i ended up sleeping a lot this weekend, and i think i did get drugged with something, but it's the same tiredness i remember feeling after passing out at the bar a few years ago. i haven't been drinking or smoking anything at all for months. i think i got drugged with a date rape drug a few years ago and they might have got me again this weekend.

there's no sign of entry into the unit and no obvious way in. i note the windows are wide open. it's 4:29 and i can hear them hacking and wheezing, but i can't smell it.

i plugged the vacuum battery in on saturday afternoon and intentionally slept for a few hours with the intent to wake up and charge it. it showed the charged symbol when i plugged it in but i let it sit. when i woke up, i made a large plate of pasta with a box of kd (200 g; i would normally boil 110 g. oops. so it was bigger than normal.) and ate through most of it but passed out after and then slept almost right through until 21:00. when i did wake up, i made some coffee and am more alert.

the battery did not charge, or there's an issue with it. it revs up and falls from charged to uncharged in a few seconds. but then when i plug it in it says it's charged. i'm trying with a different adapter and getting the same results.

let me try to understand this better.

but i lost the day due to this.

my new shop vac is shipping for the 18th. so i might just get the dustbuster in there in the morning and get the carpet down. i want to understand what the battery is doing and then order a new fuse, before the sun comes up. 

let's look at the tariff issue empirically, not theoretically or ideologically.

the theory - it is old tory, mercantilist - says you use tariffs to protect domestic industry. it's an old theory, 19th century, and broadly abandoned. that's the best academic analysis we have for this confusing policy, so the analysts continually go back to it. trump must be pushing tariffs to create jobs. right?

but is this an empirical analysis?

there are a small number of the tariffs where the intent appears to be to protect domestic industrial production for national interest reasons - chips, vaccines, drones. i have little criticism of these tariffs. i don't think tariffs are bad. i'm a socialist; i think tariffs are hard. trump is proving ricardo right. tariffs on chip or vaccines are a correct application of mercantilist tariff theory.

the reality is, however, that most of the time when trump talks about tariffs, he doesn't say anything about protecting industry. rather, trump tends to focus on tariffs being a large government revenue stream and frequently argues they are making the country richer. in fact, the theory trump is following doesn't seem to be old tory at all, but a kind of trickle down reaganomics and focused on implementing a tax shift from income taxes on the rich to consumption taxes on the general population. trump has repeatedly explicitly stated that the tariffs are intended to mitigate upcoming slashes to income taxes at the highest brackets. further, all evidence suggests trump actually believes canadians end up paying the tariffs. an empirical analysis is that canada is going to build the tax cut wall, and canada is going to pay for it, however ridiculously wrong that is.

it follows that the purpose of these tariffs is not to try to kill industry in canada or shift jobs south, but to generate tax cuts for himself. this is not really an attack on canada, then; canada is just being chosen as the hapless sock puppet that takes the hit on a policy intended to raise government revenue through a taxation stream on americans. if it does create job losses in canada, that's collateral, and doesn't matter.

canada has been making the mistake from the start of taking this seriously and trying to undo these policies by taking the arguments on directly. but the arguments are disingenuous, and it's just an excuse for trump to raise taxes. canada has to shift it's approach to fundamentally understanding this: what trump wants is the revenue stream. what trump wants is the tax shift. it's not about industry, not about jobs. 

that is the reason there's nothing canada can do to stop this; what trump wants is the revenue, and this is just the damaging way he does that. it's all theatre to enforce the tax hike and subsequent tax shift.

that's what trump has said and which the analysts aren't grasping. do the numbers add up? of course not, but that doesn't matter when it's trump. it's just the excuse he needs to cut income taxes.

canada's better tactic is to try to shift targets. the target was supposed to be mexico, not canada. how did canada get shifted to the scapegoat role? by fighting back, which drew attention to us as the insolent ones. the mexicans shut their mouths. we retaliated.

there's no deal coming because there's no deal to make. trump wants his tax hike, and canada cannot agree to the terms. nafta necessarily dies, as it cannot coexist with large tariffs.

in the end, we got outsmarted by the mexicans.