Let's be careful. It wasn't really "vibes", especially not at the start. There was a very clear cut ("simplistic" would be too generous) formula that determined the tariffs. Granted, probably the tone of the "negotiations" since then has been vibe-influenced...
Sorry, but I have first semester art students who apply more care when choosing electronic components for their first project after 8 hours of instructions. And art students are not exactly known to be math-heads.
The first thing you'd do is to check for edge cases, like how the formula treats countries that you just extract wealth from like Lesotho. If you have 10 interns spending 20 minutes on each of the 194 countries that takes you a single 8 hour work day tops.
Yes, the formula is appallingly stupid. But it is a formula. If it was "vibes", do you think Trump would have anything to say about Lesotho at all? Or the Heard and McDonald islands? Maybe we're disagreeing on the term....
I just think we should be careful to use rigorously correct criticisms of the cheeto. There's still plenty to say.
Ed: thinking more, I think the best way it could still be vibes based is if they only evaluated the formula for China, said "looks good", and mass-applied it with no further thought.
Maybe we're arguing about words and definitions here, but with "vibes-based", what I meant isn't that there was no plan at all and everything was purely vibes, what I meant is that the plan they put into reality appears to have no internal logic that aligns with the stated goals.
The elastic constants in the divisor of that formula were 0.25 multiplied with 4, which obviously results in 1. And something divided by 1, well stays the same. So why the hell even have them? It does not appear anybody had any real basis for the why of that formula.
Your idea that they went with the result for China and applied formula without more checking sounds surprisingly plausible..
