Coffee, Sex, FIDE ,Fake News and Cyber Nonsense!
Coffee, Fake News & FIDE Trash Talk
It is Sunday already, a sure sign that another week has come and gone. For those who like numbers, Monday (tomorrow) is the beginning of week #33 of this year. In terms of days, only 141 remain until January 1, 2019. And for those who also follow the FIDE election, there are another 51 days remaining until the October 3rd vote count.
Coffee, Trump and Tariffs
As Trump’s trade wars are seemingly escalating into a bona fide global trade war, we coffee drinkers have unexpectedly found ourselves on the front line. We can expect very soon, if not already, to pay more for our coffee. Everyone in the supply and distribution chain is going to suffer.
Take the case of the state of Washington, as an example, one of the US’ leading processors of coffee. Last year Washington exported more than 6 billion dollars worth of processed coffee products to Canada, China, Europe and Mexico. With the new tariffs just in place, Washington’s coffee industry is faced with the likely possibility that it will lose hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, if not more. And Washington is not the only state worried about coffee tariffs:
Starbucks has been in China since 1999, and is currently opening an average of 600 new coffee shops a year. By 2022 it will have a total of 6,000 coffee shops in China. And even more ambitious plans are on the drawing board.
This despite fierce competition from rival coffee chains. Doubling down on China’s growth potential, Starbucks has even entered into business with Alibaba for home and office delivery of coffee!
What can one say? It is good to be in that niche of the coffee industry that Starbucks finds itself. Tariffs or no tariffs, the truth is that people are going to continue to consume more and more coffee.
Regardless of the price per cup. Coffee shop owners, however, will likely be the only ones in the massive coffee producers – coffee distributers chain that will not feel the pinch. For people like you and I, who make their local café part of their daily ritual, it is good to know that they are not going to go out of business any time soon!
Reflections on FIDE and Ethics, or the lack thereof…
Fucking is generally acknowledged as a pleasant activity, except in politics. Not that there is any less fucking in politics than elsewhere. Politics is all about perception: the winners are perceived to do the fucking; the losers are perceived to be the ones who get fucked. That, I think, is the basic reason politics can be a very dirty business at times.
No one wants to get fucked in public. But enough of philosophy. Let me get to the core of this coffee article: the current FIDE elections. I have been following the FIDE ritual of elections in depth since at least 2006, and as a disinterested spectator since way before then.
I have observed that FIDE elections are not very pleasant events. But they are very necessary, because they are the only way to clean house. And that makes the 2018 FIDE elections even more important because it is time for the FIDE voters to assume their responsibilities and throw out a crowd of fucking politicians that have been there for way too long, who have been fucking everybody and everyone. And everything. Especially fucking the game of chess. Just to remain in power, or close to it. And to be able to live off of it…
To be continued.