Blinding

Dec. 26th, 2011 08:38 pm
kevin_standlee: (House)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
Today's chore was getting five loads of laundry done. It's not a terribly time-consuming chore when the laundromat (which we can see from the house) isn't busy, but we weren't the only people who were getting caught up on chores, and the place was crowded. I'm glad it's only about one long block to the laundromat, because those wet clothes are heavy!

We got a call back about the Levelor blinds. It turns out that the off-the-shelf blinds use a button, while the custom-order blinds have a handle. Lisa decided to put aside the blinds order for a while and to consider her options. At [livejournal.com profile] galtine1's suggestion, we decided to get some of the temporary paper blinds for use in the windows in the part of the house that isn't completely habitable until we get a new furnace. They're not available in Fernley, so we drove into Reno this afternoon to Home Depot. We found the blinds easily, but not so easily any of the other things we wanted. Items either weren't available or only Made In China. So we skipped buying anything else. Since the North Reno Home Depot is just across the street from WinCo Foods, we stopped by there to pick up a few things that we could just as easily waited to get on our next big shopping trip, but since we were there we might as well get them now. Then we made a brief stop at the Nugget in Sparks, where Lisa's low-grade slot machine luck continued to hold, contributing $1.50 to the Laundry Fund.

Heading back to Fernley, we stopped to see if any of the other home supplies we wanted were there. We found a couple of things, but the others (like an indoor clothes-drying rack) were only Made In China. Lisa says she might build one from PVC pipe instead. It might even cost less that way.

Date: 2011-12-27 07:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] daveon.livejournal.com
Im interested in your issue with Made in China? Is it China or all imported manufacture?

Date: 2011-12-27 03:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kevin-standlee.livejournal.com
China is the worst offender, and it's not all imported manufacture. China isn't playing on an even field, that's all. They fix the value of their currency and they allow the environmental destruction of their country in ways that the USA wouldn't possibly tolerate. Free trade isn't fair trade when all we're doing is offshoring our pollution to China at an exchange rate that wouldn't hold up in a truly free market.

Lisa's preferred option is that nobody should be allowed to sell things in the US market that would be illegal to produce in the USA under the conditions sold. That is, anyone wanting to sell in the USA has to abide by at least the same environmental conditions and free-financial-trade (that is, currency exchange rules) that the USA follows. Countries with more-stringent environmental restrictions (Europe comes to mind) would be okay here, but not less-stringent ones.

Lisa contends that the way China is behaving toward the US market is reducing us to a colonial state: exporting raw materials and buying finished goods. In the long term, it's damaging the US economy.

It's not an all-imported-goods ban. Lisa says, for instance, in buying Mexican-made products over comparable Chinese ones: "If we buy Mexican-made goods, we're providing jobs to people in Mexico, meaning fewer Mexicans will be starving and having to enter the USA illegally." The problem is that you can't fit the longer economic argument onto a bumper sticker, so the over-simplified version is "Buy American: Save the Economy, Save the Planet." It's sort of designed to get both the right- and left-wing views something to agree with.

Date: 2011-12-27 07:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] galtine1.livejournal.com
I'm glad that my tip has been useful.

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