Oi Barone!
It’s not every day one gets cited in the financial press (even if it’s only obliquely).
I have a long history as a data geek. As a high school kid, I spent hours researching and creating lists of physical and mental diseases as reference material for roleplaying games.
In college, I pored over lists and dictionaries en route to creating a 45,000-item database of words and phrases for a natural language insult generator I wrote.
And in my first professional job, I read through 13,000 medical diagnosis codes to find the oddest, such as “adverse effects of plague vaccine”, “atypical face pain”, “fall into hole”, “fall into other hole”, and dozens more you can read about here.
Fast forward to last week, when I was reading the daily market summary email from Barron’s financial newspaper.
In a section discussing the president’s deferring tariffs on imports from China for a specific list of products, the author included links to the full data for both List 4A (products being taxed in September) and List 4B (products where tax is deferred until December). The article talked about how outdated the lists were (37 subcategories related to VCRs?), and mentioned that “live asses” and “track suits” appeared on List 4B.
Being the kind of person I am, I went and took a look at those lists for my own entertainment. I subsequently emailed the author, saying “I'll be sure to finalize my purchases before the tariff on imported warships (List 4A subheading 8906.10.00) goes into effect per the original schedule.”
The author was sufficiently amused to (a) respond via email, and (b) include my observation in the weekly print issue of Barron’s.
I’ll take that as proof that I have a share-worthy sense of humor…
