F
Home Depot's monopoly on kitchens and bathrooms in the greater NY region is kind of disgusting.
Not that I expect to see anyone care about monopolies any time soon. I will be over in the corner singing old US Steel Union songs sadly if anyone needs me.
They can't scale up fast, but furniture isn't the kind of thing that people can't just wait and buy later. It's not like food or something.
@btuftin
In fact, until recently there was cabinet manufacturing in the Bronx, tile floors too. But over the past two decades Home Depot has become the only place you can buy cabinets unless you want a luxury job done by the tiny firms in the village. (Think 20k remodel vs. 50k remodel)
Home depot has very limited selection of mostly low quality imported cabinets.
The Bronx manufactures hung on by doing high end custom luxury work but they are gone now.
True. I just wish we could talk about trade policy without all of the free trade absolutism. First of all because I don't think it works, but also when big news channels act like no tariff could ever be good they loose a lot of credibility with people who have seen how things have gone for the losers under these policies.
Things have gone badly.
One can point to a higher GDP, but there are towns that have never recovered from free trade. People hate it.
Some TN cabinet guys gave him big donations. This might be their ask. An ask that has been perhaps wrongly ignored for decades by free-trade-drunk liberal and right wing admins.
The answer for all tariffs has been NO for everything and maybe it went too far IMHO.
So he could have stumbled into this through corruption.
His initial moves have set a BAD tone. I'm not running to invest in US furniture makers, and I doubt they will start hiring because of this. Unless it proves to be different from the other chaos.
The perfect tariff target has a struggling domestic industry, employs a lot of people, isn't something like food, clothing, or medicine that people have no choice but to buy.
So, more luxury and differ-able goods. Bonus if it's big and bulky and shipping is eating up a lot of the value with the imported goods.
This could be... fine?
Will it be around long enough to do anything?
Could someone who understands how this kind of thing is supposed to work have gotten through to the guy?
Seems unlikely. But, I'm a little disipointed that these are being panned like the other tariffs that made no sense. You can make a case for these. Is it a good case? The Free Trade fans will say no way.
Personally I think shipping cabinets halfway across the world is kind of inefficient.
And the drug thing could be bad.
Hm. 2/2
Trump's newest tariff targets are:
*Big trucks
*Furniture
*Cabinets and Bathroom vanities
*Name Brand Drugs
And... I don't hate it? I'm very concerned about the drug tariffs, but the other items are actually good targets for protectionist trade policy in the US.
We have domestic cabinet manufacturers in TN and VT and they are struggling. There *is* an issue with "too cheap to ignore" imports. And also these aren't things poor people buy very often.
1/
"Blood for the blood god!"
"Information for the data ants!"
"Food was never scarce for our colony—indeed, it has rarely been the limiting factor in our growth. Our constraints have always been space, material and information."
Having fun writing this morning.
When I pointed it out to the other graders, who really just wanted to go home one guy tried to justify this by saying that "anyone experienced in math wouldn't write x like that" which might be true but what came first? Why did it matter?
We re-scored the problems.
I once did an informal survey of regents exams marked by NYC math teachers. I was tasked with sorting several 100 word problems but I was curious if student handwriting had any impact on the subjective points that could be awarded for partial credit.
Specifically I suspected that students who wrote the letter "x" like a times symbol (eg not in cursive) were awarded fewer points than those who did (all else being equal.)
From my rough count of the points this seemed to be the case!
I'm fascinated by Math Culture because math people tend to think it doesn't exist. All of the traditions, fables, superstitions, variations in language are totally invisible to many of them because obviously math is made of logic and culture is made of nonsense and so how could there be any such thing what are you talking about?
But, also these things can be the cause of a kind of gatekeeping but by talking about them and defining them as culture not logic that barrier may vanish.
The story about him being asked to sum all of the numbers from 1 to 1000 and finding a shortcut as a child is probably as fake as the one about George Washington and the cherry tree. But, I still like it and it is a part of Mathematics Culture, it's one of our parables that illustrates the values of the community.
So, I still tell it with that caveat and the hope that it will inspire young people to look for ways to avoid drudgery.
Also when you start with a founding queen and watch her raise her first eggs you don't need a lot of supplies. For many species all you need are some glass test tubes, cotton balls and water. You don't even need food for the first weeks.
Founding queens can fail so it's a good idea to get two or three and put each one in a test tube. Check that you have a "Fully Claustral" species. It's very important to know the species so you provide the right care.
I always suggest by learning about the common ants in your area. Find out their species and see which ones interest you.
There are some good ant shops in Europe (especially Germany for some reason) that have nest boxes and out-world and sometimes sell queens.
But it's also possible to collect a wild queen once you know when they fly.
Starting a colony from scratch gives you the best opportunity to observe interesting ant behaviors.