alt Hacker NewsAm I the only one who finds this site undecipherable?
Take this snippet for example:
American exporters
$16.0B of what American exporters sell to Canada sits in headings Canada taxes today, 10.5% of the total. From 8 September it is $26.5B.
See whose jobs
"See whose jobs" is even more confusing. Nothing about jobs was mentioned. It's talking, presumably about an increase in a tariff collected by Canada. I can understand this will affect certain jobs, but "See whose jobs" just confuses the situation more. I cannot figure out for the life of me what's going on.
Here's another example when you click the "nuclear option" it jumps, without context beyond "Canada’s energy supply is a fourth exposure, and a different kind" to this:
The nuclear option
Canada has not done this, and nothing here predicts it will. But tariffs are the smaller lever.
Flip the switch to see which states buy their energy from Canada, and whether they have anywhere else to buy it.
Crude cost per gallon
$1.86
what everyone else charges, up 26¢ a gallon
Both figures are prices the United States actually paid this year: $67.17 a barrel to Canada, $77.92 a barrel
to everyone else, across 704 million Canadian barrels. Careful with the gap, though. It is not a pump price,
since refining, distribution, tax and margin all sit on top of the crude. Nor is it really a discount: Canadian
barrels are mostly heavy crude, and heavy crude sells below lighter grades wherever it goes, so a lot of the
difference is just the grade. What replacing one with the other would cost is a question this page does
not have the data to answer.
Replies
It is AI slop, which has the veneer of sense without the substance. https://cymerys.com/w/im-becoming-ai-blind
It is AI slop. It was written using Claude Code.
The language is very like Claude Code with Opus 5: no prepositions, unclear references, ambiguous, bad phrase transitions, ...
And the css is exactly the same that Claude Code uses for its artifacts and documentation.
> What does "sits in headings Canada taxes" mean?
My guess would be it's refering to the Harmonized System[1], used to classify goods on import and export declarations:
The HS is organized into 21 Sections, which are subdivided into 96 Chapters (Chapters 1 to 97 with Chapter 77 reserved for potential future use by the HS). The 96 HS Chapters are further subdivided into 1,228 headings and 5,612 subheadings in the current 2022 edition of the HS.
Most countries have additional subdivisions, for example in US the HS is used as a basis for the Harmonized Tariff Schedule[2].
The classification is used to determine tariffs, taxes and restrictions, but those are often applied to the broader groups, so covering say all imported aluminum, rather than say aluminum of a particular kind for use in a particular sector.
> Whatever this means, how does it jump to $26.5B from $16.0B on a single date?
Because Canada announced it will impose tariffs on more types of goods on that day, ie more headings, affecting more of the exported value.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonized_System#Structure
[2]: https://hts.usitc.gov/