President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariff on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.

Trump also said he would start charging a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week.

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[–] 34 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Future economists are going to love this time period. It's basically a goldmine for papers, articles and books about the effects tariffs have. Sure, we have that sort of history already, but this time it's very well documented. Current online economy has so many new numbers you can track. You should be able to look at the data and tell exactly what went wrong and how it was reflected on everything.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    It's sort of like when we want to know something, but all experiments to find out would be highly unethical. So we wait for a madman or authoritarian regime to torture someone to find out the limits of human capability. Just with the economy instead.

    Basically, in 2025 we are running a simulation to find out how much stress an economy can take before it collapses, and the goal is to actually get there.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Same goes for chemical safety. How do we know what the effects of mercury, lead, ammonia or sulfur dioxide are on humans? Tragic things have happened in the past, and the survivors just documented the results.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Yeah, but you can’t Gauge everything that way…

    Or bleach… we should have great information on the maximum amount of ordinary household bleach that a human being can drink at this point.

    To google scholar mobile chum!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    With observational incident reports you can only get a list of symptoms and a very rough range of exposure. If you want something more detailed than that, you need a proper LD50 study.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That’s fair. Not being an actual sciencer, approximately how many anit-vaxers would I need to deliver? Like you can probably round to the nearest truckload or something like that.

    I think I’m gonna go somewhere and find a new edge to lord over. Maybe even touch some grass… This is getting far too close to history :-(

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    A good rule of thumb in statistics is that a sample size of about 30 will give you some idea of the standard deviation. Anything less than that, and your analysis is on shaky ground. In logistics terms, all you need to get started is just one truck load of anti-vaxxers.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think that truckload should be the new standard unit for ~30 anit-vaxxers.

    I propose the we call it T sub L as a challenge to the poor folks still trying to write Fediverse mobile clients ;-)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    How about we just call it "The Standard Unit" and choose U its symbol. You know, just to mess around with all the other "units" we have for everything. I'm looking at you, Enzyme unit, in particular. Also, the "Astronomical Unit" was a pretty obnoxious name too, so points for that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That one kills me… I couldn’t even get U400 or however it goes. My doctors all blew off their chemistry prerequisites so they couldn’t fathom another human being keeping track of different concentrations.

    Pens designed so a literal blind person can work it out by shape :-(

    Ah well… it just adds to my country’s rich history of nonsensical metrics.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Separating the various fuck ups and disasters will be the hardest part.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Economics is a messy science where you’re constantly dealing with messy data. There are always several variables at play, and their countless interactions make interpretations super tricky. You can’t really make controlled double blind experiments to isolate the effect of a specific variable.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    It’s still in its infancy. Give it a few centuries. Back in the 1400s physics was still full of opinions rather than theories backed up by empirical experiments. Economics hasn’t even figured out what the elementary particles or fundamental forces really are or how to measure them. That’s why all the models are pretty vague and qualitative at the moment.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Oh yes this is just extra messy. Like the federal reserve being robbed by several loosely cooperating gangs with differing goals.... During a riot caused by yet another group of gangs some of whom overlap.

    A forensic nightmare within a clusterfuck.

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