Either there are zero (0) ships headed from China to ports in California, or there are 53. It’s one or the other, it cannot be anything in between. In the media war over Trump’s tariffs, truth is the first casualty. And AI is holding the smoking pistol.
The headline from CNN yesterday was provocative,
Zero ships from China are bound for California’s top ports. Officials haven’t seen that since the pandemic.
Provocative, but not true. CNN drills down,
Not a single cargo vessel had left China with goods for the two major West Coast ports in the past 12 hours.
Which 12 hours? CNN does not specify. ZeroHedge replies,
This is great…the only problem is that there actually are – checks Bloomberg – exactly 53 ships headed for California’s top ports, more than there were on this day one year ago.
So, which is it? 0 or 53? ZeroHedge later posted the list of vessels en route, by ship name and arrival date at LA/Long Beach, showing the tonnage increasing over time.
This is no small matter of dueling statistics. If the answer is zero, then it shows that Trump’s tariffs have completely destroyed the world economy, turning back progress to something on level with the pre-Bronze-Age era. If the answer is 53, then it looks like…business as usual.
I had planned on writing about this topic last week, keying off of an earlier ZeroHedge post on Twitter (X). However, before I could get to it, the post had vanished, pulled from the platform.
From what I could piece together, the post was pulled due to a dispute with Grok, speaking of non-corporeal beings.
Here, ZeroHedge makes a good point about AI models: they can (perhaps) tell you where a target once was, or where a broad consensus believed it to be. But they cannot tell you where the target is at this moment, or where it will be in the next instant. AI is a lagging indicator.
Caveat lector.
