Weekend Vibes [DOT 23/12/23]

23/12/23 MegMegMcGee 26
Graphic that quotes the Frank Costanza character from "Seinfeld"
Blessed are the consumers...

Happy Festivus y’all!

I got a lotta problems with you people and now you’re gonna hear about it!

[Not really but it’s fun to say.]

Noice!

Biden pardons thousands of people convicted of marijuana possessions
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/22/biden-pardons-thousands-convicted-of-marijuana-possessions

This is my shocked face :/

Supreme Court won’t expedite ruling on Trump’s immunity claim
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/22/supreme-court-trump-immunity-expedition-denied/

Sprots!

Behind the scenes with goalie mask artist Dave Gunnarsson
https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/39140197/nhl-goalie-mask-artist-gunnarsson-sweden-lundqvist-talbot

Stonks!

S&P 500 closes higher Friday, registers longest weekly win streak since 2017: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/21/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

What a horrible sounding vacation!

Cruise passengers return to port in Charleston and find their cars flooded
https://www.cnn.com/travel/carnival-cruise-flooded-cars-charleston/index.html

Wow

Have a great day!

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26 Comments

    • My narcissist mother-in-law occasionally blathers about her obituary. We tell her “write it down, we’ll get it printed.” We have no intention of spending money on that. She’s far outlived anybody who would see it and there was never a point in her life when she had friends who would care. She also thinks she’s getting buried in the upscale cemetery that her parents are in. She doesn’t want to be buried next to her husband in the veteran’s cemetery, I can only assume as a final insult to him. Which also reduces the cost, since the government provides the plot and ongoing upkeep. My wife quietly made all the arrangements, and that’s where she’s going. When she asks we just say yep, right next to your parents.

      I probably shouldn’t tell you about the details of the actual funeral, which is not taking place. At all.

      • My parents both told me they didn’t want a visitation, just a mass.

        Which is a fucking trip seeing as both haven’t been to mass outside of other funerals in probably 20 years.

        I mean I’ll have that set up for them, but also *shrug*. Both are getting cremated (per their wishes) and going into the same reliquary that already holds 2 grandparents and an aunt. It’s basically the family ashtray I guess at this point?

      • I really feel sorry for all of you who have contentious relationships with family members. I was on the phone just recently with my sister and we’ve always been each other’s best friend. The call went on for 2 1/2 hours.

        I loved my MIL and I know she loved me, or she said she did. My sister-in-law is a piece of work and a grifter who would put Donald Trump to shame but we think we have everything ironclad and nailed down in case Better Half predeceases me (highly unlikely), but she’s significantly older and not in great shape, according to the unwanted photos she sends. So our hope is that we outlive her. I know. Even her own brother is hoping for her death. Cruel, I think, but if you ever met this God-bothering thrice-married carny you’d understand.

        Needless to say, she is active in her church and her latest husband is the freelance pastor. This is another good thing about the Catholic Church. You can’t just rent an abandoned auto parts storefront and make up a phony religious denomination and appoint yourself “archbishop.” Whatever gets them through the night, I suppose.

  2. Speaking of stonks and other things financial, yesterday I decided to check on my retirement accounts and found that after six months or a year all my credentials were removed. So that was fine, I have them all written down. But then came the dreaded security questions and the texting of the security codes. And apparently this will go on every time I log on to get this basic information. Do they really think that the teenager in Uzbekistan who can hack into my account can’t also gain access to my mother’s maiden name?

    It’s time to go back to the old days. Cash on the barrelhead, and stash it under the mattress and under the floorboards. There’s a saying in German, “Früher war es besser,” which means it was better earlier. It has slightly neo-Nazi connotations and I suppose many Americans would disagree with this sentiment, but I’m telling you, give me a typewriter and some postage stamps and a passbook savings account and I would be perfectly happy.

    Or maybe not. Did I ever tell you guys that Better Half demanded that I clear out some of the crap in the office so he could store some of his crap, which should also be shredded? It’s of historical interest, but a Q3 financial projection from 1988 from a company that no longer exists is not particularly helpful. But I was no better, and came across some relics. In about 1992 I had a NY Bell Telephone account and an MCI account. I had forgotten that long distance was a different thing, I can’t remember why. To my astonishment, as I was shredding them, I realized that in nominal terms I was paying more than I do now for cellphone service, and in real terms (inflation adjusted) it must have been at least twice as high. I vaguely remember making my long distance calls from work, and trying to restrict home use to certain hours. Does anyone remember this?

    Ever onward. An early happy 2024 everyone.

    • …even before cell phones I remember some calls were reserved for evenings & weekends because those were cheaper…& that was without the kind of local/long distance split the US involved…so I can even remember dialling vast sequences of numbers into payphones to use trunk lines for cheaper overseas calls just to provide proof of life while knocking about from state to state

      …in terms of internet & cell phone rates there was definitely a long period where the US was on a different standard so a lot of european models wouldn’t work…involved the GSM acronym…but even after all that got ironed out the contracts in the US were/are not great in relative terms…although probably a fairer (sort of) comparison would be roaming since you don’t (last I checked) network hop when changing states unless your phone thinks it’s already abroad…which outside of the EU deal that says you can’t be charged over your home rate would close that gap considerably

      …pretty sure the likes of lebarra & gif gaf…or the “networks” offered by places like tescos iirc…are a bit like those old school pre-paid phonecards with the trunk lines in that they discount their rates in lime with getting economies of scale out of leasing arrangements with “actual” networks…which seems like moëbius logic to me…but I’m sure market experts could explain how it’s “perfectly logical, really”?

      • Once you’re up near the Canadian border, like in Detroit for example, or “down east” in Maine, your phone might think you’ve gone abroad, you might pick up service from a Canadian supplier, and you’ll be liable for roaming charges. Another pain in the neck. Good luck getting a human on the phone to sort that out. And if you do get a human it will be someone with a suspiciously heavy South Asian accent who will say something like, “Hello, Mr. Matthew, my name is Siobhan [mispronounced], how may I help you today, sir?”

        I once read this really fascinating article about Indian call centers, by the way. Those jobs are considered incredibly prestigious and well-paying, and yet they don’t pay very much by Western standards. But all things are relative and apparently you can comfortably house and feed a family of five on something like $15,000 a year. I’ve never been to India and I’ve always wanted to go. I went through a Bollywood movie phase and the movies, thankfully, were subtitled. Amazing. The movies go on for hours, they’re usually complicated romances and there is always a lot of singing and dancing. Why don’t we make movies like that anymore? We used to. In the 1950s MGM was famous for them.

        But, so, in the call centers the employees are given false identities. They take on different names, which vary day to day so they can’t really be traced, and then different locations which they learn about by having another monitor tracking their “hometown” news. So, for example, “Kenny” will tell you, if you ask, that Buffalo, where he’s supposedly at, got 4.6 inches of snow overnight but the good news is the Bills triumphed over [he pauses while he consults the scores]. Does anyone really fall for this?

        • …probably old hat…& arguably more of a brain drain sort of an observation…but the best exotic marigold hotel (& the sequel) is based on a genuine phenomenon to do with retirement savings going further in india…only with a who’s who sort of a cast

    • Of course I remember long-distance calls and evening and weekend rates. I’ll go you one better. Have you ever had a party line? In rural Florida I did. For you youngsters, I’ll note that you shared a phone line with all the people in a geographic area (it was several families for us). You could pick up your phone and hear someone else talking to whomever. So phone calls were necessarily brief and to the point. I think we had that until I was 7 or 8.

      • My aunt had one – the phone had an assigned number of rings for each party on the line, and as one would expect, the local busy body who listened to all calls.

  4. Well, had the holiday party at work yesterday. I organized, planned, got the food and even subsidized it as a small gift to the production team I’m part of. Despite everything, we had enough food and drink and people had a good time (I hope.)

    Original plan was for me to go out to the front to get the pizza/pay for it and someone else to pick up the Hakka Chinese food at a local restaurant. That didn’t happen because my idiot of a supervisor insisted that we work till the bitter end. This meant I had to do everything myself. I bolted out of the floor and got the pizza from the delivery man then jumped in my car and had to pickup from the restaurant (I could have done Uber eats, but I didn’t want to double the food bill for delivery charges.)

    I had drinks and some small cheesecake pastries from a local supermarket known for its bakery. Unlike some folks I know who charged people extra so they got the free meal, I undercharged and subsidized the cost as a small thank you. I didn’t really mention it either.

    Some of my former managers accused me of having a “cult of personality”. Nah. Unlike Mao or Jim Jones, I’m not demanding these folks to die for me if I asked. Unlike those dipshits, I don’t demand anything (even loyalty.) It’s just my way of saying thank you and merry xmas which those selfish motherfuckers don’t get.

    I did similar stuff when I did have the authority/responsibility and spent my own money (like I did yesterday.)

    The idea was to have some fun and enjoy things even when we’re led by an idiot.

    • I was accused of a similar personality issue years ago. As an account manager, I had to send client publications through the art department. I would go sit with my artists, shoot the breeze, bring them small gifts, and generally treat them like human beings. As a result, every time I put a job through art, they’d drop everything else and work on mine.

      I was told that was inappropriate because it was affecting other jobs. My response was that perhaps the other account managers should also try treating the artists like human beings. It … was not received well. But my billing was too high and I handled more accounts than anyone else (you see a connection here?), so I had the ability to say fuck off. And I did.

      • Oh, Bryan, I spent my life working in Art Departments. The worst thing about it was the eye strain, but the second-worst thing was being second-guessed by idiots in other departments who, no matter how young and inexperienced, seemed to have veto power. I used to organize seminars to get them to understand what my department was doing and why and how they could help and what wasn’t really possible without advance planning. I was hugely popular with the whole staff but the minute they left they’d be back to their old tricks and I and my staff would be scrambling to accommodate these strange ideas that were greenlighted by the usual series of otherwise-unemployable nuts who found senior management positions in my company.

        • Another reason they liked me was that I rarely asked for changes. My philosophy was “I get paid to handle the client, you get paid to handle the design, let’s both just do our jobs.” Clients sometimes made changes, but I was pretty good at selling them on stuff.

          • Exactly. Stay in your lane. But no, everyone was allowed to throw in their two cents, no matter how nonsensical, and no matter how short their tenure before they moved on. I never said anything about what the others were doing, and some of the stuff was a car crash waiting to happen, but they, apparently having nothing better to do, decided to share with me their insights on how I could improve my output.

            I wish them a happy life. Just keep me out of it.

            • One of my petty joys at work is on calls where the design team is walking through designs and morons are being critical in an area they have no expertise in is to go off mute and just praise how great the design looks and how much I appreciate the work the design team does. I know it annoys the team that’s always criticizing the designs, and that team can either join the design team or go kick rocks/stay in their lane. 

              It’s 100% true, their designs do look great consistently and they have tons of work with clearing things with legal etc that the rest of us never need to do. And I don’t see a need to nitpick a design that looks great to me just to hear my own voice on a call.

          • What I always found was they were happy to get into the weeds as long as you frontloaded the process. Hashing everything out and anticipating the wrinkles before they started work made things easier for them. Doing the old whatever, whatever, whatever NO! thing was a really bad idea.

      • Yeah, my “cult” happened because I provided some semblance of leadership when none was around. When folks needed something I went and got it. When folks wanted an answer, I provided it. When folks needed some advice on something, well I would provide it.

        The supervisors/managers that cried about my “cult” didn’t provide any leadership. They just assumed that their title and given authority was enough to call themselves a leader and viewed anyone who could make them feel insecure as a threat. Something something about nature abhoring a vaccum.

        My answer to that was “DO YOUR FUCKING JOB ASSHOLE! IT’S NOT ABOUT FRENCH KISSING THE DIRECTOR’S ASS OR WALKING AROUND LIKE A SELF IMPORTANT PONCE. MAYBE IF YOU DID WHAT I DID THEN PEOPLE MIGHT ACTUALLY RESPECT YOU A BIT.”

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