Category: Uncategorized

For years as I bought cheap flashlights and parts, mostly from China, I was amazed I could buy something for only a few dollars and get free shipping from China. eBay is the same way. I bought a phone case for $1.50 from China and got free shipping. Sometimes there were even stamps on the envelopes and I know shipping is never really free. I figured maybe the Chinese government was subsidizing Chinese businesses by giving them a special low rate in order to increase exports. It certainly was a nice benefit and made the 3 week wait a lot easier to take knowing I was getting a great deal.

In 2018 while the trade war with China was flaring up, there was a story about how you can buy things shipped from China for less than it would cost to ship the item in the United States (even if the item cost was nothing). The article I read at the time said there was an international organization called the Universal Postal Union that set rules on international shipments and its members (everyone) agreed that poor countries like China wouldn’t have to pay high shipping rates to developed countries, which is very progressive of them. So it wasn’t actually that China was subsidizing their businesses, but the United States Post Office that was losing money on the whole deal because they were taking in much less than the price of delivery on Chinese imports. Anyway, the Trump administration was saying this was an unfair system and they were going to withdraw from the UPU and start charging higher rates unless the UPU fixed the problem within a year. Economists seemed baffled at the time because it wasn’t a huge amount of money at stake, but it made sense to me.

It is more than a year since that happened. In the meantime the UPU held an emergency meeting and developed new rules. Whereas currently China pays 20-30% of US domestic shipping rates for items that come into our country, the new rules would allow countries to start charging more in 2021, eventually up to 70% of the domestic shipping rate. Big economies like the US could potentially start charging anything they want as early as July 2020. So maybe cheap goods from China are coming to an end. The US trade representatives touted the victory and said the United States would save $300 million per year. But like with a lot of the tariff stuff, what will really happen is those companies will start charging for shipping to the United States or increase the price of their goods. So the end user will actually pay. Though it makes more sense for me to pay for shipping of my flashlight parts than for the United States Postal Service to pay.

About six years ago for some reason I started buying gold and silver coins. Part of the reason was it was a way to diversify my investments, but I guess there are other stupid reasons like thinking the government will collapse, making it a hobby, and liking shiny metal. I knew it was never going to be a good investment, so I never bought a huge amount in terms of the percentage of my investments, though that percentage went up to a higher point than I would have initially liked. The worst investment is silver where you get eaten up by premiums for coins, often $2-$7 per ounce when an ounce is only maybe $16. That could be a 20% premium. And that premium is hard to ever get back since most coins sell back close to the spot price. Gold coins might have a premium of $20-$40 over spot, but the spot is $1400, so the premium is more like 3%. But gold is expensive, whereas you can buy some nice silver coins for $100 and get free shipping.

Before I started buying there was a big surge in prices as exchange traded funds were set up that would invest in physical gold. This made getting into and out of gold much easier with lower premiums and expenses than ever before. I think a lot of people started making those ETF’s part of their portfolios and as the price skyrocketed and you saw “We buy gold” signs everywhere you looked, more people paid attention and bought more and more before it crashed. I love a crash, so that is when I stepped in. But it hadn’t bottomed out yet, dropping a couple of hundred dollars more per ounce. So I bought a little more at the lower prices. And kept buying stupid silver.
Continue reading “Gold Sold”

Over two years ago I got my very first smartphone, a Moto G4. The G was a great value when it came out and was marked down substantially since it was near the end of its production life, having already been replaced by the G5. I figured if I bought a cheap, somewhat out of date phone now, I could justify upgrading sooner. The old phone has been getting slower and the battery hasn’t been lasting as long. Plus the newer G5 has a fingerprint scanner which is an easier way of logging in than typing in a PIN. Now the G6 is old tech and the G7 is the latest. I could get a G6 for $120 on sale. I actually bought one, but wound up letting a friend have it who needed a new budget phone and the 3-month trial of Mint Mobile that it came with. So a few weeks later I found the Moto Z3 Play for only $150 which has a faster processor, a little more memory, and seemed just generally a step up from the G6 for not that much more (originally $450). So I ordered that instead and it even came with two free back plates (not really cases, but I thought they would protect it a little).

Continue reading “Moto Z3 Play”

“Black Friday” has been creeping more and more towards Thursday night when door busting sales start. But really even sooner than that. Best Buy would start their sale online at 1 AM on Thanksgiving Day with most of their big sale prices on blu-rays and DVD’s (which is all I’m after), but not usually the biggest deals. Walmart would start even earlier online, on Thanksgiving Eve, but their online deals are much worse than the advertised in store Black Friday deals. That was true again this year, which was unfortunate because they had some very good deals in the Black Friday ad. I wasn’t planning on staying up until 1 AM for Best Buy’s online deals, but I was up at midnight and the deals were already active, so I picked:
Continue reading “Black Thursday Morning”

A while back I made several batches of beer using a Mr. Beer kit that Mom gave me for Christmas. Eventually Mom made a batch and so did Jeb and one of them gave me back the keg, so now I have two kegs, but only one set of bottles. In the Spring, Mr. Beer had a sale on their cans of beer syrup and I bought four of them. Adding water and yeast and waiting for fermentation, the result is 2 gallons of beer with a 3.2% alcohol content. The ones I bought this time included “booster” which is additional sugar that adds 1% to the alcohol content and they sent two packs with each can. It doesn’t affect flavor like adding malt, just gives extra food to the yeast who generate more alcohol.

After a very hot October, the house is now cool enough to ferment beer, so I decided to do a batch this weekend. One of the cans was for a Marzen style of beer, which is German, but I thought I would still add stuff to it, including extra hops (even though Marzen isn’t that hoppy usually) and some malt. So I drove to Ale Yeah and was told they hadn’t sold homebrew stuff for 6 years (bought some beer anyway). So it has been a while since I did this. But they told me a place that is actually closer to my house and I went there and picked up 1 oz. of Mosaic hops and a pound of Golden Light dried malt extract, plus a reusable bag to put hops in since adding hops makes such a mess. So an extra $8 in ingredients and $4 for the bag plus each can plus booster was $9.

I had to go back and check out the process that had gotten the best results, which is what we did at Jeb’s house. I pretty much repeated that, but only used half of the malt since I was still adding the two booster packs (hopefully the opened pack of malt will keep) and used Mosaic instead of Wilammette hops. I boiled the malt and half of the hops for 25 minutes and added half of the hops with about 15 minutes to go. The hop bag made things a lot better and I was able to reopen it and add more hops to it partway through. The bag can be washed in the washing machine, but it is stained green now. The yeast started working right away and I am getting trub, but not that many bubbles yet. 4 weeks of fermenting puts me bottling on December 7.