Political Memes

All the chat bots say this is how you balance it...

They absolutely asked chatbots, and I'd bet money at some stage someone said "make it look more complicated" and that was then made as a prompt to the AI...

Who made a simple mathmatic equation look complicated by adding shit that cancels out.

The people who actually used the numbers had no idea where they came from, or what it meant.

So they're almost certainly learning today that it both was made by a chatbot, and that it's just that simple.

Like, the people running this clown show literally and figuratively don't know what they're doing. They think real experts are giving them advise on this shit and it's some boomer using chatgpt

Then having done all the bullshit maths, they found out that Australia was a negative number because we buy more than we sell with the USA. But they slapped a 10% tariff on anyway because we don’t like their beef products because of a little issue of biosecurity.

Pretty sure all of economics is just using greek/roman letters to make the most basic and irrelevant equations seem smart.

Quality use of that meme, all I can say.

What offends me most about this is using the convolution operator * for multiplication in a typeset equation

The meme is referencing the official US Trade Representative's explanation^1^ of the tariffs, where yes, the math really is as stupid as it seems, but it gets worse.

The research that Trump's team used to determine that "calculation" flat out states that when the US tries to tariff other countries:

1. American importers pay for the US tariff AND
2. American exporters pay for the foreign retaliatory tariffs.

The source clearly demonstrates that American tariffs are paid directly by Americans in both directions, meaning out of everyone on Earth the tariffs screw the US the most. Trump's administration legitimized the source by citing that research for its calculations on the tariff rates.

The explanation freely admits that the stupid parameters were chosen more or less arbitrarily, and they cited the paper (Cavallo et al 2021)^2^ but conveniently didn't list it in their "References" section.

Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States... Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods... [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs

~1~ ~https://web.archive.org/web/20250403013314/https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations~

~2~ ~https://www.nber.org/papers/w26396~

So you’re saying they named a recession after me? I can do better! I’ll give them the Donpression! It’ll be the greatest Donpression there ever was. It’ll be in the history books, folks. No Donpression will ever be greater!

They forgot to multiply the whole thing by -e^(i*pi)

No way... Is this real? LOL

Can someone please provide the context what epsilon and phi suppose to represent and why they are 4 and 1/4?

I'm surprised that actually had someone with enough math skills to accomplish that.