My few remaining friends and relatives can confirm I’m a longtime fan of the lazy-man’s load. You know, carrying more and heavier items in increasingly precarious positions to avoid making safe and annoying extra trips.
Well, my devotion cost me plenty a few weeks ago, when my shopping cart with 80 pounds of kitty litter and 50 cans of cat food went off a curb, and I tried to use my lightning reflexes and pea brain to save it. I was reflexively unwilling to let go, allow the cart to fall, and go and pick it up. Instead, I held on, tumbled over it, and mashed my thigh muscle into a severe contusion and grapefruit-sized hematoma. This required a two-day hospital stay, and is still expected to take several months to reabsorb and heal. Brilliant, and even more so because it was easily avoidable.
Just a little side advice: be cautious about blood thinners. They may be good at reducing stroke risks, in my case, reportedly from 1.5% to less than 1%. However, the downside is they don’t just make shaving nicks hard to coagulate. They can turn simple bumps and bruises into more serious injuries, especially near the cranium. So, thoroughly quiz your clinicians, and be persistent because I’ve found many as difficult to interview as my most reticent and closed-mouthed sources.
Anyway, perhaps it’s my as-needed, opioid, painkillers talking, but I couldn’t help noticing multiple parallels between my own physical foolishness and the tariff-driven tempest tossing the Top 50 global and North American automation suppliers in this issue’s “Braced for a beating?” cover story (p. 20). They’re all facing the usual do-more-with-less pressures they’ve always encountered. And, since the COVID-19 pandemic waned in recent years, perhaps the biggest challenge was digitalization, and migrating many formerly hardware-based functions to software, which have been greatly energized by the matchless hype of artificial intelligence (AI) and its many permutations.
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Unfortunately, the real monkey wrench this past year has been the Trump Administration’s arbitrary and chaotic imposition of unnecessary and self-destructive tariffs on products, nations and markets worldwide. Long-ago recognized and discredited as indirect taxes on consumers in the nation trying to impose them, tariffs were generally minimized and restrained in recent decades because no one wanted to participate in or be blamed for their brainless drawbacks, which also hobble jobs and companies in related industries. Well, the blinders are back on.
Maybe because I grew up there, I think tariffs are very similar to three-card Monte (no relation I know of) that reappears on the streets of New York and elsewhere every couple of decades. This ancient con from the 15th century periodically reemerges, and flourishes like measles after enough suckers have forgotten about it, and a new generation grows up thinking their awareness and/or their community’s shared immunity doesn’t require maintenance.
I used to be equally mystified by anti-immigrant sentiment, arguments and attacks in the U.S. and Europe. This is because I remember one of their biggest economic problems used to be—and still is—millions of unfilled jobs, and declining birthrates including looming, negative population growth. So, what’s the response when hundreds of thousands of people want to come and work for minimal pay, learn our languages, largely assimilate, and have their kids grow up in our educational system? Do we welcome them, and invest in some housing and training? Heck no. Keep them out, and violently attack immigrant families and communities that are already here, and typically working hard and paying taxes like everyone else.
Talk about an epic example of shooting ourselves in the foot for nothing. Brilliant, and also easily avoidable.
