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President Donald Trump may have paused the reciprocal tariffs that crashed the worlds stock marketsand still threaten to cause a global recessionbut his original aim remains: He believes that he can restart the American manufacturing engine by penalizing imports from China, Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, the European Union, and penguins. His logic is that tariffs will make products like iPhones and Air Jordans (made in and imported from countries like China and Vietnam) too expensive for American consumers to buy. If companies want to keep selling their products, they will be forced to build new factories in the U.S., Trump claims. These factories will employ millions of 100% pure Usonians, he says, thus ushering the country into a new era of prosperity in which everyone is happily earning a living wage manufacturing smartphones and sports shoes. It sounds good until you really think about it. While the administration touts the measures as a path to economic renaissance, the fact is that many Americans are bracing for a future of higher prices and economic uncertainty. Many economists will tell you in detail why this is a very bad idea for everyone. The explanation is complex and, in the past, the argument would have been confined to op-eds by experts and TV interviews with political pundits. This time, things are a bit different: https://t.co/nT8L9losRl— Linus Ekenstam eu/acc (@LinusEkenstam) April 9, 2025 Everyday people are using generative AI to create pictures and videos to make the case in the most powerful, easy-to-understand way. These are made with Sora, Linus Ekenstam, a European self-defined AI evangelist and optimist, tells me via X. He wasnt alone in his visual critique. Meanwhile, others visualized Trumps dream of America as a 1950s industrial wonderland, imagining the ultimate consequences of such an idea today. Chinese social media users have taken to dunking on the U.S., holding a mirror up to Trump’s policies with the help of AI-generated images that depict a not-so-glamorous future. Leaving aside the fact that any future factories will probably be heavily robotized, does anyone in the U.S. really want to be exploited for low pay and long hours, like overseas workers are now, to satisfy our consumerist hunger? @axiang67 Make america great again#tariff #america – Ben Lau Raw power Thanks to tools like Kling, Sora, Runway, and Luma, ordinary people are able to create striking images and videos that encapsulate their visions, fears, and frustrations more or less instantaneously. Their pixels bypass intellectual circuits and connect directly to human nature. If the images are rich and engaginglike that video of the factorythey leave a lasting effect on our emotional state. Research in neuroscience has shown the primal power of visuals in shaping beliefs and emotions again and again. Images activate regions of the brain tied to emotion and memory more effectively than text and words, a well studied phenomenon known as the picture-superiority effect. Visual stimuli reach us 60,000 times faster than text and leave a more lasting impression than verbal information. According to Lynell Burmark, PhD associate at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development and expert in visual literacy, unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7 bits of information. . . . Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.” — Glaucous (@glaucousness.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:19:27.785Z Images also bypass cognitive resistanceour brain trying to avoid discomfortand just make you feel in 13 milliseconds. This explains why AI-generated imagery is so potent. It doesnt just inform, it evokes. Theres no way around that. We are visual creatures, shaped by biological evolution since eyes first developed in the Tree of Life 544 million years ago. Resistance is futile. Democratizing political commentary The power of AI-generated tariff memes lies in neuroscience but also in their ability to eliminate the need for imagination. When confronted with an abstract concept like economic inflation, many people struggle to imagine its impact. But show them an image of a $20 loaf of bread, empty shelves in a store, or tired, sad workers in a factory, and the message becomes visceral. This is where AI memes shinebridging the gap between abstract policy and visible consequences. In the past, creating such impactful images required tools, specialized skills, and access to a limited platform like a newspaper or TV channel. Now, for just a few bucks a month, anyone can transform their thoughts into compelling visual narratives and put them in front of the eyes of millions. Anyone with a smartphone is now a political cartoonist or filmmaker. A lot of what people make will be worthless, sure, but there will also be some gems. "Be cool! Everything is going to work out well" pic.twitter.com/WxPfEBCdem— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) April 9, 2025 Nothing about this is new. We have seen AI being used for political commentary before. Remember the viral images of Trump getting arrested? Those were just early examples of how generative AI could be used for political commentary and shaping public perception. These new memes are next-level, though, visualizing complex policies like tariffs in ways that resonate universally. This use of AI as a tool to democratize powerful visual commentary is perhaps one of the few silver linings of a technology that, until now, mostly consumed computing cycles to make absurdly surreal clips. As Trumps tariffs sink the world’s economy, its good to know that people can use AI to fight back against the White Houses policy mayhem one prompt at a time.
Category:
E-Commerce
Many people have been waking up over the last 24 hours to find that they have received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. The first question people have is whether the payment is legitimate. And the good news is: yes, it is. Heres what you need to know about the Facebook payment you may have received since yesterday. Why did I get a payment from Facebook? Starting yesterday, people began posting on social media that they had received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. That payment is actually part of a class action lawsuit settlement Facebook agreed to back in 2022. At the center of the class action suit was the allegation that between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, Facebook improperly tracked its users around the web using its then-newish Like button that was displayed on non-Facebook websites. Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, denied wrongdoing but ultimately decided to settle the class action lawsuit instead of fighting it in court. As part of that settlement, Facebook agreed to pay $90 million, which would be distributed to its users in the United States who were covered under the settlement (after attorney fees and other associated costs were deducted). The individual user’s payments from that settlement are now being distributed, which is why you may have received one since yesterday. How much is the Facebook internet settlement payment? Users on social media are reporting that they have begun receiving a settlement payment of around $40. On this Reddit thread here, multiple users say their payment was for exactly $40.67. Some users on X are likewise reporting that amount. The payments are showing up as coming from “Facebook Internet Tracking Settlement Administrator,” users are reporting. The effective date of the settlement was February 24, 2025, according to the settlement website. The terms of the settlement mandated that Facebook begin sending out the payments within 45 days of the effective date, which meant that the funds would start being distributed on April 10, 2025. Given the social media reports, that is the same date that people began reporting receiving payments from Facebook. How are people being paid? Claimants could choose how they wanted to receive their settlement payment when they submitted a claim, according to ClaimDepot. Claimants reportedly could select from one of five options: PayPal Venmo Virtual Prepaid Card Zelle Check mailed to an address the claimant provided Can I still submit a claim? No. All claims needed to be submitted by September 22, 2022. If you did not submit a claim by then, you are not eligible for a payment.
Category:
E-Commerce
China announced Friday that it will raise tariffs on U.S. goods from 84% to 125% the latest salvo in an escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies that has rattled markets and raised fears of a global slowdown.While U.S. President Donald Trump paused import taxes this week for other countries, he raised tariffs on China and they now total 145%. China has denounced the policy as “economic bullying” and promised countermeasures. The new tariffs begin Saturday.Washington’s repeated jacking up of tariffs “will become a joke in the history of the world economy,” a Chinese Finance Ministry spokesman said in a statement announcing the new tariffs. “However, if the U.S. insists on continuing to substantially infringe on China’s interests, China will resolutely counter and fight to the end.”China’s Commerce Ministry said it would file another lawsuit with the World Trade Organization against the U.S. tariffs.Trump’s on-again, off-again measures have caused alarm in stock and bond markets and led some to warn that the U.S. could be headed for a recession. There was some relief when Trump paused the tariffs for most countries but concerns remain since the U.S. and China are the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 economies, respectively.The trade war between the U.S. and China “could severely damage the global economic outlook,” the head of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said earlier this week.Chinese tariffs will affect goods like soybeans, aircrafts and their parts and drugs all among the country’s major imports from the U.S. Beijing, meanwhile, suspended sorghum, poultry and bonemeal imports from some American companies last week, and put more export controls on rare earth minerals, critical for various technologies.The United States’ top imports from China, meanwhile, include electronics, like computers and cell phones, industrial equipment and toys and consumers and businesses are likely to see prices rise on those products, with tariffs now at 145%.Trump announced on Wednesday that China would face 125% tariffs, but he did not include a 20% tariff on China tied to its role in fentanyl production.White House officials hope the import taxes will create more manufacturing jobs by bringing production back to the United States a politically risky trade-off that could take years to materialize, if at all. This story has been updated to correct the attribution of the quote about the U.S. raising tariffs to a spokesman from the Finance Ministry spokesman, not the Commerce Ministry. Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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