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nonethewiser04/03/20251 replyview on HN

>It explains why they singled out Reunion from France, it has a separate ccTLD

It also has a separate country abbreviation (RE). You know, like you'd see on an address. The thing that tells you where something, like a good imported in to the United States, is coming from.

This is is why it has a separate ccTLD by the way.

This blue sky thread is just an incredible example of motivated reasoning.


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garfield_light04/03/2025

> It also has a separate country abbreviation (RE). You know, like you'd see on an address. The thing that tells you where something, like a good imported in to the United States, is coming from.

Yes, obviously, it's ISO 3166-1 but that's a batshit way of assigning tariffs. To the point I suspect it's a LLM.

Norfolk Island? The island with 3000 people, which in the context of international trade is a speck at the side of Australia. Or the uninhabited Heard Island and McDonald Islands with zero trade?

If Reunion and Norfolk Island are to be considered separately from their mainlands, where are the tariffs for Easter Island (Chile)? It has more people than Norfolk and probably more trade, it's 3700ish km from the administrative region it belongs, so it geographically distinct like Reunion.

Anyone (with a pulse) tasked with calculating the tariffs would see this and think "I have to remove these outliers". So the two options are:

A. Someone took the ISO 3166-1 codes and brainlessly calculated their batshit formula without noticing that HM doesn't produce anything. They did not instead do the more natural thing, go from highest imports to lowest which would've eliminated HM and most anomalies. They didn't even check their work.

B. They asked an LLM, which calculated this in the most naive way possible one-shot.

I dunno governor, this looks like vibecoded Excel spreadsheets.

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