Category: Consumerism

InSinkErator instant hot water success-via-failure tale (and a dishwasher question)

by philg

Because I’m incredibly lazy, one of the first additions that we made to our house in 2022 was an InSinkErator under-sink instant hot water dispenser (Home Depot):

It failed in 2023 (leak under the sink, quickly caught thanks to our Chinese brothers and sisters at Govee) and InSinkErator offered to come out to replace it or send a replacement so that I would do the labor myself in exchange for a new 3-year warranty. I chose the latter option not because it was easy, but because I thought it would be easy (it actually wasn’t too challenging since all of the connectors were the same and no wrench was required).

The tank failed again this month, not with a leak, but by failing to heat. I called InSinkErator again, having a dim memory of the above conversation. They came back with “the warranty on the replacement expires in November 2026” and, again, offered to send me one more device and extend the warranty to 2029. The device retails for $300 right now at Home Depot ($400 at Amazon) so I’ll take this win-by-losing. (Imagine if the device had lasted just another few weeks!) Given that both adults in the household work from home and we use the instant hot water for cooking as well as making tea, the device probably made over 1,000 gallons of near-boiling water before dying. That sounds pretty good until you reflect that a standard domestic hot water heater will make the same quantity of hot water every week or so and last for 8-10 years. Admittedly, the whole-house hot water heater isn’t heating to as high a temperature. ChatGPT says that the higher temp can lead to more scale build-up and also that packing everything into a compact enclosure shortens the life.

We had the opposite consumer experience with our noisy unloved Bosch 300-series dishwasher the other day. This was installed by the previous owner shortly before we moved in. It’s almost $1,000 for a new one, which is absurd considering that a higher-rated-by-Consumer-Reports-and-quieter Chinese Midea MDT24P7CST is $700 (Midea is now rated #3 in reliability among dishwasher brands by CR, just behind Bosch/Thermador and Miele; I wonder if Miele will continue to be able to charge $4,000 for a dishwasher that is $2,000 in Europe and that doesn’t perform better than whatever Midea cooks up for its next generation). The racks began to fail probably about a year ago, but we didn’t notice until just recently when rust stains began to appear on the dishes. The plastic coating on the steel tines is worn away. Bosch has a five-year warranty on the racks and decided that we didn’t qualify even though the machine is likely right at the five-year mark. We could get new racks for around $300, I think, including shipping, but I decided that it would be a fun project for the kids to use a Dremel tool and a hand file to remove the rust then apply Plasti Dip ReRACK ($21; smells like 1970s model airplane glue), which is supposedly good for about a year.

(We’re apparently not efficient in our use of dishes and pots/pans because we fill and run the machine 2-3 times per day. Adjusted for vacation time away from the house, this is about 800 runs per year and the Federales say that 215 runs per year is the average (source). Miele aims for its machines to last 5,600 cycles, which they say is 20 years (it would be 7 for us). Some older Bosch literature says that they aim for 4,000 cycles over 10 years and our machine is probably close to the 4,000-cycle number. So our racks, perhaps, failed right on schedule. This makes me wonder why the dishwasher manufacturers don’t put a cycle counter display on the unit. Customers might feel better about a failure and an expensive out-of-warranty repair if they could see that a machine had saved them from handwashing 3,286 times, for example. The LG ThinQ app shows that we’ve used our washing machine more than once per day, on average, in the past couple of months, but doesn’t give a grand total for the lifetime of the machine. Our ghetto-class Bosch 300 doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi or the app, but ChatGPT says that even those with new machines and the Bosch app can’t see a lifetime cycle count.)

Readers: what dishwashers do you love? The Bosch that we have claims to generate 48 dBA of noise (that’s in a test chamber). In our open kitchen/family room it is way too loud and interferes with conversation, TV-watching, etc. As noted above, the machine is running for 4.5-6.5 hours on an average day (2-3 cycles at over 2 hours each). Cleaning performance is okay, but seems to have gotten weaker over time (circulation pump feebling out? The machine was serviced with a new one about three years ago; ChatGPT says that the top-of-the-line Bosch Benchmark has exactly the same pump/heater as our $900 one). It isn’t completely dead, but I’m considering euthanasia (have to find a Canadian to help?) because there is no fix for the loudness. An appliance sales guy absolutely loves his Cove (Sub-Zero) dishwasher, but a friend has one and she says that she can hear it running from a kitchen table 15′ away (not obtrusive, but audible). Consumer Reports hasn’t tested the Cove for cleaning or noise, but gives the brand a low rank in reliability (that’s based on a survey). Some people love Miele, but as noted above they mark them up to insane numbers here in the U.S. (Bosch, by contrast, is a similar price in Germany and the US). LG makes big claims for their one-hour wash, Consumer Reports found that LG cleaned better than Bosch, and Yale Appliance (big YouTube channel) says that LGs have the lowest first-year service call rate, but some online reviews say that LG was noisy for them and CR gives LG low marks for reliability and satisfaction. We have a Monogram range and Monogram makes huge claims for the low noise level of their latest ZDT900 dishwasher, but nobody has reviewed it (CR gives Monogram low marks for both reliability and owner satisfaction). Does anyone have a dishwasher that they love for (a) true silence, and (b) cleaning performance on the one-hour cycle?

Finally, as long as we’re talking cooking, I thought the kids might want to get some explicit instruction in cooking from The Joy of Cooking, but then realized that the 1975 book on the shelf (1) had ten pages about aspics that might not engage them, (2) wasn’t printed on acid-free paper, and (3) had some issues with binding separation. The 2019 update is quite a bit plumper, despite the aspic section having been reduced from 10 pages to 1. It’s amazing how much can be communicated compared to online recipes (10 pages per recipe vs. 10 recipes per page?).

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Should teen drivers be charged crazy high insurance rates if they’re using Tesla FSD?

by philg

Happy National Teen Driver Safety Week for those who celebrate.

ChatGPT says that an American family with two cars can expect to pay an additional $3,250/year for car insurance when a household 16-year-old gets his/her/zir/their license (“Often doubling the premium if the base policy was modest”).

I typically think that the insurance market makes sense, e.g., in COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed and Life insurance and Covid we looked at (a) the government telling us that COVID-19 was killing healthy young people, and (b) unchanged life insurance rates for anyone who was eligible for life insurance (i.e., not ancient with one foot in the grave).

For a Tesla that does 96% of its miles on FSD, however, I’m struggling to understand how a teen “driver” adds risk. If anything, a teen should have better reflexes for reacting to a misstep by the FSD software. If the primary driver of the Tesla is the robot, then there is no reason to price insurance for the robot engaging in riskier behavior when the teen is in the car rather than a prudent adult.

Maybe there should be a special Tesla+Teen insurance policy that charges adult rates if the car is at least 95% on FSD and never in a driving mode faster than “Standard”:

On the back of a Jeep Liberty in a strip mall near us:

Update from our AI Overlord: “Florida already has a statute specifically authorizing this kind of discount. The most useful finding is Florida Statutes § 627.0653(6). “The Office of Insurance Regulation may approve a premium discount”. This language was added in 2019. … Florida § 627.0651(6)–(8) specifically allows different rates reflecting differences in expected losses and expenses. It also permits group-based rates when supported by credible actuarial evidence. … California is more restrictive about the rating factors an insurer may use.”

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Did AI stick a fork in 8K televisions?

by philg

The American dream of sitting home all day in means-tested public housing while enjoying streaming programs on a beautiful OLED TV seems to be dying due to our evil AI overlords. Televisions are becoming MORE expensive, not less, because AI is buying all the processors, memory, and fab capacity. (See “TVs are finally being hit hard by the AI-fueled memory crisis: for the first time, the cost of the processors is higher than the display panels in some models”, October 2, 2026.)

Movies are still being made primarily in 2K Digital Intermediate because Hollywood can’t afford the memory and processing power to do editing and effects at 4K. Our brothers and sisters in Japan introduced practical 8K devices about 12 years ago (Wokipedia). I would have expected 8K televisions for desktop monitor use and for living room use by now.

Should we just give up on ever having an 8K television at consumer prices? I know that the theory is we can’t use that much resolution with current sizes and viewing distances, but I don’t believe it. There are a lot of situations where one can walk right up to a TV and inspect detail, e.g., if it is displaying a document. Maybe it isn’t necessary for enjoying a movie mastered in 2K, but there are lots of ways that a big screen can be used other than for watching a movie. Family photo collage, for example. One of our neighbors recently got a 100″ TV at Costco and there is nothing in front of it. If the machine were 8K, he could put an entire vacation’s worth of photos on the screen at once and people could walk up to the TV if interested. (I don’t like how it looks in his house, incidentally, when it isn’t on. It is a truly massive black hole in the wall. If I can take over from Donald Trump as dictator, I will order TV companies to put in all kinds of great features for what the TV can/should do when nobody is watching TV.)

Separately, who has bought a TV roughly 85″ in size lately? We have a low-end 86″ LG that we got for $900 at Costco in 2022. It was a floor model and came with a 5-year warranty. I wanted to see if something that huge was actually what we wanted. Should we splurge on an 83″ OLED? We never watch when the room is brightly lit (sometimes in the afternoon because of passionate NFL fans, but windows can be shaded). Or are the vastly-cheaper LCD TVs nearly as good? One of my big dreams, as noted above, is convenient software for running a slide show when the TV isn’t being used for TV (we might actually watch 10 hours per week).

Gemini on why we could never have a $900 OLED TV this size, even without AI as our enemy (not in quote style):

The reason OLED TVs max out at 83 inches instead of the standard 85 inches comes down to the fascinating—and ruthless—math of how panels are manufactured in factories.

Every OLED TV starts its life as part of a massive, garage-door-sized sheet of glass called “Mother Glass.” Most OLED factories use what is called a “Gen 8.5” size sheet. Manufacturers need to cut this mother glass into TV-sized rectangles with as little wasted glass as possible, much like cutting cookies from rolled-out dough.

Engineers figured out a highly efficient cutting layout (called Multi-Model Glass production) that perfectly fits two 83-inch panels and two 48-inch panels onto a single Gen 8.5 sheet with almost zero waste. If they bumped the size up to 85 inches, the 48-inch panels would no longer fit. They would have to throw away a massive amount of unused, highly expensive mother glass, which would make the 85-inch TVs prohibitively expensive.

Manufacturing an OLED panel requires depositing ultra-thin organic materials with near-perfect precision in a vacuum. It is a highly volatile process. A single microscopic dust particle or moisture drop can ruin an entire panel. If a tiny defect happens on a 55-inch panel, they throw away a 55-inch panel. If it happens on an 83-inch panel, they have to throw away a massive piece of inventory. The cost of all the ruined large panels gets baked directly into the retail price of the ones that survive the factory.

Standard LCD panels are completely commoditized; there are dozens of massive factories in China and Taiwan churning them out, driving prices into the floor. Large-scale OLED TV panels, however, are incredibly difficult to make and are almost exclusively manufactured by just two companies on earth: LG Display and Samsung Display. Without a flood of cheap, third-party competition, there is no pressure to slash prices.

OLEDs will likely always carry a premium simply because the organic technology fundamentally resists the kind of dirt-cheap mass commoditization that makes 85-inch LCDs so affordable today.

CES 2012:

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Artificial Intelligence for Bonsai care (ChatGPT, Bonsai Master)

by philg

Can ChatGPT prune a bonsai? Our backyard plant:

Initial advice:

Yes, a light pruning would help. The narrow-leaved tree looks like a podocarpus, and its tall shoot on the left has grown well beyond the rest of the canopy.

I’d start by cutting that tall shoot back to a leafy side branch around the height of the middle foliage. Then shorten a few other long tips to bring the outline together, and remove the clearly dead twigs near the trunk. Keep some green foliage beyond each cut; avoid cutting the live branches back to bare wood. Podocarpus can be pruned during active growth.

The broad-leaved shoots at the base look like a different plant. Trace them to the soil before pulling them: if they have separate stems, remove them so they don’t compete with the bonsai. I’d do those few cuts first and reassess its shape before pruning more.

I removed the weed (“undocumented enriching immigrant plant”) and asked ChatGPT to annotate an updated photo:

The pruned-by-an-11-year-old version:

ChatGPT:

That cut looks clean, and the tree’s height is much closer to the rest of its canopy. I’d stop pruning live branches for now and let it grow. The two thin shoots still reaching up on the left can be shortened later if you want a tighter outline. For now, I’d only remove twigs you’ve confirmed are dead.

Might we be about to enter a golden age of Japanese gardens and bonsai? The problem with these disciplines is that they require intelligence that Americans lack (average IQ in Japan is substantially higher than in the U.S.), diligence and attention to detail that Americans lack, and labor that Americans can’t afford. What if AI supplies the intelligence and Optimus supplies the labor? Why not have a yard that looks like Kenroku-en, Koraku-en, or Kairaku-en? Why wouldn’t a Floridian have a tropical bonsai collection that competes with the one at Heathcote in Fort Pierce? (Not exclusively Japanese, but why not also have an orchid garden comparable to the one in Naples? Need to mist them every day? Not a problem for Optimus. (the Japanese are great at everything, of course, and have a rich orchid tradition as well))

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iPhone 18 Pro Max first impressions

by philg

Was it worth sticking to a one-year upgrade cycle on the iPhone Pro Max? (see the comments in Are iPhone 18 sales off to a weak start? for the costs: “$414/year for annual, $345/yr for every 2 years, $281/yr for every 3 years.”)

So far, I think so! The provisioning process wasn’t too bad, maybe because I had the new phone copy everything directly from the old phone rather than going through the cloud. It seemed that a lot more apps were already signed-in and ready to use. Battery life is vastly superior to the year-old iPhone 17 Pro Max. Is the camera way better? Tough to say. Here are some samples.

Predator emerges from the sea in Jupiter, Florida:

(This isn’t Mindy the Crippler, in case you were wondering. She actually doesn’t like the water!)

A high-contrast scene due to shadows from the mangroves:

Let’s check text sharpness:

This high-contrast scene of a father and son strolling by the Juno Beach Pier doesn’t seem to have been handled well… (the humans are too dark):

Here’s one that worked out, though:

A local restaurant (Double Roads in Jupiter, Florida) held a small car show. Click to read some of the text and, also, think back with nostalgia to a simpler time when Americans could buy cars that weren’t tainted by any Nazi associations (1966 Volkswagen Beetle). In my opinion, it is impressive how well the camera handled the engine, which has a lot of Black parts (that matter) and is shaded by an overhanging lid.

(Maybe the Tesla Y, currently at 4 million, will surpass the Beetle’s production record of about 23 million? Elon doesn’t seem to be in any mood to update the name or the body shape.)

This 1960 Corvette was handled well:

I bought the wrist strap and the Apple silicone case. My idea was that the strap would be useful when using the device primarily for photography. Unfortunately, it gets in the way when using the smartphone as a smartphone, e.g., putting it into and pulling it out of one’s pocket. It would be great if there were a way to store the strap somehow inside the case or up against the case, but there isn’t.

Loyal readers know me as a historical hater and mocker of Apple (part of my successful record as a stock picker!) so it pains me to admit that Apple has done a nice job with the iPhone 18 Pro Max!

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Are iPhone 18 sales off to a weak start?

by philg

I didn’t get organized to order my iPhone 18 Pro Max until 8:09 am, a full nine minutes after the start of ordering. To get in touch with my feminine/2SLGBTQQIA+ side, I ordered the new light blue color. (“All of us have a homosexual part of 25 per cent, which I also have,” Silvio Berlusconi told the crowd. “The only thing is that I, after a profound examination, have realised that my homosexual part is lesbian.”) Because I don’t want to fight with our AI overlords for SSD, I ordered the stripped 256 GB device. This should be one of the most popular combinations and yet Apple promises that it will be delivered on Friday, i.e., Day 1 of deliveries with no lining up or camping out.

For previous generations of phones, wouldn’t someone who was this late to the party have had to wait beyond Day 1 for delivery? ChatGPT:

iPhone 15 Pro Max (2023): Within the first hour, many Pro Max configurations had slipped to October or November, and some buyers who finally got through around the 10-minute mark were already seeing delayed delivery.

Update at 10:28 Eastern time (2.5 hours after ordering began): the same phone won’t be delivered until October 6-13:

Related:

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iPhone 18 Pro camera improvements

by philg

Apple has announced the iPhone 18. The part of the phone that motivates me to pay to upgrade is the photography pipeline. It looks as though there are still three lenses on the Pro and Pro Max. Apple press release:

The new 48MP Fusion Main camera with variable aperture is the most advanced camera Apple has ever made, bringing aperture control to iPhone for the first time along with even more creative control. Six laser-cut blades smoothly transition between different apertures, making it incredibly easy to capture the best shot by automatically adjusting for depth of field and lighting. Combined with a new sensor that improves image quality, the result is better low-light photography, crisper detail in the back of group photos, and more unique shots. Variable aperture also provides more control for creative pros by giving them the ability to manually adjust any of the four aperture settings in the Camera app, and an API is available to developers for even more control across the aperture range in their apps.

With a new computational imaging pipeline, the Main camera produces sharper, more detailed shots, and upgraded Photographic Styles with new texture and grain controls let users further dial in their desired appearance and have more creative control over their photos.4 Industry-leading video capabilities also become more versatile, with the ability to apply Cinematic effects after capture to videos shot at up to 60 fps. In Time-lapse mode, users can now record videos in 4K and Dolby Vision HDR. Audio Mix also has new algorithms that deliver higher-quality voices and can now isolate music.

Pro controls is a new customizable experience in the Camera app for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that makes it easier than ever for users to access their most used settings and introduces new options for manual control. Users can now adjust settings such as lens aperture, shutter speed, and white balance, or use a histogram to check exposure levels throughout a scene.

From this is it reasonable to infer that the tele and wide lenses/sensors are unchanged?

It looks as though there is an interesting new way to carry what is effectively a camera:

The Pro Max is $1,300, which is $100 more than the 17 Pro Max (256 GB of precious SSD that AI wants to steal from us).

What about the new $2000 folding phone? It has just two lenses on the back. They claim to have some sort of built-in telephoto lens on the main camera, but if that is such a great idea why isn’t it on the Pro Max? I’m skeptical!

The new watch supposedly has some better heart rate tracking features and, channeling Elizabeth Holmes, Apple wants healthy people to get tons of blood tests:

The Health app also includes movement evaluations that measure flexibility, strength, balance, and more using vision-based AI models on iPhone and heart rate data from Apple Watch. Users will be able to schedule and purchase new labs that feature over 50 key biomarkers for $119 directly through the Health app at approximately 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations in the U.S. The redesigned Health app will arrive later this year, starting in U.S. English.

It looks as though the watch will also measure pulse ox so you can see if you’re dying, if it is time to put on the cannula in an unpressurized airplane, if it was unwise to rush straight to a ski mountain from sea level without sleeping in Denver for a couple of nights, etc.:

Readers: Who is brave enough to try the new folding thing?

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ChatGPT, roof warranty analyst

by philg

Our clay tile roof was installed a year ago and came with a 7-year warranty with the following condition: “All warranties require free annual maintenance inspections, in order to maintain validity throughout the duration.” During this year’s inspection, done by drone because the roof was slightly wet and clay is extremely slippery/hazardous when wet, a cracked tile was discovered.

The roofer has to fix this at no charge? Email from the roofer: “Clay tiles will not crack like concrete tiles since they aren’t absorbing water and would only crack from impact of some kind.”

There haven’t been any real wind storms here in the past year (the last “major hurricane” in Palm Beach County was in 1949). The cracked tile isn’t near a coconut palm that could have dropped a heavy nut onto it. I uploaded the photo to my warranty analyst (ChatGPT):

The crack looks more like a structural/installation crack than a classic impact break. It is a fairly clean, narrow crack running longitudinally through the tile, without an obvious crater, chip, crushed spot, or radiating fracture pattern where something struck it. Impact from something substantial—fallen branch, tool, golf ball, worker stepping hard on an unsupported portion—often leaves some evidence at the point of contact.

On a one-year-old roof, plausible non-impact causes include a hairline crack present when installed that subsequently opened up; a tile stressed by its nail/screw/clip or adhesive; inadequate support beneath part of the tile; somebody walking on it during installation or later work; or occasionally a manufacturing defect.

(I’m pretty sure that we’ll still have to pay the roofer to fix the problem that his crew created, or maybe that the tile manufacturer (Verea in Spain (maybe they’re too busy freeing “Palestine” to go the last kilometer in quality control?)) created, but at least now we know that we’re being cheated!)

Also at the intersection of AI and Florida homeownership, I asked ChatGPT about what stain to use for the front door, beginning to look a bit shabby. Absent AI, I would have tried to buy Sikkens, making stain in the Netherlands since pre-Islamic times (1792). ChatGPT had a different perspective:

I bounced the question to Grok and Claude and learned… that Sikkens in the U.S. is marketed as “PPG”. The AI was still useful, though, potentially, because it calculated how many quarts are needed and that there is a specific stain for doors as opposed to siding.

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An uninterruptible power supply for A/V cabinets (lithium-ion!)

by philg

Even an antique house like ours (2003) here in Florida comes with an A/V cabinet (example from Leviton), the natural home of routers, switches, etc. because this is where all of the Cat 5 cables (Cat 5e in our case; Cat 6, obviously, for newer houses (6A is stiffer and maybe builders wouldn’t want to use it?)) to wall plates end. The Florida Power & Light grid has amazing uptime, but our epic afternoon thunderstorms do cause 1-2-second power hiccups. That’s enough time to force a 5-minute reboot of our cable modem (still in an Xfinity coax ghetto here). Having failed to find what I expected to be a wallet-sized lithium-ion-based UPS, I set the cabinet up initially with a CyberPower lead-acid-based uninterruptible power supply (UPS) of absurd weight and capacity given the use case:

The CyberPower began to shut down randomly, despite the low load. Replacing the battery didn’t help. CyberPower did not want to offer a warranty replacement. Another summer arrived and we had a couple of power glitches. I found that Liebert, the storied manufacturer of machine room AC, introduced the Vertiv PUL-350LVT back in May 2026. This costs about $142 at Amazon and can handle 210W, which seemed potentially insufficient given that the Netgear GS116PP PoE switch by itself can supply 183W of output. Due to the lack of a lead-acid battery, the weight is just over 3 lbs. I used a Tapo P110M smart plug to see what the total draw from the cabinet was (cable modem, Omada router, Netgear PoE swtich) and it turned out to be just 72W steady-state (I rebooted most of the Omada access points at the same time and power consumption did not spike). The UPS will keep our home on the Internet for over 10 minutes, therefore, in the event of a serious FPL problem.

Tangent Alert! Maybe we should buy Vertiv stock? No matter who wins the AI and data center wars, Vertiv/Liebert will have to be paid! They’re like Levi’s for gold miners, right down to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ passion:

The company also seems to admit that it doesn’t pay employees fairly:

Why is there “work we need to do to improve”? If Vertiv/Liebert pays employees what they’re worth, what would be an improvement? (paying some employees more than they’re worth?) If Vertiv/Liebert does not pay employees what they’re worth, what stops them from adjusting pay right now?

But I digress…

Returning to the question of lithium-ion to sit behind the small boxes that are critical to home happiness…. so far it works! (I bought it at Amazon, set it up in a few minutes, and simulated a brief outage by unplugging it a day after the install.) The only unknown unknown unknown is what happens if there is a 20-minute outage, the batteries die completely, and then power is restored. Will this thing turn itself back on? When initially plugged into the mains, it did not come on without me pressing and holding the button.

What would be nice to have? How about a small light lithium-ion UPS for a desktop PC with a standard 750-1000W power supply? Instead of the lead-acid monsters designed for max runtime, this would have enough battery for only a 1-minute outage and then a 2-minute orderly shutdown if the outage persisted. Let’s assume kind of a worst-case draw of 1000 watts for all three minutes, which is essentially impossible (GPU-intensive processes would be shut down shortly after the first minute). This could be accomplished with a 12.8 V 10 Ah LiFePO₄ battery, I think, that weighs only 2.7 lbs. and costs $60. It’s about 6x3x4″ in size, though, so my dream of having the UPS built into the PC power supply might not be achievable. (On the third hand, maybe the dream IS achievable. The power supply can have a small LiFePO₄ battery. If mains power dies, the power supply can pull power from the GPU after 5 seconds in order to give the motherboard/CPU/any hard drives another 55 seconds and, then, if the grid is still dark, sufficient time for an orderly shutdown. Maybe the unexpected disappearance of the GPU would cause an LLM or video game to crash, but that’s unlikely to leave any files corrupted.)

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What can we buy from Venezuela to help the Venezuelans recover from the recent earthquake?

by philg

The Trump administration has sent the U.S. military to Venezuela (“hundreds of personnel, two warships, fixed and rotary-winged aircraft, and search and rescue teams”), which will, I hope, help with immediate problems. But what about supporting long-term rebuilding of this frenemy? My preferred method for helping afflicted foreign countries is to boost their economies by buying their exports (see Japan Relief: Idea #1 (buy a knife), for example).

What can we buy from Venezuela in the coming months that we wouldn’t have otherwise purchased? ChatGPT says that Venezuelan coffee is “potentially very good, but uneven and hard to find” (old/popular brand available on Amazon), that chocolate made in Venezuela can be good. Franceschi Chocolate, Chocolates El Rey, and Savoy are the recommended brands. Of these, I found only Savoy at Amazon. ChatGPT apparently wants humans to be too drunk to resist its takeover of the planet and consequently recommends rum: Diplomático, Santa Teresa, Pampero, Cacique. Venezuelan seafood is apparently a big export, but tough to find as a consumer.

Since we live in a Latinx-rich environment, I am going to visit some of the local “Hispanic” supermarkets and see what I can find before hoping and praying for chocolate to make it through the mail in summer heat.

The good old days…

My first order… (U.S.-roasted because ChatGPT says that nationalization and state control hasn’t worked out well for the quality of the two big Venezuelan coffee companies, though of course Mamdani-run state enterprises will do better!)

Purchase #2, at Jupiter’s Latinx supermarket (Tapatia):

Note that the above shows 100 percent of the Venezuela-made items available in the store, according to the staff. They had a lot of stuff from Mexico, some from Central America, and not even coffee from Venezuela.

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