Category: economic issues

Helpful reviews

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I know that a lot of you out there think that it’s all invitations to film premieres, VIP seats at international music events and black tie charity auctions with foreign dignitaries – and look, a lot of it is – but there is also a mundane side to being South Africa’s favourite blogger.

You can’t simply overlook the day to day stuff.

Like buying bags for your German-made vacuum cleaner, for example. We’ve got the Kärcher WD3: a good mix of power, portability and reasonable value for money. And I need some new bags for it.

Und es ist gelb!

Weirdly, it’s proven actually quite difficult to find these things on previous occasions. They can be pricey, there always seems to be a stock and supply issue, and making sure that you get the correct bag with many similarly coded variants around is more of a pain than it should be.

So, here’s what I found initially:

OK. No stock, but that’s fine, I can wait. Fits the WD3. And 4 bags, which means that I probably don’t have to go through this rigmarole for maybe another year or so.

But this being a page from our pisspoor local Amazon wannabe, and they’re not always as trustworthy and accurate as we’d all like them to be, so – as always – I’m just going to check the reviews before I order.

And – as always – they’re absolute gold.

You know – you just know – that when anyone starts shouting at the end of a 5 sentence review, they are part mildly unhinged and part absolutely furious. There’s a guy on the Whatsapp group down in Agulhas that is FAMED FOR HIS SHOUTY RANTS, and you can always tell how outraged he is by how many he gets into a single message. I wonder if he’s related to Luke?

But look: that’s exactly what I was saying about above. You can never guarantee that what you ordered is what you’re going to get.

Elme’s a big fan of Takealot, though:

Elme’s hoping for a voucher for her groveling review. Sadly, she messed up by trying to buy her vacuum bags somewhere else first. Though quite why she needed to order from here at all when she couldn’t not find the bags at her local store is a bit beyond me.

5 stars from Tracy:

I wouldn’t love that it comes in a pack of 3 when I’ve ordered a pack of 4, but clearly Tracy doesn’t see that as a problem. I would agree that it’s the beat vacuum ever, though.

Grant is all about the savings:

I wouldn’t know where to go to buy an individual vacuum cleaner bag. I didn’t know that was a thing. And given the stress of trying find these things each time I need them, I’m already thinking that they need to be sold in a 20-pack.

But it’s Gabrielle that nails it for the “most helpful comment on the page” award.

What… what on earth was anyone planning to do with them aside from replacing the old bags? Use them as some sort of humane rodent trapping device? An avant-garde handbag for an upcoming trip overseas? A lamp shade for a troublesome pendant light fitting in the garage? Or a cheap (not that cheap) alternative to a beekeeper’s hat and veil?

Gabrielle has opened a can of worms here in hinting that there may be some other use for vacume bags for her vacume cleaner. Thankfully, with (hopefully) 4 in the pack, maybe I can try out some alternatives while not compromising on the housekeeping.

I’m going to order now, and experiment in 5-7 work days. Watch this space.

Which is more expensive?

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Well, I can safely say that whatever we’re talking about, it’s probably more expensive now than it was this time last year.

But let’s compare like with like, instead of now with then.

I’m forever being asked about the prices of things. Printer ink, for example:

6000, exactly how expensive is printer ink?

We’ve all seen that thing about the world’s most expensive liquid being printer ink.
Of course, it’s not true – depending on what source you choose, perfume, scorpion venom, and the bloods of both human and… er… horseshoe crabs are way pricier* – but whenever you’re buying your printer ink cartridges**, it doesn’t feel that way.

So. Printer ink: actually not that expensive.

But no sooner have we determined that printer ink isn’t the world’s most expensive liquid (not even close), then suddenly the line of questioning obviously goes straight onto cars and cheese.

6000, pound for pound, which is more expensive: cars or cheese?

See?

At first thought, this seems fairly straightforward. It’s clearly… it’s… hang on, actually, which one is it?

Thankfully, there’s a graph. There’s always a graph.
And yeah: it’s actually pretty tight.

Can’t read it? Make it bigger by clicking here.

Is this pre-tariff or post-tariff? And if it is (or isn’t), which prices will be more affected?

OK, let’s leave out the ridiculously priced vehicular outliers at the top. And the run-of-the-mill mass produced dairy products at the bottom, and… it’s actually pretty even, isn’t it?

Stilton: more expensive than a Range Rover.
The 4 wheels of a BMW 330i: cheaper than a wheel of brie.

How bizarre.

It was Gouda outpricing a Ford Mustang GT that really got me, though. A Gen-4 5.0L Coyote V8 engine generating a track-ready 328kW of power and 540Nm of torque, or some rather bland, beige, Dutch dairy offering?

I know which one I’m choosing – and it’s not going to fit on a cracker.

I’m not sure if ranges of any other everyday products would fit together so nicely when measured on the same price for weight scale – oranges and refrigerators perhaps, or household pets and glass – but if anyone has any examples, please send them through.

.

* And if we’re going down the route of molecular biology reagents, then this stuff at €1,750 for 10uL (that’s 0.00001ml) beats everything else hands down.

** LPT: Get a tank printer.

Here we go…

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A little over 4 years after we moved into this place, and with our ensuite bathroom top of the list of priorities for renovation when we moved into this place, tomorrow morning will see us finally begin the renovation of our ensuite bathroom.

Eish.

It’s not like we haven’t done other stuff instead. The living room has been transformed. The kitchen refloored. The bar has been completely redone. New French windows. We built a braai. We got rid of the horrible ou doos tiling in the entrance hallway. The kids’ bedrooms have been recarpeted and reglazed. There are several (or more) other new windows around the place.

And these were the things that we chose to do. There was a lot of fixer-upper stuff that has been forced upon us (and this) along the way.

It would have been great to get all of this done ages ago, but the magic money tree simply doesn’t bear that much fruit.

The bathroom was awful when we moved in – hence the priority thing – and so we had to do a few things to it to make it less awful and more livable with. But it turned out that those things apparently made it very livable with, and so we have lived with it for 4 whole years.

Oops.

Now, the time has come to bite the bullet and get on with starting over. Over the next few days, it will be completely gutted, back to the bare walls (and in a couple of places, beyond the bare walls). And then a new bathroom shall spring forth, phoenix-like, from the fiery(?) ruins.

And, since they were here anyway, we’re getting them to remove the hideous guest bathroom tiles and sort that out too.

The next few weeks are going to be pretty stressful, but it will – it will – all be worth it.

On Tariffs

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I’m not an economist. But I know some people who are.
And they don’t seem very impressed with Trump’s tariff plans:

Oof. But I am a scientist, so I know how a graph should look, and perhaps more importantly, how it shouldn’t look. That there isn’t a good look. If this was a patient, they’d be on their way to ICU.

$2 trillion gone in less than half an hour. Poof!

You can say many things about Trump (and people do), but you can’t knock his power. Even 80s magician David Copperfield is impressed, and he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Trump is just making money vanish. Well, that and actual Liberty.

Still, you can’t argue that these things haven’t been well thought out. There’s clearly been a lot of planning that’s gone on here. The penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands are finally paying the price for their frankly heinous 20% import tariffs on American goods. Famed for exporting Elephant Seal Oil as recently as… er… 1877, it seems like the infamous H&McDI Stock Exchange would be in all sort of bother if it actually existed.

No-one has lived there for decades, but these tariffs mean that if anyone ever does live there again, they won’t be exporting much to the US.

Elsewhere, the EU (including France) gets a tariff of 20%, but Réunion (part of France and therefore also part of the EU) gets hit with 37%. But of course, French Guiana, Mayotte and Martinique (each part of France and therefore also part of the EU) get a 10% tariff on their exports to the US.

Réunion has had it too easy for too long.

The big losers in this whole thing is everyone. But if I were to be more specific, it would be St Pierre & Miquelon. This isn’t a French overseas territory: it’s a French Overseas Collective – Collectivité d’Outre-Mer.
But because of… er… reasons, their exports to the US will be charged an additional 50%. That’ll teach them for being to close (geographically, not necessarily politically) to Greenland.

Only local boys Lesotho (as far as I can see) manages to match the heady height of a 50% tariff, so Southern African

diamonds, garments, wool, power equipment and bedding

markets will be hit. And it looks like the mokorotlo won’t be part of the New York Spring 2026 Collections anymore.

It’s the clear attention to detail that makes me think that maybe these tariffs might well have been devised by a troop of circus monkeys who have been blindfolded and then instructed to throw various coloured darts at a world map.

I’m just impressed that there was anyone in America who was able to work out which countries the darts hit.