Tag: cashmoney

An $80,000 Volkswagen Golf LOL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always been a fan of the VW Golf, or as the hipster in me still likes to refer to them as Rabbits.  The boy racer that I once pretended like I was loved their versatility, tunability, the hatchback experience, and their general performance for a car that was the slightly more upscale alternative to the Honda fandom.  The only thing that ever prevented me from ever owning my own was simply the fact that I just couldn’t ever afford to get a Volkswagen, because whenever I’d been in the market for a car, they were always at a price point that I didn’t feel comfortable committing to.

And then I read this story about a super-limited edition Golf going to be released, to where only 333 will be produced, a pithy number as if they thought they were Bugatti or Lamborghini or something, will be a sickly-looking greenish yellow and will cost roughly the equivalent of $80,000 USD, and I roll my eyes and come to the conclusion that I will probably never own a Golf in my life, and think about how the car and its branding have seemingly grown a little too big for its britches.

Much like the Honda Civic, the VW Golf has long since strayed from its general position in their respective automotive lineups.  Originally the economical, entry-level compact options for their makers, both of them have grown up substantially with the generations and have turned into ridiculously expensive budget sport cars where honestly, their name is more valuable than the sum of the parts that they’re composed of.

But $80k is absurd.  Asinine.  Completely ridiculous and out of touch.  I wasn’t a fan of Honda finally bringing the Civic Type-R to America, only to turbo charge it and slap a $45k price tag on it, but at least it’s not an $80,000 Golf.

$80K is like Supra territory.  Numerous BMW and Mercedes options.  The price point of importing a R32 Nissan Skyline and taking care of all associated costs and maintenance.  Nearly double of what my car cost for 1/3 of the capacity and utility.  Nearly double the cost of the Audi that I would much rather have.  Hell, it’s nearly double the cost of the R32 Golf which was already the super version of the Golf, and for what?  19 extra horsepower, that most people wouldn’t be able to legally capitalize without breaking the law?

And all for a Volkswagen Golf.  The econobox hatchback that was every person my age’s first car type of car.  No fucking thanks, although I will be interested the kinds of schmucks out there who will inevitably hoover up these 333 krauts.  I can only imagine the wildly varied types of bullshit they’ll tell themselves and others to justify dropping $80k on a gaudy fluffed out Golf.

WWE’s new blets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have to say, I’m very entertained by what the WWE has been doing over the last few months, with their management of their slew of championships.  Roman Reigns has had such a chokehold over the two world championships that the company is forced to introduce a new world-equivalent championship.  The RAW women’s champion is on Smackdown and the Smackdown women’s champion is on RAW.

And now, in honor of Roman Reigns’ aforementioned chokehold over the company’s world championships having surpassing 1,000 days, the WWE has decided to fold his two blets into a singular championship, and awarded him with a brand new, gold variant of The Logo blet, and are calling it the Undisputed Championship or at least that’s what the blet itself says.

I guess the Universal championship is kind of dead at this point, but I’m sure the WWE will rewrite the history books in some convoluted manner to make sure all holders of all variants of the title that have ever been folded in are accounted for except Chris Benoit.

The best part is though, with the Roman’s two blets now merged into one blet, he or Paul Heyman are looking a little inadequate when it comes to hardware.  So it’s good that the WWE introduced another world championship blet, because that way Roman can get back to being a dual blet holder in due time.  And I am here for it, for when Roman Reigns inevitably becomes WWE Undisputed World Heavyweight Universal Champion.

The funniest thing about all this blet shuffling is that I have no doubt in my mind that a lot of it is driven by the need for fresh merch.  Prior to the introduction of these two new blets, the WWE had basically made replicas of every active blet in the company, and had nothing new in the pipeline.  I’m guessing the parade of bullshit tribute blets, SEC college blets, and like the three MLB collaboration blets haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire, so if WWE Shop wants to have some high-dollar items to peddle, they need to start developing some new shit, which is exactly what they’ve done.

My knee-jerk reaction is that I don’t have much interest in either the new big gold blet, or the new big gold blet, especially with their $499 price tag at full retail.  It’s like AEW fucked the market with their ridiculously high-priced replicas, so WWE Shop has taken that as established market and are selling their newer shit accordingly.  But never say never, and if in the 1-2 times a year where they sometimes have some deep price cuts, anything can happen if the inspiration and the financial means lines up just right.

Unsolicited Delivery Advice #001: Never assume a manual tip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I number this as if I plan on ever doing more of these in the future, but you never know.  Ironically if I had any camera presence, I could probably become like TikTok famous for spreading unsolicited advice, but I’m an old dad and don’t want to put forth the hustle to be an obnoxious vlogger of any capacity.

But I still do some gigging on the side, because I like to make a little bit of extra scratch to have hopes of using to buy personal shit for myself, but really it’s mostly to supplement my income and build up a little safety net for all the endless parade of life’s expenses and parenthood.

At this point, I’ve got over 400 deliveries completed in my time doing it, and have a fairly decent grasp of how the whole process works, to the point where I have my own sets of rules and guidelines that I try to adhere to, in order to not burn out and feel like it’s a necessity and not a side hustle.

One of the rules I have is to not accept any shit pings.  The ones that are under $3, because those are almost certainly fares where the cheap motherfucker on the other end has added no tip, and regardless of the fact that I deliver myself, even if I weren’t, I’m 100% on board with the whole notion of no tip, no trip.  If I’m ordering food, I wouldn’t expect anyone to pick up my fare if I’m declaring a $0 tip up front, so cheap assholes out there who don’t tip shouldn’t expect me to pick up their bullshit requests.

The only exceptions to the rule are when there’s a trip bonus in play, and I’m just trying to clear as many trips as possible as to get a bonus from like UberEats or DoorDash, or it’s just such a miserably slow night that I take something just to get on the board.

But for the most part, acceptance rate be damned, if I’m pinged for a fare that’s sub-$3, I’m not only declining it, but I’m cursing the customer out loudly in the confines of my own car, saying shit like they can starve, fuck that, etc.  These cheap fucks all hide behind the veil of anonymity and use it to let their inner stingy cheapskates out, and delivery drivers have it ten times worse than restaurant servers.

Anyway, what prompted this whole post is there was a night that was pretty dreadfully slow.  I had already made a first drop, and I was hoping to pick up a second far so that I could get a pithy $2 trip bonus for making two deliveries.  I get a ping, it’s shit, for $2.83 for Baskin Robbins cakes, but the estimated distance is but two miles, it’s on my way home, so I figure fuck it, I take it, it becomes a $4.83 ping with the bonus, which is still pretty shitty, but at least it’s not a difficult delivery.

Or so I thought. I get into the Baskin Robbins, and the workers tell me they have one of two items, and the cake they wanted, they didn’t have.  So I’m like wtf, I don’t want to cancel the order since I wanted the trip, so they suggest reaching out to the customer.  I text them to let them know that they don’t have the cake they want, and we go back and forth for way longer than $2.83 should’ve gotten them, but the TL;DR is that they pick a different cake that is in stock, their cost doesn’t change, and I’m on my way to drop off.

I get to the house, and of course the instruction is to leave at door; this is what I prefer, but when it’s coming from a no-tipper, it’s obvious that they’re also trying to avoid the shame of facing a person they’re stiffing.  Anyway, I get to the door, and through some windows I can see all these party decorations, and I’m thinking to myself that maybe I just rescued a birthday party or something.  Which explains why the customer was so eager to get any cake at all.

So after dropping off, I’m feeling a little good that maybe there’s a chance that I just saved a party by coming through with the clutch cakes.  And maybe this person will really be one of those customers who love to tell themselves that they don’t tip up front, because they WILL tip afterwards, depending on the level of service received.  And seeing as how I didn’t outright cancel their order, and worked with them to provide an alternate and get their shit to them, I figured my level of service was pretty high.

Obviously this post doesn’t exist if that had happened, and unsurprisingly the cocksucker didn’t tip at all.  I’m not surprised by it one bit, but considering the extra effort I put into their request, I had hopes that this might’ve been the first time that someone recognized it and rewarded it accordingly.

So lesson learned, and lesson to impart: if looks like a shit ping, smells like a shit ping, it most likely is, going to be a shit ping.  Don’t believe that a customer is going to be remotely capable of removing their head out of their own self-absorbed ass to be able to give one iota of consideration of you, the deliverer.  They can’t even be bothered to click a fucking thumbs up after their shit arrives, because you know they’re not going to re-open the app again unless there’s a problem, until they next time they need it, at least a day later. 

In fact, all customers are shitheads (unsolicited advice #002?), and are assumed to be trash unless proven otherwise.  But we still need ‘em, and it’s a vicious cycle in which we co-exist in.

Yet another losing faith in humanity scenarios

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In one of my friends group chats, one of my bros posted a picture of himself with a book, attempting to be funny; it’s okay because he’s black obviously.  Now of course there’s a part of me that did think it was funny, but more than that, I had more questions than I thought it was amusing the whole irony of black guy perusing book with inflammatorily racist title.  Namely, the curiosity on if it really were a book with 328 pages with nothing but the N-word in it, or if it were just an attention-grabbing title, with the contents of the book actually being something substantial.

Nope, it was the exact polar opposite in the sense that it actually had absolutely nothing at all inside of it, as in zero text whatsoever, between the header and footer of every page.  And according to Amazon, it’s not even actually 328 pages, so it’s more like 242 blank sheets of paper sandwiched into a book form, and it’s somehow $14.99 on Amazon, and shocking to absolutely nobody is that it’s been purchased enough to have a slew of verified purchasing reviewers doing their best jobs of being internet comics and failing predictably with “reviews” of it.

All the same, what we have here is another classic example of people out there in the world who knowingly put out means for people to spend actual currency that are useless, pointless, known wastes of said currency; and then to no surprise, people go out and actually do it, because they think it’s funny and/or they really are that stupid to where they’re completely at ease with dumping their cash for goods or services that serve no purpose whatsoever, instead of, possibly putting it to any good use at all.  Not for themselves, not for charity, not for anyone at all, but basically the equivalent of knowingly setting their own personal cash on fire.

It’s like the idiots who raised $50,000+ for some clown’s GoFundMe trying to make a potato salad, or that time where Cards Against Humanity had a live-streaming sale where people paid in real-time to keep an excavator operating digging holes for absolutely no reason, or when Cards Against Humanity literally sold nothing for $5 a pop and still raised tons of money.

People just, love to throw their money away, when they think in doing so, they’re in on some clever joke.  And it’s instances like this where it’s apparent that some people have too much money or too little intelligence or both, and it just turns into scenarios where the end result is just a nihilistic feeling of disappointment and losing faith in the species to where people would rather spend $5 on nothing than putting it to absolutely any form of productivity instead.

I know this is rich coming from a person who has spend an inordinate amount of money on replica wrestling belts, but at least those purchases are going to businesses or individuals, or parties where amassing money is some sort of objective, and not knowingly throwing it into a barrel fire.

And here’s the worst part; while looking up the particular book, just to get my facts straight, it turns out that it’s not alone.  I wish I could say I were surprised by this, but of course I’m not surprised, that there are basically two other alternatives, with one of them literally changing out one word and adding “Fun” into it, while the other is just fewer alleged pages.  And that’s just on Amazon alone, I can only imagine how many other copycat “publications” of this same title are floating out there.

Naturally, people are buying them, and aside from disgust, I’m also a little envious in the fact that these clowns are also getting a cut of the purchases of their bad jokes, while I’m struggling to make ends meet every single month and always looking for ways to try and make some extra money in order to have some breathing room.  I can’t say that I wouldn’t be above trying to capitalize on bullshit to make money, but there’d probably be a part of me that wouldn’t want to be a flagrant hypocrite in order to try it out.

This is what we call a smart bride

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I would have killed to have had a wedding food budget under $2,000: Georgia bride sparks internet debate after revealing that she had catered her wedding with food from Chili’s

Camp me firmly and unquestionably on the side that is completely on board with catering from Chili’s.  I would have been willing to shave my head if I could have paid 1/6 of what I ultimately paid for catering at my wedding.  Not to mention the menu itself sounded perfectly adequate, if people didn’t hear the Chili’s name attached to it:

served guests an all-Chili’s menu including chicken tenders sliders, egg rolls, chips and salsa, Cajun chicken pasta and salad

I know the woke society we live in is all anti-chain and tends to automatically dislike restaurants like Chili’s, but I have no problem with Chili’s.  In fact, of all the lily-white chain restaurants out there, I’d go out on a limb and say Chili’s is probably among my favorites if not my favorite one.  Their ribs are fantastic, they used to have these tacos that were both good and economical, and frankly there’s nothing on their menu that wouldn’t hit the spot on any given day.

When a Taco Mac is slammed to the gills despite the fact that they’re a chain restaurant themselves, just regional, it’s nice to know that I can probably get expedient and quality table service from a Chili’s if there’s one nearby, which has been the exact case more than just a few times in my life.

I feel like I went to a wedding within the last year where the menu was kind of like this, and I’ll be lying if I didn’t say that it wasn’t completely satisfying to go back up for seconds and get a generous helping of chicken tenders with three different dipping sauces.  It might not have been from Chili’s, but the menu seemed to have some overlap here.

But seriously, I’m completely on the side of this bride who sounds like she made the best of her budget and went with an option that provided decent grub at an extremely economical price point, and I feel like anyone who criticizes her choices probably needs to get their pretentious heads out of their pretentious asses, and get over their prejudices of chain restaurants.  More so if they themselves have never had to plan a wedding and deal with the ridiculous cost of catering, because that shit is absolutely bonkers and they 100% put a cost on the fact that it’s for a wedding in the pricing.

The Galactic Starcruiser experience shutting down pleases me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Surprise, surprise: there aren’t as many people willing to plunk down nearly $5,000 for two days, to live out Star Wars fantasies, as Disney decides to shutter the Galactic Starcruiser experience in September

I like to think that this was some convoluted experiment by Disney, in seeing just how far they could push a price tag before it actually proves to be insurmountable by even the richest of the privileged class.  And it appears that they’ve found their answer with the Galactic Starcruiser, and that roughly $1,200 per person per night for a two-night experience seems to have found that breaking point where they just can’t swindle enough people in order to remain open.

Now I like Star Wars, even though my fandom has been put through the ringer throughout the passage of time and the growth of the internet.  Sure, my fandom has been disrespected, invalidated and questioned by the smarmy segments of fans that feel the requirement to test the level of interest, and the internet has more than opened my eyes to just how shitty and insufferable the base majority of Star Wars fans are, but there’s no level of dedication to the property I could achieve to where I would think it was a good idea to drop nearly $5k in order for mythical wife and I to have a two day LARP in the world of Star Wars.

All through the journey of speculation, development and execution of the whole Galactic Starcruiser idea, it was pretty early revealed that this was something that really only those with the deepest of pockets would be able to partake in.  And when stuff like this is priced out of oblivion for the rest of the, well world, I begin to feel resentment towards it, so it makes me feel smug satisfaction to hear that Disney is pulling the plug on it, in such short order.

At the same time, I feel more disdain for the Mouse at not just, lowering prices, and making the whole thing a little more attainable for the rest of us pleebs, because if it weren’t more than my property taxes, I’d probably be interested.  The idea of shuttering it versus lowering the prices is an egregious act of arrogance of the biggest asshole variety that really could only come from the money printer known as Disney.

But when it really comes down to it, good riddance to an experience that really was catering to the 1%, and it’s very amusing that even the 1% reached their limits with this whole idea, to where even a company that’s so adept at glorifying their wins and hiding their weaknesses like Disney, to have such a public and monumental L on display.

Because as an annual passholder, I can say all this shit, because nobody hates Disney more than their annual passholders.

Of course the Braves had to sell their jerseys too

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to clowning on the stupid shit that happens in professional sports, nobody is exempt, especially the teams that I say that I am a fan of.  After all, nobody hates X more than fans of X, so when the Mets were getting dunked on for their ludicrously large sponsorship patches on their jerseys, it wasn’t because they were the Mets, I would’ve done the same to absolutely anybody.

Which brings us to the Braves, who have also jumped aboard the sponsorship patch train, because they clearly need the money; $588 million in revenue in 2022 barely covered the spike in the cost of eggs that occurred.  And much like the Mets who sold their jersey sleeves to a local entity, the Braves sold their sleeves to an Atlanta company, Quikrete, which is among the leaders of the entire concrete industry in the western hemisphere.

But not only did they sell their sleeves to Quikrete, they also did exactly what the Mets did, at first: not really consider just how ridiculously large the sponsorship patch would actually be on their sleeves.  I mean seriously, the patch is maybe a 25% size increase from being the primary logo on the entire fucking jersey, and the Braves would become the first franchise in baseball to go the route of futbol, and have the chief sponsor be the biggest focal point of the jersey, even over the team’s name or city.

I don’t know how many people reading this (zero) have any understanding of embroidery or any experience with it, but it’s tremendously difficult to engrain any sort of details in embroidery.  That being said, Quikrete’s likely insistence that their logo look like it was on one of their signature yellow bags of concrete probably explains why it’s so fucking huge; in order for the tiny little wrinkles to show on the corners of the bag that help make it look like a bag of concrete are the reason why the whole thing has to be the size of an actual bag of concrete, making their logo shout louder than a MARTA rider hoping to avoid the post-Taylor Swift concert rush.

Either way, my theories about how the patches might affect player performance for the Mets now also apply to the Braves.  And considering the Mets’ performance was pretty pitiful, and the fact that they relented and actually redesigned their sponsor logo, let’s hope the Braves wizen up a little bit sooner than the Mets did before their nice little cushion they’ve build in the National League disintegrates.

Speaking of which, among the best slams on the internet to emerge from the mass-dunking on the Braves for selling out, was this particular gem that I chuckled heartily at:

Right to the jugular.  Good job Barves, for never straying too far from the need to be greedy.