If not the NOAA, then who? The NOAA is the agency that was doing it, and knew how to do it.

I don't know that you would, but some people might like to have a "heads-up-display" so that they don't have to take their phone out of their pocket every time they receive a notification; they could just glance at the text message in the corner of their vision and decide right away whether it's something worth dealing with immediately, or not. YMMV.

Do non-Libyans belong in Libya, in the middle of a civil war? Do non-Salvadorans belong in a nobody-can-ever-leave oubliette in El Salvador?

That sounds less like "returning them" anywhere, since they've never been there before in the first place, and more like a deliberately cruel and unusual punishment, intended to make an example of them in order to intimidate others.

Yes, it's good to be the Hegemon: you're expected to keep the world running in a predictable and orderly fashion, but that means you are given lots of leeway to do things your way, and as a side benefit you get to take economic advantage of the world's faith in your competent leadership, in the form of cheap capital provided to you at very low interest rates whenever you sell Treasury bonds to foreigners.

That works fine (for the USA anyway) until the day the world loses faith in the USA's ability to run things competently, and starts moving its investment dollars out from US bonds and into something else that they feel is safer (Renminbi or Euros or cryptocurrency or gold or tanks or whatever). At that point the USA loses its traditional Hegemonic privileges and will have to start playing by the same financial rules as everyone else, and US citizens aren't going to like that transition very much.

Trump appears to be doing everything a President could possibly do, to make that day arrive sooner rather than later.

That would require them to trust us not to do it again. I don't know what could induce them (or anyone) to trust the USA again after two Trump presidencies.

Funny, normal people say the same thing about austerity conservatives existing.

Yes, all college should be free. If you need to go back again for some reason, that should also be free.

You said "bear" summoning ðY. I think you meant "bare".

Universal, single payer university access would have wholly prevented this fraud.

Sure, and if China's only concern was to minimize its costs, that would be that. But China isn't just trying to minimize its costs; it's also trying to become the world's technological leader, which means doing a lot of in-house development of technology it considers strategically important, even when it would be cheaper to just buy the products pre-made from abroad. Trump is now demonstrating the prescience of China's approach; technology produced in-country can't be held hostage against you when things go bad.

"Massive upfront investment" is exactly what the Chinese government has been doing. They're willing to spend the money and take the risk.

The hypothesis here is that Americans would be willing to suffer the deprivations of a trade war longer than the Chinese would be, forcing China to cry "uncle" first, if only Trump stuck to his guns for long enough.

I see several problems with that. The first is that Americans see themselves primary as customers and only secondarily as citizens, and the customer is always right -- so if Americans are unlikely to stand for getting squeezed economically for very long.

The second issue is that there are 195 countries in the world, and even with the USA taking its ball and going home, China is still free to trade with 194 of them. Hell, China can probably trade more with many of them, since many of them have America-shaped holes in their import/export markets right now that they are looking to refill.

The third issue is that while the USA is (ostensibly) still a democracy, while China is decidedly not. So if Chinese consumers suffer, there isn't much they can do about it, and they are used to that. They will just have to grin and bear it.

The fourth issue is that China has a lot to gain here. If the USA isolates itself (politically and economically) from the rest of the world, that makes China the world's new #1 superpower, which (presumably) has been their long-term goal anyway. So China has a lot of motivation to just keep doing what they're doing, regardless of the economic pain -- why interrupt their enemy when he is making a mistake?

Another question would be, how will this stop China from building its own chips that are as good or better than what the US could sell to them?

If they aren't there already, they are certainly on their way. Their government still believes in growth through supporting advances in science and technology, so their science and technology is going to advance. Our government believes in growth through artificially handicapping all our competitors, which will work about as well now as it ever did in the past.

What I'm saying is that when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7th in such a brutal way, then I would fully expect Israel to completely lose their shit and flatten Gaza to make sure it can't happen again, and that's what they're doing. Given that the attack was funded by Iran, I can only assume this is the reaction that Iran was trying to create, since it makes Israel look bad. Mission accomplished. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are in the right here. It's just two groups fighting for their survival and fighting over a really shitty piece of land. It looks to me like a chihuahua picking a fight with a doberman over a bone. Do I care? Not much. Do I think the chihuahua is stupid? Yep.

Good for you, buddy. Probably a good idea not to get butthurt about being asked to pay into society commensurately to the benefit you received from it.