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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
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