Tag: cashmoney

If my life were different, I would live above a Costco in about two months ago

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Better late than never: ground broken in south Los Angeles for a Costco that will have 800~ apartment units above it

I saw this query on my theFacebook feed about if people were willing to live above a Costco should there be a Costco that had residences above one, and my knee-jerk reaction was pffh, absofuckinglutely I would live above a Costco if my life were different, and I didn’t have a wife and kids.

I could only imagine how much money I’d save if I did, knowing that at any given meal of any given day of any given week of any given year, if I were hungry and didn’t want to think about it, I was a literal hop skip and a jump from going downstairs into Costco, and grabbing a hot dog and soda I probably wouldn’t even drink or swap it for water, for a buck-fifty. 

That’s $4.50+tax a day for a food budget, and extrapolate that of the course of a year, and I’m spending like $7K a year on food.  Sure, undoubtedly I wouldn’t be eating a glizzy and soda for every single meal in a year, but that’s still a tremendous savings from what my general food budget is now in comparison, not even factoring in the kids and everyone else I have to carry.

Or I could alternatively meander downstairs, grab a $5 rotisserie chicken and probably fill up a series of cookbooks of all the different things I would do to the meat in order to mix things up, but that might also jeopardize by $7K annual food budget but maybe not if I’m getting multiple meals out of a $5 chicken.

Or, I could be the ultimate shithead and just wander downstairs, pretend to be shopping but really going around and being one of the degenerates who just wants to snag as many free samples as I could, and try to fill up best on free shit, and call it a meal.

Either way, I really don’t see any drawback at all to living above a Costco, other than maybe automotive traffic issues when at their peak times, unless there’s a separated residential means to get in and out of the complex.  Also, cholesterol, if I planned on having the bulk of my meals being hot dog+soda, but human bodies can adapt, and I’m sure someone like me who has the innate ability to never get sick of things would rewire my body do solder through.

I like how a membership is included with the lease agreement, as if a $79 annual fee is really that huge of a benefit when you’re most likely going to be paying like $2100 a month since it is in the greater Los Angeles area.  It’s the equivalent of when Costcos try to sweeten the membership by throwing in a free chicken.  Small, but amusingly meaningful.

Honestly, when the day comes that I become an empty nester, I wouldn’t turn my back on the idea of living above a Costco.  I think it would be pretty incredible to have that kind of convenience just downstairs, but I guess it really depends on how much the cost of living is get into one of these units, and if these things will ultimately begin to migrate to other parts of the country and world.

But to answer the original query, emphatic yes, I would live in an apartment on top of a Costco, without any hesitation.

The expansions of Erris Irand wounds my soul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Look, I know and understand that the point of any business is to grow, improve, and make money.  And I genuinely am happy for ellis island • casino • hotel • brewery for continuing to grow, presumably making more money and gaining success and foothold in the crowded Las Vegas ecosphere, but this is definitely one of those old man, it’s straying away from the charming little shithole I once knew and loved things going on, and every time I check in with what I endearingly have always referred to Erris Irand, things continue to change and stray further and further away from Erris Irand and becoming a more, miniaturized little posh typical Vegas casino with less and less character and personality with each change.

It recently came to my attention that Erris Irand is embarking on another round of upgrades, and although I’m amused that they along with other businesses I remember fondly like Battista’s are suing the shit out of F1 for wrecking shop in the city I used to once really really love, and went to at least 2-3 times a year, it adds to the melancholy mood of things changing yet again, furthering it from the specific place that I would say that nobody loved more than my big orange brother and I did.

The photos they used was deceptive in making it look like there was the possibility of upward expansion, as in building a tower on top of the existing structure, but that’s just a silhouette of the hotel behind them that I frankly don’t remember what it was called or is called now.  But that’s the only real relief I get is knowing that they’re not going to (yet) turn into some posh, metrosexual named joint, much like Imperiar Parace and Bill’s and O’Shea have all done over the last decade or so.

And although the proposed upgrades are all purposeful, and will undoubtedly help boost business, revenue and general success for the business as a whole, it’s just so, so far gone past the little locals shithole that I first really discovered back in like 2006, that it wounds me in the soul to see just how much things have changed throughout the passage of time.

Like, when I first stepped into the place, the floors were hard oiled concrete, decades of cigarette ash, spilled booze and the dreams of degenerate gamblers ground into them by the footsteps of ornery locals, adventurous travelers and, degenerate gamblers.  The sirloin special was $6.99 and came with a $5 match play coupon for table games.  Metro Pizza was buy one get one on Sundays, applicable to a single slice or an entire pie.  Their excellent house beer was a dollar a pint, if you weren’t actively gambling, and that’s if the cougar-ey bartender even bothered to take it.  There were only a handful of table games, roulette was almost never going, and they barely had enough room for a half craps table, where there’s nowhere in the city where I fared better at, earning so much in one session that I was able to get a brand new replica wrestling blet.

For years, there wasn’t a single trip to Vegas without at least one trip to Erris Irand, where I ate well, gambled well, drank well, and spent many great hours with my brother and whichever of my friends could lower their noses to realize the charm of what Erris Irand was and represented.

Frankly, I’m the only person I know that has actually stayed in the attached Sleazy Super 8 motel, twice in fact, and I have no regrets in doing such.  From what I understand, it’s now not even a Super 8 brand, and is actually branded to the casino itself.

But as is the case, no good things truly last forever, and perception is the eye of the beholder, and as much as good is what the business perceived, the change was not good to me, but like I said, I understand the business aspect, and growth and expansion and change is inevitable in successful operations, and such was the case with Erris Irand.

The BBQ restaurant grew and blew up, the sportsbook turned into a respectable setup that wasn’t just a bunch of 19” screens inside of basically cubicles.  The brewery was opened up to the public, and more tables and more slots entered the establishment.  The floors were eventually cleaned and refinished and tiled, and the dim smoky ceiling lights were replaced with actual bright and welcoming lighting.

My last time at Erris Irand wasn’t that long ago, and after a few trips where mythical wife and my friends had no interest in going, I was by myself on this trip, and I literally took an Uber directly from McCarran to Erris Irand, because nothing was going to stop me from visiting my old friend on this trip.

And it was a surreal experience walking into the side entrance, where everything was different, the air didn’t reek as much of smoke.  The bathrooms were all posh and even had branded wallpaper and backdrops, inviting people to take selfies and be shitty millennials and shitty Gen-Z’ers.  The restaurant was without all the framed artwork of warships and pirate ships and infernos, and I had to wait an inconvenient amount of time for a shift change to occur despite the restaurant being kind of empty.

The sirloin special was still unlisted and available, but it was apparent that the kitchen isn’t used to making these as they once did, as my steak came out overcooked, but not inedible, but the magic wasn’t really there this time around.  The table limits were still fortunately lower than the rest of the Strip, but I didn’t have the time on this trip to come back despite the fact that I really wanted to, with my friend who had just gotten hitched by Elvis.

But now we’re deviating even further from that, with the next wave of expansions to implement rooftop access, so people can presumably look at the Total Rewards Group’s parking lot and training facility, unless there’s plans for something to take up the giant concrete lot between Koval and Audrie, for Erris Irand visitors to stare at being constructed over the next few years alternatively.

Like I said, a lot of old man things changing rambling going on here, so I’m going to stop here before I continue to write in circles like I tend to do sometimes about the things I’m passionate about.  I won’t not go to Erris Irand the next time my travels actually take me out to Vegas again, but honestly I’m kind of over the city as a whole lately, and I just don’t have the disposable funds available to finance the gambling I’d like to do, so it might be a while, but I imagine it’ll be yet another surreal experience of seeing just how much the place has changed. 

Here’s hoping they’ll still have the sirloin special and the best hefeweizen when that time comes, and that I don’t go broke in an hour like the rest of the Strip’s casinos had done to me my last time out there.

So many easy jokes about the Mariners repping Nintendo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

LL: Seattle Mariners agree to wear Nintendo Switch 2 patch for the 2025 MLB season

I don’t care enough to dig deep into the finer details, but Nintendo doesn’t own the Mariners like they once did, but they have enough pull with the baseball organization to ensure that throughout the 2025 baseball season, the Mariners will have a sponsorship patch on their away uniforms for the Nintendo Switch 2.  Their home whites will have a regular old Nintendo word mark logo on those alternatively.

Regardless, the jokes write themselves about a company like Nintendo being the uniform sponsor for a baseball organization like the Mariners, because in more ways than one, they operate in similar manners.  Now such could be as the result of the once ownership and the influence Nintendo clearly still has within the Seattle Mariners organization, or maybe they really are two peas in a pod in how their business philosophies are concerned, but the fact of the matter is that there really is a lot in common between both companies.

Nintendo is notoriously Japanese, as in that they are more than happy to operate in a completely risk-averse, efficient manner that prioritizes a zero-waste mentality.  For example, despite the fact that a billion people on the planet wanted the Wii when it first came out, they were all like ehhhh, let’s make just 20 million units, can’t possibly risk there being some false demand and us being stuck with extra units and being forced to sell at a discount.  And for the next several years, nobody could get their hands on one, and they were selling on the resale market at insane markups, and by the time demand was truly fulfilled, the Wii 2 was knocking on the door, and the process kind of repeated itself. The point is, Nintendo prioritizes efficiency and avoiding all risk over possibly making consumers happy and meeting demand a lot closer in which they operate to this day. 

And the Mariners are kind of the same way, because they just, always kind of suck as an MLB franchise, and no matter how much the market changes, how much talent they luck into from their system, and the availability of free agents throughout the years, the organization just somehow manages to always suck at winning baseball games, and much like Nintendo, letting consumers down by taking no risks, avoiding any possibility of dead money by signing no free agents, and routinely letting their fans down on a yearly basis.

It’s funny, because I actually wrote about the Mariners not too long ago and how it’s pretty incredible how much they’ve sucked historically.  Because this is an organization that has had the likes of Ken Griffey, Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez and a prime Robinson Cano, and in some cases, an overlap of some of these talents. Yet they never won anything, beyond the magical 2001 season where they won 116 games, before crashing out unceremoniously in the playoffs to the Yankees.  They rarely saw the playoffs, didn’t do much once they got there, and no matter the talent that has been on the squad, they just, well suck.

Just recently, the Mariners successfully signed their catcher Cal Raleigh, to an insanely team-friendly deal, six years at just $105M.  The guy is an average 4 WAR player, not even hitting his prime, and could easily have been worth double of this, in just a few years.  But he clearly likes something in Seattle and has agreed to stay there, but the real question is if the Nintendo Mariners will actually do something with this centerpiece, or if it will just be more of the same, operating like Nintendo, where they will only produce the absolute bare minimum in order to be relevant, but absolutely nothing more in order to even attempt to be anything but afloat.

It’s really a chicken and egg situation on whether the Seattle Mariners are operating like Nintendo, or if Nintendo is operating like the Seattle Mariners; but if I’m a betting man, I’d say the former, but either way, neither is a particularly enviable position to be in, because jaded video gamers all resent Nintendo for their Nintendo-ey business practices, and Mariners fans all resent the Mariners for simply never really trying, so ultimately, this sponsorship marriage seems to be a very fitting fit for both parties involved.

Welp, absolutely no more reason to favor Southwest over anyone else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AP: Southwest Airlines ditching bags fly free, eliminating their last real differentiator to competitors

And with the elimination of open seating as of the start of the 2025 season, Southwest Airlines has fully committed to blending into the landscape entirely, leaving them with no more real differentiators from their competition.  Honestly, bags fly free, as small as it seemed in comparison to what they once were as one of the true alternatives in the airline playing field, was still something to consider for airline passengers planning a trip.

Sure, they kind of baked it into their general fares once you did some price shopping against other airlines plus bag fees, but if you played your cards right, Southwest was still a place where you could snag a bargain, if you had the flexibility or willingness to nudge your schedule around.

But with the elimination of bags fly free, it’s apparent that Southwest no longer gives any shits about industry disruption and shaping their brand around being a friendlier alternative to the Deltas, Uniteds and Americans out there that are otherwise crowding the playing field, and prefers to be among the big dogs, raking in profits through a smorgasbord of industry collusion, fare hikes, fees, and general practice of cornering and exasperating consumers into feeling like they have no choice but to shell out in order to accomplish their travel objectives.

It’s funny, because regulation ended in the late 70s, partially so that airline companies could exercise some freedom to be creative, shake up the industry and ultimately strive towards some innovation and likely profit.  But it was done because regulation was choking the industry out with standardized practices, policies, fares and routes, and everyone was basically the same despite operating under different banners.

In the grand spectrum of the airline industry today, regulation might have officially been deregulated in 1978 but make no mistake, regulation really isn’t gone as far as practice goes.  Between all the big dog airlines out there that have a stranglehold on most of the premier routes throughout the country and internationally, they’re all basically the same despite having different names.

They’re all ass-expensive nowadays, have as many taxes and fees as a Ticketmaster transaction, bags don’t fly free and cost an arm, changes at their behest fuck your schedule up, and changes at your behest costs a leg.  They all have shitty customer service, and when the day is over, coordinating airline travel isn’t really that different than coordinating a trip to the movies.  Sometimes we’ll pay the extra and settle on having to deal with a shitty 3-D version of the film solely because the schedule is optimal, and it’s not that different with flying the skies, we’ll go with the airline that fucks us the least and isn’t that terrible for our desired schedules.

In the end, the airline industry really has turned into absolutely nothing more than a game of hubs.  Where smaller airlines squabble and compete over every single customer, the bigger dogs are all trying to gain footholds in regions, because the more regions they can hold higher market share in, the more they’re simply going to win the wars of attrition solely based on routes.

Everyone knows that Atlanta is Delta country, Chicago is where United and American have giant presences, and all of them have smaller hubs across the country.  Southwest seems content to keep their footings in places like Dallas, Baltimore and Phoenix, and instead of trying to keep customers happy or working to be the refreshing alternative to the rest of the market, they’ll probably focus on gaining footing in other markets instead.

Either way, at this point, one change Southwest really should consider is allowing their flights to be searchable on aggregate comparison sites and scrapers like Kayak, Expedia and Travelocity.  I have to imagine it was probably fucking them in the past, voluntarily not being searchable on third-party sites, trying to really push consumers to search directly and save some money, but since they’re no longer trying to compete anymore, they may as well try to bail on this methodology and allow themselves to be searchable on aggregate sites; just like all their competitors do.

The bottom line is that I don’t travel as much as I once did, but I always did like Southwest in that they flew directly from Atlanta to two places I like to be able to get to.  I’m not going to outright blacklist them because that would only hurt myself, but I don’t really have any reason to give them any preferable consideration over any competitors.

And as I’ve said hundreds of times in my life, I miss AirTran, and I still hold a little salt at Southwest for Borg’ing them just to get access to their routes, but then jacking up the fares on said routes to where it’s difficult to consider them more often.

WTF is AEW doing #387

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first saw this shirt, I thought it was a joke, a bad photoshop from some shitty wrestling shitposting meme account or something.  But nope, it’s very much real, and actually available to you for the low, low price of $29.99 plus tax and shipping, which means it’s basically a plain white t-shirt for somewhere just under $40.

Of course I know that there are all sorts of brand name designers out there who have been peddling plain white t-shirts for upwards of $100+, but they’re often times players in the egregious fashion industry, whom most of them have earned the right to hawk their shitty wares for exorbitant prices, and people not smart enough to realize that they’re being fleeced will actually buy them.  But yeah, them, they’re not a professional wrestling promotion, whom most equate their product and their merchandise as tantamount to carny shit, and only exist at that price range solely on the basis of inflation.

Yes, I can see the Property of the Death Riders wordmark on them, anyone (with a magnifying glass) can see it, but the point remains is that AEW’s merch team has basically posted up the absolute bare minimum effort in an actual product available to the public.

In the past, I’ve called out other bullshit cash grab products like Faarooq’s DAMN shirt which is basically just the word DAMN written on the chest in Rockwell Bold, and the B-Team’s signature shirt, which was obviously deliberately shittily made to help sell the fact that Axel and Bo were B-tier talents, but still turned into a screen print and peddled for $30 a pop (plus tax and shipping).

Well, Property of the Death Riders joins that club of some of the worst wrestling shirts in history, without any question at all.  Like, I’m becoming desensitized to a lot of the weird and silly shit that AEW does that I have a hard time grasping because I grew up with the WWE, but to offer up a plain white shirt with the tiniest of logos as an actual product definitely stands out in a sea of weird and silly shit, at least in my mind.

Here’s the funny thing though, as I’m typing this out, there’s a part of me that actually does admire the fact that in spite of the overall bullshit this shirt really is, as far as utility and being able to wear it out in public outside of wrestling shows or flaunting fandom, this shirt actually probably a GOAT.  Being a plain white t-shirt, it’s a perfect undershirt, and the lack of any design whatsoever on it means that there’s zero concern of any design being visible behind an opaque white dress shirt.  And 10 times out of 10, whenever I’d be wearing a plain white t-shirt, it’s tucked into dress pants, and the dorky little Death Riders wordmark wouldn’t be a factor at all.

But I’m not really fan of white t-shirts in general, because white fabric is like this ticking time bomb where they’ll slowly turn yellow from absolutely no other reason than existing, and any exposure to air, water, moisture accelerates it, and even more so when exposed to human oils or perspiration.  I literally had a few white tees that were still in their Ziploc bags, completely unopened and unworn, and when the day came where I felt the need for one, and ripped open the sack, it was yep, yellowed with age.

White t-shirts are basically for weddings and funerals, or any other instances where I’d need a specifically white t-shirt underneath a more priority garment.

Back to the Death Riders white shirt, the jokes just write themselves, as far AEW’s fanbase is concerned.  The schlubs who will be willing to plunk down the cash to get these bad boys don’t have to worry about them yellowing from age, because they’ll rapidly turn from the sweat, nacho cheese from Daily’s Place, and vape juice they’ll be exposed to, accelerated whenever they see Toni Storm, Harley Cameron or Skye Blue.

All these observations, without even having to even scratch the surface of what failure the whole Death Riders faction has turned into, because when they formed, they had a ton of momentum, but as is often the case with Tony Khan booking, there’s no focus, no end game or no execution, and all members of the group have been swirling around doing dick and butt for weeks, with no end in sight.

It really is incredible how Jon Moxley in NJPW took his Death Rider persona and absolutely slayed over there, but bringing the name to AEW and making it a group has been absolute death to the brand and identity of it completely.

And I don’t really get it either, the whole white t-shirt thing was Bryan Danielson’s, and the Death Riders basically smothered him and killed his career, and suddenly Mox picks up the whole white shirt thing, acting like a jacked psychotic Andrew WK or something?

As the subject of these posts goes, jesus, wtf?

I’m not sure all these soft-ass new Dodgers fans even know who Clayton Kershaw is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLBTR: Clayton Kershaw set to re-sign with the Dodgers for his 18th season

Back in 2008 when I was still on my quest to visit every MLB ballpark, my journeys took me out to the west coast, where I was going to hit a Dodgers, Angels and Padres game in one fell-swoop.  I got tickets to the Dodgers game on ebay well in advance, and was pleased to have apparently gotten someone’s season tickets, as they were printed with a design versus the generic Ticketmaster printed tickets.  Little did I or the guy who sold me the tickets, realized the significance of the specific game that I was going to.

My friend and I were having a quick breakfast after landing in Los Angeles, before heading to Dodger Stadium, and we had little idea of what we were in store for seeing.  Frankly, since they were playing the St. Louis Cardinals, we were more excited at the prospect of seeing Albert Pujols, very much still in his prime, doing Albert Pujols things.  Being fans of east coast teams, we had little clue to who this kid Clayton Kershaw was, but was starting that day.  I remember saying to my friend, man, but he has a 9.7 K/9, as a starter, so we kind of had an idea of what to expect.

This Kershaw kid would go on to strikeout the first batter of the game, ultimately pitch six innings while only giving up two earned runs, and although he didn’t get a decision in the game, the Dodgers ended up winning in extra innings.  A few people on the internet told me that I was really lucky to have been able to bear witness in person, to the debut of Clayton Kershaw, but I didn’t really think much of it that year.

In ensuing years, Clayton Kershaw would become the de facto ace of the Dodgers pitching staff, and basically become the best pitcher in all of Major League Baseball.  He was a strikeout artist, with his signature pitch being this cartoon-looping curveball that has paralyzed an entire era of hitters, on top of the fact that he comfortably pitched at 98 mph with his fastball.  He would win three Cy Young awards in 2011, 2013 and 2014, and he was so good at baseball in 2014, that he would also win the NL MVP award, which was a tremendous rarity for a pitcher to take home the MVP.

However, there was a lot of tough luck in Kershaw’s career, where no matter how good he was at baseball, the Dodgers just couldn’t ever seem to get the job done, when it came to winning championships.  Twelve years after he debuted, the Dodgers did win a World Series, but it was the 2020 World Series that receives a tremendous amount of scrutiny over its legitimacy, but for all intents and purposes, Kershaw did get to be able to declare himself a champion, finally.

He technically pitched in 2024, to which if I understand correctly, means he gets to declare himself a champion again, even though he was barely a factor in the team’s overall effort, but the point is, the Dodgers never really amounted to anything when he was the man, and nowadays, as the subject of this post implies, I’m not even sure all the swaths of brand new lifelong Dodgers fans are even aware of who he is, regardless of just how much of an absolute world eater he was throughout the entire 2010s decade.

I may or may not have written about this over the last few months since the Dodgers became World Series champions and spent a gozillion deferred dollars to create a mega roster for 2025 and beyond, but Dodgers fans are an interesting fanbase, in that they’re basically terrible from all criteria sports fans use to judge other sports fans.

They’re fair-weathered, in that they’ve multiplied by 50, coincidentally immediately after they won the World Series.  They’re the sorest winners I’ve ever seen from a fanbase in that they can’t seem to shut the fuck up and be happy that their team just won a championship and are more interested in parroting the same shit to textually barb with fans on the internet.  They’re softer than Charmin in that they are incapable of accepting the criticism and scrutiny that goes with success, and they all seem to go ballistic at any sort of judgment, regardless of the fact that they’re repping the reigning champions.

But on account of the fact that I’d say 69-70% of Dodgers fans decided that they were lifelong Dodgers fans probably three months ago, they seem to be pretty unaware of their team’s general history, or anything beyond November.  They’re all so busy parroting the same shit in their little echo chambers about their stacked roster, that it feels like the news of Clayton Kershaw coming back for one more year, seems to have fallen on deaf ears, despite the fact that he was easily the best pitcher for an entire era, and honestly if he’s remotely healthy, can probably be a legitimate pitcher all over again.

None of these fans seem to care, because the ドジャース Dodgers rotation is pretty shored up with Yamamoto, Roki, Glasnow, Snell and very likely Ohtani will return to pitching this season, so even if they did care, there’s really not any room currently for Kershaw, in spite of his right to be in it.

Sad as it, having written out this summary of events, it kind of seems apropos that Kershaw is in the background of things, considering the fact that such kind of has been the story of his entire career.

However, considering he needs like 32 strikeouts to reach 3,000, I’m sure the Dodgers media machine will work wonders getting their hordes of fairweather fans all educated up on just how legendary of a pitcher Clayton Kershaw is, and by the time he’s knocking on the door, they’ll all be ready with their freshly purchased Kershaw merch, ready to represent and proclaim themselves fans of his entire career, but at least it will afford Kershaw to be in the spotlight where he rightfully belongs, as artificially manufactured as it might be.

Either way, I’ll be happy for him when he inevitably hits it, because unlike a lot of Dodgers fake ass fans, I have been following the guy’s career, and despite the fact that I generally revile the Dodgers these days, save for Freddie Freeman, I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy I just happened to luck into being able to see his major league debut, after all he very well might be the greatest pitcher of my entire generation, and undoubtedly one of the best to ever do it.

New cars are useless without improving the infrastructure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ATL Urbanize: MARTA’s train cars of the future unveiled in a ceremony full of people acting impressed who will probably never ride them again

It’s funny, among the things that I try to do on the regular, is that I like to look back and see the posts I made in previous years, and not that long ago, I came across a post I made back in 2022, writing about a proposed train car redesign MARTA had in the works.  I chuckled a little at my own analogy about how it looked like a cross-breed between a Daft Punk helmet and a Mass Effect Cerberus shock trooper, with its prevalent colored light in the front, but mostly allowed myself to have a thought about where the fuck these supposed train cars of tomorrow were, considering the post was from three years ago.

So it wasn’t that distantly past in my brain when I found out that MARTA actually just unveiled the supposed train cars of the future in recent ceremony, filled to the gills with press, bureaucrats and a bunch of people who have never actually used public transportation in their adult lives, all applauding and congratulating mostly themselves at the unveiling of a singular shiny new train car, with supposed promises that they’ll be operational and ready for the pleebs public in July.

Like I opined three years ago, as much as I had my clowning shoes on and I am always ready to get ready to criticize and textually rip MARTA apart for what is usually most likely misspent funds and poor operations, the new cars really aren’t that bad.  The current trains are all dated as fuck, and it’s like they literally transported the Washington DC’s old Metro cars to Atlanta, while they dumped their even older cars into the ocean, so some fresh new train cars are actually a great idea in the grand spectrum of running a transit authority.

From what I have been able to see, the new train cars are like, one gigantic car, with no portioning or separation between them.  I’m sure there’s a good reason for doing such, but at the same time, I’ve seen criticisms about how this will enable train trash like bums, grifters, panhandlers, and other knuckleheads to kind of have more freedom to roam and troll the entire train, instead of being portioned off into a singular car, and give riders a chance at avoiding them.

I used to snidely remark about how I’d donate $100 to a charity of anyone’s choosing if I were ever able to ride MARTA without having to hear someone else’s music, which is to say that such never happened in all the times that I’ve done such, but now that cars will be open and accessible to all riders instead of single cars, I have a feeling that dickhead behavior isn’t really going to change so much as it’s going to evolve, much like a variant of the flu.

Which leads to the very obvious observation that new train cars are nice and all, but if the general infrastructure of MARTA itself doesn’t improve, it doesn’t matter how many shiny new rail cars with interactive screens and fancy lights up front to avoid confusion on what line you’re on is.  If riders don’t feel safe, or have confidence that the trains will work, be on time, and not break down, nothing is going to change from how things are today.

MARTA still has a piss-poor reputation, remains the butt of jokes for the city, and faces an uphill battle as endless as Sisyphus.  Keith Parker was the last guy that managed to actually improve things, but it was clear he was pushed to his patience’s limit before he cut and run, and the guy that followed him was drained by MARTA so badly that he killed himself.

I don’t pay attention to the minutiae of MARTA like I used to in the past, but I’m not sure new train cars are going to really solve much if the perception and infrastructure of the authority hasn’t improved at all.  New cars are one thing, but the fact that MARTA itself hasn’t added any real new stops, showed any expansion whatsoever, and is still going back and forth on the same mostly useless cross-shaped map, nothing has really changed.

But hey, at least the trains are going to look cool.  I wonder just how much pocket lining every single train is going to make a bunch of shadow investors?  All I know is that if I ever find out, I’m sure there’ll be a brog post about it.