, especially with diminishing real power.

"They make it a desert and call it peace(winning)."

India and US still have not signed any trade deal. Not sure what's the basis of your comment.

No one other than close US allies caved.

And even then, they all realize Trump is a mad man and cannot be relied upon.

What are we waiting for.

it would be so disruptive that europe would have to make and use an alternative, and then the US could not regain that market

Responsible governance around something like when and how to retaliate (if at all) against tariffs comes down to one of the most fundamental forces of economics and trade: real leverage. Whether or not the US should exercise its leverage to attain outsized and favorable terms on the economic stage is the peanut gallery conversation that happens on social media. The two worlds couldn't be farther apart. What will actually happen in the end is just a math equation that has never changed and will never change.

That was the EUs top priority. The other issue was that each country had its own products they didn't want to lose sales from.

More generally, the EU isn't built for a world of presidential powers exercised at whom, which is becoming more of an issue this decade.

But you already had that - this tariffs “deal” was just extortion, adding a tax for nothing

For Europe to become fully self-sufficient when it comes to defense, for one thing.

The world has the technology. Canada has the resources and the manufacturing capacity. Europe has the money. It can be done.

Look at Ukraine. They are becoming a military superpower in terms of technology and experience.

Aside 1: there are quite some areas where European weapon systems are state of the art, but you won't hear about that unless you are more in the know. The US is hurting itself here in a big way. Going alone = $$$$$$$$$$$$

Aside 2: The European Union has been conceived as an 'ever closer union' from the beginning as to lower the likelihood of new wars on the continent; something the USA pushed us to btw post-WOII. Canada and Australia have raw materials, something which Europe doesn't have abundantly. Sharing development costs across the free world is mainly why you see Canada, Japan, Australia etc having a heightened interest in Europe. There is world-wide a lot of interest in the European defense sector, but South Korea and Israel have also interesting defense sectors.

I think Israel has become politically just as toxic as the USA (or moreso even). It seems incredibly unwise to make your defense industry dependent on a currently openly warmongering genocidal state.

that was a significant different europe than today.

What is different for post-war Europe is that the USA forced Europe to stop developing their own complex central pieces, making Europe fully dependent on the USA. These pieces are critical and expensive and forces/limits the design parameters of connected systems. This handicapped a lot of Europe grown hardware. These critical dependencies are getting patched away atm, but that will take time because they are complex and expensive.

PM's resignation stemmed from unpopularity not due to tariff negotiation, but diminished ability to pass laws after the ruling party lost significant number of seats in elections for upper and lower houses.

As for other countries around the world, the world-wide inflation caused many ruling parties to lose support.

politics vs reality. they could correct though by selling US treasuries - but that would make the world economy sneeze which might result in pneumonia.

USA market is "yuuge", but rest-of-the-world market is much much bigger.

Not saying I agree with it, because it sends the wrong signal, but I can understand the reasoning at least.

We aren't the ones who are destroying it, and we have a backbone strong enough to say this isn't good enough.

If what you say is true, then the next administration should understand how one sided the damage done to the relationship has been. No economic trade partner should have to tolerate attacks on their sovereignty and unreliable trade negotiators.

This was a common attitude 2017-2020, and they got disabused of that notion when Trump won in 2024. I would further argue the muted response during Trump I based on an idea that thing would "return to normal" emboldened Trump II - so that was not a winning strategy. The only country that seemed to have the correct read, and translated it into policy was China. Every other trading partner of the US seems to be floundering still.

The UK's Neville Chamberlain is remembered for saying of an agreement with Hitler, "peace for our time"*, and by this agreement, appeasement; less well known was that he did pursue re-armament and mutual defence agreements while attempting to deescalate.

Hopefully we won't be here in 8 years wondering how the USA got carved up into a Canadian zone, a Chinese zone, a European zone, and an Aztec zone. That last one might be from a TV show I watched as a kid.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time

Look into the policies and results the Biden administration had on American manufacturing versus the contraction in American manufacturing caused by tariff implementation. Biden even invested heavily in infrastructure in red states just because it was good positive ROI policy.

Now we see Democratic Socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani doing things like cutting permitting red tape on small businesses and it’s the exact kind of thing the Republican Party claims it stands for.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act actually raised taxes for lower wage Americans and increased the budget deficit, the exact opposite of typical Republican talking points on those subjects.

We have to remember that in a lot of cases, policy is not the same as messaging. This is especially pertinent in personality cults. This something the US hasn’t really experienced in the US presidency in quite some time if at all, and that has made it a…unique…experience. The idea of consistent policy is currently meaningless, because it’s all about whatever is on the demagogue’s mind today.

trump won the primary and then the election

republicans who didnt want his policies and could see that the inflation was in a large part the result of trump's handling of covid would have put somebody else up for president

It's a nice thought, but I wouldn't "bank" on it.

The uniparty foreign policy blob that always does identical stuff regardless of party like: signing the JCPOA with Iran / killing the JCPOA and starting War with Iran, or rejoining UNESCO and paying back due obligations / re-leaving UNESCO and WHO... etc.

This capital can then be reallocated into domestic investment to continue to decouple from the US. Very similar to how Germany learned the hard way that buying fossil gas from Russia wasn’t going to prevent aggression. Canada has started this with their recently announced energy investment plan, Europe can do this with Eurobonds.

PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339577 - August 2026

China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932 - January 2026 (a component of China’s next five year plan includes LNG infra investment to support imports from Canada)

On Eurobonds:

Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708337

(Canada and Europe collective hold ~$9T in US treasury debt, almost 25% of total outstanding debt)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284950 - March 2025

> “How can I decouple from the US as fast as possible?” is what this leads to.

> Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. The US will apply pressure for short term gain against allies while they move away long term.

Canada has had a long term investment and productivity challenge with too much focused on North and South. I suspect that this is now the catalyst for East and West investment.

I think the calculation was that no deal and the natural consequences are not that much worse than the deal on the table short term. And taking into account the future of the above it was going to be worse.

“We take the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.”

> In the final hours of negotiations, the U.S. tried to include restrictions on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, Carney said.

> "Unacceptable," the prime minister said flatly.

> Plus, the U.S. tried to restrict Canada's protections of its languages, its culture and its sovereignty, Carney added. He did not provide details of what those restrictions looked like.

Part of the reason Ray Dalio was on Bloomberg saying to sell bonds and buy gold or Bitcoin. Treasuries used to be where capital would “flee for safety” and that concept is breaking down.

Dalio Says Sell Bonds, Buy Gold, Bitcoin as Debt Crisis Looms - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-21/dalio-say... | https://archive.today/jlUBA - August 21st, 2026

But once they are 'prepared' as best they can, one approach is for other countries to decide / accept that the US is mostly a lost cause while Trump or most other Republicans are in power, which will happen at times. It will affect their economies but they cannot control that. Negotiating with the US only encourages more bad behavior.

The rest of the world could then recreate (or continue) the global trading system, including the WTO, simply excluding countries that violate its rules. This puts the ball in the US's court to participate or not, never slamming the door in the US's face, always welcoming and encouraging them rhetorically, by their rules, and genuinely ('we look forward to our friends in the US joining and enjoying the benefits of doing business with the rest of the world').

In the meantime, global trade rules would be created in the interests of the other countries, without the US having a voice - a great boon after decades of US domination of such rules. This incentivizes the US to join sooner rather than later.

(It seems to me - I have no expertise in this area.)

are the trade barriers in the room with us?

Not only USA products. Most countries with low safety standards and known for dangerous products are barred from trading with the EU, or at least many of their products. Recently, even big Chinese on-line shops are being targeted for selling dangerous products and lying on the description on that products.

I understand that quality and safety is a diminishing goal for the USA. But I hope that other countries keep the care for their citizens as a achievable goal.

> is not entirely incorrect

With enough re-interpretation nothing is not entirely incorrect. Agree on the part that it is misleading.

This is the difficulty with discussing "trade barriers": things that are simply handled differently in different countries can be (arguably) economic factors that discriminate against one side or the other, hence they're trade barriers. Complicating it further, one can create barriers that have plausible deniability, or point to unrelated factors and scream "TRADE BARRIER".

I know someone who was involved for a while in the softwood lumber discussions. Just an absolute snake pit trying to suss out what are real barriers, intended barriers, relevant inputs... and all of this in the context of negotiations over the same, so everything is also "does he mean this or is he distracting us from something else or just building up a talking point to surrender later?"

the logs in canada are just worth less than the ones in the US. Differential advantage is a real thing that exists.

If the US government really beleives it to be a canadian government subsidy to loggers, it should be more than happy to give the tariff money to the canadian government, making canada's taxes and fees exactly what the US thinks they should be.

BTW, I'm Canadian. IIRC, the trade courts didn't find that the complaint about fees wasn't legitimate, it was that American logging companies had other, offsetting economic benefits, so the bottom line was that they weren't disadvantaged. So the U.S. simply refused to abide by the ruling and didn't pay the fine it was supposed to, so that receiving the fine or some portion thereof, became another thing to negotiate in the next round. Unbelievably hairy stuff.

Honestly if that is the best you can come up with, please try a lot harder.

that is a subsidy to american businesses and a barrier against german ones, when germany trains its Citizens in both german and english

it silly, but it is a barrier with a measurable dollar spend related to it

The local jobs market is currently demanding a lot of C1 German. This does not seem unfair to me. Does make it challenging to sell services to Germany if you can't provide it at that level.

Or, to put it another way, imagine my response had been:

  Hör mal, Kumpel, wenn du glaubst, du kannst deine Dienstleistungen in einem Land verkaufen, dessen Landessprache du nicht sprichst, dann glaub mir als jemandem, der es gerade versucht: Das ist verdammt schwer.

1. Bring back manufacturing jobs 2. Remove trade barriers 3. Make US rich by collecting huge amount of tariffs

If 1 is true then there is no benefit for countries to remove trade barriers or pay tariffs because now there is no leverage (manufacturing jobs to protect).

If 2 is true then there is no leverage for other things to happen - countries aren't going to voluntary remove trade barriers without keeping the jobs or paying tariffs.

So and so forth.

One example: In Canada, there's a vibrant french language film industry, meaning films in french that originate and are made in Canada and then marketed abroad. The english language equivalent is anemic because decades ago, as part of trade negotiations, the Canadian gov't gutted subsidies for english language film production as a trade barrier against Hollywood.

Being in Canada though this does look v. short sighted of the US. All this is going to achieve is pushing Canada much closer to other countries, particularly China, which at least superficially these negotiations were meant to prevent.

"We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market."

[1] _ https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement...

The US was a good faith actor, especially relative to its power. Now it is not. It is not good for the world's most powerful military and economy to stop "pretending" to be a good faith actor, and it is not something you should find any joy in.

I mean, in a way Trump's tendency to back out of everything, good or bad and base his entire foreign policy relationship with your country based on who he last spoke to is predictable, but predictable in a way the only winning move with US relationships is not to play

I'll throw in China, which might want whats best for Chinese influence even more than it wants to sell you cheap consumer goods, but it's also very, very predictable in what it wants from any sort of international agreement with you and these days has an abundance of capital and the ability to sell you most things the US can sell you for less...

The world is watching this story just like the world watched Davos.

Last night will encourage further decoupling of the US for nations other than Canada.

idk if Trump 2028 will happen or not. I will say with conviction no matter who is in office by then will not rebuild trust around the world in their tenure. Too much damage is done to the US's reputation.

The only way that the US can start rebuilding this trust is that the incoming Democratic President and Congress (assuming we are so lucky) immediately starts by prosecuting Trump and his family (and results in actual jail time, not just fines or small stays), zero out their government contracts, fire most of the people installed in government since 2025, expand the Supreme Court, and remove the fillibuster. I know people think ideas like that are extreme, but really, what else is going to convince the rest of the world that the US has cleaned up their act? It has to start at home first.

a de-nazification program similar to germany post-WW2, combined with a shredding and full rewrite of the US Constitution by western allies to bring it in line with estonia's as an example, in addition to clearing house with the Trumps is the kinda thing that would start building trust

I'm not hopeful for a full Constitutional Convention, but every possible effort by any means must be made to put into law every "unwritten norm" that the Trump administration took advantage of.

Impeachment is the mechanism to remove a rogue president, and the entire GOP is party to a "soft coup" against the Constitution of the United States. I agree it will take a complete societal rejection of MAGA and the Unitary Executive theory for allies to ever trust the US again.

That has always been clear, seeing how it is the default mode of operation for empires throughout history. The solution here is separation of powers: the ruler itself is bound by rules and institutions that provide a check on their power, and in turn those institutions protect the ruler after stepping down.

It is Trump and the Republican party that chose to abandon that solution. There already is no going back from that choice.

So I’m hoping the justice department either doesn’t have enough of a case to convict, or has enough of a case that the whole country falls in line. The in between, it’s time to get out. Because shit will go downhill very fast.

And I reject your premise that putting one's leaders in jail will only lead to an infinite spiral of partisan kangaroo courts because other democracies manage to hold their leaders to legal account without going into a death spiral.

And it's honestly weird and more than a bit disturbing how controversial that simple concept has become. I guess we really do want kings here.

You implied that Democrats would be jailed for following the law with this comment.

This is laughable.

He never hit 50% in the popular vote, and that doesn’t count the ‘none of the above/don’t care’ non-voters. That was at the peak of the oligarch-funded campaign that saw record-smashing spending and advertising to gin up support.

His popularity immediately fell after the election and has been sliding the entire time he’s been in office. A majority of voters supported his impeachment shortly after he started the Iran war in back April and he’s even more unpopular now.

Yeah, no. Obviously not what I said, or what my comment implied, and you're not even trying to respond in good faith.

Unless Trump does something egregious enough in the coming years that the case against him is rock solid, black and white, and heavy, any move to jail him and those around him is impossible to distinguish from political targeting. I have not seen evidence of something out of line enough, no matter what Reddit hive mind thinks.

So with the knowledge I have, I’d say any serious push to jail him and his team would be terrifying. If we get crystal evidence of bribery that holds up in court and is clear enough to sway a large swath of Republicans, then that’s great. Still a worse outcome than there not being something black and white to nail him with, but I think that case democracy survives. But not “trumped up” charges.

> You’re just as bad as Trump.

No, Trump's 2nd term is in the running for most corrupt administration in American history. Even what Nixon did would just be another scandal for this administration that would leave the news cycle in a couple weeks.

He, or at least his officials and family need to be held accountable. That is the right, just and Constitutional thing to do.

But... that's still perfectly legal, isn't it? All of these little backdoors the founding fathers added to the executive as some vestigial organ of monarchical power just because they couldn't trust the people in "we the people" maybe should be reconsidered. If we don't want presidents to be able to pardon themselves and anyone else without limit, there are ways to make that happen. Never even bothering to convict any president of a crime doesn't even attempt to fix that problem however.

can you really point to a single government where they dont illegally communicate outside of logged channels, or any such things, to scam the voters? or where they intentionally promise something they have zero intention of keeping, or lying about whether its possible. and of course some such things are not considered crimes because the very people who would then be violating the law would be the ones who MAKE the law.

the vast majority of politicians worldwide are super criminals doing things that if you or I did even 1/100 what they did, they would lock us up and throw away the keys.

It's basically what Canada is doing to the US with dairy, except with Chinese cars.

From the US strategic perspective this is moving out of the frying pan and into the fire.

There are zero Canadian automobile assemblers; they are Canadian subsidiaries of American companies, with some parts manufacturers being here.

Assuming American companies (and companies from subordinates like Japan) leave, what would be the problem in having a similar relationship with China? Is it because their manufacturing is more integrated?

But hey, they have cheap shit, so what better wagon to hitch your country to?

Some EU carmakers are fighting back but it's very hard when politicians managed to have energy price in the EU being about 7x higher than those carmakers in China do pay.

I'm not for tariffs but China is dumping and if we don't all want to end up being vassals of China, we should at least protect some of our industries.

And as "good" as chinese EVs are, I'm sorry but they're not anywhere near the quality of, say, what German cars used to be.

If western carmakers had been given a reasonable timeline to switch to EVs and reasonable energy price, the situation would be different.

EU carmakers may be saved by people preferring to buy cars from their own continent but that remains to be seen. The latest BMW EVs, for example (once you remove the spying / remote control issues: but that affects chinese EVs doubly so), are apparently very fine machines.

To be fair, German cars aren’t anywhere near the quality that German cars used to be, either.

EU and even USA should start doing something reasonable. Like introducing quota on how much overall can be imported/exported to protect local markets. Like lets say 40%.

Everyone gets a piece of cake.

But lets be honest, germany (my country) also never played fair. We gained quite a lot of export strength through the Euro and overall german politics.

And its not just the energy prices, it was quite clear what the energy prices going to be but no one really invested into reducing them early or fast enough at all. No one cared. BMW new factory in hungarie though does has a lot more reneablw and was able to continue production despite hungaries energy issue.

In China a person makes 500-1000 per month, in germany the same person makes a lot more.

China you have raw resources and cheap labor and cheap energy on EVERY SINGLE point of the process. From iron ore to the assembly itself.

And it doesn't matter much anyway because with the current and future grade of automatisation, a lot less money is getting directly to the people.

We need laws enforcing the rich to pay the taxes and/or invest A LOT more a lot faster and a lot broader.

We need real politics and not this garbage happening in germany or in the USA or in Russia.

Nice Jedi Hand Wave there.

That's the issue.

China invested in producing cheap energy. Most of the rest of the world did not.

At root, economics is about turning energy into goods and services. If the root industrial input of your competitor is cheaper than the cost of that same root industrial input to you, you're gonna need some incredible efficiencies elsewhere in that production pipeline to pull even.

At this point, the EU should be all about keeping the other major powers at arm's length, (economically and militarily), while pursuing renewable electrification with all deliberate speed.

That should be everyone else' strategy going forward as well by the way. Without cheap energy in the next global economic phase, your nation or bloc is dead in the water.

Especially with being well behind in the current AI arms race. You need the opposite of a "workers utopia" to do all the things the EU needs to do, and do them fast.

They either stay with the US or become a vassal of Xi Jinpeng.

You mean coal[1][2]?

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...

Though coal has dropped as a percentage of their portfolio fairly dramatically, and in absolute twh has been stable since 2010, with other energy sources growing.

China dominates global clean energy investment, accounting for more than half of the $1.1 trillion invested worldwide between 2019 and 2025, while the United States contributed approximately $236 billion, representing less than a quarter of the total. - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/china-spen...

They are 80% there for 30% the price as a consumer it’s a tremendous deal

And we already have an actual NATO example, where one member attacks countries around the world, one of those countries fights back, threathening to attack american bases even in europe if needed... and now other nato members might get involved in a war that was started by one of it's own members, that no one else really wanted, and side on the side of the agressor ( https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/nato-chief-reaffirms-allianc... ). To turn back into economics, what happens when EU declares an "economic war" against china, china retalites (by eg. banning exports of something we really need)... does canada go along and threathen it's own economy? Or do they form a new "NATO" with "everyone-else except EU"?

Most obviously Southern Ontario is living in a dreamland where inexplicably ICE autos remain a viable industry ad infinitum.

Some forced reality, by any means, will in the long run prove to be welcome.

Canada has manufacturers that the US doesn't (and won't for at least 5 years) and vice-versa.

It'd be like trying to convince the US to reduce their Corn cartel. Except the corn industry keeps prices low, paid for by the American tax payer and demand mandates, and the Dairy cartel keeps prices high so consumers pay for the lack of competition.

The Quebec PM did say that if the dairy industry wasn't happy they wouldn't put US alcohol badk on the shelves, which would have effectively killed the whole thing.

While a factor I doubt this is the whole story though.

No story can be told in a HN comment. No story can be fully told in words.

However, having spent much of my existence around the Canadian diary industry it is clear that it has always been the biggest sticking point in US and Canada relations. Not just today, but that's been the case for my entire life.

That’s not really true. The US has 5% of the quota, tarrif free. Which they don’t even fully use. But, to be sure, it does get used. You absolutely can buy American milk products in Canada.

The problem is that they have to go through the processors to satisfy the processors' own quotas so by and large the meager 5% isn’t worth the operational complexity vs just buying milk locally for the processors. The US wants to be able to go directly to the grocery stores.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

what changes is parts that arent so visible - milk powders, sugars, proteins, etc, that are inputs into ultraprocessed foods like a cheezit

I mean, what were you expecting? Like before, they only have access to 5% of the market tarrif-free, and, in practice, cannot even use all of that due to the practicalities of 5% not being all that operationally useful to the Canadian processors. The US hasn't been bemoaning these tariffs for longer than I've been alive (and I'm quite old by HN standards) because the market is flush with their goods...

> It's extremely hard to find non-Canadian liquid milk on Canadian store shelves.

Hard is a long way from never. Yes, the volume is negligible, but known to be non-zero. Although we'd really have to understand the makeup of the milk to know how common you consuming it is. If every jug has a tiny drop of US milk in it then the chances of you encountering US milk on store shelves is actually quite high. It is highly unlikely that any jug will be 100% US milk. It is not like anyone is going to take the time to painstakingly separate it into a separate tank before bottling. Milk is milk.

Carney is very popular for a reason.

What exactly does this word mean? It definitely doesn't mean a stable set of agreements that can be relied upon to ensure a stable future business environment. That's not in the cards.

What I suspect Carney is doing, and fully support as a Canadian, is running down the clock. An agreement is America isn't worth anything without leverage to back it. The main goal is to stall to delay the damage as much as possible while diversifying away our economic dependence on the US. There is no other long-term goal - everything else is just appearances and showmanship.

Similarly, people who don't have self-respect don't respect others.

Outside of the small fringe communities that support it, the reaction of the broader country has been to actually shift MORE into hardline stances against the US, as the effort is seen largely as an American manufactured thing.

Additionally, I'd advise to take with caution perspectives from any sources that would characterize the province of Alberta as "the west".

Not really, though. Despite what even a good chunk of Canadians (or yourself) might think, the country doesn't end at Toronto.

If the government wasn't worried about the effects, they wouldn't be in any hurry to approve the infrastructure projects; they've been in the works for a very long time, stalled out. Urban Easterners claim to believe the planet will explode if they're built, and the governments they elect act accordingly, but it's really just a power thing.

Additionally, I'd advise you to not think you know better than the people that actually live here.

The government's actions are much better explained by a sudden actual, panicked focus on actual development of the economy towards some combination of diversification and domestic demand - after the governing party's leader was replaced by arguably a much more results oriented PM after having been governed for a while by a much more vibes oriented PM.

Opening up the pipeline projects required more than just "conceding" to Alberta, it required negotiating with BC and the native tribes that would have a say in the path and ensuring they got the concessions they needed. Boring work. Not really meme material and doesn't make the headlines.

Between all the things the government has been doing - the oil sector work, the acceleration of military procurement, the various bilateral trade agreements, and work on easing internal trade restrictions, acceleration of internal projects - it's easy for some interest or another to cherry pick a particular set of events and use them to paint a narrative.

These narratives would be more compelling and maybe work better at other times, but the issue currently is that the American president is just so effective at drowning out any of these. There's nothing quite so unifying as an obnoxious tyrant rambling on about your country in disrespectful terms.

The commentary (mistakenly) assuming my nationality could probably have been left out of your response :)

It's unfortunate and in some ways unfair. I hope the Canadian economy will move towards more open trade partners and will proposer.

The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is. A logical consequence of the tariffs is that Canada, Europe and other American allies focus more on those who are willing to trade with them, including China.

If I put a 2/3y contract in place with an American supplier, there's a fair chance that I might have to deal with 10-50% tariffs at some point during the contract. This does make (long)-term business deals with the US risky.

  > The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is.

This is something so far removed from the way normal, constructive way people (have to) think and behave with each other as a prereq to participate in society that they will inevitably fail to see this parasitical dynamic, because there is no way they can relate to that from their own frames. Even when we learn about this we will instinctively dismiss it. It doesn't fit our frame of reference, so we decide this can't be true.

They don't respect anything. They stand for nothing. Their only concern is to pay lip service to Trump's crazy ideas.

s/Trump.*ideas/Line their own pockets/

For example, the first tariff wave was a huge transfer of wealth from citizens to corporations in the OBBBA. First, the income from tariffs was projected to offset the tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Then, when the Supreme Court found them unlawful, the money had to be returned. But first the corporations let consumers pay the tariffs by increasing product prices, but now it is the same companies who get the tariff refunds. And since they are obviously not going to give the money back to the customer, it lined their pockets.

Also, of course, extracting as much money from the state as possible

Wow, a global Great Depression II really does look like it is in the cards.

Every baffling, self destructive move Trump makes, basically always aligns to a long stated goal of Russia.

europe and east asia whove been helping to fund and arm ukraine are also taking the real pressure from iran and the US halting energy exports from the gulf.

the oil price for high enough to where russia gets paid the same amount despite having most of its infrastructure blown up, vs having its infrastructure blown up and also the oil proce being low.

The war with Ukraine is currently doing huge damage to Russia. Maybe Putin wants to be more securely in charge of a diminished Russia. IMO again, I doubt that.

This is impractical. There is a hierarchy of thousands of Mullahs that ascend when you kill off one. There is no "head". It's a distributed hierarchy or hydra, rather than an effective dictatorship. ofc, Trump wanted to appease Bibi and Trump fired most of the advisors who object to his bad ideas, so it was a perfect storm for a global quagmire.

The irony is that China is the big winner from all of this, simply by staying above the fray and making trade deals with all the countries that more bellicose superpowers start fighting. When your adversary is making a mistake, let him.

He would also want the munitions stockpile to be depleted, which it is now.

Though I do agree, not literally every move Trump does is on a string from Putin and the Iran war isn't one; it sure still is mighty convenient all the same to make the US military look weak and incompetent.

They could be both pulling at the strings, often in different directions with varying success. It could even be tracked by the people going in and out of favor with the admin: MTG, Carlson, Gubbard riding high? Russia's pull is stronger. Them becoming pariahs reduced to criticizing the Iran war from the peanut gallery? Israel has taken over.

They represent two completely opposite poles, geopolitically. Not horseshoe theory compatible: they are mutually exclusionary.

The Green Movement in Europe, which Trump opposes, was best thing to happen to Putin.

As far as I can see, where Trump goes wrong is the same place the social democrats go wrong: believing in economic fallacies. In Trump's case that would be the belief that tariffs are beneficial.

He also on rare occasion aligns with very socialist leaning politicians like Elizabeth Warren, like when he sought to prevent private equity from buying up housing — which totally misdiagnoses the cause of the housing shortage. But it's these economic fallacies that makes Trump popular for the same reason social democrats are popular. The vast majority of people don't understand economics.

[1] https://youtu.be/eKEycjREgPE

The US administration twists facts to suit their agenda. For example, they often complain about the trade deficit the US has with other countries. However, that deficit often (depends on the country) only exists if you exclude digital goods (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.).

If the rest of the world were to restrict the import of those digital goods, in the interest of fairness, the tech lobbyists would swarm D.C. in panic.

Besides we can just distill Chinese modules and release open weights like they do now.

I think Poland alone could defeat Russia, if it even still exists in the current form in a few years -- add the finances of France and Germany and it's even more one sided.

losing that #1 status also means you have to work for a living, rather than just printing dollars and debt. see: britain

everyone in the west except the US already has to deal with that, so we'll be fine

The important thing when dealing with Americans is to pay no attention to what they say as that is all "PR", you only need to observe what they do. Most Americans dont know this even about themselves, which is why they end up with a guy like Donald Trump

that's a weird example to give about it being lies from the beginning when he spent 4 years not being at active war with iran

Remove that the trade is fairly balanced.

It’s insane that the US administration (said as an American) doesn’t continue to treasure a values-aligned, peaceful, stable, independent neighbor along a massive unprotected border.

But I don’t understand this energy carve-out argument.

That is the ironic part.

The US trade deficit is mostly balanced out by service (often not counted) and investment flows. The US could theoretically end most of its trade deficits if it balanced its budget, thus reducing demand for treasuries. However, that would come with other pitfalls. It would either entail tax increases, spending cuts, or both at the government level and it would then bleed into the standard of living of most Americans as foreign investment slowed down.

It doesn’t surprise me at all to see yields go up as foreigners invest less into the US as they get dinged sending goods here. So maybe that’s ironic…

You’re telling me that this country is capable of learning?

Or maybe I want something a little more significant than "we asked around the newsroom, and 35% of fox news reporters approve of the current administration". Cool, thanks, but that's not helpful or even a useful datapoint.

The state of the art (which confirms this ~35% approval number) is far more rigorous than that.

Start with a meta-review of historical accuracy and transparency, eg: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...

Details on methodology and sample size can be Googled, eg: https://poll.qu.edu/methodology/ , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/24/ev... , https://www.google.com/search?q=Marquette+University+Law+Sch..., etc.

Sample size is less important than you might think, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...

I doubt that is going to happen. Trump is going keep the strings behind the party, fucking everybody hard, until finally he dies or otherwise implodes. What is left of American democracy when that happens is a whole another thing.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

Speaking as an independent non-voter.

see independent voters polling don’t matter in the electiona since you don’t vote. /s

Some days I feel I could start a whole revolution against taxation without representation...

Its the people that are the problem. These policies and politics will outcast Trump because middle Anerica and The South are filled with morons.

Leadership matters.

A different leader could take the country in a different direction - with the same voting base.

Eg an actual policy of isolationism instead of instigating multiple foreign conflicts.

What a sad and tired take. Trump won both the electoral and popular vote. Discounting the opinions of over half the country as morons is exactly the type of behavior that got him elected.

That's not even close to an accurate number now. There are many sources e.g. (1)

It's a shame that people mostly learn the hard way, and forget easily. But that's not the support now.

1)

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-falls-33-low...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3fRIleMK-8

that wasn't even accurate on the day he got elected, considering a third of the country did not vote at all.

It is a particularly interesting position when the US is trying to counter China. The only hope the US had was an alliances with other Western-style nations, but instead it has been nothing but attacks and diminishing.

The US put countering China way behind on its priority list, below "owning the libs" and settling old scores. I am convinced that if the Iran decapitation had worked like Venezuela, which seems to have been what they expected, then Cuba would have been next.

Cuba is completely insignificant beyond some ideological value.

To get an easy win compared to Iran just before the midterms? Of course, it could end up in a mess, but it's a mess already anyway.

The point is to prop up Putin.

Attacking one of Russia's few allies and weapon suppliers is counterproductive to such a goal, even if higher oil prices also help the Russian state finances.

China yes, Russia no.

> And of course it helped Russia make hundreds of billions more on oil. Win win win.

For this to be intentional, the USA would have needed to intend Hormuz to be closed, rather than surprised and upset by it.

(Not that it matters much, but estimates I see say about $50bn, which is closer to the destruction of Wildberries than it is to $100bn).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin

> while reaping the benefits of access to your market.

Huh, what? Trade is a win-win situation: you and your people benefit from imports, too.

The only real concession the EU made was just allowing Trump to tariff them at a certain rate, and not counter-tariffing back (with various escape clauses).

While the EU response certainly wasn't a feel-good display of chest thumping, I think it was somewhat effective. He was able to strut around and feel big, and they were able to move on.

The only reason the EU would really want to apply counter tariffs against the USA would be to either make a point, or because they are actually afraid that exports from the USA could outcompete EU products unless tariffed, but this just isn't really the case right now.

___________________

The only form of retailiation I think the EU should actually be pursuing is the equivalent of tariffs on US software. This is the area that the USA is a highly competitive 'exporter', and putting up barriers agaisnt these software services would be a good way to hurt the USA, and protect / stimulate domestic alternatives.

EU has carbon tax internally and they are rolling out CBAM to prevent "carbon exports" (manufacturing stuff outside EU and then importing those product without tax). CBAM is currently used directly some high-emission sectors: iron and steel, aluminum, fertilizers, cement, electricity, and hydrogen.

EU importers require granular data on the embedded emissions (both direct and indirect). US companies in these supply chains have had to overhaul how they track and verify carbon intensity down to the sub-supplier level to help their EU buyers comply with strict European reporting standards.

EU will gradually expand CBAM after allowing supply chains to adjust.

Germany (by itself) is apparently out-producing the US artillery shell production.

* https://www.newsweek.com/germany-overtakes-us-in-ammunition-...

Russia's GDP is below that of Italy (and barely above Canada, who is in NATO):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

If the Europeans really want to, they could produce a lot more by converting over to 'war mode'. Certainly they need to do more with current geopolitics, but there is no need to crank it to 11.

As an Italian there's definitely been a perceptible shift due to the increase in defense spending. Leonardo now makes TV ads (something I had never seen before), they advertise on newspapers (...)

Off topic, but it's funny to me how the Leonardo TV ads basically skips over the defense part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXytSNOt_0I

dunno why youd want tanks and not drones though, when even russia's new tanks with anti-drone defenses can be taken out by 30ish drones

Not wrong, but GDP is a rough metric of economic and industrial capacity. So if Italy wanted to, it could convert its economy to produce tanks and missiles at a similar rate as Russia is doing. And Italy is just one member of NATO:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO

If anything, the major gap is the EU's lack of cheap drone manufacturing, but even that is starting to make progress with help and integration from Ukraine.

> In 2025, Russia produced an estimated 7 million artillery shells,

vs.

> Germany has rapidly scaled up artillery ammunition production, led by defense giant Rheinmetall. Output targets have surged from roughly 70,000 shells per year prior to 2022 to a projected 1.1 million to 1.5 million rounds annually by 2027–2030,

so now vs. "projected" and Russia still heavily outnumbers the former Nazis.

Which is to say give me a fricking break, I live in the closest EU and NATO capital city to Southern Ukraine, I know my shit.

The EU also simply has way more capacity to scale up shell production than Russia does, and the EU is building up stockpiles while Russia uses up everything they make.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...

And I said "had", because this was before Ukraine destroyed most of their oil plants, and refineries, and their navy, and their petrol fleet, and the online stores, and before they killed a big chunk of their male workforce. And before they have an increasing debt with China and NK that they will need to repay somehow.

At this point everybody knows that the Russian economy will not survive after the war is over and that the country most probably will split.

Europe can deal with a ruined post-Ukraine war Russia.

They would just stand some suffering, but for sure 500 millions of motivated people can build more and faster than 100 millions of a Russia tied by deliberate anti-efficiency rules build to please oligarchs. The only question is how much damage could Russia do, before Moscow and St Petersburg are reduced to ashes as retaliation if they dare to try the final solution.

The hybrid war is the real problem. Russia can sponsor still many street "Syrian" terrorist attacks in Sweden, or cause a train wreck here and there, or burn Malibu for basically peanuts. They can do this for years and years.

I really would love to see this, but the sad truth is that there are no real alternatives for a very big amount of software products. In the end, the eu residents will simply have to pay more for a lot of software products, and that's it :(

Yeah, there will be immediate pain but if EU competitors can spring up because the American software giants are disadvantaged it'll slowly erode the reliance on US's software.

Russia went into the war with armed forces that turned out as you say (possibly except the nukes, hard to tell unless they attempt to use one); the war forced them to develop substantial drone and anti-drone capabilities that the EU nations are not yet in a position to counter.

I suspect that if my country gave Putin what we give to the US - military bases where they can do whatever they please no questions asked, real-time intelligence access, unofficial favored supplier status for anything that might be control-relevant, quiet veto power over any national policy decision deemed "strategic" - then we wouldn't have to worry about invasion - from Russia anyway. Why invade what you already own?

I think that price is a little too steep, though. Not to mention that the US would then be at least as willing to topple governments/invade as Russia currently is.

Then, because it isn’t on-premise anymore where you could just continue running without paying for the service contract you lose direct access to the product. So that might even mean whole companies going under.

You pull the plug the money stops rolling in. I don't know if you've ever tried to sell something vs buying something but buying is a ALOT easier than selling.

You can easily choose where to buy but choosing to sell is a lot trickier. Pull the plug on AI and the EU will switch to Chinese models. Trade negotiations and relations are very fragile and difficult to curate and maintain. Very easy to rip up.

There are entire governments in the EU with workflows built around Microsoft products that have no real 1:1 alternatives. If a governmental procedure stipulates that a ministry uses Windows w/ Office365, it uses Windows w/ Office365, no room for an argument. If anybody pulls a plug here, the consequences will be unimaginable.

It's nice that a single German state has switched to LibreOffice, but the rest of Germany, or the remaining 26 countries might take years, if not decades, to certify and permit someone else's solution.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/france-has-ditch...

In an all-out economic war, anything could happen. The source code of Microsoft products probably exists somewhere in Europe (since they have European offices) and definitely binaries, since it's run on European servers. Once nobody plays by the rules anymore, all bets are off.

That said, a trade war would hurt both badly and it would be an epic fail on the side of the US administration. (Since the EU would not start such a trade war by itself.)

The US are making a fortune on gas at the expense of Europe an it's not that the promise to buy gas is meaningless because unenforceable within Europe, it's that it was already happening in practice. And that makes Europe even more dependent on the US (while the complaint was that we could't buy gas from Russia and depend on them).

Not to mention current EU stated goals is to reduce consumption by 50% by 2030. Which is coincidentally pretty US and Russia imports combined sized, and timed pretty well with the expiration date of the EU/US trade deal.

The UK is the same as the rest of Europe. They don't leverage their gas reserves and have a shambolic renewables and nuclear strategy (or lack thereof...)

But this is also why the EU is aggressively pursuing and building up alternatives, including investments in Canada's ability to export LNG, but also buildouts of solar, wind, and batteries.

Solar and batteries come with their own dependencies on China, but at least those are a different sort of dependency than fossil fuels. If China stops exporting solar / batteries, the ones we have will still keep functioning for decades while alternatives are built up.

Unfortunately, this couldn't be further from the truth:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/12/head-of-iea-roasts-euro...

Here are some specific numbers:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/many-building-r...

The EU is heavily investing in renewables, but mainly to phase out coal rather than gas, and it's absolutely not electrifying its economy.

You can see this in the EU Emissions Trading System. It covers about 40% of all emissions, but leaves out buildings (dominated by gas) and transportation (dominated by oil). Since electricity is covered, it actually encourages oil and gas over electricity.

Furthermore, member states like Germany are resistant to taxing gas higher than electricity:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/17/germany-warns-...

Despite the wars in Ukraine and Iran, gas is still encouraged over electricity in many European countries.

China and some other Asian countries have adopted the opposite approach. They aim to replace oil and gas by all possible means, including coal (although it's not the preferred choice).

But re:DMA see the most recent Apple app store post on here. Kinda feels like the EU folded too easily there as well.

This would not be the first time that Apple unilaterally claimed something was DMA compliant, and then the EU had to come out and say "no, that's clearly not"

https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/18/tracking-and-new-commerc...

Not sure how credible this is though

Apple recently received a very favorable settlement instead of serious fines and enforcement actions for blatantly refusing to follow the DMA for the entire time it was in force.

In November 2025, they were working on gutting GDPR; I don't know what exactly actually passed so far.

The EU has no mechanism to make those investments in the USA, and no mechanism to force any member state or company to make investments.

They literally just made up a number and said "oh yes, we'll make a bunch of investments" with zero intention of doing anything to make it happen.

I can't understand why there isn't a single country that did that.

Don't assume EU is stupid.

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/08/18/voka-invoerheffingen...

That is quite the comparison. It also doesn't seem correct at all. What world are you living in where Zohran is a populist demagogue?

N.b. if you look up 'populism' on Wikipedia a huge portion of the page explains the contested term is sociologically vague and did not have the negative connotation it does in mainstream discourse. Most people are not aware of this.

Pointless, incredibly bad faith bothsideism. Zohran was the only one in the NYC mayoral race to believe in actual democracy. Cuomo's whole campaign was "elect me because the other guy is a muslim, and I won't do anything during my mandate, like the previous mayor". Zohran did actual campaigning on issues the electorate cared about, and so far has delivered on his promises.

I don’t see news about what he has accomplished. Can you give a few examples?

In short: he has balanced the city budget with a 2% tax increase on millionaires, matching New Jersey. He's moving to give every family free childcare. He has frozen rent for rent-controlled housing, and planning the construction of 200,000 more such apartments. He's fixing potholes (that part went viral, for some reason). And more.

Support is up in every demographics, including Jewish New Yorkers, that corpo dems were insisting would be threatened under Mamdani, in a cynical attempt at instrumenting islamophobia to win the election for their do-nothing candidate instead. Crime is down.

He did a pretty good explanation of the difference between theory and practice in his Rest is Politics Leading podcast interview recently :).

Sticks in my mind and well worth listening.

Since you are getting hurt you play tit-for-tat to get the other to knock it off.

So you add export taxes to items they care about (oil/fertilizer/...) and compensate the losses incurred by existing industries.

You also add tarriffs on items that have alternatives, like alcohool.

Maybe add tarriffs on items with elastic prices, say 100% tarriff on digital services. Software services will have to adjust prices so they end up the same after tarriffs since few people will accept youtube or netflix doubling in price.

This hurts both countries but will get a result - either free trade or no trade.

In the meanwhile, Trump's entourage has derivative bets on this and take massive proffits shorting everyone. For them, this is all massively profitable.

For bilateral trade it doesn't matter much whether country A imposes import tariffs or country B exposes export tariffs.

Basically, the whole talk about retaliatory tariffs is silly.

Why?, retaliatory - in response to US, tarriffs - taxes, whether on export or import, as you noted, doesnt matter much. Effect depends on who needs to either sell or buy the tarrifed items the most.

China put tariffs specifically on the sectors that voted for Trump and depended on sales to China.

When the other party is not playing the same game, or not playing in fairness, then the best game theoretical move is to cease cooperation and retaliate.

We'll go trade with other countries and stop giving the troll the attention it craves.

This was one of the very embarrassing things that happened to Donald as a boy, done by Freddy Trump (his late older brother), when everyone had enough of him.

Ganging up on the US isn't likely to work well.

Take the USMCA - Canada and the US at times team up against Mexico and then the pendulum swings, line item by line item - no one has anyone’s back and they all have short memories

A deal with the US when others turns away from them is still a good deal

BRICS is just that for oil.

The US is not indefatigable. As of March 2026 the nine largest foreign holders of US Treasury securities are Japan, UK, China, France and Canada.

All nations the US is jerking around. If they dump bonds US in big trouble. Oh, and the US is almost $40T in debt.

Is out of ammo.

Cannot win against Russia in the proxy war with Ukraine.

Cannot match China with their long term energy plans.

Has debt that explodes

Has a president that sells early access to his tweets for 100k$ a year ; insider trading in the open.

The USA are not in a good posture right now.

Ukraine existing even with Trump waging war against Iran negates this argument

One note: aren't these sentences strange - like a series of half-thoughts? Especially the 2nd paragraph.

> Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market. > > We have worked in that context. To strike a fair deal that would provide the best access to the U.S. market and greater certainty to Canadian businesses and workers.

Yes, but the pain is likely unavoidable. The alternative is much more pain, but slightly later/more spread out, from repeatedly giving in.

Further, dairy and poultry are an interesting one. Do you think the US is asking us to eliminate supply management? Because you should know they aren't. They are asking us to keep it, but also to allow the US to dump their subsidized excess production here. How do you think that plays out?

But let's imagine that dairy became free trade (which is not at all what Trump is looking for, btw): Imagine that Canadian farmers, much like New Zealand farmers, make a product more efficiently than the US and start taking the US market? How do you imagine that plays out? Hint: It yields new protectionism, because the US can only win in every area.

There is no good play here but waiting for this pedo bag of shit and his administration of conmen and pedophiles (like that greaseball Nutlick) to be gone. At the same time removing all dependencies on the US.

So is your position that only Canadian firms should be allowed to operate in Canada in general? Foreign competition helps us because then we benefit from further specialization and trade which increases everyone's standard of living.

> Imagine that Canadian farmers, much like New Zealand farmers, make a product more efficiently than the US and start taking the US market? How do you imagine that plays out? Hint: It yields new protectionism, because the US can only win in every area.

Well, who else benefits is consumers who get to purchase products of higher quality, convenience, and affordability. Also employees of the dairy sector who face higher competition from firms bidding up their labour. Investors, who have more investment opportunities and therefor higher yield. Government and entitlement recipients who benefit from tax revenues from these incomes and investments.

When you are 1/10th the size of your neighbour, this generally doesn't work to your benefit. Every integration has led to the hollowing out of Canada. NAFTA cum USMCA has been a catastrophic mistake for Canada, and we're so deep down that well that loads of idiots wants us to dig even deeper.

Right now the only rational action is starting the six month expiration on USMCA. It not only was always a bad deal, the compromises we made for it stay while the US tries to hollow out even more industry.

Fuck that.

Yes, I had the thought that it sounded a lot like speech.

Thanks.

Why won’t the same logic apply to Canadian tariffs?

He provides some details about the last minute demands that the US made including restricting Canada's ability to trade with other countries. He also refers to the US signature as being written in "pencil".

The words were mostly diplomatic. The expression was not.

If Bob shows evidence of not sticking to deals, there's little point in Alice striking any deal.

Wearing my forecasting hat…

Canada holding $200 billion in USA treasuries, one of the largest exporters of oil into the USA, and integrated supply chains for everyday goods. A fast and painful price shock is coming for every average American.

Canada has and will continue to be very dependent on the USA. No amount of new trade partners can change the fact that the largest economy in the world is a 2-hour trip down the road while everyone else is an ocean apart. This has a risk for long-term price pain for decades.

it is easy to tax exports, but this makes the export less profitable (for the entity making that export). Unless you mean the producer raises prices to cover the new tax - in which case, the export is now more expensive, and less of it gets exported.

It doesn't really help with the tariff situation much in any case - a political problem requires a political solution (such as reciprocal tariffs). Both sides hurt, and there's no good outcome.

Depends whether demand is flexible or not.

Right now Alberta and Saskatchewan are not suffering at all (2% of exports affected) from Trump's tariffs.

This is by design.

He (or the "smarter" people he surrounds himself with) is attempting to drive a wedge in Canadian unity.

Danielle Smith is, btw, totally onside with playing this to her advantage to get things.

Export tax, as just as it might be in these circumstances, would be used as pretext for wholesale foreign interference and domestic disruption on a level we have never seen in this country. It would end up being a profound self-own

If you are in Alberta or Saskatchewan, the government is decided before your election is done. There is no Senate, like in the US, to balance your needs vs others.

Despite this unbalance, there is a clear majority of Albertans who are anti-independence. (I agree that the government, run by a radio entertainer is shameful and disgusting.)

this is consistently a self criticism in alberta that we arent actually getting our money's worth from our oil

Speaking of "Reddit opinion".

Politicians tend to not want to do things that display them as directly responsible for eroding their support base’s quality of life.

> The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

> Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/why-us-canada-trad...

Premiers are almost united (excluding Alberta's Danielle Smith) in their support for Carney walking away from trade negotiations.

I'm no Trump enthusiast, but nearly every country under USA's sphere of influence (i.e. not China) has capitulated to his lopsided trade demands. Canada seems to be the last holdout. But even that can only last so long considering ~25% of Canada's wealth comes from extracting and exporting oil products from Alberta.

This will cause some short term pain for Canada, but hopefully they'll have a less insane trading partner after November.

I would however urge my fellow Canadians to continue to or start boycotting goods from the US and travel to there, generally.

And likely encourage Americans to come visit here. Come ski here this winter. You're more than welcome here.

- the US imports 60-70% of its oil from Canada

- 100% of the natural gas

- 85% of energy imports

- 25% of Uranium

- 20% of all mineral imports, ahead of China

- the Great Lakes hold >80% of the USA's fresh water

- patrolling the almost 9000km border is mostly up to Canada

Despite the size disparities, they run close to a trade equilibrium: US exports $420B, imports $450B. There is a lot on the line for the US.

In context, this only applies to oil that the US imports. That number means that of the oil that the US imports, 60-70% of it comes from Canada. The US currently produces more oil than any other nation. Your note should read "the US imports 60-70% of the oil that it imports from Canada"

- 100% of the natural gas

As mentioned above, this means that US imports of natural gas come exclusively from Canada. The US currently produces more natural gas than any other nation too. Your note should read "100% of the natural gas that the US imports comes from Canada"

It makes sense that Canada is sole source for imported natural gas since that is a product that is most efficiently transported in pipelines, like crude oil.

The way your numbers are framed seems to me to imply that the US is a net importer of oil and natural gas when in fact we began to ramp up exports of oil and natural gas (and coal) in 2006-2008 time period. Those exports helped the industry remain a dominant political force and provided a lot of seed money for the corruption that we have seen in the US since.

Man, I remember watching the '88 election debate as a young teen. So many people were saying this then. Look at us now.

No, instead the Trump tariffs have specifically targeted the regions of Canada that a) elect left of centre governments and/or b) have manufacturing economies.

So Ontario's auto sector, BC's forestry, and Quebec's aluminum and aerospace sectors.

Meanwhile Alberta and Saskatchewan -- which have compliant quite honestly pro-Trump governments -- have only 2% of their exports currently impacted by tariffs.

It has the look of an attempt at regime change, masquerading as economic policy.

Plus when one side is an unreliable negotiator (the US) there’s not much rational behind continuing.

That's an understatement. Hypothetically if Canada were isolated from the world, it would regress in the quality of life in 10 years. The most capable Canadians have moved out, mostly to the US. The average Canadian has unwarranted sense of nationalistic pride about them (compared to their neighbors).

Isolate US from the world, and assuming that the govt does not meddle too much with local businesses, in 10 years they will bounce back to being more self sufficient than it is now.

If you think Canadians have more nationalistic pride than Americans, you seriously need to get glasses.

Americans literally pledge themselves to their country every day of school.

Literally every American has been force fed nationalistic pride propaganda since their first days at school, continuing for 12 years.

Never mind the average American. They’re all stuffed full of it.

It really feels strange, odd, yet unsurprising that the US is going from a globalist leadership to selfish nationalism.

Literally the only losing move was to mess with our relations to them.

The Heritage Foundation's agenda is to isolate the USA and bring it back to the Gilded Age, which runs counter to the narrative of 'the greatest country on earth'. So far, the Heritage Foundation is making great progress with putting processes in motion that makes the downfall almost irreversible.

How is America going to project its power without the ability to use overseas air bases? Is it going to do Falklands-style bombing runs to the Middle East, with 15 tankers to get a single small bomber to its target?

Is it going to accept an even higher defense budget, without the NATO's near-compulsory purchases from American weapons manufacturers?

If America can barely keep a single aircraft carrier functioning in the Middle East, how is it going to wage a proper overseas war?

America's might comes from its giant network of overseas forward bases. Take those away, and you're left with a smaller variant of China.

  > We don't need war to grow stronger.

With America isolated, the world becomes a 'might makes right' order. State level maffia. In that model, it is eating the other or getting eaten, zero sum. Now the extremist ideologists believe that in that order America will shine and will dominate everything in its sphere of influence, as will China do. That's why you keep hearing the claims on Greenland, Canada and South American countries. These aren't jokes, but when people cannot fit information in their frame of reference, they will put that information aside. A very human trait, but also a tragic weakness.

The conservative ideologues' thinking is that the USA will have local clashes with China over who will claim Africa's and Europe's resources. So no, it won't have to be a full out war, but lots of local wars around the world. If you want to have an idea where might makes right leads to, look at Russia which has been perpetually involved in colonial wars and wars of conquest.

china is already attracting its best talent back home, and nothing forces even american talent to stay in the US, when americans hate the smart and talented

Show us it isn't just lies and bad faith.

It's absolutely fair to count how much lumber and oil and cars you're importing-exporting while ignoring how much services in technology, IT, space, software, cloud, finance, etc, you're exporting. /s

It’s worse than that. This doesn’t suit the US. It suits Trump (or at least, that’s what his addled mind thinks).

So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.

That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.

As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.

Population aside, there's no system that fixes what's broken in the US in the 21st century.

Trump, sadly, is the symptom of deeper structural ills that have been building in America for decades.

I mean, you still have the "every 4 years", or worse, "every few months". It's not at the pace that Trump changes things, though.

In short, attenuate executive power.

European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.

We still aren't doing border checks on EU imports.

Still, Boris Johnson wasn't as bad as Trump.

The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.

The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.

For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.

You can be like Norway and join the EEA: full access to the single market, but having to make a financial contribution, accepting most EU laws, and with free movement of people. You get an exemption on some laws, but you don't get a say in any of the rules of the single market.

You can be like Switzerland and join the EFTA: partial access to the single market (notably not the banking sector), still have to contribute, only have to follow EU laws when it comes to trade, and still free movement of people.

You can be like Turkey: a customs union meaning no tariffs apply to EU trade, but you have to apply EU tariffs on all other trades and have no say over them.

You can be like Canada: a comprehensive free-trade deal which covers the majority of goods, but it means having to follow EU standards and requirements without having a say in them, and it probably won't cover services.

The EU was never going to give every Briton a magical gold-shitting unicorn, no matter how much the UK was going to plead and beg for it. It was more than happy to negotiate a deal on any of the options like those above, but it was up to the UK to decide what Brexit was going to look like.

But the Brexiteers promised the voters they could have their cake and eat it - "Brexit means Brexit", after all. Everyone invented their own personal idea of a Brexit, and the various interpretations were always going to be fundamentally incompatibly with each other! The negotiations went so horrible because the UK had absolutely no idea what it wanted, and any option was going to be wildly unpopular as it did both too much and too little at once. And all of that is before you take Northern Ireland into consideration, where the wrong move would result in a literal civil war...

Brexit wasn't a negotiation. It was a therapy session to help the UK find itself.

Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.

The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.

Please state the official "consistent" position regarding the main problem caused by your own decision to leave: the Irish border.

"Forced into the Brexit outcome"

Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.

And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.

Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.

So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.

That's the reality of most mature democracies from UK to Germany to Italy.

If anything, that makes change slower and based on coalition consensus, not a single winner-take-all individual mood.

Which means that there isn't much to "work" as previous arrangements keep holding and they hardly change.

I would never exchange our democracy for a king electing one like in US, Turkey or Russia.

I'd rather have our democracies slower, the governments more unstable, but representative.

They are usually negotiated by a nation's crack team of experts. America just does not take any of this seriously anymore.

There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.

The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.

If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.

[edit autocorrect changed divisive to decisive]

They'd rather fall into Russian models of government where a single person can promise you the world and you give it the power to do so, rather than bother with things like "compromise" or "representation".

Re-electing somebody who openly attacked the institutions, instead of taking what happened on Jan 6th as a wake up call is the clear sign.

Why do I single out the Democrats? Because after Trump, they're going to have the first chance to fix this so that it can't happen again.

Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.

As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.

Germany's first two constitutions quickly failed because they weren't democratic enough. The US constitution - despite its obvious flaws - has somehow managed to make it 250 years without causing huge issues, but it is now becoming quite clear that there should probably be a revision to prevent another giant mess like the current one from happening.

Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.

A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.

I've got a better idea.

1) Repeal all DMCA-like laws. Make it explicitly legal to break a digital lock to repair a device, run custom code, install third-party parts, or just tinker and hack with your own devices and software.

2) Ban parts-pairing. Prohibit manufacturers (looking at you Apple & John Deere,) from using cryptographic serialization to block independent mechanics and technicians from swapping parts.

3) Legalize "Adversarial Interoperability" (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...)

4) Copyright reform.

That's it. This would make things cheaper and better for Canadians. Lutnick and Trump would seethe eternally, but it would be downright excellent for Canada and a shining beacon unto the world.

I'd be happy to see the solution to consumer pain And economic productivity to pass permanently pro productivity and pro consumer policies.

Anti monopoly stuff. Maybe a growth policy like land value tax.

I'd need to hear from some experts to know which specific policies would be best though. Ideally you choose some policies that are not perceived as going nuclear, or which leave open counters, or which you would want to remove after a deal is made.

In general, going heavier into consumer/data protection laws and proceeding to prosecute both the Canadian and American monopolies would be amazing though.

IMO you don't want lawfare -- but rather you want to remove bad laws like the DMCA (and related), and the life-plus-70 copyright term, and thus foster more innovation and growth.

It's easiest to repeal anti-consumer/anti-commons laws.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/12/disenshittification-natio...

A rather large amount of Canadian industry is benefiting from these regulations. Adopting policies like these would be tremendously disruptive and cause a lot of short term issues, upsetting manufacturers, foreign owned subsidiaries (who employ a lot of people), unions and retailers.

I'd love to see copyright reform though.

Why?

This didn't even exist until 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

And how would something like banning parts pairing "cause a lot of short-term issues"? Existing supply chains would remain intact. They'd simply be broadened, eventually, by new entrants. If incumbents leave the market in a fit of pique, you can rest assured that the gaps will be filled, and that those incumbents may very well be liable for breach of contract if they refuse to service existing Canadian customers.

Sales of US vehicles in Canada would approach zero in just a few years.

Yet what I'd suggest is to go a step further rather than retreat: Subsidize EV production (including from Chinese firms) on the condition that final assembly or some fraction of production is done in Canada. Keep the jobs, make cleaner cars more efficiently, and make them available to Canadian consumers at reduced (subsidized) prices.

...Then export those subsidized vehicles to Europe and wherever else, where they might benefit from favorable EU-Canada or Brazil-Canada trade policies.

Yes, there is no war without pain. But I am willing to face the pain.

However, in the long run, the pain might bring good. It might help products from other countries to enter the Canadian market. I hope to see more food, cars and appliances from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa in the Canadian market.

Elbows up, at last.

Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy per

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...

I’m trying to encourage people to understand the facts in a forum dedicated to intellectual discussion.

Uranium and potash from SK are huge bargaining chips.

AB separatism is meaningless and it's emphasis and influence is propped up by Canada's adversaries.

What a sick people.

More "relative" than you think.

Look at the wars the US fought after WWII: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. The US suffered a lot less pain than any of those countries and was in a lot stronger position. But those countries were willing to face the pain, the US wasn't. That's why the US lost those wars. The same pattern goes now with Iran. You kill people on those countries, those countries hurt the American voters in their pockets.

In trade wars it might be the same mechanism. For the American people, a trade war is mostly to follow the glorious orange leader. For Canadians it is a matter of national sovereignty.

Economic growth and inflation have kept pace with gross debt for a long time, and if the US continues to stay on top of the tech industry, the raw numbers will likely continue not to matter.

Most of that was inflation, so it hurts U.S. citizens. I mean, you could reduce it even further pretty easily, but I'm not sure you would want to pay $1,000+ for a Big Mac.

“What’s at stake in the Canada-U.S. trade deal? How looming tariffs could cost Canada 90,000 jobs”. Trevor Tombe, professor of economics at the University of Calgary

https://thehub.ca/2026/08/20/whats-at-stake-in-the-canada-u-...

If they really want to hurt them start making it legal to circumvent DRM on American products and allow build meaningful replacements.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91531349/trumps-canada-trade-war...

And from a different angle: “giving fines to firms makes no sense since they firm can only get money from customers so it’s just going to make it more expensive for the customer”.

Not an identical situatio, but to say it’s the only consequence, that it becomes more expensive for Canadian, is just not right.

In the short run, yes. In the long run we can start replacing American imports with other countries' imports.

I want to see more fruits and vegetables from Mexico, Africa and South America in supermarkets. Give me less "Made in America" on shelves.

Which highlights the problems with tariffs, they are self harming. You have to be willing to give up better alternatives for some other reason, and food is a hard one.

Bullshit. I already see in the supermarket (Canadian Superstore) oranges from South Africa, lemons from Morocco, broccoli from Mexico, mangoes from Malaysia, fish from the Philippines, coconut from Vietnam, kiwis from Italy, etc.

Yes, oceanic shipping adds to the cost. But most of those countries already have cheaper labor, and that partially offsets the extra cost.

If you were going to take that tariff money to build up a local tomato industry it might make sense, Canada already has a growing hot house industry. But don’t kid yourself, tariffs cost the consumer and for low margin highly seasonal and subject to going bad goods like produce is about the worst case scenario.

If you want people to buy stuff from you Americans then just try to stop pushing forward American imperialism down into everyone's throats. This isn't just about money, it is about my country's sovereignty.

We get to get taxed on the other side by paying more for Canadian goods.

These moves increase other countries independence of us, lessening our power and forcing us into a more post America world.

If Trump isn't a double agent then he missed his calling. It feels like every decision they are making is intentionally the "wrong" one.

I think it's motivated entirely by schemes to stuff his pockets with money.

i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893397/trump-again-shr...

EDIT: Adding a TL:DR, this article explains how the Trump admin reduced the size of two national monuments by 90% and 91% respectively. This is just one example, there are more and most of them are out west in lands untouched for nearly a century. Saved for posterity because once they're gone, they're gone.

Someone's pockets, must be gnomes:

• PHASE 1: COLLECT UNDERPANTS. (tariff "foreign" goods desired by Americans, collect upon import from companies, clarify spiked prices experienced by consumers ‘entirely’ due to prior admin policies)

• PHASE 2: … (let simmer)

• PHASE 3: PROFIT. ("return" tariff costs to companies)

May 16: Vietnam approves $1.5B Trump hotel project (https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-trump-golf-estate-investm...)

July 2: US lowers tariffs on Vietnam to 20% (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500738/pdf/DCPD-...)

Love the see-how-ignorant-I-am type of comments.

Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.

Watch what they do, not what they say. They say a lot of things, and where they can they take all positions.

https://annas-archive.gl/md5/2275fbf2d96f518e54c2b72edf163f8...

Two things that will prevent that:

- inertia

- it's likely that Canadian lumber before the tariffs wasn't the marginal good, wasn't the highest cost supplier. If Canadian suppliers were making 10% more profit than the previously marginal supplier, the price will go up 40% instead of 50%, Canadian suppliers absorbing that 10%.

Canada also participates in trade, is located in the same geographic continent, and is also suffering housing issues.

I too struggled to identify which “our” the comment referred to

Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?

His second weapon is throwing a monkey wrench into the works after agreeing to something. Keep the opponent on their back heel.

It works well, until it doesn't. Once you meet an opponent who stands firm no matter what you threaten, you lose your bargaining position. Carney is well-versed in this kind of negotiation.

May also explain why he stopped doing actual NYC RE dev and moved onto his licensing model in dozens of cities (new pools of suckers).

But when every threat & walk back is covered in national media, and he is playing the same game with the same big trading partners .. it loses its effect. Similarly he’s quite old and certainly lost any touch he had.

But you burn the ability to make more deals with the same counterparty again.

If you played this game with your neighbor over a fenceline or tree limb dangerously overhanging into your yard.. you would save a few bucks once, and have an antagonistic relationship for the next 10-20 years of living next to them. Good luck getting the benefit of the doubt next time.

Apparently Machiavelli was onto something

Do you have to talk like this? How difficult is it to rewrite this as "I don't believe this is the message conveyed in The Prince."

So there must be something specifically interesting for you I suppose.

Even positive reporting of the man makes him out to have a massively fragile ego.

And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.

This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost.

American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.

People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.

This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.

The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.

The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.

You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.

The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better.

Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering.

Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world.

Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that.

The right says protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.

The right says give them jobs, but in reality, their policy destroys jobs. It doesn't help that GOP fiscal policy also implodes the deficit further than it already is, so now you can't even use that money to stimulate businesses. We're stuck in a corner. It will take decades to fix this fiscal mess, and in the meantime a lot of people are going to suffer.

Tariffs have been used to protect industry for centuries by every country in the whole current debacle.

Again I'm just speaking about what the wrench does, not how the guy wielding is working.

Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that

Going against "business as usual" resulted in higher prices, as predicted and promised.

Nearly everyone here benefited from lower prices afforded by reduced trade barriers. This isn't some obscure hidden fact.

Lumber is a different long standing trade dispute going back to the 80s unrelated to the industries targeted by the 50% tariffs.

Trump created a 10% Lumber tariff in Sept 2025, but it was already tariffed before that. Canadian lumber today isn’t suddenly 50% more expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

Motor Vehicles, Alcohol, and Dairy as the largest industries.

https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-of-us-trade-tariffs-hitti...

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/html/202...

The new 50% tariffs don’t suddenly make Canadian lumber more expensive. It was already expensive.

This was all being negotiated together between Canada and US, but it’s not part of the new tariffs.

I tried to do some more research before my coffee finishes in 5 minutes, you're right it's not ALL Canadian products or even all Canadian lumber products.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/world/canada/trump-tariff...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...

All other issues aside, Trump and the Republicans love to boast that they aren’t bound by anything including their own promises. This is the end result of that.

You’d be mad to cut a deal with the US right now. The Trump Admin will just try to take another bite. They are dishonest and unreliable. Making America’s word mean nothing is the greatest long term damage done to the country and the surest indicator of the end of the American Century (80 years but we can round up)

But it isn’t politically possible for Canada to do this. The two segments that would be most effective, oil & gas and potash happen to come from provinces that already have significant issues with the federal government. One is even flirting with separation, which would be inflamed by export taxes.

Canada is also very venerable to similar actions by the Americans. Refined oil products, fertilizers and oil & gas pipeline transit all come from the Americans.

It is fun to imagine Canada sticking it to the Americans with export taxes, but it will never happen.

"Western alienation" is created and maintained by American propaganda.

But I think overall it does not really matter. A war is a war, so there will be no real winners.

Here we go again.

> Canada supplies the overwhelming majority of U.S. maple-syrup imports.

Canadians are way too nice to do this, but it would be sensational.

So consumers will pay double or substitute with flavoured corn syrup.

But scarcity is the problem. Unless you're able to demonstrate that the low supply is artificial, and that maple syrup producers are a cartel and restrict their own production and distribution chain, as well as block any newcomers from trying to enter large-scale production.

Because as is is, if they manage to sell their entire supply through their sugar shacks, then it obviously means they don't have enough capacity to supply grocery chains, let alone on a national level. That's the literal definition of scarce supply.

One must stand up to bullies otherwise they’ll keep at it. Until the US population feels the pain the rest of the world has been dealing with, nothing will change.

What he’s been doing is only good for his grift game, not the USA.

If you want to bring manufacturing home, you frame a 5-10 year progressive tariff plan with tax incentives, financing, and grants to help build the infrastructure to progressively fill the demand as the tariffs roll in. Commerce thrives in stable environments with predictable changes, not in chaos and broken promises.

I moved ops to a Caribbean nation where we can get parts, (it’s simply not possible to source many parts and services within the USA anymore without paying 2-3x in fees or enduring weeks to months of delays in customs) and iterate at a competitive speed.

R&D in the USA went from riding a sport bike to swimming in molasses with crocodiles basically overnight, way too unpredictable to even sign contracts with suppliers, with random tariffs creating 2x cost uncertainty.

You simply cannot plan or make long term contracts when the uncertainty is so high with no predictable pattern. Ironically, we also cannot sign even with US suppliers, because they don’t know if they will have ongoing tariffs to protect buildout or if they will evaporate, so they also cannot risk expanding production.

It’s a total shitshow and the only reason it exists is to power the grift train. If a company is big enough, some shady deal goes down and suddenly they magically qualify under de minimus or some other supposedly dead exemption. I would not be surprised to see that you could correlate these exemptions with purchases of shitcoicins or similar shady wanker-works. The trade shenanigans do nothing to help US businesses, and drive innovation out of the USA like rats off a sinking ship.

Our system progresses in two year increments, by design.

So I ask again, what would you propose?

I'm a big fan of the civil rights movement, but a lot of this kind of stuff like your comment that I see strikes me as nostalgia that doesn't seem to understand what made that movement effective. It was effective because they thought, concretely, about their goals and about what concrete steps they could take that they thought would make progress toward those goals. That concreteness always seems (to me) to be lost in these contemporary discussions, replaced with "do something" and sloganeering.

Another difference, in my view, is that John Lewis was trying to figure out how to change a system in which there was no hope that the next election, or the one after that, or the one after that, ad infinitum, would itself affect the desired change, because both parties were opposed to the policy he desired. In my view, that's not the current situation. This thread started out being about the Trump administration's tariff policy (which I think is awful and stupid). But the next Congress, which will be seated quite soon - certainly much sooner than any kind of civil disobedience campaign would be able to bear fruit - can write laws that change that policy. And the more people are mad about the current policy, and the more they vote for the opposing party because they are mad about the status quo, the more likely that new Congress is to write those new laws.

There are times when it makes sense to lose faith in normal electoral politics, but in my view, the eve of an election where the incumbent powers are about to get routed is a weird time to suggest it.

If even 50% of people just stopped going to work and spending money, things would change veeeery quickly.

A few weeks of inconvenience for decades of a better future? Sign me up.

It brings up the 1940s struggles of labor, industry, and .gov, and labor lost and had its back broken. Could labor outmaneuver industry and the state today if we ran it back?

Not yet. But it’s coming.

I do appreciate the concrete suggestion rather than the vague "do something", but another attribute of the civil rights movement was that their goals were modest and their "good trouble" targeted at achieving those goals were things they could actually organize. I'm sure John Lewis would have always loved there to be a general strike to achieve his desired policy, but he and his movement understood what they could and couldn't actually organize.

But the internet makes organizing a general strike exponentially easier than it was in the past.

If you don’t like the general strike idea, what is your suggestion?

I think you’ll need to revisit this in a few months when he finds a way to make the election ineffective, and/or just keeps doing what he’s doing regardless.

And again in 2029 when he doesn’t leave the White House.

Anyway, you have kings, you just elect them and call the presidents, but they have basically the same political role and powers as George III did in the 1790s cut-and-pasted across. The USA needs to get itself a decent parliamentary system.

There's arguably a straight line from the Commonwealth's greater deference to inherited authority to today's tolerance of weak borders, stagnant growth, and declining economic mobility. A king seems like more of the thing that caused the problem, not the solution.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Short_Reign_of_Pippin_IV

That means the hardcore MAGA base is a third of the US population. I genuinely don't know how to reconcile that with the long term future of the United States.

0: https://time.com/7809/1-in-4-americans-thinks-sun-orbits-ear...

It seems like a lot of the governmental structure of this country is predicated on the idea that the People will not elect someone who puts their own interests over those of the nation. And when we do, the whole thing starts to unravel.

Not to diminish you statement, but you are right.

Something similar can be said about Canada. In your sentence replace:

US with Canada

Trump with Carney/Trudeau/Others

35% with 95%

and the situation can be summarized as significantly worse in Canada.

https://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efxV1-2rQ2o

I don't understand what you mean by this? Fight back against what? Protective tariffs?

And Trump has given no thought to his tariffs. There is no analysis underlying it. It's just him acting out like a child and trying to get some kind of "win" that he can sell as a personal triumph.

It's Congress who has the power to tax. If Trump wants tariffs he needs to propose a bill that creates them or gives him clear powers. The legal scholars in his cabinet know this, so why has he not proposed a bill?

Trump is stretching the definition of those circumstances to the limit, in my opinion, especially because protectionism is the fundamental policy being pursued. If we want general protectionist tariffs than the law should be passed that enables the executive to do so, but that hasn't been forthcoming.

How effective are tariffs as a trade negotiation tool if your counterparty believes its likely the courts will take away the big stick?

It seems like if the other side agrees to a deal too easily then Trump doesn't think the deal is good enough. He only likes deals where the other side is getting screwed and has to be coerced into signing.

That's a great observation. So basically everybody should be saying no to him all the time to limit the damage because as long as there's one yes the stupidity will only grow.

I'm so glad there wasn't a single yes, when Greenland popped up.

What's madness is continuing policies that antagonize other countries, and which are bad for Canada, just to make yourself feel better about having "elbows up".

The future is unknowable, so that might be the wrong bet. But in my view, it is the right one, in no small part because the political situation is on their (that is, the Carney administration's) side. Political support is what determines the ability to withstand pain. In Canada there is currently far more solidarity with the administration's stance on standing up to US bullying than there is in the US for the Trump administration's (many) price-increasing policies.

If the political situation were reversed, this would probably be a bad idea for Canada! But it isn't, so it isn't.

The U.S. was already buying considerably more Canadian goods than Canada bought from it.

Trump is officially billions richer since he became president for a second term.

Officially.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-to-secure-the...

> US mines produce roughly 500,000 metric tons of potash per year, only about 8 percent of the 5.9 million metric tons of apparent annual US consumption. The remaining demand is met through imports, producing a net import reliance of about 92 percent. Reflecting the high concentration of global potash production, most of that supply comes from Canada (79 percent), with smaller volumes from Russia (12 percent) and other producers (9 percent) including Israel.

It would be decidedly un-Canadian to leverage electricity, potash, or other commodities necessary for survival in trade negotiations -- despite what Ford may suggest. We're nice, but we won't bow to bullies. Elbows up, eh!

As much as it pains me to say it as an American, little will change unless US citizens are negatively impacted. Trump is losing power and support in the US precisely because people are becoming more aware that he's hurting them.

It’s Vietnam Hearts and Minds all over again.

And you don't have to ban them, just make them more expensive. Your US brethren did vote for tarriffs. With that comes higher prices.

Another Musk moment: most aluminum in the US comes from Canada. Most of Musk's vehicles are built with aluminum. These tariffs will directly increase Tesla manufacturing cost in the US, making them even less competitive.

What a vile and predictable comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443

Accession was the likely inevitable outcome up until the reelection of the current President but after the American people expressed their continued support for a systemically corrupt gerontocracy and all that this entailed this kind of willing and amicable outcome has been taken off the table and likely will be for several generations. I get a sense that the general sentiment that Canadians are feeling regarding American attitudes and actions right now is outright betrayal and condemnation.

As for annexation it's important to keep in mind that this would be an illegal act of aggression against a peaceful ally and that it runs counter to everything that America claims to stand for. I'm skeptical that it would even be possible at this point, and I don't see a way that it could be done without military action.

Annexation is a pretty drastic thing to suggest too, how are you thinking it will unfold? Are you talking about something impending by the end of this decade or a multi-decade sort of thing? What happens if Canada resists? And what about other countries?

Something that I think is often overlooked is that there is a true appreciation in Europe for the Canadian sacrifices made in the World Wars and that these sacrifices have tied our countries together. I also think that you've underestimated the resolve of the Canadian people and how much they are incensed by these recent actions taken by America.

I'm sure you have a really neat and clean geopolitical analysis for why annexation is inevitable that factors in the geographic realities and economic / military disparities between the two countries and I'd love to read it but I'm quite certain that's likely to be just one big McNamara Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Yes, let us look up the US law that prohibits annexing additional land or another country.

>A charitable interpretation of your comment is that you intended to use the word accession.

A charitable interpretation of your comment is that you think "annexation" = "hostile takeover of territory". (Hint: The US annexed Hawaii and Texas after their governments agreed.)

>As for annexation it's important to keep in mind that this would be an illegal act of aggression against a peaceful ally

Beyond your pointless repetition, as I said:

>I'm not talking about a military invasion (Trump explicitly ruled that out when speaking of annexation, instead stating "economic force"); I'm stating geopolitical inevitability.

(And no, Dutch gratefulness for Canadians helping to liberate their country in WW2 != waves of Dutch paratroopers landing on Halifax beach to help liberate Canada from Adolf Trump.)

If trade can be used to eliminate a nation's sovereignty, was that sovereignty ever real in the first place?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwymk20n0v7o

In 2016, an anonymous woman filed a federal lawsuit alleging that he raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old. The lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn that same year, before the allegations were adjudicated. No court found that he committed the alleged assault.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/howard-lutnick-comm...

I wonder if he tanked those discussions on purpose, his sons now at his former company, profited wildly from the last round of tariffs:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-quiet-winners-supreme-co...

The thing to keep in mind is that the current trade agreement was negotiated and signed by Trump himself. He has spent the last 18 months seeing what a terrible deal it is. He does not want a "deal" into conventional sense, that is an agreement that works for both parties. He needs the counterparty to be humiliated and subjugated. CUSMA (the current agreement he promoted and signed) is bad because it works for all parties, it does not subjugate and humiliate the counterparties.

What happened in these particular trade negotiations? Is that the actual negotiators had something worked out earlier in the week, then at the last minute the US made some new demand that was meant to humiliate Canada, and this tanked the negotiations. What exactly did they ask for? It's irrelevant, the point was humiliation.

Actual trade policy, whether you want access to Canadian dairy market, or lumber tarrif rates or whatever, none of that matters.

Is this a common understanding down south?

Edit: after I wrote the above, it came out that the thing they demanded last minute is restricting Canada's ability to trade with other countries. Obviously, no PM would agree to such a thing, it's purpose isn't to have a deal, but as I said, subjugation and humiliation. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/us-canada-trade-war-...

Trump tore down a third of the White House without permission, and somehow it doesn't set off alarm bells. He's supposed to be a steward of the government for 4 years, not a king.

The leaks surrounding the deal that was on the table earlier this week did not look promising. e.g. Locking in 15% tariff's on autos made in Canada would have resulted in slow death for the Canadian auto sector, not to mention hamstringing all of NA at a time when their only way to compete with Chinese auto makers is crushing tariffs or outright import bans. Something probably had to move here to get the deal done. Unbelievably, things went in the opposite direction.

Howard Lutnick strolled into the Whitehouse at the eleventh hour and told Trump he thought that they could get an even better deal with Canada than what was on the table[1]. Americans should probably remember this guy. His family runs Cantor Fitzgerald, who has been buying up rights to tariff refunds[2]. Companies hit by tariffs can gamble on them eventually being declared illegal, or they can sell the rights to their refunds for a smaller amount and have some degree of certainty. When tariffs are struck down in court, companies like Cantor Fitzgerald make serious bank. So, here Lutnick is again, whispering in Trump's ear, drumming up more business for his family.

Trump tends to listen to the last person who talked to him, whether it's an economist (This is unlikely, as Trump prefers not to talk to academics) or a bell hop. In this case, Lutnick got in last, Trump decided to move the goal-posts, the talks failed as a result, and now there are more tariffs that will probably be struck down by courts.

Meanwhile, in Canada, people actually seem to be happy that this deal failed. Carney has made multiple concessions over the last year and change while the U.S. has made none and just kept demanding more and more. The general sentiment was that it's time to get tough, even if that means tariffs. Reports are that the latest demands during these talks were for limits on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries, exclusive U.S. access to Canadian critical minerals, and even meddling in Canada's French language laws. Any one of these things would have been seen as a deal-breaker during normal times. With the mood being what it was, they were unthinkable. The American contingent knew this, so we can only conclude they deliberately scuttled the deal.

Interestingly enough, Carney seems to have taken a page out of Trump's book by delaying retaliation until Sept. 8th, giving the Americans a deadline for a change. That leaves room for a couple of TACO Tuesdays. However, the messaging from the PM and premiers has been careful to point out that they are ready to hunker down and wait for Trump to leave office. Carney has solid support for this stance while Trump does not, even among republicans, plus the midterms are looming. Trump increasingly looks like the one without the cards.

---------

[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-us-tariff-trade-talk...

[2]https://fortune.com/2026/03/07/winners-supreme-court-tariff-...

If Trump and his cabal is left unchecked we will be running fast towards something that will make 1929 like child's play.

And no, I am not a liberal. Far from it.

This is not a problem that goes away when Trump ultimately leaves office.

On the campaign trail, Trump disavowed any connection to Project 2025 when it was leaked, and I suspect most of his base took him at his word. To anyone not trapped inside the right-wing media bubble, that is somewhere between naive and insane, of course, but people inside the bubble don't live in the same reality as the rest of us.

However, your response does remind me of an important point: two other rather large, looming threats which need addressing are media consolidation and money in politics.

And specifically any deal made with the U.S under Trump has no credibility, just ask Iran.

I think he will cave pretty quickly and Canada knows it.

Elbows up, finally!

This is will be painful. But it is what we need.

It is more than time for Canada to learn the lesson that Navajos, Comanches, Apache and Cherokees learned too late: Americans lie, cheat, betray and steal. We shouldn't be cozy with them.

"~70% of Canadian exports go to the US"

If you remove oil[1], Canada has a trade deficit with the US. And strangely the US has never said an iota about tariffing or restricting oil, and on the contrary keeps trying to increase it. Like Trump's big celebration was about hoping to revive a pipeline.

The vast majority of Canada's economy is internal, and rapidly non-US. We replace what we buy from the US. Somehow lots of countries on this planet don't rely upon being a subjugated feeder to the US.

>Unemployment, business investment, and the CAD are all deteriorating far more deeply and rapidly than any impact on the USA

Canada has fielded better employment numbers than the US. Business investments are at an all time high (lol, slop purveyor now claims that actually no, that's bad too!). The CAD has been gaining over the past few weeks.

Stop writing hilariously stupid slop on here.

[1] The US actually makes hundreds of billions of dollars processing and exporting Canadian oil, and it was yet another foolish decision of Canada not to process in country. But don't worry, exports to other destinations are rapidly increasing.

Sadly, U.S. politics doesn't attract high-quality thought in general (especially in more recent years), so any discussion surrounding our little three-ring circus cult here isn't likely to be much better than the subject matter bein' discussed. It's all just too crazy to base any sane discussion around.

So expect Trump to start spiralling. Also expect lots of astroturfing about how desperate Canada is and that it has no choice (one of those hilarious slop purveyors appeared below).

Canada should begin the process of withdrawing from USMCA, and the truth is that NAFTA cum USMCA has worsened Canada's lot over the past four decades compared to peers. Trade agreements with the US are worthless, and even negotiating with that Epstein pedo cabal of grifters is useless. It sounds like the Canadian team were foolishly going to give in to many things (any concession of any form always comes back to hurt you), but at the last minute Howard "Epstein Island" Nutlick swooped in and tried to extract even more, undoing it all. Which...thank you Nutlick, you disgusting greaseball. You did us a great favour.

Carney internally is playing to a domestic crowd that is actually more hardline on US trade policy than he has projected.

The issue with "bending the knee" so to speak is that the hardship is just as bad as the no deal situation, except with the worse outcome that Canada's future prospects for diversification are diminished.

There is hardship down both paths for Canada, but only one of those paths has a long-term future.

You're right that it likely involves a heavier investment in our own resource extraction, but that seems to be precisely what Carney is moving towards.

As for the amusing side-quip about Russia, chances are Canadians will likely look to emulate some other resource-extractive based economies, like the nordics. The issue is less the extraction and more how the wealth from that extraction gets hoarded. And there too, it would manifest as the need to move away from the American/Russian model of a small set of simple-minded, deranged oligarchs siphoning all the wealth in the economy towards themselves.

It is a reasonable position to frame them as opposing authoritarian government policies and for the governments response to be overreach.

The popularity of the trucker protest made and makes sense. Big anti government movements like that attract all sorts of bad actors and the media and government worked to highlight the worst aspects of that protest.

Mentally reducing the trucker protest to "thus Canada is bad" makes you seem like the type of black and white American fool that has created the political environment in the USA.

Well that's a big coded pile of bullshit.

What polices are "overreach"? By what standards? What authoritarian rules are being protested?

Oh that's right. It's all anti-vaxxer and 'cure yourself of Covid with bleach and ivermectin' bullshittery.

I have absolutely no fucking sympathy for a bunch of covidiots. Doubly so, since these chuckle fucks were ALSO pro-Trumpers.

> black and white American fool that has created the political environment in the USA.

And it's hilarious that you wouldn't touch the Alberta seperatism/fascist movement happening right now. You all like to pretend your shit doesn't stink... And well, I smelled it during wildfire season. Turn my sky yellow orange.

But all of this is spoken like a Republican riling shit up on Facebook.

> Trucker protest is _all_ pro trump anti vaxxer / ivermectin

This is black and white "us vs them" thinking. This is fundamentally false and your inability to parse truth out of your political opponents positions will make your positions meet more resistance, ultimately you personally less influential and less useful to your team. Perhaps even net negative.

> Wouldn't touch the Alberta separatism

I am from Alberta. Alberta separatism is far less relevant or popular than the media makes it out to be. Im not sure how to make sense of the difference between CBC's reporting and my lived experience on the ground in Alberta, but everyone around me here is pro Canada and against separating. Even the rural conservatives. I have literally never met someone who actually wants to separate from Canada.

Most of the wisest ones who had the means have already left. My heartfelt sympathies with the one who are still stuck there.

Name one country that has done this.

How about 29 countries?

"AC penetration stands only at 19% (vs. 90% US, 91% Japan). This is not a cultural inevitability but a regulatory outcome"

And specifically Geneva Switzerland, it requires medical need to install air conditioning. https://www.gazetaexpress.com/en/Why-are-air-conditioners-al...

the amount of mental gymnastics needed to believe this is off the charts.

US's largest trading partner is Mexico. The biggest thing we import from them is automobiles & auto-parts and the second largest is computers and electronics.

We all understand the benefits of trade is meant to bring in - such as goods manufactured by countries whose prowess making those goods better to the benefit of all.

So it's interesting to look at this example. Automobiles - does Mexico have a prowess in that segment? A tell tale sign of "no" is that Mexico has no domestic auto brand. In other words 100% of auto exports from Mexico is actually US automaker production that shifted to Mexico is persuit of cheaper labor, weaker unions, and less environmental and other regulations that gets in the way of manufacturing.

I am focusing on this example because it's the largest segment of our trade with our largest partner - literally the biggest thing the US imports is our own shifted auto production.

The second largest segment is also interesting. Mexico isn't known for its computer and electronics brands either. What's going on? Turns out that Asian manufacturers (eg Lenovo) do the very final assembly in Mexico but all the components come from Asia. It's not actually "efficient" to do this except that when assembly happens in Mexico those components magically become a "north American good" by NAFTA terms and can go all over US and Canada with no duties or tarrifs or restrictions.

So the second largest segment with our largest trading partner is Asian manufacturers exploiting a NAFTA loophole.

As an American who inherently is pro trade (I am an MBA...) this is revealing about the obvious disadvantages of how trade has been configured. The auto example is literally NAFTA being used to bypass American labor laws and environmental regulations while maintaining access to our market by American companies themselves. The electronics example is Asian companies bypassing the long standing trade conditions by whitewashing Asian products as north American goods.

It is obvious that trade pre-Trump was not set up in a smart way from American perspective. The auto is a great example: the government simultaneously made it very hard and expensive to manufacture at home, and very easy to shift to Mexico.

I don't know the details with Canada as much but I no longer assume things were working great and US is meddling lens by default.

As for companies looking for loopholes, it may be fun to blame it on Asian manufacturers. I would suggest that Americans take a good long look in the mirror. US companies were outsourcing assembly to Mexico long before Mexico came under the NAFTA umbrella. Quite often, at least with electronics, those US companies were using parts manufactured in Asia. Should Asian companies hold themselves back, should they avoid using the same practices as their American counterparts, just because it isn't fair to Americans? If anything, they have less reason to because Asian countries are responsible to their own citizens, not to Americans.

I am not "Blaming Mexico" - I am pointing out that the policy as I described it made no sense from American perspective. You are right that the American manufacturs did assembly in Mexico (form Asian components) before as well but it's the same point - an essential Asian good masquerading and benefiting from being a "north American one"

Early on, it may have included semiconductors designed in the US, with manufacturing outsourced to Asia. That outsourcing may have been to a facility owned by an American company or to a foreign owned company. Then the semiconductors may have been shipped to Mexico where another company was manufacturing consumer products. Under such circumstances, can such a product be described as essentially Asian?

Of course, things changed. Asian companies took more control over product development and manufacturing. When they ran into labour and regulation making manufacturing in their own country more expensive, perhaps due to tariffs or perhaps due to their own citizens demanding better, they used the same playbook.

You're right in that it made no sense from an American perspective, but that isn't because it suddenly became cheaper to manufacture in the US. It did not make sense because they lost control of the playbook, because others could do it better.

On the whole, I agree with your point about trade being used to bypass labour laws and environmental regulations. I'll be more blunt with how I phrase it: the practice is exploitative and causes more harm than good. That said, the current American response appears to be driven by the demand for trade on their terms exclusively. Never mind that other countries may want something in exchange for their resources.

Trump imposed tariffs on an island populated only by penguins.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly8xlj0485o

So on one hand it's government regulation that makes us not compative. On the other hand the government doesn't ensure this happens by making it easy to bypass via mexico. So the end result is the environmental protections don't kick in and Americans don't make the high (or any) wages.

So we either drop those laws and open up trade, or we keep those laws and make it harder to bypass. Those are the two non-dumb options.

The British did this to almost 20 different colonies, with the same people groups for the same reasons.

However if you take a step back and wish to argue in good faith, and look at where people did come from when Trudeau decided to open the flood gates 10 years ago, you'll find that India represents roughly 40% of immigrants. I'd say that can be described as "largely", and there is no reason to believe that opening the gates even wider would change those proportions.