SKULL.GIF posted:

huh? go into detail please

i am harry posted:

maybe candy lungs can just vape outside like any other sane and respectful smoker

Hamas Attack on Israel: For Oil, It's Not 1973, But It Could Still Turn Ugly

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the world’s first oil crisis, the parallels between October 2023 and October 1973 are easy to draw: A surprise attack on Israel and oil prices rising. But the resemblance ends there.

The global economy isn’t about to suffer another Arab oil embargo that would triple the price of a barrel of crude. Yet, it would be a mistake to downplay the chances that the world faces higher-for-longer oil prices.



The situation is fluid, and for the oil market, everything depends about how Israel responds to Hamas, which launched the attack, and Iran, which typically pulls the strings of the Palestinian group. Still, we can draw a few tentative conclusions:

1. The crisis isn’t a repeat of October 1973. Arab countries aren't attacking Israel in unison. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world are watching the events from the sidelines, not shaping them.
   
   
2. The oil market itself doesn't have any of the pre-October 1973 characteristics. Back then, oil demand was surging, and the world had exhausted all its spare production capacity. Today, consumption growth has moderated, and is likely to slow further as electric vehicles become a reality. In addition, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have significant spare capacity that they use to curb prices – if they choose to do so.
   
   
3. As importantly, today, OPEC nations aren’t trying to boost prices beyond a few extra dollars. Riyadh would be content with oil prices rising another 10-20% higher, to just above $100 a barrel from $85 currently, rather than pushing them more than 100% higher to $200 a barrel. Just before the October 1973 oil embargo, OPEC nations unilaterally hiked the official petroleum prices by about 70%. Although the embargo is the element most vividly remembered of the crisis, the price hike was as crucial.
   
   
4. The fallout could yet have an impact on oil markets in 2023 and 2024. The most immediate impact could come if Israel concludes that Hamas acted on instructions of Tehran. In that scenario, oil prices could go much higher. In 2019, Iran demonstrated, via Yemeni proxies, that it’s able to knock down a significant chunk of Saudi oil production capacity. It could do the same as retaliation if it finds itself under Israel or American attack.
   
   
5. Even if Israel doesn’t immediately respond to Iran, the repercussions will likely affect Iranian oil production. Since late 2022, Washington has turned a blind eye to surging Iranian oil exports, bypassing American sanctions. The priority in Washington was an informal détente with Tehran. As a result, Iranian oil output has surged nearly 700,000 barrels a day this year – the second-largest source of incremental supply in 2023, behind only US shale. The White House is now likely to enforce the sanctions. That could be enough to push oil prices to $100 a barrel, and potentially beyond.
   
   
6. Russia will benefit from any Middle East oil crisis. If Washington enforces sanctions against Iran, it could create space for Russia’s own sanctioned barrels to both win market share and achieve higher prices. One of the reasons why the White House turned a blind eye on Iranian oil exports is because it hurt Russia. In turn, Venezuela could also benefit, with the White House relaxing sanctions to ease market pressure.
   
   
7. The Saudi-Israeli diplomatic deal, which many had penciled in for early-to-mid 2024, is a casualty. Even if Riyadh is likely furious with Hamas, it’s difficult to see how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would be able to sell the deal domestically. That, in turn, removes the potential for Saudi Arabia pumping more oil to help passage of the deal in Washington. The other victim of the Hamas-Isaeli war is the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, which itself was another bearish element for oil.
   
   
8. Finally, a key difference from 1973, Washington can tap its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to limit the impact on gasoline prices — and on President Joe Biden’s approval rating. If oil prices surge because of tension in the Middle East, the White House is sure to tap the SPR. Although it’s at its lowest level in 40 years, the reserve still has enough oil to deal with another crisis.

Zodium posted:

brexit was a thoroughly reactionary response to the core's growing loss of control over the periphery, which britain is uniquely vulnerable to due to its great reliance on the city of london. reaction, and the form it takes when it reaches sufficient mass to control the state, fascism, is basically a reaction to a bourgeois state's inability to serve its purpose of producing capital, and the particular form this reaction takes is always an attempt to reproduce the material conditions of the distant past, when the system was stable and serving its purpose for the reactionaries. in the original sense, this took the form of trying to return to feudal rule; in modern britain, it took the form of a blind attempt to disentangle itself from cybernetic capitalism's integrated imperialism; in america, it took the form of trump's america first. this produces deeply incoherent politics because the political world is contingent on physical relationships, and the physical relationships that existed when the system was stable and serving its purpose no longer exist, and so trying to simply will the past back into existence produces only self-destructive nonsense. but these were just canaries in the coal mine--reaction wasn't able to reach the necessary critical mass to control the state. what terrifies liberals is that they will lose control of the periphery to a point where it will, and the bourgeoisie are made to turn their efforts towards intensifying exploitation of the core to maintain capitalism, and so they paradoxically rally around imperialism, and thus reaction, in an attempt to shore up the system. it has nothing to do with people wanting to burn down the system. quite the opposite.

SirPablo posted:

How much walking did you do compared to your typical day at home?

BornAPoorBlkChild posted:

we can all equally agree that it was Just Some Black Guys who are Definitely Totally the actual assailants and no further investigation is needed into the motivations as such

BornAPoorBlkChild posted:

we can all equally agree that it was Just Some Black Guys who are Definitely Totally the actual assailants and no further investigation is needed into the motivations as such


https://twitter.com/Klaus_Arminius/status/1710542243545641462?t=N_QGV9KW5lZC2XxWgEFY6g&s=19

SKULL.GIF posted:

Wired has journalistic standards?

Pretty obviously a bunch of bigshots at Google breathing down their collective neck.

BornAPoorBlkChild posted:

between these and the Ferguson Activists being found murdered Gangland Style those goshdarn minorities sure do love acting against their own collective self interest it seems!1!1!1!

Stinky Wizzleteats posted:

It's just a hunch based on knowing dozens of people who worked in plasma centers and donated because they why not, and now have leukemia, one of which being my mom. You're running your blood through plastic tubes and having to regenerate cells you would normally not be losing at such a rate.

quote:

No one expects an Ikea bookcase or West Elm sofa to last for generations, or maybe even to survive another move. But walk into a vintage furniture store and you'll find all types of old pieces that were inexpensive and mass-produced in their day, yet have still managed to achieve heirloom status.

Furniture isn't what it used to be. Fifty or 60 years ago, people thought of it as something they'd have for life -- a dresser that a grown kid could take to college, a dining table where future grandchildren would have Thanksgiving. Today? Not so much.

Modern consumers are often all too happy to ditch last year's Wayfair shipment for whatever new trend is sweeping their social media feeds. At the other end of that cycle is an industry relying on cheap labor and flimsy materials to fatten profit margins and keep prices down.

Even higher-end chains aren't always a safe bet. Michael Brotman has designed for several of them, but he recently quit Big Furniture to open his own studio. Of one past employer, he says: "Without giving away any secrets, their margins are high and their quality is not good at all. I had a big discount working there -- I didn't buy anything."

To understand the decline in quality, first consider what most furniture is actually made of. In the mid-20th century, the more affordable stuff was typically made domestically of American plywood -- i.e., thin layers of wood glued together -- while fancier pieces might be solid cherry or oak, and could be made in the United States or come from Italy or Denmark. Today, most of what's on the market consists of Chinese-made press board and plywood, while pieces marketed as "solid wood" might be rubber wood with glued-on veneer.

These changes result from the same directive: "Everyone is just trying to reduce cost," says CoCo Ree Lemery, a furniture designer who has worked for brands such as Pottery Barn and West Elm, and is currently a visiting professor of furniture design at Purdue University. Rubber wood, for example, is less expensive than most other lumber because it's a byproduct of latex manufacturing, but it's prone to decay. Chinese-made wood products are similarly cheap, but the quality is wildly inconsistent.

"The whole industry has just changed so dramatically," Lemery says. She describes the constant grind of the design process for major retailers as "soul crushing." When she dared to create pieces that cost more to make, and thus were more expensive for consumers, she says her employers would take them out of production quickly. "My most successful products, sadly, have always had the biggest margin, so they've had the lowest cost."

Today's cheaper materials and construction go hand-in-hand with the voyage that most new furniture takes across the ocean. The mainstreaming of container shipping in the 1970s "effectively erased distance" as a manufacturing concern, says Christopher Mims, author of "Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door." "It's just so mind-bogglingly efficient and cheap" to transport goods around the world.

Labor is cheapest in China and Southeast Asia, so those are the places mega furniture companies tend to make their products. To drive costs down even more, they aim to cram as many of those products into as few containers as they possibly can. The result: "flat-pack" furniture that you, the lucky consumer, get to assemble at home, amid a mess of Allen wrenches and screws.

"Every inch and every pound counts when you're shipping things," Mims says. If you're trying to transport a container filled with disassembled desks, reducing the thickness of each package by just a fraction of an inch can amount to squeezing in dozens more of them. But that calculus comes at the expense of quality.

For starters, lighter, thinner materials work much better for these purposes -- so even if solid oak was plentiful and inexpensive, furniture makers would still probably opt for press board. On top of that, Lemery says, "It's very hard to design something that can disassemble and assemble and have the same level of longevity that a fully assembled piece can have."

And now we're just kind of stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle. Cheap manufacturing practices have conditioned consumers to expect that furniture should be inexpensive and fall apart in a few years. So not many shoppers are willing to pay for good quality even when it is available.

Designers, not surprisingly, find this distressing.

Lemery says the never-ending pressure to keep costs down meant she and her colleagues were constantly making compromises and revising their ideas.

"You are working so ruthlessly to keep the price, that initial cost, low," she says. "When you get back the drawing from overseas, whether that's India or China or Indonesia, you're reworking the drawings to make them cheaper or you are saying, 'Can we substitute this for this?' . . . so that I can get this product into a price point that the consumer is willing to pay."

Brotman laments that some people are willing to shell out "thousands of dollars on jewelry" while balking at spending the same amount "for a piece of furniture that their family sits around and eats around every single day."

### Related

As seems to be the case with most things, much of the blame falls on social media. Rather than seeing furniture as an investment -- and seeking more timeless styles -- customers often look for trendier pieces that fit the online micro-aesthetic of the moment. A fuchsia "Barbiecore" sofa, for example, might wear out its welcome before the movie's sequel, and reupholstering it would cost more than simply buying a whole new couch.

"Factories are so much more nimble and they can be retooled very quickly to make a new thing in a new shape," Mims says. "And then those things are communicated to us more quickly through the internet. It has created a material culture which is just more and more disposable."

And this, in turn, creates a huge amount of waste. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 10 million tons of furniture ended up in landfills in 2018.

If you don't want to trash your coffee table after your next move, designers say there are some ways to know you're getting a product that will last. High price alone does not determine quality. But buying something that comes fully assembled or that was made domestically are good signs. A piece made "out of solid wood … that you've heard of," such as walnut, oak or cherry, will almost certainly endure for the long haul, Brotman says.

He spent more than a dozen years working for Room & Board, and says that "as far as bigger retailers go, I think they're probably the ones doing it the most, quote-unquote, 'right'" -- as in, they charge fair prices for items crafted in the United States.

One way to guarantee quality is to buy custom furniture, although the expense means it's out of reach for most. Brotman is currently making a dining table by hand for a client of his new business, Ogden House Studio + Design. He is crafting it to her precise specifications, which include making it 11 feet long so that it easily seats a dozen people. A similarly sized table at a chain retailer might cost about $2,000, and Brotman estimates it would take about a day to make in a factory. This one will run the client $10,500, including the solid maple used to build it, and require 90 hours of Brotman's labor.

He says the customer told him "her goal is for us to create a table that her kids fight over when she's gone. And I mean, I don't want any fighting, but I also love the idea that she's creating this heirloom."

This story was originally published at washingtonpost.com. [Read it here.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2023/09/05/new-furniture-quality-doesnt-last/)

eXXon posted:

Re: homeownership rates and Gen Z not leaving the nest:

https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/1710400928191250764?t=WDUo9EI1180Kvy1k1rtdxQ&s=19

Germanic heritage/the Alps are evidently very powerful.

Paradoxish posted:

I have literally never had a piece of furniture "fall apart" after "a few years" and I've bought some incredibly cheap and lovely furniture.

Nonsense posted:

journalists move a lot, hirer movers and movers break their poo poo

Paradoxish posted:

I have literally never had a piece of furniture "fall apart" after "a few years" and I've bought some incredibly cheap and lovely furniture.

Paradoxish posted:

I have literally never had a piece of furniture "fall apart" after "a few years" and I've bought some incredibly cheap and lovely furniture.

Paradoxish posted:

I have literally never had a piece of furniture "fall apart" after "a few years" and I've bought some incredibly cheap and lovely furniture.

PoundSand posted:

I have a chair destroying rear end. And I mean yeah I'm fat now but I haven't always been fat, was pretty skinny for most of my life really and I still just went through chairs. Cheap ones, expensive ones, it didn't really matter. Dunno if I fidget too much or sit weird or what but it's something I've noticed my whole life.

Our entryway is next to our open dining room so I often shoe up there and as a result have used our dining table chairs to don and doff shoes, not like prolonged sitting sessions and they're just solid chairs that aren't intended to fold or swivel or whatever and sure enough a year or so of using them as my temporary seating for putting my workboots on and their legs get the wobbles. Rather than just run the gamut of destroying the entire dining room set I've set up a humble folding chair there, but I'm sure soon enough it will fade into ruin.

Nonsense posted:

journalists move a lot, hirer movers and movers break their poo poo

mawarannahr posted:

the customer is always at fault
Why furniture got so bad

anime was right posted:

new market innovation just dropped



what if instead of having one ghoul leeching off your rental payments, you had two?

anime was right posted:

anime was right posted:

new market innovation just dropped



what if instead of having one ghoul leeching off your rental payments, you had two?

RealityWarCriminal posted:

rent seeking is the most efficient money making method known to man and ofc this thread poo poos it

RealityWarCriminal posted:

rent seeking is the most efficient money making method known to man and ofc this thread poo poos it