The Tarriff Hype.

[spaminator]

 

[Ron in Regina]

Lando Calrissian: “That wasn’t part of the deal!”

Darth Vader: “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Lando: “This deal is getting worse all the time!”

As he left the White House for a campaign rally in Alabama on Friday, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter if he had “jumped the gun” by announcing on Wednesday that South Korea had agreed to pay for a $54bn natural gas pipeline in Alaska, only for a Korean official to contradict him on Thursday, saying that Korea had only agreed to “initiate a review” of the possible investment, and South Korean lawmakers pointed out that a single $54 billion commitment would massively violate the $20 billion annual outbound investment cap established by South Korea's National Assembly.

“No, I didn’t jump the gun,” Trump replied. “Let’s see if they don’t want to do it. That’s okay with me. I’ll just charge them more.”

When he announced the pipeline project in an Oval Office ceremony on Wednesday, the president claimed that the Korean investment was part of a deal he struck in 2025, to lower tariffs on imports from South Korea in return for billions of dollars of investments in the US.

{Political scientists and economists frequently use terms like "gangster logic" or "gangster diplomacy" to describe Trump's foreign policy. Scholars argue that by bypassing multilateral institutions (like the WTO) and using unilateral tariffs or withholding aid as leverage like with the Ukraine, his administration treats international statecraft like a corporate or mafia-style extortion scheme}

Trump’s move to gut South Korea alliance is ‘inane, haphazard decision’, lawmakers say

US president’s abrupt order to scale back joint exercises with Seoul is meant to ‘flatter’ North Korea’s dictator, top Democrat says

www.theguardian.com

“They said they didn’t sign it?” Trump asked the reporter on Friday. “Tell them if they don’t sign shortly, I’m going to double it up, okay?”

In the August 2026 shake-down, U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly ordered a substantial scale-back of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military drills. According to reports from the Associated Press, Trump cited the high costs borne by the U.S., his personal relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Seoul’s refusal to participate in U.S. military operations against Iran as reasons for the reduction that i was anchored by the historic 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty.

 

[Taxslave2]

Yep….true, & out here on the prairies overpass bridges are costly getting hit by tall equipment loads as truckers are coming up on them at 60 mile an hour trying to mentally convert metric to imperial.

I have a Jamaican friend who really doesn’t think in imperial like most Canadians still do half the time, depending on what they’re measuring and imperial sounds like gibberish to him (he’s an exception to the Canadian rule of mixed confusion measures). Have you tried to purchase a metric tape measure recently in Canada?

…& half a century later, we’re still stuck with two measurement systems, one official and one unofficial, but very real. Yes there are only three countries on the planet that still use the imperial system as their official measuring system…but one of them is Canada‘s largest trading partner and the only one that we’re physically connected to.

I’m in commercial international shipping, of products made in the US for the Canadian market and built to Canadian standards, with documentation for import into Canada. About 1/2 the American manufacturers use metric for these documents, and about half don’t. If I’m setting up a border crossing for a mixed load of RV’s with one of the units being from Forest River (only uses Imperial) and the other being Keystone (uses Metric), and CBSA allows one measurement system per load…do I convert the metric into imperial so they’re both the same? Or do I convert the imperial into metric so they’re both the same?

In all honesty, it depends on my mood because I think in both systems. Somebody older than me by a decade would convert everything into imperial, and somebody younger than me by a decade would convert everything into metric. I totally get where you’re coming from.

The lower mainland gets overpass hits almost weekly. Mostly by flipflop trucks. They can't measure in either system.
I work reasonably well in metric for n old guy, but we have had metric equipment since the late 70s, and government construction and logs have been metric since that time , mostly. But I still convert a lot to Imperial to ensure my eyeball and the numbers are close. We still have a lot of dirt taxi drivers that don't know the difference between bank yards and truck yards, so now that almost all pits are selling by metric ton, they get really confused.

 

[Ron in Regina]

The lower mainland gets overpass hits almost weekly. Mostly by flipflop trucks. They can't measure in either system.

This may be a contrary opinion, but my heart really goes out to these guys, or many of them anyway. They come to Canada as accountants and software programmers, and they pay big money to get out of India and over here, only to find out once they’re here that, “You’re gonna be a Super-Trucker!” & get punched through those schools and out on the road with no real world experience with things like…winter, commercial hauling, etc…& then they owe a bigger debt for the trucker schooling in the indentured servitude world of immigration from India.

I work reasonably well in metric for n old guy, but we have had metric equipment since the late 70s, and government construction and logs have been metric since that time , mostly. But I still convert a lot to Imperial to ensure my eyeball and the numbers are close. We still have a lot of dirt taxi drivers that don't know the difference between bank yards and truck yards, so now that almost all pits are selling by metric ton, they get really confused.

We would just “gently” scale it into the trucks with my mantra of, “Don’t break the truck, don’t break the truck, etc…” with 844K2’s.

 

[Taxslave2]

This may be a contrary opinion, but my heart really goes out to these guys, or many of them anyway. They come to Canada as accountants and software programmers, and they pay big money to get out of India and over here, only to find out once they’re here that, “You’re gonna be a Super-Trucker!” & get punched through those schools and out on the road with no real world experience with things like…winter, commercial hauling, etc…& then they owe a bigger debt for the trucker schooling in the indentured servitude world of immigration from India.

We would just “gently” scale it into the trucks with my mantra of, “Don’t break the truck, don’t break the truck, etc…” with 844K2’s.

From what I have seen most of the seat warmers come straight from an ox plow to superB. They can't read or speak English. They are allowed a translator to do the driving exam, which is scary enough. Also have their own driving schools. Perhaps more importantly, the flipflop trucking companies all have dispatchers that either don't do English, or don't care about weights and measures. SO, they either do not get, or lie about size to get permits. Weights is a problem when the shipper does not know the weights either, but that is easily corrected at the scales. Our system is pretty good. When you call in for an overweight they will leave the number blank until you get to the scale and then that is the number put on the permit. Or you can just permit to max for your axels and hope.
The dirt taxi problem isn't so much the weight in the truck, but the number of loads required. a truck yard(meter) is aprox 1/3 larger than a bank yard, so they get confused on the number of loads required.