Tag: ohatlanta

lol MARTA #620

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: MARTA “payroll error” results in janitor making $620,000 in overtime pay in April, not flagged until July; neither janitor or employee responsible for clerical error are with company, no funds have been returned

Chalk this story up as one of the most Atlanta stories there could possibly be.  A crime that should have no right succeeding, and perpetrators who will in most likely get away with it, enjoying the spoils of their effort, before the legal system drags on and on and on before any sort of comeuppance is achieved, to where nobody’s going to even remember much less give a shit about this story by the time anything happens.

Make no mistake, there’s in all likelihood no error at all that resulted in a MARTA custodian somehow getting $620,000 bones in overtime in April, because the reality is that most payroll systems are nearly completely automated, and it most definitely required some degree of manual manipulation to suddenly make this guy’s OT hourly wage go from like $7.75 an hour to $7,750.

It’s a two-person job and everyone knows it, considering the obvious result that both the person who made the ‘clerical error’ and the custodian who received $620,000 in OT wages, peaced the fuck out of the job, and probably the country, the second after the funds hit the bank.

I think the funniest thing is that the crime happened in April, wasn’t flagged until three months later in July, and it’s now practically October that everyone is now hearing about it.  Even though MARTA is pursuing legal action and should by all rights win whatever case they have against those who stole from them, it’s not going to change the fact that the crooks who robbed them are going to be living pretty until that day of reckoning comes, if it ever does.

It’s a microcosm of the state of the legal system, not just in Atlanta, but the country, where it seems that so often times, the legal system is so slow, inefficient, and full of loopholes and trash cans to tip over to slow down the chase, where crooks are emboldened and not at all afraid to commit crimes and flagrantly steal, because it just seems like the punishments don’t outweigh the benefits and luxuries of committing the crimes in the first place, and in the end, they still win out.

The only ones who really suffer are probably the people who rely on MARTA, because the agency will probably cut jobs or worse off, implement a fare hike, to make up for the $620k that they lost, service will suffer, MARTA becomes an even larger ironic joke, and Atlanta takes more flack for being a low-rent city with a completely inefficient and incompetent transit authority, and where criminals are playing the game on easy mode.

It’s times like these where the world needs vigilantes like Batman, who don’t operate under any rules or jurisdictions, and could probably go after, apprehend and turn in the two crooks to the authorities in like two seconds.  It’s not like they probably went all Milton from Office Space, and actually managed to get out of the country and are enjoying their stolen money from some tropical paradise.

But how many colleges will he get accepted into??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox5Atlanta: 14-year old Fulton County teen scores perfect 1600 on the SAT as a freshman in high school

Just when you think #TRYHARDSZN is over, we have #TRYHARDs still #TRYHARDing over in Fulton County to prove otherwise.  Because if you’re not #TRYHARDing all year round, would you even be a #TRYHARD at all?

Anyway, this is going to be an interesting subject come next #SZN, that is if his fate isn’t already sealed by now, because we have this 14-year old little Doogie prodigy already putting up credentials to dwarf and shame all #TRYHARDs come the 2027 #SZN, what with his perfect 1600 SAT score, and already farming up college-level courses at Harvard and Rice.  I don’t know the approximate number of high school credits required for graduation, but he’s already completed 14.5 while still just a freshman at a fancy applicant-only innovation academy.

The difference is that this #TRYHARD goes to school and presumably lives in the bougie part of town, and not on the hood-ass south end anywhere remotely close to Westlake High, the undisputed champion of farming #TRYHARDs to apply to 117+ schools por gratis and to see how many times they can get their name in the news for having students getting into 89+ of them.

It’ll be an interesting scenario to see how an Indian kid from the nice part of town with at least one ace credential will stack up against underprivileged teens from the hood who leverage quantity over quality, to see which lands in the better collegiate scenario.  It’ll probably be a tale of extremes duking it out, where on one side we have a whiz-kid prodigy who will not only have socio-economic factors working against him, but the obvious (South) Asian Curve to overcome, versus teenagers from the hood who have generations of systemic racism, an unspoken affirmative action and reparative intentions by colleges across the nation on their side.

It may be worth passively following to see where this Doogie ends up versus the top #TRYHARDs of the 2027 #SZN, or whenever he decides to start applying to colleges, because I think it’s going to be interesting on many different accounts.  Primarily because I’d wager that Doogie isn’t going to have his college application fees waived across the board, and it’ll be interesting to see where he ends up deciding to go, versus the top #TRYHARDs of his graduating class.

Oh, Atlanta #614

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: Atlanta-based Sumo Championship League (SCL) to begin debuting in October

So let’s see: Atlanta has an MLB team, NBA team, NFL team, and even an MLS team.  Scattered throughout the rest of Georgia are all four levels of minor league baseball affiliates of the Braves.  USA Soccer has chosen Fayetteville, Georgia as their headquarters.  There’s an affiliated minor league hockey team in Duluth, which is as close as Georgia is going to get to the NHL after two previously failed NHL squads that have left for Canada.  The University of Georgia and Georgia Tech athletics are both reputable athletic programs in most major sports, and even Georgia State, Kennesaw State and Georgia Southern are D-I programs.

Needless to say, there’s no shortage of athletic competition to imbibe in at any point of the year for anyone who wants to watch competitive sport.  So perhaps it might not be a bad idea to start considering using dollars in the state of Georgia for maybe anything that isn’t related to athletics, no?

What’s that you say?  What about sumo wrestling?  Georgia doesn’t have sumo wrestling?  I mean, why wouldn’t Georgia, United States have an association of a sport native to the country of Japan in it?  But what’s that?  It’s going to have sumo wrestling debuting in Georgia?  In October?  What say whaaatt??

And here we are.  Some new Sumo Championship League is about to embark, and it was founded by a dude who used to be a bigwig at WCW Turner Broadcasting, so it has some sturdy Atlanta ties, and leads to believe that the SCL could be considered Atlanta-based.

Because there appears to be a belief that there is a thirst for some real life sumo wrestling in North America.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the sport, and the athletes that make up of it.  I don’t see a bunch of fat guys crashing into each other (like in futbol americano), I see athletes who just happen to have large mass, who play a human game of chess of trying to knock down their opponents or maneuver them out of a ring.  It takes intelligence, adaptability and actual skill in order to achieve victory, and I have seen some live sumo wrestling in my life.

It’s just that it just seems like a complete, nobody-asked-for-this kind of endeavor, where the league is supposedly valued at $25M, which means it has received about as much of that in funding, and it begs me to ask the question on how many other things in this world could $25M have better gone towards other than starting up a sumo league?

I digress though.  If the SCL starts running shows in Atlanta, preferably up where I could take my dad to some live events, it seems like something that would be interesting to check out, if the price is right.  Now if they start charging $65+ up for a completely unproven commodity from the onset, they’ve got to be diluting themselves, but if they play a smart game and offer up cheap, affordable entertainment until some worth is established, maybe I’ll go check out some actual sumo wrestling.  I’m always looking for interesting things to take my dad to go see, and perhaps we can both derive some entertainment out of welcoming some live sumo wrestling to the Metro, after all.

Who would’ve guessed that foreign travelers don’t want to get gauged either?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau report that hotel bookings did not live up to the impact predictions that the FIFA World Cup would bring

Among some of the great content that came out of the FIFA World Cup, I particularly liked the local Atlanta material, about foreign visitors’ experiences in the Metro.  I really enjoyed videos about witnessing people wandering around in the hoods of College Park, the West End and East Atlanta, looking absolutely petrified at just how hood some of these neighborhoods were capable of being.

It’s obvious that they chose these areas because they were MARTA accessible, and they figured that instead of staying within a mile radius of The Benz and get gauged to death, they’d stay a little bit further out for less, but it’s aight because we got train access.

I’d never seen so many the sax is getting louder memes in such a short time, but they’ve all been entertaining to me, especially when I recognized some of the places of some of the videos.

But getting back to the article here, it brings me great satisfaction to see all the L’s the city is taking in regards to expected hotel occupancy versus what had actually happened.  It’s not that I want to see Atlanta getting laughed at by the rest of the world, but I’m diametrically opposed to flagrant price gauging and any act of trying to turn screws to the people of the world, that I feel like quantifiable evidence of failure like this is necessary in order for any sort of course correction to happen.

It’s pretty great:

FIFA once promised an impact equal to eight Super Bowls.

But then the numbers start coming in, and tax revenue, hotel occupancy and hotel occupancy within a 1-mile radius are all in the negatives, and it’s just one of those smug, gee, tf did you think was going to happen when you ask people to pay thousands of dollars to fly to Atlanta, thousands more dollars to get tickets into the matches, and think that they’d still have thousands of dollars left over to stay in overpriced hotels?

I especially like the Ls that all the nearby hotels took, because firstly, they’re all of the luxury, high-end name brands, of W, the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton, and then all the Dragon-con hotels that are all perpetually overpriced all the time.  They should be the least surprised that people who were dumping their life savings into these trips would prioritize lodging the last versus logistics and match tickets.

I am surprised to see that the general, umbrella Metro Atlanta hotel occupancy also remained in the negatives, which means that probably the AirBnB and short-term rental markets probably did gangbusters throughout the World Cup’s tenure in Atlanta, or perhaps people were staying in places like Newnan, Woodstock, Braselton and the way the fuck outskirts that might not fall into the Metro umbrella.

Either way, chalk this up as some satisfying tea to indulge in, because as much as I love sports, the politics that go behind it are as much full of shit as the nonsense that endlessly churns up in Washington DC.

Sounds like a way to lose $500 and feed the squatting epidemic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: City of Atlanta announces new no-fee microloan program for renters to help avoid evictions during times of duress

Upon reading this, I feel like Mayor Andre Dickens must’ve recently seen Jim Carrey’s Yes Man and was inspired by the scene where JC’s loan officer character, under hypnotic suggestion, said yes to just about every single loan request that came across his desk, with his bank’s branch giving out tremendously more loans than the rest of the company.

When confronted about it by a higher-up who came in to investigate the generosity, the twist was that all the people he was giving loans out to were just so grateful to be having their needs met, that the repayment rate of all his loans was 98%, and the bank was actually turning a profit on the repayments.  Good job, Carl.

Seemingly inspired by a fictional film, Andre Dickens launches the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, where he believes that loaning out $500 at a time to people who might be a little short when the rent is due, will help keep good families secure in their homes, and not be at risk of eviction.

The alleged rationale behind the initiative is altruistic, and I don’t mean to shit on a program that has such altruistic objectives, but there’s zero part of me that believes this has any chance of being like Yes Man, and 98% of these $500 loans will be repaid, much less used in any sort of responsible manner.

First of all, the $500 microloans are no-interest, no-fee, require no collateral.  They will then have 25 weeks to pony up a Jackson at a time, and although I feel fortunate to say that I could probably pay $20 a week, I know a lot of the people this is intended for probably aren’t.  I get that this is all in the name of helping people, but programs require funding to survive, and if they’re not going to make any sort of payment, especially to off-set the extremely high chance that most of these loans aren’t going to get repaid fully, if at all, then may as well not even bother launching it in the first place.

Second, has anyone stopped to look at the eviction rates in Metro Atlanta?  For 2026, one in four renters defaults, and although they may face eviction, the corresponding squatting rates are also so astronomical that this program is basically setting itself up to be a means to give future squatters $500 bones to supplement themselves with before they inevitably start living illegally.

$500 is not an inconsequential amount, but given what the cost of renting is in Metro Atlanta and all around the US these days, it’s barely a drop in the bucket as far as actually being able to help someone out goes.  I have a feeling the people who are struggling with making rent aren’t short by $500 or less each month, and require that difference to be made up somewhere, every single month, and not just have one bad period.

Hypothetically, a responsible borrower gets their $500 loan, staves off defaulting for one month, but then the 30th rolls around four weeks later, they’re short again, but now they are ineligible for another $500 because they received one a month prior, what then?

I can tell you that with my general expenses and costs of supporting my household, $500 vanishes in the blink of an eye, often in a single transaction somewhere, and $500 wouldn’t really help that much in the grand spectrum of the debts that I could incur, and in fact, be worse in the sense that I now owe one more something back.

The idea of this is nice, and if it isn’t just a smoke screen meant for Dickens to operate as his predecessors did (read: stealing taxpayer funds), I would hope that this truly does help a lot of people having a bad month, stay afloat, and pay back responsibly, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I look forward to revisiting this topic in a year when I see this post show up on On This Day, and I’ll be curious to Google it to see just what came of the whole thing, but probably find nothing about it because everyone loves to hide their L’s and Dickens was probably using this whole thing to steal money to begin with.

Y’all thought it was just a joke

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox5ATL: man found stabbed at 725 Ponce de Leon Avenue, later died from injuries; suspect in custody

For those unaware, 725 Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown Atlanta is a Kroger grocery store located right off of the famed Atlanta Beltline, which I like to call the Jesus Sidewalk because it’s basically a gigantic fucking sidewalk that runs a big ass circle within the city limits of Metro Atlanta, unintentionally creating another hoop of segregation for snobs to flex just how Atlanta they are based on where they live in proximity or within it.

However, it’s not just any Kroger grocery store, but it’s the address of what was once infamously known as Murder Kroger, whereas the name sake implies, several deaths had occurred.  As the Beltline project grew, everyone knew that the OG Murder Kroger was going to get torn down and redeveloped, but the popular joke was that the building could be torn down and massive image rehabilitation could be undertaken, but the general fact that this address would forever be known as Murder Kroger was never going to change.

Longtime Atlantans would always know 725 Ponce as Murder Kroger, and no amount of Jesus sidewalk adjacency or fancy mixed-use buildings being erected on that spot was ever going to change that.

A few months ago, I made a tongue-in-cheek observation after multiple incidents tied to Kroger stores in the Metro Atlanta area where death has unfortunately occurred, that the spirit of Murder Kroger was a lot like the concept of The Grudge, where even leaving the accursed house in Japan didn’t save victims from being cursed by it, and that it was capable of traveling.  725 Ponce might have been rechristened and redeveloped, but the grudge of Murder Kroger was never going to go anywhere, and it had apparently traveled to other Kroger locations in the area, spreading its curse of death towards Decatur and east.

But lest the Grim Reaper of Atlanta forget where their base of operations lie, it didn’t take long before yet another auspicious incident happened at 725 Ponce, where a serial criminal with allegedly over 30 arrests, stabbed a guy on the Jesus Sidwalk, close enough to Murder Kroger to where the infamous 725 Ponce address was what was reported as the scene of the crime.

How a man with as many arrests on his record was somehow allowed to be on the streets in the first place is beyond me, but from what I could tell, he was white and I guess that says everything we already need to know.  But he still took it upon himself to play Judge Judy and executioner and took a life, and the question really is, did the location of the incident make this happen, or was the haunts of past visit to Murder Kroger compelling him to drop another human being?

And seeing as how the victim unfortunately succumbed to their wounds, all joking aside, it’s safe to say that Murder Kroger has claimed yet another life.  Like I said, you can tear the building down, build it back up as something fancy and modern, slather some shiny new paint on it, and attach it to the Jesus Sidewalk.  But Murder Kroger is never going to go away, and nothing short of a Shinto exorcism is probably going to have a snowflake’s chance in hell at getting rid of this curse.

But of course, the Barves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BaseballWRLD: Braves’ shortstop Kim Ha-Seong is statistically basically having the worst baseball season in history

I really hate that it’s a Korean player, on the Atlanta Braves, that is having this unfortunate distinction, but the proof is in the pudding and the numbers don’t lie.  I know that all over the internet, there are couch statisticians and homers who are going to cry that ~85 plate appearances is too small a sample to make this kind of judgment, but those individuals probably aren’t really seeing the bigger picture, nor have they actually watched any Braves games in which Kim has actually been in this season.

Man has been the very definition of a free agent flop, and one more thing that sucks about this whole thing is that this is the kind of free agent signing example that will further make the Atlanta Braves corporation even more gun-shy and risk-averse skittish about free agent signings in the future, than they already are.  One-year pacts are pretty low-risk as they come, albeit at high price tags, but considering the return on investment Kim has provided, or didn’t, the $20M he is making in the 2026 season has been particularly brutal.

Like with most Korean players in MLB, I supported Kim and have been such, even when he signed with San Diego and was playing out there.  I was proud of the guy when he was putting up 5+ bWAR seasons for the Padres, with him being so good in 2023 he was even notching some low-end MVP votes and a Gold Glove. 

Injuries derailed his time in San Diego, and he was shipped off to Tampa Bay where he couldn’t ever get back on track, and I was really excited when the Rays made him available and the Braves being the Braves did the Braves-iest thing and managed to buy low on him, picking him up at the waiver-deadline last year, which is the second trade deadline, the one nobody ever talks about, because that’s the one that’s like C-rated CDOs and there’s rarely any notable talent ever exchanged.

And that initial gamble paid off, and fed into my hypothesis of how much playing environment matters, with Kim’s numbers improving noticeably going from Tampa to Atlanta.  It’s like going from sleepy Tampa with white trash and no Korean community to Atlanta, that sure, still has its share of white trash, but has a robust Korean community mattered, and across the board his counting stats all improved in roughly the same amount of plate appearances.

The union proved to be mutually beneficial enough to where the Braves actually spent money and spent money on a Scott Boras client, two things that the organization normally hasn’t done a lot of historically, but it was a good opportunity for the Braves to get a reliable shortstop, and a good opportunity for Kim to possibly flex a season of being healthy and playing in a good environment, which he could then hope to parlay into a larger, more lucrative deal, likely away from Atlanta afterward.

But then he just had to go to Korea in the offseason, where the winters can be brutal, he slipped on some ice and fell and fucked up his hand, and before even reporting to Spring Training, the Kim deal had already begun to go tits up.  He missed all of Spring Training, and it’s evident that the lack of preparation put him in a miserable place to play catchup with, and when he returned to the Major League squad, he was joining the team that was contending and facing real pressure, and Kim just couldn’t get going.  He was a black hole in the lineup, and it went from it’s too early to tell to okay, maybe he does suck now.

A setback that put him on the disabled list was kind of a convenient excuse to remove him from the roster and start getting some production from other players, and fans began to bemoan his inevitable return, because the Braves being the Braves always demand ROI, and they would undoubtedly be determined to recoup anything at all from the $20M they were paying him.

He hit well in his rehab assignment, which the team was milking to the absolute maximum to keep him out of the Majors, but when push came to shove and they were forced to bring him back up, they did the predictable thing and brought him back up, while releasing one of the guys who was filling in for him, and doing it better than he was.

But the fact that Kim can’t hit Major League pitching goes to show that this is probably where he realistically is now, as a player.  Capable of doing well against Triple-A talent, but unable to be competent in the Majors.  As much as I support Kim personally, the reality is that his MLB career is more than likely done after this season, and he’ll probably go back to Korea to where he can hopefully salvage a lucrative career out in the KBO.

Regardless, we’re back to square one, where Kim is still sucking, and sucking to the magnitude of being on track to having the literal worst offensive season in MLB history, no hyperbole.  bWAR is kind of a catch-all statistic, loosely used to measure player worth, and Kim is currently sitting on -1.0 bWAR, which doesn’t sound like that much considering there are guys with worse, but it’s the fact that he’s gotten there in much shorter time that shows just how bad and detrimental he has been. 

Google estimates the cost of one bWAR in 2026 is roughly $11M, so the fact that Kim is sitting on -1.0 bWAR, and is getting paid $20M to get there, his financial impact to the organization is -$31M dollars.  That’s nearly two not-retired Prince Fielder seasons, but the difference is that Fielder wasn’t in the dugout adversely affecting a batting lineup, or on the field being fat, immobile and hurting the team defensively.

Most anyone with a brain knows that at some point, the roster spot is more valuable than a bad asset, and the smart play would have been cut Kim, eat the $20M, and to have kept Jorge Mateo, who at the time I’m writing this, had contributed +0.7 bWAR to the Braves before he was ungratefully released.  But like I said, the Braves are so corporate and so predictable, that everyone unfortunately knew that they were going to keep Kim and demand to get any modicum of ROI.

Again, I hate that this is happening to Kim, because this will undoubtedly make the baseball public continue to question Korean baseball players while still fetishizing Japanese ones, and I hate that it’s happening to the Braves. This will further cloud their willingness to use the free agent market, and I’m not going to hold my breath that I’ll ever see a day where there’s a standout Korean player on the Braves.

When the inevitable day comes where the Braves are bounced from the playoffs, many are going to be pointing their fingers at Kim, who sure, isn’t undeserving of it, but the team is also culpable for keeping him, when more optimally strategic options were available the whole time, due to their obsession with ROI and getting their money’s worth clouding optimal strategy.  That part, wouldn’t be on Kim.