this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face

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[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 27 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Man, this isn't even "doing your research" it's just knowing what very basic words mean.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 24 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".

[–] towerful@programming.dev 10 points 2 hours ago

Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I would've made you pay him. Every tariff is a tax but not every tax is a tariff. Of course your actual point still stands.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's not what a synonym is.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 points 53 minutes ago

My point exactly. The bet was about whether "tariff" and "tax" are synonymous. They aren't synonymous if they describe different things, even if one of those things is a subset of the other. (This is complicated a bit by the fact that synonymity is context-dependent so in some contexts they can be synonymous. I'm assuming a general context.)

To give a different example, every iPhone is a smartphone but not every smartphone is an iPhone. The two terms aren't synonymous except in specific contexts like when discussing the inventory of an Apple store.

In a general context, I would argue that the bet is lost – tariffs are taxes but taxes encompass more than just tariffs. The definition of synonymity is not fulfilled.

The actual point of the bet, namely to illustrate that tariffs are paid by people in the country that raised them (because they are taxes on imported goods and services), remains valid.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 hours ago

It's anti-intellectualism.

You don't need to understand any of it, you can just ask people who spend their lives researching this stuff.