| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a gas-guzzling gallimaufry of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Tariffs May Mean America Will Keep on Truckin' | I don't drive. That's meant that most of my life, I've been relegated to cities with public transportation or that are walkable — hence New York and London. I've often fantasized about being able to rent a car and zip north along the Hudson River or through the chunnel to France. But that would mean having to decide what car to use. And now I'm grateful I don't have to deal with that miasma of politics, economics, nationalism and climate policy. Donald Trump has now imposed a 25% tariff on all new car and auto component imports. As Chris Bryant writes: "The president cited national security grounds, but his aim is clear — to force manufacturers to re-shore production and thereby create US manufacturing jobs." Chris reminds us that history has already shown what that's likely to do to the US market. He writes: "Consider the 'chicken tax,' a 25% tariff on light truck imports enacted by the US in the 1960s in protest of European levies on US poultry. The tax is still around today (oddly, Trump doesn't talk about it much), and it's played a big role in reshaping the auto market to favor larger trucks. By choking off foreign competition, pickup trucks turned into a cash cow for US manufacturers, and combined with weaker fuel-economy standards, the market gradually shifted away from small cars to capacious trucks and SUVs. The two top-selling vehicles in the US last year were both pickups." Chris notes that Germany's former vice-chancellor once said that the way for the US to correct auto trade imbalances was to "build better cars." The latest tariffs aren't likely to encourage that. In fact, as John Authers notes, they may even increase prices in the already altitudinous US used car market. Furthermore, as much as they'd affect European sales in the US, they will stymie the Japanese and Korean manufacturers who are providing Americans with the most affordable alternatives to China's electric vehicles. Says David Fickling, "If you had a vision of the future where the global car industry wasn't dominated by China, you can kiss those dreams goodbye." This Is a Test (Psst. Here Are the Answers.) | The stories about how applicants are gaming the job market — that is, cheating — are appalling as well as ingenious. Parmy Olson says, "large employers have created this problem for themselves. More than 80% of companies use AI somewhere in hiring, and one in four use it for the entire recruitment process, according to Resume Builder, a recruitment-advisory service. That makes banning applicants from using AI hypocritical, particularly when many of them will be expected to use it on the job." AI may also have, surprisingly, run its course. Parmy writes: "Employers may be starting to notice the generic, jargony features of chatbot-generated text." Says one student preparing for his job hunt: "Standing out from the crowd is more important than ever." Among the urban myths standing out in AI paranoia is that the em dash is a sign that a piece of text is artificially generated. It's so unknowing that the propagators of this belief call "—" a hyphen, which is much shorter and looks like this: "-". Says Dave Lee: "Things have become so dire that some are inexplicably referring to the em dash as the 'ChatGPT hyphen.' Brands that use the mark in their advertising copy get called out as lazy. 'Public service announcement,' one popular clip discussing the issue declared, 'take out the hyphen.'" As Dave eloquently notes: "The em dash — so named because it is about the width of a capital letter M in whatever typeface is being used — is beloved by writers as one of the most versatile pieces of punctuation at our disposal. It lets you drop in extra information without spoiling the flow. It gives you latitude to write in the way you think, interrupted by thoughts, or other people. Above all else, the em dash is about setting the right pace for whatever it is you are trying to say." It's gotten into this popular mess because of "its prevalence in books and academic papers that OpenAI has ingested into its large language model." Those who are offended by it are just bad writers. And they'd better not go after the real hyphen. Otherwise, my last name is just going to be a mess of vowels. "Just like the Americans, Chinese women are starting to give up on marriages, too. But many still want to be mothers. A new phenomenon called 'drop the dad, keep the baby' is taking shape. Under this arrangement, the biological father agrees to be no more than a sperm donor, while the mother is solely responsible for bringing up the child. … Conservative commentators have panned this concept, arguing that a child must grow up with a father. But beggars can't be choosers. China is entering a fertility crisis, and the government must encourage this new way of thinking." — Shuli Ren in "'Drop the Dad, Keep the Baby' Is Chinese Women's New Mantra."  "Almost uniquely among developed nations, UK rates of disabling ill health that spiked during the pandemic have failed to recede and instead are forecast to rise further. (Denmark is another outlier, though the trend is less severe.) Different surveys say different things. So researchers must decide which data to give weight to, and which to discard. Has the long-term underfunding of the National Health Service caught up with us? Why are mental health distress rates surging among young people? Did raising the retirement age push more older people on to disability benefits?" — Matthew Brooker in "Britain's Sick Society Won't Heal Without Trust." Why coal is still king in green China. — David Fickling Erdogan's autocracy has ruined Turkey's promise. — Marc Champion Hegseth sloshes into the Pacific. — Karishma Vaswani Modi isn't a friend to Elon Musk's Grok. — Catherine Thorbecke Adolescence is a wake-up call. — Rosa Prince Britain's broke-down real estate isn't a buyer's market. — Marcus Ashworth Don't punish UBS for doing the right thing. — Marc Rubinstein Hong Kong lays down the Crypto law. — Andy Mukherjee Don't rush US banking reform. — Paul J. Davies Walk of the Town: Home Is Where You Draw the Lines | As many of my regular readers are aware, I have apartments in both New York and London. More importantly, I frequent restaurants in both cities that I consider extensions of my home. I like to eat well enough to know that I am a bad cook. And so to avoid dealing with my own cuisine, I step out to enjoy fare produced by much more professional kitchens. I will not pretend it isn't a good life. But it does have its endings. A favorite spot of mine was Momofuku Ko, which was part of David Chang's empire. I'd become so comfortable there that I'd just sit at the bar and sketch. Manager Su Wong Ruiz noticed one doodle and asked if I'd do it at a larger scale, so she could put it on the wall. It wasn't a pretty drawing, but it matched Chang's viral theme at the time, "ugly delicious" — which was also the name of a Netflix series he hosted. I agreed but kept falling behind schedule, finally finishing it while on vacation in the oxygen-lite heights of the Indian Himalayas. In July 2018, just days before I moved to London, I gave Su "Dragonfish." It hung by the bar to greet me everything I returned to New York — until November 2023, when Ko closed. I managed to get a hold of it before staffers scattered and the usual chaos of a shutdown dispersed things to who-knows-where. It sat in a corner of my Upper West Side apartment for months — until the manager at a London restaurant asked for a drawing. I'm a regular at Quality Wines in Farringdon and, as I was at Ko, feel so comfortable that sometimes I just take out my sketchpad and draw. And so I said, "I think I have one for you." In New York in January, I packed "Dragonfish" into my suitcase and brought it back to London (tariff-free!).  At home in Farringdon. Photograph and Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan The restaurant has pinned a little tongue-in-cheek "provenance" beneath it to explain how it got to be on its walls: "First displayed in Momofuku Ko in New York City from July 2018 to November 2023 when the restaurant closed." And so, it goes on. I don't cook. I like to eat out — and to draw in restaurants. It makes me feel at home. Notes: Please send art hacks and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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