Tag: cashmoney

When in doubt, change the name, make logos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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Too distracted to enforce the distracted

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC

That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.  Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities.  One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.

And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?

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Would you rather have an awesome player longer, or an awesome player immediately?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is the age-old debate that resurfaces just about every single year, around this time during Major League Baseball’s Spring Training time.  Team X has a highly-touted prospect that has some hype behind their potential, and they get a substantial chunk of time with the Major League squad, getting to scrimmage against Major League players, and it turns out that they can not only hold their own, but excel immediately.

But then right about this time every year, citing some sort of bullshit excuse along the lines of “they need more seasoning” or “they need to work on hitting breaking balls on Monday night games with 75%+ humidity,” Team X, Team Y and every other team that has a hotshot prospect, reassigns them to minor league camp, where they will inevitably start out their seasons in either Triple-A or Double-A minor league baseball.

And then right on cue, the internet explodes up in arms about the fallacy of the so-called “abuse” of the “system,” how young prospect players are artificially held back in the minor leagues, regardless of how ready they are, so that the teams can manipulate their service clocks in a manner that would give them the maximum amount of time they are allowed to employ the player at the most minimal financial commitment.  How it’s crooked, and abusive to the players, and this and that concerning themselves over money that is hardly their own, and concerns that are curious to why people care so much about how a private business operates.

This year, the Atlanta Braves are the de facto Team X of 2018 Spring Training that is embarking on this journey, as they have just recently assigned 20-year old phenom outfielder Ronald Acuña to minor league camp, where he will remain and begin his season with the Triple-A Gwinnett Strippers Stripers.  Despite the fact that he had a blistering Spring Training up to this point where he literally led the big league squad in hitting, batting .432 with 4 home runs and 11 RBI, the Braves have stated the fluffy excuse of how he needs to “work on his flow,” to which not a single person can comprehend what that actually means, but whatever, Acuña is in the minor leagues, and just about any educated baseball fan with a brain would have guessed, was going to happen with 150% certainty.

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Can David Wright surpass Ryan Howard for worst MLB contract?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was skimming baseball news recently, when I came across this article about how the Mets’ third baseman, and the Face of Major League Baseball™, David Wright has suffered some physical setbacks, and has been shut down for eight weeks, thus missing out on Opening Day and likely all of April.

For the record, David Wright has had a laundry list of physical ailments throughout the last few years, such as spinal cord stenosis, a hernia in his neck, rotator cuff surgery, and another undisclosed back injury.  Over the span of the last three seasons, Wright has played in a grand total of 75 games, with a big fat zero in 2017.  Needless to say, it’s been particularly challenging for Wright to stay healthy, and I can only imagine the frustration of a guy who makes his living playing baseball, being so physically incapable of actually playing it.

Here’s the thing though: baseball contracts are guaranteed, unlike in the NFL.  If your contract states you make X over Y number of years, you get exactly that much money, regardless of if you play or not.  David Wright signed an eight-year contract back in 2012 that dictated that between the years of 2013-2020, he would be paid $138 million dollars.

Considering the fact that he’s played in 15% of games over the last three years, you might be able to see why this is a problem for the Mets, and a legitimate question to whether or not his contract just might be the worst contract in baseball history.

Among baseball nerds, the debate is endless on who really is the worst contract in baseball history.  But for the sake of ease, and the fact that I dislike the Phillies, we’re just going to go with one of the more popular options, as the de facto current worst contract in MLB history: Ryan Howard’s five-year, $125 million dollar contract he signed with the Phillies in 2010.

How does David Wright’s current, and still active deal stack up to The Big Piece’s albatross that hamstrung the Phillies for five years?  Let us compare.

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Baseball’s Dwyane Wade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: MLB third baseman Mike Moustakas re-signs with the Kansas City Royals on a one year for $5.5 million dollars

If anyone were to read that line, it doesn’t seem like much of a big deal; grown-ass man getting paid millions of dollars to play a kids game, who cares, fuck that lucky motherfucker, etc, etc.

But it’s the background of the journey that ultimately makes the story as a whole more entertaining, because it’s reveals that it’s the story of a professional athlete who took a gamble on himself, but instead of triumphing in securing a long-term, way-more-multi-million dollar contract, he ends up falling on his face and has to sign for a fraction than he could have made had he not taken the gamble.

2017 was the walk year for Mike Moustakas, which is sports nerd-speak for a professional athlete in the final season of their contracted agreement with the team they play for, before they become a free agent, where they hope to sign a contract with the highest bidder, and secure hundreds of millions of dollars over the span of the next several years. 

Professional athletes have developed this infuriating practice of suppressing their talent until they reach walk years, where they can unleash their full potential at the time in which potential suitors will be watching the most intently, thus creating an inflated sense of demand, and get maximum dollar, before they begin the whole cycle all over again, loafing early in their deals before ramping it back up as they approach free agency again.  All will deny this, but it’s pretty undeniable if people take the time to look at professional statistics and see the blatant correlation with inflated production in the years prior to free agency.

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I guess Atlanta can kiss Amazon HQ2 goodbye now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you’d have asked me any time prior to today what I thought were the chances that Atlanta would have landed Amazon’s prized HQ2, I would have said somewhere in the realm of, 100%.

And I wouldn’t be saying it solely because I live here, and I’d love the idea of HQ2 taking root in my city; in fact, I’m actually quite skeptical of if Atlanta were to be the selected holy land to secure HQ2.  As much as people believe that the arrival of Amazon into the State of Georgia would magically turn the entire state into millionaires, there’s quite a substantial amount of proof that quite the opposite could occur, from one corporate entity holding way too much leverage over the place they chose to call home.

But I think when all the dust has settled, I think there’s more room for benefit and good to come out of HQ2 being in Atlanta than would be if it didn’t.  And realistically speaking, I genuinely feel like Atlanta has a very good shot and getting HQ2, mostly because it’s a city that offers just about everything that they’re looking for: an EST time zone, mild climate that rarely has to worry about snowstorms derailing everything, a major travel vein both domestically and internationally, major hubs for both UPS and FedEx, and a pipeline into a prominent tech incubator that Georgia Tech would be for them. 

Most importantly, Georgia is a state that has proven to be more than willing to play ball with big businesses, and have been willing to bend over backwards for prominent names and businesses, such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and the entire film industry.  Without question, Georgia and the City of Atlanta would have done absolutely whatever it took to make Amazon pick them for HQ2, even if it meant royally screwing every single Georgian in the process, just to be able to say tomorrow will be better than today.  Shit, one entire town has declared willingness to rename their entire populous Amazon, if they were chosen to house HQ2.

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Racist, decency or revenue?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: South Carolina proposes new bill that would punish people who sag their pants too low with fines and/or community service

At first blush, my knee-jerk reaction is applause.  But the more time I think about it, the more I anticipate the inevitable debates about how this is racist because as the myth goes, only black people are the only ones who sag their pants anymore these days.  But then I think about that, how back in like the 90s, every single male teenager in my high school sagged their pants, and it didn’t matter if they were black, white, Korean, Vietnamese, Afghan, Salvadorian or Honduran, it was just the thing.

Sure, it’s a little too obviously targeting the black community, since black folks are pretty much the only ones out there that still carries on with sagging pants, but let’s also be real here: people don’t really want to see the drawers of other dudes, at all.  It was gross back then, even if we were too dumb to realize it, and it’s most certainly gross now.  Nobody, wants to see the Huggies of another grown ass man.  Does not matter if they’re black, white, Korean, Vietnamese, Afghan, Salvadorian, Honduran, or any other demographic, sagging pants is just stupid across the board.

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