These tariffs are not brand specific. Replace “SILCA” with your preferred brand and you’ll see similar results: products not available in the US, moving factories outside of the US, and increases to retail prices without new features or better quality.

You’re correct.

"It doesn’t make sense for chocolate bars to be divided into equal-sized chunks when there is so much inequality in the chocolate industry! The unequally-sized chunks of our 6.35 oz bars are a palatable way of reminding Choco Fans and Serious Friends that the profts in the chocolate industry are unequally divided.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the bottom of our bars depicts the West African coastline. The chunks just above it represent the Gulf of Guinea. From left to right, you have Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin (terribly politically incorrect, we know, but we had to combine them to create enough space for a hazelnut), Nigeria and part of Cameroon."

https://us.tonyschocolonely.com/pages/faqs

That department has been RIFed.

I wouldn’t mind liability insurance for guns if it’s similar to car insurance. Car insurance only covers about $30,000 per person injured/killed, maxing out around $60k per incident.

Unfortunately that low payout amount also means coverage is near useless. Especially when insurance coverage doesn’t go to the victims but to other insurance companies.

Car Insurance is Too Cheap

I wanted to upvote this twice. Instead I’ll leave this comment.

Great rant. Would read again.

Aquaman.

Broadcast TV is already going that way. ATSC 3 requires an internet connection to get decoding keys. For your protection, of course.

That’s a great question. My guess is the bandwidth comes from bonding those extra modes and from the lower signal-noise ratio. That lower SNR means they could modulate with more sensitive but faster modes.

Why wouldn’t a price that’s too high to pay prevent a product from selling? If demand of a product goes from 10,000 units to 10 units from the price shift, then it’s better to not develop and sell it. The rational move is to focus on the high end or custom-made products where you can have the margins necessary for low-volume to make sense. When it comes to low-end products, volume and throughput is the name of the game.

Want an example? How about this smart move by Framework stopping selling some of its cheapest laptops.

So long Ivanpah and thanks for all the fish clean energy.

I’m sad to see this technology not pan out, but being supplanted by another solar technology is a good outcome too.

Yes and sometimes worse. When a market cannot bear a price increase, the product simply ceases to exist. E.g. a low end $800 bike would never sell at $1,600.

If you like the idea of taxing rent, then you definitely need to read up on Land Value Tax. It ignores all the complexity of trying to figure out the economics of specific practices (it works for retail, commercial, sports areas, etc) into taxing the rent value of the land.

It also encourages building and maintaining housing when compared property taxes (those discourage improvements as improvements increase the landlords taxes).

RTO definitely has something to do with it, but I don’t think it’s a direct cause. Weekend ridership up to and surpassing pre-pandemic levels while weekday ridership has not recovered as well (though still up).

I believe ridership is up because of the new and more frequent trains. 1 hour intervals really suck and while 30 minutes isn’t great, it’s a whole lot easier to deal with. Weekday intervals were also reduced to sub-15 minutes during traditional peak commute. That’s a lot of time savings for a daily rider!

RTO does have an indirect impact: the freeways are always jammed. With partial RTO and split teams, there’s not been a return to the in-the-office-at-9am culture. Our local population has grown as well. Highway traffic is all-day now.

Is it really just RTO causing ridership increase if the dilemma faced is a guaranteed sit-in-traffic for an extra 15+ minutes versus a train that runs on time with 15-minute intervals?

Perhaps today you’ll also learn about Hellschreiber. Old tech is really clever!

I know I’ve been riding Caltrain more.

It’s shocking how much better the new train sets are. I remember the first time I took the new one. It was rolling in so fast that I thought it must have been an express train about to pass my local stop. Nope! It stopped on a dime compared to the old train!

Good job, Caltrain!

Yep. My consumer concerns are less of retail sticker-shock than people not realizing how dependent they are on consumer surplus. Even a few thousand a year in tariff related expenditure can be quite impactful on comfort.

Sticker-shock will happen with the tariff-adjacent removal of de minimis. Right now it’s China, but it was threatened against Canada and Mexico too (officially delayed, whatever that may mean). A $50 per-item charge is going to be quite a surprise to many.

E.g. if Canada is going to be levied like China, then my plan of getting a pair of oversized Cam-Lock kits for my Canadian-made Arkel bike panniers is gone out the window. There’s no way I’ll buy small parts when the total package cost is the same as getting a whole new set of panniers.

Correct, tariffs are not a consumption tax. That fact doesn’t mean prices will not increase, nor does it mean that small increases don’t have a big impact. We, the common people, will have have to go about our lives with less. Maybe wear your shirts an extra day because laundering more regularly consumes more soap. Perhaps it’s going without avocado on your lunch sandwiches. You’ll still have shirts and sandwiches, but you certainly wouldn’t be as clean or as filled. (See the “surplus” chapter of your high-school/undergrad econ books.)

What an absolute beauty of a bike and a story.

I think I recognize that dock. Port Townsend? Should you know the area, what sort of good biking is in the area? I often find myself in Sequim and Port Angeles with time to kill. So far I’ve only done the ODT between the two and could use some suggestions for great rides.

That’s fair. Comparing regular drivers doing typical city trips to commercial big rigs is a bit apples-and-oranges. I wonder how CDL data would compare when the self-driving semi-trucks start putting on miles. Aurora is about to launch in that exact space.

Uber had a net income of 9.86 billion dollars and spent 7.14 billion in operations in 2024. That’s a single transportation company. Do you really think Uber or anyone else is going to ignore researching the technology that could significantly reduce their billions in operations costs?

I’m also not so sure that Europe is 20x safer than the US. A quick search pulled up the International Transport Form’s Road Safety Annual Report 2023 and their data disagrees. The US, even with its really poor showing in the general numbers, is safer than Poland and Czechia (Road fatalities per billion vehicle‑kilometres, 2021). I could see an argument for a 2x gap of Europe outdoing the US, but a 20x? Citation needed.