July 28, 2013

How you know Seattle has too fucking many Starbucks

This is Starbucks Center, corporate headquarters for the global coffee leviathan. Starbucks Center used to be Sears' west coast catalog fulfillment warehouse; at 2.1 million square feet it is the biggest building in the state of Washington that isn't owned by Boeing. (It's right next to the Seattle railhead; the plan was for Sears to receive boxcars full of mailed orders then ship merchandise to customers via Parcel Post on other boxcars. Until Sears got out of the catalog-sales business, the plan worked just fine.) It is at the corner of Utah Ave. South and Walker Street. And as one would guess, there is a Starbucks store in this building.

If you go east on Walker Street exactly one block to 1st Avenue, there's another Starbucks.

Interestingly enough, the Fred Meyer chain of general stores, which serves Starbucks in its stores everywhere else, doesn't serve Starbucks in Seattle; there they serve Tully's, another Seattle-based coffee company that runs its operations out of - this is no shit - an abandoned brewery.

July 27, 2013

Twinkies: worst product launch in the history of ever

Except for pictures in newspapers and news footage, has anyone here seen a box of Twinkies since they came back?

July 26, 2013

If privatization is the cure for all ills, explain TSA

On the day George W. Bush was inaugurated, airport security was in the hands of the private sector. And until 9/11 they did a pretty good job.

After 9/11 they were replaced by a huge federal agency.

The question is, if we had to deprivatize airport security, why should we privatize anything again?

July 23, 2013

Is Seattle dumping roids in the Sound or something?

The seagulls are far larger than they once were.

July 22, 2013

Eating every scrap of food in the house is no mean feat

Tomorrow starts my week of vacation. I will be 300 miles from my refrigerator, and to ward off the possibility that we could lose power and I'd come back to a steel box with rotten food in it, I decided to eat all the perishable food I owned.

If I never see a piece of chicken again in my life it will be too soon.

July 21, 2013

The bellyache of a teabagger

"Hi. I'm Frank, and I'm a Tea Party Patriot. I believe in a government so limited it can't interfere in my life choices.

"And ONLY my life choices.

"I was okay with it many years ago when the government decided homos didn't need rights. Hell, I thought it was great: any man who doesn't want to marry a woman and have lots of kids like a patriotic American does deserves everything he gets.

"And I was overjoyed when the government started cracking down on all those dope-smoking hippies. I'm not a hippie. I'll never be a hippie. And if any hippie doesn't want to look like me, work the same kind of job as me, and refuses to smoke cigarettes and drink booze like a patriotic American does, he deserves everything he gets.

"Then I found out the government was looking at my phone records to make sure I wasn't calling any terrorists. Hey! I'm a patriotic American, dammit, how dare the government come after me? So I wrote a letter to my congressman, and a letter to my senator, and a letter to the editor, and stood on a street corner with a sign that says 'Government Keep Your Hands Off Patriotic Americans!'

"While I was doing it, some guy named Martin Niemoller came up and kicked my ass so hard I have to take off my pants to answer the phone. Why would that dirty hippie do anything like that to a patriotic American?

"By the way, these pants are squeezing my head really hard, and it hurts. Can someone help me get them off?"

July 19, 2013

I worry more about license plate scanners than NSA surveillancw

One of the fun new technologies the cops have is the license plate scanner. AP reports indicate they can be attached to just about anythiing - bridges, buildings, non-police cars - that the police share their take between agencies, and there are very few restrictions on their use.

Since the files these generate can be considered public records, anyone can get them...and it's okay to charge a reasonblee fee for records.

Wrap yer head around this: firms could spring up to datamine these files. And working on the theory itt's already okay to hire the police, why couldn't an abortion protest group pay to have a scanner placed outside the entrance to Planned Parenthood, a corporation looking for an excuse to fire workers pay to put one near a union hall, or....well, you think of one.

July 19, 2013

Robocop wasn't supposed to be a documentary

So far Rick Snyder hasn't managed to get a cop killed and transplant his brain into a robot, but other than that the privatization theme is coming true.

I wonder when they're going to start building Delta City...

July 19, 2013

Movies you would like them to remake

Since that's all Hollywood wants to do now...

Mine:
1. The Untouchables. I thought the movie was good...then I read the book Eliot Ness wrote and there are some things in there that would be fun in a movie.

2. Patton, starring Lee Ermey and using the kind of language Patton really used. In Patton's address to the troops he did not use the word fornicating.

3. The Great Escape without the Steve McQueen character Captain Hilts. It's understandable why he was there - higher box office. He didn't add much to the film because the little prima donna didn't want to do anything.

4. A new Heavy Metal movie centered around Ranxerox, the robot made out of copier parts.

and...

5. An animated Starship Troopers. In animation you can do powered armor, you can do a drop the way Heinlein wrote it, you can give cap troopers weapons that will kill bugs...most people would think that if trying to kill bugs with rifles on Klendathu got 125,000 guys killed they'd send them to the outlying systems with howitzers, but noooooo...

July 18, 2013

Are college loans H1Bs for Americans?

H1B is the work visa for technical people. It's what you use if you need an Indian programmer. H1Bs tie a worker to a company, so you can shit on your H1B staff all you want.

The same is true of college grads with loans, which is most of them. You don't want to miss a payment on those and good jobs are hard to find, so you can put a college loan holder through shit that would make a non-loan holder give you precise details of how he wants you to fuck yourself.

When I see that now it takes a degree to get a job supervising potato washers, I have to think that's their true motivation.