Jordan117

White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it's based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations

Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary

White House lackey says "Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this" and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters

Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent... the trade deficit divided by imports.

tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up

Direct from USTR.gov:

To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

He has statutory emergency authority which can be checked by Congress if abused, except, what Congress?

(Also the tariffs are enforced by CBP, an executive agency.)

Drone warfare is politically agnostic. If it can be used by a Luigi against a healthcare CEO, it can be used by far-right extremists against progressive politicians, pride parades, or Black churches. I'm not very jazzed to live in the world of Slaughterbots.

Potential legal problems for Goldberg if he continues eavesdropping after realizing the chat is real.

Tyranny.biz

In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There's a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and "for you" pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it's too late.

At least it's not pulling up mostly Motorhead-related content like it used to...

Yep. (Google Translate link)

I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.

It had been crossposted to TheOnion community on another instance, but the story is real.

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past -- his unemployment, his wife's involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay -- would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).