Bibble from the Barbie fairy movies

I believe tape is one of those words that used to have a more broad application, and then narrowed in on a new product.

I sew a bit, and “bias tape” is non-adhesive, thin strips of cloth used for hems and other edge applications. Measuring tapes likewise aren’t adhesive and have probably been around for about as long as measuring has - my old art history class is ticking my brain, reminding me of measuring rods and ropes being the symbols of power and rulership in extremely ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, etc art.

According to this link, it is indeed an old word that meant “thin strip of cloth used for tying, measuring, etc”. So it sounds like we’re just doing tape dirty by forgetting it’s one of the OGs of civilization.

Feet squared

Dude, you can make a barcode of anything with literally a Microsoft word font, and you can scan with a phone. They can keep the same item IDs for heaven’s sake - I work for a manufacturer, and we wanted to add barcodes literally just for our own internal inventory counting (no on site POSs, less structured warehouse given nature of work). Our internal item codes have letters and symbols in them, like 25WIDGET-01.

I was able to tweak the label printing template to add an additional line of the same item code in barcode font with the right open and close symbols added (/25WIDGET-01/) and then when we do inventory, we use a really cheap app that let me put together a scanning form that lets the user scan the code, converts it back to the string, and then lets them input a quantity, and sends it back to a master excel document without needing to manually transcribe written inputs or risking employee typos or visually misidentifying the item as 26WIDGET-01 instead. We also no longer have to have one group of counters scour the entire disjointed warehouse looking for every single location one of “their” items might be and hope they found all of them while other groups chaotically do the same - your group is assigned to scan EVERYTHING in this section. If you find something without a label you report it. No more crazy margin math, no more “oops I didn’t think I’d find boxes of our hottest seller in the storage trailer”, no more 30 paper copies of a form.

Our total organizational cost to use this system in 2 countries and half a dozen locations was about 12 man hours of my completely underpaid time and about $30 per location per inventory in app fees on existing company phones.

We made no changes to our ERP. It reduced inventory time, recounts, and mistakes by ~50%. Employees LOVED not having to waste time trying to exactly copy longass random strings for our weirder items or the “gotcha” items. Our vendors don’t barcode for us either - we do it on receiving, because we already have to label the items with our internal code anyway.

And we’re doing a TON of custom manufacturing - often items that literally may never be sold under that code again - with large volume orders, we’re not asking cashiers to manually enter everything for stocked items sold repeatedly at small volume. We’re literally ONLY using this for inventory and get no other benefits. Their excuses are such hot bullshit it’s crazy.

Barcodes also literally have nothing to do with discounts - as above, they are literally just a way of storing a string visually. Not exaggerating to call them a font meant to be read by computers. If you are storing pricing in a computer anywhere, and not making cashiers enter THAT manually as well, then the only difference between barcodes and not is that with a barcode they scan the item code into the computer and without they manually type it?

And if the only place they store pricing is on the item sticker, that is a system so fucking vulnerable to fraud both internal and external it’s CRAZY. For an organization of their size??? No way.

Niche show, but Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Holy shit that was a great show and SO well written, but I can see why it wasn’t well received on a traditional TV format - if you didn’t watch from the beginning and keep watching to the end it wouldn’t make a lick of sense. Definitely meant to be enjoyed with a serious watch of an entire series and not episodically.

I would give my left foot for a Season 3.

Tell that to the Canadian woman who was detained while trying to legally enter and was disappeared for weeks until her friends got her story into the news - Canadians are very much NOT safe and with the 51st State rhetoric, we’ve got as much of a target on our backs as anyone else.

I suggest spending some time on page 38.

Jesus.

Given that the week can’t be divided evenly with 7 days, but Greg has 4 letters and Ian only has 3, I feel like it’s just math that there should be 4 Greg days and 3 Ian days instead of vice versa

This is a great description of severe cramps. Please accept your honorary Period Enjoyer Certificate™ and also my condolences.

Hopefully they come up with a solution for yours, because the solution for mine was an IUD and it sounds like that one won’t work for you.

I used Linux in university also, and actually had LESS problems than my classmates - a few of our textbooks came with “homework” versions of industry software (made by the textbook writer, just coded to be good enough to learn some basic concepts and work with some provided example files) and for reasons unknown to man and beast, most of them worked better on wine than on Windows natively - for one, the “submit” button was basically off-screen on Windows but placed where you’d expect on wine, on another trying to connect to machines was a HUGE pain… Except the Linux networking interface had no issues haha.

I only switched because the forced upgrade to Windows 8 ate my first year midterm essays and I never forgave it.

The idea of wearing heels on the beach and not breaking your ankle is hella funny ngl

This was my take as well - liberals are pretty centrist generally, which has its advantages, but having to cooperate with a smaller progressive party keeps them accountable. I liked what the NDP was able to leverage our of the last government, and I’m hopeful that the NDP and Greens (or, well, Green) can continue to punch above their weight as kingmakers here.

The amount of flip flopping, technicalities, and multi-front nonsense attacks is making this increasingly hard to keep up with or parse.

Thank you VERY much for translating this shit into “burned out regular dumbass”-ese.

I think they’d also have some old History Channel type content, back when it was like legit deep dive WW2 documentaries and shit.

Shit’s fucked.

As a good faith answer to your question that I hope you read with an open mind -

Between the tariffs and what the tariffs have done to the market (reducing options for supply makes the market less competitive and increases demand in other ways), my industry’s publicly available market costs went up a few tenths of a percentage point shy of 50% in the last two months alone.

In my industry, to pay your bills (your rent, your taxes, your employees, your lights, your freight, marketing, R&D, liabilities, funds to replace equipment when it breaks, etc) you are targeting 25-30% “direct” margin - minimum, if you’re barely treading water - which is (sell price - material costs) / sell price. With that math, a company that was previously reporting a 40% margin (say ($100 - $60)/$100) that had a 50% increase in material costs is now making a 10% margin (($100 - $60x1.5)/$100 = (100-90)/100 = 10%). That’s bankruptcy.

That’s not considering that costs have been increasing for more than just the last 2 months - anyone with a wallet knows that already, our industry number is 80% YOY increase in basic costs (margin math: 40% ==> negative 8%) - or that the true costs of tariffs haven’t even hit yet.

We also cannot pass an 80% increase in costs on to our customers without literally triggering industry recession if not collapse. We can barely pass on 40% and “tightening belts” to make absorbing the other 40% possible (margin math: 40% ==> 16%, half the general target) means good guys and gals with families lose honest, hard-working jobs. Even for a highly efficient business, being told the government is going to send you an extra 25-104% bill because fuck you, that’s why is going to be a heart attack level shock.

This is local manufacturing - the exact businesses who tariffs are supposed to be encouraging to do business in the US. A LOT of manufacturing is like this - it turns out tariffing the ever living fuck out of literally everything includes raw materials that you can’t get here that manufacturers need. This is literally just for our divisions’ own internal numbers too - no CEO pay coming out of this. Administratively, we run a skeleton crew already to make sure our costs are competitive, and it costs us hard already in turnover due to burnout.

The number of meetings we’ve had trying to figure out how on earth we keep our doors open without crashing an industry and then closing our doors anyway has quite literally had people in tears in the board room.

Are there companies who will use this for profiteering? Absolutely, tons of them. The companies who have the luxury of doing so are either are “inflexible demands” (ie food and medical care) or extremely large monopolies. Smaller companies, “discretionary spending”, and highly competitive markets like mine are just going to hold their breath and try not to drown, raise prices where they have to, inevitably go out of business in droves, THEN get bought up by a large monopoly who will make an 80% price increase look like child’s play because fuck you, everyone else closed.

We don’t need to fuck ourselves, Trump is doing that for us, thank you. And yes, people without jobs or who have nothing left after groceries don’t buy a lot of luxury keyboards, especially after their costs go up significantly - something I’m sure they have considered once or twice or repeatedly at checks watch 2 in the morning when they wish they could sleep, if they’re having the sort of time we’re having here.

I think tariffs are generally applied based on date of customs arrival, not time of order - discussion on wine imports who order months+ in advance as well as some small businesses getting hit unexpectedly on long-ordered goods, plus my own industry that has a several month lead time on orders and some bills we have received. I’m less familiar with that mechanic but I don’t know that placing the order before that time will help you if it has to ship from overseas.

sweats in supply chain management

And 85% of medical isotopes come from Canada!