Tag: government

Oh, Atlanta #285

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB-TV: Georgia Department of Transportation wants to hear from the pleebs about something that they’re probably 20% already initiated into the project, adding express (read: pay) lanes to the top half of I-285

Shade aside, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about the way the world works, is that when a big entity, be it a company, agency or local or even national government tries to look democratic and get feedback from the people in regards to a proposed project, it’s all just a formality and done for optics, photo-ops and public appearance.  I’d say probably 80% of the time, the projects are already underway, and the public is being tapped to hopefully identify and shortcomings or oversights, but with the guise of pretending like they care about the opinions of the rest of the poors.

That being said, nobody’s going to convince me that GDOT hasn’t already gotten the ball rolling in regards to adding Peach Pass lanes to the top half of 285, and that they’re tapping into the public at this juncture just to get a feel for public sentiment, with the idea of pivoting or adjusting the direction of the new lanes based on public opinion.

I’m just curious to know where the fuck these magical extra lanes are going to be built, or if they’ll just cannibalize the far-left lanes of existing I-285 and make them Peach Pass only.  It doesn’t take a genius to identify that there’s basically zero space in between the two directions of I-285, so adding extra lanes on the left doesn’t really seem realistic, unless they add them onto the right, and shift everything down, but that would basically necessitate colossal road work to probably 34 miles worth of highway, feeding the narrative that GDOT is completely incapable of leaving well enough alone, and is always working on something at any given time to all but guarantee that Atlanta’s traffic is among the worst in the nation.

Either way, regardless of if the project is or isn’t actually already started, it’s definitely going to happen if it’s already gotten this far, to ask for public opinion, and I think it’s a dumb one all the same.  It’s like city planners or GDOT schmucks have never played an iteration of Sim City at any point in their careers, and never learned that adding moar lanes of roads is never the solution, and only investing in rail or alternative means of infrastructure do cities really grow, flourish and liberate themselves from the rat race of cars and roads.

Besides, even if and when moar Peach Pass lanes are added, it’s not like the city will actually do anything about the inevitable legions of violators that use them without tags.  Last time I heard about the problem with violators is that there were well over six figures worth of violations that were left unpaid, and that was many moons ago, so I would wager that there are probably well over a million dollars by now in Peach Pass violations that will go uncollected.  So that’s kind of like a double fail that will result if and when Peach Pass lanes are added to I-285, but hey, maybe one more lane is what the City of Atlanta really needs in order to unlock the gridlock that many of us suffer on a regular basis.

Dad Brog (#123): I hate daylight savings so much

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whomever came up with the idea of daylight savings is an asshole. Google says the concept was originally credited to Benjamin Franklin, but the modern concept is “credited to George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, who in 1895 ‘proposed a two-hour time shift so he’d have more after-work hours of sunshine to go bug hunting in the summer,’”

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that neither of these guys probably had any children, but to avoid being too reactionary, it turns out George Hudson had a daughter, and Ben Franklin had several kids, legitimate or not, it’s irrelevant to this discussion.  But Hudson existed around in the late 1800s where his wife was probably the one who had to do all of the parenting while this dork played with bugs all day and extra-day and into the night. 

And Ben Franklin had fucking slaves, who probably did all of the parenting for him, so it’s probably a safe bet that neither of these cocksuckers had to deal with the backlash that comes with fucking with clocks and messing up the routines of young children.

Today, my kids were up at like 6:20 am, and I had no milk ready for them, no breakfast ready for them, and we had company whom I didn’t properly brief on the morning routine, so my kids were either pissed and screaming about the lack of food waiting for them, and/or running amok around the house because everything was awry as a result of daylight fucking savings.

People who try to defend it because of a single extra hour of sleep, obviously have no children, or kids that are grown past the age where they’re on strict circadian rhythms.  Parents of my circumstances don’t get an extra hour of sleep and in fact probably lose a net of like 4-5 hours over the span of the next week as toddlers’ rhythms adjust to the dumbass rule, and come March when we lose the fucking hour back, we’re all fucked all over again, but ironically thinking about it, losing the hour probably is the one time in which parents are benefitting from their kids snoozing past their routines for a little bit in most cases but that’s not the point, which is daylight savings fucking blows.

In the few minutes of reprieve that came when getting some food on plates in front of the kids, I shot a quick text to my friends’ group chat, and stated that I would vote for the orange guy in charge if he swore he would get rid of daylight savings.  Because it’s such an archaic, bullshit mandate that modern civilization is still beholden to, and I’m baffled at why that is.

So some shithead in New Zealand wanted to chase bugs for an extra hour or two every day, why the fuck does this asshole get to dictate how the rest of the entire fucking planet should be conducting time?  So some farmers have to do some work in the dark, big fucking whoop, chalk it up to seasonal changes, and adjust according to the calendar, I can adjust to my fucking potatoes or corn being at a higher price point at certain times of the year if it means I don’t have to deal with the fucking that changing clocks entails.

The point is, daylight savings is fucking stupid, and I hate it so much.  Even before kids, I wasn’t really that keen on it, because by the time we’re all talking about how it’s happening, I’m already dreading the Saturday in March when we lose it, and knowing that I’m going to wake up on a Sunday morning feeling like a small hangover, worse if I actually were in a situation where I could end up with an actual one on top.  But now that I have kids, daylight savings is a fucking nightmare, and I feel like if I’m ever in a position to where I could visit the graves of Benjamin Franklin or the NZ bug dork, I’d piss all over them just to express my disdain for their stupid concept.

It doesn’t happen often

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But what we have here is someone who appears to be more egregiously overpaid than a professional athlete: Georgia Department of Transportation commissioner to receive a $100,000 raise, bringing annual salary up to $550,000

Obviously there’s no shortage of crooked government workers in any state, but GDOT’s flagrant doling out of taxpayer dollars to some stooge who doesn’t know how to use the railroad button in Sim City is pretty noteworthy, at least to make it onto the brog, interrupting the fairly droll legion of baseball, professional wrestling and angsty dad brog posts.  At least it gives me the opportunity to blow the dust off of the ohgeorgia tag and utilize it to throw shade at the state’s poorly veiled attempts to pad the pockets of some glorified crooks.

Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of anyone getting more money for as little justification as possible as this clown of a DOT commissioner.  Even the article itself fails to really come close to justifying why they deserved a 22% raise up to over a half-million dollars cumulatively:

Among achievements Brown cites are McMurry’s management of a series of highway improvement projects, including reconstructions of major interstate junctions in Atlanta, Macon and Savannah.

Reconstruction?  What reconstruction?  I’ve literally driven in all three of these cities within the last six weeks, and there’s been no real construction anywhere.  There have been lots of instances where shoulders are closed, cones are doled out all over the roads, some concrete barriers are erected, and the rando police car with their lights on to try and get the speed demons of Georgia to slow the fuck down, but there sure as shit hasn’t been any construction beyond maybe re-paving of some highways here and there.  Unless we’re awarding raises to people who look like they’re pretending to do work, there’s zero merit to these fake claims that these are actual improvement projects.

Brown also credits McMurry’s leadership for Georgia’s growing transportation budget, and notes praise Georgia has received for its infrastructure during McMurry’s tenure.

Translation: traffic is so epidemically bad once again due to the world seemingly believing the pandemic is completely over and so they’re all hitting the roads again and clogging everything up that Peach Pass registrations and toll payments have gone up, which is where this transportation budget is coming from.  Too bad it’s going directly into the pockets of all these clowns in GDOT and their cronies, because there sure as shit is still no real infrastructure in this entire state to be worthy of any mention.

What’s incredible is that whomever this guy is, he must have incriminating photos of the people who are in charge of giving him raises, because this is far from the first raise he’s gotten for doing absolutely nothing:

McMurry’s pay rose from $250,000 to $350,000 in 2017, then to $450,000 in 2021. The raises, including the latest, will also boost McMurry’s state pension.

Seriously, the guy got his foot in the door of a job where he doesn’t do anything, and banks a quarter mil.  For pretty much no reason other than he was too lazy to look for anything else, he ends up doubling his salary over the span of like 6-7 years, and he has accomplished basically nothing.  2-3 of those years were kind of a wash thanks to Coronavirus and people not really going anywhere, and the bozo still got a $100k raise in 2021.

Here’s the kicker too.

The state paid Gov. [Yosemite Sam] $176,250 in 2022.

The governor of the entire state makes less than half of what the GDOT commissioner makes.  Now I don’t like that cocksucker either, but something seems fishy when he’s getting literally lapped salary-wise.

Either way, it’s pretty incredible that there’s actually someone out there that actually makes as much money as a professional athlete and deserves the money even less.  It’s also pretty incredible that I somehow managed to find the time to bang out a brog post about something out of the usual array of fallback topics, but I wouldn’t anticipate it happening again for another minute, but for what it’s worth, it was a little reprieve.

Not bad, Utah

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

notbad.gif: Utah seeing massive uptick in child support payments after new law enacted that states those who fall too far behind in payments will become unable to acquire hunting or fishing licenses

Big kudos to the nerds who recognized the correlation between deadbeats who didn’t pay their child support and people who liked to hunt and fish.  And then good on the politicians who realized that the old system of simply arresting and throwing the book at them wasn’t working, and came up with a more effective means of penalization that is actually proving to be effective at keeping deadbeats from being deadbeats.

In all seriousness, I do commend this line of thinking, and think it should kind of serve as a model to the rest of the country that jail just isn’t always the right consequence for anything and everything negative.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought the fake Iron Bowl Tickets sweepstakes/sting to bust deadbeats done in Alabama was hilarious, but that was like 2011, and times have changed, and the context to the narrative has as well.

The impetus behind it seemed solid, and the results are speaking for themselves.  If the threat of jail and the consequences of having a criminal record is what people have to look forward to facing if and when they start falling behind on child support, then most people are just going to cut and run and stay hidden as long as they can, until they swirl down a downward spiral of failure, where everyone suffers, including the children they need to be supporting.

But hitting them in their hobbies and vices, that conveniently have license requirements that need to be renewed annually?  That’s pretty smart thinking.  It’s nowhere near as severe as jail, but it’s still seen as punishment enough, to where they won’t legally be allowed to partake in the activities that they like to do, and it’s proving to be enough of a threat to make them pony up and square up their debts so they can get back to the things that make them happy.  And the proof is in the pudding, with as much payment is seemingly coming back to Utah’s kids in the process.

Not much else to say about this, other than to once again opine, not bad, Utah.  Creative solutions to problems that never were getting better, and showing some improvement in the process.  The country could sure use a whole lot more of this.

Trolling the troll for the win

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I was driving to my car appointment, I drove past a house that had a massive display in their front yard that went to the trouble of spelling out, of all the things in the world, Let’s Go Brandon.  Which is basically the dog whistle phrase that hardcore baked potato worshippers have latched onto like ticks to an elephant’s asshole, for how they feel about the actual president of the United States.  And I feel stupid for having to explain but ticks on an elephant’s asshole seemed too accurate and good of an analogy to pass up.

Firstly, fewer things seem more pathetic to me than anyone, right or left, who is that into politics, that they pollute their properties with propaganda that they are so wanting everyone to notice.  Like, you have absolutely nothing else in your life to be passionate about other than politics, and to a degree that you just have to make sure everyone knows where you stand?  Quite saddening.

Second, the Let’s Go Brandon thing is about the stupidest shit I’ve seen emerge from political meme-licking over the last few decades, and between the last three presidents, we’ve definitely seen some declining bullshit over time.

The thing is though, if I’m the Democratic Party, counteracting Let’s Go Brandon should be the easiest thing in the world to do; as long as we were willing to stop trying to play so high and mighty and stop worrying about the perception of sinking to their level. 

Republicans haven’t been the least bit shy or tried to hide their willingness to capitalize on unethical shit like racism, memes, Twitter and racist memes on Twitter in order to have the upper hand in the political arena.

Plus what I’m about to suggest isn’t even unethical or underhanded, it’s just capitalizing on the opportunity that was dealt to them.

If I’m the Democratic Party, across the board, I’m pushing as many elected officials I can, whose name is Brandon.  Like, legitimately. 

Brandon Affleck for Senate in California.  Brandon Jablonski for Lt. Governor in Wisconsin.  Brandon Marshall for Secretary of State in Mississippi.  Brandon Wojchehowski for Superintendent of Education in Butts County, South Dakota.

Doesn’t matter how big or small the position is, if it’s an elected official, push out a guy named Brandon.

So when the baked potato idiots are all flapping their gums about Let’s Go Brandon or driving around with their stickers on their cars, or wearing shirts or caps with the message on it, or decorating their front yards with the message… they’ll now be supporting these actual politicians named Brandon. 

Preferably Democrats.  Or fuck, even third parties should consider capitalizing on this strategy.  I’m sure a Green or Libertarian party candidate would have more success in the ballots if their name were Brandon, solely based on voters who vote entirely on name recognition alone, which last time I checked is a legitimate reason and tactic behind why some candidates go so ham on signs and campaign awareness.

And that’s basically the point of this whole strategy.  Take the power of the message away from the baked potato’s buffoon followers and it will die faster than Kentucky in this years tournament.  But until then, let all these idiots basically be free advertising for aspiring politicians around the country named Brandon, and see just how much power at the polls name recognition alone does.

I’d wager some money that there would be a laughable amount of Brandons throughout the country who would find themselves in a job after election season is over.  Sure this bones most women and minorities from taking offices, but last time I checked it wouldn’t be illegal for Elizabeth Warren to change her name to  Elizabeth Brandon or Andrew Yang to change his name to Brandon Yang.

Fuck man.  I don’t even like politics, or ever wanted to have shared so many opinions on politics on my brog, but here we are. Fixing political scenarios for free, if I had any readership at all.

Peak America

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I read this story about how health care in America is so fucked up, that it creates a perfect scenario for billionaire Mark Cuban to swoop in and get to play hero to the country.  In short, Mark Cuban launched an internet pharmacy that offers more than 100 generic drugs at reasonable cost, which is a bigger deal than it might sound, because American pharmacists have been notorious for gauging the fuck out of the American people over the last decade or so.

Naturally, Cuban is being lauded with acclaim, in addition to people being refueled for their disdain for the pharmaceutical industry for being greedy and valuing profit over human lives.  The thing is, Cuban embarking on this endeavor is about as low-hanging fruit as they come; there are a number of billionaires, corporations, conglomerates or any other entities in the world that could have done this, a long time ago.  The fact that of all the random rich entities in there are, Mark Cuban is the guy that grasps the low bar, and is not only going to look like a modern saint, but make no mistake, he’s going to profit, massively.

I have no qualms with Mark Cuban, in fact I respect the guy tremendously, in spite of the fact that us pleebs are supposed to hate the wealthy.  He’s one of the guys that actually understands the need to give some shit away in order to make money, and such is the core strategy of how he basically transformed the Dallas Mavericks from perennial laughing stocks into eventual champions.

In fact, he’s basically doing the same thing all over again, but instead of basketball tickets, it’s common, necessary medicine.  Just because he’ll be selling generic medicine at a little over 15% over at-cost, he’s undoubtedly going to be raking in massive amounts of money on account of the likely million people who will all be shopping his online pharmacy; all while gaining their adulation at providing such a compassionate service.

It’s basic Wolf of Wall Street math here, sell cheap necessities to the lower classes, and there’s ridiculous amounts of money to be made.  And as much as I too think what Cuban is doing is a very good thing for the world, the sad reality is that he probably shouldn’t have been the party to have had the opportunity to do this; when it really should’ve been the responsibility of, fucking America, to do this for its own people instead.

But I guess without stories like this, America really wouldn’t be America.

That’s one way to approach the overpopulation problem

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not sure how they’re going to make this work but ok: China, the country, has decreed that those under the age of 18 years are now forbidden from playing more than three hours of video games a week; an hour a day only on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 8-9 pm local time

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that within those who will have to deal with transition, the suicide rate just might go up.  Considering the country is already facing an overpopulation crisis, this might not actually be the worst thing in the world to happen.  Clear way for a newer, fresher generation of Chinese, who weren’t raised and became video game-obsessed, mouth-breathing troglodytes.

All seriousness though, I’m very curious to know just how the entire country is going to enforce this mandate.  When it comes to online games and mobile games, I can kind of take some wild swings, mostly on account of a nation that’s extremely big brother-ey in the first place and can probably try to implement shit to try and prevent their minors from unauthorized gaming.  I’ve already heard things about how some games will require cameras in order to play so that facial recognition can be implemented, but I’m sure that’ll lead to legions of masked gamers to try and circumvent the measure.

But what about offline games, like consoles, arcade cabinets and shit like PSPs or 3DSs that can be played without an internet connection?  I’d have to take a guess that the console business is about to start doing very well in the near future if kids will be relegated to playing offline games by themselves or with their siblings, neighbors or with actual other human beings in the room.  There’s no way offline gaming can actually be enforced, and I’m going to guess most parents will be so desperate for their kids to get out of their hair that they’re not going to enforce this rule in the privacy of their own homes.

And then we get to China’s rich eSports culture, to where they’re always among the world’s best when it comes to all sorts of competitive gaming.  But as I’ve learned from my years of following the pro League of Legends scene, pro players often times are starting their careers as young as 16, which means they’ve been practicing and developing since they were way younger than that.  Sure, I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of exceptions for those in careers and professionals in gaming, but with an entire country now limited to just three hours a week, the well of future players is about to get very, very shallow real quick, and I’m curious to know what the future of eSports in China is going to be with this mandate in place.

Of course, another potential blowback to this law is that there’s absolutely nothing that says a guy can’t become a video game-obsessed cretin after they hit 18 and beyond, with the only difference is now that they’re adults and can act like dicks as adults as opposed to being shithead pre-teens and teenagers.  All of the educating and social graces they are believed to have developed from having their gaming being limited, all go flying out the window when 18-year old Xin Peng realizes the handcuffs are off, and then spends the next five years of his life glued to League of Legends, getting dominated by 14-16 year olds in Korea, Denmark, Russia and even maybe Americans.

In the end though, I don’t think much is going to be made from this.  If it doesn’t blow up in their faces from the onset, it’ll probably be a law that’s so loosely enforced that it might as well not exist at all.  And even if it is something that is enforced seriously, China is also one of the greatest cheating cultures on the planet, and no serious gamer would be above cheating over their own country’s laws in order to have a nice marathon session of Counterstrike, whether it’s manipulating their IP, wearing a mask to circumvent facial recognition, or any sort of measure in order to get around the law.  After all, this is a country where teenagers go to tremendous lengths to cheat during high school entrance exams, for something they don’t even want to do, so imagine just how far they’ll go when it comes to gaining something they do?

Anyway, it’s stories like this that kind of make me scratch my head and wonder why China is actually seen as this threat to the world when it comes to economics, business and general population.  They can barely keep their own population in check so much being a threat to other countries in the world outside of building Chinatowns all over the world.  But I could be wrong, and this could be a game-changer of a law that ushers in a generation of better adjusted, more mature and intelligent and successful Chinese citizens that are better than everyone else in the world that were raised on video games and other brain-rotting content.

Wouldn’t take that bet though.  I’ll keep my eyes on suicide rates among minors in China for the next year instead.