• Please Remember: Members are only permitted to share their own experiences. Members are not qualified to give medical advice. Additionally, everyone manages their health differently. Please be respectful of other people's opinions about their own diabetes management.
  • We seem to be having technical difficulties with new user accounts. If you are trying to register please check your Spam or Junk folder for your confirmation email. If you still haven't received a confirmation email, please reach out to our support inbox: support.forum@diabetes.org.uk

Penguins

B

Burylancs

Well-Known Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 2
Trump puts tariffs on Penguins. Trump has imposed 29% tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands. These are uninhabited dependencies of Australia - except for penguins. They are near Antarctica and it is not thought anyone has visited there for 10 years.
 
The mind boggles.

What’s next? Putting a huge tariff on popular chocolately layered lunch biscuits?
 
The suggestion is they used chatGPT (or Grok) to construct the list, basing it on internet TLDs:

Forum penguin thread.PNG
 
Last edited by a moderator:
If the Oz govt was on the ball it would cut a deal with Trump: up the tariff on the H & M islands to 100% in return for reducing it to zero for the rest of the country. All the winning, except for the penguins, and they don't vote.
 
Eddy Edson said:
If the Oz govt was on the ball it would cut a deal with Trump: up the tariff on the H & M islands to 100% in return for reducing it to zero for the rest of the country. All the winning, except for the penguins, and they don't vote.
Click to expand...
Norfolk Island has been confused with the county of Norfolk in England ....according to the Guardian ...

some cases involving Norfolk Island, which is 1,600km north-east of Sydney and has a population of 2,188, the confusion appears to have resulted from the fact that the company’s address or port of departure is Norfolk, UK, or the destination is Norfolk, Virginia in the US, or a company’s registered address in New Hampshire (NH) has been listed instead as Norfolk Island (NI).
 
We all know that Trump does not do detail or think beyond a headline. The problem with the penguins is that attitude seems to have descended into the minions that are left who actually did the work and prepared the documentation. If they don't care then heaven help America.
 
Watched a podcast - The Rest is Politics - by Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (ex political PR man and ex MP) which I found quite interesting in that they got past the weird stuff that is the meat and drink for the interweb and "news" reporting,

I won't try and summarise what I got from it here but well worth a watch if you want a better picture of what the implications of the change in American trade policy might be. There is a lot more to it than dodgy statistics and penguins.
 
Yes, thanks @Docb, it was interesting. They drew attention to Trump in his element, basking in his appearance on almost every newspaper in the world as front page news, 2 days running. Chinese news was the exception! Plus many other implications and more insightful observations about where this could take America, world trade and world politics - both in the immediate and possible long term future.

Oh, and penguins did get a mention!
 
Docb said:
Watched a podcast - The Rest is Politics - by Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (ex political PR man and ex MP) which I found quite interesting in that they got past the weird stuff that is the meat and drink for the interweb and "news" reporting,

I won't try and summarise what I got from it here but well worth a watch if you want a better picture of what the implications of the change in American trade policy might be. There is a lot more to it than dodgy statistics and penguins.
Click to expand...
I really like that podcast. Was my go to listening when I was trying to ignore all the other flim flam before the last GE.
 
@Proud to be erratic. Glad you found it interesting. I found Rory Stewart's comments about using tariffs on foreign products to promote home production are only sensible if you target tariffs to things that you can produce yourself. Crude application of blanket tariffs actually does more harm to the home economy than good. Bananas will become (and stay) more expensive because they cannot grow them, the only thing being hit is the American consumer of bananas.
 
And coffee beans, apparently!

I liked the discussion around the pure unpredictable behaviour of Trump, which might mean no big organisation would risk a major reorganisation and investment in change to manufacture (or grow) more at home in the USA for fear of further overnight change ruining that investment. Everyone with commercial interests likes and needs stability; planing is essential before investing and the fear of a coming trade war, with inherent deep instability, could produce a serious planning blight. Which would prevent the very thing that Trump seems to think is the natural outcome from his present shenanigans.
 
It's strange, really. There must be parts of the USA where both bananas and coffee beans have ideal climates for their growth.

Mind you so many things are strange. Despite global warming making UK a bit warmer, we seem obsessed with more solar panels (but less than 50% efficiency) - but negligible investment in the one constant thing below us: geothermal energy. It is cost prohibitive today, but with some imagination, engineering astuteness and Gov't encouragement we could be world leaders in this niche source of constant energy. We don't need to be in a geological active zone (yes, a ready source of red hot lava helps) - we just need to tap into the ground beneath us.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top