Category Archives: Business

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on the proceedings of an ongoing criminal enterprise

It’s hard to escape the taint of dirty money in modern society.  Hell I watched three NFL games yesterday and all 32 team owners are some of the most scuzzy dudes on the planet.  But I still watch.  These dudes have their hands all over the public till.  I think New York State just gave the Bills like a $1B for the new stadium.  I wonder if that money, could say, be used to hire more NYC subway cops?  But nah, the billionare needs it more.

So I guess I can somewhat understand how billions of humans are just going to straight ignore the criminal farce of Qatar hosting the World Cup, and enjoy themselves the games.  After all, in the grinding routine of life, a good ball game with family and friends sure does hit the spot.  But make no mistake, these games were bought via bribes to FIFA by a corrupt petro dictatorship with stadiums built using non union indentured slave labor.

It’s like asking the Klingons to host the Olympics after they drop a battlecrusier’s worth of gold pressed latinum onto the doorsteps of the IOC.  Just like FIFA, the IOC would take the money, and Kronos would host the games.  Only the Klingons have additional (not optional) demands.  Those who do not qualify in Heat 3 of the 100M butterfly have to subject themselves to the pain stick lineup ritual.  When asked, why that specific Heat, and that specific event, the Klingons get all angry and throw half full blood wine mugs at the IOC goons’ faces.

When you leave out the slave labor, there are only a little under 400K actual Qatari citizens.  It’s as if Cleveland, and only Cleveland, hosted the World Cup entirely on its own.  It’s patently absurd, but then again, so is bold faced open international bribery in front of the whole planet.  And FIFA is still telling the planet to just embrace the suffering.  Here’s a great article from Defector on FIFA goon Gianni Infantino essentially claiming he’s all things to all people, including a Klingon, and how it’s ok to worship Satan, so long as you have feelings, real like, people feelings.

This type of immoral world where anything goes so long as you can be bought, and then talk your way around it afterwards, it’s what makes dudes like Vlad and Xi swoon.  This is the world they want us all to live in.  And a bunch of people are just fine to go along with it.  Just ask Budweiser (an all American brand owned by a Brazilian / Belgian brewery conglomerate hedge fund) who got knee capped at the last moment on alcohol sales.  What was Bud expecting?  When you do a deal with the Klingons, don’t be surprised when they fuck you over on a whim and laugh to your face about it.

Enjoy the games, folks.  Take what joy you can.  There’s nothing you can do to fix Qatar or undo the corruption.  So enjoy the month long ride as some of the planet’s most elite athletes duke it out for their homelands glory and honor.

My prediction?  Hell, I don’t know shit about soccer / futbol.  I couldn’t name you a single player on the American team.  I do know they’re going nowhere.  Because for top high school atheletes in America, soccer is their seventh sport of choice.  So who wins?  Uh, um, Argentina?  I think I heard Messi this is his last World Cup, so he’ll play hard?  And Argentina’s usually good aren’t they?  So, I dunno, fuck it, Argentina.

behold: a future Qatari high school futbol stadium Circa 2027 that will look like it was built in 1964

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become not just your own boss, but your own royalty

Let’s face it, if you don’t try very hard, you can choose a career path that adds little to no value to your own self worth or to humanity in general. You could be a mandatory Jersey gas pumper, mime, day trader, second hand snake oil peddler, investment banker, or komodo dragon wrangler.

But studies in the past have shown that most human beings think that if they were appointed emperor of Earth, that the world would be a better place. Which says a lot about us as a species, because it’s patently untrue. But hey, just take a look at who just got elected to Congress, and it’s easy to conclude your next door neighbor’s four year old is both better qualified and a better person.

But now here’s a chance to become not just your own boss, but your own royalty. Per the BBC, an entire abandoned village in Salto de Castro, Spain can be yours for like $250K, or about 11% of the price for a one bedroom flat in Frisco. Here’s an aerial shot of your future kingdom:

Now my first thought is the village is on top of a mountain because like a lot of the planet’s villages they were built on hills for defensive purposes against [insert any human or natural calamity here]. And I was wrong. The village was built in the 1950’s by a power company to house workers building a reservoir. You can just see the water on the right of the above shot.

So it’s not like it’s an ancient village, but I’m sure there’s history there. The Iberian Peninsula has a ton of history. And you can make your own history, for after your purchase of Salto de Castro, you can just straight go ahead and claim independence and appoint yourself to enteral, divine rule. Any person on the planet can apply to become your subject, for a fee, of course. I mean, you’d be royalty, and need coin.

Why should Monaco or Andorra have all the weirdo small state fun? Get in on the action, while you can. What’s the Spanish Army [cue laughter] going to do? Attack? [cue even more extensive laugh track] You could even get some mercs on the cheap to act as your royal bodyguard.

I hear there are a bunch of mercs in a place called [shuffles through notes] Ukraine who are having a hard time with their current boss and looking for a new gig in which they are not cannon fodder for a failed invasion. You could get them on the cheap. Though it would increase your chances of regicide by 723%.

In all seriousness though whoever buys this place is a fool. For $250K you get the honor to have to plow like $56M just to make it livable again. And it’s all industrial strength faceless buildings from the 1950’s that I doubt are seeping with culture. Plus if you look at the above pic, you can see the high tension power lines running up from the reservoir past the town. How peaceful.

Someone will do it though. There are all kinds of idiots with big money out there who are looking to blow it on crazy projects or vanity ideas. And Salto de Castro won’t be the last. In 2075 due to crippling rural depopulation you’ll likely be able to buy an entire Korean or Japanese province for a pack of salted shrimp snacks. After all, it’s good to be the king.

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random thoughts of the day

1) I’m on extended travel, and for the first time in my life (I’ve stayed in hundreds of hotels) I bailed. I didn’t expect five star anything, the price was the point. But when the room is clearly not cleaned and bugs greet you at the room door, it’s time to bail. The poor clerk up front totally understood, I guess this happens a lot. She did everything right, and then told me to complain to the company. As in, not her boss, who it’s quite clear doesn’t care. She probably hates going to work. I can sympathize. The problem is I’m well compensated for my day job misery, whereas she is not. Be kind to service workers, in 98% of the case they make less than you and suffer for the privilege.

2) Muhammad bin Salman is proving to the planet that money matters. And he has a lot of it. So he can buy out crass golfers, get Biden to grovel, and now is doing the same to a recently legislatively impotent Macron. This guy didn’t just murder a man, he had him dismembered and melted in acid. He’s a monster. Yet he knows the same thing that Putin knows, that Xi knows, which is that significant portions of the West are for sale. You just have to pay the right price. I was in Boston yesterday and they had a Miller Lite ad at street level with one of the LIV sell outs. A person had scrawled in sharpie next to his face “Saudi Blood Money”. Yep.

3) Speaking of selling out, Brittney Griner will eventually get home, because the Biden administration did what the West does. They caved to most of Russia’s demands. Only on Ukraine does the West show strength against a country that has a GDP close to Spain’s (one of 27 EU nations). And Vlad is just buying time until he hopes the alliance cracks (see Italy’s upcoming election). But to me the question becomes, why was Griner in Russia anyways? Easy: $. It’s why golfers play for LIV. I’m just gonna go ahead and say this, if you’re an athlete or business person, or even just a tourist: If you go to Russia, or China, or about a half dozen other places on the planet and they put you in jail as a political playing card? You deserve it. You asked for it. Don’t go to these places and then be shocked that you have no rights, your own government has very little power to help you, and the leaders of these nations spend human lives like currency. Just don’t go to them, it’s rather simple.

4) I’m traveling for the first time in years and it’s been great. I’m seeing so many sights, driving around, sometimes planned, other times random. It feels great. I missed it, more than I remembered. Get out there and make it happen. Explore, see neat things, talk to interesting people, live life.

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little things to help start the day + trains

Friday nearly cuts the subway population in half.  This is a huge benefit when with my subway over half the train cars don’t work right now.  So say on a Thursday you get to share personal space with 173 of your best friends.  But it’s Friday and on Memorial Day weekend so I suppose a whole gaggle of people want nothing to do with the office today.  This was a nice little pick me up to get the day going where I had space enough to actually read my magazine.

In merry old England they just opened the Elizabeth Line which is one of the most modern (and expensive) train lines ever built.  But then I read that even London’s subway is still only at about 2/3 to 3/4 of pre pandemic capacity.  So it seems working from home is semi-permanent, or perhaps a lot of businesses no longer see advantages to being downtown.  Is it in fact going to permanently reshape urban transportation?

Or, with inflation, war, supply shortages, alien sabotage, etc, the economy has still not fully recovered from pandemic?  Maybe in say five years after inflation has cooled, Vlad is impaled on a spike by that Hero Comic Guy, and people can once again buy critical supplies again (like garden rakes) then the economy will blast off.  And when it does downtown offices and their supporting subways will get cracking again.  Who knows?  At this point, it’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen to the planet in say three or four days.

But we at TAP are here to help!  We can predict what will happen by next Tuesday!  Honest.  Let’s go!

1) Zombies

2) Pizza will be made illegal

3) …

Nah, nope, we’re ah, we’re just not going to do this today.  Sorry.

Enjoy your weekend, friends!

Boris will get drunk, comically push the train conductor out, and drive the train to Wales (somehow) where he will stop the train at an old Edward I hilltop fort castle (somehow) and then pass out drunk by falling through a wooden table.

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pop ups are back [frowny face]

Will the Internets devolve? Is Netscape coming back to life? What about [shuffles through some old dusty velum parchments] Myspace, I think maybe they’ve got Facebook in their sights.

Well, at least we got rid of pop ups. Remember those? From like 15 years ago. It was so bad you had to download pop up blockers. But then each individual web browser began putting the blockers inherently into the browser’s code. So you didn’t have to worry about it.

Glad those days are over. So yeah, I was talking to my dog and … oh, oh

oh no

no, please no

Am I going to have to search for a pop up blocker? For fuck’s sake I might as well search for the hottest new clamshell phone. REMEMBER THE 486?!!! IT’LL BE BACK SOON!!! [throws chair]

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setting $500M on fire

Last month we wrote a piece in which we were flabbergasted that any rational human would be interested in CNN+. But even we had no idea it would be this bad. After three weeks and a daily average of only 10K users the hammer came down and it’s done.

They spent $500M on this. There are some fellow bloggers on wordpress that get more than 10K visitors a day. What a disaster. But this was predictable. We saw it coming. Hell give me that $500M. I need my own zoo.

To me, this is a good thing. Some streaming services need to fail and fail badly. Otherwise we’ll just replace cable with 79 different streaming services. Which is asinine and silly.

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oh, CNN is now streaming too

Soon there will be 129 streaming services, somewhat close to the number of core cable channels I suppose.  But at $5.99 each month per service, your new streaming bill will be $772.71 per month for them all. Please save ahead of time so your bank account doesn’t go into the red.

So don’t think for a second all the media companies are upset that cable is dying.  Not even a decade or so ago nine out of ten Americans had cable.  Within the year I bet it’ll be less than half.  But media companies are making more money than ever (except for live sports) so it all works out for them.

And so now CNN is in on the game.  In America you can watch all their programs, but not live news. The international version gets live news.  Because the last thing people know CNN for is live news.  You could spend time with such intellectual heavyweights like Wolf Blizter or Anderson Cooper on their talk shows, two arrogant empty suit guys who have contributed less to the goodness of America than your local jury duty foreman during any equivalent time period.

Uh, there’s some food stuff on there.  Because I guess CNN thinks food will sell.  But Bordain’s dead, so they’ve lost that brilliance.  So I guess they’ll pull some other person out of the woodwork, like some celebrity to talk about food.  Umm, I think they have a bunch of documentaries hosted by people they picked off a spreadsheet based on their political beliefs and skin color.

Um, they do some history stuff every now and then.  Like they had that series that covered each decade.  But that was shallow, pandering, and sucked.  So, um, [furrows brow] what preciously is there for CNN to stream, without live news?  If I were them, they should just throw a puppy on screen with a ball of yarn.  Though they can’t do that because Animal Planet already has a $4.99 a month service exclusively covering puppies playing with objects.

Would it be too earnest of us to ask the aliens to just get on with it?  I mean I know the invasion target date is 2037, but what’s the point in waiting?

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all trees must pay, for the alter of work

A new person at work has decided that they’re going to manage everybody’s training records.  I suspect because they just got hired, nobody is telling them what to do, and they feel that have to do, like, something, anything?  Normally this wouldn’t matter to me, but now they’re after me on my training records like I work for them.  Normally this wouldn’t matter to me, but all our work training sucks and is a check in the block.

Plus, all this extra work, spreadsheets, training records, etc, is all paper printed off, signed, scanned whatever.  We go through a legendary amount of paper in this office.  It’s like it’s still 1947.  We buy paper by the pallet full.  All trees must pay, for the alter of work.  Bow down to it, or they get mad at you and put your name in red text on an excel spreadsheet.

There’s this theory going around, I think somebody wrote a book, on the era of white collar “bullshit” jobs.  Where folks think they (or actually) accomplish nothing of actual value.  They just keep the hamster wheel of their place of business moving along.  I’ve read a few articles lately about how all that’s a lie, and that much of this work actually matters, it’s just most people hate their jobs.

I would tend to agree with that, that most people don’t like their jobs.  But the idea that our super modern white collar world is not about 73% bullshit, is, well, not exactly, precisely correct.  On a given day I’d say about only 1/3 of what I do actually matters.  The rest is the hamster wheel that my boss, or his new training assistant, makes me do that has no value.

I should quit this bullshit gig and go take care of homeless puppies.  But then I’d have a bill pay problem, my dog’s kibble is expensive, beer doesn’t pay for itself.  I should quit and take a risk at value, I won’t, that’s the trap I guess.  We all got bills to pay and white collar work combined with dead trees means you don’t work in a cadmium mine 12 hours a day.

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to Office Space is a verb

I watched four of my employees this morning struggle mightily with the photocopier like it was cavemen learning about fire. They fought the machine for a half hour before they got it to work again. This copier is brand new, and it already is failing. It’s a Xerox, who has been making copiers since 1959 and things still don’t work.

You’d think if they’d been making the same kind of machine for over six decades they’d have figured this sort of thing out. Nope! Everybody around the planet is still struggling with the same flaws, failure, frustrations, and fury. It’s almost like they build these machines poorly on purpose. So you can pay them for maintenance or have to buy a new one all the time.

Everybody wants to Office Space their photocopier. It will always be so. Aliens don’t even need to blow up the planet to take over. They just need to give every family on Earth their own copier. After one month of dealing with failure, we’ll be begging the aliens to become our overlords. Just as long as they destroy all copiers.

not complying with electronic equipment environmental disposal / destruction laws is the dream of every white collar employee

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Japan hosts sporting event, things happen

Five years later I can’t really say my overall opinion of the Olympics has changed much. This boondoggle probably made a whole bunch of Japanese construction guys super rich ala The Bad Sleep Well. Instead, they probably should have spent all the money fixing Fukushima but oh well. What’s a two week sporting event for supermen and superwomen when you can just go ahead and dump a billion gallons of radioactive water into the oceans. Silly oceans, what do they really do for humanity anyways?

What really is kind of crazy is how the IOC and the Japanese government are so hell bent on making this happen. To them the Olympics must happen. All the athletes are already there, rearing to go. Why? What makes these two weeks so special that they have to risk the health of the Japanese nation just so a bunch of creepily machine engineered humans can defeat the other creepily machine engineered humans by 0.15 seconds.

Well, the first answer is money. And the second answer is money. The third answer is politics (Japan sees cancellation as a political failure. Let’s not forget the IOC is a corrupt money pot like FIFA where dishonest men and women go work to take backhanders from politicians and corporations. Don’t think these politicians and businessmen are just gonna go ahead and let the Olympics get cancelled just because somebody’s health might be endangered.

I have this idea for an official Tokyo Olympics commercial. It’s of a random human buying a Coke with a Visa credit card and then getting into their Toyota with Bridgestone tires while wearing an Omega watch and they’re talking on their Samsung phone and so are so distracted as they exit the parking lot they run over a 78 year old Japanese woman on her way to get tested for covid. Then they quick cut to a whole line of rich dudes in suits licking their cigars with 10,000 Yen notes and the CEO of Omega looks directly into the camera and wryly states, “Stupid peasant, she should have gotten out of our way.”

Eh, why bother? I’ll probably just binge watch a BBC series on Netflix for two weeks. Or, like, read a book.

enjoy the spectacle, for one day, we shall die