Every once in a while I get a mailing from my alma mater asking me to give them money. Do you know what I do with these? I Throw Them. Right The Fuck. Away.
And every once in a while, too, I see you posting on Facebook asking me to donate money to your Kickstarter campaign so your band can go on tour or you can make a “film” about all the meaningful experiences you have. To which I can only reply: What Ed Said.
The Internet is nothing if not a powerful enabler of the very best and the very worst in ourselves. Its anonymity allows trolls that would otherwise be spending their time under bridges to spew hateful garbage in Tommy-Gun patterns without fear of reprisal, while its versatility fosters vibrant, passionate communities capable of changing laws and toppling dictators.
This post is about none of that, however, because for most people, the Internet is usually nothing more than biggest, weirdest, niche-iest mall of all time.
For example, while stumbling through StumbleUpon yesterday, I came across a page forTrunk Club® Men’s Outfitters. Initially hoping it had something to with either elephants or vintage bathing suits, I was almost equally amazed to discover it was actually a start-up devoted to helping men “who want to look great without having to go shopping in stores or online.” Wait a second, I thought. I want to look great without having to go shopping in stores or online!
So naturally I signed up for an account, at which point I was asked to enter my physical measurements (though not all of them, ladies!) and various personal style choices, such as how I dress at the office — “Business Dressy (Ad Agency, Law Firm)” vs. “Casual (Silicon Valley Start-Up)” — and how I roll on the weekends — “Classy (Country Club)” vs. “Relaxed (Bumming Around).”
Annoyingly, though perhaps predictably, after about five minutes of filling out style-preference questions related to the potential contents of my first trunk, I still hadn’t come across a single reference to what the hell this might all be costing me. Then I got to the final page, where I was told that, “Now that we know what you want, save your shipping address and credit card below to expedite your order. We won’t ship anything or bill anything without being in touch first!”
Thanks to computers, you no longer have to dress yourself!
Umm, yeah, No thanks. I prefer to see the price tag on my Tommy Bahamas before leaving Kohl’s in disgust. Apparently, elite Yelp user Johnny T. can relate:
Maybe this is customary. Maybe this is what shopping is all about. Thing is, when your target audience is made up of guys who don’t tend to shop all that often or consistently, take some time to warn a fellow. When I saw the bill for my 5 items, I might have blacked out a bit. Don’t get me wrong: everything looked ridiculously awesome, was made of fantastic quality and bore designer names I’d never heard of, but my wallet took me outside and slapped me around a bit.
So maybe Trunk Club wasn’t for me. (I’m more of a valise guy anyway, to be honest.) But what about my wife? Where can a bag-lady-at-heart like her go to rep all the hottest styles without filling our non-existent closet space (and, ideally, without emptying our very-much-existent-but-not-exactly-sumo-sized bank accounts). Well, apparently, there’s an app for that, too. Enter Bag Borrow or Steal — the catchily titled online retailer that lets ladies and Lucky Cheng’s employees alike Netflixorcise their fashion demons with weekly, monthly, or seasonal rentals of designer handbags, jewelry, and any number of accessories that only the truly terminal should have to live without.
While something like a Hermes-brand Porosus Crocodile Birkin 30 Satchel Handbag (WTF?!) might set you back a cool $1,632.00 per week, at least you know up front what food groups you’ll have to give up in order to afford it. And to be fair, there are actually plenty of purses made by other companies I’ve never heard of that’ll run you as little as $6.00/week, so you pick your pecuniary poison, I suppose.
Of course, no mall is complete without a food court…but since my doctor worries that evenwriting about Bacon Freak might raise my cholesterol to dangerously high levels, I’ll have to save that post for another day.
As I’ve confessed previously, I used to be a magician. For much of this period in my life, I also worked at a mid-size magic shop in Peabody, MA, called Diamond’s Magic. At the time, our main brick-and-mortar competition was Hank Lee’s Magic Factory in Boston — a much bigger operation with more employees and an online presence that greatly exceeded our own. Our one advantage was that my boss, Eddie, was liked by pretty much everyone I ever met, and while I never met Hank (né, Harry Levy) personally, I honestly can’t remember a kind word that any of his customers (many of whom were also our own) ever had to say about him. Granted, you can’t give too much credence to this kind of second-hand information.
From the Medford Patch a few days ago:
The owner of a magic store in Medford is charged with credit card fraud and making false statements to authorties after he tried to pull off a $500,000 trick on one of his customers, according to court filings.
Harry P. Levy, the owner of Hank Lee’s Magic Factory, admitted he made 134 false transactions between 2009 to 2011 on a customer’s American Express card totaling $561,927, according to a stipulation of facts signed by Levy and prosecutors. The document was filed in Federal Court in Boston Friday.
[...]
Levy faces a total of up to 20 years in prison on the charges.
Sorry Hank. Hope you remembered to conceal a bobby pin in your lips before being fitted for your new bracelets.
(H/t to Magic Steve for the heads up. If you’re ever lookin’ to hire a magician in or around the North Shore area, he’s your legerde-man.)
And I’m feeling fine about it.
Ottawa will save $11-million annually by scrapping the one-cent coin, an amount that reflects the cost of supplying the economy with both new and recirculated pennies.
The Royal Canadian Mint produced 660 million pennies in 2011, federal officials said.
The Harper government says savings for business and consumers will vastly exceed what Ottawa recoups by killing the penny.
A study by one Canadian bank, Desjardins, has estimated the economic costs of the penny for the private sector total $150-million annually. This includes counting, storing and transporting the coins.
Some dour souls are penny-pinchers. I’m a penny vacuum-cleanerer. I see a penny on the carpet, and in my head I’m like “fuck bending over for that worthless piece of shit; it’s just gonna end up in a jar!” and I run the vacuum cleaner right over it and savour the sound of it clinking up the tube. Now I’ll know to savour it special this the last year of the pocket-jetsam’s minting.
Yes. I hoover money. Stick that in your mouth and eat it, starving African children.
Here’s a picture of a penny symbolically fading out (of focus):
Makes me itch for my vacuum cleaner.
Not so thrilled about the 10% cut to the CBC. Nor the retirement age thing (raised from 65 to 67). On bunging old people up in jobs…
The youth unemployment rate, roughly double the national average at 14%, is known to be low because those who have given up are not counted.
The TD report found that the relative scarcity of jobs is putting downward pressure on wages — for every 1% rise in the youth unemployment rate, it found a 6%-7% drop in wages. Jobs are scarce not just because of the high number of graduates with degrees fighting over the same small pool, but because older, more experienced workers are either looking for replacement jobs after the recession, or are delaying retirement and staying in the work force longer, slowing down opportunities for newcomers.
With 535 people in congress (plus six non-voting members of the House of Representatives, but who gives a shit about them?), you’d hope that the law of large numbers would ensure that the American people are being represented by a relatively diverse cross-section of society in the national political process.
Then again, such hopes would also make you a naïve ass.
According to recent articles by ABC News (12/27/11) and MSN Money (1/15/12),
The average American’s net worth has dropped 8 percent during the past six years, while members of Congress got, on average, 15 percent richer, according to a New York Times analysis of financial disclosure. The median net worth of members of Congress is about $913,000, compared with about $100,000 for the country at large, the Times’ analysis found. [ABC]
Broken down:
At least Americans are realistic about how much they’re being screwed over, right? Yes, and we also love exercise and hate high fructose corn syrup!
More MJ:
See, Republicans? Nobody hates rich people because they’re rich. Hell, we wanna be rich, too! And we know we’ll never get there if some income disparity doesn’t exist in the first place. All we ask is that everyone play by the same rules (HA! “Studies by Alan Ziobrowski at Georgia State University conclude that our reps regularly outperform the markets by large amounts due to the ‘significant information advantage’ they derive from their jobs.” [MSN]) and that we are at least given the chance to pursue geniune upward mobility – you know, without having to move to Canada or Europe.
Now where the hell did I put my cravat…?
Why do poor people (and, for that matter, lower-through-upper middle class people) simultaneously hate and envy the rich? Maybe it’s because they do boorish shit like leaving their pet $13 million when they die.
As MSN money taunts:
It’s hard to imagine an heir more indifferent to his huge inheritance than Tommaso.
The 4-year-old Italian black cat — a former stray on the streets of Rome — is apparently now the richest cat in the world, according to the International Business Times.
Tommaso inherited an estate worth $13 million when its owner, Maria Assunta, died two weeks ago at the age of 94, The Telegraph reported. Assunta was the widow of a property tycoon, and had no children or living relatives.
Thank dio that Italy’s financial management skills are only mostly nonexistent, rather than entirely so.
Assunta’s estate included a large bank balance and property in Rome, Milan and Calabria, but Tommaso’s care was entrusted to the nurse who cared for the cat’s owner in her final months. In fact, because Italian law doesn’t permit animals to inherit property, the attorney for the estate gave the cat and his fortune to Assunta’s former nurse.
A lot tougher to be mad about someone giving millions to her nurse instead of her cat, no? But that was obviously an unintentional byproduct of Assunta’s legal ignorance; otherwise Tommaso would be rolling in genuine Fancy Feast till the end of his days. (Presumably he still will be, but at least his caregiver can use those few extra dollars for things that also benefit humans.) Now I’m not saying that we should make a law specifically dictating how and to whom one can leave one’s money when one dies (and I phrase it such because the only thing left when I die will undoubtedly have to be counted in ones), but such excessive displays of wealth-induced eccentricity are incredibly hard to stomach when you calculate how much good could have come from Assunta’s estate had she given her cat, say, a mere $1 million to live on for the rest of his lazy life while bequeathing the rest to charity. Hell, even giving it to the local animal shelter would have at least benefitted multiple animals (including strays, like Tommaso himself used to be) rather than just one prodigiously pandered-to pussy.
The article goes on to list a number of pets who have inheritted — or stand to inherit — millions upon their owner’s death, but one owner’s name stood out to me as easily the most aggravating (and, frankly, surprising) of them all. Apparently (at least according to Woman’s Day):
Oprah’s pampered pooches stand to inherit a whopping $30 million if they happen to outlive their owner.
Christ. Okay, look: I know Oprah is a self-made billionaire (as much as anyone can be a “self-made” anything, that is — see: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) who can do whatever the hell she wants with her fortune. And I know that she’s already one of the great philanthropists of our time and is probably going to leave the bulk of her estate to various charitable organizations when she finally kicks the gilded bucket. But $30 million to take care of your dogs once you’re no longer around? Just because that’s merely your annual Ring Ding budget doesn’t mean it couldn’t do a shit-ton of good for no fewer than millions of less-fortunate humans were you to allocate it a bit more judiciously.
And here’s the thing: I’m actually making this argument from the position of someone who would totally leave money in his will for the continued care of a beloved pet if he had any to spare when the reaper came a’callin’. But there are only so many diamond-studded collars an animal can wear in a year — not to mention only so many that an animal should wear in a year, which is zero. It’s not exactly differential calculus to estimate how much you spend on your pet each year and multiply it by the most ridiculously optimistic number of years he or she could possibly live. Factor in a reasonable salary for the kind soul willing to provide such posthumous looking-after and badda-bing, you’ve still ensured your domesticated darling’s future well-being while still having enough money left over to, I don’t know, bulid another goddamn school or finance any number of other worthy endeavors.
Money, man. It not only goes to your head — it wallpapers your entire cranium.
Here’s a ridiculous idea: let’s give a 32-year-old athlete more than $200 million for a ten year contract.
“But Albert Pujols the best player in baseball!” you whine.
Doesn’t matter. If he hasn’t peaked already, he’s nearly guaranteed to within the next few years, which means you’d be paying him stud money at $20 mil a year for the worst years of his career for the majority of his contract, stealing money from future prospects in the long term in order to capitalize on his admittedly unsurpassed skills in the short term. Idiotic. Check the actuarial tables: 99% of athletes — even namby-pamby baseball players — start to decline after their mid-30s. (Pulled that out of my ass, but it’s probably close. I’ll look it up when work stops kicking said ass.)
Plus, this should have the Marlins scared shitless:
Pujols, who turns 32 in January, has led the Cardinals to two World Series titles, including this season. He has a career batting average of .328 with 445 home run and a 1.037 OPS. He was below his career norms last season but still batted .299 with 37 home runs and 99 RBI.
I’ll remphasize: Pujols wasn’t just below his career norms last season; he was waaaay below.
Could he bounce back? Absolutely, and he probably will, but if you think he’s going to play at his career average over the next decade, you’re not paying attention to how life works.
So the long-awaited “Best and Worst Run States in America” report is finally available from 24/7 Wall St (and by “long awaited,” I mean, “never even knew existed till MSN clued me in a few minutes ago”), and boy is it…umm…a list?
You can read every excruciating methodological detail and the subsequent state-by-state ranking justifications via the previous link, but if, like me, you only care about the end results, here they are in table form for your viewing convenience:
| 1. Wyoming 2. Nebraska 3. North Dakota 4. Minnesota 5. Iowa 6. Utah 7. Vermont 8. Virginia 9. Kansas 10. South Dakota |
11. Maryland 12. Hawaii 13. New Hampshire 14. Maine 15. Pennsylvania 16. Wisconsin 17. Washington 18. Alaska 19. North Carolina 20. Missouri |
21. Delaware 22. Connecticut 23. Indiana 24. Ohio 25. Texas 26. Idaho 27. Montana 28. Oklahoma 29. Tennessee 30. Massachusetts |
31. Oregon 32. Georgia 33. Colorado 34. New York 35. Arkansas 36. Alabama 37. New Jersey 38. Mississippi 39. West Virginia 40. Florida |
41. New Mexico 42. Louisiana 43. Rhode Island 44. Kentucky 45. South Carolina 46. Nevada 47. Arizona 48. Michigan 49. Illinois 50. California |
After scanning the list, I consulted my tentative knowledge of U.S. geography and began to wonder if there might be any sort of cartographical correlation between the best- and worst-run states — to the country as a whole and to each other in particular. So with the motivating combination of a bug up my butt and too much time on my hands, I crafted the following color-coded map using the pain-in-the-ass “Do-It-Yourself” mapmaker utility available at monarch.tamu.edu/~maps2.
The results were…interesting? Irrelevant? Somewhere in between? You tell me:
[Editor's note: The color choices were limited, so for ease of viewing, I tried to make the groupings run lighter --> darker and greener --> bluer as the states moved from best to worst in arbitrary subsets of 10.]
I don’t have time for a deeper analysis now, but if anyone wants to steal my thunder and engage in some armchair analyzing themselves, by all means. I don’t have much of a head for this shit anyway.
Hey, guess who topped the Global Fortune 500 this year with $422 billion in revenue ($16 billion in profits)? Walmart!
Now guess who’s “substantially rolling back coverage for part-time workers and significantly raising premiums for many full-time staff”? Walmart!
Because, you know, fuck coming away with only $15 billion next year.
