“The lizard people, in a nutshell, are people whose wealth and/or circumstances have led to a real and serious distance in perception and behavior from normal Americans.”
This would appear to rather firmly establish that I am assuredly NOT a Lizard Person - or a Lizard Person Cargo Cult(ur)ist, for that matter - since I spent the first half of my life (to date) in Hooverville and keep in close contact with many people I have known for over 30 years: Fellow humble, hardscrabble hillbillies not unlike myself in origin.
“Our friend Sherman, who repeatedly fumbles through a sort of “Australopithecus Portrays Socrates” commenting routine in which he tries to mis-associate Powerball winners, YouTube clowns, incel inheritors, car-show operators, and the like with the concept of Lizard People, has a bit of Cargo Culture about him. His endless rants about how building anything in America amounts to “make-work projects” and “welfare by other means” are, I think, vaguely analogous to the harmless butterflies who attempt to emulate the poisonous monarch butterfly and thus avoid consumption by real predators. He’s acquired a Plato’s Cave version of these sociopathic attitudes from consuming the media made by other Lizard Cargo Culturists, and claims them as his own because he believes they confer status upon him.”
My rants about “make work” and “welfare by other means” and - yes - DEI for laborers is not constrained to manufacturing work. It applies to *all* “work” (by which I mean trading time for a paycheck, in this sense), since I strive to be consistent in the application of my beliefs.
Here’s a recent example:
-Last week, I bumped into a guy that I worked for earlier in my career; we share an alma mater, and he hired me a long time ago.
-He is now a group head at another investment bank, which means he has significant P&L responsibility (and oversight). As with any investment bank, his biggest expense is personnel costs.
-I asked him if that bank was using Rogo - an AI “agent” targeted toward investment banking - or any other similar tools.
-Yes, they are using them, but it hasn’t materially cut down on junior hires (yet); the market cycle still controls hiring and firing of execution bankers. The bank for which he works was burned badly during the post-COVID boom because they hired too many juniors, which led to them laying off 40% of their workforce when rates rose and deal volume slackened. The bank is a private partnership, so the partners have to eat first.
-He believes that, historically, the *only* reason that the junior grunt work was performed by highly paid Americans (or foreigners on sponsored visas) sitting in cubicles in expensive American office buildings was because the next generation of senior bankers learn those skills on the job, primarily through observation and indirect exposure to client discussions; you could outsource the work to India, but that kills the pipeline of people who will transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly and begin generating revenue after ~10 years of execution and learning. Which is why no investment banks materially outsource work done by people who could conceivably become revenue generators in the future. They do outsource middle- and back-office work.
-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”
I agree with him: No one is owed any sort of job, any sort of paycheck.
Pinning this because I appreciate the response, as well as the breadth and depth of the thoughts within.
What interests me is the following:
'-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”'
One anecdote does not a sea of data make, but I can't help but contrast this with the obsession I've seen people display about other even vaguely meaningful businesses, careers, and products they've made.
Pilots will cry real tears on their final flight with an airline. When he was alive, Kalamazoo luthier Aaron Cowles would always stop what he was doing to look at any old guitar he'd helped make. Jimmy Page has spent thirty years obsessively remastering and reworking the music he made fifty years ago.
This fellow not only isn't sentimental about the future of his firm, he'd willingly destroy it for three years' worth of enhanced payouts.
Because he fully and completely understands that nothing he's ever done has led to anything good or worthwhile. The fry cook at McDonald's can say he's fed thousands of people, but this fellow has done nothing other than enrich himself by wetting his proverbial beak.
The only payoff was what he got paid. Therefore anything that increases that is worthwhile.
When you lampoon me for describing certain kinds of work as "GAY or UNMANLY or FAKE" or whatever... this is what I have in mind. Forty years of parasitic behavior. No actual good done for anyone. And memorable for nothing but the size of his paycheck.
You sound like his ex-wife. They were forced to spend more time together during COVID, which led to her to pursue divorce.
No one has ever cried on their last day of investment banking, unless they were tears of anguish (got fired unexpectedly with no money to walk away) or tears of jubilation (quit the millisecond their bonus hit their bank account).
The company I work for is owned by PE. The owners don’t give a damn about the future, they only care about exiting in 5 years at a profit. I am relatively young with a 20 year work life remaining (mostly due to not wanting to pay insurance out of pocket). These clowns know nothing about our business, spend small fortunes on CRM and data analytics tools, and think we are so stupid that we won’t notice they are screwing us for the long term. When I meet people who work in PE I know exactly what I am dealing with.
I don’t work in Private Equity, and I have never sold a company to PE, because PE firms - with rare exceptions - do not buy banks, because they would be forced to become (heavily regulated) bank holding companies in exchange, and that is the last thing they want to do.
2 of our clients are being bought out this year. I should go into their business. I didnt sign a do not compete. They make what i make look like peanuts
"I don’t give a shit about training the next generation"
the real american dream is entirely self serving and indifferent or hostile to anyone who might get in the way right. why bother continuing the method that allowed the firm to effectively operate anyway
the _only_ role of a manager is to help his / her team succeed. before you say "no, the role of a manager is to help the organization succeed," the former leads to the latter.
His job is to generate revenue himself and also hire other senior bankers who will generate lots of revenue. And then it’s to determine how much each and every person on the team gets paid at year end (within some goal posts - he can underpay someone who deserved more so that he can overpay someone else that he wants to keep, etc.)
The job of those who work under him is to execute his deals and anticipate his needs. If they do those things, they will learn quite a lot.
Early boomers even pulled up the ladders on late boomers like me. I’m technically a boomer by birth year, but by attitude I have nothing in common with them.
Not for me, Nate -- but then I was always the throwback. Didn't go to college. Married young, had kids early (3 by my 27th BD). Wife never worked. Learned a trade. Started a business. Built a nice life in the town where I grew up. Raised God-fearing kids (2 out of 3 anyhow) who are all productive members of society raising their own kids.
My kids are all laying waste to their peers by every metric. They have great jobs, several kids of their own (each).
I was talkin' 'bout mmmmy geeenneeration. Generally, Boomers raised entitled snots in their spare time.
I graduated HS in 1981, having underachieved spectacularly and taken every shop class offered in a town and a time where/when shop classes were liberally offered to those students not being tracked into engineering, accounting, or nursing (where 85% of my classmates ended up). The idea of any of them as a vocation gave me hives.
Having been born into the family of some seriously smart people, my grasp far exceeded my reach. I was content to spend my 4 years at THS sitting on the hood of my Firebird and eating Dolly Madison "Donettes" during "Engine Testing" or some such, smirking at the brown-nosers sweating out classes to prep them to be worker bees in the corporate hive.
I took the required math (one year), the required science (two years), and English (3 years). The rest of my time was spent "finding my own" way in the parlance of the day, which involved a good deal of hood sitting and Donette eating. And lifting weights. And working on my Firechicken.
I learned to write in English 2, when Mrs. Evans basically dared me to apply myself. I rearranged my schedule to get her for English 3 and become the editor of the student newspaper, a position I used to mock the administration in thinly veiled terms.
And then it was over. I graduated into 20% inflation and >10% unemployment. My dad was a plumbing contractor (the smartest man in a family of college profs and medical Drs.), wildly successful in 1979 and near bankruptcy in 1981. I kept my HS job changing oil at the Mobil station for $4/hr. I didn't WANT to go to college because I didn't want to be an accountant or engineer, and didn't want to work for dad because I was a snot-nosed punk.
Good thing too, because there was zero money for me, even with a state scholarship (earned for testing well on my ACT). I wanted (in order) to:
1) stop striking out with pretty girls
2) crew for Big Daddy Don Garlits
3) play bass for a righteous rock band
I had no clue how to accomplish any of these goals.
Fast forward 44 years, and I've somehow found success owning and operating a union supermarket refrigeration contracting business, have been married for 40 years to BY FAR the prettiest girl who would ever have had me, and somehow fathered and raised 3 successful kids. I've got the cars I want, live in a home I built and own several others. I could retire tomorrow, but I don't want to -- I genuinely like what I do, and always have. The income is nice too.
The point? I'm not your guy. College was never for me, and I regret nothing. My generation sold your generation a bill of goods. There are a lot of roads to success. You do you -- nothing is stopping you.
My peer group has embraced this "sport" like they embrace everything else -- with a mania bordering on obsession. It will last until "The Next Big Thing" comes along to steal their (our?) attention. This is the generation, remember, that busted my dad's generation for playing shuffleboard bocce ball as they aged.
... and while It may be less harsh than tennis, I know of nobody who plays >3x/wk who hasn't torn a meniscus, ACL, or hamstring at least once.
If they're as serious about pickleball as they sound, your parents are going to end up on somebody's table -- guaranteed.
We have already determined that you are in fact, not a hillbilly. I’m unsure why you keep that charade up since hillbillies don’t go to W&L, brag about finance contacts and work in investment banks. Additionally, lizard cargo shorts people are the exact type of person who would claim some background to justify their behavior as not being that. I wasn’t expecting a Sherman McCoy stray, but here we are.
I am *actually* a hillbilly! I have another hillbilly friend (from comes from coal mining stock in Eastern Kentucky) who is now a lawyer at The Heritage Foundation. He has transcended his humble origins and done well for himself.
Unlike, say, JD Vance: He grew up in flat-as-a-board Middletown, Ohio, appropriated my culture, and used that appropriation to (metaphorically) fellate Peter Thiel.
Having a poor friend who makes good does not make you a hillbilly. I went to high school in the Bronx, with friends from the hood, I’m in no way shape from the hood.
I said he grew up in a coal mining family in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky.
I grew up in a copper mining family in far Northern Georgia; the area in which my maternal grandfather grew up is between “Devil’s Den” and “Hell’s Holler,” and it remains an exceedingly unpleasant location.
By that standard I guess I grew up in a junk dealing family because my maternal grandfather was a ragman, notwithstanding the fact that my father was a veterinarian.
Maybe recycling scrap is in my blood. With the amount of cardboard boxes that people get due to online sales, I've looked into leasing a cardboard compactor to set up at my grandkids' school. The idea being that families would drop off their scrap boxes at the school, the custodian or some staff member would run the compactor, and I'd split the proceeds with the school. The problem was getting the school to buy in to the idea.
Considering how easy it is to recycle cardboard, it's a shame how much gets thrown away.
My dad was a steel worker and union man. All my uncles were, too. I hung out in steel worker neighborhoods and went to the bars and bowling alleys.
I am not a steel worker or union man. While I have a slight understanding of the life my dad lived, I am so far removed from it, at my dad’s insistence, that I was but a mere observer to the life he lived. I did not come close to truly experiencing it. Just because I was there for part of it means next to nothing.
I guess I can’t add anything the other commentators have stated, but if your dad is truly a dentist, then you come from educated and wealthy stock in which you probably grew up without an accent. Adjacency does not mean reality. I’m sure you play up that hillbilly bs in board rooms right? Didn’t think so.
I don’t think I have an accent; people in Chicago thought I had an incredibly thick “Southern” (not “Appalachian”) accent.
I am happy to discuss my humble beginnings - when appropriate - in professional context. I met a guy earlier this year who grew up in the “Appalachian” portion of Nova Scotia before attending Middlebury, where I went to summer school. We had quite a lot in common, as outsiders from the middle of nowhere Appalachia who ended up on Wall Street.
I'm curious Sherman; I was born in a small 8 room hospital in Spencer, WV. I invoiced at $179.66 where my Father put $100 down and financed the rest. By the blessing of my parents and the Ford Motor Company I was moved to Akron at 5 months old and have lived in NE Ohio for most of the remainder of my life with frequent stays back in WV, even tomorrow night I plan on sleeping in the room my Mother was born in.
Hillbilly or not?
My brother, born in Akron 5 1/2 years following me in a proper hospital with a much larger invoice raised in the exact same environment.
Hillbilly or not?
PS. Every branch of my ancestry, both legitimate and not, settled in what is now WV in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
I am gratified that you consider me the arbiter of “hillbilly.”
I think if you spend your formative years in Appalachia, i.e., attending school in Appalachia would be the easiest way, then you qualify. Bryce is a hillbilly, in my definition.
It's a well known saying. Three of my great aunts came to Akron to work in the rubber factories and found husbands also from WV. One distant female cousin I found worked in the office where they were building Corsairs and then for Leo Mehl. I wish I had met her. A prominent history of the rubber industry devoted a entire chapter on the employees from WV that began with a description of the very town I was born in.
Yes, if the hypothetical descendant of the billionaire forebear grew up in Appalachia and interacted with other Appalachian Americans on a daily basis (school, etc.); it’s a cultural thing that remains bounded by geography, even today.
Are you really so dense as to not understand that the reason he(Vance) and others ever talk about the "hillbilly" thing has everything to do with how uneducated the coasts and places of "culture" are now?
I grew up in the heart of the Ozarks and graduated with a prestigious degree for what I wanted to do. I can tell you right now that I was ALWAYS branded a straight up hillbilly outsider by the college elitists regardless of what my intellectual ability was. Hillbilly means many things to many people and is often slang for other things like trailer park people(as it is in OHIO).
And no, you are not a lizard person. It's super clear when you type that you aren't. But, as Jack says, you're often arguing as a lizard person adjacent. I often hate your arguments but I do like that you are very thorough in your explanations for things. My main issue is always that you are so far away from a normal person now (my perception) that you cannot see the reality for the majority of us hobbits living in middle earth. We just want to live in our holes and be left alone to raise our kids.
-Some people use “redneck” or “hick” or “hillbilly” interchangeably. I would be puzzled if someone called me a “redneck” or a “hick,” since I am demonstrably neither. It also amuses me when a smartypants refers to people, e.g., “hicks” as “hillbillies.”
-I am not so far away “normal” people. I have plenty of life experience interacting with them, and bear in mind that most of the clients we served as investment bankers operated rural community banks that served “normal” people.
While this is mostly true about elitist people on the east coast, it doesn’t mean that that person thinks of himself as a hillbilly. In fact, one who does, tries to shed that label faster than anything. It’s utilized to sell sob stories or an insincere & shallow way of saying “I’m a normal person” when in fact, one has done nothing to keep it that way.
There are a lot of succesful people here at acf. Some financiall, i suspect even more financially than sherman, and a lot socially and family. Id guess, but i havent taken a survey, is the overall opinion is “clown” not flaneur or hillbilly
Your beliefs are consistent; I do appreciate that about you, as well as the fact that you are disagreeable, and that you dgaf about other people think of you. But what you wrote reads as a confirmation of Jack’s response.
Came here for this comment, and I was not disappointed. Quelle surprise, a head parasite cares nothing about the next generation of parasites. On the upside, less parasites.
No one is 'owed' a job. But we as a society should strive to ensure the next generation is left with more opportunities to have one, not less.
Also, that man is the stupidest person in every room if he thinks he can replace everyone with AI. I’m assuming an Ivy League MBA which just means he only knows how to torpedo, not build.
He has been covetously eyeing high-spec, PTS 911 GTS Targas (used since the 992.2 Targa will be hybrid and not offer a manual). As if the hivemind here needed another reason to hate his ilk!
I was sitting at a wedding reception nearly a year ago. After a few drinks, I found myself - unfortunately - in libation lubricated conversation with a friend’s wife; she does not like me, has never liked me, and almost certainly will never like me.
She said: “You know, I’ve figured something out about you. I used to think you just had no self awareness, but that’s not true. You do have self awareness, you just don’t give a shit what people think about you.”
Why do you think you're expending so much effort justifying your parasitic existence here if you believe that you don't care what people think about you? You're a void of self-awareness raised to an exponential power. I'm sorry for pointing it out, since Jack asks us not to insult one another, but it would be nice if you learned something about yourself before you learn what accountability means.
The attitude of "no one is owed a paycheck" is in my opinion, the justification used to eliminate job security over the past three generations. It's the same callous mindset that holds that a paycheck is all the thanks an employee has any right to expect, and the one uttered by those business managers who can't understand why good personnel are so hard to find.
I was motivated to pursue a career in banking for the paycheck, obviously.
If asked “are you motivated by money” in a job interview - even a Wall Street job interview - it’s smart to prevaricate a bit and talk about “opportunities” and “learning” and “exposure” and so on. So that’s naturally what everyone does, particularly undifferentiated college seniors with no skills (yet).
In retrospect, I got far more than just a paycheck out of my ~12 years in the trenches; I walked out with substantial domain knowledge and relationships to draw upon in the future. That was the true takeaway, as I have written many times.
If someone fucks up my life enough I can't feed my kids, I'm going to take my extensive gun collection and fuck theirs up. You would think the lizard people would have learned something from luigi even if he didn't target the right person.
To "owe" means to have an obligation. The employer has no obligation but he, presumably, is not stupid and understands meritorious performance on his (the firm's) behalf when he sees it, thus the paycheck and assurance, no guarantee, that the paycheck will continue to be provided. That is know as quid pro quo.
I'd argue that when companies try to do something *other* than provide a paycheck, it can be bad. I mean, this is part of what DEI was about. Let's make work culture better through diversification. Let's "look good" instead of actually making money. Yes, making money. Usually that means making the best darn product or offering the best darn services. To achieve that, it means hiring the best darn people.
It's also an easy argument that job security can be just as bad. Look at where we are with tenure professors and teachers. Even in the private sector, I've seen companies crumble because so many middle managers had job security.
I'd argue that the social employee-employer has in fact become too complicated. At the same time, the customer-company contract has as well, and I'm not sure which came first.
Sir, this sounds a great deal like what you believe:
"They believe, or pretend to believe, in a strict meritocracy that justifies their wealth and power. Consequently, they also believe that anyone who is poor or downtrodden deserves to be so"
cf
"-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”
I agree with him: No one is owed any sort of job, any sort of paycheck."
A simple "yes" would suffice as the two ideas of self-capacity for improvement and reinvention do not exclude the former.
There are issues around this belief primarily pertaining to individual ability and networks where leaving everyone to their own devices is not so much empowering the best it is sewing the seeds for anarchy.
I think people are recoiling to this sort of sociopathic relationship toward their fellows and subsequent generations for easy to understand reasons. An analogy to the experience is the biological phenomenon of cancer. Cancer is, ostensibly, a part of the body and shares the same DNA and cannot live apart from the body. However, people with cancer lose weight even if they eat more and more because it is the cancer receiving that energy and not the body proper. As the tumescent growth burgeons the body proper becomes increasingly ill and feeble. In your world, you are awash in possibilities and money, while an outsider looking in sees you proud to enable the sexual exploitation of the young and old, men and women alike, all to make money off their backs. Taking the energy of the body for your own good to the body's detriment. In your banker friend's world he give no fucks for the people of his actual corporate body (corporations naturally being composed of people) and only cares insofar as he gets remuneration. Ostensibly you and he share the same rough background and raising as Americans as the rest of us, but in reality it looks a lot like you're interested in killing the host and feeding while you can. I'm fairly certain Sir Morris Leyland sees the importation of labor, who will form nepotistic networks and lock out people who are better qualified, as one and the same. You might say he should have started his own business/built better contacts/etc but those things are also no guarantees of success.
We've touched on this before that stuff like fractional banking and other financial techne can be put to the good, we do seem to have big disagreements on both the reality of the "value stream" in the highly financialized world, and the external effects that it carries. I think banking and markets should work to serve the nation and not the reverse, which seems to be more what you think.
Excellent, thoughtful response; the best among many I have received today.
I don’t think that banking and markets, etc. SHOULD serve the nation (they often do, of course) or SHOULD NOT be served by the nation (which also happens sometimes). I don’t think we need any central planning.
Geez, Sherman, I don’t know whether a career in banking made your ex-boss that way or whether he was already like that (and therefore went into banking). Either way, aside from the financial rewards, I doubt he’s led an enviable life. Not by me, anyway.
Not only did Jack Baruth steal the show at MotoAmerica, Baggers competition is stealing the show for MotoGP next year with their official support class having a new name THE HARLEY-DAVIDSON BAGGER WORLD CUP*
*GET BENT INDIAN, I guess, even though their machines are clearly superior
This new premiere class, destined to replace all motorcycle competition at all levels; make women wet and men hard; is coming next year! https://www.motogp.com/en/news/2025/08/15/harley-davidson-bagger-world-cup/756437 The EUROSTANKS will finally know TRUE POWER and RACECRAFT as roaring American V-Twins finally put hair on their Eurochests.
Ahem.
Superbike competition at Mid-Ohio was good, actually, with Bobby Fong once again taking a win in race one but without the obscene gap that he had at VIR. In Race 1 Josh Herrin was a huge pussy about the oil dry on the track and, after riding over it, blew a turn and made a fuss before getting on with the race and finishing 7th. Cameron Beaubier kept Fong honest until the last lap where he blew turn 6 (where the oil dry was) and finished down in sixth. This left Sean Dylan Kelly on a GSXR1000 to secure second place while he fended off JD Beach and Hayden Gillum. Honda, on a Stock 1000 bike of all machines, was the third place podium with JD Beach and not Hayden Gillum standing on the step.
Race 2 had Herrin and Fong mixing it up into turn 6 (?) and contact of Herrin's front with Fong's rear sent them both off track. Herrin dumped his bike by the tire wall and then had a freak collision, which may have left him with a leg injury (unclear, couldn't find a press release) with another rider that he had already passed late in the race. Fong would perform an excellent recovery ride and claim the bronze, minimizing points damage and keeping him first in the championship. Cameron Beaubier took first place after Fong and Herrin were removed from the battle and Jake Gagne was back on the podium in second, though almost 4s adrift of Cam.
Supersport continues to be the fight between ex-superbike riders Scholtz, Jacobsen, and Petersen with the young Blake Davis being the least experienced rider giving them the most trouble.
King of the Baggers remains scrappy with a lot of crashes, mechanicals, and aggression compared with the other MotoA classes. Gillum wins race 1, Herfoss a (very) close second, and Kyle Wyman a distant third. Race 2 Herfoss and Gillum went at it again with Herfoss in the lead for much of the race. Gillum attempted last lap dive bomb into turn 6 and went wide off track which dumped him far back in the field. Herfoss takes race 2, Wyman far behind in second, and Tyler O'Hara, who has not been a force at all this season, finishes on the podium for third.
MotoGP at the Red Bull Ring!
Marco Bezzecchi puts the Aprilia on pole position with Alex Marquez a tenth of a second down for 2nd. Bagnaia, who has won repeatedly at the Red Bull Ring, qualifies in third. Marc Marquez missed pole position due to crashing out on a hot lap and has to start from the second row of the grid in fourth.
In the sprint Marc Marquez simply dominates again, jumping from 4th to second by turn one to follow his brother in second place. He would quietly sit behind Alex for half distance before passing him and putting on two tenths a lap for which Alex had no answer. Bez fell prey to Pedro Acosta, back on the podium, and a feather in KTM's cap at their home round. Where was Bagniaia? After horrendous wheelspin off the start he decided to retire after 3/4 race distance with complaints of no grip.
In the full length race the lead pack was 5 with Bez making a better start, Bagnaia behind him, then Marc, Alex, and Pedro. Bagnaia and Marc would go toe to toe for a short while before Marc passed on lap two to chase down Bez. Alex Marquez was looking good, but had a long lap penalty which put him down pack and from there he made no recovery. Bagnaia, having lost second to Marc, would hold on for much of the race until Acosta made it past him, whereupon he was quickly passed by Fermin Aldeguer who put on an amazing late show. Bagnaia faded down the field to 8th. Aldeguer, meanwhile, had .5s-1s of pace on Bez and Marc until Marquez responded to keep him at bay by a second. Bez had nothing for the rookie, however, and lost out to Fermin finishing two seconds down.
Baganaia almost looks sporting.
Jorge Martin did nothing of particular note except crash out of the race.
MotoGP is at a new venue where the initial turns after the start are quite tight and saw quite a lot of contact in WSBK superbike race 1.
The YouTube algorithm has had motogp show up in my feed and i think im going to be hooked. Injust need to pick a driver to hate. These guys are insane. They need to do a drive to survive for this
Here at ACF, you're free to make fun of me or any other public official, but we do require civility to each other. This fellow does a complete race report once a week, for free, so every one else can read it. We shan't require he be a prose stylist.
silentsod's first paragraph consists of two complete sentences ("Baggers competition is stealing the show" and "Jack Baruth did steal the show at MotoAmerica") with a few prepositional phrases thrown in.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right.
I think we need a reality show (stay with me here) in which we pay for leftist Americans to travel to foreign countries and do the things there that they think illegals should be allowed to do here in the USA. It would be fun to watch what happens when they are arrested and imprisoned for things that millions of illegals get away with here every day. I’ll add driving semi-trucks to my list of challenges.
I always laugh when some idiot american goes to a foreign country with weed. "It's just weed"
They take that shit seriously. We should too. What a mistake legalizing it was. I don't personally care if our resident harmonica icon partakes but it's pretty obvious the proles can't handle it.
I’ve basically sworn off weed. I didn’t do it much before, but it wasn’t doing me any favors and so why bother. And same with booze, it just destroys my sleep now that I’m old. I stopped recreationally drinking for the most part aside from a glass of wine with certain meals. However I’ll still socially drink for the right occasions, of which I have two coming this weekend (40th bday party at a bar Friday, block party on Sat). RIP my sleep cycle until mid next week.
I have been doing dry January which usually runs into mid February for the last few years. The only benefit I've noticed to not drinking at all is it's a lot easier to lose weight. And I like people even less than I already do although that isn't much of a benefit. I tried edibles to help me sleep a few years back and while I slept through the night, it was worse than a hangover. I'd be useless till noon.
Since my wife is invariably pregnant or breastfeeding I do major fasts and some of the two week fasts alcohol free. This, along with the standard Wednesday/Friday fasts, means I am alcohol free about a third of the year by default with no real effort.
I also won't be drinking once the baby is here for a month or two.
To find the required simpleminded candidates you would likely need to recruit influencers or wanna-be influencers, so some payment would be necessary, could be like the Amazing Race where you cover their expenses and promise large cash winnings to whoever completes the challenges. Of course that is unlikely to happen since other countries enforce their immigration laws ruthlessly. I think this is TV ready, just need Mark Burnett to produce it.
This is a great idea and I’d watch every episode. The only downside is that the show probably will only run one season once the pool of potential participants sees what happened to the first batch of volunteers.
I am not so sure- the American left thrives on the idea that bad progressive ideas (socialism, communism) that have failed every time they have been tried have failed because they were not implemented properly. American progressives are nothing if not arrogant and believe they can do it “smarter”. They would see season 1 contestants get locked up for decades in foreign prisons and think” I am smarter and can do it right!”
"Perhaps a commenter or two will pop up to decry the hiring of American citizens to drive trucks as “make work programs” or so on, along with a commentary on how lazy Americans think they are entitled to make a living wage for something as trivial as operating a 50-ton vehicle on recapped tires in all weather and road conditions while surrounded by vehicles to which it is a constant and deadly menace. Anyone who truly believes that has a chance to “own some outcomes” here. Three innocents dead."
There is no truck driver shortage and it is 100% correct that there are lots of foreigners, who probably aren't legitimately licensed, operating under shady contracts for shady companies all to save a buck and enrich a few. x.com/supertrucker where it is his pet peeve the ongoing propaganda campaign of the "driver shortage."
grrrr. you had to hit a sore point - I've been hearing the "engineering shortage" BS for 40+ years. its infuriating. and what it really means is "there is a shortage of engineers willing to work for very low salaries"
Exactly. While I am a great 2A proponent its perfectly correct for parents who irresponsibly let kids get guns face the music in criminal court when said kid does something stupid or bad with the gun.
Juts put the companies and individuals who hired these guys on trial. But therein lays the rub, the sate of comifornia gave him a ldv license and he prob even has a soc security number. Maybe we can arrest Newsome and the cal legislature for this one.
I mean we sent our governor to prison (one of many) for allowing illegal truck licenses to be sold by the IL sec of state. Several kids were killed which spurred the lawsuit and sure something similar could happen here 🤷🏼♂️
Or they filed the asylum form that then allows them to get a work permit while they wait for their asylum case to process. There are lots of NGOs that coach how to do the process, which is how you get illegal kids working in meat packing plants. They were coached on what birth date to use on the forms.
Even better is the fact that many states make it illegal for the potential employer to do a significant check to see if the future employee is of legal status. Apparently checking on the immigration status of the guy who can't speak English proficiently is racist or something.
My FIL was an over the road trucker for 25 years, and he says there is not a trucker shortage, there’s a SKILLED trucker shortage. We have a bunch of pump-and-dump driving schools pushing bad drivers out into companies that are terrible to work for, so they move on to other careers. Rinse and repeat.
Obviously recruiting illegals is only compounding this problem.
I just heard about the student visa scam in Canada wherein strip mall "colleges" operated by Indians provide documentation for tens of thousands of folks who aren't exactly the intellectual cream of the subcontinent.
Perhaps, while some studies show an average IQ of 75, which is below that which the U.S. will accept recruits because they're not considered trainable, with a cohort of over a billion people, you're still going to have some exceptionally smart folks.
From Grok: "Without more robust data, a conservative estimate based on a mean IQ of 85 (a commonly cited middle ground) and SD of 15 suggests about 0.02% of the population, or roughly 280,000 individuals, might have IQs over 140."
There's a privately operated kosher food pantry around the corner from my house. It's set up to augment the official Jewish Federation supported food agency for people who are officially below the poverty level (besides folks who are actually poor, even if you're making a decent salary if you have 8-12 kids, you might be below the poverty line, at least according to the government). The private food pantry gets so much food from food recyclers like Forgotten Harvest and via private donations that regular folks have to show up one day a week or else they'll be throwing away food.
If I wanted to be frugal, I could probably survive on stuff I get there.
I'd hazard a guess that with the number of food banks and food pantries that exist, if you're an adult going hungry in America, it's your own damn fault.
while that does sound like an excellent food bank and a good justification for that the ones im referring to in canada are frequented by indians making above average wages who see these places as a way to get free food rather than a resource for the less fortunate
theyre also stupid enough to record themselves doing it and to make tutorials on how others can scam the system as well
I thought it was you, but I'm guessing now it was someone else - wish I could find the article - who did a really good breakdown on the whole 'lizard people thing'. It's a lot like what you wrote but goes into even more detail. We all have a 'lizard brain' in us, these people just let their rule them.
And sadly far too many of them are in the halls of power now.
On 'Lazy Americans'.
I have worked, as an engineer in critical fields, for a number of foreign companies over the years. I have heard them call us 'lazy' but the truth is, no one in the world works as hard as Americans do.
We get two weeks vacation. Most get four. In Germany, that heart of 'hard work and production' they get 6, plus unlimited sick leave, 30 hour weeks, no overtime, and the companies also shut down for August.
Meanwhile they once canceled the Labor Day weekend at their American Subsidiary - everyone had to come into work for 3-days because the Germans, once again, fucked up a critical piece of equipment design and we had to fix it. By non-stop work while the Germans all took the week off because it was a minor holiday and THEY weren't going to come in and fix it. One guy had to reschedule his wedding or he would have been fired. (I quit).
But I've never worked for a foreign company where the foreigners worked even half as hard as their American counterparts. It's just propaganda.
Michael Hastings.
I don't know who killed him, but it was clear someone else took over control of his car.
This has been done to airliners by a guy sitting in the back with a laptop - though he didn't crash it, he was just proving to a number of people that it was easy, and it could be done. Things have since been 'fixed'.
Cargo Cult.
I had the displeasure a couple of months ago of running into an 'Agile Specialist' who told me how great it was. The displeasure was telling him Agile is shit, he has no idea what he's doing, and he shouldn't be doing it, and all that training he took is bullshit because he's got no real understand of how development works. He seemed to think that a 6 week course trumped my 4 year engineering degree and almost 40 years of experience.
Understand I was polite the entire time, but I honestly just wanted to beat him to death with one of the bar stools. Thank god I don't drink like I used to, or I might just have done it. The only scam bigger than Agile in the software world today is that German software everyone buys for their company, which even though it costs a billion dollars, doesn't work. So you spend another billion on 'consultants' who constantly fix it - because it's so shitily designed it will never work (Germans suck at software - then again, they suck at hardware too) so it must always be fixed.
(I've been offered, and still get offered, to be one of those consultants, but I have too much self-respect).
My grandpa was 100% german. I have stories and some german idiosyncrasies. Balanced with my Irish side it is almost comical what i obsess about and what i dont.
I know you're talking about SAP but we worked for a liquor distributor that upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics for 20ish million dollars. AS400 worked better.
The fundamental proposition under SAP is that forcing the entire company to use one single piece of software for everything will unlock more efficiency from where individual systems talk to each other than will be lost by using a system for a task that it wasn't optimized for. I'm not sure it pans out for most implementations, but SAP sales contracts are a master class on making it expensive enough to change it out that the careers of everybody who approved it in the first place will be ruined if it is declared a failure. As a result the goalposts are moved enough to declare victory.
Whatever those salesman made wasn't enough. We should also throw them in jail for fraud. Mabye it's because I don't have a sales bone in my body but "We lie to them and they buy it" seems sleezy to me.
In my experience, the best day to be fast tracked to the director level is to botch an implementation and then come up with a solution to it. Many such cases.
I wish I could like this comment 70 million times, once for every dollar my state is wasting on this crap. OK, it's Vermont and Workday.
In my career I've seen a few implementations. All except for one amounted to, "how do we duplicate what we already have in the new system?" So why did they get the new system?
The exception, at a brokerage firm, was built internally and it was pretty good.
The best part about working for Germans is that they love to schedule their Audits for September and early October. This gets them a month or two of travel after the month of vacation. Then they get to coast until the holidays working on “the report.”
Meanwhile, us lazy schmucks over here are scrambling to fulfill document requests when half of the company is on vacation.
I'm not ashamed of admitting I've seen that look of Mr Singh's before. Perhaps a few hundred times when I was in India on company business. They warned me before not even try to drive, just take a cab when I need to go somewhere. Well, smarmy me immediately rented a Mahindra Bolero (imagine putting a G-Class through the Xerox machine at 80% scale; even the motor sounded like a MB prechamber diesel) and took to the roads of Maharastra. Years on, words still befall me; I understand that 95% of the country lives under the poverty limit, but this method of infrastructure maintenance should be rejected. If you can't upkeep a 2-lane tarmac road, then I'm sorry, it's back to macadam for you - the road surface you can work on with a rake and shovel. If there is a closed lane, most drivers just turn into your lane with this absolutely gormless expression in their faces. *that* expression is the one I saw in the accident video.
Again, I understand that according to _your_ religion you'll be coming back, but a) it's going to hurt all the way there and b) *I* am quite happy with this life I have. Maybe stick to hotel/bodega management instead.
People in America/Europe are trained to think that we have universal human values and I really ought to buy and read Dominion so I can properly reply how stupid a concept that is.
I recently learned the Assyrians (I think it was) would flense a person alive, stretch their skin over what was that person's bed, and rape their wife and kids on it and didn't find that to be outrageously objectionable behavior wise.
Maybe that one is a story to get across how bad they were and they were historically known for their brutality in general and much feared.
There's an assertion that only deeply uneducated people make, and it makes them easy to discern at a distance: the idea that there's some sort of "just being a good person" moral system that you can naturally intuit.
The people who say that are always sitting in a room surrounded by people who have been shaped by 2,000 years of Paul's letters to the disciples.
Travis Bickle, Paul Kersey, Walt Kowalski, ahem, Frank Castle: choose any war vet portrayed on TV and you'll see what all those cultural experiences do to a soul. Pacific theater (and Nam) vets saw the blind allegiance to one's country, endless stories of Allied soldiers counting the dead after battle and when they turn an Asian face-up, with the last breath he lets the lever ping off of the grenade. Nevermind the lost soldiers who kept fighting for 20 years after V-J day and only gave up their weapons when their old commander was pulled out of retirement.
I still hear new stories from Afghanistan vets, theirs complicated by the fact that the U.S. had partner forces there eg. locals that fought with Americans - not being much better than the Taliban, one particular story I read was the resistance leader having a boy-toy whom he regularly sodomized. The general second-classedness of women in Persian countries. (Insert Amendment XIX. joke.) Different strokes for different folks I guess. (you hit the ones who you love with an open fist)
Bezos almost single-handedly killed the mall by using mail-order convenience to appeal to the same mindset that sees people drive five minutes out of their way to save seven cents a gallon on $3.00-a-gallon gas.
I've said this here before, but it bears repeating: Many of the people who (rightly) railed on Walmart for killing small-town economies and mom-and-pop operators are oddly silent about Amazon doing the same thing, on a much larger scale. I can only assume it's because they never shopped at Walmart (I still refuse to, for what it did to Hearne, Texas, in the early 1990s) but get Amazon deliveries several times a week.
Amazon is the perfected form of Walmart, the Hellcat to Walmart's Wildcat. It industrializes human misery in a way that even prevents the sad remaining pleasures of human connection left to people who work together in a superstore.
I still think it’s cia funded for the perfect logistics system. As much as i hate them, it really is perfect. Now if theyd onky sell real goods and not fuck their suppliers and employees
Same. I will combine gas with a Costco run when possible, otherwise it's the nearest station to my house. May as well help keep them in business, they're 2 miles away.
If I had to put my own definition of the Lizard People, it's the modern American Left power class... i.e., they don't just brand progressivism, they have the power to force the implementation of progressive policy, all while - *and this is the important part* - diabolically fortifying their personal position to ensure they'll never face the progressive edicts they've mobilized...
Examples would be climate activists flying on private jets while pushing legislation to curtail oil production... White male CEO's who implement DEI hiring/promotion policies at their companies... essentially the entire Democratic Party who pushed Defund the Police initiatives from 2020-2024 while substantially increasing the funding for the Capitol Police force in DC...
There are no liberal or progressive policies that have positive outcomes, that’s why they don’t follow their own edicts. It would make their life worse, they know it, so they don’t do it.
As Glenn Reynolds said, “I’ll believe it’s a problem when the people who say it’s a problem start acting like it’s a problem.”
When the people who tell you the polar ice caps will melt and drown us all go out and buy $10 million beachfront mansions in Malibu, you can bet your paycheck on them being full of shit.
I personally knew a climate activist who not only advocated on behalf of electric cars but did not own a car, electric or otherwise, he rode a bicycle.
...and such an individual would not be the "Lizard People". I think virtually everyone here respects each individual's choice in lifestyle. Some people choose to minimize their carbon footprint, others choose to race cars on the weekend...
Notice I specifically highlighted "and this is the important part"... which is sort of what completes the point.
How was this non English speaker communicating with his trucking company? I think we know how. Time for visits to these companies to arrest the illegals working in their offices, too. Then arrest the employers who perpetrated this entire criminal enterprise.
I went to open up a bank account for our youngest yesterday. Since having our 3rd child, the bank has been completely overrun by Pakistanis. So now in my quaint little suburb, we have Indians and Pakistanis and we all know how much they like each other.
-I know WinTrust well! They had a great growth strategy (practice alchemy by buying up failed banks in FDIC auctions and spin some lumps of shit into a cohesive franchise over time) after the GFC.
-I worked the sale of the bank that previously owned their branch on Delaware Place (in the shadow of John Hancock); the seller had NOTHING going for them: breakeven (at best), father and son management team extracting $1MM+ annually to do nothing, still had TARP, and lots of other liabilities (i.e., TruPS). Well, they had ONE thing going for them: They owned their branch, which was on the books at ~$5MM and worth more than $30MM. It was an interesting deal. I led the Board meeting to formalize the sale (my boss was on vacation), since there was hardly anyone in the room who would vote against a deal (you have a business worth ~$0 and a building worth $30MM+; would you like to exchange that for ~$33MM of WTFC stock?)
-WinTrust once (quietly) banked most of the strip clubs in Chicagoland, unsure if they still do.
Wintrust had a really smart strategy opening small local banks in wealthy Chicago suburbs and then playing up the community bank aspect, then hiring nice employees with low turnover. I always got greeted by name and loved doing business with them. A very boutique experience.
I keep so little money in my personal and kids accounts it is just a hassle to change. All real money is in vanguard. Probably have 30k in the checking/savings account when it is high
I'll take that as admission that Americans are bad with geography. Nowhere else in the world do they mis-asssociate which country is in which continent.
I will not tolerate any dissing of the 912. A high-school crush drove an orange one back when Metallica was making music that actually mattered, Van Halen still had its only frontman who mattered, and air-cooled Porsches of that vintage were just cheap used cars. I will forever associate the 912 with her and will not tolerate anyone sullying so fine an automobile.
I'm with you on all the 912 stuff but the car that Adrian reviewed sounds like a fun ride IF it cost something like $80,000. When you get to half a mil you're in too precious to drive-look at me while I wank territory.
Id have a tough time justifying much more than the s4. I guess if dropping 500k didnt matter at all to me, maybe. But still seems like a waste of money. Theres some 100k cars I like. I could maybe see myself getting my dream amg wagon or rs6 but probably not in reality. What can i say, im cheap
"I actually ruined two sets of Continental ExtremeContacts"
gotta petition them to get a set of cup 2s or something becuase thats gotta be cheaper in the long run
"My top speed at Mid-Ohio is 156-157 but even the 600cc Supersports can knock on the door of 170 down the back straight, with the Stock 1000 and Superbikes doing another 10-15mph above that"
motorcycle downforce is still a strange thing to me becuase of all the leaning and whatnot
"The media outlets who breathlessly prattle on about Crazy Stuff The Prole Trash Actually Think are revealing more about themselves than about “Qanon”"
qanon was catnip for tragically unaware boomers. im shocked at its lifespan frankly
the numbers are wild except for the horsepower but thats all the little flat four can make (although a few people have produced some custom porsche 4cyl engines that are far more powerful but of course this one doesnt have the cool bits) and its really not that far from a hotrodded beetle engine and between the two im taking a restomodded beetle over this. at least that comes across as being more honest in your desires. i have a friend that kinda wants a 912 and im convincing him the 308 he is also interested in is a better idea.
"I feel compelled to point out that it’s possible to get this level of performance for less money. Like a K-swap Honda Fit, or a Fox Mustang with $800 worth of spray on it."
i still want to see what a 1500lb porsche can do even with that power because thats almost half the weight of a fox (and hundreds of pounds lighter than the fit despite being down a few dozen hp or so).
"Legend has it that not even William Calley looked as mellow after killing innocent people as Harjinder Singh did when a minivan struck his trailer during an illegal freeway U-turn."
and people say america isnt influenced by canada. how are you enjoying your taste of bramptons finest? this is only getting worse as more and more of them filter out onto the roads with zero knowledge of how to operate motor vehicles safely. the solution is to never hire them but the schools and companies they work for get shut down and just pop back up under other names. its absolutely maddening. eventually people will start dealing with companies based on what the people look and sound like becuase that might be the only way to make sure somebody isnt killed on the road delivering their packages. my thoughts go out to the family and all those affected.
A few minor issues at 131K but in general I'm happy. Still on the first clutch, only had to do the brakes once. After the recent discussion of low viscosity oils I switched to 5W-20 on the last oil change.
Sir, I'll have you know that even I, the least of commenters here, graduated SUMMER-COME-LOUDER with several advanced degrease from one of America's TOP PRESTIGE INSTITUTIONS the venerable and well-regarted DeVry University!
We don't have no time for this high-falutin' grammarlarian noncents.
We’re forgetting about the mother of all “aaS” scams (behave, children) and maybe the one that harms the most people annually- property tax. Whether the bank holds the title or you do, try to stop paying your annual subscription to NOT being a victim of state sponsored violence and see what happens after a few consecutive ones.
RE: p-car disease, I’ve harped on this before but part of the disease entails an active flaunting of the concept of “relative value”. Who CARES that you could buy a like new V10 R8 plus a Q5 for the wife for the cost of one hand rubbed jerkoff spec GTPEEPEE - you wouldn’t get it, it’s a Porsche thing. If you’re concerned with things like value for your money, you’re a poor who has no business rubbing your grimy little peasant hands on the shield.
also, the punitive sales tax PLUS luxury tax on new cars means the truck/SUV i am eyeing up will be used. i bought a brand new car in 2023 and i am unsure i will ever do so again because they make it incredibly expensive for no reason here.
same boat. ill force my kids to share bedrooms. i hate the new idea that every human in the house needs 1,000 sq ft of air conditioned space. also provides some motivation for them to get out when the time comes - i'd never kick them out, they can stay as long as they like, but you're not living in a palatial estate - its your childhood home and bedroom.
Our kids will share rooms even if we upgrade. Not a lot of 5 bedroom houses these days. I did promise the wife we'd upgrade eventually. I'd like to keep the house we currently have. Maybe one of my kids will want it but I dread of being a "landlord"
Grade school is cheap. If my girls go to private high school, the years they will all be there is 45k in todays dollars. Those numbers make me feel ill. If I lived in Chicago, those numbers would be triple, if not more.
"They are literal human sacrifices on the altar of Cheap Labor, the god to whom we have sacrificed more than the Aztecs could ever dream. There’s no humanitarian justification here."
Never forget that "SuperFreakanomics" or whatever they call themselves decided to say part of the crime falling in the 90s had to do with ABORTION of all things.
Yeah, that's it. Let's just kill more babies and we will all have less crime. Oh and scientists. And teachers. And hot moms. Come to think of it we'd have less of everything.
This argument also reminds me how much I loath this "well let's make excuses for why tariffs aren't killing the economy because it totally will in the future". Well, it's the future and the economy hasn't died yet. In fact, it sure seems like it won't die due to tariffs.
The lizard adjacent class will ALWAYS sacrifice something they don't have for their cause. Whether that's children or the last remaining paycheck of the working poor. They will completely raise that knife to get the clout even if it isn't intentionally for bad reasons. We used to be a country that could recognize carpet baggers a lot easier.
BLACK babies. Pre crime instead of just locking criminals up. At this point, we should execute felons. If you cant be reformed by less than a year in prison, what's the point?
We should always be careful about letting the State kill people.
Because the State doesn't benefit when murderers and rapists are executed. It *wants* those people to exist, because it justifies their power. What the State really wants is to execute dissidents.
Amen! Think of all the court cases you know of where guilty have walked free (if even charged) or cases where someone got released after serving years in prison following a wrongful conviction.
""Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends"
I'm mostly against capital punishment for this reason. But I'm for it in fantasyland. Just wait until Canada starts euthanizing angsty pubescent teenagers
The key concept of "execution" is that it's a LEGITIMATE killing, like putting a murderer to death. Since killing someone for a political offense is by definition illegitimate, it cannot be an execution.
The point is so some liberal judge with the help of the innocence project will let them out on a bullshit "technicality" when people are too old to remember facts for them to go terrorize society again. Wayne on x.com had a great rant about this back when i was on x.com
Eerie parallel (and by this I mean "easily foreseeable") between this latest truck driver incident and the license-for-bribes crash that sent former Illinois governor George Ryan to prison. In that crash, part of the truck's taillight assembly fell off which then punctured the gas tank of a trailing minivan, causing it to catch fire, severely injuring the driver and his wife and killing their six children. Apparently the taillight assembly was dangling long enough that several passing motorists noticed and tried to signal the driver. Unfortunately the driver did not speak English and did not comprehend their warnings.
This particular incident was the impetus for the feds investigation into George Ryan’s administration at the IL Secretary of State. My recollection is that the feds got really interested when they learned that the IL driver didn’t speak English and wondered how on earth he got a CDL.
I guess I'm Nobody because I've always liked/wanted 912s since I became aware of them as a young teenager back in the 80s. I like the simplicity of their power plants and always thought they'd be fun to drive. But then again, I like pre-'68 Bugs too. 912 pricing though in the past few decades has all but assured me that I'll never own one.
*Cracks knuckles*
“The lizard people, in a nutshell, are people whose wealth and/or circumstances have led to a real and serious distance in perception and behavior from normal Americans.”
This would appear to rather firmly establish that I am assuredly NOT a Lizard Person - or a Lizard Person Cargo Cult(ur)ist, for that matter - since I spent the first half of my life (to date) in Hooverville and keep in close contact with many people I have known for over 30 years: Fellow humble, hardscrabble hillbillies not unlike myself in origin.
“Our friend Sherman, who repeatedly fumbles through a sort of “Australopithecus Portrays Socrates” commenting routine in which he tries to mis-associate Powerball winners, YouTube clowns, incel inheritors, car-show operators, and the like with the concept of Lizard People, has a bit of Cargo Culture about him. His endless rants about how building anything in America amounts to “make-work projects” and “welfare by other means” are, I think, vaguely analogous to the harmless butterflies who attempt to emulate the poisonous monarch butterfly and thus avoid consumption by real predators. He’s acquired a Plato’s Cave version of these sociopathic attitudes from consuming the media made by other Lizard Cargo Culturists, and claims them as his own because he believes they confer status upon him.”
My rants about “make work” and “welfare by other means” and - yes - DEI for laborers is not constrained to manufacturing work. It applies to *all* “work” (by which I mean trading time for a paycheck, in this sense), since I strive to be consistent in the application of my beliefs.
Here’s a recent example:
-Last week, I bumped into a guy that I worked for earlier in my career; we share an alma mater, and he hired me a long time ago.
-He is now a group head at another investment bank, which means he has significant P&L responsibility (and oversight). As with any investment bank, his biggest expense is personnel costs.
-I asked him if that bank was using Rogo - an AI “agent” targeted toward investment banking - or any other similar tools.
-Yes, they are using them, but it hasn’t materially cut down on junior hires (yet); the market cycle still controls hiring and firing of execution bankers. The bank for which he works was burned badly during the post-COVID boom because they hired too many juniors, which led to them laying off 40% of their workforce when rates rose and deal volume slackened. The bank is a private partnership, so the partners have to eat first.
-He believes that, historically, the *only* reason that the junior grunt work was performed by highly paid Americans (or foreigners on sponsored visas) sitting in cubicles in expensive American office buildings was because the next generation of senior bankers learn those skills on the job, primarily through observation and indirect exposure to client discussions; you could outsource the work to India, but that kills the pipeline of people who will transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly and begin generating revenue after ~10 years of execution and learning. Which is why no investment banks materially outsource work done by people who could conceivably become revenue generators in the future. They do outsource middle- and back-office work.
-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”
I agree with him: No one is owed any sort of job, any sort of paycheck.
Pinning this because I appreciate the response, as well as the breadth and depth of the thoughts within.
What interests me is the following:
'-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”'
One anecdote does not a sea of data make, but I can't help but contrast this with the obsession I've seen people display about other even vaguely meaningful businesses, careers, and products they've made.
Pilots will cry real tears on their final flight with an airline. When he was alive, Kalamazoo luthier Aaron Cowles would always stop what he was doing to look at any old guitar he'd helped make. Jimmy Page has spent thirty years obsessively remastering and reworking the music he made fifty years ago.
This fellow not only isn't sentimental about the future of his firm, he'd willingly destroy it for three years' worth of enhanced payouts.
Because he fully and completely understands that nothing he's ever done has led to anything good or worthwhile. The fry cook at McDonald's can say he's fed thousands of people, but this fellow has done nothing other than enrich himself by wetting his proverbial beak.
The only payoff was what he got paid. Therefore anything that increases that is worthwhile.
When you lampoon me for describing certain kinds of work as "GAY or UNMANLY or FAKE" or whatever... this is what I have in mind. Forty years of parasitic behavior. No actual good done for anyone. And memorable for nothing but the size of his paycheck.
You sound like his ex-wife. They were forced to spend more time together during COVID, which led to her to pursue divorce.
No one has ever cried on their last day of investment banking, unless they were tears of anguish (got fired unexpectedly with no money to walk away) or tears of jubilation (quit the millisecond their bonus hit their bank account).
This is the difference between money changers and people who produce something.
We do “produce” - or, really, “create” - something:
Value.
As much as I'm MORE in line with your beliefs on the general economy, this is where you lose me.
Hard disagree, at least on the meaning and the depth of said ‘value’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE
The company I work for is owned by PE. The owners don’t give a damn about the future, they only care about exiting in 5 years at a profit. I am relatively young with a 20 year work life remaining (mostly due to not wanting to pay insurance out of pocket). These clowns know nothing about our business, spend small fortunes on CRM and data analytics tools, and think we are so stupid that we won’t notice they are screwing us for the long term. When I meet people who work in PE I know exactly what I am dealing with.
I don’t work in Private Equity, and I have never sold a company to PE, because PE firms - with rare exceptions - do not buy banks, because they would be forced to become (heavily regulated) bank holding companies in exchange, and that is the last thing they want to do.
2 of our clients are being bought out this year. I should go into their business. I didnt sign a do not compete. They make what i make look like peanuts
"I don’t give a shit about training the next generation"
the real american dream is entirely self serving and indifferent or hostile to anyone who might get in the way right. why bother continuing the method that allowed the firm to effectively operate anyway
fuck that guy
That attitude explains a lot of (all of?) why Things Are Like This Now
To clarify: He was like that when I worked for him. There’s no “teaching” or “mentoring,” only observation.
so you're saying he's a lousy manager.
the _only_ role of a manager is to help his / her team succeed. before you say "no, the role of a manager is to help the organization succeed," the former leads to the latter.
His job is to generate revenue himself and also hire other senior bankers who will generate lots of revenue. And then it’s to determine how much each and every person on the team gets paid at year end (within some goal posts - he can underpay someone who deserved more so that he can overpay someone else that he wants to keep, etc.)
The job of those who work under him is to execute his deals and anticipate his needs. If they do those things, they will learn quite a lot.
A rising tide lifts all boats. 🤔
The boomer boats don’t do that.
Early boomers even pulled up the ladders on late boomers like me. I’m technically a boomer by birth year, but by attitude I have nothing in common with them.
Likewise x2
There was an attempt to call those born in the early 60s something like Gen Jones because some Boomers are really not.
Likewise.
I think it's called "pulling the ladder up after you"
The #1 Boomer pastime, even more than pickleball!
Inheriting from their “greatest generation” parents and then spending it to 0 on themselves.
But they’re on a fixed income!
I wonder how many here live on as little as I do and you don't hear me complaining .
-Nate
Zoe dig nit to 38 trillion of debt and counting. Not just them but their spawn too
Actually it's the following generation now and has been for a while but don't let me interrupt your bullshit rant =8-) .
-Nate
No, the number one pastime was raising entitled snots, then complaining about them when they entered the workplace.
I say it was their pastime, because they didn't really make child rearing their vocation -- it was sort of a spare-time thing.
For _you_ maybe, I took the raising up of my son very seriously indeed, he's never had unemployment, food stamps etc.
-Nate
Not for me, Nate -- but then I was always the throwback. Didn't go to college. Married young, had kids early (3 by my 27th BD). Wife never worked. Learned a trade. Started a business. Built a nice life in the town where I grew up. Raised God-fearing kids (2 out of 3 anyhow) who are all productive members of society raising their own kids.
My kids are all laying waste to their peers by every metric. They have great jobs, several kids of their own (each).
I was talkin' 'bout mmmmy geeenneeration. Generally, Boomers raised entitled snots in their spare time.
Or, telling my generation a college degree was the ticket to a good life.
Yeah, so about that--
I graduated HS in 1981, having underachieved spectacularly and taken every shop class offered in a town and a time where/when shop classes were liberally offered to those students not being tracked into engineering, accounting, or nursing (where 85% of my classmates ended up). The idea of any of them as a vocation gave me hives.
Having been born into the family of some seriously smart people, my grasp far exceeded my reach. I was content to spend my 4 years at THS sitting on the hood of my Firebird and eating Dolly Madison "Donettes" during "Engine Testing" or some such, smirking at the brown-nosers sweating out classes to prep them to be worker bees in the corporate hive.
I took the required math (one year), the required science (two years), and English (3 years). The rest of my time was spent "finding my own" way in the parlance of the day, which involved a good deal of hood sitting and Donette eating. And lifting weights. And working on my Firechicken.
I learned to write in English 2, when Mrs. Evans basically dared me to apply myself. I rearranged my schedule to get her for English 3 and become the editor of the student newspaper, a position I used to mock the administration in thinly veiled terms.
And then it was over. I graduated into 20% inflation and >10% unemployment. My dad was a plumbing contractor (the smartest man in a family of college profs and medical Drs.), wildly successful in 1979 and near bankruptcy in 1981. I kept my HS job changing oil at the Mobil station for $4/hr. I didn't WANT to go to college because I didn't want to be an accountant or engineer, and didn't want to work for dad because I was a snot-nosed punk.
Good thing too, because there was zero money for me, even with a state scholarship (earned for testing well on my ACT). I wanted (in order) to:
1) stop striking out with pretty girls
2) crew for Big Daddy Don Garlits
3) play bass for a righteous rock band
I had no clue how to accomplish any of these goals.
Fast forward 44 years, and I've somehow found success owning and operating a union supermarket refrigeration contracting business, have been married for 40 years to BY FAR the prettiest girl who would ever have had me, and somehow fathered and raised 3 successful kids. I've got the cars I want, live in a home I built and own several others. I could retire tomorrow, but I don't want to -- I genuinely like what I do, and always have. The income is nice too.
The point? I'm not your guy. College was never for me, and I regret nothing. My generation sold your generation a bill of goods. There are a lot of roads to success. You do you -- nothing is stopping you.
Considering those who signed my paychecks were typically all college / university graduates, why not ? .
-Nate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niBhO3qGeGE
TV: "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?"
Homer, after Maggie wandered off: "I told you already, NO!"
My boomer parents play 3x a week at least. It is fun and less harsh on the body than tennis.
Boomer here (barely- 1963).
My peer group has embraced this "sport" like they embrace everything else -- with a mania bordering on obsession. It will last until "The Next Big Thing" comes along to steal their (our?) attention. This is the generation, remember, that busted my dad's generation for playing shuffleboard bocce ball as they aged.
... and while It may be less harsh than tennis, I know of nobody who plays >3x/wk who hasn't torn a meniscus, ACL, or hamstring at least once.
If they're as serious about pickleball as they sound, your parents are going to end up on somebody's table -- guaranteed.
Do you want to tell them?
Wait, what about calling young people lazy and ungrateful?
And, yelling at clouds ! . =8-) .
-Nate
I was in Arizona a few years ago and some youngsters referred to the local pickleball courts as “the old people’s cages!”
The wisdom of youth!
We have a lot of middle aged people
Like me playing too. I dont play much but i do like it. My back cant handle tennis anymore
I know that jerk is technically an American, but he needs to be deported.
Not all who hold United States citizenship are American.
"The real American dream is entirely self serving....."? Amigo, you are divorced from reality!!
i was being a smartass to make a point
im aware the american dream is literally not that
We have already determined that you are in fact, not a hillbilly. I’m unsure why you keep that charade up since hillbillies don’t go to W&L, brag about finance contacts and work in investment banks. Additionally, lizard cargo shorts people are the exact type of person who would claim some background to justify their behavior as not being that. I wasn’t expecting a Sherman McCoy stray, but here we are.
I am *actually* a hillbilly! I have another hillbilly friend (from comes from coal mining stock in Eastern Kentucky) who is now a lawyer at The Heritage Foundation. He has transcended his humble origins and done well for himself.
Unlike, say, JD Vance: He grew up in flat-as-a-board Middletown, Ohio, appropriated my culture, and used that appropriation to (metaphorically) fellate Peter Thiel.
Having a poor friend who makes good does not make you a hillbilly. I went to high school in the Bronx, with friends from the hood, I’m in no way shape from the hood.
I didn’t say he grew up poor.
I said he grew up in a coal mining family in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky.
I grew up in a copper mining family in far Northern Georgia; the area in which my maternal grandfather grew up is between “Devil’s Den” and “Hell’s Holler,” and it remains an exceedingly unpleasant location.
Your father is a dentist.
Do you know how hard it is to make a living as a dentist in an area where people do not GO to the dentist? 😉
A dentist with a multi-million dollar wooden boat collection, IIRC.
By that standard I guess I grew up in a junk dealing family because my maternal grandfather was a ragman, notwithstanding the fact that my father was a veterinarian.
Maybe recycling scrap is in my blood. With the amount of cardboard boxes that people get due to online sales, I've looked into leasing a cardboard compactor to set up at my grandkids' school. The idea being that families would drop off their scrap boxes at the school, the custodian or some staff member would run the compactor, and I'd split the proceeds with the school. The problem was getting the school to buy in to the idea.
Considering how easy it is to recycle cardboard, it's a shame how much gets thrown away.
My dad was a steel worker and union man. All my uncles were, too. I hung out in steel worker neighborhoods and went to the bars and bowling alleys.
I am not a steel worker or union man. While I have a slight understanding of the life my dad lived, I am so far removed from it, at my dad’s insistence, that I was but a mere observer to the life he lived. I did not come close to truly experiencing it. Just because I was there for part of it means next to nothing.
It literally grows on trees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yin_(entrepreneur)
I guess I can’t add anything the other commentators have stated, but if your dad is truly a dentist, then you come from educated and wealthy stock in which you probably grew up without an accent. Adjacency does not mean reality. I’m sure you play up that hillbilly bs in board rooms right? Didn’t think so.
I don’t think I have an accent; people in Chicago thought I had an incredibly thick “Southern” (not “Appalachian”) accent.
I am happy to discuss my humble beginnings - when appropriate - in professional context. I met a guy earlier this year who grew up in the “Appalachian” portion of Nova Scotia before attending Middlebury, where I went to summer school. We had quite a lot in common, as outsiders from the middle of nowhere Appalachia who ended up on Wall Street.
I'm curious Sherman; I was born in a small 8 room hospital in Spencer, WV. I invoiced at $179.66 where my Father put $100 down and financed the rest. By the blessing of my parents and the Ford Motor Company I was moved to Akron at 5 months old and have lived in NE Ohio for most of the remainder of my life with frequent stays back in WV, even tomorrow night I plan on sleeping in the room my Mother was born in.
Hillbilly or not?
My brother, born in Akron 5 1/2 years following me in a proper hospital with a much larger invoice raised in the exact same environment.
Hillbilly or not?
PS. Every branch of my ancestry, both legitimate and not, settled in what is now WV in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
I am gratified that you consider me the arbiter of “hillbilly.”
I think if you spend your formative years in Appalachia, i.e., attending school in Appalachia would be the easiest way, then you qualify. Bryce is a hillbilly, in my definition.
I can't make fun of him because he's not here but I'm going to anyways. Bryce is a hillbilly because he dates strippers.
Wait, jack is also a hillbilly. A reformed hillbilly
Is dating a stripper better or worse than a Hooters waitress?
Since the capital of West Virginia is Akron, Ohio, yes to both.
That is hilarious, lol.
It's a well known saying. Three of my great aunts came to Akron to work in the rubber factories and found husbands also from WV. One distant female cousin I found worked in the office where they were building Corsairs and then for Leo Mehl. I wish I had met her. A prominent history of the rubber industry devoted a entire chapter on the employees from WV that began with a description of the very town I was born in.
Indeed. Sherm is unaware of the cultural influence of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky on Akron and other industrial towns in Ohio.
You wear hillbilly when it suits you, like Leatherface wore people’s faces
I have never claimed to be otherwise (or bristled at the negative connotations the term might entail).
Would you consider the billionaire great grandson of some coal mining company founder to be a hillbilly if he was raised in Appalachia?
I'd say that most people outside of the region consider the term to connote a certain socio-economic standing more than mere geographical origins.
Yes, if the hypothetical descendant of the billionaire forebear grew up in Appalachia and interacted with other Appalachian Americans on a daily basis (school, etc.); it’s a cultural thing that remains bounded by geography, even today.
Are you really so dense as to not understand that the reason he(Vance) and others ever talk about the "hillbilly" thing has everything to do with how uneducated the coasts and places of "culture" are now?
I grew up in the heart of the Ozarks and graduated with a prestigious degree for what I wanted to do. I can tell you right now that I was ALWAYS branded a straight up hillbilly outsider by the college elitists regardless of what my intellectual ability was. Hillbilly means many things to many people and is often slang for other things like trailer park people(as it is in OHIO).
And no, you are not a lizard person. It's super clear when you type that you aren't. But, as Jack says, you're often arguing as a lizard person adjacent. I often hate your arguments but I do like that you are very thorough in your explanations for things. My main issue is always that you are so far away from a normal person now (my perception) that you cannot see the reality for the majority of us hobbits living in middle earth. We just want to live in our holes and be left alone to raise our kids.
-Some people use “redneck” or “hick” or “hillbilly” interchangeably. I would be puzzled if someone called me a “redneck” or a “hick,” since I am demonstrably neither. It also amuses me when a smartypants refers to people, e.g., “hicks” as “hillbillies.”
-I am not so far away “normal” people. I have plenty of life experience interacting with them, and bear in mind that most of the clients we served as investment bankers operated rural community banks that served “normal” people.
-And now some humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE
While this is mostly true about elitist people on the east coast, it doesn’t mean that that person thinks of himself as a hillbilly. In fact, one who does, tries to shed that label faster than anything. It’s utilized to sell sob stories or an insincere & shallow way of saying “I’m a normal person” when in fact, one has done nothing to keep it that way.
Wahoo! I’m from the hood. I got the n-word pass from Sherman!
youre basically 50 cent now
“King of corn and porn from way back in the holler.”
https://youtu.be/jRiSl8G077g?si=OFwUZxa2kH__Adlu
There are a lot of succesful people here at acf. Some financiall, i suspect even more financially than sherman, and a lot socially and family. Id guess, but i havent taken a survey, is the overall opinion is “clown” not flaneur or hillbilly
Peak boomer attitude. Dear God. When you end up at the guillotine or the gallows dont wonder “why me?”
At least the eventual hand behind the pillow will be a diverse one; no one will accuse him of racism.
Your beliefs are consistent; I do appreciate that about you, as well as the fact that you are disagreeable, and that you dgaf about other people think of you. But what you wrote reads as a confirmation of Jack’s response.
Came here for this comment, and I was not disappointed. Quelle surprise, a head parasite cares nothing about the next generation of parasites. On the upside, less parasites.
No one is 'owed' a job. But we as a society should strive to ensure the next generation is left with more opportunities to have one, not less.
The “opportunity” of doing that job is what you learn, what you take out of it yourself.
It doesn’t come pre-packaged, but anyone who does the job for any length of time will earn that reward, which lasts a lifetime.
'I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.'
This, is why you fail.
Also, that man is the stupidest person in every room if he thinks he can replace everyone with AI. I’m assuming an Ivy League MBA which just means he only knows how to torpedo, not build.
He said he WOULD do so if he could.
No MBA.
He has been covetously eyeing high-spec, PTS 911 GTS Targas (used since the 992.2 Targa will be hybrid and not offer a manual). As if the hivemind here needed another reason to hate his ilk!
Well he should drive a modern targa with the top down. The effect is as if a leaf blower is pointed at each ear above 50 mph. He'll change his mind
Not sure what the Porsche part has to do with anything, but ok.
Only that Jack HATES the sort of person who would covet a modern Porsche 911.
Is on reddit
Is in therapy
Own a porsche
Is an incel
Lizard behavior
All I gleaned from this is that Lizard Cargo Culturists don't have any self-awareness.
I was sitting at a wedding reception nearly a year ago. After a few drinks, I found myself - unfortunately - in libation lubricated conversation with a friend’s wife; she does not like me, has never liked me, and almost certainly will never like me.
She said: “You know, I’ve figured something out about you. I used to think you just had no self awareness, but that’s not true. You do have self awareness, you just don’t give a shit what people think about you.”
She’s right.
Lol. CLEARLY you do.
Please tell you stood up during the ceremony, pointed at the bride and in a horrified voice cc uttered, "Oh my God, she's wearing a WHITE dress!"
I had no problem with the bride
Why do you think you're expending so much effort justifying your parasitic existence here if you believe that you don't care what people think about you? You're a void of self-awareness raised to an exponential power. I'm sorry for pointing it out, since Jack asks us not to insult one another, but it would be nice if you learned something about yourself before you learn what accountability means.
The attitude of "no one is owed a paycheck" is in my opinion, the justification used to eliminate job security over the past three generations. It's the same callous mindset that holds that a paycheck is all the thanks an employee has any right to expect, and the one uttered by those business managers who can't understand why good personnel are so hard to find.
I was motivated to pursue a career in banking for the paycheck, obviously.
If asked “are you motivated by money” in a job interview - even a Wall Street job interview - it’s smart to prevaricate a bit and talk about “opportunities” and “learning” and “exposure” and so on. So that’s naturally what everyone does, particularly undifferentiated college seniors with no skills (yet).
In retrospect, I got far more than just a paycheck out of my ~12 years in the trenches; I walked out with substantial domain knowledge and relationships to draw upon in the future. That was the true takeaway, as I have written many times.
Ladder pulling.
If someone fucks up my life enough I can't feed my kids, I'm going to take my extensive gun collection and fuck theirs up. You would think the lizard people would have learned something from luigi even if he didn't target the right person.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlUg8oqyU8M
Civil society is a mirage or and understanding
To "owe" means to have an obligation. The employer has no obligation but he, presumably, is not stupid and understands meritorious performance on his (the firm's) behalf when he sees it, thus the paycheck and assurance, no guarantee, that the paycheck will continue to be provided. That is know as quid pro quo.
I'd argue that when companies try to do something *other* than provide a paycheck, it can be bad. I mean, this is part of what DEI was about. Let's make work culture better through diversification. Let's "look good" instead of actually making money. Yes, making money. Usually that means making the best darn product or offering the best darn services. To achieve that, it means hiring the best darn people.
It's also an easy argument that job security can be just as bad. Look at where we are with tenure professors and teachers. Even in the private sector, I've seen companies crumble because so many middle managers had job security.
I'd argue that the social employee-employer has in fact become too complicated. At the same time, the customer-company contract has as well, and I'm not sure which came first.
Sir, this sounds a great deal like what you believe:
"They believe, or pretend to believe, in a strict meritocracy that justifies their wealth and power. Consequently, they also believe that anyone who is poor or downtrodden deserves to be so"
cf
"-He said: “If it were up to me, I would fire everyone on my team and replace them with AI in a heartbeat, since I’ll be retired in three years - I don’t give a shit about training the next generation.”
I agree with him: No one is owed any sort of job, any sort of paycheck."
I do believe in meritocracy; I “own” my personal outcomes, good and bad.
I also believe that the poor and downtrodden have capacity for self-improvement and reinvention.
A simple "yes" would suffice as the two ideas of self-capacity for improvement and reinvention do not exclude the former.
There are issues around this belief primarily pertaining to individual ability and networks where leaving everyone to their own devices is not so much empowering the best it is sewing the seeds for anarchy.
I think people are recoiling to this sort of sociopathic relationship toward their fellows and subsequent generations for easy to understand reasons. An analogy to the experience is the biological phenomenon of cancer. Cancer is, ostensibly, a part of the body and shares the same DNA and cannot live apart from the body. However, people with cancer lose weight even if they eat more and more because it is the cancer receiving that energy and not the body proper. As the tumescent growth burgeons the body proper becomes increasingly ill and feeble. In your world, you are awash in possibilities and money, while an outsider looking in sees you proud to enable the sexual exploitation of the young and old, men and women alike, all to make money off their backs. Taking the energy of the body for your own good to the body's detriment. In your banker friend's world he give no fucks for the people of his actual corporate body (corporations naturally being composed of people) and only cares insofar as he gets remuneration. Ostensibly you and he share the same rough background and raising as Americans as the rest of us, but in reality it looks a lot like you're interested in killing the host and feeding while you can. I'm fairly certain Sir Morris Leyland sees the importation of labor, who will form nepotistic networks and lock out people who are better qualified, as one and the same. You might say he should have started his own business/built better contacts/etc but those things are also no guarantees of success.
We've touched on this before that stuff like fractional banking and other financial techne can be put to the good, we do seem to have big disagreements on both the reality of the "value stream" in the highly financialized world, and the external effects that it carries. I think banking and markets should work to serve the nation and not the reverse, which seems to be more what you think.
Excellent, thoughtful response; the best among many I have received today.
I don’t think that banking and markets, etc. SHOULD serve the nation (they often do, of course) or SHOULD NOT be served by the nation (which also happens sometimes). I don’t think we need any central planning.
If someone walks up to you on the street and shoots you in the head it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at you owning your outcomes.
"Owed" is the operative word here and you, sir, are 110% correct!!
Geez, Sherman, I don’t know whether a career in banking made your ex-boss that way or whether he was already like that (and therefore went into banking). Either way, aside from the financial rewards, I doubt he’s led an enviable life. Not by me, anyway.
Not only did Jack Baruth steal the show at MotoAmerica, Baggers competition is stealing the show for MotoGP next year with their official support class having a new name THE HARLEY-DAVIDSON BAGGER WORLD CUP*
*GET BENT INDIAN, I guess, even though their machines are clearly superior
This new premiere class, destined to replace all motorcycle competition at all levels; make women wet and men hard; is coming next year! https://www.motogp.com/en/news/2025/08/15/harley-davidson-bagger-world-cup/756437 The EUROSTANKS will finally know TRUE POWER and RACECRAFT as roaring American V-Twins finally put hair on their Eurochests.
Ahem.
Superbike competition at Mid-Ohio was good, actually, with Bobby Fong once again taking a win in race one but without the obscene gap that he had at VIR. In Race 1 Josh Herrin was a huge pussy about the oil dry on the track and, after riding over it, blew a turn and made a fuss before getting on with the race and finishing 7th. Cameron Beaubier kept Fong honest until the last lap where he blew turn 6 (where the oil dry was) and finished down in sixth. This left Sean Dylan Kelly on a GSXR1000 to secure second place while he fended off JD Beach and Hayden Gillum. Honda, on a Stock 1000 bike of all machines, was the third place podium with JD Beach and not Hayden Gillum standing on the step.
Race 2 had Herrin and Fong mixing it up into turn 6 (?) and contact of Herrin's front with Fong's rear sent them both off track. Herrin dumped his bike by the tire wall and then had a freak collision, which may have left him with a leg injury (unclear, couldn't find a press release) with another rider that he had already passed late in the race. Fong would perform an excellent recovery ride and claim the bronze, minimizing points damage and keeping him first in the championship. Cameron Beaubier took first place after Fong and Herrin were removed from the battle and Jake Gagne was back on the podium in second, though almost 4s adrift of Cam.
Supersport continues to be the fight between ex-superbike riders Scholtz, Jacobsen, and Petersen with the young Blake Davis being the least experienced rider giving them the most trouble.
King of the Baggers remains scrappy with a lot of crashes, mechanicals, and aggression compared with the other MotoA classes. Gillum wins race 1, Herfoss a (very) close second, and Kyle Wyman a distant third. Race 2 Herfoss and Gillum went at it again with Herfoss in the lead for much of the race. Gillum attempted last lap dive bomb into turn 6 and went wide off track which dumped him far back in the field. Herfoss takes race 2, Wyman far behind in second, and Tyler O'Hara, who has not been a force at all this season, finishes on the podium for third.
MotoGP at the Red Bull Ring!
Marco Bezzecchi puts the Aprilia on pole position with Alex Marquez a tenth of a second down for 2nd. Bagnaia, who has won repeatedly at the Red Bull Ring, qualifies in third. Marc Marquez missed pole position due to crashing out on a hot lap and has to start from the second row of the grid in fourth.
In the sprint Marc Marquez simply dominates again, jumping from 4th to second by turn one to follow his brother in second place. He would quietly sit behind Alex for half distance before passing him and putting on two tenths a lap for which Alex had no answer. Bez fell prey to Pedro Acosta, back on the podium, and a feather in KTM's cap at their home round. Where was Bagniaia? After horrendous wheelspin off the start he decided to retire after 3/4 race distance with complaints of no grip.
In the full length race the lead pack was 5 with Bez making a better start, Bagnaia behind him, then Marc, Alex, and Pedro. Bagnaia and Marc would go toe to toe for a short while before Marc passed on lap two to chase down Bez. Alex Marquez was looking good, but had a long lap penalty which put him down pack and from there he made no recovery. Bagnaia, having lost second to Marc, would hold on for much of the race until Acosta made it past him, whereupon he was quickly passed by Fermin Aldeguer who put on an amazing late show. Bagnaia faded down the field to 8th. Aldeguer, meanwhile, had .5s-1s of pace on Bez and Marc until Marquez responded to keep him at bay by a second. Bez had nothing for the rookie, however, and lost out to Fermin finishing two seconds down.
Baganaia almost looks sporting.
Jorge Martin did nothing of particular note except crash out of the race.
MotoGP is at a new venue where the initial turns after the start are quite tight and saw quite a lot of contact in WSBK superbike race 1.
The YouTube algorithm has had motogp show up in my feed and i think im going to be hooked. Injust need to pick a driver to hate. These guys are insane. They need to do a drive to survive for this
Your first PARAGRAPH is a sentence fragment. Do you ever re-read what you have written or do you even care?
Here at ACF, you're free to make fun of me or any other public official, but we do require civility to each other. This fellow does a complete race report once a week, for free, so every one else can read it. We shan't require he be a prose stylist.
You do let us jaw at eachother a bit. Well, at least a couple of us as long as we dont go too far
Some commenters are, as Omar said in "the wire", in the game. Others aren't, and take criticism unhappily. I want to protect the latter.
I appreciate the unheavy handidness for those of us who willingly go at it
I don't care, and I am thrilled that you took the time to complain over the opening which was painstakingly crafted to maximize enjoyment.
"erm ackshully"
bro shut up
I dont think jack has ever banned someone before. Fuck off
silentsod's first paragraph consists of two complete sentences ("Baggers competition is stealing the show" and "Jack Baruth did steal the show at MotoAmerica") with a few prepositional phrases thrown in.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right.
Yes, it's a "comma splice," probably from forgetting the conjunction ("but").
Oh God, “Schoolhouse Rock” just started in my head: “Conjuction Junction! (What’s Your Function?)”
Must! Purge! From! Brain!
Before I look it up on YouTube and start it on continuous repeat! 😂😂
Some of us simply don't "get' proper english......
-Nate
Should be a comma between “written” and “or” please, thanks very much.
GOT EEM!
I think we need a reality show (stay with me here) in which we pay for leftist Americans to travel to foreign countries and do the things there that they think illegals should be allowed to do here in the USA. It would be fun to watch what happens when they are arrested and imprisoned for things that millions of illegals get away with here every day. I’ll add driving semi-trucks to my list of challenges.
I always laugh when some idiot american goes to a foreign country with weed. "It's just weed"
They take that shit seriously. We should too. What a mistake legalizing it was. I don't personally care if our resident harmonica icon partakes but it's pretty obvious the proles can't handle it.
Every weed store acts as the Batman sign for degenerates.
The amount of people who are high 24/7 amazes me.
One of my greatest disappointments of the COVID lockdowns was realizing how many of my neighbors had no other hobbies other than smoking the stuff.
Oh, I GOTTA use that!!!
Time to return to how things were in Americas Golden Age -- that's right every guy hammered drunk after work and their stay at home wife on benzos
If only I could get hammered every night and keep at a respectable weight. Bring back martini lunches!
Hear hear!
Wedding is next week and I've been trying to drink less in advance of that. It's been successful. I have some visible definition on my stomach.
I would also kill for a negroni right now.
Congrats man! I mean we knew you were getting married but next week is awesome. Maybe we can add you to the kid counter in a year or two.
I’ve basically sworn off weed. I didn’t do it much before, but it wasn’t doing me any favors and so why bother. And same with booze, it just destroys my sleep now that I’m old. I stopped recreationally drinking for the most part aside from a glass of wine with certain meals. However I’ll still socially drink for the right occasions, of which I have two coming this weekend (40th bday party at a bar Friday, block party on Sat). RIP my sleep cycle until mid next week.
I have been doing dry January which usually runs into mid February for the last few years. The only benefit I've noticed to not drinking at all is it's a lot easier to lose weight. And I like people even less than I already do although that isn't much of a benefit. I tried edibles to help me sleep a few years back and while I slept through the night, it was worse than a hangover. I'd be useless till noon.
Since my wife is invariably pregnant or breastfeeding I do major fasts and some of the two week fasts alcohol free. This, along with the standard Wednesday/Friday fasts, means I am alcohol free about a third of the year by default with no real effort.
I also won't be drinking once the baby is here for a month or two.
My dad made me watch Midnight Express as a kid. That kind of thing sticks with you. I don’t know if this country takes any crime that seriously.
I’ve always thought it would be hilarious to see the Japanese response to someone taking a crap in the train…”well, straight into the ocean for you”.
theyre gonna reopen unit 731 for those people
Along with repercussions for their family.
It’s the dead kennedy’s song of “holiday in Cambodia” in real time. Some things never change.
what if we dont pay them and just deport them to a third world slum for the lolz
To find the required simpleminded candidates you would likely need to recruit influencers or wanna-be influencers, so some payment would be necessary, could be like the Amazing Race where you cover their expenses and promise large cash winnings to whoever completes the challenges. Of course that is unlikely to happen since other countries enforce their immigration laws ruthlessly. I think this is TV ready, just need Mark Burnett to produce it.
Sort of like a real world survivor game: “if you can survive 10 years as an illegal in _____ then we will give you an early pension.”
Starting with a lot of media figures!
I will pay to watch this. Any amount short of a full months paycheck.
This is a great idea and I’d watch every episode. The only downside is that the show probably will only run one season once the pool of potential participants sees what happened to the first batch of volunteers.
I am not so sure- the American left thrives on the idea that bad progressive ideas (socialism, communism) that have failed every time they have been tried have failed because they were not implemented properly. American progressives are nothing if not arrogant and believe they can do it “smarter”. They would see season 1 contestants get locked up for decades in foreign prisons and think” I am smarter and can do it right!”
If that ends up being the case season 2 should be even better—I’ll be watching.
"Perhaps a commenter or two will pop up to decry the hiring of American citizens to drive trucks as “make work programs” or so on, along with a commentary on how lazy Americans think they are entitled to make a living wage for something as trivial as operating a 50-ton vehicle on recapped tires in all weather and road conditions while surrounded by vehicles to which it is a constant and deadly menace. Anyone who truly believes that has a chance to “own some outcomes” here. Three innocents dead."
There is no truck driver shortage and it is 100% correct that there are lots of foreigners, who probably aren't legitimately licensed, operating under shady contracts for shady companies all to save a buck and enrich a few. x.com/supertrucker where it is his pet peeve the ongoing propaganda campaign of the "driver shortage."
Trucker Shortage: As Valid as the "Engineering Shortage" or "Programmer Shortage" or "STEM Shortage."
There are no shortages in a free market.
There are no shortages when the paychecks are sufficient.
_THIS_ .
-Nate
grrrr. you had to hit a sore point - I've been hearing the "engineering shortage" BS for 40+ years. its infuriating. and what it really means is "there is a shortage of engineers willing to work for very low salaries"
"you kids are just greedy and want too much money"
day of the pillow cant come soon enough for some
Homer: "Shut up, or we'll put you in a home!"
Grandpa: "You already put me in a home!"
Homer: "Then we'll put you in that crooked home we saw on '60 Minutes!'"
Grandpa: "I'll be good..."
ICE should hang out at weigh stations and rest stops for the next month.
Impound every rig with an illegal driver and the problem will go away pretty quickly.
It will go away even faster if you threaten to sue or arrest whoever hired them.
Exactly. While I am a great 2A proponent its perfectly correct for parents who irresponsibly let kids get guns face the music in criminal court when said kid does something stupid or bad with the gun.
Juts put the companies and individuals who hired these guys on trial. But therein lays the rub, the sate of comifornia gave him a ldv license and he prob even has a soc security number. Maybe we can arrest Newsome and the cal legislature for this one.
I mean we sent our governor to prison (one of many) for allowing illegal truck licenses to be sold by the IL sec of state. Several kids were killed which spurred the lawsuit and sure something similar could happen here 🤷🏼♂️
Agreed but part of the problem is that these illegals have fake social security numbers that give the crooked employers plausible deniability.
Or they filed the asylum form that then allows them to get a work permit while they wait for their asylum case to process. There are lots of NGOs that coach how to do the process, which is how you get illegal kids working in meat packing plants. They were coached on what birth date to use on the forms.
Start arresting the NGO members for this stuff too
My grandfather died in 1978. I'm pretty sure his Social Security number's been used by at least 10 Mexicans by now.
"So your name is Ernest Grosser?"
"Si."
Even better is the fact that many states make it illegal for the potential employer to do a significant check to see if the future employee is of legal status. Apparently checking on the immigration status of the guy who can't speak English proficiently is racist or something.
Many states need their federal funding cut.
All of them do. Minus highway funds that are actually interstate. The feds are too big. Bring back federalism
This, the employers and the facilitators and the landlords need to be gone after, and the existing law provides for it.
It seems they're going to.
My FIL was an over the road trucker for 25 years, and he says there is not a trucker shortage, there’s a SKILLED trucker shortage. We have a bunch of pump-and-dump driving schools pushing bad drivers out into companies that are terrible to work for, so they move on to other careers. Rinse and repeat.
Obviously recruiting illegals is only compounding this problem.
You should see the trucks and “drivers” (using that term loosely) here on the SoCal freeways.
Many entertaining videos attest to this .
-Nate
was hoping someone else would mention this because its true
some might even be so bold to say that there isnt really a labour shortage too and the genuine reasons for infinity browns is basically nil
I just heard about the student visa scam in Canada wherein strip mall "colleges" operated by Indians provide documentation for tens of thousands of folks who aren't exactly the intellectual cream of the subcontinent.
I thought most of the subcontinent wasn’t the intellectual cream of anything!
Perhaps, while some studies show an average IQ of 75, which is below that which the U.S. will accept recruits because they're not considered trainable, with a cohort of over a billion people, you're still going to have some exceptionally smart folks.
From Grok: "Without more robust data, a conservative estimate based on a mean IQ of 85 (a commonly cited middle ground) and SD of 15 suggests about 0.02% of the population, or roughly 280,000 individuals, might have IQs over 140."
there are plenty more scams of differing flavours here but they are very often perpetrated by the same people
raiding food banks for one
There's a privately operated kosher food pantry around the corner from my house. It's set up to augment the official Jewish Federation supported food agency for people who are officially below the poverty level (besides folks who are actually poor, even if you're making a decent salary if you have 8-12 kids, you might be below the poverty line, at least according to the government). The private food pantry gets so much food from food recyclers like Forgotten Harvest and via private donations that regular folks have to show up one day a week or else they'll be throwing away food.
If I wanted to be frugal, I could probably survive on stuff I get there.
I'd hazard a guess that with the number of food banks and food pantries that exist, if you're an adult going hungry in America, it's your own damn fault.
while that does sound like an excellent food bank and a good justification for that the ones im referring to in canada are frequented by indians making above average wages who see these places as a way to get free food rather than a resource for the less fortunate
theyre also stupid enough to record themselves doing it and to make tutorials on how others can scam the system as well
I've seen pictures of food bank lines around the block with semi luxury cars.
On Lizard People:
I thought it was you, but I'm guessing now it was someone else - wish I could find the article - who did a really good breakdown on the whole 'lizard people thing'. It's a lot like what you wrote but goes into even more detail. We all have a 'lizard brain' in us, these people just let their rule them.
And sadly far too many of them are in the halls of power now.
On 'Lazy Americans'.
I have worked, as an engineer in critical fields, for a number of foreign companies over the years. I have heard them call us 'lazy' but the truth is, no one in the world works as hard as Americans do.
We get two weeks vacation. Most get four. In Germany, that heart of 'hard work and production' they get 6, plus unlimited sick leave, 30 hour weeks, no overtime, and the companies also shut down for August.
Meanwhile they once canceled the Labor Day weekend at their American Subsidiary - everyone had to come into work for 3-days because the Germans, once again, fucked up a critical piece of equipment design and we had to fix it. By non-stop work while the Germans all took the week off because it was a minor holiday and THEY weren't going to come in and fix it. One guy had to reschedule his wedding or he would have been fired. (I quit).
But I've never worked for a foreign company where the foreigners worked even half as hard as their American counterparts. It's just propaganda.
Michael Hastings.
I don't know who killed him, but it was clear someone else took over control of his car.
This has been done to airliners by a guy sitting in the back with a laptop - though he didn't crash it, he was just proving to a number of people that it was easy, and it could be done. Things have since been 'fixed'.
Cargo Cult.
I had the displeasure a couple of months ago of running into an 'Agile Specialist' who told me how great it was. The displeasure was telling him Agile is shit, he has no idea what he's doing, and he shouldn't be doing it, and all that training he took is bullshit because he's got no real understand of how development works. He seemed to think that a 6 week course trumped my 4 year engineering degree and almost 40 years of experience.
Understand I was polite the entire time, but I honestly just wanted to beat him to death with one of the bar stools. Thank god I don't drink like I used to, or I might just have done it. The only scam bigger than Agile in the software world today is that German software everyone buys for their company, which even though it costs a billion dollars, doesn't work. So you spend another billion on 'consultants' who constantly fix it - because it's so shitily designed it will never work (Germans suck at software - then again, they suck at hardware too) so it must always be fixed.
(I've been offered, and still get offered, to be one of those consultants, but I have too much self-respect).
Talk about the best salesmen in the world.
"Germans suck at software - then again, they suck at hardware too"
John, you said the quiet part out loud. Haven't you heard of the "Sainted German Engineer"? He can do no wrong.
Just ask him.
dad always said "you can tell a german but you just cant tell him much"
he was right about a lot of things in hindsight
My grandpa was 100% german. I have stories and some german idiosyncrasies. Balanced with my Irish side it is almost comical what i obsess about and what i dont.
i bet you have opinions on alcohol
It should be free!
I WORKED for him. Dear lord we all got so damn tired of it.
Germans build solid cars with shaky electronics.
Weird dichotomy there.
I do love the cars
I know you're talking about SAP but we worked for a liquor distributor that upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics for 20ish million dollars. AS400 worked better.
The fundamental proposition under SAP is that forcing the entire company to use one single piece of software for everything will unlock more efficiency from where individual systems talk to each other than will be lost by using a system for a task that it wasn't optimized for. I'm not sure it pans out for most implementations, but SAP sales contracts are a master class on making it expensive enough to change it out that the careers of everybody who approved it in the first place will be ruined if it is declared a failure. As a result the goalposts are moved enough to declare victory.
Whatever those salesman made wasn't enough. We should also throw them in jail for fraud. Mabye it's because I don't have a sales bone in my body but "We lie to them and they buy it" seems sleezy to me.
If it doesn't work, do we get our money back?
NOPE!
VALUE ADDED
In my experience, the best day to be fast tracked to the director level is to botch an implementation and then come up with a solution to it. Many such cases.
I’m convinced that SAP is only in business because German companies are obligated to do business with them.
The ENTIRE ERP thing is a scam. It's been 20+ years and they all suck.
I wish I could like this comment 70 million times, once for every dollar my state is wasting on this crap. OK, it's Vermont and Workday.
In my career I've seen a few implementations. All except for one amounted to, "how do we duplicate what we already have in the new system?" So why did they get the new system?
The exception, at a brokerage firm, was built internally and it was pretty good.
I have been on the inside of 2 implementations and the outside of 3 ish. They've all gone over budget and under delivered.
yep, every one of them WAY over budget and WAY under delivered
No comment! (Watching a PeopleSoft->Oracle Cloud HCM implementation from the sidelines!)
I spent the majority of the past two weeks chasing down an issue caused by the genius who decided to tie Workday to HCM to Entra ID.
The best part about working for Germans is that they love to schedule their Audits for September and early October. This gets them a month or two of travel after the month of vacation. Then they get to coast until the holidays working on “the report.”
Meanwhile, us lazy schmucks over here are scrambling to fulfill document requests when half of the company is on vacation.
Fucking lazy Americans. We really suck, don't we.
I don’t know how anything gets done in Germany. Their schedule is like this:
Jan-March: Conferences, conventions, and large meetings related to initiatives for upcoming year. All requiring travel.
March-April: Easter holiday.
April-June: Actual work gets done.
July: More conferences, conventions, and large meetings. Travel required.
August: Summer holiday.
September/October: Corporate audit. More travel.
November: Finalize audit report. Blame delays on Thanksgiving in America.
December: Winter holiday.
What month do they invade their neighbors?
Audit szn is the closest a 2025 German gets to 1945.
The best run companies run SAP!
I'm not ashamed of admitting I've seen that look of Mr Singh's before. Perhaps a few hundred times when I was in India on company business. They warned me before not even try to drive, just take a cab when I need to go somewhere. Well, smarmy me immediately rented a Mahindra Bolero (imagine putting a G-Class through the Xerox machine at 80% scale; even the motor sounded like a MB prechamber diesel) and took to the roads of Maharastra. Years on, words still befall me; I understand that 95% of the country lives under the poverty limit, but this method of infrastructure maintenance should be rejected. If you can't upkeep a 2-lane tarmac road, then I'm sorry, it's back to macadam for you - the road surface you can work on with a rake and shovel. If there is a closed lane, most drivers just turn into your lane with this absolutely gormless expression in their faces. *that* expression is the one I saw in the accident video.
Again, I understand that according to _your_ religion you'll be coming back, but a) it's going to hurt all the way there and b) *I* am quite happy with this life I have. Maybe stick to hotel/bodega management instead.
People in America/Europe are trained to think that we have universal human values and I really ought to buy and read Dominion so I can properly reply how stupid a concept that is.
I recently learned the Assyrians (I think it was) would flense a person alive, stretch their skin over what was that person's bed, and rape their wife and kids on it and didn't find that to be outrageously objectionable behavior wise.
Maybe that one is a story to get across how bad they were and they were historically known for their brutality in general and much feared.
There's an assertion that only deeply uneducated people make, and it makes them easy to discern at a distance: the idea that there's some sort of "just being a good person" moral system that you can naturally intuit.
The people who say that are always sitting in a room surrounded by people who have been shaped by 2,000 years of Paul's letters to the disciples.
Travis Bickle, Paul Kersey, Walt Kowalski, ahem, Frank Castle: choose any war vet portrayed on TV and you'll see what all those cultural experiences do to a soul. Pacific theater (and Nam) vets saw the blind allegiance to one's country, endless stories of Allied soldiers counting the dead after battle and when they turn an Asian face-up, with the last breath he lets the lever ping off of the grenade. Nevermind the lost soldiers who kept fighting for 20 years after V-J day and only gave up their weapons when their old commander was pulled out of retirement.
I still hear new stories from Afghanistan vets, theirs complicated by the fact that the U.S. had partner forces there eg. locals that fought with Americans - not being much better than the Taliban, one particular story I read was the resistance leader having a boy-toy whom he regularly sodomized. The general second-classedness of women in Persian countries. (Insert Amendment XIX. joke.) Different strokes for different folks I guess. (you hit the ones who you love with an open fist)
The price of liberty is eternal vigilantism.
The Assyrians would also put up monuments around the middle east basically saying "check out my war crimes record here"
Stacks of skulls by men/women/children was them?
Them and Genghis Khan.
ive wondered if that counted as a luxury belief. it might explain why people in the nicest and safest countries are so pro third world immigration
Bezos almost single-handedly killed the mall by using mail-order convenience to appeal to the same mindset that sees people drive five minutes out of their way to save seven cents a gallon on $3.00-a-gallon gas.
I've said this here before, but it bears repeating: Many of the people who (rightly) railed on Walmart for killing small-town economies and mom-and-pop operators are oddly silent about Amazon doing the same thing, on a much larger scale. I can only assume it's because they never shopped at Walmart (I still refuse to, for what it did to Hearne, Texas, in the early 1990s) but get Amazon deliveries several times a week.
Amazon is the perfected form of Walmart, the Hellcat to Walmart's Wildcat. It industrializes human misery in a way that even prevents the sad remaining pleasures of human connection left to people who work together in a superstore.
+1 on Grumman fighter aircraft references.
Hard to believe the name "Tomcat" was a controversial choice back when they made it.
I still think it’s cia funded for the perfect logistics system. As much as i hate them, it really is perfect. Now if theyd onky sell real goods and not fuck their suppliers and employees
These people also "care about the enviroment" but apparently the amazon packaging which is discarded not so much.
My mother still does not understand the concept of opportunity cost. She will waste 5 hours to save five dollars.
i stopped caring about the variation of a litre of gasoline when the largest discrepancy in cost in my surrounding area was a total of $2 per tank
i just go to the nearest gas station when i need to
Same. I will combine gas with a Costco run when possible, otherwise it's the nearest station to my house. May as well help keep them in business, they're 2 miles away.
I pay a dollar extra a gallon for premium these days. It used to be ten cents! Im not sweating ten cents
Boy, he sure is smart, ain’t he?
Re: The Lizard People
If I had to put my own definition of the Lizard People, it's the modern American Left power class... i.e., they don't just brand progressivism, they have the power to force the implementation of progressive policy, all while - *and this is the important part* - diabolically fortifying their personal position to ensure they'll never face the progressive edicts they've mobilized...
Examples would be climate activists flying on private jets while pushing legislation to curtail oil production... White male CEO's who implement DEI hiring/promotion policies at their companies... essentially the entire Democratic Party who pushed Defund the Police initiatives from 2020-2024 while substantially increasing the funding for the Capitol Police force in DC...
There are no liberal or progressive policies that have positive outcomes, that’s why they don’t follow their own edicts. It would make their life worse, they know it, so they don’t do it.
As Glenn Reynolds said, “I’ll believe it’s a problem when the people who say it’s a problem start acting like it’s a problem.”
When the people who tell you the polar ice caps will melt and drown us all go out and buy $10 million beachfront mansions in Malibu, you can bet your paycheck on them being full of shit.
Or knock down the Magnum PI house.
I personally knew a climate activist who not only advocated on behalf of electric cars but did not own a car, electric or otherwise, he rode a bicycle.
You found the unicorn. He's the exception that proves the rule.
Willing to bet he's a "foot soldier" advocate. None of the leaders practice what they preach.
Like those black churches where the minister has a 10,000 square foot house and a Bentley.
That’s his reward for being so close to God.
But the carbon dioxide from the sweat and the materials used to make the bike!
Bike probably made in China as well. Lots of bunker-c to get it across the Pacific
which is why the last 2 bikes I bought have frames made in the USA.
...and such an individual would not be the "Lizard People". I think virtually everyone here respects each individual's choice in lifestyle. Some people choose to minimize their carbon footprint, others choose to race cars on the weekend...
Notice I specifically highlighted "and this is the important part"... which is sort of what completes the point.
Moron, but an honest one.
One question about this illegal trucker/murderer.
How was this non English speaker communicating with his trucking company? I think we know how. Time for visits to these companies to arrest the illegals working in their offices, too. Then arrest the employers who perpetrated this entire criminal enterprise.
I went to open up a bank account for our youngest yesterday. Since having our 3rd child, the bank has been completely overrun by Pakistanis. So now in my quaint little suburb, we have Indians and Pakistanis and we all know how much they like each other.
we had a few machete fights between them up here
fun times
Curious the name of the bank (assuming it’s a local bank and you don’t bank at a GLOBOHOMO BANKSTER BAILOUT BEGGING establishment like JPMorgan).
For my kids, globohomo bank so I can transfer cash they receive via an app. I should switch to a local bank.
I always got great service at my local Wintrust bank in DuPage.
-I know WinTrust well! They had a great growth strategy (practice alchemy by buying up failed banks in FDIC auctions and spin some lumps of shit into a cohesive franchise over time) after the GFC.
-I worked the sale of the bank that previously owned their branch on Delaware Place (in the shadow of John Hancock); the seller had NOTHING going for them: breakeven (at best), father and son management team extracting $1MM+ annually to do nothing, still had TARP, and lots of other liabilities (i.e., TruPS). Well, they had ONE thing going for them: They owned their branch, which was on the books at ~$5MM and worth more than $30MM. It was an interesting deal. I led the Board meeting to formalize the sale (my boss was on vacation), since there was hardly anyone in the room who would vote against a deal (you have a business worth ~$0 and a building worth $30MM+; would you like to exchange that for ~$33MM of WTFC stock?)
-WinTrust once (quietly) banked most of the strip clubs in Chicagoland, unsure if they still do.
Wintrust had a really smart strategy opening small local banks in wealthy Chicago suburbs and then playing up the community bank aspect, then hiring nice employees with low turnover. I always got greeted by name and loved doing business with them. A very boutique experience.
I keep so little money in my personal and kids accounts it is just a hassle to change. All real money is in vanguard. Probably have 30k in the checking/savings account when it is high
I get it. I only have a Chase account because I like their app.
Could you actually start a bank called Globohomo bailout seeking bank?
It’s very, very hard to start a new - or ‘de novo’ - bank.
And why would you WANT to? It’s a heavily regulated, low return industry. A 1% return on assets is considered “good” performance.
https://theonion.com/indo-pakistani-tensions-mount-at-local-amoco-1819566316/
He made a comment about how he likes bikes but doesnt want to ride in the usa because it’s not safe. I said “is it safe in india”
“I am pakistani”
Sorry for the international incident.
Wait...WHAT?
I should have put 2 + 2 together when his name wasnt neil patel
Customers or employees?
Employees. The "asians" live on the south side of town or aurora
Why the double quotes? Are they not Asian?
In america, it’s complicated. The asians, as we usually call them, live in a different area.
I'll take that as admission that Americans are bad with geography. Nowhere else in the world do they mis-asssociate which country is in which continent.
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/qMhX6o80aB4
I will not tolerate any dissing of the 912. A high-school crush drove an orange one back when Metallica was making music that actually mattered, Van Halen still had its only frontman who mattered, and air-cooled Porsches of that vintage were just cheap used cars. I will forever associate the 912 with her and will not tolerate anyone sullying so fine an automobile.
When they were just cheap used cars, they were neat!
I'm with you on all the 912 stuff but the car that Adrian reviewed sounds like a fun ride IF it cost something like $80,000. When you get to half a mil you're in too precious to drive-look at me while I wank territory.
Unfortunately I think the body alone is eighty grand!
Id have a tough time justifying much more than the s4. I guess if dropping 500k didnt matter at all to me, maybe. But still seems like a waste of money. Theres some 100k cars I like. I could maybe see myself getting my dream amg wagon or rs6 but probably not in reality. What can i say, im cheap
Gary Cherone?
Obviously, he made great music with TWO bands!
And going by that metric, it was a thick assed white girl in a MKI MR2.
we call that a PAWG, my good sir.
Jack, ban this man.
Van Halen was just another sleazy party band till they hired Sammy Hagar.
Raising shields...
"I actually ruined two sets of Continental ExtremeContacts"
gotta petition them to get a set of cup 2s or something becuase thats gotta be cheaper in the long run
"My top speed at Mid-Ohio is 156-157 but even the 600cc Supersports can knock on the door of 170 down the back straight, with the Stock 1000 and Superbikes doing another 10-15mph above that"
motorcycle downforce is still a strange thing to me becuase of all the leaning and whatnot
"The media outlets who breathlessly prattle on about Crazy Stuff The Prole Trash Actually Think are revealing more about themselves than about “Qanon”"
qanon was catnip for tragically unaware boomers. im shocked at its lifespan frankly
"$460,000, 1540-pound, 182-horsepower carbon-fiber Porsche 912"
the numbers are wild except for the horsepower but thats all the little flat four can make (although a few people have produced some custom porsche 4cyl engines that are far more powerful but of course this one doesnt have the cool bits) and its really not that far from a hotrodded beetle engine and between the two im taking a restomodded beetle over this. at least that comes across as being more honest in your desires. i have a friend that kinda wants a 912 and im convincing him the 308 he is also interested in is a better idea.
"I feel compelled to point out that it’s possible to get this level of performance for less money. Like a K-swap Honda Fit, or a Fox Mustang with $800 worth of spray on it."
i still want to see what a 1500lb porsche can do even with that power because thats almost half the weight of a fox (and hundreds of pounds lighter than the fit despite being down a few dozen hp or so).
"Legend has it that not even William Calley looked as mellow after killing innocent people as Harjinder Singh did when a minivan struck his trailer during an illegal freeway U-turn."
and people say america isnt influenced by canada. how are you enjoying your taste of bramptons finest? this is only getting worse as more and more of them filter out onto the roads with zero knowledge of how to operate motor vehicles safely. the solution is to never hire them but the schools and companies they work for get shut down and just pop back up under other names. its absolutely maddening. eventually people will start dealing with companies based on what the people look and sound like becuase that might be the only way to make sure somebody isnt killed on the road delivering their packages. my thoughts go out to the family and all those affected.
That driver had the "look what those idiots did to my truck" look.
I pay, up front and in American money and yes, I am a newbie.
Welcome aboard; as you may have noticed, we play a bit differently here than is the custom on the rest of the 'Net.
Good to have you but remember, you walked into this with your eyes open.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go beat up those midgets who fucked up my mailbox.
They're at the wrestling ring practicing being tossed.
That tracks. Hustler Club Detroit is hosting midget wrestling in October.
Cmon man. Give sherman a break
GET THOSE BASTARDS!
they couldnt have run far
or fast
Welcome to the asylum.
Welcome aboard
WELCOME Sir .
-Nate
My '15 6MT Fit weighs about 2,400 lbs, almost exactly what my dad's '84 Accord hatchback weighed.
thats not bad but i am a bit shocked its 200lbs heavier than my miata though i doubt dumping a k series in it would inflate the weight much
is the car still treating you well?
A few minor issues at 131K but in general I'm happy. Still on the first clutch, only had to do the brakes once. After the recent discussion of low viscosity oils I switched to 5W-20 on the last oil change.
A word to the wise, try tailoring your remarks to just a few sentences. I guarantee you will garner more attention.
Sir, I'll have you know that even I, the least of commenters here, graduated SUMMER-COME-LOUDER with several advanced degrease from one of America's TOP PRESTIGE INSTITUTIONS the venerable and well-regarted DeVry University!
We don't have no time for this high-falutin' grammarlarian noncents.
🧐
Speed has been here forever. You seem new. Maybe shut up. Unless you pay of course.
Excuse me, who are you?
yeah im not doing that
i garner plenty of attention if for no other reason than volume and absurdity
Bro won't be prepared for when I have thoughts on something again lmao
Who the hell are you?
A PAYING CUSTOMER!
We’re forgetting about the mother of all “aaS” scams (behave, children) and maybe the one that harms the most people annually- property tax. Whether the bank holds the title or you do, try to stop paying your annual subscription to NOT being a victim of state sponsored violence and see what happens after a few consecutive ones.
RE: p-car disease, I’ve harped on this before but part of the disease entails an active flaunting of the concept of “relative value”. Who CARES that you could buy a like new V10 R8 plus a Q5 for the wife for the cost of one hand rubbed jerkoff spec GTPEEPEE - you wouldn’t get it, it’s a Porsche thing. If you’re concerned with things like value for your money, you’re a poor who has no business rubbing your grimy little peasant hands on the shield.
I spend 8k a year, 90% to fund the public school system, to spend another 20k a year* on private schools. Fortunately, the fourth kid is free.
*well, not yet.
I feel you. I live in a modest 2,600ft home in the northeast paying $12k a year in property taxes and another $2k a year for the cars.
At least our cars are relatively cheap. My biggest desire to not move is my property taxes will double
also, the punitive sales tax PLUS luxury tax on new cars means the truck/SUV i am eyeing up will be used. i bought a brand new car in 2023 and i am unsure i will ever do so again because they make it incredibly expensive for no reason here.
same boat. ill force my kids to share bedrooms. i hate the new idea that every human in the house needs 1,000 sq ft of air conditioned space. also provides some motivation for them to get out when the time comes - i'd never kick them out, they can stay as long as they like, but you're not living in a palatial estate - its your childhood home and bedroom.
Our kids will share rooms even if we upgrade. Not a lot of 5 bedroom houses these days. I did promise the wife we'd upgrade eventually. I'd like to keep the house we currently have. Maybe one of my kids will want it but I dread of being a "landlord"
WOW ;
We were never too snug in my 1,158SF house .
I don't use the back bedroom except for storage since my son moved out long ago .
-Nate
Scott-- blue state? I feel your pain.
Yes, IL
Those numbers make me feel Ill
Grade school is cheap. If my girls go to private high school, the years they will all be there is 45k in todays dollars. Those numbers make me feel ill. If I lived in Chicago, those numbers would be triple, if not more.
why do good people get stuck in blue states? why indeed.
Chicago has become ridiculous.
"They are literal human sacrifices on the altar of Cheap Labor, the god to whom we have sacrificed more than the Aztecs could ever dream. There’s no humanitarian justification here."
Never forget that "SuperFreakanomics" or whatever they call themselves decided to say part of the crime falling in the 90s had to do with ABORTION of all things.
Yeah, that's it. Let's just kill more babies and we will all have less crime. Oh and scientists. And teachers. And hot moms. Come to think of it we'd have less of everything.
This argument also reminds me how much I loath this "well let's make excuses for why tariffs aren't killing the economy because it totally will in the future". Well, it's the future and the economy hasn't died yet. In fact, it sure seems like it won't die due to tariffs.
The lizard adjacent class will ALWAYS sacrifice something they don't have for their cause. Whether that's children or the last remaining paycheck of the working poor. They will completely raise that knife to get the clout even if it isn't intentionally for bad reasons. We used to be a country that could recognize carpet baggers a lot easier.
BLACK babies. Pre crime instead of just locking criminals up. At this point, we should execute felons. If you cant be reformed by less than a year in prison, what's the point?
Never going to happen though.
stuff like that makes me wonder what the point of life in prison without parole is even for
if someone is so awful they cant ever be allowed back into society why is the taxpayer on the hook for them for life?
firing squad and be done with it
We should always be careful about letting the State kill people.
Because the State doesn't benefit when murderers and rapists are executed. It *wants* those people to exist, because it justifies their power. What the State really wants is to execute dissidents.
Amen! Think of all the court cases you know of where guilty have walked free (if even charged) or cases where someone got released after serving years in prison following a wrongful conviction.
""Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends"
-Obi-Wan Dumbledore, or somebody
I'm mostly against capital punishment for this reason. But I'm for it in fantasyland. Just wait until Canada starts euthanizing angsty pubescent teenagers
yeah the hardest part is the state killing people
i dont know the solution other than what henry said about lynch mobs but obviously that has its own set of problems
maybe the real solution is cultivate a culture and people who dont do the shit that gets you life in the can
This is ironically an argument for lynch mobs.
You can't execute a dissident.
The key concept of "execution" is that it's a LEGITIMATE killing, like putting a murderer to death. Since killing someone for a political offense is by definition illegitimate, it cannot be an execution.
The point is so some liberal judge with the help of the innocence project will let them out on a bullshit "technicality" when people are too old to remember facts for them to go terrorize society again. Wayne on x.com had a great rant about this back when i was on x.com
I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT THE WAR THAT INDIA/INDIANS ARE WAGING AGAINST THE US AND EVERY CIVILIZED COUNTRY.
The all caps made me think of the “WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU…” spam calls.
which incidentally are typically indian
Hahaha
You'll love this
https://bluewaterhealthyliving.com/news/national-news/ohio/hindu-group-buys-former-our-lady-of-the-elms-motherhouse-in-akron/
And I've been humbly denying it.
Eerie parallel (and by this I mean "easily foreseeable") between this latest truck driver incident and the license-for-bribes crash that sent former Illinois governor George Ryan to prison. In that crash, part of the truck's taillight assembly fell off which then punctured the gas tank of a trailing minivan, causing it to catch fire, severely injuring the driver and his wife and killing their six children. Apparently the taillight assembly was dangling long enough that several passing motorists noticed and tried to signal the driver. Unfortunately the driver did not speak English and did not comprehend their warnings.
I thought the load was falling off a flatbed
It would not surprise me if there were another horrendous incident where something fell off a flat bed, killing a family in a minivan as a consequence of licenses-for-bribes. The incident I’m remembering involved the Willis family and a taillight/mudflap assembly: https://www.npr.org/2007/11/06/16051850/former-illinois-gov-george-ryan-heading-to-prison
This particular incident was the impetus for the feds investigation into George Ryan’s administration at the IL Secretary of State. My recollection is that the feds got really interested when they learned that the IL driver didn’t speak English and wondered how on earth he got a CDL.
You must be correct, I heard the story second hand.
I guess I'm Nobody because I've always liked/wanted 912s since I became aware of them as a young teenager back in the 80s. I like the simplicity of their power plants and always thought they'd be fun to drive. But then again, I like pre-'68 Bugs too. 912 pricing though in the past few decades has all but assured me that I'll never own one.
If a 912 cost the same as a Beetle I would get a 912.
They once were affordable!
They look sharp. Just not 500k sharp.
Buddy of mine brought a 912 to a recent autocross. He had more fun than anyone else there.