I think the argument is that NSA already knows exactly how valuable metadata is, while the average person significantly underestimates its importance without a concrete demonstration.
The same NSA that publicly states "We kill people over metadata"?
If that's the type of things they say publicly at conferences we can only imagine what a more sensitive comment would look like. How anyone can underestimate the importance of that is beyond me.
2"! I found a matching reference to it but this is not where I bought it (and also sold for waaay more than I paid, which was something like $130 IIRC) https://www.ebay.com/itm/136814704435. The pictures and details in all of the listings are often very mismatched (there are several variations of different lengths and sizes) but that's the model number of the one I ordered.
Here's a funny picture comparing it to a 2 liter https://i.imgur.com/UIzpDMO.jpeg. As far as the matching bolt... I never did find one to order in time so I gave that as a challenge to figure out before next year! So far he has been using it as a doorstop, mostly to cause people to do a double take when they walk through.
If anyone knows of a good pair of comically large pliers that actually function well enough please let me know.
Outside the specious argument that other countries would pay, the other more serious argument was that tarrifs would promote the growth of domestic alternatives.
Yes it will hurt, they argued, but the long term effect will be a stronger and more independent domestic economy. And the pain is worth it for that end. There's plenty of evidence that what actually results are inferior products from domestic companies insulated from international competition, but that was the pitch.
There's also a large group in the base that voted for this who already had an ideological "buy local even if it costs more" philosophy, so to them the proposal was just to force everyone else to join their cause.
Thing is, whilst you can make that argument for carefully chosen tariffs in strategic industries (something basically every country including the US was already trying to do, for better and for worse), you don't get much domestic production realignment for arbitrarily large short term tariffs as a precursor to a "big beautiful deal" or punitive tariffs because other countries push back on your proposal to annex another country. Or indeed tariffs levied on the exports of uninhabited islands
In some cases, the Trump tariffs have actually been so poorly designed that US manufacturing has been hit, because the tariffs on the raw materials and parts are higher than the tariffs on importing finished products from third countries...
The "do something" is support open hardware, sell more machines, provision fewer product variations.
I get that these are the immovable objects and sacred cows of the management ranks ..new executives need to try, try, try again. All these features just sit in the "update" queue advertising their uselessness, and eventually highlight their abandonment.
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