On Kitchens

One house want I’ve developed over the years is a kitchen area that can be closed off from the rest of the house. With actual doors of some sort. Ideally discrete doors like pocket doors that are out of sight most of the time, but are invaluable when needed.

Kitchens are loud. Not just loud appliances, but the process of cooking is usually a very noisy affair of smashing pots and banging cutlery and rattling equipment.

Kitchens are also smelly, which sometimes is good but often isn’t. Especially when you have children old enough that they’re often making their own creations at random hours, so at 3 in the morning the entire house suddenly smells like nuggets.

Kitchens have unique ventilation needs. Not just smells, but literal pollution. Who wants this escaping through the rest of their living area?

So what is with the bizarre tendency of every home to open-plan the kitchen? In my area literally every home is like this, at every price point. Six million dollar mansions have a centrally located kitchen blended into the primary living rooms. In a way that you can’t even retrofit in any reasonable way to sequester the kitchen area.

Much older homes had an isolated kitchen if there was enough space to facilitate it, but invariably someone since has knocked out a bunch of walls in the pursuit of “sightlines”.

Is this some sort of weird effect of years of cooking shows, and everyone wanting to showcase being a chef as they cook a pot of spaghetti? I know it became the social norm to base social events around the kitchen.

This is a bad trend. Seal off the kitchen. Yes, your stove and fridge are very nice, but it doesn’t justify turning a very practical room into a show room.

Does a custom home really have to be built just for this simple need? Does a home need a show kitchen and a “staff” kitchen to satisfy this criteria.

Open concept in general is simply bad, and it’s a plan that presumes minimal human activity.

On Dairy

Howard “Epstein Island” Nutlick, that dirty greaseball scumbag, has been trash-talking Canada for well over a year now, mirroring his boss, who also happens to be a frequent Epstein associate.

For instance dairy. They’re always talking about dairy.

For my American readers force-fed an endless torrent of lies and propaganda from your plutocrat-owned media, here’s the deal: Canada has something called supply management covering a tiny percentage of the economy. This means that dairy (along with a couple of other industries: eggs, chicken and turkeys) are “right-sized” for Canada’s need by the government through industry trade boards. If you want to produce milk in volume you have to buy a slot of the quota from one of the milk boards, ensuring that there isn’t a glut of overproduction.

This means that Canada’s dairy industry generates milk production approximately equal to Canada’s consumption. It is a market stabilizing technique both to ensure food security, and to make for a viable, consistent industry that isn’t a race to the bottom of horribly-treated, steroid-pumped animals. It also ensures farmers aren’t constantly killing themselves, as they do in outrageous numbers in the US, and the government isn’t constantly dolling out massive subsidies (again, as they do in the US, where the agricultural industry is backstopped by the US government to such a degree that it’s basically Soviet Russia).

It has benefits and detriments, and is often debated among Canadians if this should be a protected market, but generally the consensus is yes. It arguably makes our dairy more expensive, but it’s a robust, healthy, well-managed industry.

It has been this way for many, many decades.

So when we sign trade deals, we exclude dairy beyond some token amount in both directions: We won’t allow you to flood us with your dead-farmer generating, massively subsidized, anabolic-laced dairy, but on the flip side, we also don’t represent a competitive threat to your industry.

Every single trade deal Canada has signed has started with this basic reality. NAFTA, USMCA, CETA: We entered every one of them with everyone at the table knowing we were largely excluding dairy in both directions1, and it was negotiated on that basis.

This was never, ever a surprise for anyone. When Trump misinforms his cult about Canada’s tariffs on dairy above the trade quota (the TRQ), he somehow fails to mention that exactly the same tariff applies in reverse!

But let’s be clear: If Canada was somehow coerced into removing supply management on dairy, we would destroy America’s dairy farmers. Utterly annihilate your entire industry. Obliterate it.

We have loads of land and perfect conditions to be an unstoppable dairy super power. We have lower input costs across the board.

If you want a teaser for this, look at New Zealand, a tiny country that absolutely curb-stomps America’s dairy industry. Do you really want that, Americans? Be careful what you wish for.

Of course not. And even Epstein-buddy Nutlick knows this. America’s demand isn’t that we abolish supply management, but that we keep it, but also let America’s farmer-crushing outputs flood the country.

That isn’t going to happen. It just isn’t.

On Zero-Sum Thinking

On the eve of my honeymoon a couple of decades ago, my manager called me into his office and asked if I could cancel it.

We had absolutely nothing pressing going on in the office. No major project deadlines coming up. No big new clients to wow.

He just saw a moment where a bit of suffering could be applied, and if suffering was applied, somehow the organization would benefit. That he could tell others how good of a manager he was because he forced such a disruption on an underling.

I said no that isn’t going to happen, he understood that I could walk if he really wanted to press this, so life went on.

He is not alone in this incredibly destructive thinking, and many people operate with this busted logic that every negative has an offsetting positive. I’ve worked in offices where no one cared at all if people were working or achieving, but if they worked overtime, well then that’s a big win, right? Get people to come in on the weekends, even if absolutely nothing of value was being produced, and wow what a super achievement2!

Busted zero-sum thinking.

JD Vance recently celebrated that America’s “allies” were hurting more than the US was on fuel disruptions. This was a win to him and something to celebrate. Similarly, Trump sees groups like the European Union as an “attack” on the United States if the group somehow benefits the members. To a zero-sum thinker, if they benefit, well then you must suffer.

This is the brain-dead thinking of someone who sees the world as zero-sum: That any gain anyone else makes must be at a cost to you, and if you can cost others, well somehow that benefits you. That there is no way both parties can benefit.

You see the same thing in the way the US approaches trade negotiations under this administration. Their primary goal is making partners hurt in some way, and to celebrate every pain they cause as a win. Pathetically backwards, self-destructive, nonsensical thinking.

As an aside, the toady Trump enlisted to make some sort of trade deal with Canada, Jamieson Greer, has been plying every manner of “tough guy” rhetoric, and it’s simply pathetic at this point. You don’t have the cards, fool. You’re played out.

But his latest complaint is the most uproarious of all. After over a year of American attacks on Canada (in trade restrictions, tariffs, and endless insults and belittling — starting with the insulting “fentanyl” nonsense — by that clown show of mediocrity), this foolish man complained about Canada’s “globalization”. Just to be clear, the US could have worked with Canada on a North American strategy that would empower the continent. Instead it started by assaulting and attacking Canada, thinking every harm it caused — which it did explicitly and with great gloating and celebration by Trump — was some win for the US.

Now it’s bitching and gnashing that it turns out we have other markets to turn to.

Get bent.

Footnotes

  1. Like every single trade agreement on the planet, occasionally there are disputes. In the rare case where Canada’s dairy farmers had excess production, often it is made into milk-based products and powders that occasionally other trading partners feel shouldn’t be exported in volume. That is for trade panels to deal with ↩

  2. You see this nonsense on LinkedIn where the startup industry tries to announce their suffering to the greatest extent possible, trying to cargo-cult their personal sacrifice into some illusion of achievement. Wow you work 168 hours a week and dedicate your existence to your job…which is meaningless if not mock-worthy if the results don’t correlate ↩