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Will anyone in the rest of the world that wished to purchase a Harley, now purchase a BMW, Honda, etc equivalent?

I find it bizarre that the current Canadian government has the gall to criticize the US in light of the supply management bullshit they defend at every turn. How does that benefit Canadian consumers?

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America imports far more than it exports, so a decline in exports doesn't affect it as much as the rest of the world, except in the short term as production ramps up in America to compensate for more expensive imports.

And, whatever happens, international trade is about to enter a rapid decline as technology allows us to make more and more stuff ourselves. No point shipping cheap Chinese plastic tat around the world if you can print it out in your basement instead... and cheap home metal printing isn't far off.

I do think Trudeau missed a real opportunity though, he could have found a much better costume for his 'get tough' act. WWE wrestler, maybe?

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I am starting to agree with you more as I am seeing more and more 3d printed products show up in my fish supplies for my aquariums, one item that has been made in China for eons, now boasts on the label that its 3d printed in the USA, so while I doubt doing 3d printing of such small plastic parts leads to much employment in the US, there does seem to be more and more smaller items being produced in such a way vs being made oversea's, obviously just one small example.

Also notice more and more people 3d printing items from home and custom making products for people in the aquarium trade which has led to innovative products none of the larger companies ever thought of or could make in traditional manufacturing which has led to more independent small companies.

That is just one industry, I suppose this will indeed become more the norm in the future?

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Maybe a new factory will open in Mexico or Canada to get around the US tariffs.

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I know Trump doesn't the hotel/building but he must be making money off the licensing of it and of course his company manages the hotel, gov't should add a idiotic high fee to every room in his hotel, say 500% tax. That might get his attention, hit him in his own pocket.

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Until the US can increase their aluminum production capability their manufacturers will still have to buy all the aluminum they currently do from Canada, and it will cost them 10% more. MAGA.

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What it shows is that Canada needs to diversify its markets. To have something like 75% of your trade with one country smacks of complacency and laziness. And then to pretend that you are independent...

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Hence the need for a pipeline/s to the West Coast and Pacific markets?

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When 100% of a country's land border is with another country that can both buy your stuff and sell you stuff it's common sense that they be your major trading partner.

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Yes. I've been avoiding buying a 3D printer for years because the technology was still around the equivalent of the Sinclair ZX-80 in home computing: you could do stuff with them, but... why? Now, though, I'm seeing more and more stuff they can make that I would actually find useful. When they can print metal cheaply in a few years, that will cover many of the things I might otherwise buy.

That's particularly true for a lot of the weird stuff I buy off ebay, which would be much cheaper and faster to print here than to buy online and ship from Bulgaria. I hadn't thought about aquariums, but I remember my sister's used to have a whole bunch of plastic bits which could almost certainly be printed these days.

CNC is another thing that's become much cheaper over the last few years, and opened the market to many small companies to produce things that would previously have required a large manufacturing facility. And allows them to customize small production runs, which would have been impossibly expensive twenty years ago.

And all of these things are only going to become cheaper, faster and simpler to use.

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CNC is in the aquarium trade too making some really nice aquarium lids, a few are just a guy with the machine in his basement making lids to order, and the lids are nicer and slightly more then massed produced ones, but the look is far nicer so for most is worth the slight premium, plus being able to customize the lid for your needs such as specific spots for cords, feeding lids etc you cannot do with the generic mass produced ones.

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3d printed housing

How is this Printing? It doesn't look any different to a lot of automated production...sausage making, bottling, cars, lots of things from TV's "How It's Made" show.

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"Additive manufacturing" is a term often used for 3D printing in industrial/manufacturing applications. The difference between this and "regular" automated production is that the raw materials are processed at the point of manufacture and the machine can be programmed to produce many different things. In a bottling or canning line, a complete bottle, its contents, the bottle cap, and the label or shrink-sleeve are all brought together on a production line in the right order. The bottles and caps will have been moulded elsewhere using whatever blow-moulding or injection-moulding technique is appropriate. The plastic for the labels or sleeves will have been extruded somewhere and printed somewhere else. The machines that produce these do nothing else but make bottles, caps, labels, etc.

Even though they may be made of the same material, you couldn't make a bottle in a bottle-cap machine. But a 3D printer with the correct polymer as its raw material could be programmed to make either - or anything else.

In additive manufacturing, you use a machine that can produce a variety of different components depending on how you program the "print head." In the case of the concrete houses in the video, the print head pours a carefully controlled strip of concrete in a pre-programmed pattern to build up the layers of the walls of the house - that's the "additive" part. The path that the concrete dispensing head follows can be programmed to build something in almost any shape.

The game-changer in all this is that it's cost effective to 3D print components in much smaller quantities than the break-even point for designing a single-purpose machine. So, for a niche market like aquarium parts - or, my favourite example of 3D printing, replacement string-plucking picks for an 18th-century harpsichord - it makes economic sense to produce small volumes of parts that would otherwise have been either impossible to find or exceedingly expensive to make.

For another extraordinary application of 3D printing, check out "Team Unlimbited" - a small team in a shed in Wales making custom prosthetic hands for children at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional prosthetics. http://www.teamunlimbited.org/

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or you can use your 3d p[printer to build a working R2D2 (its taking a LOT of filament)

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So, in the case of these houses, the "print head" is making or moulding the shape of the house. But they will still need doors and windows - the equivalents of the labels and caps for the bottles. So this same piece of equipment will then make the doors and glass for the windows?

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Potentially, but I doubt it would be worthwhile at the moment: it's going to be easier to put a rectangular piece of plastic in the hole for a window than to take a reel of plastic filament and create a rectangular piece of plastic in the hole as you build the house.

Are these the same people?

https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...printed-houses

They're talking about hoping that, on later houses, 'the drainage pipes and other necessary installations will also be made using the printer', but it's not really clear what 'other necessary installations' covers.

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Maybe the bottle and cap analogy wasn't the best. Imagine a machine that can make an infinite variety of different shaped and sized bottles. No need to build a special machine to, for example, make a short-run promotional tie-in bottle in the shape of a cartoon charater. The same bottle cap could still be used, because the machine would produce the neck of the bottle at standard sizes (like the concrete machine can leave standard-sized gaps for doors and windows, whatever the shape and configuration of the house).

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Or, I guess, they could print non-rectangular windows, if you fancy living in one of Lovecraft's non-Euclidean houses. Or one of those roadrunner-shaped doorways from the old cartoons.

Theoretically you could use it to produce any kind of house that can physically be built. That may be the big advantage aside from not needing as many construction people to work on it.

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Trump's tweets yesterday were a bit colorful after he left Quebec.

Anyhow in one he mentions Canada flooding the US market with cars, wonder if Trump is aware that a good chunk of these cars are US companies? lol. I could see if these were Canadian car companies, but they are not and he is only going to hurt US consumers and US companies in the end.

Not sure what his obsession with Canada trade is, especially on Dairy which seems to be the sticking point for Trump, but Canada isn't likely to budge much there due to the supply control in place in Canada for that industry.

Getting closer to an all out trade war it seems.

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Trump might be the worst chocolate in the box, the one that nobody likes and spits out, but.....
He does have a point about the US economy. I doubt that it's possible to sustain an ever rising annual financial deficit currently in excess of $800B. The US keeps it's head above water by borrowing and sooner or later the US turkey will come home to roost if things remain as they are.
Exiting WW2 as the world's superpower with wealth dripping from the fingers of each GI stationed in bankrupt countries has left a legacy that's been difficult to break free from and it's taken a renegade like Trump to start to loosen the stranglehold of those who see benefits in continually sucking wealth from the US economy.
I suspect that, like the bullet ridden messenger, he carries a message that most find extremely difficult to accept.

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I am hoping this trade dispute doesn't hurt cross border air travel too much, my job and income would be in jeopardy if US airlines start to cut back services.

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I found this quite interesting, the Canada-US economic history.

Canada–US Economic Relations - The Canadian Encyclopedia

Who knew the US owned so much of our resources?

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It helps to understand what is going on. The dairy situation is interesting, unlike the US the cost of dairy in Canada reflects true supply and demand and production costs.

To some extent the world is awash in milk. Canadas solution to that oversupply has been to require farmers to purchase quota and limit the amount of milk produced here. On the other side of the coin the US has subsidized US farmers (currently to in excess of $20Billion) to keep them afloat. US government subsidies works out to about 35c / liter.

With subsidies there is no incentive for US producers to cut production as the government provides a safety net by buying the excess, and that means they have excess milk looking for a market. It also means that farmers in the US have been known to use BGH to increase milk yields, which is a practice banned in both Canada and the EU as the health implications are unknown.

So, in order to stop canada being flooded with milk produced by US governent subsidized farmers, Canada imposes a 270% tarif on milk imports. Trump is right that the playing field is not level, but if hes so concerned maybe he should look at the amount of money flowing from the US government to a US dairy industry that has become dependent upon them. The Canadian system isnt perfect either (ask the children of dairy farmers looking to take over their parents farm about having to borrow to buy quota in the face of large agribusinesses with deep pockets looking to expand their operations), but at least its being managed without a direct flow of money from taxpayers to big agribusiness.

So, as usual there is way more going on than can be explained or comprehended in 280 characters. Which is unfortunate if that is all your leader is capable of dealing with at a time.

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Yes. America is an empire that exists not by looting its colonies, but by subsidizing them. American taxpayers have been loaded up with ever-increasing debt to fund welfare states and military protection across the West.

And Trump is telling the colonies that the money is running out.

Just imagine the changes that would have to happen in Canada for the country merely to be able to defend itself without offloading the cost onto the US military. And then imagine someone like Trudeau in charge of the country when it's having to make those changes.

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Not sure where you get your information, but the US provides the least amount of welfare per capita than any other industrialized nation. Have you ever lost a job, earned minimumwage, or been sick in the US. I guess not. Or were you talking about countries taking on US loans and subsidies?

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I have a number of neighbours that are dairy farmer so I believe I understand the issues quite well. It still results in Canadian consumers paying more than they ought to for dairy products, including cheese, which is exactly the reason why we will not be seeing cheese coming in from Europe at the price it should, as a result of the government's wish to protect them, at the expense of the consumer. Just as they do with cable, cell phones, lawyers etc. It's the Canadian way.

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I didn't say America. I said 'across the West'.

Few Western nations could afford their welfare states if they didn't have American taxpayers to borrow money to buy their stuff, and pay to protect them so they don't have to protect themselves.

Seriously, how much do you think taxes would have to rise here if America said 'bye, you can protect yourselves from Russia and China in future'?

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There are better, cheaper places to invade such as Africa. The Cost of invasion, compared to the wealth of natural resources, makes other nations a more likely target. So in answer to your question, not that much.

The biggest cost, is the cost of Policing and bullying the world, not protecting NATO States.

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54% of all federal discretionary funding is on the military. Maybe thats the real problem.

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The Chinese are busy buying up Africa. They have no desire to own it, just to loot the resources there.

And 'policing the world' is just another name for Americans protecting the Western nations who aren't paying to protect themselves. Just look at how much America spends to keep oil flowing from the Middle East to Europe, for example. What do you think would happen to Europe if Trump said 'bye, the Middle East is your problem now'?

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Ouch!
Brewing problem: U.S. beer drinkers pay more as aluminum tariffs hit cans | CBC Radio

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Maybe paying more for beer will get people riled up and not support Trump.

Hit em where it hurts although in the case of aluminum isnt it Trump causing the pain?

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[QUOTE=Jsmth321;12533318 Hit em where it hurts although in the case of aluminum isnt it Trump causing the pain?[/QUOTE]
Yes, as I understand it his tariff on aluminum is hurting them because US manufacturers currently need every ton of aluminum they buy from Canada to maintain production, so in this case it's a tax on his own people. This trade war will effect a lot of things on both sides of the border. I bought a big $8 can of hoisin sauce yesterday because I was out, even though I know it comes from the US (Lee Kum Kee). Now I regret not going to the Asian store and looking for one from overseas.

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It will, I will buy whatever is least costly so will have to wait and see if what I buy is hit with price increases. I know pepsi has said they will need to raise their prices in Canada due to some of the raw ingredients being hit with tariffs, although they do bottle in Canada using Canadian cans.

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Seems the US and Mexico have come to an agreement. Canada has been frozen out of talks since July.

Trump hopes to start talks with Canada as soon as possible.

Of course any agreement still needs to be approved by both the house and senate and who knows if all this can be concluded before the current congress is done, and who knows what the next congress will be like, wont know until November.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ractious-talks

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He wants to COMPLETE talks with Canada by Friday ...... or else!!

more sanctions??

Chrystia Freedland is on her way to Washington.

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There are NO sanctions on Canada, there are tariffs on certain goods. Iran has sanctions from the US.