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Chalk it up to bad timing: Some Home Depot customers are furious after a recent April Fools’ Day prank from a tool review website suggested that the home improvement giant would start charging parking fees due to inflation. This was no laughing matter, as anxious Americans awaited President Donald Trump’s tariffs news, expecting higher prices on goods and services. So the April 1 date didn’t register with angry viewers right away. Many took to social media, some creating a Reddit thread about the supposed fees, with one duped X user even proposing #BoycottHomeDepot. Desperate for some damage control, Home Depot responded on its official X account, posting, “this is an April Fools’ post from a tool review website. We do not charge for parking.” So, what exactly happened? On April 1, Pro Tool Reviews, an online product review site, published a fake news article that said Home Depot would start charging for parking to combat inflation and “offset increasing operational costs [to] keep prices competitive,” and that the modest parking fee (“$2 for up to two hours in central Florida, to $5 for a full day of parking in Los Angeles”) would help the company avoid passing those extra costs directly on to customers. Unfortunately for Home Depot, as the target of the joke, American consumers are now particularly sensitive about retailers passing the cost of tariffs on to them. Pro Tool Reviews told USA Today that the article’s high viewership was “truly humbling,” indicating the traction this apparent PR nightmare has received, with editor-in-chief Kenny Koehler adding, “we hope our friends over at Home Depot were able to laugh as well.” (We’re not so sure about that, Kenny.) This isn’t the first time an April Fools’ Day joke has caused trouble. In fact, there is a long list of brands whose pranks have gone awry, from Google to Volkswagen. In 2016, Google announced a new Gmail feature that it claimed would add a GIF of a yellow animated “Minion” character dropping a microphone at the end of an email. Google later apologized. And in 2021, the German carmaker claimed it was changing the name of its American division to “Voltswagen,” causing the stock to rise, as well as a great amount of confusion. The origin of April Fools’ Day dates back to 16th century France, when Charles IX decreed that the new year would no longer begin on Easter, but instead on January 1. Those who refused the change were named, you guessed it, “April fools.”
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump promised tariffs that would raise U.S. import taxes high enough to mirror what others assess as trade penalties on American goods. What he’s actually imposing is based on far more complicated math. Here’s a look at how the White House got its numbers: Why do the new tariff rates often differ by country? The Trump administration has declared an economic emergency to bypass Congress and impose a 10% tariff on nearly all countries and territories. It has set even higher levies for about 60 nations that it says are the worst” offenders. The 10% global tariffs take effect at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. The higher tariffs set for specific countries are due to kick in at one minute past midnight on April 9. Among the so-called worst offenders is China, which Trump argues protect its producers through malicious trade practices in addition to tariffs. Those efforts include actions such as imposing value added taxes on all goods, dumping overproduced products on markets to artificially deflate prices, or manipulating currency. To determine how much higher those nations’ rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each countrys trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation. It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate. Why not just charge reciprocal rates? The White House says its calculations kept new tariffs from going even higher for many countries and demonstrate that Trump is being kind to global trading partners. The administration maintains that creating a baseline levy with few exemptions is necessary to keep China and others from skirting the new tariffs by manufacturing goods and then shipping them to Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico or elsewhere to then be sent to the U.S. Thats why the White House list of tariffed locations includes obscure places like the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited. They are 2,550 miles (4,100 kilometers) from the coast of mainland Australia, which claims them as a territory. Is every country affected? No. Canada and Mexico are excluded because they already are facing 25% taxes on most imported goods that Trump announced last month, in an attempt to force both to crack down on fentanyl smuggling into the U.S. The White House originally said all others would be affected by at least the 10% tariff. But administration officials clarified on Thursday that countries already subject to stiff U.S. sanctions for example, Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, as well as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Belarus and Venezuela will not face the new, 10% global base tariff. Official said that is because sanctions and other existing barriers mean the U.S. has so little trade with those places that deficits are minimal. Why is Trump doing this? The president has spent months insisting America was at its wealthiest at the end of the Gilded Age in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it imposed high tariffs as the key means to generating revenue for the federal government. Trump even suggested Wednesday that the U.S. moving away from higher tariffs and toward a federal income tax in 1913 helped trigger the Great Depression of the 1930s a claim that economists and historians roundly reject. A more contemporary explanation might be found in Project 2025, a comprehensive blueprint compiled by leading conservatives about how to shrink the federal workforce and push Washington further to the right. It spelled out how Trump might impose high tariffs around the globe, giving his administration more room to negotiate lower levies with trading partners in exchange for U.S. priorities. White House officials insist the new tariffs are more about closing trade deficits, stimulating U.S. manufacturing and generating government revenue than eventually negotiating new trading deals. But Trump has shown he is willing to back off on threats of tariffs in exchange for offers of concessions. His administration has said the president is always ready to make deals, a sign the new tariffs may prove to be more bargaining chip than permanent policy. Why do US trade imbalances matter? American trade policy created a U.S. trade imbalance worth $1.2 trillion last year, a gap that some experts believe should be addressed in order to ensure the country’s long-term economic strength. But many economists say the trade imbalances that Trump is looking to correct are based on more than countries just using high tariffs or protectionist trade practices to boost their own exports. Basing the White House’s tariff math solely on trade deficits, for instance, fails to take into account U.S. consumer demand. Americans relish buying BMWs assembled in Germany, as well as French wine and coffee beans from Guatemala, and their spending can fuel trade imbalances regardless of the tax and tariff policies of the countries producing those goods. That means any attempt to close U.S. trade gaps by tariffs will likely mean increasing the cost of imported goods that Americans are buying, which in turn could hurt the economy because of increased inflationary pressures. Will Weissert, Associated Press Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
Google released its new Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental AI model late last month, and its quickly stacked up top marks on a number of coding, math, and reasoning benchmark testsmaking it a contender for the worlds best model right now. becoming apparent that the new reasoning model may be the best model in the world, at least for now. Gemini 2.5 Pro is a reasoning model, meaning its answers derive from a mix of training data and real-time reasoning performed in response to the user prompt or question. Like other newer models, Gemini 2.5 Pro can consult the web, but it also contains a fairly recent snapshot of the worlds knowledge: Its training data cuts off at the end of January 2025. Last year, in order to boost model performance, AI researchers began shifting toward teaching models to “reason” when they’re live and responding to user prompts. This approach requires models to process and retain increasingly more data to arrive at accurate answers. (Gemini 2.5 Pro, for example, can handle up to a million tokens.) However, models often struggle with information overload, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights from all that context. Google appears to have made progress on this front. The YouTube channel AI Explained points out that Gemini 2.5 fared very well on a new benchmark test called Fiction.liveBench thats designed to test a model’s ability to remember and comprehend context information. For instance, Fiction.liveBench might ask the model to read a novelette and answer questions that require a deep understanding of the story and characters. Some of the top models, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic, score well when the amount of stored data (the context window) is relatively small. But as the context window increases to 32K, then 60K, then 120Kabout the size of a noveletteGemini 2.5 Pro stands out for its superior comprehension. Thats important because some of the most productive use cases to date for generative AI involve comprehending and summarizing large amounts of data. A service representative might depend on an AI tool to swim through voluminous manuals in order to help someone struggling with a technical problem out in the field, or a corporate compliance officer might need a long context window to sift through years of regulations and policies. Gemini also scored much higher than competing reasoning models on a new benchmark called MathArena, which tests models using hard questions from recent math olympiads and contests. The test also requires that the model clearly show its reasoning as it steps toward an answer. Top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek failed to break 5% of a perfect score, but Gemini 2.5 Pro model scored an impressive 24.4%. The new Google model also scored highly on another super-hard benchmark called Humanitys Last Exam, which is meant to show when AI models exceed the knowledge and reasoning of top experts in a given field. The Gemini 2.5 scored an 18.8%, a score topped only by OpenAIs Deep Research model. The model also now sits atop the crowdsourced benchmarking leaderboard, LMArena. Finally, Gemini 2.5 Pro is among the top models for computer coding. It scored a 70.4% on the LiveCodeBench benchmark, coming in just behind OpenAIs o3-mini model, which scored 74.1%. Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 63.8% on SWE-bench (measures agentic coding), while Anthropics latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored 70.3%. Finally, Googles model outscored Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI models on the MMMU visual reading test by roughly six points. Google initially released its new model to paying subscribers, but has now made it accessible by all users for free.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Trump administrations 25% tariffs on imported cars and auto parts is expected to disrupt the auto industry and raise car prices by thousands of dollars. Electric vehicles are at particular risk. Trumps tariffs on vehicle imports went into effect on Thursday, and tariffs on imported auto parts will go into effect by May 3. For the car industry broadly, the lowest-priced American vehicles could see additional costs of $2,500 to $5,000 due to the tariffs, the Anderson Economic Group said in a report this week. SUVs, in particular, could be hit even harderthough many are assembled in the U.S., they have parts from Canada, Europe, and Mexico, and so could see price hikes of $10,000 to $12,000. EVs, as well, could see price increases that “exceed $15,000,” according to the report. For some imported models, tariffs could raise prices by up to $20,000. All told, U.S. consumers could see an estimated $30 billion increase in the cost of cars in the first full year of the tariffs. Though the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) sought to spur domestic EV manufacturing, there are still a handful of EVs that are importedincluding the Polestar 2 (from China), the Mustang Mach-E (from Mexico), the Volkswagen ID.BUZZ (from Germany), and the Hyundai Ioniq 6 (from South Korea), though Hyundai did just open a U.S. plant to build its Ioniq 5 and 9 EVs in Georgia. EVs manufactured in the U.S. still rely on imported materials, primarily batteries and battery components. The IRA has led to the establishment of domestic production facilities, but the transition is still ongoing, says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. Even Teslas, which are made in the U.S., have about 20% to 25% of their value in components sourced from Mexico. Elon Musk himself said that the cost impact of these tariffs is not trivial. And these arent the only tariffs at play for EVs. While both electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles are affected by tariffs, EVs are impacted more by aluminum tariffs and battery materials, which can significantly raise production costs, Valdez Streaty says. EVs use more aluminum than gas-powered cars as a way to reduce weight and make them more efficient (both vehicle types use about the same amount of steel, which is also facing tariffs). Trump could also impose even higher tariffs on graphite, a key component in anodes and batteries overall; the U.S. International Trade Commission says China has been exporting artificially cheap graphite, which has suppressed the U.S.’s own graphite industry. Petitions from U.S. producers of anode materials have requested tariffs on Chinese graphite be raised to as high as 920%. (The U.S. produces no graphite itself, and so relies on imports.) That could raise the cost of synthetic graphite anode material from $4,200 per metric ton to approximately $42,672 per metric ton, Valdez Streaty says, which could raise the entire cost of NMC 811 cells, a type of lithium-ion-battery, by 51%. Tesla, Volkswagen, and Ford have used such battery cells. Tariffs, EV tax credit removal would hurt EV demand The U.S. already lacks affordable EVsespecially compared to China, which has made EV models for as cheap as $10,000. Tariffs, combined with the potential rollback of the EV tax credit, could sink domestic EV demand, even those made by American workers. The EV tax credit, part of the IRA, was meant to spur domestic EV production; getting rid of it could then eliminate the need for future EV or EV battery factories here, according to a Princeton University study from March. That study found that if that EV tax credit goes away (and also if tailpipe emissions regulations are reversed), then as much as 100% of planned EV factories could be at risk of being canceled or closed. Between 29% and 72% of U.S. battery factories operating by the end of 2025 would also be unnecessary to meet automotive demand and could be at risk of closure, the study noted. Thats because removing the tax credit could cause EV sales to drop about 30% in 2027 and 40% in 2030, compared to a scenario in which those policies continued. The study found that cumulatively, there could be 8.3 million less EVs and plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads in 2030.
Category:
E-Commerce
Extreme weather is dangerous weather, and that’s particularly true for the heavy rainfall events that experts say are becoming more frequent with climate change. The powerful storms can pose threats ranging from falling limbs to downed power lines to drowning. Experts say disaster preparation and good planning can help protect lives and property. What should you do if you face record rainfall? Long before extreme weather happens, it’s important to consider whether your home meets building codes, and to know what your insurance covers, experts say. This is the time to address any shortcomings. Once storms draw near, stay informed by signing up for real-time city, county and federal weather alerts, and listen to the news and whatever your local officials are saying. You can take simple steps to help protect your property, such as ensuring that gutters, storm drains and stormwater systems are clear and ready to do their part in carrying off heavy rain. If using sandbags to protect property, make sure they’re properly made and stacked to keep water out. Should you try to evacuate or stay put? If there are local orders to evacuate, you need to heed them. Gather important documents, get enough gas to drive out and prepare to be away for an extended period of time, said Jeannette Sutton, associate professor at the University at Albany. People need to err on the side of caution, she said. As major storms move in, there often comes a point when leaving is more hazardous than staying put. One major danger involves flooded roadways. Drivers who attempt to push through them can be swept away by water that is deeper than it appeared and stronger than thought. How can you prepare your home and belongings? Moving keepsakes, furniture and valuables to upper levels and making sure sump pump batteries are fully charged are shorter-term ways to prepare, along with ensuring there’s enough food, water and medical supplies. Cars can be protected by getting them into a parking structure with upper levels. Experts also say use common sense in planning: Don’t keep your backup generators in a basement where they can be ruined by flooding, for instance. What can you do once a disaster has started? If you aren’t able to prepare for floods in time, you should move to the highest level of your home, experts say, or seek out a safe shelter. If high winds and tornadoes are a threat, however, it could be dangerous to be too high up. That’s why checking forecasts is critical. Alexa St. John, Associated Press climate reporter
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E-Commerce