Tag: cashmoney

The world will one day drown in cardboard

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every other Sunday, I spend an inordinate amount of time outside with a box cutter, slashing up cardboard boxes as if I were plotting to hijack an airplane.  This is an activity that I have grown quite exhausted with, and every other Sunday, I curse my waste management company for being greedy pricks who have handcuffed my general area with a monopoly of the waste disposal everywhere.

Seriously, they’ve literally purchased all of their competitors, and regardless of the fact that there are waste bins with three different companies, it turns out that they’re all owned by the monopoly and it’s just more cost efficient to let all the other-brand bins remain as-is.  I know, because I’ve reached out to these other companies to seek an alternative waste provider, only to be told this.

The monopoly has grown complacent and lazy with their service, and used coronavirus as an excuse to curb their recycling pickup to every other week, citing safety for their workers or some other bullshit, but really it’s probably to reduce overhead and maximize profits, especially considering the reduction in service seemed to coincide with an increase of cost.

As it is, every two weeks, my household has the capability to generate an absurd amount of cardboard that needs to be recycled, because we do pretty much all of our shopping online, and we’re purchasing a ton of shit because we’ve got a second kid on the way.  Needless to say, without any sort of actual physical effort involved, the amount of cardboard we typically amass is usually impossible to be securely placed inside of the pedestrian 96-gallon waste bin provided by our waste management company.

So every two weeks, when I’m in the driveway cutting boxes down to more compactable chunks, all I can think is that the world is destined to drown in cardboard, because of all the online shopping that is done these days.  And as convenient as Amazon is, they’re the ones probably leading the forefront of this inevitable destiny, and I can’t imagine that no matter the claims of recycled materials or environmentally-friendly initiatives, I’m dubious that the recycling of all this cardboard can keep up with the demand for shipping boxes, and that the world is really headed for a future where we’ll drown in all this brown corrugated shit.

Given the endless escalation of Amazon Prime, and online shopping, I would wager that I am the only household that generates ridiculous amounts of cardboard on a regular basis, and it’s simply a game of basic math; all the households that generate tons of cardboard every single week, versus the time and resources it takes to break down, sort and actually recycle all this shit, and we’re all on borrowed time.

Unless someone invents a way to turn all this cardboard into masses of land to plop into the water like the landfills in Sim City, I do think that if coronavirus doesn’t kill us, overpopulation doesn’t kill us, climate change doesn’t kill us, then drowning in cardboard probably stands a chance to land on the endless list of things that will one day overrun the earth.

Yeah good luck with that

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Job Creators Network sues Major League Baseball for $100M and demands that the 2021 All-Star Game be returned to Atlanta

Sometimes I wonder if third-parties like this get involved in scenarios like this because they actually care, or if they’re just chasing the potential to get some free money in a settlement when and if an entity like MLB just doesn’t feel like dealing with this bullshit and is willing to throw some money at it in order to get it out of their hair.

Obviously with a case like this it’s undoubtedly going to be the former, because anyone with a brain knows that it’s nigh impossible to go at a gozillion dollar company like MLB and actually expect to have a fighting chance.  Frankly, I’d love to see MLB take it on and potentially counter-sue for the inconvenience and bury a shitty-sounding organization like “Job Creators Network” into oblivion.

Normally, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge an organization that sounds like it’s trying to create jobs, but when I saw this blurb, I kind of felt like I knew what I needed to know to be able to determine a side I’d rather side with:

The lawsuit was filed in New York City by attorney Howard Kleinhendler, who was also involved in several failed lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

So basically some baked potato-supporting brainless fucks who are picking fruitless fights for no real good reason.

The funny thing is that I normally love to see when MLB or Braves Corporate get owned, but in this particular instance, I have to stand with MLB, but at least Braves Corporate is still getting owned in the process.

Because there is a 0% chance that the All-Star game is coming back to Atlanta, and I’d like to see it remain that way; for both symbolic reasons that Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 personally ushered in by Bubba Kemp is horrific and flagrant, and that Braves Corporate, Truist and all their crooked cronies, constituents and talking heads are humiliated, owned and denied all the money that an All-Star game would’ve brought to them.  Bonus also being a big super-spreader event avoiding Atlanta Smyrna, alleviating roads, businesses and traffic.

Either way, this is a story that’s pathetic on all fronts, no matter what source it’s read from.  It’s a waste of time, money and resources for those who have to deal with it, and a perfect example of peoples’ eager willingness to do it in order to gain notoriety, exposure and potentially free money if the right people just want to see it go away.

God bless China

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret in the world that nepotism runs rampant in the world, and it’s bad enough when you’re in out in said world and people are always trying to use the phrase “it’s who you know..” when referring to the perceived advantages some people get over others, regardless of their merit, qualifications or deservedness, and it’s even worse when you find out that there are people in positions of note, that just so happen to be related to people in even higher positions in the world.

But as obvious as nepotism is in the world, at least in places like America, as third-world of a place we are here, people still try to pretend like nepotism isn’t an issue.  The relatives of those in a place of power at least try to bring some degree of experience, or potential sense of belonging when they try to capitalize on their familial connections.

Well that kind of shit doesn’t fly as much overseas, especially in a place like China, with this particular example being dead eye obvious to the concept of nepotism: a wealthy businessman purchases some semi-pro/minor league soccer club, and then demands that the coach plays his son… his 126 kg son (278 lbs.).

I mean the picture above says everything that needs to be said about this whole situation.  Yes, the boy is quite rotund and looks like he should have no business being on a soccer field, but what if he was really just the living embodiment of a troll customized character from an EA Sports game where they were made deliberately fat but had a 99 rating in every attribute?

The son’s personal highlights from the game he was in finishes the painting of the picture to those whom might think that he was potentially a lion in elephant’s clothing, and the best part was the ending to the clip.

The point is, god bless China, because it’s one of the cultures out there with the technological means to broadcast their examples of their archaic, sexist preferential treatment of little prince first sons, even if it means putting them into scenarios where they have to know the rest of the world is going to laugh at if they ever catch wind of it.

Venom 2: Poor Woody

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw an ad on theFacebook for a second Venom movie, and my first thought was, surprisingly, whyyyyyyy?  I never saw the first one because I thought it couldn’t possibly be anything but suck, and although from what I read, lots of critics seemed to agree with that assessment, the almighty financial results seemed to prove contrary to that notion, grossing $856 million during its run.

So regardless of if the movie’s story, plot, acting or production sucked, it’s still a success if it rakes in money, and if it rakes in money, a sequel is all but inevitable.  So here we are, on the doorstep of a Venom 2, the sequel to a movie that has everything to do about Spider-Man but somehow doesn’t have a single thing to do with Spider-Man.

Frankly, I could save all zero of my readers the trouble and just say to go back and read the post about the first Venom (above) and just swap out “Tom Hardy” with “Woody Harrelson,” because the sentiment is exactly the same for Woody as I felt for Tom Hardy.  In spite of the star power a guy like Woody can bring to the table, and in spite of all the positive credibility he’s built up over the last decade with stuff like True Detective and getting into the Star Wars universe, he’s pissed his chance to get implemented into Marvel, by tying himself up to a Sony Pictures Marvel film and not a Marvel Studios Marvel film.

By doing so, not only does he follow in the footsteps of a guy like Tom Hardy who blew his shot at getting onto the money printer bus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s also going to be mentioned in the same breath as the walking STD Jared Leto whom last I heard, was going to be in a Morbius film, which is another Spider-Man sub-property that will try to have a film that has nothing to do with Spider-Man.

Frankly, I’m lukewarm on Tom Hardy, and I couldn’t think any less of Jared Leto, but I actually like Woody Harrelson.  I’m sad for him that his people have steered him into such a stinky detour into the Marvel family, and I figure he could’ve been so much better as a lesser character in the MCU than a pretty high-tier villain in the Sony…verse, because at least he’d have an actual adversary to go up against.

I don’t have any doubts that Woody will probably be able to squeeze a good bit of watchability portraying Cletus Kassady who eventually becomes Carnage, but when the day is over, it’ll be like polishing a turd.  With no fucking SPIDER-MAN to ultimately oppose him, there’s only so much road for he and Venom to actually be able to go down before they run into a brick wall of failure because you can’t really have a bunch of villains going at each other without their origin being seemingly legally forbidden from interacting with them.

Either way, much like the first Venom, I have zero intention of watching the second.  I wouldn’t watch either of them short of being paid to do so, and even then I’d probably demand my professional freelance hourly rate in order to do so, and I’d probably still bitch about wanting my money back afterward.  I shed exactly one tear for Woody’s involvement in this film, and wish that he could’ve been some rando third-tier property in the MCU than to be a first-tier villain under Sony.

Revisiting An Old Post: Stephen Strasburg’s 2016 Extension

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the best things I ever felt I implemented into my brog was the On This Day plug-in, which lets me look back to the date in all prior years in which there was a post, and read, cringe and laugh at myself for all the bullshit I’ve spewed throughout the years.  Occasionally, I’ll come across a post that I’ve written in the past, and think to myself, man, how much things have changed, or man, how fucking wrong was I about that?

Regardless, it serves to be potential inspiration for things to write about that aren’t the depressing-ass news of every single day in the world and it’s not that I’m so narcissistic that I source the inspiration for my writing to myself as much as sometimes I just don’t want to look at local or national news, because it’s all just so demoralizing, for humanity.

So, back in 2016, I wrote this diatribe about how the Washington Nationals were probably embarking on the path to becoming the New York Mets, because they were repeatedly exercising the contract strategy of deferring salary to way later in the future in order to maintain financial flexibility in the present, which is exactly one of the reasons on how the New York Mets became the laughing stock of baseball, because they deferred payment of $5.9 million dollars for one year of Bobby Bonilla, and somehow turned it into 25 annual installments of $1.3 million dollars, which it doesn’t take a math whiz to realize is vastly more than $5.9M cumulatively.

Back then, the Nationals had signed star pitcher Stephen Strasburg to a seven-year, $175 million dollar contract to stay with the team, where in the fine text of the deal was that the Nationals would pay him a large portion of his salary many years after the deal was done, to which baseball nerds love to ridicule deferred money, because they years in which they are paying are often times years in which the actual player themselves are somewhere else, or not even actually in baseball anymore, so effectively paying for nothing.

The thing is, the Nationals also had other players on similar deals, namely pitchers Max Scherzer and Rafael Soriano; and the thing that I had decided to zero in on was this window of time between 2024 and 2028, in which the Nationals would be on the hook for deferred payments to guys that will most likely no longer be on the Nationals, or even playing in Major League Baseball.  It would be a five-year window in which the Nationals would be paying a total of $127 million dollars to literally, no actual players.

Obviously, this is a giant epic fail, and we should all laugh at the Washington Nationals right??

Continue reading “Revisiting An Old Post: Stephen Strasburg’s 2016 Extension” →

Here we go again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Up until this week, I had no idea what the Colonial Pipeline was.  But when I heard that it had something to do with the supply of fuel to the southeastern region of the United States, my first thought was, hmm, maybe I should go fill up my tank.

Seeing as how I still have the luxury to be able to be working from home, I decided to dip out for a spell, at a time in which people might still be working, and head to a gas station, since I was sitting on just a quarter of a tank left, and I didn’t want to be in a position to if another fuelmageddon were to begin, I’d be left with my dick out with no way to get more gas for my car.

The first gas station I got to, every pump was full, but it wasn’t pandemonium yet.  I did one circle, and was able to get to a pump, but it turned out that the display screen was busted, in a constant state of reset mode, and I wasn’t able to actually use it to start a transaction.  I punted on it, as there was already someone waiting behind me, and I was technically on the clock at work, and I figured I should get back sooner rather than later.

I went to another gas station, which was deserted, and I was able to fill up without any issue.  I felt relief knowing that if shit did hit the fan, I would be okay, because since I work from home, I barely drive much as it is, and I typically have been filling up like, once a month, and I’d hope that if any fuelmageddon were to start, I could probably weather the storm; sure mythical wife who has to drive daily wouldn’t be so lucky and her problem would become my problem because that’s what good spouses do, but at least that would be one less car to worry about.

Later in the day, when I went out to go grab dinner, I realized that the shit did hit the fan.  The first gas station I passed had all their prices pulled, the sure-fire tell that they were out of gas.  The giant QT gas station that I occasionally go to because they’re the cheap gas was all out of gas too.  And across the street was a line onto the main road, for the diminutive 4-pump Shell station that wasn’t probably long with the size of their facility.  The picture above is a RaceTrac gas station that I had the leisurely position to take a photo of at a red light.

But here we are again, another fuelmageddon plaguing the Atlanta area.  I remember the last one in 2008 like it were yesterday, seeing all this mayhem over gas, and I really hoped that it wouldn’t get to those levels, because that shit was really scary back then.  Prices climbed to $4+ a gallon, and any stations if they even had gas at all, put a $40 max transaction, which for most vehicles with a fuel tank over 10 gallons, wasn’t ever enough to fill up.

Naturally, a lot of this bullshit stems from the fact that Americans are greedy motherfuckers who always feel the need to hoard and amass for themselves, with zero compassion for their fellow human beings.  Even at the first station I went to, I saw one guy filling up gas canisters, as if he were preparing for the zombie apocalypse, and if stations were running dry, that means other people were doing similarly all over the place.

Of course, it goes without saying that with chaos comes people who try to profit, and there’s been no shortage of reports all over of people trying to re-sell fuel at egregious markups, which is nothing short of disgusting.

However the best part about this whole post is that as long as it took for me to write it is about how long the offline status of the Colonial Pipeline lasted, and at the time I’m writing this, it’s already been reported to be up again, and hopefully that means that fuel production will resume again to normalcy pretty soon.

But my biggest hope is that every asshole who hoarded and amassed gasoline over the last 48 hours, is stuck with canisters of gas in their garages and homes, that nobody needs, and they have to eat the cost of having stockpiled, while it deteriorates and stinks up their properties with noxious fumes.

People never fucking learn that their greed seldom results in anything good.

How about y’all just get better at baseball instead?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t pay a tremendous amount of attention to baseball anymore these days, but I came across this particular article in Sports Illustrated about how recently retired Jay Bruce basically retired because the shift killed his career, and how they opined that shifting should be made illegal in baseball.

Now as far as sports columnists go, I actually really like Tom Verducci.  He’s a well-versed guy who has good insight, adapts to the times, and has always had a fairly pleasant, readable tone in his writing throughout all the years that I’ve known of his existence, but I have to say that his opinion that the shift should be made illegal is one of the dumbest things that I’ve ever read.

In short, the shift is when baseball fielders position themselves heavily on one side of the field, because a batter might have a very predictable tendency to hit to that side of the field, thus optimizing their chances at being able to field a hit ball and get them out.  Good examples of the shift in action are this fictional instance known as the DeVanzo Shift from Artie Lange’s Beer League, and this hilariously similar but actually real instance known as the Joey Gallo Shift from the Houston Astros.

There is absolutely nothing illegal about teams shifting their fielders, and as a result over the last decade, the strategy has been adopted all over the league and employed on a countless number of mostly-left hand hitters, although there is no shortage of righties that hard shifts work on as well.  And as the number of teams employing shifts has gone up, the careers of many pull-happy hitters have gradually begun plunging down metaphorical toilets all over.

So instead of suggesting a not-illegal tactic be made illegal, here’s a wild and crazy suggestion for baseball players being victimized into retirement by the shift: get fucking better at baseball.

Learn to hit the other way.  Learn to drop a good bunt down the opposite field.  Pop your hips early and hit the ball where they ain’t; accept singles as not making outs instead of looking like a fucking idiot swinging for the fences, but then hitting a hard grounder to a shortstop playing in shallow right field 75 feet away from they’d normally be positioned.

Verducci suggesting MLB ban shifting is a sad pro-players suggestion that shields a league full of overrated assholes who get paid millions to play a kids game so that the league can make billions to exploit broadcast it.  Seriously, the league minimum last I checked was a hair under $500,000 a year, so even the shittiest 26th man on the roster is still making half a million dollars, but still can’t hit the ball to the opposite field, so the league should just change the rules?  Fuck that shit.

Players who can’t adapt to defensive strategies all deserve to have their stats and value plummet, because as often times as baseball can metaphorically be compared to life, it really is a story of adapt or die.  It’s ironic too, because so many baseball players get to the biggest league in the world, because at some point, they’re taught and demonstrated good hitting acumen, which usually involves being able to hit baseballs to various parts of the field except pull-side, but somewhere along the path of the majors, whether it’s poor coaching or aspiration of greed, guys end up these pull hitters who are eaten alive by shifts.

Guys like Pete Rose and Ichiro Suzuki are the greatest all-time hitters and played for eons respectively, because they were guys who could always hit to all parts of the field, even if they weren’t putting up gaudy home run numbers.  Meanwhile jobbers like Jay Bruce are calling it quits because they can’t produce because the shift is killing them, and all I can think of how sad and pathetic it is that there are guys that would rather quit, instead of perhaps going back to the cage and breaking the rust off of the ability to possibly hit the other way instead.

Like I said, I typically enjoy Verducci’s writing and opinions, but this one was a total stinker.  Instead of banning the shift, how about baseball players collectively just get better at playing baseball, and learning to hit baseballs to more parts of the field except their pull side?  That, right there, would be some real Moneyball shit, in the sense of it being an underutilized strategy to exploit.  

I’d love to see an MLB squad rebuild, with a mentality of building a team of good spray hitters, and then when the stars align, they go on a 98-win season, dinky-hitting all their opponents to death and march through the playoffs and bust open the World Series with all sorts of drag bunts, opposite field singles and triples down the line.  And after a few years of other teams copying that game-breaking strategy, maybe Verducci will write an article about how opposite-field hitting should be outlawed.