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A comment on Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything. Parent comment

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by the_gastropod on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @01:59PM (#45118709)
They’re not equal. There are more Spanish-speakers in the U.S. (and the world, for that matter) than there are German, Estonian, Russian, Croatian, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, … speakers. You’re ascribing some bizarre conspiracy to basic market dynamics.

And again, this is pretty localized. Salt Lake City has less Spanish than Los Angeles. Flushing, Queens has more Mandarin than Spanish or English.

It remains unclear who is being harmed here. And what solutions are you advocating for?

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Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by yubblegum on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @07:52PM (#45121718)
What "market"? Did this "market" exist 100 years ago or not? If yes (and it did) then why haven't we been bilingual English-Spanish since day 1? There is conspiracy theory here - just pretty straightforward observation of facts.
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Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by the_gastropod on Thursday September 04, 2025 @12:16AM (#45123528)
The market for reading the NYTimes in Spanish… There’s also a big enough market for reading it in Chinese! (https://cn.nytimes.com)

Since these are online-only versions of the NYTimes, and immigration sources change throughout history, no. This particular market did not exist 100 years ago.

However, the portion of non-English speakers has remained about the same since the 1910 census began asking about this. ~100 years ago, German was the most prominent non-English language spoken in the U.S., and there were over 500 German-language newspapers in circulation. Yiddish newspapers were common in New York. And Spanish newspapers were widely read in Texas. In Chicago, Polish newspapers were common. San Francisco had the Chinese World (世界日報) newspaper.

Your idea that, 100 years ago, everyone spoke English, and we didn’t support non-English speaking is just flatly wrong.

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