Ski resorts are on low reliability areas of the electric grid and use backup generators to avoid stranding skiers. As soon as 2029, a resilient nuclear microreactor could carry you back up the hill, on a reliable and clean microgrid keeping the mountain air 100% fresh!⛷️🏂

Guys, closing off de minimis ISN'T a new tariff. It's eliminating a customs loophole that was originally intended to allow American manufacturers to order small parts from abroad, or have family members send items to one another. What it became was a black hole of duty avoidance schemes heavily subsidized by the USPS and other parcel carriers on this side, with vertically-subsidized Chinese manufacturers knocking off everyone else's IP and R&D to ship directly to American consumers' doors. On top of that, apps like Temu and Shein are MASSIVE data-mining operations that allow for micro-targeting of American buyers' habits, location, and other data on their phones. And all of that is on top of the massive amount of fentanyl and precursor trafficking that is enabled by the lack of inspections on these shipments. If you're commenting that closing de minimis is ackshually bad for consumer prices or is a tariff, you need to simmer down, because you have zero idea what you're talking about and/or don't have the US' best interests at heart and/or need to curb your addiction to cheap crap.

It's becoming clearer and clearer that we're looking at a seismic shift in the US's relationship with the world, between: 1) The US dismantling its foreign interference apparatuses (like USAID 👇) 2) Marco Rubio stating that we're now in a multipolar world with "multi-great powers in different parts of the planet" ( and that "the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us" ( 3) The tariffs on supposed "allies" like Mexico, Canada or the EU This is the US effectively saying "our attempt at running the world is over, to each his own, we're now just another great power, not the 'indispensable nation'." It looks "dumb" (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it's always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb. Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of "allies": they don't want - or maybe rather can't afford - vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline - because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire - or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era and, while the Trump administration looks like chaos to many observers, they're probably much more attuned to the changing realities of the world and their own country's predicament than their predecessors. Acknowledging the existence of a multipolar world and choosing to operate within it rather than trying to maintain an increasingly costly global hegemony couldn't be delayed much further. It looks messy but it is probably better than maintaining the fiction of American primacy until it eventually collapses under its own weight. This is not to say that the U.S. won't continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed "rules-based order", it now doesn't even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It's the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs. All in all this transformation may mark one of the most significant shifts in international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. And those most unprepared for it, as is already painfully obvious, are America's vassals caught completely flat-footed by the realization that the patron they've relied on for decades is now treating them as just another set of countries to negotiate with.