Tag: greed

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.

The fresh contract tanking has begun

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Poor baby: Dansby Swanson cites exhaustion for pulling out of the sixth inning of a game against the Mariners

Here’s the kicker: this was the 11th game of the season.  Out of 162, plus playoffs if the Cubs can be good enough to get in.  There’s a long way to go before the season is over, and things are only going to get harder as the weather gets harder, the days start piling up, and the wear and tear of an entire season begins to pile up.

Exhausted after just eleven games into the season; as the kids say, the fuck out of here.  He cites excuses like his MLS wife’s knee injury and subsequent surgery as reasons for him not getting adequate rest before playing baseball as if him and his wife weren’t both professional athletes who don’t understand that all they do to make egregious amounts of money is play sports, and that all they really have to worry about is keeping themselves healthy and contributing and that injuries to occasionally happen.

What we’re more likely witnessing here is the start of the traditional tanking, sandbagging, talent suppression or whatever you want to call it, of a professional athlete, fresh off of signing a big money contract.  As most baseball fans in Atlanta know, Dansby Swanson left the Braves and signed with the Chicago Cubs on a seven year, $177 million contract, which I was tepidly sad to see a key contributor to the championship team depart, but the bean counting stathead I can occasionally be, relieved that the Braves don’t have to be responsible for that deal, especially for a guy I just never got any impression really had his heart with the team as much as he was chasing dollars not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But now that he’s got his big money guaranteed deal, Dansby Swanson really has nothing to play for.  He’s going to get paid $20M regardless if he hits .309 with 29 home runs or hits .209 with 211 strikeouts.  There’s absolutely no incentive for him to go balls out in every game until around 2028, when he begins creeping closer to the end of his deal, and he’s going to want to try and prove that he’s got talent to contribute to someone, and possibly land one more multi-million-dollar deal before the sun sets on his career.

And this is nothing we haven’t seen before in the grand spectrum of the professional sports landscape, it’s a practice that nobody admits to but everyone knows happens, and it doesn’t matter if it’s baseball, football or basketball, as long as it’s played professionally and there’s money to be made from gamesmanship, the players are doing it.

The thing is, I’ve never seen such a flagrantly low-effort excuse than exhaustion after 11 games into a season before, which is what prompted this post coming into existence.  Usually, players just loaf and claim to start slow, and if there’s any sort of injury or ailment, milk that cow until it’s shriveled like a raisin before easing their way back into being forced to earn their money again.  They don’t just straight up recuse themselves from an active game and just say they were exhausted, because again, professional athletes are supposed to be the cream of the crop and the greatest athletes in their world.  Not bitches who get exhausted after 11 games into a baseball season.

But then again, Dansby Swanson knows there’s no incentive to even trying to hide it, so he just lets loose with a lame excuse.  Much like my perceived opinion of his attitude of playing for the Braves, apparently, there’s little heart that goes into his excuse making to justify his fresh contract tanking either.

Anyone who thought the Braves were going to keep Swanson doesn’t know the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker of the century: Dansby Swanson signs with the Chicago Cubs, parting ways with his hometown team Atlanta Braves

Before we get to Swanson, I just wanted to take this opportunity to lol very heartily at the breaking news that Carlos Correa failed his physical with the Giants but then was immediately swooped up by the Mets for comparable money (12 years, $315M), and it doesn’t help the narrative that nobody wants to play for the Giants which tickles me pink.

As the subject states, anyone who thought that the Atlanta Braves had any chance at all at retaining hometown boy, Dansby Swanson, simply doesn’t know the Atlanta Braves at all.  It was such a foregone conclusion when the Braves either didn’t try hard enough or just didn’t try at all and didn’t extend him when they had the chance, that he was gone as soon as he hit free agency.

Honestly though, I’m not the least bit mad about it.  Sure, it puts the Braves in a pretty big hole of losing an above-average caliber shortstop, and on paper they’re weaker than they were the year prior when they won the division in exciting fashion.  Not to mention it doesn’t help that the Phillies and Mets have both dropped massive money on upgrading at the shortstop position, and on paper, should both be surpassing the Braves in 2023.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m still in the fan hangover of the 2021 World Series champion Braves that shields a number of years afterward from abject criticism.  Maybe it’s because I’m just such a fan removed from the minutiae of the team that it doesn’t bother me.  Maybe it’s because I knew there was a 0% chance that he was going to come back and I like being proven right.  Or maybe it’s because baseball is a bigger crapshoot than any other sport, and the Braves will plug someone in at the six, catch lightning in a bottle and still remain competitive in a suddenly white-hot NL East on paper.  Or maybe it’s a combination or bits and pieces of all of the above, but I just don’t really care that Swanson isn’t coming back, regardless of how much of a competitive disadvantage it puts the Braves at to not have him.

Dansby Swanson has nothing left to prove staying on the Braves, and the Braves don’t really gain much benefit in dumping a ton of money into keeping him.  He’s the hometown kid from Kennesaw, Georgia who contributed towards the franchise’s first World Series in 27 years, all while making team-controlled money.  As far as Braves Corporate goes, this was the best-case scenario that they could have asked for, and now the real financial commitment to him belongs to the Cubs and not them.

Continue reading “Anyone who thought the Braves were going to keep Swanson doesn’t know the Braves” →

Sports have too much fucking money vol. 1,232 feat. Jason Heyward

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: the Chicago Cubs release Jason Heyward after seven years of his eight-year contract

Between 2008 and 2009, Jason Heyward was one of the most hyped prospects in baseball.  After the 2009 season, he was the de facto #1 prospect in baseball.  In the Spring Training of 2010, Heyward emerged onto the radar of the national spotlight when he clubbed a home run so far, it left the ballpark and shattered the windshield of a car in the parking lot.

He was so good, he forced the Atlanta Braves to put him on the Opening Day roster instead of taking part in the traditional practice of stashing him in the minors for two months in order to ensure that they can keep him for an additional year of indentured servitude known as team control, instead of getting to free agency.

That Opening Day, Jason Heyward took the first step to immortality by launching a three-run home run in his very first at-bat.

To this day, I still consider that day and that moment, one of the most magical sports memories I’ve ever had.

He performed so well through the first few years of his career, it became very apparent that he was going to become problematic in the sense that as he grew closer and closer to free agency, he was going to command a tremendous amount of money, and as any Braves fan can explain, the Braves absolutely do not like to spend money.

The inevitable became fulfilled when the Braves shipped him off to St. Louis for his contract year in exchange for a pitcher who still had team control available to him, and Heyward unsurprisingly put up a monster year for the Cardinals.  He went into free agency in as optimal position as a player really could be in.

And the Chicago Cubs came knocking, as they signed him to an 8-year, $184 million contract.  Jason Heyward had accomplished what just about every professional athlete strives to do; make it to the big leagues and perform well enough to where you can make it to free agency and cash in on a monster megadeal.

But then something interesting happened: Jason Heyward basically forgot how to play baseball.  From the moment he suited up for the Cubs, he was mostly an offensive liability, hitting .245 and OPSing .700 between 2016 and 2022.  Almost all of his value came from the fact that he was still a reliable glove in the outfield, winning two Gold Glove awards.  That, and the fact that as a person, Jason Heyward has always been a pretty outstanding human being, personable, polite, philanthropic, and just a great teammate, as many of his peers have attested.

Continue reading “Sports have too much fucking money vol. 1,232 feat. Jason Heyward” →

Why it’s hard to take AEW seriously sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was watching some highlights from the latest Dynamite, because I was interested to see who won the match between Bryan Danielson and Daniel Garcia.  But during the match I couldn’t help but notice that the turnbuckle pads had something other than an AEW logo on it, and at one point, I had to scrunch my brow when I realized that it was literally the crest for House Targaryen.

Why was the House Targaryen crest on turnbuckles of an AEW wrestling show?

Well, the answer wasn’t hard to determine, because outside of any shot that wasn’t zoomed in to where you could see the turnbuckles, pretty much everywhere else in the West Virginia arena was like an explosion of Game of Thrones branding.  Since TBS is a Turner Network and Turner bought HBO and HBO owns the rights to Game of Thrones, naturally it was decided that AEW Dynamite would be the perfect venue to cross-promote the impending premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon prequel series.

So instead of continually pushing awareness for AEW, or their shop’s website, or perhaps promoting any upcoming pay-per-views, all through the entire night was Game of Thrones shit, all over the place.

If I didn’t know what AEW was, and I was flipping channels and landed on Dynamite, I probably would’ve thought that some mega nerds* had created a wrestling promotion based on Game of Thrones, and I was watching some LARP of some Dothraki slave pit fighting instead of professional wrestling.

*I realize this is kind of an oxymoronic descriptor to describe Tony Khan, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks

But this is a good example of why it’s hard for me to take AEW seriously sometimes.  No matter how genuinely good their wrestling product is capable of being, they just do so much shit on the business side or over social media or their performers, that just pumps the brakes on the progress they are totally capable of making, if they just didn’t get in their own way so much.

AEW’s entire show was completely hijacked by Game of Thrones this week.  A few weeks ago when I went, the entire show was completely hijacked by Discovery/Animal Planet plugging the ever-living fuck out of Shark Week, to where they had a match where Jericho’s cronies were suspended in a diver’s cage.  And a little while back, just about every AEW show was paintbombed by Draft Kings logos all over the place.

I’m not sure if it’s Tony Khan’s choice, or if he’s being strong-armed by Turner Ben Afflecks, but AEW is basically this cheap vehicle to promote other things, completely sacrificing their own brand identity and integrity whenever they do.  They’re like a Tesla Model S, with a vinyl wrap for Juan’s Paint and Windows, and they’re required to drive it around in prominent communities and log a substantial amount of miles to justify the ad space. 

If it’s TK’s choice to allow his pet promotion to be pimped out to plug shit that isn’t his, then shame on him.  If it’s Turner being Turner and fifteen old white guys with VP titles are all jabbing their fingers into the AEW pie to try and make their mark, then that’s really nothing out of the ordinary for Turner’s modus operandi, and we can continuously count the days before AEW copies WCW in another manner; being managed to death by Turner.

But the bottom line is that it’s really hard for me to take AEW seriously when they participate in shit like this, and it’s got to be hard for even them to continuously try to declare themselves the alternative to the WWE, when they’re constantly being handcuffed by shit that makes it hard for people to take them seriously.  As much as the WWE is so often seen as this corporate soulless entity, they take their brand seriously, and they almost never cross-promote with anyone or anything, not without at least some substantial benefit to them. 

There’s absolutely zero benefit for AEW when they help plug Shark Week, House of the Dragon or Draft Kings, and until the company can grow a backbone and push back on bullshit orders to cross-promote, they’ll never be taken as serious as they should be capable of commanding respect.

A new metric for the vernacular: A WCW

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of my friends in a group chat turned me onto this keen observation, and I found that I liked it so much, I believe it’s worth integrating into my general lexicon, to casually drop into conversation and low-key hope to have the opportunity to mansplain it to anyone who risks questioning what I mean by it when I use it.

In 2001, Vince McMahon bought the crumbling remains of World Championship Wrestling for an estimated $4.2 million dollars; a tremendously far cry of a bargain, considering the company was about $30 million in the green just two years prior.  Fairly recently, in spite of my own general ambivalence towards the subject, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo over a WWE scandal in which it was revealed and continues to unearth, that Vince McMahon has shelled out over $20 million dollars over the years in hush money to hide his and his inner circle’s general sexual deviancy.

Frankly, it’s no shock or surprise that it turns out that Vince McMahon and his cronies did any of the things they’re being accused for at a rapid pace these days, because they’re rich, they’re white, they’re old money, and they’re in an industry where there are literal Playboy-caliber women that come and go.  As much as I respect Vince McMahon’s business acumen, I’m not the least bit surprised that he’s an asshole who wields his money and power for sex, because an endless parade of men in similar circumstances have been doing the same for eons now.  But when the day is over, there’s a whole lot of murky water in the sense that the money was accepted by their recipients, and in my legally uneducated opinion, I have to ask, what crimes actually occurred?

Regardless, the silver lining to it all is that the HeAT has forced Vince McMahon into the retirement that wrestling fans have been calling for, for years now, to actually occur, and in the aftermath of it, same with all of his cronies and stooges who were all implied to be complicit to his bad behavior, if they weren’t accomplices to begin with.  And with it, ushers in a new era of WWE, helmed by his more progressive daughter Stephanie McMahon and with her, Triple H is back into the fold, creating optimism and hope, considering his popularly lauded work with NXT over the last decade.

Obviously, most wrestling fans know that we’ve not seen the last of Vince McMahon, but as long as this scandal is continuing to unfold, we know there’s plenty of time for the company to move and evolve without him so frequently aboard the main cabin.

But anyway, back to the point of this post, the takeaway of it all is that the analogy was made that to date, Vince McMahon has paid out the valuation of 4.7 WCWs, in hush money for his sexual indiscretions.  WCW has become a noun, which is definable as an analogy for approximately $4.2 million dollars, and is applicable as metric in dannyhong speak moving forward.

  • Lionel Messi’s salary for 2022 is approximately 9.76 WCWs
  • Tiger Woods reportedly turned down anywhere from 166-190 WCWs from the Saudi-run LIV golf organization
  • Juan Soto rejected a 15-year/107.14 WCW contract from the Washington Nationals before they traded him to the San Diego Padres

Yep, metric checks out. Once the greatest threat to the WWE, now a unit of measurement to ironically measure stupid amounts of money to something more humorously.

On principle, I now have to root against Juan Soto

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

We pleebs will never understand: Washington Nationals outfielder Juan Soto rejects contract extension offer worth $440 million dollars over 15-years

The armchair baseball analyst stat geek in me understands the impetus behind this decision.  It’s really not that complicated.  Combining never-ending inflation and the fact that between now and 2025, other players will continue to raise the bar of annual value, Juan Soto stands to make more money than $440 million dollars when he his free agency.

But the normal human being in me just sees that a guy has rejected life-changing money two-hundred times over, and can’t help but feeling infuriated at the arrogance of some asshole who gets paid insane amounts of money to play children’s games.  Like really, even in “just” his arbitration years, he’s making more money than most people will ever see in their entire lives, and here he is turning down $440 million dollars like someone asked him if he were interested in learning more about timeshares.

Fuck this guy.  Frankly, fuck any guy who turns down any figure that’s seven figures or higher, and honestly, fuck anyone who turns down a league minimum deal to be a bench warmer considering the league minimum was bumped up to like $700,000 a year.  Y’all motherfuckers play baseball for a living, and turn down big money offers like they’re some sort of insults, like you were genius doctors who were working on the cures to deadly diseases on a daily basis.

Prior to this, I never really had any qualms with Juan Soto.  I always liked that he was this fairly unknown to those outside of the Nationals fanbase, that just quietly came up after all of the pomp and hoopla of the Bryce Harper departure of DC.  And not only did he quickly erase and make people in Washington forget about Bryce Harper, he helped the Nationals go all the way, and win a World Series in short order after showing up.

Obviously, at the rate in which he was performing, it was only a matter of time before this day would come when the rhetorical questions of how much Juan Soto was worth were going to emerge, but I just haven’t been paying any attention.  I can hardly keep up with the bullshit going on in Braves Country™ much less the baseball country outside of it, but I’m not the least bit surprised that we’ve finally gotten here to where Juan Soto is no longer the team-controlled stud that’s just happy to be here, but is a budding superstar who’s on the cusp of getting paid.

All the same though, now that he’s turned down a purported three different extension offers from the Nationals, with the last one being the aforementioned 15/$440M/no deferred money, it’s just absolutely flabbergasting the arrogance and audacity a person can have to actually say no to a sheer amount of money such as these.

Sure, there’s always the game of keeping ahead of the Joneses but nobody ever wins as is the passage of time.  Soto takes a 15/$500 in 2025, but by 2026, there will be some future megastar that will sign a 15/$505, and so on and so on.  It’s a game of insanity that will never end, and other than a few individuals getting rich, it’s only going to result in future professional athletes looking like bigger and bigger greedy assholes as they continue to extort and accept these gaudy salaries for playing kids games.

So now, on principle, I have no choice but to start rooting against Juan Soto.  He is far from the first guy that I’ve held this attitude towards, but as certain as the game of salaries continues to grow every year, he’s just the latest prick to cave into the game of greed. 

Soto may be on pace to be worth more than $440M in a few years, but that is, if nothing bad happens to him between now and 2025.  An injury or two, or perhaps the rest of the league re-writes the book on him and realizes he sucks at hitting pitches up-and-in, or maybe a combination of both.  History has no shortage of professional athletes who completely collapsed onto themselves during their contract years one way or another, resulting in them getting owned into oblivion in hindsight brutality.

I don’t wish physical harm to come onto anyone, but if Soto were to get hurt between now and 2025, I can’t say that I wouldn’t shake my head and laugh, especially if the guy struggles to bounce back and by the time 2025 rolls around, he’s just another silly greedy gambler who didn’t take the money when he had the chance, and instead ends up on the Long Island Ducks just trying to cling to any semblance of a career.