LOL, but is my 14yo son who shares my candles with it 
?
Any product recommendations if I decide to treat myself?
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Sadly my local small producers on the west coast of Scotland won’t be much use to you!
Do you have any local farmers/craft markets? I love to support local makers but don’t need any more stuff in the house, so now have a consumables only rule. This means I get to buy fantastic handmade candles and soap 
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I have one of those candle warmer lamps and it is an absolute game changer. I’m not coughing like I do with burning the candles and the scent goes so much further.
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I bought restaurant hot and sour soup, and it’s too oily. Is there a way I can make it less oily? I’m traveling and don’t have access to a stove.
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What do you have access to? I would chill to let the oils solidify and then remove the chunks and microwave back to deliciousness.
Timing might also be a consideration though
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I’m in one of those extended stay hotels, so I have access to:
- microwave
- Fridge
- Bowls/silverware/fridge
- Time to let it sit etc
- I am on the fence about going to Walgreens or similar for other things I need, so if I need one easy ingredient I could grab it
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A quicker way would be to get a ladle and fill it with ice and pass the bottom of it through the top of the soup so that the oil solidifies in contact with the cold ladle and then you scrape off the ladle.
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An ice cube directly skimmed over soup might work.
Corner of a paper napkin to try to wick up some oil
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I have ice and a ladle!
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Does anyone have extra time on their hands and want to explain tariffs to me? In the ELI5 way? 
I know nothing so my opinion of “they are bad” doesn’t come from anywhere logical. Like before this happened I literally never thought about them.
Why do they exist at all? Why not just have free trade I think it’s called? And I’m seeing some republicans talking about that.
I just said “Trump is stupid for doing this” and a coworker said “Trump is smart for doing this” even when his IRA cratered because of him. We don’t generally agree on much though. Ha.
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I also understand very little about this. Google sent me here; it’s been helpful for me: What are tariffs, how do they work and why is Trump using them?
The one thing I understand is that it’s a way to punish other countries for not following his agenda.
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Yep, that’s the one thing I do know, that Trump is a bully.
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If you have time for a podcast episode, Hood Politic’s most recent episode is about tariffs.
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tariffs might make sense if, for example, you had a whole bunch of people growing wheat in your country, and they had to pay their workers a minimum wage, and have taxes with health insurance coverage and stuff, and a system that made sure that nobody was using really bad pesticides, or that there wasn’t sewage runoff contaminating the results.
and there was another country that had slave/prison/child labour and no rules and so they could grow wheat for a lot less and their government in fact subsidized the wheat growers so they never needed to make a profit because they wanted to bankrupt all the wheat growers in country 1.
Then country 1 might say ‘every time Big Cereal Manufacturer imports cheap wheat from country 2, they need to pay us $$ to make up for country 2 dumping their stuff on us’, and then of course BCM will say, ok, that means the price of Os will be $1/box more, that is still cheaper than what it would cost me to buy from country 1’s farmers and I don’t care about the slave labour or pesticides.
OTOH, if you are country 2, and your chicken is full of ick, and you’re unhappy that countries with actual good poultry practices aren’t buying your chickens, and then you say ‘well I’m going to make it so that companies charge customers $$$ more to buy your pretty cars which are much safer because you aren’t buying enough of our crappy chickens’, that is less reasonable.
And it you’re saying ‘I’m going to ignore that your country spends money on our software, and that you have very little money because we pay you very little for all the tea you ship over, so now all of the US is going to pay 2x as much for tea because you don’t buy enough of our expensive goods’, then all that happens is that USians buy less tea, or have to spend more for tea, but that money doesn’t go to the very poor country that is shipping over the tea because that is all they have right now. And the US isn’t very well going to start growing tea, or have ppl set up to pick it or process it, because that takes a very poorly paid labour force (shall we do it with gig workers or prison labour?) and no know-how or equipment to do it.
So for the average USian, prices just go up. The US gov’t pockets some money and gives a tax break to billionaires.
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So. The buying country is taxing the selling country in order to make these products more expensive in order to get their citizens to buy from their own country instead? When it’s quite possible that their own country doesn’t produce the item at a price that’s affordable? Obviously Trump and his friends don’t give a crap about affordability. Trump has repeatedly said that the US is going to start manufacturing again and I see people say that’s simply not going to happen or if it does it’s going to take like 3 years because factories don’t get built in a month.
Not that Trump has ever been accused of being reasonable.
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the buying country isn’t taxing the selling country. The US isn’t charging Canada for the car parts. The US is charging Ford or GM for moving a car part that was manufactured in Canada and being shipped to a factory in Michigan. And then Ford or GM will charge the American buyer more for the car to make up for it.
the buying country is taxing the company that is importing the stuff from the country that made it. and then the company that imported it will pass along that price increase to the people living in the buying country. (edited because Ford is also the name of the Premier in Ontario, which makes things less clear)
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and then the question is, are those going to be creating safe, stable, well paying union jobs, with proper regard for environmental regulations, or are they going to be price competitive with places that do not have any of those? And if so, what corners will be cut to achieve that, and is it worth it? (again, precarious contract work that doesn’t need to hit minimum wage ala Uber, undocumented labour force who can be deported at any time, or just put more people into the prison system)
ignoring how long it would take to actually set up precision manufacturing
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At this point for a lot of goods you can just stop at “doesn’t produce the item.” Obviously that’s not true for all things, and targeted tariffs aimed at goods produced with the example of slave or child labor can potentially do some good, but manufacturing as a whole isn’t the kind of industry that turns on and off with a snap. It would take years if not decades to build up (or possibly build back) some of that capbility in the US, and that’s discounting things that we can’t produce in quantity period (ex. I’m not a fan of coffee, but good luck with a coffee manufacturing plant).
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This is what I’m seeing. So again… it’s really just Trump being a bully and making random decisions because he can. I feel like that’s the best answer we’re getting. Trump is certainly old enough to remember when the US was a strong manufacturing country and I guess he thinks that we need to get back to that. But why do we need that if we are doing fine having moved on to other things?
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several possible answers
He promised certain groups he would bring manufacturing back, this shows him being a Strong Man and doing so, then those groups feel the Leopard Eating Face Party will never eat their faces
He creates a reputation of chaos so that brinksmanship works around the next wild idea he has, because people know he could do anything, or nothing
He creates market turmoil so he and his friends can do insider trading, and SCOTUS says nothing he does is illegal and the SEC has been lobotomized
and now there is a 10% tariff against Canada again because uncertainty is his negotiation strategy. (Plus side, I might not hate the party that wins the upcoming federal election as much as I was anticipating, which was not an outcome I was expecting from this presidency)
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