Comment by deepfriedchokes

Comment by deepfriedchokes 9 hours ago

2 replies

This is stupid. The law shouldn’t be written in such a way that companies can exploit silly loopholes, nor should it be written in such a way that is so invasive to normal business operations.

JadeNB 8 hours ago

> This is stupid. The law shouldn’t be written in such a way that companies can exploit silly loopholes, nor should it be written in such a way that is so invasive to normal business operations.

Note that the article discusses that these are not loopholes in the sense of weird unexpected hacks, but that the original exceptions were intentionally written in response to lobbying by manufacturers betting that they can offset their lobbying costs by the associated reduction in tariffs.

Orthogonally, though, even if these were loopholes that manufacturers were wriggling through against lawmakers' intentions, then (1) I think that there is no such thing as a law that is written so that it has literally no loopholes—even to make the claim, you'd have to define what a "loophole" is, which would probably require first require a precise definition of what the intent of the law is, at which point that would be the law and any work-arounds would be not loopholes, by definition—and (2) more or less because of (1), these things are still enforced by humans; as redpanda notes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594968), one of Ford's attempts at such skulduggery was successfully stopped by a DOJ lawsuit.

  • laweijfmvo 8 hours ago

    yup, my first reaction was “who lobbied to get their products excluded from the tariffs”