I learned Ping Pong at the the major YMCA where I spent 14th summer here on Earth. My summer long Eagle Scout project was me alone. Chopping down large trees and smaller limbs, making a crane and hoist to build a 50 ft long 6ft wide walking bridge for the Y. Lotta rope.
I was taught with the sandpaper racket and the rubber racket. 1968.
Now Kurt, maker and absorber of "How things are made" Sensai.
How did the Americans and how did the Chinese, make their Ping Pong balls in the 60s?
As soon as I got to PALIO I knew I was going love this. Thanks!
Whenever I get an electronic item made in Asia, I especially enjoy unfolding the tiny enclosure with instructions and being startled by the translations.
Without going into details, i have a busy & somewhat stressful week ahead, so it was fun to read this and put off the phone calls to insurance companies and service providers, leaving messages, waiting for call backs, etc., that just drain the joy out of life.
I am left-handed, but with four siblings who were right handed I grew up learning to use both hands in sports. Although not very well.
I play left-handed, more for control, and right handed for more power. When Katie and I began playing pickle ball it confused her to watch me switch hands while playing. I tell her I can write with either hand, but my handwriting is poor. I call it being. Nobidextrous.
During Christy’s illness, we used to play ping-pong. She was bound and determined to learn how to use her left hand so we would set the table next to a wall and I would put my left hand over hers, and gently guide her to returning the ball. She promised me if she learned to play left-handed that she would invite me to go water skiing, and she’d go barefooting for me.
During Covid, Katie bought a net for our dining room table. So we played a lot of ping-pong in there. One of our dogs would sit on a chair watching the game and if you hit the ball near him, he would lunge to grab it with his mouth.
My dad was left handed. Severely left handed, as my mom would say. He and his brother would play in our garage. It sounded like they were killing each other. Dad taught me to play and I got pretty good, we even played in a decent church league. I’d make my dad play me right handed, while on one foot, one eye closed, whatever nonsense and that guy could still beat me. In pickleball, now I play and find myself switching hands on occasion because of the way Dad taught me. I use my left hand for a ton of things and never noticed much until I shattered my left wrist in May. Update: I’m back to my fighting strength with it and playing regularly again. 😀
Close. Golden Doodle. We had a golden Retriever, and he was a wonderful dog....except he shed. When he would shake, you'd see dog hair fly...But other than that he was so good natured, so intelligent. After he died, two years later friends of ours were breeding doodles. Our youngest was there when a litter was born. A few weeks later, Katie went to pick him up from after school, and one crawled on her feet. She picked him up and he licked her face. So we got a dog. Same thing happened a year later, we got a 2nd. Third year I picked our son up!
Very relatable but substitute ping pong with pickleball, especially the part where the old folks drive the ball down your throat. You have to watch out for the veteran racquetball players.
I think our Pickleball rackets cost $50 for four paddles. They get the job done but over Christmas we were shopping. I’ve noticed many people are shopping at Christmas. Anyway, Dick’s Sporting Goods had an endcap of Pickleball rackets. The top end price was $300. I showed them to Katie and she asked why anyone would spend that much money.
I told her I didn’t want an expensive racket like that. But yeah, there are serious players out there.
This is how it starts in any individual sport, Kurt. Skiing's the same. You start with basic equipment and apparel. Pretty soon, you're buying $1200 bespoke skis, $700 boots, $300 goggles, a $250 helmet and, even though that $300 Columbia ski jacket worked fine, you just have to have the $880 Arcteryx one.....
I wonder what accounts for the Chinese affinity for table tennis, and when it started. Did they invent it? Is it because of it’s practical small footprint as a sport, since you don’t need courts or fields or gymnasiums for it. Just space in a room for a half a table and a wall permits you to practice by yourself.
Maybe. I'll look into it. They're so into it, poor folks out in the countryside used to have tables formed out of concrete, with a concrete net because they were too poor to afford a real table.
I was an exchange student in Lima, Peru the summer of 1973. Ping pong was popular at the time. My family and friends had tables and we played constantly. I had a huge ego and killer sports instinct at that time. I won most games. I then went to Peru. My host family were German immigrants. They played non-stop. They cleaned my clock! There is a large Chinese immigrant community in Peru. When they would come over to play, they would clean my German families' clock! In college, a Chinese championship team gave a demonstration. They would slowly back up from the table as play progressed until they were against the far walls of the student center. Simply incomprehensible level of skill.
The city park where Fang works has permanent ping pong tables. Maybe they're concrete, or maybe they're some other fabricated material. At least they can't be destroyed. There are supposed to be paddles and balls in a cabinet near the tables, but they tend to disappear. Understandable with the balls, but people must steal the paddles.
Good morning. The temperature is 26, which looks to be today’s high, with temps slated to drop into the teens today.
The mothership is updating on the great LA fires, which have now claimed the lives of 24, and on the finger-pointing that has resulted even while fires continue to blaze, with more strong winds predicted today.
The FP headline is this: “Joe Biden Was Never a Moderate”.
Kurt’s story story reminded me how ping-pong crazy the Chinese are and how that served as an entree for the US outreach to the PRC under Nixon.
Much discussion of the fire situation on the mothership. A few people are saying stupid things. Many people aredeploring the rush to politicize. A significant number of commenters who know what they're talking about are contributing information, background, perspective.
If all the blow hard pundits would shut the hell up about who or what is to blame for those fires, those hot winds just might die down enough to give some relief.
Morning. We had temps climb in the night from around 14 to around 22 with increasing clouds. I think yesterday marked the one day with clear, sunny skies in two weeks…
Yeah, ping pong diplomacy. Although, here it's table tennis...not that they care if I say "ping pong". They're accommodating. They think it's grand I'm trying to play. It really is kind of amazing. Husbands and wives play after dinner, there's the hardcore guys down at the end with special clothes, sports shoes and warm up sweats, little kids taking lessons, guys that adopt this trance like state where they volley back and forth at blindingly fast speeds...not keeping score but just doing it as a focusing meditation, and lots of people that just volley without keeping score because it's a thing to do with someone else.
You can work up a serious sweat in a table tennis game. Over here, they play for real.
I’m still figuring it out. They call it ping pang qui (乒乓), which translates as rattle/clatter, but sometimes will call it ping pong which doesn’t translate so they call it table tennis which does translate…or something like that.
"Ping Pong", like "Frisbee", was a brand name for equipment. The term was in colloquial use before it was trademarked in 1901. The game originated in Victorian England. It may have been invented by colonial forces in India as early as the 1860s. It used a row of books as the "net" and books as "paddles"!
"Ping pong was brought to Japan in 1902 by a university student who had learned to play in England. It eventually spread to China, where revolutionary leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai would often play against each other during their long years of political exile."
By the 1930s, it was played widely in China. The Chinese National Team was founded in 1952.
Thank you, author Kurt, for providing the impetus to learn this!
You have to wonder what those original ping-pong balls were made of, since the first major plastic invention and implementation was Bakelite back in around 1907.
Maybe cork or balsa wood? A natural rubber ball would have been pretty painful if it hit you…and I’m not sure natural rubber (latex / caoutchouc) was available technologically for the task early on. A skim of the Wiki seems to confirm that it wasn’t.
Celluloid, "a transparent flammable plastic made in sheets from camphor and nitrocellulose," so, like, plants.
"At the end of the 19th century, when ping-pong was coming into its own, the ball was generally made of string, rubber, or sometimes even a used champagne cork. It wasn’t until 1901, that James Gibb, an Englishman, discovered celluloid balls in the United States and found them 'perfect for the play of ping-pong.' The name of the sport is attributed to the sound the ball makes when it is hit back and forth on the table."
I remember the "original" paddles of my youth were sandpaper faced. There was some mensch, recently deceased, that lamented the introduction of high traction rubber paddles. "It used to be a conversation" is what I remember him being quoted saying.
I've been following the LA story. The Great Chicago Fire was a kids campout gone awry compared to this. What's been ringing in my head is...."Where is the labor force that can even begin to make a teeny dent in this mess?" Every contractor I know can't find competent workers, let alone skilled labor, to handle building a couple houses.
I posted a day or so back, that the entire Chicago fire would essentially fit inside my backyard view (US Forest N and E).
The LA fire width, fits inside my front yard near view. Its length is a half mile short of the nearest gas station and mile short of my first traffic light. No stop signs to there
Maybe. Or maybe there are endemic problems (like low wages and poor working conditions) for many of the jobs that tend to hire illegals, which never get fixed because there is no incentive to do so, and if businesses try, they have to raise prices and so become non-competitive in the marketplace. Those kinds of things are what I mean about the market being distorted.
Of course, I can't discount a poor work ethic among Americans. But IMO there's more to the problem than that.
If people who speak Spanish and may or may not be legal immigrants are working for lawn service companies (operated by local citizens) for wages we really have on idea of, but enable them to support families/pay for housing; and people are free to compare prices and quality of work and hire whomever they want, isn't that our free enterprise system at work? Who are the "legal" people who are being done out of a living?
We’re more likely to have the problem of young druggies willing to work for cash occasionally while they get their main income from a combo of the dole and drug transport.
Heard of a guy who did excellent drywall work on a cash basis, but was unreliable. Asked why he didn’t just get a regular contracting job, he said he could make more in a day driving drug shipments across the state than he could working as a laborer for a week. And the driving involved an unlicensed, uninsured driver in a barely street legal vehicle…
Our rural area does not have the illegal immigrant option, so there’s a lot of handyman work that goes undone. Not enough reliable contractors that are insured, few that will return your calls.
Day labor and "poor working conditions" are the same thing. Americans won't do them. Distorted, not distorted, conforming with some mythical nice working conditions in positions where no such things exist... I don't care about "distortions". I just want to get stuff built.
One solution to illegal immigration that no one in either party talks about, is mandatory "E-verify" that requires employers to validate the employment status before hiring them.
If it really comes to a crisis point, that problem will get fixed rapidly, perhaps like expanded work visas. That is, work done by legal, not illegal, immigrants.
Or maybe wages and working conditions will improve, backed by a market that will accept those higher prices.
Yup. There's a reason. They show up on time and kick ass. If it was my call, I'd say (some number of) years on time every day on a job site with no major screwups and showing good citizenship characteristics... and you're a citizen.
Yes, exactly that. My garden apartment tenants…the oldest son did 4 years in the Marines, the parents work their tails off, the daughter is a 4.0 student, church going, responsible, great neighbors, we watch out for each other. They have to live in fear while they work through the details of citizenship. I think we should rubber stamp the whole family to citizenry. I think that any family that sends a kid for 4 years in the military should get in. I’m sure many disagree.
Noodling on the thought: Trump wants to forcibly remove the cheap labor force and impose import taxes on large portions of the materials for building, from Canadian timber to Chinese steel…
Question: how much of rebuilding is skilled-labor and how much is a strong back? It is very hard to find even a semi-skilled handyman where we live. The area is full of willing labor but no skills (and not much English either).
Tilted very much to skills. Strong backs are necessary, of course, but even that isn't just hod carrying. Stuff can get messed up if the strong back isn't thinking.
People have no idea (yet) just how screwed this all is. They think they do, but they don't. I know guys in the biz for 30 years that can't find a decent carpenter. Same with most trades.
The next realization will be "why do we build with wood?!?" There's so much stuff coming down the pike, this mess isn't even getting started.
I Work at the F.T.C. I Know What Is Killing Local Groceries.
I don't work there. I've testified and successfully led a win there about 2 lifetimes ago.
I'm a strong proponent of antintrust laws being enforced.
Gift article
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/opinion/ftc-robinson-patman-grocery-food-desert.html?unlocked_article_code=1.o04.Dhr5.-fkNFnkII6jn
Very interesting!
I learned Ping Pong at the the major YMCA where I spent 14th summer here on Earth. My summer long Eagle Scout project was me alone. Chopping down large trees and smaller limbs, making a crane and hoist to build a 50 ft long 6ft wide walking bridge for the Y. Lotta rope.
I was taught with the sandpaper racket and the rubber racket. 1968.
Now Kurt, maker and absorber of "How things are made" Sensai.
How did the Americans and how did the Chinese, make their Ping Pong balls in the 60s?
As soon as I got to PALIO I knew I was going love this. Thanks!
Whenever I get an electronic item made in Asia, I especially enjoy unfolding the tiny enclosure with instructions and being startled by the translations.
Without going into details, i have a busy & somewhat stressful week ahead, so it was fun to read this and put off the phone calls to insurance companies and service providers, leaving messages, waiting for call backs, etc., that just drain the joy out of life.
I am left-handed, but with four siblings who were right handed I grew up learning to use both hands in sports. Although not very well.
I play left-handed, more for control, and right handed for more power. When Katie and I began playing pickle ball it confused her to watch me switch hands while playing. I tell her I can write with either hand, but my handwriting is poor. I call it being. Nobidextrous.
During Christy’s illness, we used to play ping-pong. She was bound and determined to learn how to use her left hand so we would set the table next to a wall and I would put my left hand over hers, and gently guide her to returning the ball. She promised me if she learned to play left-handed that she would invite me to go water skiing, and she’d go barefooting for me.
During Covid, Katie bought a net for our dining room table. So we played a lot of ping-pong in there. One of our dogs would sit on a chair watching the game and if you hit the ball near him, he would lunge to grab it with his mouth.
My dad was left handed. Severely left handed, as my mom would say. He and his brother would play in our garage. It sounded like they were killing each other. Dad taught me to play and I got pretty good, we even played in a decent church league. I’d make my dad play me right handed, while on one foot, one eye closed, whatever nonsense and that guy could still beat me. In pickleball, now I play and find myself switching hands on occasion because of the way Dad taught me. I use my left hand for a ton of things and never noticed much until I shattered my left wrist in May. Update: I’m back to my fighting strength with it and playing regularly again. 😀
Golden Retriever?
Close. Golden Doodle. We had a golden Retriever, and he was a wonderful dog....except he shed. When he would shake, you'd see dog hair fly...But other than that he was so good natured, so intelligent. After he died, two years later friends of ours were breeding doodles. Our youngest was there when a litter was born. A few weeks later, Katie went to pick him up from after school, and one crawled on her feet. She picked him up and he licked her face. So we got a dog. Same thing happened a year later, we got a 2nd. Third year I picked our son up!
Very relatable but substitute ping pong with pickleball, especially the part where the old folks drive the ball down your throat. You have to watch out for the veteran racquetball players.
Was just about to comment on this. Never underestimate an 80 yr old with a brace on every limb. You’re gonna get your tail handed to you.
HA! You’re right.
I think our Pickleball rackets cost $50 for four paddles. They get the job done but over Christmas we were shopping. I’ve noticed many people are shopping at Christmas. Anyway, Dick’s Sporting Goods had an endcap of Pickleball rackets. The top end price was $300. I showed them to Katie and she asked why anyone would spend that much money.
I told her I didn’t want an expensive racket like that. But yeah, there are serious players out there.
Oh the paddle can definitely make a difference. I have a mid range PaddleTek that is so much better than my entry level paddle.
I've played enough P-ball to feel the difference in paddles.
Yeah, lotta similarities. I remember the racquetball craze in the 80's.
This is how it starts in any individual sport, Kurt. Skiing's the same. You start with basic equipment and apparel. Pretty soon, you're buying $1200 bespoke skis, $700 boots, $300 goggles, a $250 helmet and, even though that $300 Columbia ski jacket worked fine, you just have to have the $880 Arcteryx one.....
Music and art are the same too - the right tools make a big difference
Agree wholeheartedly.
Speaking of Arcteryx...that's the status jacket here too.
The new hot apparel company here is Stio, which formed out of the bankruptcy ashes of Cloud Veil (which was a great company). I have 2 Stio jackets.
I remember Cloud Veil. A couple women refugees from Patagonia or maybe Marmot. They made nice stuff. I've seen Stio in the sports rags.
You can't get any of that here because it's all made here. The national brand that's trying is Wolfskin Jack. Lousy name, decent stuff.
Yeah, British company. Seen their stuff. Agree on the name.
I'm also an early adopter of Kuhl products. They make really nice gear.
I like Kuhl. I own a few pairs of their shorts and a bunch of their shirts. And I have one 1/4 zip sweater that wears like iron.
Well made clunky stuff. No style.
They don't fit me well, so I've been spared at least that expense. But I've found others!
Arctery'x tends toward super slim styling.
Yeah. I'm slim, but not THAT slim.
Still waiting to save up my first billion so I can take up the sport of competitive hypersonic flight.
Yeah, you start with a small two seater...
I wonder what accounts for the Chinese affinity for table tennis, and when it started. Did they invent it? Is it because of it’s practical small footprint as a sport, since you don’t need courts or fields or gymnasiums for it. Just space in a room for a half a table and a wall permits you to practice by yourself.
Maybe. I'll look into it. They're so into it, poor folks out in the countryside used to have tables formed out of concrete, with a concrete net because they were too poor to afford a real table.
I was an exchange student in Lima, Peru the summer of 1973. Ping pong was popular at the time. My family and friends had tables and we played constantly. I had a huge ego and killer sports instinct at that time. I won most games. I then went to Peru. My host family were German immigrants. They played non-stop. They cleaned my clock! There is a large Chinese immigrant community in Peru. When they would come over to play, they would clean my German families' clock! In college, a Chinese championship team gave a demonstration. They would slowly back up from the table as play progressed until they were against the far walls of the student center. Simply incomprehensible level of skill.
The city park where Fang works has permanent ping pong tables. Maybe they're concrete, or maybe they're some other fabricated material. At least they can't be destroyed. There are supposed to be paddles and balls in a cabinet near the tables, but they tend to disappear. Understandable with the balls, but people must steal the paddles.
It's a sad fact that anything left out gets stolen nowadays. Sigh....
Good morning. The temperature is 26, which looks to be today’s high, with temps slated to drop into the teens today.
The mothership is updating on the great LA fires, which have now claimed the lives of 24, and on the finger-pointing that has resulted even while fires continue to blaze, with more strong winds predicted today.
The FP headline is this: “Joe Biden Was Never a Moderate”.
Kurt’s story story reminded me how ping-pong crazy the Chinese are and how that served as an entree for the US outreach to the PRC under Nixon.
Much discussion of the fire situation on the mothership. A few people are saying stupid things. Many people aredeploring the rush to politicize. A significant number of commenters who know what they're talking about are contributing information, background, perspective.
If all the blow hard pundits would shut the hell up about who or what is to blame for those fires, those hot winds just might die down enough to give some relief.
It’s 4 here with a “feels like” temperature of -11. 🥶
Another one of those comments where "like" is just wrong...
Morning. We had temps climb in the night from around 14 to around 22 with increasing clouds. I think yesterday marked the one day with clear, sunny skies in two weeks…
Yeah, ping pong diplomacy. Although, here it's table tennis...not that they care if I say "ping pong". They're accommodating. They think it's grand I'm trying to play. It really is kind of amazing. Husbands and wives play after dinner, there's the hardcore guys down at the end with special clothes, sports shoes and warm up sweats, little kids taking lessons, guys that adopt this trance like state where they volley back and forth at blindingly fast speeds...not keeping score but just doing it as a focusing meditation, and lots of people that just volley without keeping score because it's a thing to do with someone else.
You can work up a serious sweat in a table tennis game. Over here, they play for real.
It's great fun to watch!
I didn’t realize there’s a distinction between ping-pong and table tennis.
I’m still figuring it out. They call it ping pang qui (乒乓), which translates as rattle/clatter, but sometimes will call it ping pong which doesn’t translate so they call it table tennis which does translate…or something like that.
Something's gettin' lost in translation, me thinks.
"Ping Pong", like "Frisbee", was a brand name for equipment. The term was in colloquial use before it was trademarked in 1901. The game originated in Victorian England. It may have been invented by colonial forces in India as early as the 1860s. It used a row of books as the "net" and books as "paddles"!
"Ping pong was brought to Japan in 1902 by a university student who had learned to play in England. It eventually spread to China, where revolutionary leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai would often play against each other during their long years of political exile."
By the 1930s, it was played widely in China. The Chinese National Team was founded in 1952.
Thank you, author Kurt, for providing the impetus to learn this!
I am a walking revelatory machine, anointing others to seek knowledge.
You have to wonder what those original ping-pong balls were made of, since the first major plastic invention and implementation was Bakelite back in around 1907.
Maybe cork or balsa wood? A natural rubber ball would have been pretty painful if it hit you…and I’m not sure natural rubber (latex / caoutchouc) was available technologically for the task early on. A skim of the Wiki seems to confirm that it wasn’t.
Celluloid, "a transparent flammable plastic made in sheets from camphor and nitrocellulose," so, like, plants.
"At the end of the 19th century, when ping-pong was coming into its own, the ball was generally made of string, rubber, or sometimes even a used champagne cork. It wasn’t until 1901, that James Gibb, an Englishman, discovered celluloid balls in the United States and found them 'perfect for the play of ping-pong.' The name of the sport is attributed to the sound the ball makes when it is hit back and forth on the table."
I remember the "original" paddles of my youth were sandpaper faced. There was some mensch, recently deceased, that lamented the introduction of high traction rubber paddles. "It used to be a conversation" is what I remember him being quoted saying.
I've been following the LA story. The Great Chicago Fire was a kids campout gone awry compared to this. What's been ringing in my head is...."Where is the labor force that can even begin to make a teeny dent in this mess?" Every contractor I know can't find competent workers, let alone skilled labor, to handle building a couple houses.
I posted a day or so back, that the entire Chicago fire would essentially fit inside my backyard view (US Forest N and E).
The LA fire width, fits inside my front yard near view. Its length is a half mile short of the nearest gas station and mile short of my first traffic light. No stop signs to there
The unskilled labor market has been distorted by the availability of illegally present immigrants, who will work for less than legal workers.
Sorta, but that's the bottom end...the hanging around the Home Depot parking lot day laborers. They at least work. American day labor is worthless.
Maybe. Or maybe there are endemic problems (like low wages and poor working conditions) for many of the jobs that tend to hire illegals, which never get fixed because there is no incentive to do so, and if businesses try, they have to raise prices and so become non-competitive in the marketplace. Those kinds of things are what I mean about the market being distorted.
Of course, I can't discount a poor work ethic among Americans. But IMO there's more to the problem than that.
If people who speak Spanish and may or may not be legal immigrants are working for lawn service companies (operated by local citizens) for wages we really have on idea of, but enable them to support families/pay for housing; and people are free to compare prices and quality of work and hire whomever they want, isn't that our free enterprise system at work? Who are the "legal" people who are being done out of a living?
If a free labor market is to be a free labor market, it has to be free for everyone, not rules and regulations that apply only to some people.
We’re more likely to have the problem of young druggies willing to work for cash occasionally while they get their main income from a combo of the dole and drug transport.
Heard of a guy who did excellent drywall work on a cash basis, but was unreliable. Asked why he didn’t just get a regular contracting job, he said he could make more in a day driving drug shipments across the state than he could working as a laborer for a week. And the driving involved an unlicensed, uninsured driver in a barely street legal vehicle…
Our rural area does not have the illegal immigrant option, so there’s a lot of handyman work that goes undone. Not enough reliable contractors that are insured, few that will return your calls.
Day labor and "poor working conditions" are the same thing. Americans won't do them. Distorted, not distorted, conforming with some mythical nice working conditions in positions where no such things exist... I don't care about "distortions". I just want to get stuff built.
Contractors hire whole firms of illegal workers.
One solution to illegal immigration that no one in either party talks about, is mandatory "E-verify" that requires employers to validate the employment status before hiring them.
Which means there's no construction, agricultural, meat processing, food service, hospitality, or lawn care labor force. Zero.
I have Epic Fail Lawn Service, whose motto is, "You get what you pay for." We get the lawn kind of mowed.
If it really comes to a crisis point, that problem will get fixed rapidly, perhaps like expanded work visas. That is, work done by legal, not illegal, immigrants.
Or maybe wages and working conditions will improve, backed by a market that will accept those higher prices.
Yup. There's a reason. They show up on time and kick ass. If it was my call, I'd say (some number of) years on time every day on a job site with no major screwups and showing good citizenship characteristics... and you're a citizen.
If only we could go through the present illegally-here population and pick the ones we want to keep!
"You, nice church-going Mexican family with everyone working, you get legal residency and an opportunity for citizenship that's not an insane hassle."
"You, Venezuelan organized crime creeps, you get loaded in the back of a transport plane and dropped none too gently back in Venezuela."
Yes, exactly that. My garden apartment tenants…the oldest son did 4 years in the Marines, the parents work their tails off, the daughter is a 4.0 student, church going, responsible, great neighbors, we watch out for each other. They have to live in fear while they work through the details of citizenship. I think we should rubber stamp the whole family to citizenry. I think that any family that sends a kid for 4 years in the military should get in. I’m sure many disagree.
Noodling on the thought: Trump wants to forcibly remove the cheap labor force and impose import taxes on large portions of the materials for building, from Canadian timber to Chinese steel…
What—as they say—could possibly go wrong?
The tariff talk especially against Canada and Mexico is nuts.
Nuts is the New Normal
That was a big part of my question. Canadian lumber, Mexican labor. What could go wrong?
Of course, because it's Donald, there'll be a culprit that's not him.
Question: how much of rebuilding is skilled-labor and how much is a strong back? It is very hard to find even a semi-skilled handyman where we live. The area is full of willing labor but no skills (and not much English either).
Tilted very much to skills. Strong backs are necessary, of course, but even that isn't just hod carrying. Stuff can get messed up if the strong back isn't thinking.
People have no idea (yet) just how screwed this all is. They think they do, but they don't. I know guys in the biz for 30 years that can't find a decent carpenter. Same with most trades.
The next realization will be "why do we build with wood?!?" There's so much stuff coming down the pike, this mess isn't even getting started.
Do you live in Italy?
Couple months twice a year. The trip gets harder and harder tho - not sure how long I,ll be able to do it.
My comment referred to the US. The Italians still know how to do things.
Maybe that’s where the idea comes into play of annexing Canada. After that would be stealing its resources and enslaving its population…
Don't you just know it.
Where will Tom Hanks go?
I hope somebody makes a documentary about the clean up/rebuilding because I cannot wrap my head around the scale of the destruction.
I'm sure it's already underway. The city is overstocked on out of work screenwriters, film makers, and every other possible film adjacent occupation.
You're right though...the scale is beyond my ability to get a handle on it.
Assumptions
10,000 houses and structures
20,000 4 inch nails per
200 million nails
152,000 miles of end to end nails.
Or about 6 wraps of 4" nails around the earth.
Assuming the labor time set a nail, after measuring, cut, install piece, place nail and hammer to be 10 minutes, my ROM estimate yields,
10 x 200M or 2 billion labor minutes or
3.3 million labor hours.
At a rough guess of $100 fully burdened cost, or about ~~ $330 million labor cost.
That's probably low. Could be higher. Of course, there's a tiny bit more labor involved than just banging nails!! 🎍🎎🎎🎏🎉
Good question.
This is how it starts, Kurt.
Good morning. That was really enjoyable.
Esp the thought of Kurt in lime green après-pong!
Agreed. It was a lot of fun.
Thanks. I forgot The Leader was putting it up today.
I hope it was a pleasant surprise.
It was. Seeing one's stuff put up as the day's feature is kinda cool.
The thrill of being a published writer!
Yeah! Who needs the NY'er?!?