K Sorenson

The nice thing about weed was popping over to a friend’s house to smoke a bowl and chat. People need to reconnect. I’ll get you started- get a cool pipe and go show it off ✨

humbleprideglass.etsy.com

There’s a series on History Channel, Hunting H*tler, about what happened to the Nazi’s after WWII.

Saying that we were entering a Nazi regime is not hyperbolic- it’s connecting the dots.

It’s been a long game, decades of infiltration; and now they own our army.

You can't call immigrants lazy moochers looking for government handouts and then round them up at Home Depots where you know they are looking for work.

You can't say immigrants don't follow the rules and then round them up in courthouses where they are following the rules.

Get your lies straight.

Why is this happening right now?

- increasing heat feeds chaotic scenes. Chaotic scenes feed the narrative.

- the Big Ugly Bill is in the Senate, they don’t want you to stay on task.

- Nothing is happening by accident. Timing is everything.

THERE WAS LESS TROUBLE IN L.A. SUNDAY, THAN THE LAST TIME THE LAKERS WON THE TITLE. 76 people arrested then. 42 on Sunday

THE BLANK CHECK: Newsom sues; memo "lets" Trump use military even if there's been no violence

Get the new Tuesday Countdown podcast: tinyurl.com/4886dx4p

If Obama had prosecuted the Bush administration for the illegal torture, we wouldn’t be where we are today. History has consequences.

Just wondering-

Couldn’t Gov. Newsom take charge of his National Guard and redirect them to protect lawful protesters and the people on California soil being illegally kidnapped by unmarked ICE agents?

Shouldn’t that be what the National Guard is for? To protect states from Fed tyranny?

Reports and video show flash-bangs thrown into piles of debris just before a car caught fire, strongly suggesting it was law enforcement, not protesters, who sparked it. More details are coming. Don’t let them control the narrative. Thank you to everyone sharing footage, always record everything.

Healthcare for seniors is *not* waste, fraud, or abuse.

Food for hungry kids is *not* waste, fraud, or abuse.

A $45 military parade for a draft dodging felon *is* waste, fraud, and abuse.

Paying the National Guard to attack US citizens *is* waste, fraud, and abuse.

The federal government is moving to take over the California National Guard and deploy 2,000 soldiers.

That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.

Glass raindrops

humbleprideglass.etsy.com

So, back to the tariffs. While our first agreement was that they are cruel and stupid, the nuanced conversation needs to be had: are Americans aware of how their constant hunger for lower lower lower prices is devastating industries, neighbors, communities?

And that’s how it’s gone. In the past couple years, the entire borosilicate functional glass industry has crumbled; our color manufacturers have stopped production, laid off workers, our materials suppliers can’t afford to keep raw glass in stock. Top down, bottom up. An entire industry is folding.

Meanwhile, there’s a crush of imported closer-copies of our designs just flooding onto Etsy and the American market, being sold at far below what it would cost us to produce them. The guy in Canada told him this would happen- they would crush us by selling cheap, then take over once we were gone.

I tell you this story to illustrate the mindset of the greed-class; instead of offering us more money, instead of working with us to slow the workload, they went to China, had near-replicas made, and overtook our niche (and the burgeoning ‘weed fashion’ industry ate it up.

We contacted the owner and expressed our feeling of hurt and betrayal at this situation.

Then, a couple months later, they are now marketing a new set of fruit pipes, with tiny slight differences, that we traced back to a manufacturer in China, being sold wholesale for 1/3 of our already low price

Then we get a message through Etsy from their new buyer, asking if we would be interested in making a custom line for them. (Excuse me? We already make a custom line for you??) It was clear she reached out to us because she saw the fruit pipes, thought we were a different artist, and go around us.

After about a year of producing an ongoing line for them (that we thought was going to be a limited edition) at roughly what we would charge for our usual wholesale (marked up 400% roughly) their production demands were unbearable and we explained we had to also focus on our other markets as well.

That’s was all really exciting- from the taboo shadows of the art world to being accepted into a major department store by the shoes section, we were thrilled to finally break that glass-ceiling of being actually recognized as art, as a skilled craft, as a legitimate product.

A little side story: about 2019 we were approached by a ‘fashion brand’ Edie Parker from NYC about making a custom line of fruit pipes for them, with our designs in special colors. There was an article about them in Forbes, they were listed in the Playboy gift guide, and were sold in Barney’s in LA.

We were pretty successful, though. We had built strong ‘brand loyalty’ on IG, had numerous wholesalers, and were in the top 1% of sellers on Etsy until about 2021, when Etsy stopped caring about ‘handmade by the artist’ and Meta started shadow banning any form of functional glass art posters.

Over the next decade, blowers continued to innovate, and cheap imported copies flooded the market. It got to the point where blowers were afraid to put out new designs, because it was just feeding the machine. But, they kept growing, trying, lowering their prices, going out of business.

That caused a discrepancy in the mind of the marketplace- it set a too-low bar for the pricing level buyers were coming to expect. Blowers lowered their prices to below a functional rate, and worked themselves out of jobs. The psychology of how this affected the artist-patron perspective was huge.

Over the next few years, as legalization expanded, so did the imports, and they often would be cheaper copies of the designs being innovated in America (we looked into copyrights, but you can’t copyright form with a function), and they were 50-80% cheaper than we could produce them for.

During the interview, the guy tells him that they import the glass through Vancouver, because they are illegal to import from China, and he has a team of lawyers working to legalize in the US so the import laws will change (this was roughly 2013). This guy is mega-rich, and the warehouse enormous.

One day, a friend approaches him about a design job in Canada, so he goes up for the interview, only to find out that the job was to go to China to teach workers how to copy the designs of American artists. He says “hell no” and leaves. His own designs were in the gallery of copies.

My husband had started a line of fruit-shaped pipes going back to 2003, as an effort to find a niche after Operation Pipe Dreams, and bring some form into a mostly standardized shapes format. They were extremely popular, and his line and notoriety exploded over the next couple decades.