That reminds me of this comic strip…

silently goes to German GitHub to learn German words

If they can’t change what’s essentially a variable name without issues then should they be doing the job?

They have a reason. You just don’t like it.

I don’t think we can be. We’d be paralyzed if we tried to be wholly serious.

If they weren’t in plain text how could we check to make sure it’s still there?

I wouldn’t put it past them to experience numbers in the per second realm, especially as new data posts and everyone is rushing to grab it.

Held back by his environment.

I laughed but really I know when the last good database and systems people left government to be replaced by contractors. It was Bush’s first term. Since then everything has been just putting a new front end on the back end government programmers created in the 1990’s.

Just so you know census data is very heavily queried. Everything from civil engineering to economics wants to look at that dataset every day.

Oh I just curled up into a fetal ball at the thought of that…

Login? Why would I do that? Aren’t the credentials in the code? I just hit the go button.

What makes you think they’re uneducated?

But why even? There’s no risk to changing it and some risk to keeping it. That’s the reason for the push to change it. Keeping something just because it’s tradition isn’t a good idea outside ceremonies.

Lmao, somebody said to do it and got called on the carpet by their shareholders.

Monopolies don’t need as much manpower as companies in competition. There’s less marketing, less customer service, less quality control, and ultimately less production staff. They don’t care if the item gets back ordered, if you wait on hold for hours, or you think there’s a better product overseas. They don’t have to care.

We can do that without import taxes. I deride Biden’s CHIPs act as a giveaway to billionaires but it is certainly going to cause chip manufacturers to move their operations to the US instead of China. While I’m not excited about more low wage jobs, I’m less excited about import taxes that codify domestic monopolies and often cost jobs.

Tariffs aren’t charged to the country or corporation the product came from. They are charged to the importer. It’s literally a fee at customs to release the item into the country. Some companies take care of this for you if you’re buying personally from overseas. Some do not and it is more transparent

Let’s use alcohol as an example because I like scotch and some stores in the UK do and some don’t. The ones that take care of customs for me would just show me a price of 68.75£ along with a warning that the exchange rate may cause a minor shift in price. The ones that do not would show a price of 55£ along with a warning about the exchange rate and that I need to deal with customs. Customs sends me a letter when the bottles arrive in the country saying I need to pay 17.26 US Dollars (about 13.75 in British money) to clear customs.

So that’s why Trump’s Tariffs are actually a sales tax on Americans. But why are countries going to retaliate?

That’s because industry owners in affected countries are going to complain to their government about our government making their products more expensive in our country. It’s okay if you need to read that a couple times, I did when I was learning about international economics. This is going to affect the trade balance between the two countries if they don’t retaliate. It will make American goods cheaper and thus give them an advantage on the world stage because they always have a protected market at home to profit from.

This is especially disastrous when the countries are dissimilar in size. Like the US and UK. Take two producers of Soybeans. In the US they have twice the available production capacity (arable fields) and a protected market six times the size of the UK by population. So if the UK producer can only sell at market rate to 60 million people and the American producer can sell at market rate to 330 million people, the American producer can make more money before we even talk about international markets. So the American company has more money than the UK company to operate internationally.

Between the two countries specifically this means that without retaliatory tariffs the American company could even buyout or bankrupt the British company and replace it in British stores, without hiring British workers. That’s an extremely important point in an economic system based on selling your labor. And why the workers will also demand retaliation.

I could keep going, there’s a lot that goes into this but at the end of the day everyone’s economy gets hurt. And the biggest thing to know is that there are two giant weak points in a trade war. Being a manufacturing country that exports a lot of stuff, (Mexico), and being a food importer, (USA). You’ll notice I didn’t mention China. That’s because they import food mostly from Africa and export goods to Russia, Europe, and the rest of Asia. Our tariffs are not going to meaningfully hurt them. As far as Mexico, you may be thinking we’ll just tariff their manufactured goods, but not their food. Well, let me introduce you to Exit Tariffs. They can make their food more expensive only in the US as a retaliation. Is that a bit self harming? Yeah, but what’s worse? Less income or Less food?

And that’s why Trump can’t possibly win his Trade War.

In graphs like these it is very much all smushed together. Otherwise they’d need a 3d plot.

If you want to get really technical too, liberalism and socialism have giant grey overlap areas. Classical Liberalism wasn’t just about personal freedom, but also government by the people, for the people. Which is a collective good and freedom.

It’s not nearly so easy as labeling one person a leftist and another a liberal. So above I use leftist in it’s colloquial meaning of getting less conservative, literally moving to the left.

Interestingly it looks like in 3 of 4 charts men have, at worst, returned to mean. It’s the women getting more leftist. And I don’t blame them.