I can’t tell if people are really trying to front-run the tariffs, or if articles like this are intended to cause a stampede for the stores, so they have a banger Christmas. People in another forum I read, who claim to work in the auto industry, talk about how their companies are trying to stockpile imported parts, to front-run the tariffs. If all this stockpiling is going on, as claimed, Q1-Q2 of next year will be a recession, due to all the purchases pulled forward.
Personally, the thought has crossed my mind. My car will be 11 years old next month. But nothing on the market new fits my use as well.
Gee, I wish there was something I needed so I could go out and buy it before the price triples…?
I just had a good laff. A Jeep dealer near me has a used 2023 Compass on the lot. The asking price had started at $23k. Then he started stepping the price down, a hundred or two, at a time. Last night, it was $22,350. Today, coincident with the media chatter about people rushing to buy stuff to front-run the tariffs, the dealer has bumped the price back up to $23,000.
I just bought a new clothes dryer, a new cooktop, and a new heat exchanger for the furnace. Those purchases had nothing to do with tariffs, but they were still things I wanted/needed to get done sooner rather than later.
For the furnace, during the annual inspection, we found out that the old heat exchanger had cracked. The HVAC guys said that if they had been able to detect carbon monoxide from it in the house that they would have been required to lock out the furnace until the heat exchanger got replaced. So that was pretty much a non-negotiable “ok, fix it.” The inspection was in October, and it was just this past week where they were able to get the part to replace it.
For the cooktop, two of the four old-school coil burners had failed in the past few months. The cooktop was original to the house (1989), and replacement parts were no longer readily and reliably available. We had been muddling through, but Thanksgiving served as a reminder that sometimes, it helps to have a fully functioning cooktop.
As it turns out, most modern cooktops require 40 or 50 amp circuits or use natural gas instead of electric as a fuel. The electric to our cooktop was wired as a 30 amp circuit, so we either had to rewire or extend the natural gas line. Extending the natural gas line was substantially cheaper, so we went that route instead.
The temperature knob had broken off the old clothes dryer, and when the knob broke, the rest of the related mechanism fell back inside the dryer and became inaccessible. Similar to the cooktop, the dryer was so old that replacement parts were no longer easily available and accessible….
At this point, I’m hoping the water heater lasts awhile longer, as that’s the next likely appliance to fail, and I am tapped out at the moment.
XMF, sounds like you have been having “the year everything broke”. I had one of those a couple years ago. The 15 year old washer only required a new pump motor. The 28 year old dryer has worked perfectly since I bought it. New HVAC system in 2018. New water heater this year. The fridge is getting old, maybe 15. The kitchen range and garage door opener are original to the condo 1982. Door opener works perfectly. The range hardly ever gets used.
I have stockpiled spare TVs and DVD players from thrift stores over the past year.
I bought a $1,600 computer at BestBuy last week. When I installed my copy of Microsoft Excel 2010, the Windows11 operating system bricked it and said I needed to get Office 360 for $10/month. I’m moving my spreadsheets to Google Sheets.
I have a copy of Office 2010 running on an old Windows10 laptop I rarely use. I turned that on to use Excel and that copy was inoperable too.
I suspect Microsoft has sent out an update that impairs Excel versions that no longer get support to actually brick them. That’s one way to increase sales for Office 360.
I have three computers: a Dell I bought new, for $800. An HP I got off eBay for $225, and another Dell I found in the neighbor’s trash (free) They all are running Windows 10. None will support 11, so I intend to run 10 as long as an A/V app is available that runs on 10. I am using a Canon printer I found in the neighbor’s trash (free), which is so old Canon does not support it on 11, but it runs perfectly on 10. I also picked up a spare Canon at Salvation Army, that was full up used up cartridges. I took the cartridges to Office Depot, for their recycling “rewards” bux, so that printer’s net cost to me was $6. That printer uses the same carts as the one I found in the trash, and also is not supported on 11, but works perfectly on 10.
Office??? I use “Open Office”. It works well enough, works on 10, and is free.
You could buy a 2024 MS Office license for $20-25 pretty easily. I will stop using Excel (I’m just a very casual user) if I have to pay monthly or annually.
(I saw other sites that had this or MS Office 2021 for $19.99, but this one looks better.)
I buy a new copy of MS Office Home/Student (?) every 10 yrs or so. Four programs: Word, Excel, OneNote, and one other (forget name). Ballpark $100-$150. I get the activation code from the box, download the software, and run it all here (not connected to the Internet). I never use cloud storage for anything. Too risky for me. Businesses do not take responsibility when they get hacked. So, don’t use them.
Sure. As Chinese competition becomes substantial, as the US enters the “pre-stocking-up tariff fear” recession, as Germany craters and Musk retweets the Nazis, I expect Tesla stock will do great.
Or maybe not. Maybe he can keep the spinning plates in the air with more talk about taxis and AI and such. You never know.
