Trump Calls for 20% Tax on Mexican Imports to Pay for Border Wall
January 26th, 2017Update: Trump, Mexican President Agree to Not Debate Wall in Public
*phew*
Via: The Hill:
President Trump agreed not to publicly discuss payment of the border wall during an hourlong call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto Friday.
“With regards to the payment of the border wall, both Presidents recognized their clear and very public different positions on this very sensitive subject, and agreed to resolve these differences as part of an integral discussion on all aspects of the bilateral relationship,” a statement from Peña Nieto’s office said.
“The Presidents also agreed for now to not publicly talk about this controversial topic.”
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Update: Trump, Nieto Talk by Phone
It looks like cooler heads intervened. Thankfully.
Via: Reuters:
The presidents of the United States and Mexico spoke by phone on Friday after relations between the neighboring countries frayed further over Donald Trump’s border wall plan, with the U.S. leader calling the talk friendly but still demanding reworked trade and other ties.
The call between Trump and Enrique Pena Nieto came a day after the Mexican president scrapped a meeting set for next week at the White House over Trump’s demand that Mexico pay for a multibillion-dollar wall along the lengthy southern U.S. border with Mexico. Mexico insists it will not pay for it.
Both countries issued statements saying Trump and Pena Nieto recognized their clear differences of opinion on the payment demand, and agreed to settle the matter as part of a broader discussion on all aspects of the two nations’ relationship.
Financial markets took news of the call as a sign that the crisis in U.S-Mexican relations just days after Trump took office had eased. Mexico’s peso rose on the news.
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Update: Trump: Enough Talk
There you have it.
Via: Reuters:
President Donald Trump pushed Republican lawmakers on Thursday for swift action on a sweeping agenda including his planned U.S.-Mexican border wall, tax cuts and repealing the Obamacare law, despite tensions over timetables and priorities.
Congressional Republicans were in Philadelphia for a three-day retreat to hammer out a legislative agenda, with the party in control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade.
“This Congress is going to be the busiest Congress we’ve had in decades, maybe ever,” Trump said in a speech to the lawmakers at a Philadelphia hotel.
“Enough ‘all talk, no action.’ We have to deliver,” Trump added.
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Does Trump understand that bloody knuckles should be avoided when it comes to international relations?
A 20% import tariff on goods from Mexico would be roughly equivalent to carpet bombing the place.
Does Trump realize that he has an entire bureaucracy full of people who have spent a substantial portion of their lives learning about the languages, politics and customs of other countries? The State Department can be helpful here.
I think Trump wants everyone to know that he is not messing around. (I definitely believe that he is not messing around and that this is the warm up before the main event: China.) Surely, the people around him and professional diplomats will be trying to explain to him that a 20% import tariff would cause disaster in Mexico.
The way to go about this is to carrot and stick the Mexican regime over some period of time. When tensions are so high, why schedule such a high level meeting!? This should have been dealt with quietly in the diplomatic backchannel before scheduling the high level meeting.
Nope. Instead, Trump is coming at them with a baseball bat in the first week.
Maybe he’s bluffing. (I doubt it.)
Maybe he’s not listening to diplomats.
Maybe the time for talk is over.
Keep in mind, myriad components are made in Mexico that find their way into much higher value products that are made in the U.S. There could be weird butterfly effects. Maybe expensive automobiles, that are mostly made in the U.S., include floor mats, gas caps and windshield wiper blades made in Mexico. Maybe expensive computers, that are assembled in the U.S., use plastic connectors, screws and rubber feet that are made in Mexico. Etc.
What happens if there’s a trade war with Mexico? You could see product delays and higher prices on products in the U.S.
I hope someone in the Trump regime is thinking this thing through very carefully so that blowback is minimized. The mess that the U.S. is in happened over decades. They can’t flip a switch and make it go away overnight.
Via: Guardian:
Relations between the United States and Mexico appeared to be heading for crisis on Thursday after Enrique Peña Nieto cancelled a meeting with Donald Trump and the White House retaliated by suggesting a new 20% tax on imports from its southern neighbour to finance the construction of a border wall.
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, made the announcement to reporters on Air Force One as Trump returned from addressing the congressional Republican retreat in Philadelphia.
Spicer painted the border tax as one aspect of a broader tax reform policy. “When you look at the plan that’s taking shape now, using comprehensive tax reform as a means to tax imports from countries that we have a trade deficit from, like Mexico,” said Spicer.
“If you tax that $50bn at 20% of imports – which is by the way a practice that 160 other countries do – right now our country’s policy is to tax exports and let imports flow freely in, which is ridiculous. By doing it that way we can do $10bn a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the funding,” he said.
Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus later appeared to walk back on the proposal, describing it as one of a “buffet of options.”
DragonflEye Project Wants to Turn Insects Into Cyborg Drones
January 26th, 2017Via: IEEE:
As hard as we’re trying, it’s going to be a very long time before we’re able to build a robotic insect that’s anywhere near as capable or versatile as a real one. So for now, we rely on a cybernetics approach to get real insects to do our bidding instead. Over the past several years researchers have managed to steer large insects using electrical implants, a sort of brute-force method with limited real-world usefulness.
Now engineers at Cambridge, Mass.,-based R&D company Draper are hoping to overcome those limitations by creating a cybernetic dragonfly that combines “miniaturized navigation, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.” To steer the dragonflies, the Draper engineers are developing a way of genetically modifying the nervous system of the insects so they can respond to pulses of light. Once they get it to work, this approach, known as optogenetic stimulation, could enable dragonflies to carry payloads or conduct surveillance, or even help honey bees become better pollinators.
Trump Open to CIA Using Torture
January 25th, 2017Cut off funding to ISIS.
Stop giving them weapons.
Stop training them.
Use special forces, and work with the Russians, to kill ISIS leaders.
You know, do the opposite of what the Obama regime did.
Via: ABC:
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, President Donald Trump said he “absolutely” thinks waterboarding works and would consider reinstating it as an interrogation technique, depending on the advice of Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
“I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group. And if they don’t want to do, that’s fine. If they do wanna do, then I will work toward that end. I want to do everything within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do legally,” Trump exclusively told “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir during an interview at the White House. “But do I feel it works? Absolutely, I feel it works.”
Trump explained it’s important to reconsider the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique because, he said, “we’re not playing on an even field.”
“When they’re chopping off the heads of our people and other people. When they’re chopping off the heads of people because they happen to be a Christian in the Middle East, when ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I’m concerned, we have to fight fire with fire,” he said.
“I’m going to go with what they say,” Trump said of Mattis and Pompeo. “But I have spoken as recently as 24 hours ago with people at the highest level of intelligence, and I asked them the question ‘Does it work? Does torture work?’ And the answer was ‘Yes, absolutely.'”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to bring back the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques.
Robotic Fabricator Could Change the Way Buildings Are Constructed
January 25th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review:
So what is the state-of-the-art for construction robots?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Markus Giftthaler at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a few pals who have developed a new class of robot capable of creating novel structures on a construction site. They call their new robot the In Situ Fabricator1 and today show what it is capable of.
The In Situ Fabricator1 is designed from the bottom up to be practical. It can build stuff using a range of tools with a precision of less than five millimeters, it is designed to operate semi-autonomously in a complex changing environment, it can reach the height of a standard wall, and it can fit through ordinary doorways. And it is dust- and waterproof, runs off standard electricity, and has battery backup. On top of all this, it must be Internet-connected so that an architect can make real-time changes to any plans if necessary.
Musk Apparently Not Joking About Tunnel Boring Venture
January 25th, 2017Is this real?
Via: Electrek:
If you weren’t convinced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was serious about launching a new company to start digging tunnels, maybe you will be now that he is putting a timeline on the project.
He announced early this morning that they have made “exciting progress” and that he expects to start digging “in a month or so.”
That would be only about two months after announcing his new venture, which could be called “The Boring Company”.
But he has been thinking about it for over a year. He mentioned it during SpaceX’s Hyperloop pod design competition in January 2016:
“It’s a really simple and obvious idea and I wish more people would do it: build more tunnels. Tunnels are great. It’s just a hole in the ground, it’s not that hard. But if you have tunnels in cities you would massively alleviate congestion and you could have tunnels at all different levels – you could probably have 30 layers of tunnels and completely fix the congestion problem in high-density cities. So I strongly recommend tunnels.”
It went from “I wish more people would build more tunnels” a year ago to this earlier this morning:
Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2017
And he needed to emphasize that he is serious again:
@clay_ellis Yup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2017
Trump Executive Orders on Immigration This Afternoon
January 25th, 2017I don’t know what category to use for this post.
I’m actually in favor of the wall, and I think that Trump is acting responsibly by securing the border. Sovereign states secure their borders. This is first-day-of-class political science. Nothing controversial.
The U.S., however, looks like a failed state when it comes to the border with Mexico. The current situation is beyond ridiculous.
It’s treasonous.
Via: Reuters:
U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders starting on Wednesday that include a temporary ban on most refugees and a suspension of visas for citizens of Syria and six other Middle Eastern and African countries, say congressional aides and immigration experts briefed on the matter.
Trump, who tweeted that a “big day” was planned on national security on Wednesday, is expected to ban for several months the entry of refugees into the United States, except for religious minorities escaping persecution, until more aggressive vetting is in place.
Another order will block visas being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified.
In his tweet late on Tuesday, Trump said: “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”
The border security measures probably include directing the construction of a border wall with Mexico and other actions to cut the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States.
The sources say the first of the orders will be signed on Wednesday. With Trump considering measures to tighten border security, he could turn his attention to the refugee issue later this week.
Massive Networks of Fake Accounts Found on Twitter
January 25th, 2017Via: BBC:
Massive collections of fake accounts are lying dormant on Twitter, suggests research.
The largest network ties together more than 350,000 accounts and further work suggests others may be even bigger.
UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.
Some of the accounts have been used to fake follower numbers, send spam and boost interest in trending topics.
Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
January 24th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Automation means wells need only five workers, down from 20.
U.S. Solar Industry Passes Oil, Coal and Gas for Job Creation
January 24th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Via: ComputerWorld:
Solar employment now accounts for the largest share of workers in the U.S. power generation field, surpassing coal, gas and oil, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
In 2016, the solar workforce increased by 25% over the previous year to 374,000 employees, compared to 187,117 electrical generation jobs in the coal, gas and oil industries combined, according to the DOE’s “Energy and Employment Report for 2017”.
Employment in the wind turbine industry increased to 102,000 workers, a 32% increase over the previous year, the report said.
In all, 2.2 million Americans are employed in the design, installation and manufacture of energy efficiency products and services, according to DOE.
Solar employment, which includes both photovoltaic electricity and concentrated solar steam generators, accounts for 43% of the electric power generation workforce — the largest share of workers in that market. Fossil fuel generation employment now accounts for 22%.
Trump Backs Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines
January 24th, 2017Via: BBC:
US President Donald Trump has infuriated environmentalists by signing executive orders that support two controversial oil pipelines.
The new Republican president backed the Keystone XL and Dakota Access projects, provided American steel is used.
The Obama administration in late 2015 halted Keystone, which would carry crude from Canada to Texas.
The Army decided last year to explore other routes for the Dakota pipeline amid huge protests by Native Americans.
