Tracking toy tariffs

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Here's a good illustration of this. Those two are right at the top which is what you want.
 
Alex Jones is a smidge higher than the National Enquirer.

It took me three times to spell Enquirer correctly 😆

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Justice said:
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Here's a good illustration of this. Those two are right at the top which is what you want.
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See, I've seen this, or something close to it before and I see some big names in the middle.

I'll never forget twenty-some years ago I was eating dinner with my parents and a big name news network was on in the background as it had been at dinner time my whole life. A certain reporter was doing a story on a certain political candidate at the time. Not a particularly favorable piece. The big name news network reporter ended his piece with, "Kind of makes you wonder what else this person is hiding". Now I was not a particularly bright 20-something year old, I did a lot of dumb things. But even then I asked myself, "Really? Is that what I'm wondering right now? How about instead of telling me what I wonder, you give me facts, and I'll decide what I wonder?" That was my head conversation with said reporter, I have been a bit weary of them ever since.

Anyway, I asked for a name and you gave me one, so thanks.
 
Justice said:
Are we sure? Dan Larson was saying tariffs WERE zero before. Originally Trump was doing tariffs last term and then they ended up with an exclusion for toys because it was right before Christmas but then it never took effect.

Unless there was a pre-existing amount before even that?
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Back in 2019 I remember looking this up and finding that there were existing tariffs against China before Trump's first term. Recently I've been looking for the history of tariff rates for China and haven't been able to find how they've varied over time.

Ideally I'd like to find them for the past century, and I'd like to find the rates for different types of products since that's how they're often assigned. So far no luck, but if I find it I'll share. If anyone else finds the history of this please do share a link.
 
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canprime said:
I think a lot of collectors are overestimating how much a price increase to say $30US per figure would slow down sales.

Don't get me wrong, it will of course. However here in Canada we have been paying $35 per figure for quite some time now. Now I am talking about pricing in local currency and not dealing with exchange rates, etc. Because quite frankly we all pay in our local currency most of the time. And while I'm sure it has decreased sales, it hasn't stopped collectors from buying. There have been sellouts of certain figures still as well.

So from what I have seen up here I think you guys will follow the same pattern. Yes people will be more selective. Yes the number of figures sold will decrease. However I don't think things will slow down as much as the current assumption. I think a lot of collectors will just bite the bullet and keep collecting.
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The Canadian dollar has often hovered around an exchange rate of 0.7 so $36 CAD Legends are essentially the same as a $25 USD Legend. It's all relative to what the local collector community has been subjected to when it comes to "worth." Action figures have also just about left the younger generation behind and it's a market of mostly adults and their disposable income. Whether its 25, 30, or even 50, that's still not a huge sum of money by itself for a little entertainment. If I want to take my kids to the movies these days that night is about the equivalent of 3 Legends, or 1 really good action figure. And finding a concert ticket at an arena for under 100 bucks is becoming impossible plus all of the other expenses that come with a night out.

The thing with media bias is to avoid the outright, blatant, propaganda networks (Rupert Murdoch is not shy about admitting why he created Fox News) and avoid any of those talking head programs because they're opinion pieces. The right in this country has also pretty successfully convinced a lot of the general population of a liberal media bias, when most outlets are actually owned by open conservatives. And the ones that aren't get attacked for reporting truthful news by the current administration so they tiptoe around news and water it down to try and placate both sides and to keep Trump from retaliating against them, which often doesn't work anyway. The New York Times is a great example of a newspaper that's attacked for being liberal that tries to overcompensate with wishy-washy headlines and phrasing to try and placate the right. It's basically unreadable at this point.
 
the number that really shocked me was the commander class transformers.

$120 for a commander class… just I think I would finish out devastator and that would be it.

Edit: Well I wouldn’t say it “shocked me” but it’s just a price I wouldn’t be willing to pay.
 
To say I dabble in Transformers would be too strong a word. I bought some from the first Bayformers movie in 2008 and though they are long gone (it was a very quick phase in my toy buying life), I do recall the size and price that constituted a "leader" class and "voyager" class back then. The other day I happened to see a current TF that was labeled a "leader" class and wow. Let's just say the figure shrunk and the price went up. Both by a lot.
 
It was an attachment a few pages back. I don’t remember exactly which page.

But I think it’s unconfirmed, so take it with a grain of salt… probably mid 70s page wise or so or so
 
yojoebro82 said:
To say I dabble in Transformers would be too strong a word. I bought some from the first Bayformers movie in 2008 and though they are long gone (it was a very quick phase in my toy buying life), I do recall the size and price that constituted a "leader" class and "voyager" class back then. The other day I happened to see a current TF that was labeled a "leader" class and wow. Let's just say the figure shrunk and the price went up. Both by a lot.
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I’m not a huge transformers guy either, but I do get some every now and then of my favorites. Usually that’s soundblaster, Optimus, and I like devastator of course.

If they come out with a good megatron that’s not $120 I’d probably grab that as well
 
Justice said:
Reuters and the Associated Press. Stay away from any "entertainment" news or 24 hour news (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, OAN, Newsmax, etc).
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Ex-journalist here who quit because I didn't want to work for partisan publications adding a +1 to Reuters and AP. Bare bones, no flash, just the facts. Despite being a Republican punching bag, NPR (at least in straight reporting vs. their opinion pieces) can be very reliably neutral for news reporting as well.

If you get tired of the deluge of information and are looking for a solid aggregator, What the Fuck Just Happened Today? is an excellent resource. He gathers all the day's issues in one place with links to multiple sources so you aren't getting fed your information from one publication or viewpoint. He's doing respectable work and I know folks who rely on that because if they try to keep up with the news all day, they'll have a mental breakdown.
 
Mr_Saver said:
If they come out with a good megatron that’s not $120 I’d probably grab that as well
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I like G1 TFs, the ones that change into real cars, have die cast parts, 15 second transformations and zero articulation is fine with me. I'm not really in the market for another Megatron because I got the G1 for a great price. I like him, trigger crotch and all.
 
Misfit said:
The thing with media bias is to avoid the outright, blatant, propaganda networks (Rupert Murdoch is not shy about admitting why he created Fox News) and avoid any of those talking head programs because they're opinion pieces. The right in this country has also pretty successfully convinced a lot of the general population of a liberal media bias, when most outlets are actually owned by open conservatives. And the ones that aren't get attacked for reporting truthful news by the current administration so they tiptoe around news and water it down to try and placate both sides and to keep Trump from retaliating against them, which often doesn't work anyway. The New York Times is a great example of a newspaper that's attacked for being liberal that tries to overcompensate with wishy-washy headlines and phrasing to try and placate the right. It's basically unreadable at this point.
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I think people in general have a really difficult time understanding what a journalist/journalistic outlet should do, how they should do it, and how much bias they are actually displaying. Not picking on yojoebro - just using his comment as a springboard - but news consumers are just as biased as the average person, so when you read or listen to a piece and your "bias detector" goes off - that detector isn't the ultimate arbiter of truth either! It's filtered through your own biases, and is just as imperfect - I'd argue more imperfect than a professional journalist making a good faith effort to do their job. It's a difficult exercise, and I have respect for people who even attempt it instead of just thoughtlessly consuming whatever makes them fell good/righteously outraged/etc.

One of my rules of thumb is to basically not even bother with "breaking news" - I have lots of strong opinions about current events, but usually a week or two after they've happened. Occasionally when the "news of the day" is broken by a proper news outlet publishing a long piece on it you can get in on the ground floor (Pro Publica investigative pieces, for example) but most often it's sensationalist headlines, the propaganda networks doing their knee-jerk reactions, and very little quality information. It usually takes a few days for the people who know what they are talking about - who want to gather more information and think before reacting/writing/recording a podcast about it - to give a more accurate picture of the thing in question.
 
yojoebro82 said:
See, I've seen this, or something close to it before and I see some big names in the middle.

I'll never forget twenty-some years ago I was eating dinner with my parents and a big name news network was on in the background as it had been at dinner time my whole life. A certain reporter was doing a story on a certain political candidate at the time. Not a particularly favorable piece. The big name news network reporter ended his piece with, "Kind of makes you wonder what else this person is hiding". Now I was not a particularly bright 20-something year old, I did a lot of dumb things. But even then I asked myself, "Really? Is that what I'm wondering right now? How about instead of telling me what I wonder, you give me facts, and I'll decide what I wonder?" That was my head conversation with said reporter, I have been a bit weary of them ever since.

Anyway, I asked for a name and you gave me one, so thanks.
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If you're interested in paying for your news, there's a website called Ground News. It's a really interesting website that shows you the same piece of news from multiple sources (so you can compare how each source is choosing to present the information), each article has a built-in evaluation of what that news source's biases are, how factual their sources tend to be, etc etc. It's a really interesting idea. But it's also a hard sell to get anyone to pay money for news these days.

I've also found it useful to just completely cut out any 'news' source that I can easily prove to be blatantly lying on more than one occasion without posting a massive retraction where everyone is going to see it. For example; if an organization reports that Donald Trump won his Garcia case at the Supreme Court 9-0, they're out. That's super easy for any citizen to fact-check themselves. He lost 9-0. This isn't a matter of shades of grey or the ability for the media to spin a story a particular way. It's a rare case, perhaps, where there is simply a truth or a lie. Anyone reporting a lie is obviously never going to be a trustworthy source.
Again, though, it's rare to get those news stories where you can just do a quick fact-check yourself and see that something is just blatantly a lie rather than a 'spin' on the truth, or misleading in some way.

Anyway, I mostly chimed in to say it's admirable for anyone to want the truth and not just whatever comfortable lies their side wants to tell them. That's a problem across the entire political spectrum.
 
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