Tobacco quotas and modern farming

Herewith some passages from "Less is Enough" - an excerpt in Harper's Magazine from the foreword to an upcoming republication of Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

"...by the work of my father and other good men to preserve the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. For about sixty-four years, by a combination of price supports and production controls, that association preserved the lives and livelihoods of small farmers. To limit the production of a product to demand, or to a demand knowingly estimated, is a simple matter. The automobile industry can do it. So can a child. Excessive brain power is not required to “figure it out.” And so it seems odd and even strange that my province and its provinciality produced the only sound agricultural economy that I have known.

Only in agriculture, so far as I know, is this obvious truth ignored, or even overturned on the recommendation of highest authority. In the Seventies, the secretary of agriculture, Earl L. Butz, who supposed that foreign demand would grow without limit, advised American farmers to plow “fencerow to fencerow.” More recently, other experts have advised American farmers to go all out growing soybeans, supposing they will be needed by the Chinese or somebody. Only in agriculture is the rule to produce as much as possible, this silliness to be redeemed if not by the market then by the government. I don’t think this can be dignified or excused by calling it “economics” or “capitalism.” It comes from ignorance or indifference. And it rests on the assumption that farmers deserve their low status because they are in general stupid and their work requires no learning or intelligence. This is the one-crop-by-prescription agriculture invented by the experts and of course recommended by them...

As the experts were seeing it in 1974, the purpose of farming was not the production of the healthiest food at the lowest cost to the land and the people. The purpose was the consumption of agri-industrial products: chemicals, seeds, and machines. The only recognized value was accounted by money...

But in 1974, we had as now, no viable concept of enough. To have some is to need more, and after that, more and more. To have more and more than you need is now a form of common sense, and so we have developed a sort of vogue of billionaires, when the model of citizenship is set by such people as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. To be successful now is to achieve the satisfaction of one’s greed, which of course is enlarged by every additional prospect of satisfaction.

Such was the state of things in 1974, and the state of things is much worse in 2026. We foresee no practical enactment of the concept of enough, but rather submit to the absolute determinism of progress: progress undirected and inevitable. Progress forbids us to stop when we are satisfied. We must go on, adopting the changes of technology, whatever the cost may be to ourselves and our children.

Well said, and I agree 100%.

This essay resonated with me because I used to live in Kentucky (home turf for Berry), and like Berry I had a tobacco allotment.  My first gainful employment as an adult was at the V.A. Medical Center and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  After a few years of frugal apartment living, I purchased my first home (in that era an $85,000 mortgage got me a nice home with about 10 acres of land in a semi-rural area half an hour from work).  

My land had a history of being a tobacco farm; the photo embedded at the top of this post is a view of my "garage", which was an old tobacco barn.  For those interested, the long drainpipe collected water from the tin roof, which was then directed to an underground cistern to provide my drinking/bathing water.  The drainpipe ends at a bucket on top of the boards covering the cistern, and the bucket had I think some sand to act as a "filter", but every year when the leaves fell onto the barn roof and gutter, various insect larvae would wind up coming out of the faucets in my home.

But back to the tobacco.  Whoever owns the farm owns an "allotment" that allows (but does not require) you to grow X number of pounds of tobacco.  I was working 70-hour weeks, so I did what other farm-squatters did - I drove down to the courthouse once each spring, surveyed the bulletin board and found an offer from someone to sell them my tobacco allotment so they could grow the product.  I don't know how many pounds I was allowed, but the average amount I received each year was about $200.

I don't know if that system still exists in Kentucky or elsewhere, but as Wendell Berry indicates, it was created to control production, because farmers early on realized that overproduction beyond demand just lowers unit costs to the end-user rather than raising farm income.

It is probably no longer possible to live in a "controlled economy," but the principle emphasized by Berry - satisfaction with "enough" - can be applied to a more comprehensive view of lifestyle and life goals.

Blogcation again

(deleted)

Back in about a week

A postcard from 1955

Found while going through some family archives today.  I sent this to my aunt and uncle when I was 8 years old.  She kept it for 60+ years, and then it cycled back to me as memorabilia when her estate was settled.  

There are several interesting features, including the postal cancel "Fight infantile paralysis.  Join March of Dimes."  In 1955 I was in the recovery phase from paralytic polio, so that coincidence is quite striking.  There was of course no ZIP code (introduced 1963), my misspelling of "resolution" at that age is probably understandable, and my admonition to the mailman that the contents of the card is "private" is of course laughable.

One of my ancestors was an "adding machine champion"

A tip of the hat to my cousin Meridee in Oregon, who noticed this passage written by our grandfather Knute Olaus Finseth in a personal diary.  Recognizing that a substantial portion of readers here cannot decipher cursive, I'll transcribe the relevant part:

"The eight(h) [of nine] in the family is Victor Milton Finseth - was a student at St Olaf College - became talented in Music Slide Trombone and piano.  He never graduated.  He won the top honors in Adding Machine speed & Accuracy Contest in Minneapolis' Bank Clerk Contest, and also won over the St. Paul Champion.  His desire to get big money in a strange profession made him a broken financial and even mentally less able.

I have no doubt that the relevant "adding machine speed and accuracy" gene, combined with my eighth grade typing class have contributed to my being able to maintain this blog for nineteen years.

Victor is in the middle of this family portrait (1903), probably taken in a studio in Northfield or Faribault, Minnesota close to the family farm in Kenyon:

The Finseth siblings, left to right:  Knute Olaus, Gurine, Caroline, Gina, Victor, Marcus, Mathilda, Anna.

Blogcation

Reposted from 2017 because I've been distracted from blogging for the past couple weeks.

Cartoon from the archives of The New Yorker.

Do you remember the "alphabet game" ?

My father's career was as a traveling salesman, driving five states selling electrical equipment to local utilities.  So when our family went on vacation, it was by car, not by plane.  We drove from Minnesota to visit family in Pennsylvania or Florida or Nevada, and on those seemingly endless days on the highway (most of them in the pre-interstate highway era) we played games, including the "alphabet game" which required one to find the letters of the alphabet consecutively on signs, license plates, etc.  Those with similar memories will appreciate this modern billboard posted by the Sign Appreciation Society on Facebook.

At some future time I want to write a post about Burma Shave signs.

Chipmunks

I first noticed the rodent activity last week (image above) at the place where the driveway meets the garage, so I replaced the gravel in the burrow and made a mental note to do something about it, but by yesterday (below) the process was obviously in an accelerated phase.

The quickest response would be to push all the dirt and gravel back down and then seal the top with an expanding foam, but I was reluctant to possibly convert the burrow into a live burial, so instead I got out our smallest Havahart trap, baited it with a piece of chicken teriyaki, and waited.  Within a couple hours the malefactor was in the trap, and I drove him/her to a new homesite near fields and prairie about a mile away.

Then I reset the trap, not sure if this was one guy or possibly two.  I captured a second one before evening and drove it over to where the first was released.  Then I realized that I don't know that the ones I trapped are a mated pair and the occupants of the hole or just wandering neighborhood residents, so I decided to look up some info on their ecology and when they have their litters.  Found this nice infographic -

That was new information for me.  I did not realize that common chipmunks would create multiple entrances to their hidey-holes.  Now I'm thinking that the risk of sealing a chipmunk family into a live burial horrorshow is unlikely, and that I can just go ahead with the cleanup and closure.

But one advantage of having a blog full of well-read and diversely-experienced readers is that sometimes I can call for help.  So I'd appreciate advice from others with backgrounds in rodentology, mammalogy, pest control, or house maintenance.

Before leaving, I'll insert several tidbits from the Wikipedia entry:

The common name originally may have been spelled "chitmunk", from the native Odawa (Ottawa) word jidmoonh, meaning "red squirrel" (cf. Ojibwe ajidamoo). The earliest form cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is "chipmonk", from 1842. Other early forms include "chipmuck" and "chipminck", and in the 1830s they were also referred to as "chip squirrels", probably in reference to the sound they make. In the mid-19th century, John James Audubon and his sons included a lithograph of the chipmunk in their Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, calling it the "chipping squirrel [or] hackee". Chipmunks have also been referred to as ground squirrels, (although the name "ground squirrel" may refer to other squirrels, such as those of the genus Spermophilus).

Eastern chipmunks, the largest of the chipmunks, mate in early spring and again in early summer, producing litters of four or five young twice each year... Chipmunks construct extensive burrows which can be more than 3.5 m (11 ft) in length with several well-concealed entrances. The burrows are complex and include plugged entryways, nseparate compartments for nesting, multiple food chambers, side pockets and escape routes. The sleeping quarters are kept clear of shells, and feces are stored in refuse tunnels.

Found the above on Facebook but lost the source.  Below is a thematically related screencap from the movie Interstellar in which Michael Caine's character is asked whether he is afraid of death.  He replies no, then adds this...

Comments are closed.

Backyard woodland garden in springtime

About 25 years ago when we arrived in Wisconsin, this wooded area behind the house was wall-to-wall buckthorn and honeysuckle.  I spent two summers grubbing those out, and within a year or two the native plants began to appear, presumably from dormant seeds that were being shaded out and starved of water by the invasives.  Jack-in-the-pulpits began popping up, along with native violets and other spring ephemerals.  I added some cinnamon fern, which loved the thick leaf litter.

We planted a few white trillium, which went on to form clusters and then metastasized to distant parts of the woods.

Red trillium are doing the same, and also the yellow trillium (here popping up in a bed of Lilies of the Valley).

For dramatic color in a woodland setting, nothing beats bleeding hearts (Dicentra), but TBH I have never seen the native bees or the bumblebees visiting these introduced flowers. The bluebells next to them get visited, but AFAIK not the bleeding hearts.

The champion of the woodland garden in the opinion of the pollinators is the vinca, which has spread as a groundcover to such an extent that I need to restrain it by pulling it out at the perimeters I want.

One other favorite of the bees is the wild ginger, which multiplies and spreads readily.  The blossoms are net to the ground and not visible to casual human visitors unless you pull back the overlying leaves.  But the bumblebees find them - and perhaps other insects as well.

For beautiful foliage, my overall favorite is the pulmonaria - so named because the leaves were once thought to resemble diseased lungs (and that is not a bad analogy, to be honest).  The flowers (not captured in this photo) are small and delicate and are visited by bees, but I like the plant for the foliage, which dramatically adds patterns to the woodland floor.

Calamint for your pollinator garden

Several years ago while visiting Olbrich Botanical Gardens here in Madison, we saw several unfamiliar mid-sized plants that were hosting a virtual cloud of small native bees.  The name tags read "Calamint" (Clinopodium = Greek "bed" + "little foot).  We found a baby one in a 4-inch pot at a local garden store.

The photo above is from this week after cleaning the winter debris in a front yard south-facing garden.  The calamint has grown to the size of a basketball.  It has a nice conformation, with dense tight foliage that has been spared the depredations of local rabbits.  The photo below shows the same plant in the autumn of 2024 when it would have been a quarter of its current size, and in full bloom...

It is my understanding that bees and other pollinating insects do not share with humans an interest in large showy flowers.  The double ("peony") tulips by the mailbox draw more views from local people walking by than they do from bees.  Bees and beetles love the garden plants with thousands of minute flowers (the goldenrod is an autumnal favorite alive with insects in September).  I'll try to remember to get a followup photo of this calamint this fall, especially if I can figure out how to embed a small phone video of the bees.

Seeking address labels that support a charity

Many years ago I used return address labels from the National Wildlife Federation and other nature- and medicine-based charities.  Then I started printing my own labels using the Avery system of buying blank sticky labels and printing them at home with my name and address.  The last time I tried that, the process was hellishly frustrating, ending with the paper jamming in my printer and the sticky labels tangled in the gears.  I vowed in the future to buy directly from charities again.

But where?  A quick search this morning wasn't productive.  And my understanding of most label-printing services (like the Walmart pictured above) is that my $$ goes to Walmart or the check-printing company and not to the charity.  My "support" for the charity thus becomes having their name or logo microprinted on the label.  

I wonder if any readers are purchasing return address labels from charities.

Me at age 4 months

Photo taken in the front yard of our post-wartime (1946) government housing in Arlington, Virginia.  The address was 3422 A South Utah, which I see on Google maps is still a housing complex (our unit was under the red dot).

I'm held by my mom, who had to retire from her career as an American Airlines stewardess when she became pregnant with me.  Dad was a Navy lieutenant stationed stateside.  Mom's sister Ona, on the right, was in the WAVES.   

Posted to share with family and as a relief from doomscrolling.

My first hospital bill

When I was two years old I fell ill while my family was visiting relatives in the small town of Ada, MN (west of Leech Lake and Itasca, near the ND border). I was hospitalized for four days. Above is the complete hospital bill (I've photoshopped out my mom's name, but the rest is undoctored). How things have changed, not just re pricing, but in terms of the complexity of billing.....

Reposted from 2007, because the more I think about this, the staggering change is in the complexity of billing.  

Addendum:  I may have posted this one before as well.  It's from 13 years later (1961) for orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic to correct some of my polio deformities:

Surgeons fees $375.  Three xrays $54.  Seven blood tests $29.  Grand total $648.  Balance due after Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance: $75.   How things have changed...

A reminder of an old friendship

I've been busy this past week trying to trim down my ThingsToDo list, so I've not been blogging.  But there's always time to doomscroll, and while doing so yesterday I saw what looked like a clickbait link to People, which I don't normally visit or monitor.

The link turned out to be a brief but fairly decent summary of Beck Weathers' near-death experience on Mount Everest thirty years ago.  Beck was a classmate, neighbor, and friend during my years of postgraduate study in Dallas in the 1970s.  Two decades later his adventure -

"... Weathers at one point became temporarily blind from the ice splinters in the air, and opted to wait 400 feet below the summit until his vision cleared... Weathers collapsed and over the next 24 hours, eight other climbers died on the summit. When a Canadian climber found Weathers half-buried in fresh snow the next day, he assumed he was too late. "I thought Weathers was dead," Hutchinson said in an earlier interview, per PEOPLE. "I unburied him and broke the ice off his face.... Weathers ultimately lost his hands and nose to frostbite and underwent 10 reconstructive surgeries in the years that followed..."

- made headlines and was eventually incorporated into the novel and movie Into Thin Air.  Beck and I have fallen out of touch over the decades, but it's nice to see that the People article indicates that he is alive and doing well.

Blogcation

The Madison (Wisconsin) public library system is outstanding.  I have been a user (and supporter) since arriving in town over 25 years ago.   I routinely monitor the new acquisitions list and place requests.  When you are 27th or 83rd on the wait list there is no way to know when the book will arrive on your shelf at your local branch.  

This week I hit the jackpot.  Suddenly multiple requests were fulfilled all at once.  Foucault's Pendulum is an "old" (1980s) book by the author of The Name of the Rose, and has been called "the thinking man's Da Vinci Code.  Flesh won the Booker Prize for 2025.  Savage Peace; Hope and Fear in America, 1919 is a scholarly study of the post-WWI era in the United States when our society was under surprising and serious stress.  The Overstory, by the author of Playground, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Pulitzer.

Two thousand pages to read.  I'm not a speed-reader because I take notes for possible blogging.  Since there are people waiting for several of these, I need to say good-bye to you guys for a week or more.  There is one room in our house that gets bright sunshine on winter afternoons, and if the cats will let me share it I will spend my time there rather than doomscrolling the internet.  I'll just have to hope that nothing important happens in the coming week.

Weather hell on the East Coast

When I started TYWKIWDBI in 2007, the first post indicated that the purpose was "to compile for the amusement of my friends an eclectic collection of gleanings from the internet..."  That's still the case, so this post today goes out to my schoolmates from the class of 1964.  

I've been exchanging emails recently with Pete W, who for education and career reasons became an expat from Minnesota and now lives in Roanoke, Virginia, near the foothills of the Appalachians.  I thought his comments the other day were informative:

"As far as our weather, I told the man who came to clear our relatively short driveway and spent FIVE hours doing only 70% of it, "I'm from Minnesota and I have never seen anything like this."

Saturday night past we had four inches of snow. Sunday at 1:00 we started 17 consecutive hours of freezing rain. End result was 4+ inches of frozen solid ice anchored to the sidewalks, streets, driveways, and ground everywhere. I've said for many years that 1/2 inch of ice is worse than a foot of snow, but this was 4 full inches of frozen solid (not just the top) ice. My yard is so slick it's truly like a skating rink that has just been Zambonied!  We are still digging out. No mail delivery until we clear access to our mailboxes, and today -- finally after 5 days -- I was able to pickaxe out that ice. Flat out brutal, and being a Gopher was of no use. Amazing. Schools still closed, of course, since buses can't go anywhere."

Apparently more bad weather is heading that way.  Just an FYI to classmates.  

"All the fun's in how you say a thing"

Fifty-plus years ago a then-young English- and American Literature major walked out of a college bookstore with this hardcover copy of Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  The $7.00 expense was substantial in those years, but he considered the book an appropriate addition to his personal library.

Since then the book has traveled with him from Boston to Dallas to Lexington to Indianapolis to St. Louis and finally to Madison.  The next destination will be as a donation to our local Friends of the Fitchburg Library book sale.  Before saying goodbye to an old friend, I thought it appropriate to give it one final cover-to-cover read.  Herewith some gleanings from that book.

Uncommon words:

"With a big jag to empty in a bay"  (a load, as of hay)

"Not old Grandsir's/Nor Granny's surely..." (grandsire is archaic for grandfather)

"But there's a dite too many of them for comfort"  (???)

"Choked with oil of cedar/And scurf of plants"   ("scaly matter or incrustation on a surface")

"...they smelled/A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented" (?neologism)

"The lines of a good helve were native to the grain" (handle of an ax, hatchet, hammer (ME,OE))

(re turtle eggs) "All packed in sand to wait the trump together."  (sound of a trumpet)

"...nothing Fate could do/With codlin moth or rusty parasite" (codling moth larvae feed on apple)

"The storm gets down his neck in an icy souse" (soaking)

"By grace of state-manipulated pelf" (disparaging term for money, from ME/OF=booty)

"On our cisatlantic shore" (attaching the prefix meaning "on this side")

"But spes alit agricolam 'tis said." ("hope sustains the farmer")

"As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins" (container of size one-quarter of a barrel)

"We would pour oil on the ingle" (fire burning in hearth; fireplace (Gael.)

"And dayify the darkest realm" (presumably a neologism and the prerogative of a poet)

"The wavy upflung pennons of the corn" (flag borne on lance of knight [from Latin pinna=feather])

"For all humanity a complete rest/From all this wagery." (?working for wages?)

"The other way of reading back and forth/Known as boustrophedon, was found too awkward."

"Behind her at the dashboard of his pung." (sleigh with boxlike body on runners [short for “tom-pung” = toboggan]

"The bulb lights sicken down." (presumably get weaker?)


Memorable lines or clever turns of phrase

(re a farmhand)
"Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in." (did Frost invent this phrase?)

(re a mountainside brook):
"Warm in December, cold in June, you say?
I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm
But all the fun's in how you say a thing."

"We love the things we love for what they are."

"Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it and yet not waste time either..."

"From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn't show."

"When I was young my teachers were the old...
I went to school to age to learn the past...
Now I am old my teachers are the young...
I go to school to youth to learn the future."

"But I may be one who does not care
Ever to have tree bloom or bear.
Leaves for smooth and bark for rough,
Leaves and bark may be tree enough." (the same sentiment as in this Denise Levertov poem)

(re life):
"It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past.  The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing -
Too present to imagine."


Miscellaneous

"And the cagèd yellow bird/Hung over her in tune..."   In my edition, the word cagèd is printed with that accent (not true in many reprints of the poem).  I presume Frost did this to alter the meter of the line.  I didn't see him employ this device elsewhere in the book and wonder if it is a common technique used by poets.

"The new moon!/What shoulder did I see her over?"  (It is said to be unlucky to see the new moon over your left shoulder, but lucky to see it over your right shoulder.)

(re orchard on a northerly slope) (?true)
"No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
'How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard.  Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

(re barn doors):
"The advantage-disadvantage of these doors
Was that tramp taking sanctuary there
Must leave them unlocked to betray his presence.
They could be locked but from the outside only...
And it had almost given him troubled dreams
To think that though he could not lock himself in,
The cheapest tramp that came along that way
Could mischievously lock him in to stay."

"As a brief epidemic of microbes/ That in a good glass may be seen to crawl..." (I've heard the term "good glass" applied to telescopes.  Presumably the reference is similar here, to lens glass that is free of imperfections) ??

(re Santa Claus):
"We all know his address, Mount Hekla, Iceland./So anyone can write to him who has to" (???)


Links to my favorite poems

Mending Wall

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Birches (and audio)

The Road Not Taken


And now, goodbye old friend.

Reposted from nine years ago to take a break from doomscrolling.

A Twixmas present

The week between Christmas and New Years may be a festive period, but the garbage bin still needs to be wheeled out to the roadside.  We've had recent snow and ice, so I needed reliable traction, and when I put my left foot into a galosh*, I felt something under my sock.  Expecting a curled shoelace there, I was surprised to find instead a food stash.

Expecting the items to be seeds from the crabapple tree, I was surprised again when I looked more closely and realized they were kernels of corn -

- and was triply surprised because there are no corn kernels in our birdseed stash (which in any case is kept in a tightly sealed container).  The colors of the kernels led me to the source -

- colorful "Indian corn" we had used for years as front door Thanksgiving decorations had been meticulously harvested.

There was no doubt about the identity of the culprit.  The unanswered question was - why were they placed in the galosh?  We have a typical American suburban garage - that is to say one that it is littered with (first world problem) lots of stuff, including lawn and garden equipment, plants in containers overwintering, cartons of odds and ends that can tolerate low temps in the winter.  Lots of nooks and crannies.  So why did Mrs. mus musculus choose to traverse the floor, climb (probably along the zipper) of my galosh and drop the corn kernels there?

Factoring in the number of kernels missing from the cobs I have to assume there are other stashes elsewhere in the garage, probably not to be found by me until springtime.  So I can only conclude that the placing of corn in the galosh is not storage for her, but is a gift to me in the traditional European fashion of the Custom of the Shoes.  She apparently is deeply appreciative of our providing her with a non-freezing garage as a "shelter from the storm."  And she is offering me the corn perhaps not for my consumption, but rather as a not-too-subtle hint to "plant more of these please."

And so the year comes to an end on a pleasant note.

* had to look it up.  Perhaps the first and last time in my life I will ever use the singular form (from Middle English galoche, from Old French galoche (“shoe with a wooden sole”).

How the tariffs have affected me

There has been a boatload of analysis, commentary, criticism, and speculation about the effects the new tariffs may or may not be having on the U.S. economy.  I thought I'd throw some actual data into the mix.

One of my retirement activities has been orchestrating the disposal of all the "stuff" I've accumulated during the past 7 decades.   This is what might reasonably be termed a "first world problem."

Books went years ago; Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr collections to eBay, various fiction, history, and science books to the library.  Clothes to Goodwill.  Rocks, minerals, crystals etc to neighborhood children.  High school and collegiate memorabilia to classmates.  Now I'm working on collectibles - stamps, comic books, baseball cards etc.  For these latter items, eBay is an excellent venue.

This summer I noticed a significant change in how the eBay sales were processing, and I began to track numbers.  For the first 125 lots I sold this year, these were the shipping destinations:

United States          72

United Kingdom    26

Australia/NZ          10

Canada                     8

Others                      9 (Estonia, Czech Repub, Sweden, Norway, Sri Lanka, Singapore)

The next 125 exhibited a markedly different pattern:

United States        114

United Kingdom      5

Canada                     2

Others                      4

At the end of July, sales to foreign buyers evaporated.  Instead of 40% going abroad, quite suddenly it was fewer than 10%.  The reason became apparent when I looked at the invoices eBay was sending to the foreign buyers (example embedded at top).  On a $35 purchase, but winning bidder was asked for $27 in shipping, tariffs, and taxes.  The VAT had always been there [this lot going to the UK], but in previous years and at the start of this year I was able to ship small lots of stamps in regular mailing envelopes for USD $1.75 and my sales (typically less than $40) were not subject to tariffs.   It was on July 30 of this year that the Trump-imposed tariffs were applied to "de minimus" items of modest monetary value.  And I presume what the buyers of my items are seeing are reciprocal tariffs imposed by their home countries?

I have corresponded with some of my (former) buyers in Scotland and elsewhere.  They are still interested in my material, but when they have to factor in the new "shipping" costs, my lots become unattractive.

I'm not suffering financially because for me this is discretionary hobby activity and basically a housecleaning operation, not a business.  But I will bet you there are lots of small businesses (especially home businesses and side hustles) in the U.S. who are seeing a similar phenomenon be more impactful on their bottom line.   I totally dismiss the claims of politicians that the U.S. economy is strong.  The stock market does continue to approach new all-time highs, but that's because of an irrational enthusiasm regarding the "magnificent severn" stocks (AAPL, GOOGL, TSLA, NVDA, META, MSFT, AMZN).   I will bet you a dollar to a dime that the weakness will show up not in the Dow or NASDAQ, but in the broad-based Russel 2000 index.

And this recent quote I find particularly baffling:

"The Federal Reserve is facing a difficult situation as the US economy shows strong growth and high productivity, yet hiring has significantly slowed... This divergence complicates decisions on whether to cool or boost the economy [via interest rates], with concerns about a potential jobless expansion despite investments in AI..."

Rising unemployment DESPITE AI?  Correct me if I'm wrong (please.  I'm no expert on such matters), but my understanding was that one of the major powers of AI was to improve efficiency by having the bots do the work formerly done by humans.  I would think increased unemployment would be expected, not a surprise.

Those who understand these sorts of things, please chime in with comments.  

Related:  A recent Bloomberg article is entitled Boomers Are Passing Down Fortunes — And Way, Way Too Much Stuff.  "As the $90 trillion Great Wealth Transfer begins, millennials and Gen X aren’t just inheriting money. They’re being buried under an avalanche of baseball cards, fine china and collections of all sorts..."  True that.

Addendum:  Another example.  Buyer paid $22.77 "shipping" (for a $37 purchase) into the eBay system to have one stamp mailed overseas, which I could do for $1.75 postage.  Probably some local taxes/fees from their local govt included.

Halloween greetings to my neighbors

Ghosts rising from tombs...

A pumpkin patch...

... and a hybrid "cat-witch"

Brought to you by the same neighborhood chalk artists who created a butterfly garden on the driveway last month.