Wednesday Racing/Open Thread
Open to all subscribers, with some focus on F1 and the new California pro-shoplifting bill
“That was naughty!”
Ah, to be Max Verstappen in Italy. At the top of your form, in a car that isn’t quite as dominating as it was at the beginning of the year but you know that it’s because Adrian is already working on next year’s RB20. About to win ten in a row, which has never been done. And Carlos Sainz is using every defensive trick in the book, including a few which are probably in the book for being illegal — but you know you’re going to get him eventually, so you can laugh about being body-checked.
I’ll start two topics today: the race, and the odd thing that’s happening in California.
Ten for Max
This has been a great season to be an F1 fan despite the lack of variety on the top step. Williams looks like a real team again. McLaren occasionally looks brilliant, but you never know what you’re going to get. Almost everyone loves seeing Alonso do well. A few thoughts:
Williams and accountability. Last week, Williams released an Instagram reel regarding Logan Sergeant’s crash at the Dutch GP. “Logan’s crash is on us,” James Vowles intoned in a hangdog voice, his cocked head and sorrowful face saying more than his words. Then he explained the loss of hydraulic pressure that made Logan basically a passenger. This sort of thing goes a long way towards building a brand and a reputation, as did yet another day of Alex Albon finishing in the points and making the McLarens look a little ineffectual by contrast. Not that everything’s perfect at Williams; Logan’s timid pace at Monza apparently had something to do with the fact that the team is a little short of current-spec front wings and, frankly, didn’t want to waste one on Logan when they could use it for Albon.
For the fans, or favoritism, or just weakness? The battle between the Ferraris at the end of the race had the potential to end the race for both of them, as Charles Leclerc made increasingly desperate moves against a man who was unwilling not to stand on the podium for Ferrari at Monza. Frederic Vasseur said after the fact that he had enjoyed watching the battle, and hoped the fans did as well. Some of those fans have been quick to point out that when Carlos is behind Charles he is usually told to stay where he is. Others have suggested that Ferrari is in such disarray that the drivers were free to ignore the pit wall. Near the end of the race, Sainz issued a plea to his team to “just go to the end”. Two laps later, he had to check Leclerc off the track. Well, you know what they say. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Lewis does the right thing, apologizing to Oscar Piastri after the fact for shitcanning his race. “It doesn’t get me my race back,” Piastri noted somewhat sorrowfully. But it did allow Lewis to get within 20 seconds of Princess George, who looks a bit revitalized lately.
Another nice race for Liam Lawson. Yuki’s failed engine means Red Bull can’t compare Lawson’s pace to that of Yuki, but his behavior during the race was exemplary and he finished 11th, which is encouraging given that Alpha Tauri has been the worst team on the grid for much of the year.
A silly season that looks quite sensible so far. All the contract news out of the teams so far suggests that stability is the watchword of the day. Lewis got a renewal to his 41st birthday or thereabouts. Both Haas drivers were renewed. Still on the fence: Tsunoda and Zhou, plus the aforementioned Logan Sergeant. As fiercely patriotic as I may be, here’s a suggestion for James Vowles: fire Logan and replace him with Mick Schumacher. There’s a whole generation of fans — and sponsors — who would like to see him fighting properly in the midfield.
Alright, now over to California.
Let ‘em cook!
Much is being written about California’s SB553, the “Workplace Violence Prevention Bill”. In an effort to avoid a media spoon-feed, I read it myself, and of course you can as well. Much is being made of the fact that employers can no longer order their employees to interfere with a theft. I’d be curious as to what our attorneys here at ACF think, because I don’t get that out of the bill when I read it.
What I primarily see is yet another paperwork and documentation burden that companies like Target will meet effortlessly with existing resources but which will cost the average small business owner another five hours of his life every month. Much is said about the creation and notation of “violence categories”, so if someone in your liquor store punches someone else you’ll need to make sure your “violence log” contains the proper category and whatnot.
A few paragraphs are devoted to restraining orders within the workplace based on “good faith”, which of course require the target of said order to surrender his firearms.
The whole thing comes off as very bureaucratic. It will create a whole new paper trail which, of course, will require new California state employees to monitor, record, document, and observe. It makes being a small businessman (unless you are in a specific “protected category”, of course) just that much more miserable. One suspects that the violence logs will also be breathlessly collated into new statistics to support more gun control.
Given the remarkable amount of organized retail theft going on in California at the moment, there’s a strong odor of “Let them eat cake” about this bill. Which is probably intentional. There’s no future for small business in California. The very idea of it is disruptive and anti-harmony. It would be better if everyone just sat at home cashing COVID checks and ordering off Amazon.
Thankfully, Connecticut is setting a strong counter-example by, uh, performing a months-long investigation to find and arrest a man who picked up a bag of money that was just sitting out on the street. It makes more sense when you realize that the money belonged to the town in question, of course.
“Oh, come on, Mandy. What’s wrong with California?”
“Really? REALLY??? Okay, poorly-aimed gunfights viewed as urban recreation, taxes through the roof on everything, bums everywhere, open-air drug markets operating in broad daylight, halfwits who try to outrun the cops in their 200,000-mile bone-stock shitboxes, hobos using public spaces as open-air toilets, the most basic house costs a million bucks, normal people have to live two hours from work, state & local governments have declared war on the common man, glass-egoed ethnic gangbangers who take eye contact as a mortal threat, illegal aliens that walk in daylight, homosexuals that walk in daylight, everything gives you cancer, sexual predators who ply their trade as if God Himself gave them permission, real-life Bond Villains trying to conquer the world by trapping everyone in a Brave New Worldwide Electronic Feudalism, everyone’s flaky as hell, auto theft & narcotics trafficking so common as to be openly viewed as legitimate sectors of the economy, environmental laws that favor plants & animals over people, far & away the most totalitarian car inspection regime in America, Rice Boys, Lower Case G’s, criminal gangs from every country on the planet, serial killers with refrigerators full of human heads, celebutante fame whores that refuse to just fucking evaporate already, smoking’s illegal but marijuana’s encouraged, government regulations that’re chasing all the non-criminal businesses out of the state, burglars who have more rights than the homeowners who shoot them, public employee unions powerful enough to bankrupt whatever legitimate government they have left out there, roads & bridges disintegrating because the government uses their funding to hire diversity zampolits, militarized police with itchy trigger fingers & a Judge Dredd mentality who’ll arrest white men for speeding while black thugs burn down a liquor store a hundred feet away, pornographers who operate under the impression that the First Amendment applies to THEM and really, how far could I go on this tangent without using the word ‘cannibal?’
I’ll just say it - it’s an evil place where only monsters can thrive. And the ones who aren’t stealing BMWs, burning down entire cities in the name of "racial justice," murdering each other over facial expressions, manufacturing entire libraries of smut or writing as many noxious laws as fast as they FUCKING can are either stoned out of their minds on pretty much any chemical substance they can get their filthy little hippie hands on, or shouting from the mountaintops that all of this absurd horror is what Paradise looks like.
I mean, have you ever noticed that every single social pathology currently tearing this country to shreds got started in either Los Angeles or Frisco?”
"Well, yeah, but besides all that?"
Regarding shoplifting, I might've mentioned here before that my 17 year old son was walking into Target in our lovely Minnesota suburb one day a year ago and saw a couple of puffy jacket wearing youths clumsily running from the store with their arms/jackets full of something. They avoided the meager "road block" attempt of a couple Target employees, but my son's instincts told him to tackle the one running by him.
This he did effectively, and various iDevices scattered on the ground, and my son started beating the "alleged shoplifter" upside the head soundly. This caused perpetrator 2 to turn around and try to pull my son off perp 1, at which point my son directed his attention to perp 2 and started knocking him around. There may have been a headlock involved.
My son then looked at the wide-eyed Target employees watching him, and seeing their inability or unwillingness to help, let the guys go. The Target employees did manage to help pick up the "stolen" items and thanked my son, for whatever that was worth.
My son then came home and told me the story and cried about it. The intense emotions and adrenalin of it came out in a rush. I told him I was proud of him. Someone has to do the right thing, and if gov't and corporate weasels won't, then who is left? We are all responsible for the worlds in which we live. Since when is it wrong to do the right thing!?
With that said, I am convinced that my son did do the right thing, but SO MUCH MORE bad could've come from this than good. One of those young perpetrator gentlemen could've stuck a knife in my son, or one of them could, in some weird backwards-world ironic twist, sue him for assault.
Target wouldn't let me see the video footage of the encounter, but I did get some "we can't believe how fucked up this is either" commiseration from the managers and security people I talked with at Target later on. I really wanted to see the ass kicking, but of course THAT would be WRONG!
What a world. We know it will continue to get worse in these ways, AND as a bonus, there are no signs it will get better.