Trump accused of consulting chatbots after critics mock tariffs on islands of penguins.
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Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots
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David Mayer
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
I get where you're coming from, but this isn't just idle speculation about something like:
And more like:
Even if the evidence is just a "rumor" there is a small amount of credible evidence and the significance of the implications is undeniable.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
I am not optimistic. Everyone who could do something about it (cough cough Republican majority) is scared of the emperor with no brain. The MAGA faithful are now pretending that "lower groceries" was never a thing and paying more for everything is patriotic.
The earliest that the damage can even be partially mitigated is Jan 2027 and that assumes people don't stay at home again because they don't have the feels.
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I'm not surprised about Trump.
But a lot of people around this don't make a good impression at all.
It's all lies.
And if it isn't a lie, it's incompetence.
Incomprehensible that one cannot find the congressmen and senators needed to kick him out.
But a lot of people around this don't make a good impression at all.
- His acolytes not getting further than really dumb blanket tariffs, coming straight from ChatGPT.
- The party establishment not being able to stop him from a policy disaster, one that threatens the republican majorities at the midterms.
- The rest of the institutions unable to stop the overreach of the executive branch. He's clearly acting outside of the legal framework that allows him to set tariffs. There is no emergency. He's also violating a ton of trade agreements.
- The press parroting 'reciprocal tariffs', while they are obviously not reciprocal. Even countries that have a negative trade balance and 0% tariffs get awarded with a 10% tariff.
It's all lies.
And if it isn't a lie, it's incompetence.
Incomprehensible that one cannot find the congressmen and senators needed to kick him out.
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Yes. They always care about the money.
We need to stop thinking of Trump as some kind of unstoppable force, or that there is the secret cabal that all rich people belong to where they plan together.
Those other things you mentioned were distractions. January 6th was disturbing, but also a joke. The invasion stuff is all bluster and BS. All these things are noise to multinational corporations, they don't give a shit.
When you tank the stock market, jack up prices, suppress consumer demand, and fuck them? They pay attention.
We're seeing the Senate start to crack. I don't have a crystal ball, but I do feel like this time the pressures are gonna be real.
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Do you think it's easy to staff a factory right now? Those people in Springfield, Ohio that Trump and Vance told racist lies about. They moved there because the local factories couldn't fill jobs. My brother works at a factory that makes brake parts, they're always hiring and they always have weekend overtime because they are always understaffed. We don't have a shortage of jobs in this country, but a problem we do have is inflation outpacing wages and the things people need to buy getting considerably more expensive, guess what kind of effect a tax on goods will have on the price of goods.
What Trump did was levy a giant tax that will be paid by working class Americans. People who whine about the trade deficit are just getting their talking points from scumbag politicians. What Americans need is for the things they buy to be affordable, not for an airhead billionaire to jack up their taxes because the people in this country buy a lot of stuff made overseas.
We even have historical precedent, Smoot-Hawley didn't make the Great Depression better... On top of all that Trump can't seem to hire anyone in his administration who isn't some kind of a fuckup moron, it's why uninhabited islands have a tariff levied against them along with apparently Diego Garcia
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Well he received more votes than Kamala did, and neither candidate breached 50%, so I do think that unfortunately counts as winning the popular vote. I do not like him nor do I support him, but the cult ended up outvoting us. Now we all suffer.
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An AI? ... What if this whole misconception of economics was planted in Trumps head by an AI?
What if he was intentionally manipulated into imposing this tariffs by an AI?
What if this if this manipulation of a gullible president and his yes-men running the world's last standing superpower was the first shot fired in the war AI vs. humanity?
Edited to add: /s
That would be an pretty interesting alternative plot to Daniel Suarez' "DAEMON". A top-down, frontal, centralized destruction of human economic power vs. Daemon's bottom-up, stealth and distributed approach to gaining power.
What if he was intentionally manipulated into imposing this tariffs by an AI?
What if this if this manipulation of a gullible president and his yes-men running the world's last standing superpower was the first shot fired in the war AI vs. humanity?
Edited to add: /s
That would be an pretty interesting alternative plot to Daniel Suarez' "DAEMON". A top-down, frontal, centralized destruction of human economic power vs. Daemon's bottom-up, stealth and distributed approach to gaining power.
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On the bright side, Messrs. Smoot & Hawley can finally look forward to not being the canonical whipping-boys for bad tariffs!
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Are we really calling an organized coup attempt a distraction/joke already? At this rate I can't wait to read the barrage of "it's a distraction" on the first day of Trump's third-term.
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I so wish Donnie PP was just a hallucination! Putin told Steele how much Donnie loves P. It can't possibly be disproven so it must be true.
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The Trump tariffs are unlikely to be a positive for the economy or work as Trump (or his handlers) wish, but on slightly different topic, Trump has (again) eliminated the de minimis customs exemption, so Temu and Schein won't be able to drop-ship from China directly to the US without duties. That is a good thing.
CNBC article link about it: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/de-minimis-trade-loophole-to-end-may-2-white-house-says.html
CNBC article link about it: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/de-minimis-trade-loophole-to-end-may-2-white-house-says.html
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Nonsense formulas to paper over raw ignorance?
I'm almost certain that came from the DOGE babies.
The sad thing is, Trumpetters looking at that nonsense will be "OOOooo look how smert our boyo is!!"
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-sighs- Just. Please tell me this didn't happen. Please? I can accept malicious intent. I can accept protectionism. I can at least understand the reasoning behind that. But if this really did happen and it was blind faith in an AI.....I just can't deal with this level of stupid anymore.
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What did rocks ever do to you to be associated with the asshats?
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Bold of you to assume this utter shitshow of a civilisation timeline will continue to exist to 2500.
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No. This is not some cyber ploy.
He genuinely thinks he is smart. He genuinely thinks as a graduate of Wharton, he understands economics. He is genuinely influenced by whoever flattered him most recently. Consumed by his own insecurity, he cannot be seen to bow at any cost.
It isn't AI as you use the term. It is that his intelligence is artificial in the sense that it does not exist, and that like "AI" he, too is susceptible to hallucination, manipulation of weights, and jaw-droppingly dumb conclusions based on poor data fed into him.
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Remember how before the election, all of us were worried that if Trump won, this time he'd be surrounded by competent advisors?
I guess we dodged that bullet.
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On the other hand, they're being quite efficient and competent at the real job: fascist takeover of America.
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Donald does like himself some File-o-fish. So you might not be wrong.
(I'm also starting to think the love of McDonalds comes strictly from the quasi-shared name. That is the level of intellect on display)
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Lock them up! Extradite those freeloading penguins to the USA, and then send them to a prison in El Salvador. /s I wonder how much Trump is paying El Salvador to jail anyone his administration deems "illegal aliens" .
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I guess we’ll see. Dumping gasoline on the fire of the Great Depression wasn’t great. But neither is taking a hammer to the kneecaps of economic recovery.
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David Mayer
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Yeah, that's fair, but that kind of winning the population vote doesn't imply a strong mandate.
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The sentiment rings true. But the reality is that Donald takes action that he wants to take. It doesn't necessarily benefit him or anyone else.
Psychopaths often have odd motivations. And his is "any attention on me is good attention".
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My best friend and I have had an inside joke going for over 20 years about "evil penguins/penguin recipes"...
Fuck you for ruining that, you ignorant orange tubby bitch.
Fuck you for ruining that, you ignorant orange tubby bitch.
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The same people that wouldn't buy a 1/3 pounder burger because they thought the 1/4 pounder was bigger?
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Right. And he's been wanting tariffs for quite a long time. To the extent that an AI may have been used, it was just to come up with the specific rates. If they'd come from trump directly, they'd all be nice, simple numbers that end in 0 or 5, based on how he feels about the country at the time and whether or not somebody from it outbid him in an auction fifty years ago
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SubWoofer2
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The going to hell in a handbasket happening so very swiftly, brings forward the date of the War being launched as a distraction.
Europe will be faced with a war on two fronts - Ukraine and Greenland. Europe can't handle a war on two fronts.
Which will they support? Long-standing NATO member Denmark's sovereign territory, or the part of ex-USSR that was pledged not to be invaded as the deal when they gave up their nukes?
The planet's Northern Hemisphere summer will be interesting.
Europe will be faced with a war on two fronts - Ukraine and Greenland. Europe can't handle a war on two fronts.
Which will they support? Long-standing NATO member Denmark's sovereign territory, or the part of ex-USSR that was pledged not to be invaded as the deal when they gave up their nukes?
The planet's Northern Hemisphere summer will be interesting.
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Just when Liz Truss thought her record for causing random economic damage through stupidity was safe, Trump retorts: "hold my beer..."
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