Aside from your opinion about that president, this is an interesting take, since the trades are between countries and the markets within those countries -- not between presidents.
> I don't think he makes the greatest trade partner anyway
This seems to imply that the president of Brazil represents the entirety of an economic block, and as such a trade deal should suffer because of just one person?
The value of a publisher these days is not about the cost of publishing anymore (for obvious reasons, like text editing technology and the Internet).
Today it's almost 100% about the prestige/brand recognition of the journals which they still control.
Journal prestige still matters because: (i) it's a way people can quickly determine the value of a paper (i.e. without reading it); and (ii) "where" you publish has direct impact on researchers careers, funding, etc.
The only way out is for the research community to start using other means of ranking papers and assessing the impact of research in a way that doesn't depend on which journal it got published.
The key here is to distinguish from the pedantic snobs from good developers.
The pedantic snob will usually hold some extreme position about topics such as (1) obscure language minutia; (2) endless "framework building"; (3) premature optimization; or (4) mindless design "best practices".
They will have high pride attached to whatever is it and they would add a flair of expertise to it, making you feel like you hired a genius. At the start, it looks like they are working on some super advanced wizardry, but you eventually find that they mostly waste time.
On the other hand, the good developers care more about delivering value.
The good developer will not waste time solving problems you don't have --thus slicing through your 90% problem like butter-- and at the same time will possess the sharp tools to solve the hard 10% problems your less than good developer is unable solve no matter the deadline.
For option 1, you hire a good developer.
For option 2, you hire a snob.
If you hire your average cheap engineer, you get option 0: he/she will eventually do OK for 90% of the problems, but the last 10% (which is often critical) will be a mess.
I think templates get a bad reputation because in practice many uses of templates are not appropriate.
Too many clever people saw 3 repetitions of a pattern and decided to show case every template trick to create a "generic library" that is compile-time optimized, usually to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Multiply that many times through the course of a project and you end up with code that seems to try to maximizes job security.
"That Tesla Autopilot had been safely used in over 100 million miles [...] That contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all."
That is such a weak statistical claim, that it border the disingenuous.
> I don't think he makes the greatest trade partner anyway
This seems to imply that the president of Brazil represents the entirety of an economic block, and as such a trade deal should suffer because of just one person?