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a new form of Trump-related offshoring
Sunday, September 16 2018
Gretchen wanted me to meet her in Woodstock this evening after she got off work so that we could dine with Eva and Sandor at the Garden Café. Since Gretchen had Neville and we'd probably be dining outdoors, I also brought Ramona. We stopped on the way there at the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I found a number of treasures: an old automotive windshield ice scraper (my Subaru needed one), a two-prong outlet designed to be put in a light socket (can't have too many of those), an HDMI cable (can't have too many of those either), and a 10 megapixel Vivitar X014N digital camera (the reviews for which are terrible, but I always buy any digital cameras I find there). The guy ringing me up was a new guy, and he actually overcharged me by a dollar, but I didn't bother to object since the price was so good: he'd said $3.24 but it ended up being $4.25. While in the thrift store, I'd also looked at the men's shoes to see if any fit me. I've been wearing the same Keen sandals (with socks!) to work every day, and I was kind of wanting a not-so-dressy shoe that also wasn't a sandal. But they didn't have anything that fit me.
At the Garden, everybody at the table got drinks, including Gretchen (who had a sake "bloody mary"). Unusually, I got two beers, and even Sandor got two beers. As for Eva, she's under a lot of work-related stress these days, so she had three glasses of white wine. "I've been having drinks," she warned us. It turns out that, as a high-level project manager for a major global cosmetics concern, Eva has seen her work complicated by the Trump administration's war on immigration. It's apparently gotten to the point that foreigners with visas are not having their visas renewed, or (if they are renewed), it happens very slowly and chaotically. Foreigners who have been working for these international corporations for years have been forced to work remotely. Indeed, Toronto has apparently become a center of near-US "offshoring," a place where foreigners who had been able to work in New York can at least work fairly close to New York. I'd known nothing about this phenomenon, but Eva says it's become a real thing.
A couple new YouTube interests I've developed recently are highly engaging for different reasons. One of these is a look at rare expensive cars, mostly fromt he 1980s, by a guy named Doug DeMuro. It got sucked in by his look at the preposterous Lamborghini Countach and continued on through some less guffaw-inducing "supercars" to "the most embarrassing vehicle you can drive," the Hummer H2.
The other YouTube channels I've been watching have shown women putting on outfits from various points in history, ranging from the late-Medieval to the early 20th Century. Interestingly, the outfits from that entire range of history are more similar to each other than any of them are to modern women's clothing (or, that is, my limited understanding of such). As you may recall, I have a fetishistic interest in such material, but I also have a completely academic interest in understanding why clothing has been, for the most part, so complicated through so much of history. Part of this complication was due to the fact that many of the individual pieces are now integrated into single units of clothing (say, a shirt, instead of two sleeves one ties onto a sleeveless contraption containing whale bone). But some of it reflects changing standards of what parts of her body are considered appropriate for a woman to display.
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