Teenagers do all those things constantly.

Telling 15 year-olds what to do famously always works.

Follow up: check out this bountiful harvest. It came in two boxes.

I have never heard of HP sauce but thank you for giving me something else to search online.

Google doesn’t work anymore but it seems like ketchup but Worcestershire? Is that close?

I don’t think steak sauce is a thing in South Louisiana. Prime rib gets a horseradish/sour cream sauce. Au jus is common with steak. But we also tend to eat more seafood than beef so the standard sauces are something like Crystal Hot Sauce, Tabasco, etc. Ketchup for making cocktail sauce. (A lot of places serve oysters or whatever with a little cup of horseradish and you decide how spicy your cocktail sauce will be by adding ketchup and stuff.)

I’ve definitely eaten more calamari than steaks. So, by no means is this a universal concept. I’ve just never seen anyone put A1 on anything.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bottle of A1 sauce in real life. What is it? I’m American but from Louisiana and we have different sauces.

They’re going to be light years ahead of us at making pregnant Sonic images.

Definitely showing both sides of their ass.

I think Weee probably already imported the Ramen and it’s in a warehouse, not being made to order. But it’s ok. I can probably afford the tax on ramen noodles. I’m partial to the spicy kimchi ones anyway so they’re probably South Korean. I also love the cheapest, finest shrimp flavored packets that are like $1 each. (I ate them as a kid so they’re a comfort food.) Those might even be made in America.

Also, Master P has a gumbo-flavored Ramen product and there’s always yaka mein. I live in New Orleans and those could be made here for all I know. (Yaka mein is definitely made here. It’s basically ramen noodles but with Creole New Orleans broth and seasoning. The legend is that Chinese laborers building the railroads introduced the concept of ramen to black laborers in New Orleans and a new, cheap dish was born. It was eventually marketed as a hangover cure and called “Old Sober” but it’s called yaka mein now.)

If anything good comes from this, it’ll be reforming that. Even if tariffs were still a couple percentage points instead of based on a formula zero economists endorsed, you shouldn’t be forced to pay (or the companies able to avoid) tariffs by using a distribution center in a third country. It should all be based on country of origin and final destination.

A Chinese (or American) company setting up a factory in Vietnam is an entirely different thing. I’m not talking about that. The product was made in Vietnam and real foreign direct investment happened that’s beneficial to everyone. I just mean logistics hubs should be irrelevant when calculating tariffs.

The “ideal” solution if we must use tariffs would be to take into account where it’s all made but that’s way too complicated to implement and easy to game¹, unfortunately. An iPhone is assembled in China but using parts from all over Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) and with a substantial portion of the actual value coming from California and the UK. Where is an iPhone really made if a Taiwan Semiconductor fab makes a bespoke processor based on ARM but designed in California? “Made in China” is what’s stamped on the box (actually they put “Made in China, Designed in California).

And that’s just the processor and a few other advanced chips. I think Samsung makes the screens in South Korea based on technology developed in the U.S. by Corning. If Apple wanted to skirt tariffs under that sort of regime, they could plausibly argue that the assembly is worth $10, manufacturing is worth $90, and the design and software are worth $900. I mean, smartphones are commodities now. People use iPhones because they like the software.

Tariffs based on the final step of assembly don’t make sense for complicated products made by multinational companies in the 21st century. The world makes an iPhone. Accounting for it all would be impossible.

I, similarly, ordered a shitload of ramen noodles from sayweee.com/en before the tariffs kicked in. They haven’t arrived yet but when they do, it’s going to be a box so big, my neighbors are going to assume I got new furniture.

Most Apple products are assembled in China — some in India and Vietnam — from parts made in the region so there’s no new tariffs involved. Only Americans will have to pay more. It’s sort of like how Toyota and Honda having plants in Alabama won’t pay import tariffs.

Cars might be a bad example because their supply chains are so complex. They’ll still be more expensive because the components are often made overseas and Trump, idiotically, has tariffs on those parts (and steel and aluminum to boot). But a “foreign” car that rolls off the assembly line in the U.S. won’t have tariffs while an “American” car assembled in Mexico will.

Not currently. I used to be.

I wasn’t dismissing the problem that they exist. That’s the first problem. I was saying uncertainty prevents as much investment as do tariffs. No one knows what the tariffs will be in a month. His brain is a non-Newtronean fluid at this point.

A big problem with Trump’s tariffs isn’t that they exist; it’s that they’re subject to change at any moment. To be clear, they’re idiotic. But no one can invest in anything long term in America right now.

Imagine opening a restaurant in the U.S. right now. Half your kitchen equipment is subject to steel or aluminum tariffs. You don’t know if you can import anything. Or you can wait a year and see how full Trump’s diaper is. He also looks half dead without makeup and might have pissed off the Yakuza (or worse). The smart move is to wait to open your restaurant.

Now imagine any business bigger than a restaurant.

Even if it does the basic shit at the expense of me working one less hour a week, it’s not worth paying for. And that ignores the downsides like spam, bots, data centers needing power/water, and politicians thinking GPU cards are national security secrets.

I don’t think we need a Skynet scenario to imagine the downsides.

I use it in software development and it hasn’t changed my life. It’s slightly more convenient than last gen code completion but I’ve never worked on a project where code per hours was the hold up. One less stand-up per week would probably increase developer productivity more than GitHub Copilot.

Did you see the wack ass Quake II version Microsoft bragged about? It wasn’t even playable. A fucking 12 year old could do better.

Because it’s alpha software. We’re 40 years away from “A.I.” being able to be competent at anything.

Dear CEOs: I will never accept 0.5% hallucinations as “A.I.” and if you don’t even know that, I want an A.I. machine cooking all your meals. If you aren’t ok with 1/200 of your meals containing poison, you’re expendable.

Humans or even regular ass algorithms are fine. A.I. can predict protein folding. It should do a lot else unless there’s a generational leap from “making shitty images” to “as close to perfect as it gets.”