Elon is a RAWK STAAAR at CPAC (or, as TBogg calls it, ‘Tragic: the Gathering’)…
This man is zooted into the next dimension
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 5:37 PM
wearing sunglasses inside and following an event where he at times had a hard time speaking coherently, Elon Musk walks off the CPAC stage waving around a chain saw. this is the guy currently running our government. Congrats, America!
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2025 at 5:48 PM
… Which reminded me, I wanted to share this thread:
Maybe everyone should be forced to advise mid sized companies for a few years because you can only have a conversation about stiffing your suppliers to buy a boat so many times before you realize how awful people can be
— Regime Accountant, CPA (@regimecpa.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Big businesses almost never act like that but small and mid sized ones do that kind of shit all the time
For a lot of people, owning a business is not about wealth really, it’s about “not having a boss” and being able to bully everyone else. Lots of business owners could not hold down a job because they’re horrible people who do not take direction well, no one wants to work is pure projection.
There is no competition and there never will be because there are basically no profits. A lot of small business owners in rural areas make less than even low level corporate employees because like running a hardware store makes next to no money.
— Regime Accountant, CPA (@regimecpa.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 12:56 PM
I know a guy who owns a small business. He's actually nice, but he's lazy af. The business is only functional because he hires a ridiculous amount of staff to do everything for him. It's almost certainly hemorrhaging money.
— Alex Z (@azincle.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 1:26 PM
The modal small business is an unintentional long firm fraud using SBA loans to fuel it.
— Regime Accountant, CPA (@regimecpa.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 1:28 PM
its a popular way for generational wealth to be laundered to kids as well, subsidizing their "startup" or "small business" that would be economically batshit without continued infusions of investment or forgiven loans
Vanity businesses for spouses and fail-children are classics. An estate planner can set up a fake job for the kids that's probably more tax efficient than forgiving loans constantly.
— Regime Accountant, CPA (@regimecpa.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 6:03 PM
(Hello Don, Ivanka, Eric, Jared… )
And one of the ‘perks’ for Owning Your Own Business is: No drug testing!
one of the things that chronic drug dependency does is obliterate your ability to gauge what kind of behavior is appropriate in public and significantly lower your inhibitions, which is how one might find themselves swinging a chainsaw around on stage at a political conference
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) February 20, 2025 at 6:56 PM
it also would explain why the entire doge project does not appear to have any real endgame, i doubt musk is capable of thinking in any kind of ordered or structured fashion now
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) February 20, 2025 at 6:54 PM
War for Ukraine Day 1,092: The Butcher’s Bill from Russia’s Attack Last Night
NotMax
Dumbass chainsaw crassacre.
//
NotMax
Repeated from downstairs.
Could it be any more symbolic?
SS United States leaves Philly, birthplace of America, on journey to be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
sab
DOGE project doesn’t need an endgame. It is effectively blowing up the government now. A whole generation has just learned that taking a job with the government (which used to be a pay cut but job security if you are competent) is now risking personal financial catastrophe.
It will take a couple of generations to fix this and get trust back if that is even possible.
NotMax
Maybe (with appropriate apologies to Murphy Brown’s handyman) we can just shorthand the despicable duo as Eldon.
sab
At this point all I am hoping is that we eventually get our government restored enough to send every one of these little Muskrat DOGE twerps to prison. They are breaking all kinds of laws. Billionaires can do that with impunity in current America, but minions are still just minions in the long run.
Martin
I would argue that the psychology of business owners depends a lot of the space in which they operate. Lot of small towns have business owners that operate they way they do because they are lords of their little fiefdom (see: farmers). It’s not just that they get to be bullies, the town doesn’t dare hold them accountable for anything because they employ half the town.
When you go up a tier or two you get to auto dealers and the like who don’t have that kind of influence, but get to be local celebrities and leverage their business into various amenities.
When you go up another tier or two, you really do need to be large business owner/billionaire, because NYC/LA gives all of zero fucks for anyone who can’t fund a new library, or who has a national public profile which gives them a large enough of a microphone to be trouble.
sab
@sab: What has made our system work is that minions need to know they are minions and not above the law no aamatter what their boss says.
I have in my day stood my ground at work by saying ” I am not risking my license (or freedom) for what you want.”
NotMax
@Martin
Respite.
The travails of a small town business owner
:)
sab
@Martin: You sound like Kay.
sab
@sab: Not disagreeing. Just noteworthy that the two of you on opposite sides of the continent have a very similar voew of local economies and politics.
eclare
@Martin:
A friend of mine inherited an RV dealership, which does very well with financing and repairs. But the real wealth, if my friend ever pulls the trigger, is the land that it is on. When the dealership started in the early 70’s it was 30 miles outside of Atlanta. It is now surrounded by very wealthy exurbs.
sab
@sab: If only accountants could spell or proofread before they post
ETA: me not eclare
Voew? meant view
sab
My baby sister is computer savvy and has done it for a living for decades. She will not do direct government work because it takes so long to get cleared in and the consequences are so dire if you don’t.
These laws are still in place. Let us hold Elon’s Muskrats to them.
sab
I work in tax accounting, so my field is heavily MAGA ( tax avoidance not tax.)
We are in turmoil because there dont’t seem to be any rules. We are in shock.
The MAGAs around the office seem hunky dory. Things are okay. Their crazed bats are flying.
I had absolutely no idea how different our world visions are.
sab
Talking to myself tonight. Bedtime!
JoyceH
News reports of rumors that Hegseth is circulating among Congressional Republicans a list of the general officers he wants to fire. To the surprise of no one, the list includes the black general currently chairing the Joint Chiefs and the female Admiral who’s the Chief of Naval Operations. You suppose there’s any white males on the list? Man, Major Mediocre is living the dream, isn’t he?
sab
Also too asshole spouses.
I left town for work with a tiny dusting of snow on the driveway.
I had just bought us a new electric snow shovel. Husband laughs when I use it.
Husband doesn’t work. He is retired, slightly disabled, and has lots of friends and a busy social schedule.
I got home last afternoon after a long workday and I couldn’t get up the driveway because ice at the top.
He had been driving in and out all day, which impacted the snow, turning it to ice.
Husband hadn’t cleared anything. He rushed up and roared my car up the driveway (when the street traffic cleared, which it hadn’t done when I was waiting.)
He banged the oil pan on the driveway while he was rushing up,which he hadn’t have need to do if he had just cleared the driveway.
I have to get up today at 4 am instead of 7 am because I need to clear the driveway.
25 years into this marriage I am so surprised I am so angry but I am. I am sorry he has so many health issues, but he needs to arise to some other occassion than his coffee klatches.
Baud
@sab:
I wonder if they’ve learned which party to vote for, though.
sab
@Baud: My guess is the newly fired were Democratic. But who knows. Biden was bipartisan in hiring.
Before law school I aspired to be a secretary. Obviously with my typing that career would have been short.
sab
I was thrilled to see an Omnes comment today, although it was brief.
Baud
@sab:
Maybe the fired were. But the generation that’s learning the lesson less so.
MagdaInBlack
Checking in to predawn shift change chat, thanks to a migraine
good morning.
sab
@sab: I try to keep personal out of commemts here but I am incandescent with rage.
What the phuck was he doing all day. And he still expects me to cook dinner? Those days are over.
sab
@Baud: But same rules apply to them. Our leadersh is lawless. So don’t work for the government.
MagdaInBlack
@sab: Rage away, I got you.
sab
@MagdaInBlack: I should be asleep for another two hours, but i have to get up to clear the driveway.
And now I am angry at a hungry cat on her usual schedule, which doesn’t sync with the schedule my husband dumped in my lap.
MagdaInBlack
@sab: My husband and his brother used to do snow-plowing in the winter for cash. Guess whose driveway was the last to get cleared?
The shoemakers children go barefoot?
sab
@MagdaInBlack: Yes so much. You have obviously been here done that.
eclare
@sab:
Sounds very frustrating.
MagdaInBlack
@sab: How are you going to clear packed glazed snow? Got salt?
sab
Got salt. Still have the cool new snow shovel. I don’t think it can do ice, but we are freezing but above the level where salt doesn’t work.
Extremely minor clusterphuck here, but I am still angry.
I try a lot ( usually successfully) to keep my anger in check. Usually it would be a distraction. This time somebody ( not me) really fucked up a responibility. As I tell my dog when she poops on the carpet, you are responsible and you will be blamed forever.
TBone
Guess Who? Inspired by Gloria DryGarden first thing today. I thought the chainsaw thing was a joke then I watched the video here and now I am certain this is the correct mood music even though I might still be asleep and dreaming
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AL0xci_rGXs
Ivan X
As the owner of a small business because, in part, it allows me to operate in accordance with my ethics and values such as kindness and fairness, without ever being asked to do things I don’t believe in, don’t see the purpose of, or feel compromised by, this post makes me feel like a luzar. I didn’t think of the opportunity to own a business to be an asshole!
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: Oh man, I still love The Guess Who.
TBone
I haven’t heard this since I was 13 y o. thanks, Al Go Rhythm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GAjbK18zw3w
MagdaInBlack
@Ivan X: Husband was partners in a small ( and I do mean small) home remodeling biz. We did it because we were tired of working for assholes, and we sure tried not to be that way. I think we succeeded.
Really it isn’t that hard to be decent to people. Asshole is a choice.
TBone
Dad brought this home from Viet Nam in one of the suitcases of 8 tracks he gave me. I can sing like this when I’m drunk enough.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rawsYQitKik
Baud
@Ivan X:
The post is probably not false but a big generalization of the type that people are fond of making.
TBone
New to me word from a post shared by Leto last night
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: good morning, woman of good taste, the Most Interesting Woman in the World!
TBone
Memory: when the 2007 Financial Crisis hit (preceded by our phone call to AIG Customer Service where we left a lengthy voice mail message), we hung up a bunch of cast iron frying pans on the backyard rolling clothesline and had moving target practice all afternoon.
Plink!
MagdaInBlack
@TBone: I have a lot of taste, most of it bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29gt1fD4abc
for example.
Shalimar
@TBone: Great song that came out the year I was born. I do think it is hilarious that one of the first youtube comments about how great it is has to also shit on current music. Yes, the music that came out when you (the youtube commenter) specifically were 20 is the greatest music of all time. Let’s all celebrate. But why does all other music have to suck for us to feel good about what we like? There are a lot of 20-year-olds right now who will be saying the same thing in 30 years about Kendrick Lamar and Chappell Roan.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: that’s in the department of it’s so bad, it’s good 😎 and I’m not ashamed that I like it hahahaha!
TBone
@Shalimar: rock and roll flute will always be badass! And shitting on teh yute is like wearing onions on your belt. Get off my lawn hahahaha!
Shalimar
@sab: Not a marriage, but my mother has dementia and I am her 24/7 caregiver. My brother also lives here and theoretically has a job that should keep him away from home at least 5 days a week. He is not away from home the last month. He is on an extended meth binge which he tries to pretend isn’t happening. He tells people he just wants to spend time with his mother while she is still alive.
Except he does not do shit, not even clean up after himself, leaving dirty plates and coffee cups and empty bags of candy and chips all over the place. He also doesn’t lift a finger to help with mom even though he tells me all the time what “we” can do better. It is so bad I try to avoid him whenever possible, which is hard when he spends all day and night in the room she is in, watching tv and sleeping on the sofa. Which means she gets less care than she would if he just went away somewhere.
Baud
UK has a chance to really shine over the next four years.
MagdaInBlack
Oh Canada.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/feb/20/canada-usa-hockey-final-connor-mcdavid-overtime
eclare
@Shalimar:
Oh gosh, that sounds awful. I’m so sorry.
eclare
@MagdaInBlack:
Trudeau tweeted about it last night.
Jeffg166
@JoyceH:
At least we will have competent generals leading the counter revolution.
Geminid
Some fallout from the collision earlier this month between the aircraft carrier USS Truman and the bulk carrier Besiktas-M near Port Said, Egypt: Truman commander Captain Dave Snowden has been relieved of command due to “loss of confidence.”
Captain Christopher “Chowdah” Hill is his temporary replacement. Hill is skipper of the USS Eisenhower, which is at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard beginning a planned maintenence cycle. Last week the Truman was anchored at Souda Bay, Crete undergoing temporary repairs.
Pictures of the damage to both ships indicate they barely brushed each other. That was a good thing, because the Truman has a displacement of 100,000 tons while the Besiktas displaces 56,000 tons when fully loaded, which I think it was.
MagdaInBlack
@Jeffg166: ….unless they’re also on one of Kash Patel’s lists.
TBone
Exhibit A: Jethro Tull “gimme some water”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vHOUq1mzdzM
Badass rock and roll flute!
satby
@Ivan X: @MagdaInBlack: My oldest son (42) worked for other small businesses before buying the last one he was a manager of. He’s not an asshole either, his full time employees at his take out pizza joint have benefits and a retirement plan and have been there for years. But he’s a pothead from before it was legalized, and he never even tried to get a job where he’d be drug tested.
I have seen plenty of small business owners who completely match Regime Accountant’s descriptions though.
TBone
@satby: nary an attorney in small firm or large ever drug tested, thank goodness 😆 but plenty were assholes.
satby
@Baud: That really is great news.
TBone
@sab: I would purchase an electric cattle prod to go with that snow shovel if it were my hubby pulling that shit.
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/producers-pride-jolt-42-in-flexible-prod-shaft-1019775
Also works on brothers.
TBone
I dunno if this link will work but we had way more than 50 people show up – meet Jordi Comas, our Action Together NEPA organizer
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DUA6xVC-a5TOCSLKYJdygcC_dRzgVZt6/view?usp=drivesdk
TBone
@TBone: EVEN BETTER:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DTpjVVGO6Ks3dkOm2Z3HQFNxsV8y2To6/view?usp=drivesdk
Geminid
I saw a Politico article about next year’s Florida Governor race. While no candidate has announced as of yet, Trump just endorsed loyalist Rep. Byron Donalds for the post. This will likely clear the Republican field, the reporters said.
montanareddog
@MagdaInBlack:
Ha! Not heard that expression before but there is an almost identical French aphorism: les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chaussés.
Baud
@Geminid:
Heh. DeSantis has no say.
I wonder what he’ll do once he’s out of office.
different-church-lady
@sab:
Us? We no longer have a say in the matter.
evodevo
@sab:
Yep…the ones I know on FB are just giddy that the govt. they and theirs depend on every day is being destroyed. “He’s finally draining the swamp!!11!!” “Musk is finally cutting out the fat!!” The actual consequences are to them unimaginable, and not real yet. And when it does hit the fan, they will blame Biden/Dems/anyone not MAGA/talibangelical. The cult runs deep. These are not sane people…
The Thin Black Duke
@evodevo: I don’t care what they think. They’re gone. What that means is I don’t have to give a shit what happens to them when the consequences of their stupidity kicks their asses.
MagdaInBlack
@montanareddog: I had to translate,and yup. Thank you for sharing that one =-).
p.s. It was just the last word that I had to check on, Im pretty impressed with myself, monolingual midwesterner that I am.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke:
Same. I don’t find the cult fascinating. We know they aren’t going to change. They were loyal Republicans before Trump. Now they’re just rapidly loyal to Trump because Trump embodies the darkness in their souls.
Suzanne
I read something similar on Xhitter a while back. A marriage counselor wrote about how he saw, over and over again, hetero couples who would be struggling because the male partner would “go into business for himself” because he could not hold down a job with a boss, expectations to come in on time, not harass or get along with coworkers, etc. And that, often, the wife actually made more money….. but that the man’s ego was wrapped up in “providing’,
It dawned on me around 2019 or so that part of FFOTUS’s appeal to a swath of Americans was this aesthetic of being a family businessman. Highly aspirational. Also, I think, being engaged in development, as opposed to something more esoteric.
Suzanne
@NotMax: DUDE! I went to yoga last night, and when I came out….. a Swastikar had parked next to me in the parking lot. As it happens, it snowed yesterday, so the steel looked terrible. (To be fair, so did all the other cars, including mine.) But this was the first time I looked at it up close. Seriously, it looks bad. Gaps between all the panels and plastic parts. And it is longer than a normal car and thus difficult to see around when I was backing out. :::grumble:::
Baud
@Suzanne:
I think a lot of these people live in a world where money = self worth. It’s why Musk and Trump are attractive to them. Providing essentially means that they see themselves as having more worth than the rest of the family.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
Etch it in stone.
kalakal
@montanareddog:
There’s an English expression ‘Busman’s holiday’ dating back to the 1920’s when very few people had cars and the most common holiday was a coach tour.
Slightly different but there’s also the “How does the snow plough driver get to work? ” joke
NotMax
@kalakal
VW, 1964.
;)
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: I think I remember that one, but I would have been 6..so maybe?
Central Planning
Musk with a chainsaw is pruning (butchering) the tree of democracy. It’s going to need a lot of water.
Suzanne
@Baud: Absolutely. And it’s deeply tied to patriarchy. In that mindset, women are homemakers and thus work for their husbands, or they have bosses….. but men work for themselves.
The Thin Black Duke
@Suzanne: If the Cyberschmuck–a 100,000 plus dollar vehicle–is constructed so shoddily, can you imagine what a piece of shit Tesla’s “entry-level” car is gonna be?
different-church-lady
@Central Planning: Once you cut it down, it doesn’t really grow back
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: Sometimes you get shoots that people keep mowing down.
arent we both cheery this morning ;-)
Geminid
@Geminid: Politico also reported that New York Governor Kathy Hochul has decide not to remove NYC Mayor Eric Adams from office. Instead– at least according to the reporters– Hochul intends to “hem” Adams in by applying other state powers.
I don’t know a whole lot about New York law, but my guess is these powers are substantial. New York’s City Council also has powers in this area, as do other elected City officials including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
This would still be a controversial course for Governor Hochul, as I expect will be discussed here later on today.
Suzanne
@The Thin Black Duke: I have ridden in a few Teslas (Ubers) that were the cheaper styles, and I didn’t get a great look at the exteriors…. but the interior feels cheap and squeaky to me. I used to have a Honda Civic and that was nicer.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Now I know why “kumquats” pops into my mind once in a while. Must have seen this when I was about 5.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
Real customer question at The Orange:
Where is your clean dirt?
pluky
@Geminid: Dad was Army, but at a few joint postings I learned a bit of Navy culture. Having the ship one commands be involved in a collision is pretty much a career ender.
Geminid
@kalakal: English detective novelist Dorothy Sayers wrote a novel titled Busman’s Holiday. It was published in 1937.
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
“In the laundry.”
Kay
https://newrepublic.com/article/191793/trump-suddenly-slips-3-brutal-new-pollsand-musk-looks-even-worse
Trump and Musk slide in 3 big polls. You could tell they were coming last week because both men started lying about their poll numbers. People on X think Musk polls at 90%.
I started calling Congress every day. I think that’s working.
Baud
@Kay:
Glad to hear more people are woke.
TBone
@TBone: Jordi:
[1] “To be of use” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use
I am lucky to get to be able to get to know this local guy better!
Central Planning
@different-church-lady: I haven’t thought this analogy through enough, but maybe it will be like wine-producing grapes. The roots are different than the actual grape. Business on the bottom, party on the top.
AM in NC
@sab: I had to have a sit down with my husband of over 25 years after we retired – new division of labor time. I was willing to cook dinner almost every night/do the bulk of house/kid work when we were both working but he worked 50 hours a week for our business and I worked 30.
Post retirement? New. Division. Of. Labor. We now trade off dinners, and he is slowly expanding his repertoire.
BIGGEST change in my life last year: I decided “I’m going to start acting like a man”. Meaning, if I don’t want to do something, I’m just not going to do it. No more fitting my needs and desires around everyone else’s. I deserve just as much as they do, and I’m going to act like it.
evodevo
@sab: Hint from someone who lives in the country – for packed snow turned to ice, get a couple bags of ag fertilizer, either 10-10-10 or whatever and use instead of hardware store salt. Ag fertilizer is 70% tiny limestone chip filler, which means you can spread it on ice directly ahead of your feet, and walk on it immediately. The fertilizer part melts ice, and the filler chips give instant traction. And it won’t kill the lawn as bad as salt runoff. We’ve been using it for years, even though when used on sidewalks/house steps, it makes a mess when you carry the chips indoors on your boots.
Kay
When I worked for the postal service there were three unions in my area of operations – city carriers, clerks and rural route carriers.
Rural route carriers make the most money – they can clear 90k a year with overtime and they had the fiercest union. They’re also markedly and almost exclusively Right wing.
So although I love the postal service I admit I got some grim satisfaction thinking of them getting the news yesterday Trump wants to replace them with people making 14 an hour. FAFO, indeed.
MomSense
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
I take it that the comment wasn’t meant in a Zen Koan way.
TBone
@TBone: Gimme Some Water!
raven
@Kay: I was a “mail handler” way back when at the SCF in Champaign. I got fired for “failure to report derogatory action” and never looked back. Some of my buddies ended up there for 30 years.
Geminid
@pluky: Yeah, the Navy has a form of strict liability in the case of a ship collision. There were other officers and sailors who contributed to the collision but Captain Snowden was responsible for all them, so he pays the price.
Ed. The others will face investigation and disciplinary action too.
I think the Truman will finish out its deployment. The Navy released video of the carrier’s sailors and aviators performing flight operations while on the way to Souda Bay, so it’s still functional. I believe the Truman left Norfolk last October. Ideally, carriers deploy for six months at a time but lately they’ve been out for 7 and even 8 months on account of the Middle East wars.
trnc
They’re not going to prison for anything they do while Trump or Vance have the pardon power.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Only people left on X are cult members, so it’s surprising he’s that low.
It means half the electorate became dumber than rocks.
Baud
@Kay:
I’ll never get over right wing union people. I mean, I get it. Social issues have power. But still…
MomSense
@Kay:
Bunch of leopards missing faces is starting to catch up with them. I know the farmers here are pissed.
In personal news the kitchen renovation entered the shit is real sink is gone phase. Found some interesting wallpapers, a watch case full of coins, and some handmade wooden toy cars.
There are too many layers of awful flooring glued to the wood underneath to save the original floors. I need to buy some flooring and I’m tempted to go to a mill about 30 minutes away that does beautiful pine flooring. I just don’t want to put plastic floors in.
AM in NC
@montanareddog: Ha! My husband and I owned a small chain of organic garden centers, and, while I love to garden, spring was our retail equivalent of Christmas for other businesses, and when our patrons would ask about our garden (sure that it was lovely) I’d respond “We are the proverbial cobblers whose children have no shoes”.
In retirement, I am planning a garden that has ALL the shoes!!
And my husband was one of the “I don’t want a boss” business owners – he was an academic before we opened our business, so he comes by it honestly. We tried to be ethical; we set up retirement matching and health care for our people (pre-ACA), paid wages above what other retail places paid, and offered ownership stakes to long-term employees. But I am sure we weren’t perfect. Better than a lot of other owners we knew. And the GOP just assumed we were one of them because “bidness owner”.
We actually were part of an ad campaign for Obama’s second term and got to meet with former NC Gov. Jim Hunt to talk about how the ACA benefitted us as business owners. It benefits us even more as early-retirees.
different-church-lady
@MomSense:
I wish you luck for the next four months.
Kay
@raven:
The postal service has a lot of veterans because they get the score bump on the test – you know how tests work – a big group is bunched up high so a smart veteran with the bump is in the hiring group nearly automatically.
I was bored as a clerk/city carrier but not after I was bumped up to manager. The postal service moves something like 45% of the mail in the world. The logistics part was interesting.
evodevo
@Central Planning: And the rootstock may be…American lol (We learned this during a tour of Colmar a few years ago)
https://www.nwpb.org/2023/06/22/european-fruit-american-roots-the-science-of-better-wine-grapes/
different-church-lady
@Kay: It’s a freakin’ miracle any of it works.
Liminal Owl
@sab: Oof. Much sympathy, and Iwould be furious too. I hope you were able to get the driveway cleared without further stress.
evodevo
@Kay: Yes. Former rural carrier here. Every day was a new experience in fustercluck planning LOL – someone has a wreck; doesn’t come in because of last minute illness/family emergency; weather goes to shit, etc. You never knew what the day would come up with, and in our tiny office (2 full-time routes, one aux route) you had to be prepared to run your 90 mile/500 box route AND part or most of someone else’s on the spur of the moment. The pay was good, though. I was an RCA for 23 years and made way more part-time (no bennies, though) than I could in any other job. Quit in Jan. 2020, just before the Plague hit. Whew!
Kay
@MomSense:
Oooh. Fun. My middle son bought reclaimed wood flooring and laid it on the slab of his little ranch house (with backing, I assume). He doesn’t recommend it though – he had to recut nearly every piece and about a quarter of it was bowed so unusable. . It took him most of a year to do the whole house working on weekends.
stinger
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: “Clean dirt” is a real thing. Also called “fill dirt”, it is generally used in landscaping, especially after construction. It’s clean in that it has no broken glass, chunks of wood, nails, etc. It might contain sand or clay, but no debris or contaminants. You fill in low spots with clean dirt and then top off with topsoil, which is better for growing plants in.
different-church-lady
@Kay: So I’m just going to fret out loud here. All the factors we warned about since the “limited immunity” ruling mean that Trump and Musk are not going to give a shit about popularity or public backlash. The Supremos told Trump he could act like a king, and he’s going to do it, public be damned, and he’s going to get away with it as long as everyone else in power just goes along with it.
NotMax
@MomSense
Some of the laminate flooring available now look real nice, are easier to clean and even have cushioning for rooms where you may tend to stand a lot.
Your mention of finding wallpaper triggered memory of a kitchen upgrade on a vacation house (circa very early 1900s). Removal of the floor covering revealed a very attractive patterned original linoleum (unfortunately too degraded to rescue).
stinger
@Geminid: Great novel! A busman’s holiday means you go on vacation and find yourself doing the same thing you do while you’re at work. So when Lord Peter Wimsey goes on holiday, he ends up solving a crime. (Early autobus drivers on vacation still had to drive the ‘bus to get themselves to the seaside from smoggy London.)
stinger
@AM in NC:
Be sure to send in pics!
TBone
@evodevo: cool knowledge points!
NotMax
@stinger
You Can Do a Lot of Things at the Seaside That You Can’t Do in Town.
;)
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: Some friends were telling me that with relationship advice, people are too quick to tell others in long term relationships to DTMFA, but all I want to do is tell you to DTMFA. I blame my lack of nuance on “I am tired of all this snow.”
TBone
@NotMax: renovating my mountain cabin revealed many treasures, one of which were two penciled inscriptions with signatures underneath the wooden stairs in the under-stairs closet that we’d missed seeing for 25 years before the reno. One was from 1929 and one from 1931.
raven
@Kay: Yea, I got fired because, when I was Korea, I got a special court martial and didn’t check the box on the application. Both of my buddies were also Nam vets and stayed all those years. One of them, badly wounded, became the head of the union and he raised some hell while he was there!!
TBone
@NotMax: you never fail me!
Starfish (she/her)
@MagdaInBlack:
stinger
@NotMax:
So great!
Soprano2
@Shalimar: I’m so, so sorry, your plate is already completely full without having a slob of a brother around, and of course if you don’t clean it up you’re living in filth because he will never clean it up (he probably doesn’t even notice it if he’s using meth). How does he still have a job if he isn’t showing up? Does he have that much leave time?
Kay
@raven:
We had a city carrier who was part of the group who pushed the government to recognize Agent Orange. He died of cancer, his daughter believed service-related. I don’t know if they ever got any compensation. A nice man. His wife had early dementia and he was so gentle with her – took good care of her.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: Trump does often back down or reverse himself when he senses a backlash among his own fans. But that’s what it takes.
Of course, he will just flatly make up fictitious poll numbers and fictitious election results and claim he has overwhelming landslide support and any evidence to the contrary is a conspiracy. So I expect a lot of denial.
Soprano2
@montanareddog: And the mechanic’s family has the crummiest, most broken-down vehicles. Ask me how I know this. LOL Although it wasn’t that hard to get my BIL the mechanic to work on our vehicles, but his were usually older beaters. When you can work on them yourself it’s easier to have a vehicle that’s not that reliable.
raven
@Kay: Ugh, my multiple sclerosis is not one of the “presumed conditions” of AO even though they have admitted they used in Korea as well as Vietnam. I hope there was some kind of payment after the fact but I doubt it.
Kay
@raven:
UPS has a veteran preference too – a lot of their drivers are veterans. The OTR UPS drivers – 18 wheelers – do very well. They can make 150 a year – they’re Teamsters.
TBone
@NotMax: PSA
a general recommendation for those who love historical dramady
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime_(film)
raven
@Kay: What could have been! I was a truck driver in the Army.
Kay
@raven:
His daughter was really passionate about it – I liked her. He had a pilots license. He no longer flew but he would tell me about places he and his wife had gone in a small plane.
A lot of the veterans had had interesting lives with twists and turns – like yours. GED to GED scholar is not an ordinary career.
Chris
This.
Soprano2
@evodevo: Yeah, he’s “draining the swamp” by firing employees who have been in their jobs less than a year. s/s/s/s/s/s I guess the only thing that matters to FFOTUS is that his cult members think he’s doing what he said he was going to do. I am arguing to one I know that FFOTUS did not campaign on giving Musk the keys to our government and letting him do whatever he wanted to it.
Starfish (she/her)
Some Republican in Georgia is trying to say that his constituents who worked at the CDC were laid off due to AI and not due to DOGE boys being morons.
The link looks like a virus before it goes through. Hang with it.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Every presidential administration, regardless of party or ideology, slides in approval polls from the initial “honeymoon” in its opening months. This has been the case ever since polling started. What varies is what happens after that.
There was some talk in 2017 about how Trump’s first administration got no honeymoon, but they did–it just started lower than usual. (And the floor was also relatively high; I think that ever since Obama, partisan attitudes have been way more calcified than they were before Obama, which constrains the range of variation.)
Trump II started a few points higher than Trump I, consistent with him also doing better in the election. But now gravity is asserting itself.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I’m sure that the man who bought the print shop where my husband worked was buying a job for his asshole son, who I am convinced never could have successfully worked for anyone, although he was a Marine (I think it was the reserves, though) for a few years and was deployed in Desert Storm. I’m SURE that guy is a MAGA unless he’s changed a lot, because every time he was beaten in some kind of game he would say it was because you cheated.
raven
@Kay: I’ve been very lucky.
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: FFOTUS enables them to show that darkness to others rather than having to hide it, that’s one of the main things they like about him.
Soprano2
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: You know, that actually means something to me. LOL “Clean dirt” doesn’t have rocks, roots, and other crap in it. And yes, we’ve gotten loads of topsoil that was supposed to be “clean” that had all that stuff in it.
Soprano2
@Kay: He thinks he can get people to do that hard work for $14 an hour? I guess he’s going to hire only immigrants and undocumented workers, huh? The postal carriers I know retired on disability in their 50’s.
CliosFanBoy
@MomSense:
Don’t throw away any cans or bottles you find, especially beer or soda. They may be worth a bundle to a collector.
Soprano2
@MomSense: You have my sympathy. Did you hire people, or are you doing it yourself? I lived without a kitchen sink for 6 years – the only way I survived that was that we had a dishwasher that we got connected early on. It was brutal.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: It’s Busman’s Honeymoon, and I’m reading it right now.
trnc
I expect the toadies will keep him from hearing about anything that will hurt his fee fees, and he sure as hell won’t make any effort to find out. If any of that info does break through, he’ll just slough it off as fake news.
Quiltingfool
@kalakal:
I know! He has a 4-wheel drive truck! Lol!
Husband is a snow plow driver (county road maintenance. Cleared a bunch of snow this week. I’m glad I don’t have to do that job, it can be tricky!
Jackie
@Geminid:
Along this angle, I read/heard that should Hochul fire Adams so close to the primaries, by the time Adams appealed and again appealed – and he would – it would be election season, so may as well let the voters take care of it democratically.
That made sense to me, anyway. Adams won’t get reelected – unless the FFOTUS interferes in some way.
Soprano2
@Starfish (she/her): Boy, I had the same thought. If hubby were himself he would have shoveled our stairs and walk yesterday. Now, though, I don’t want him doing anything like that.
Chris
@sab:
DOGE is “blowing up the government now and gorging yourself on the money that comes with it.”
I keep saying that this Trump is America’s Yeltsin. The oligarchs of the nineties didn’t have an endgame either. They just wanted to roll around with dough like Uncle Scrooge in his big money bin. (Without having to do any of the work Uncle Scrooge did to get there).
Baud
@Chris:
I’m unaware of Uncle Scrooge’s back story. How did he earn his money?
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: Look for the fish.
If they have a cross, or a fish, or any other “Christian” brags, RUN.
artem1s
@Baud:
GOPers and most Dems I know are convinced all these government workers are freeloaders and getting what they deserve. I know government workers who think every brown person or woman who gets a .gov job HAS to be a Lie-iberal. And their white coworkers are just Hippys. The defining force for all wingnuts is paranoia that someone is out to get them or isn’t pulling their weight.
The comments above about small business owners are spot on. Rural ‘Merica is full of these assholes. They are the Cletus’ at the local diner that sit on their asses all day complaining how no one wants to work anymore. I’ve relatives who retired with VA pensions and giant 401Ks built up during the first dot com boom who haven’t worked a day since they were 45. And all they do all day long is obsess over someone else’s success. It’s all lose/lose to them. Even when they do well, they can only see the grass on the other side of the fence where all those poors and welfare Queens are lounging around and living their best lives on next to nothing.
They all believe that the only reason they aren’t up on that stage swinging around a chainsaw is because they got robbed of their birthright when a Black family moved in next door or a Black woman got promoted as their supervisor instead of their inept White golf buddy.
Another Scott
@Baud: Made me look.
Scrooge McDuck:
He’s everyman!!
:-/
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh, I agree. I have no delusions about the Trump base. I live among them. Persuasion with them is a waste of time.
I figured he’s losing swing voters – the morons who thought he would lower grocery prices and interest rates. “Now I can buy a house!” – young man in my office. Yeah, sure you can.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: Interesting way to put it. I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it makes perfect sense in the way they’re always saying women should stay home: husband is boss, wife is employee who is glad to have a job. That’s why they’re especially mad when she’s not glad of her job any more and wants a divorce.
rebelsdad
@TBone: Ragtime is one of my favorite musicals. I can never listen to “Wheels of a Dream” without crying.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Oddball pastiche of a movie, The Runaway Bus.
;)
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: Generic Swasticar or Swasticar Wankpanzer?
Quiltingfool
@NotMax: We have two rental houses (tiny farm houses, built by farmers). The floors were a mess. My husband, who was a floor installer, would take the floor down to the floor joists and build back up.
Lots of covered up linoleum! And underneath was newspapers, still readable. One paper was dated 1952, I think. Big article griping about Truman. It was a Grit magazine, which was a conservative outfit.
Jeffro
and we’re only one month in to the new maladministration
and more importantly, the ‘FO’ part has not yet hit anyone except the laid-off government employees
our local Dems ‘get it’ and just as you noted, Kay, their #1 recommendation is to call our MAGA congressman and tell him to do his job. keep pounding, peeps!
The Pale Scot
Time to watch Idiocracy again
Starring Elon Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Musk as the President
Donald Trump as as Frito Pendejo, simpleton, Vice President and CEO of Brawndo Enterprises…
Clip – State of the Union
Suzanne
@MomSense:
No plastic floors! They’re bad bad bad. Don’t last, don’t look good for very long.
Shalimar
@Soprano2: He owns his own business, with a license from Florida that is very hard to pass the exam for, so he will always have work when he wants to do it. He has employees working so there is some income even when he does nothing.
Soprano2
Yes, those are the people he’ll lose, because they’re certainly going to notice that prices in the grocery store and at the gas station aren’t cheaper, and they’ll probably also notice that the federal government is shittier than it used to be. They’ll blame FFOTUS because they aren’t cult members.
Jeffro
Americans could use a reminder: absolutely NONE of this insanity and abuse needs to happen, and it’s up to us to stop it by beating on Congress.
we can put up with it for another 23 months (minimum)…OR 47 more months…OR forever, if the Orange Airhorn decides to really push it…OR we could get Congress to do its job and rein him in.
Soprano2
@Shalimar: Oh good grief, I am sorry then because there’s not much you can do. I’m sure Mom wouldn’t agree to throw him out. Let me guess, he’s the favored sibling.
Chris
@Baud:
Note that even though a lot of union people are right-wing, unions still dilute that a little.
I’m friends on Facebook with one of my college friends’ Teamster brothers. Politically, he’s generally a complete cretin on anything else (guns, immigration, “foreign aid”), but will furiously go to bat for how unions are a good thing that protect people from greedy bosses, and the end result is that he votes Democrat about as often as he does Republican. (Helps that his mom was union too, a teacher in her case, and they all grew up being taught that that was important).
Is that a good thing? Hell no, but take the same guy and remove the union culture, and he’s a 100% MAGAt all the time. Being gettable about half the time is still better than that.
NotMax
@Quiltingfool
Ah, Grit. Used to advertise with “Boys! Make money selling Grit!” in comic books and outlets such as the scouting Boys’ Life magazine.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
HuffPost has an analysis, which I can’t link to for some reason, and it’s exactly those voters – the voters who think the President controls grocery prices. You can’t blame them really – media told them Joe Biden was raising prices at their local grocery store. Walking around with one of those old fashioned ka- chunk pricers and raising them.
At least they’re consistent – clueless but consistent. They’re punishing Trump like they punished Biden.
Suzanne
@Gretchen:
The traditional male-breadwinner model of the family is 100% about setting up an employer-employee dynamic between spouses. And it’s telling…. how many men find the idea of alimony/spousal support deeply unfair. Dude, y’all might have broken up, but you don’t get to fire your kid’s mom!
And yes, this is why many men are so unhappy to not find “tradwives” and are trying to devalue college education, especially for women. College is the path to financial autonomy for women, which means they don’t have to marry low-quality men.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Politico has an article about a Republican Congressman who represents an R+20 district north of Atlanta. He held a town hall in Roswell recently and was surprised by the size and hostilty of the crowd.
Ed. The Congressman is Rich McCormick. It’s an NBC article titled “Georgia Republican faces town hall backlash over DOGE cuts.”
TBone
@Suzanne:
College is
theA path to financial autonomyzhena gogolia
@Baud: I have no idea either! I think he was a Scotsman, though.
Jeffro
I think I saw something on the front page of the Post about how polling is showing this (couldn’t read it because I canceled my subscription). MAGA’s still with the Orange Airhorn, for now, but almost no one else is.
That’s ok. ‘FO’ is coming for them soon.
Baud
@Geminid:
“You’re not hurting the people you’re supposed to be hurting.”
Chris
@Soprano2:
I mean, it’s worth noting that this has always been what “draining the swamp” meant. Nobody in Redland who embraced that message is thinking of Halliburton bilking the public on no-bid contracts because their former CEO is now vice-president, or Trump bilking the public every time he stays at one of the hotels he refused to divest himself from, or SpaceX bilking the public for shitty rockets that keep blowing up. “The swamp,” to them, is three million civil servants that they just know are taking their tax money and giving it to illegal immigrants to buy abortions and drugs.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: The Davis X. Machina Dictum always applies.
Quiltingfool
@NotMax: My grandma had a Grit subscription. I’d always read it, mainly for the comics.
Grandma voted Democratic, but she still read Grit.
Gretchen
@stinger: It was called Busman’s Honeymoon because Lord Peter and Harriet Vane had just gotten married and crime followed them to the honeymoon. I love Dorothy Sayers novels.
Kay
The NYT has “11 Black voters opinion of Trump”
Whose turn is it to Google the names and find out which ones are local GOP officials? Who will volunteer to do the reporters job for them?
Suzanne
@TBone: It is realistically the only path to financial autonomy for most women entering the workforce today. Yes, there are exceptions, but it’s rough out there.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: It’s people.
It’s a multi-century old culture of “the mail must go through.”
It annoys the crap out of me that the postal service is in the 1798 Constitution; and it’s been one of the first things to get enshittified.
Kay
@Jeffro:
He literally promised gas would be 2 dollars a gallon.
Im sorry. I can’t help the people who bought that. They’re beyond help.
MomSense
@Suzanne:
How do you feel about engineered wood? It sounds bad to me.
Jeffro
@Geminid: interesting! and encouraging!
I don’t normally read Politico but in going there to look for the article you noted, I found this: privately, the GOP is panicking about the DOGE cuts
‘FO’ is for everyone, GOP nimrods…and no one voted for ‘DOGE’
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
I think you mean Busman’s Honeymoon, where newly-married Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane can’t go on honeymoon without tripping over a body.
Chris
@Baud:
I don’t actually know the particulars myself, I don’t know that universe very well. I just know that his catchphrase is “I made my money by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties, and I made it square!” and within the story’s universe, at least, that is supposed to be true; he worked his way up from nothing and did it honestly.
Geminid
@Baud: This crowd sounded like it had plenty of Democrats. I did not read the whole thing so I don’t know if that came up.
NotMax
@Quiltingfool
True story: When one grandmother learned to read English, the first book she chose to delve into was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
;)
TBone
NOW it’s truly personal again – my Dad taught at Neumann (and West Chester U.) for years and I’m PISSED. THEY and other DelCo institutions of learning (Widener!?!) ARE OBEYING re: DEI
DelCo Times article paywalled.
I’ll find the MSN version. No other viewing options available yet. Fuck. Rep. Scanlon somehow involvedhttps://www.delcotimes.com/2025/02/21/neumann-widener-delaware-county-adapt-to-trumps-dei-orders/
I expect better from the good Sisters of Neumann! AND Widener, where I went for some law courses!
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: Carl Barks, the real creator of the somewhat independent Donald Duck comics universe, was a basically conservative guy in his political/social attitudes, and of course Walt Disney was too so he wasn’t going to object to that going out under his byline. So Scrooge McDuck was just a thrifty, shrewd and hard-working guy who came by his unimaginable wealth fair and square, never mind the details.
(He plays the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge in “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” but, you know, that’s Scrooge McDuck as actor.)
stinger
@Professor Bigfoot: This.
MomSense
@CliosFanBoy:
There is one person in every generation in my family who saves the old treasures. That’s me. I have all the lace and quilts and little wood carvings made by ancestors I never knew. My cousins are selling the old family house in Farmington (about an hour away) and they found papers my great grandfather had written when he was at Colby. You bet I wanted them!
Chris
@artem1s:
This. A surprising number of federal employees are themselves Republicans who firmly believe that all of the stories about lazy government bureaucratic drones living high on the public dime are true, but that it only applies to their co-workers, that they’re the exceptional diamond in the rough, and that if only the government was run like a business, all that dead weight would be cleared out and they’d finally be recognized as the unique and valuable employee that they are.
In other words, they take whatever petty office politics resentments you accumulate in any job, and fashion an entire political worldview out of it. Or rather, they take those resentments, overlap them with the worldview of plutocrats drowning the government in the bathtub, and assume they’re one and the same.
(Tends to be especially high in the defense sector, where a lot of the people are Republican to begin with).
JPL
@Geminid: Roswell has been shifting over the last two decades as elderly folks decide to sell their homes. It’s becoming a younger more vibrant community. It is not unusual for some of the council meetings to become lively. I didn’t attend last night because I had no desire to look at McCormick. I texted a few folks to see if they attended.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: So….. in case you are interested…. Mr. Suzanne is a lifelong Duck comics fan, and he has a podcast called “Barks Remarks” and another called “Rosa Remarks”. (I am even a guest on two of the episodes.) He got quite a bit of listenership from other Duck fans and he was featured in some magazine. He got all kinds of Duck artists and writers to come on his podcast.
Apparently the Ducks are hugely popular in Scandinavia…. who knew?
MomSense
@NotMax:
I’m so bummed about the floors. They covered beautiful oak with ugly crap, layers and layers of it.
The oldest wallpaper is really pretty. It has beautiful corals, and sage greens.
Chris
@Another Scott:
Thanks! Didn’t know he started out as a greedy antihero, I only know the later “basically a good guy just a little grumpy” portrayal.
Jeffro
@Kay: also “no tax on tips” – we all see what a priority THAT turned out to be, right?
Suzanne
@MomSense: I am anti-engineered planking because it can’t be refinished more than once. Real wood.
Architects tend to only like real materials. I will note that I do healthcare architecture now, which requires very technical interior materials, so we can’t use real wood or stone floors, etc.. I’ll also note that commercial interior materials are usually much higher quality than the residential products they sell at local big-box or Floor & Decor!
Soprano2
@Kay: What I thought was really funny was that gas was $2.29/gal here right before the election, that’s the cheapest it’s been for a long time, but you can’t point that out to them because they refuse to hear it.
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense: We had our kitchen remodeled about 15 years ago, put in real maple floors. Very happy with the outcome.
Soprano2
@Jeffro: Just watch, they’ll quietly start hiring people for those jobs in a few months, but they’ll do their best to hire white people and make up some kind of excuse like “we found out we needed more people than we thought”.
I think one big reason MAGA’s want to move government functions out of D.C. is to make it easier to hire white people for those jobs, because they know a significant amount of government employees are black.
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense:
If the floor underneath is real oak, it’s probably best just to remove everything else and have it re-finished.
sab
@Jeffro: If only my senators had answered their fucking phones we could have warned them before they approved all the lackey cabinet appointments.
Oh well.
I have a niece in the government who loved her job, and has been ordered to return to her office but she cannot because they rented out the office. Fortunately, her training and profession make her an extremely marketable person for fighting all this.
I have another niece who is trans and has a multiracial multinational family, and now she cannot visit any family because it will be too weird and dangerous to travel on her passport showing her as male when she obviously is not.
NotMax
@TBone
Only ever met and interacted with one Widener graduate. Rock-ribbed Republican, he.
Inherited mainline money, lived in the Union League in Philadelphia. What was referred to as a coupon clipper.
Probably born about 1900. Had the most elegant handwriting of anyone I ever knew.
Chris
@Suzanne:
It’s funny, when I read the point in the OP that “being a business owner isn’t about making money, it’s about being your own boss,” one of my thoughts was “funny, that’s also one of the big appeals of crime.”
And your and Gretchen’s point about “traditional family models” being about running your home like a business where the man is always the boss… reminded me that professional criminals do, in fact, literally call their businesses “families.”
Kay
@Chris:
So true. About 25% of my work is juvenile defense. If I’m retained rather than court appointed I like to go into the pre trial and count the government employees who are on the state side- they’re all rabid Righties here. I count in front of them “let’s see- it’s five against one again today, all on the state side!”
They scowl – I get a big kick out of it. Right wing judges do it themselves – they tell the state side I’m “busy” (privately retained) so the state side has to stop wasting my time. One public employee shitting on another!
They weren’t supposed to worship the private sector. It’s not a religion.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m worried some of the old linoleum may be asbestos lined, but yeah the dream is to save the old floors that match the rest of the downstairs.
sab
@Chris: All the RWNJs in my husband’s family are local government employees. As far as I can tell they are good at their jobs and responsible, but it is interesting that they hate the government but choose to work for it. Kind of like Ron in Parks and Recreation.
Every time we get a Republican government that they voted for their jobs are at risk, and we are supposed to feel sorry for them.
The only RWNJ on my side of the family is an oblivious to the world trust fund baby. And he is a piece of work.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I stopped engaging when they were deliberately spreading Covid. That was it for me. I was doing probate case after case due to Covid deaths and they were stubbornly insisting it wasn’t serious. There is not a person in this town who doesn’t know someone who died in a hospital because of Covid. It RIPPED thru here – we couldn’t get the estates settled fast enough. That was it for me. They’ll die for Donald Trump and honestly KILL for him. It’s a cult.
Chris
@Suzanne:
They were very popular in France when I was a kid. I believe Italy too.
Jackie
The leopards are starting to feast:
Link is worth the click for a tl/dr article.
Too bad these veterans didn’t believe FFOTUS really meant “they were suckers and losers” when they voted 11/5.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
One of the guys in a RPG group was an IT manager for the FDA, would boast to us about how he locked the room and played WOW all day at work, complained and fought with the management when they asked him to take time out of his WOW game and do work, and he though the FDA should be dissolved. He would then call the rest of us, who all worked for companies with less than a 300 people, communists who didn’t understand capitalism.
Oh yes, and one day well let him tag along to the gun rang and had to show him how to shoot.
He was also a vet.
Geminid
@JPL: Georgia Republicans gerrymandered Atlanta metro districts so as to reinforce the Republican ones. Roswell might be at the more Democratic end of McCormicks’s.
raven
@Jackie: Xin Loi assholes!
Chris
@sab:
The feds I know were ordered to return to the office despite the fact that the space for all of them literally doesn’t exist. I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t want to raise their blood pressure even more and they’d almost certainly thought of that already, but my first thought was “yeah, they’re fine with that: when the agency tells its higher-ups that it has no room for all of its employees, the solution will just be to start firing employees.”
Sure enough, this morning, I get a text that one of them’s job is officially being “shuttered,” and that if the agency can’t find something to transfer her to, she may be RIF’d.
NotMax
@Chris
Scads of Disney comics were produced solely for European markets.
sab
@Chris: My niece is only hanging in for student loan forgiveness. She only needs a week or two. Mentally she has been gone for a month.
It is really too bad, because she excelled at her job, and she will never go near government work again. Once burned twice shy.
ETA We have lost a whole generation of competent government employees. Those jobs are now too insecure. The only ones who want them are Muskrats.
Soprano2
@Chris: My old boss tried to tell me we aren’t government employees, we work for a utility. I said “Our paychecks literally say City of Springfield, we are government employees”. That’s how much he didn’t want to think of himself as a government employee.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: Donald Duck comics had a gigantic worldwide audience–they were one of the most globally popular Disney products to a degree that wasn’t quite the case in the US. In much of the world Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were bigger stars than Mickey Mouse.
UncleEbeneezer
I worked for a major sporting goods chain and two small solar companies. The guys who ran the small, solar energy companies were exponentially more evil than the asshole who ran the major sporting goods chain. And of course they LOVED to talk about what self-starters and glorious job-creators they were (even though they both came from serious money). At least the guy running the sporting goods chain admitted he inherited the position.
Soprano2
@Gin & Tonic: We used red quarry tile, I’ve been pretty happy with it.
Bill Arnold
FWIW, the chainsaw was not running. He wasn’t swinging a running, flaming chainsaw, so he was a wimp.
Mr. Musk was at least in part cosplaying Chainsaw Al.
He was making a mockery (probably conscious) of the “lay off the 10 percent lowest performers” narrative, too; the layoffs so far have been of people who they can easily lay off per rules, with precisely zero consideration of their performance record.
montanareddog
@Kay:
Enjoy:
Oliver Willis on BlueSky
Geminid
@Geminid: It turns out that Rich McCormick’s Georgia 7th CD runs from suburban Roswell north past Dahlonega.
The town hall was last night. CNN also reported the story, said McCormick faced “sharp criticism” and some boos.
@JPL:
Soprano2
@Kay: I rarely engage on politics especially at work because it’s not worth it, but I sometimes point out things like that. I might ask someone about grocery prices in another month or two, just for kicks.
PJ
@Jackie: It seems like the bigger worry is Cuomo winning a special election. But if Hochul waits until next week to give Adams a 30-day suspension (a necessary preliminary to removal), that will push past the March 26 deadline for a special election. That doesn’t mean that Cuomo can’t win the primary, but more time gives better odds for the other candidates.
Kay
So when I worked on Issue 2 in OH – overturning right to work – Black public employees explained to me why there were so many Black public employees in big cities in Ohio. It’s because they were able to compete on a level playing field for government jobs – they took a test. The objective standard (test score) mean they got hired where a subjective standard in the private sector that included racism bias, meant they did not.
So Trump and Musk firing public employees is absolutely a way to make the workforce whiter.
Geminid
@Suzanne: What do you think of bamboo flooring? My friend Joan had a bamboo, tongue-and-groove floor put down in her kitchen. She seems satisfied.
sab
OT: totally OT. I slandered (not really because true) my spouse last night because one time in a happy 25 year marriage he fucked up. Didn’t clear a snowy driveway because he was seriously busy elsewhere doing other things. Sucked to be me but it wasn’t really his fault. Just bad timing.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
He could deliver on that by cratering the economy. Average gas prices briefly dipped below 2 dollars a gallon during both the Great Recession and the COVID economic crash. In both cases, Republicans tried to make people feel nostalgic about the low prices later, omitting the context.
TBone
@NotMax: DelCo was controlled by a Chicago-style (and South Philly-style) rethuglican political machine since the Civil War and prolly prior too. It flipped Blue in 2018 for the first time AND WE’RE NOT GOING BACK.
https://delco.today/2018/01/newly-elected-democrats-promise-transparency-swearing-ceremony/
PS thank you for reminding me of my beloved Gramps’s handwriting and politics. He was born in 1901 in Tioga County on our historic family farm and migrated to DelCo to TEACH (and coach).
Suzanne
@sab: I applied at the VA some time back, at the suggestion of a professional contact. They hire architects and engineers to manage their healthcare construction projects (as does the GSA). I ended up not taking the job, and I’m now very glad of that.
The allure of government employment is its stability. That’s the differentiator, the competitive advantage in the labor market. If they lose that, it will impact their recruiting for a generation.
Suzanne
@Geminid: I like bamboo! It’s real material. The commercial lines of Plyboo are nice.
Geminid
@PJ: I think Cuomo is better off if he does not win the Mayor’s office by means of a special election. He has issues that need to be aired out, and contesting the June primary on a more level playing field is the best way to do that.
If he wins, Cuomo will be that much more effective a Mayor for this, and the City really needs to replace Adams with an effective Democratic Mayor.
Gin & Tonic
@Soprano2:
I like to be barefoot, and wood is warmer than tile. To each their own.
Chris
@Kay:
A ton of the problems that ultimately broke the communist world can be summarized as taking a basically unobjectionable proposition (“the state should be more involved in helping people”), then cranking it up to eleven and treating it as a universally applicable solution to every problem (“the entire economy should be part of the state! And the entire civil society, too! Everything should be under the state!”)
Apparently, the capitalist world is all set to do the exact same thing in the other direction, taking the basic proposition that market economics and the profit motive are good at a number of things, and turning that into a belief that somehow the entire human experience should be in the private sector and run for profit.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Could you refresh my recollection of what his dictum is? Google is useless here.
sab
@Suzanne: That is so true. Government work pays well under the market rate because it is so secure. Has been forever. Trump blew that up in less than a month.
Not just Trump. Our Republican Senators could have stopped this but they couldn’t be bothered.
You live in PA so not your all’s fault. I live in Ohio and our senators jumped right on the bandwagon. One of our senators is a Colombian immigrant who hates immigrants. Go figure.
Gin & Tonic
@lowtechcyclist:
Jackie
@Gin & Tonic:
Also easier on the feet! After a week of walking on tile floors while visiting my daughter, my feet were crying. I really missed my linoleum – something I never thought I’d say. Old feet and bones don’t do well on hard surfaces, if barefoot – my preferred method indoors, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
That’s been an article of faith on the right since Reagan. The market makes everything better. (Even if there’s a private monopoly running everything.) If it appears that the market is making something worse, that’s because you don’t see that it’s good in itself for it to be run by the market
But the USPS business makes me wonder if Trump is going to start nationalizing private businesses he objects to so he can dismantle them, like a megacorp buying up the competition to kill it.
Chris
@sab:
The federal workforce really is one of the diamonds of the American economy. As noted above, it has its assholes and deadbeats, like every place does. But it also has a ton of people, much more of them in my experience, who are incredibly smart and motivated workers, who could easily have done just as well in the private sector and made a lot more money doing it, but went federal instead because they care about what they’re doing. The kind of workers that bosses in the private sector are always whining that they can’t find, because they’re too cheap and lazy to attract them, keep them, or even know when they’ve got one of them. Really, the fact that the federal workforce operates so well in the last half-century despite the swarm of crooks and chuckleheads in politics constantly hobbling them for ideological reasons is a hell of a testament to its quality.
We haven’t even begun to see the end of how much of a mess we’ll cause by breaking the civil service.
TBone
@TBone: PS The Honorable Dominic Pileggi, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, former state Senator, now looks just like his dad, that’s the first semi recent photo I’ve seen at that link! He was at hubby’s Chester, PA auto repair shop the day before I met my hubby! We spoke briefly (his dad is a former employer and mentor of mine and we worked in family law offices building together). Hubby’s crew “fixed” the muffler wrong the first time (it fell off of my car, forcing me to go back the next day and YELL at hubby who wasn’t there for the original “fix”).
ALSO of note: the dirty stinkeye SOME of those other judges are giving the new, Black guy getting sworn in.
https://whyy.org/segments/dems-vow-transparency-historic-delco-swearing-ceremony/
sab
@Chris: Very well stated. I am seeing this live and in action. It isn’t fixable in my lifetime unless our courts do heroic work they are not capable of doing.
ETA Only took Trump and Musk a month to break the civil service, because meanwhile Congress let them break ( and brake) the courts.
Peale
@Kay: He promised my taxes would go down. I thought it was because I was getting a rate cut. Not because I’m going to lose my job and make less money.
LeftCoastYankee
I worked at a company that primarily worked with small business owners. In a candid moment a senior manager said something to the effect of small business owners who fit the “serial entrepreneur” description, are essentially unemployable. They work for themselves because no one else could put up with them even if they had the requisite skills/experience. And when you see the “serial” part in their history, it means they probably don’t have the skills.
Ruckus
@Martin:
THIS.
All of it.
Ruckus
@sab:
That is because they are discussing the “wealthy” side of humanity. Not everyone with money is like this, but many of them are. We may not know or understand that we are worshipping money, but most humans do, because in this day and age that is how we often measure success. In MONEY. Many of us likely have bank accounts that are reasonable because in this country and time it takes a lot of various talents to be somewhat successful AND we have a system that requires a minimum level of pay. (Which is not a huge number but it is a level that measures what work is worth, be it physical or intellectual. Or both) So more citizens can be reasonably successful and lead reasonably successful lives. It works, to a point. And there is more than a single point. One has to take into account humans and their positives – and negatives – such as greed or pompous arrogance.
Uncle Cosmo
@Chris: Just FTR, Scrooge McDuck is one of the few characters in the Mousiverse that has different names in different languages. En francais he is M. Picsou (“pennypincher” IIRC), in italiano he is Il Paperone (“The Big Duck”) and auf deutsch he is, for some ungodly/undogly/unduckly reason, Dagobert.
(Fun fact: Some years back a guy who repeatedly held Deutsche Bahn [the German national railways] up for extortion, by calling in threats claiming to have planted remote-control bombs on tracks where the ICE express trains were soon to cross, used the pseudonym Dagobert – and everyone in Kraut Kountry knew to whom he referred.)
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2:
Concentration camp labor, of course. The inmates at the temporary deportation holding facilities and RFK Jr.’s Wellness Farms can deliver the mail for $0.75 an hour while wearing science-fiction geofence collars that blow their heads off if they stray from the route.
Kayla Rudbek
@Shalimar: yikes! Is there anything you can do to move him out?