American here.

Just checked my latest paystub. My taxes are $405 per WEEK.

Good to know I’m getting such a bang for my buck.

And by bang, the military just got a few more bullets for war out of me.

You joke but…

I was in a benefits meeting a few years ago led by the insurance rep for our employee health coverage.

Deductibles came up.

I raised my hand and asked, “So if I go skiing for Christmas and snap my femur on December 26, it behooves me to delay any treatment until January 1, right?”

She didn’t miss a beat and said, “Yes, that’s correct.”

There was a stunned silence in the room from that one.

To the immigrant thing - I was on vacation a few weeks ago and took five Uber rides. None of the drivers spoke English. I wonder if ride sharing is going the immigrant predator route these days.

For clarification, it didn’t bother me to have non-English speaking drivers. They were all great.

I looked him up. He’s an old session musician. Those guys get particularly bitter about modern studio production.

Did you read my comment at all?

To the consumption part, I have given more money directly to more artists via discovering them on Spotify then attending their shows and buying their merch than I ever even came close to back in the record buying days when record companies were screwing their artists anyway.

I know quite a few bands personally who will never attain Taylor Swift levels of wealth, but they’ve got a business model of touring and merch down to a science that affords them a nice living doing what they love. This also includes tons of accessibility and fan interaction that very much didn’t use to be a thing.

The savvy DIYers are sidestepping the entire record company schematic and using streaming services as effectively free marketing.

That’s kinda how I feel about all of his videos. He’s a great illustration of latching on to the music of your formative years and firmly stating that everything after that is crap.

In present day, you’ve got to sift through a lot of crap to find the good new stuff.

What this guy doesn’t ever address is that has always been true.

My daughter always said I was lucky to grow up in the eighties because we had the best music. To this I responded that I only played her the good stuff. All the really crappy stuff, of which there was a LOT, kinda got filtered out of collective memory.

Until I saw the picture, I had so thoroughly forgotten about these that your title conjured no mental image.

I remember these mostly as soft drinks served at expensive restaurants as a way to keep the refill inclined riffraff out.

I think I also remember seeing them as mixers for bartenders at catered events, but I’m not a hundred percent sure on that one.

Connecticut penitentiary? A state facility? How are the prisons in Connecticut? The only thing I know about the state is that they have their own form of pizza though I have no clue what that form is.

I can’t tell if that’s a joke or a real question.

If it’s a real question, nips in this case refers to those little bottles of alcohol you would get on an airplane. They’re readily available in liquor stores here. Common purchase for the chemically dependent alcoholic who just needs a quick fix.

I’ve already had this talk with my daughter. I’m not presently ill or anything, but I see this as the new American version of estate planning.

Somehow, I’ve managed to build up a few meager assets to leave to my daughter and I’ll be damned if I let American healthcare take it all.

(And please refrain from bringing up misinformed statements on estate tax. I’m a tax accountant. I’m more astute on that stuff than most of the population, and my little pile of shiny trinkets is well below any threshold for any of that to kick in)

There’s a reggae album out of Jamaica by Romain Virgo with a song called “I’m doin good”

In that song is the line, “may not be able to buy what vegetarians cook but I’m doin good”

The album is from 2010. The first time I heard that song was my first realization that vegetarianism can be difficult as I’d recently been to Jamaica, and they do love them some vegetarianism. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe some of them wanted to be vegetarian but weren’t able.

Nah. In Texas all she has to do is say that God told her to do it, and she’ll get a couple years of taking drugs in a hospital.

The exception is Taylor Parker because she killed an _unborn child, and that’s a damn step too far.

Shithead maga bleeding a nonprofit dry example aside, this is a good (albeit extreme) illustration of why I’m generally hesitant to give to any large charity.

You can pull their tax returns up online (form 990) and see where the money goes. Too often, it all goes to executive salaries and marketing with some token single digit percentage going to actual charitable work that may or may not be doing any actual good.

Whoa there pal.

What part of driving pickup trucks with giant tires through the mud while drinking cases of ~~bud light ~~ Modelo and wearing jorts and a tank top with a picture of Rambo Trump firing footballs from a grenade launcher isn’t culture?

My experience in Iowa is limited to seeing Cage the Elephant at a casino in Council Bluffs.

Saw music

Got laid

Gambled

Drank

It was alright

What in Sam hell is that even supposed to be? Like what did it say on the menu?

I remember getting my Texas instruments financial calculator circa 2009 for probably fifty dollars or so.

The professor told us that at the time, production costs for my fifty dollar calculator were roughly a dollar.

On the bright side, I’ll bring that thing in whenever I buy a car and it truly fucks with the whole “what kind of payment are you looking for” routine they do. (Though these days, I’m more likely to bring a laptop with Excel. Same idea, but faster and better visuals)

Product - use daily

Language - speak English, Spanish, and Korean, though the latter two are admittedly falling off from lack of use. Lived overseas for four years in my twenties

Collared shirts - wear daily, but I’d guess that’s not goth chick bait

Dancing - was religiously prohibited from such growing up and never took an interest in it

Personal skill - I can cook like a motherfucker. Like really good stuff. If I believed in love languages, mine would be feeding others. The women in my office make weekly requests for me to cook whatever they’re craving over the weekend and bring it in on Monday.

But I’m talking about energy. Gomez spends his entire existence striving toward being Morticia’s everything. I don’t have enough gas in the tank after seventy or eighty hours of getting yelled at for my income.

Next up, since everything is so easy, I guess I just simply waltz into another job, right?

I’m of the opinion that Hillary lost because of the blatant super delegate shenanigans within the DNC. I know I was LIVID. However, I wasn’t one of the folks who were so livid that they protest voted third party. I held my nose, suppressed my gag reflex, and voted for Hillary, though I really didn’t want to.