Rabbits Against Magic is swimming upstream against a rapid current, because whatever idiotic thing Elon Musk says today, he’s bound to exceed tomorrow. His latest brainstorm is that he wants new Xitter members to pay for each posting, which would discourage bots, his announced intent, but would also discourage people from signing up at all.
If ol’ Muskie really wanted to offset his financial losses on Xitter, he’d trademark the phrase “I am not making this up” and charge people for using it in reference to him.
Specific to today’s strip, the House is considering a bill to make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections and I am not making that up, either. I hope they also make it illegal to ride unicorns on February 30, because that’s every bit as major a crisis.
It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, which nearly everyone who does not serve in the Freedom Caucus seems to know, since so few non-citizens even try to do so, and generally fail.
A few places allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, particularly school board races, on the theory that they pay taxes and their kids go the schools. That’s a tradition that goes back to the days before Women’s Suffrage, when women voted locally many places.
And let’s not forget that, before women could vote in federal elections, Jeannette Rankin won a seat in Congress because, while she was forbidden to vote, she wasn’t forbidden to serve. Now those damn women are everywhere, just because American voters want them to be.
It’s a slippery slope!
Juxtaposition of the Day
Elsewhere in things I am not making up, Britain has been convulsed with reports of counterfeit stamps being sold, apparently as a money-making scheme from China. I was going to say “illegally sold” but duh.
This was a problem here on Facebook but, unlike in Britain, the mainstream press took little notice. The US Postal Service put out a notice, including on Facebook, declaring that they don’t wholesale stamps and that the stamps being sold cheap were fake. Facebook responded by pocketing the money and ignoring repeated complaints from users about the scam.
The ads have since disappeared over here and I’d love a peek behind the scenes to find out how that happened because it certainly wasn’t because Facebook users were being ripped off.
As has often been noted, Facebook users are not the customers. Advertisers are the customers. Users are the monkeys in the zoo that the customers pay to see.
Elsewhere in the zoo, here’s one from Ed Hall, who is usually political but here is mostly being humorous.
I’ve seen Farm-Ed day at the county fair, and they will have some particularly docile cow washed down and set up so the kids can stand in line and each take a turn at grabbing a teat and making milk squirt into the bucket.
But the kids at the county fair have at least driven past herds of dairy cows nearly every day of their lives, even if they haven’t got friends who live on farms or lived there themselves.
But back in 1968, a friend of mine and I wandered through Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo the morning after a Jefferson Airplane/Iron Butterfly concert, and were amused to see a Holstein among the animals exhibited.
However, a group of tiny inner city youngsters came by shortly with their teachers and the cow was as exotic to them as the giraffes and lions. And while she seemed docile enough, given that nobody was yanking on her teats, she had not been scrubbed down and so looked, and smelled, like your average cow.
Judging from the way the kids reacted, there was going to be a lot of leftover milk at the classroom’s next lunch.
Meanwhile, back at Betty (AMS), Bub has persuaded Junior to watch a classic western with him.
Back in the Good Ol’ Days, westerns were a staple of both movies and television, and Dennis the Menace was as obsessed with Cowboy Bob as my older sibs were with Hoppy.
I was a Davy guy, myself, but trust me, that stick was portraying ol’ Betsy, and I could travel far and wide with Betsy by my side. I just couldn’t cross the street.
Junior, however, has not been steeped in the lore of the Golden West and probably thinks guns go pew-pew-pew. He’s both logically and historically correct that, while a cowboy might — emphasis on “might” — carry a gun to discourage coyotes or rattlesnakes, the full Hollywood regalia was too bulky, expensive and unnecessary to bother with.
To which I would add that those cowboys who did carry firearms on the trail were often required by local laws to surrender them for safekeeping when they came into town. It was a century before the childish dreams of five-year-olds became a legal reality.
Juxaposition of the Day #2
Two views of management, each recognizable.
I noted the other day little surprise at the finding that billionaires under 30 are all nepo-babies, and I’ve worked for enough of them that Joe Martin’s cartoon drew not a laugh so much as a chuckle of recognition.
Sometimes the founder’s wisdom sustains: The owner of Camp Lord O’ The Flies let his son run the place for one disastrous summer before selling the place to somebody competent and retiring, but I worked for a publisher whose sole qualification for management was having married the owner’s daughter.
As for generational trends, a girlfriend’s father wanted to be a meteorologist but took over the family’s major electrical contracting company when his father unexpectedly died. He passed it on to his son who managed to put the place out of business.
Not sure if Sonny could have picked his employees out of a lineup, but he sure had bought hisself a big old beautiful house.
I used to feel guilty about watching the evening news while we ate dinner, but at least my kids grew up well-informed. Now, as seen in the Lockhorns (AMS), there are TVs in restaurants.
All I ask is that they mute the sound and put on the closed captions.
Though I doubt that’s how John Lennon envisioned reading the news.
The Hall cartoon gave me a flashback to a Stone Soup comic where Holly (13 or so) tells Alex (10 or so) that chickens poop eggs out of their butts. It also made me do some research–yes, some cows do have six teats, which I didn’t know. I’m going to accept the Journal of Dairy Science as a reputable source. https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(34)93273-2/pdf
Perhaps Mr. Hall needs a refresher course in bovine anatomy? Even if you discount the shadowed one in the background, there’s still one too many, and they should not be in a line.
I posted about that earlier, but either my post didn’t make it out of my computer or it went into moderation. Gist of it: yes, it’s not unheard of them to have six.
This objection came up in the comments for the cartoon, and Ed replied that he’d researched and confirmed it. So we have some political cartoonists who carefully check the number of tits on a cow and other political cartoonists who can’t be bothered to find out if non-citizens are allowed to vote.
Funny old world.
The fake stamps posts have not even come close to being gone from Facebook in the USA. I still see and report them several times a week. Along with the fake “Chico’s, Tommy Bahama, Coldwater Creek, Talbots” and other “stores.” It amazes me how someone will send money to a “Chico’s” that is posted under another name and where the website for the items has yet an even different name, but to borrow from Bugs Bunny, the “gulli-bulls” are obviously easy to scam. People really believe they can get something for almost nothing.
Junior airs my sentiments about most gun owners.
Why waste money on such a thing if you aren’t going to use it?
As our Hopi associate says, ‘Hey, everyone is an immigrant. But, we were here first!’
The elongated muskrat has become as prolific a bullxitter as tRUMP!
at space.com › spacex-launch-astronauts-mars-2024
SpaceX’s 1st crewed Mars mission could launch as early as 2024,. . . Company founder and CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Dec. 1)
And, I read that tesla’s promised $25,000 EV project has been abandoned in favor of expensive and MORE PROFITABLE taxis.
I value the many honest, worthwhile products and services that decent companies produce. But, all the deceit these billionaire types push at us just so they can wring the last dollar from us is only one of the many reasons that CRAPITALLISM is an obscenity. Home prices? Corporate Greedflation? Even realtors: 6% of $450,000 is $27,000 for just a few hours of listing, showing and signing! I wish we could ‘pump and dump’ all these vulture crapitallists.
And, L Nojoy is still destroying OUR USPS. Because he want’s to run it like some corrupt crapitallist enterprise he’s pushing for his corp. crony businesses (I’m lookin’ at you AMAZ0N!) to get priority over our 1st class mail and is pushing for stamps to be $0.73.
I’m not convinced that real estate commissions are out of line. The commission is usually split between two agents: one representing the seller and one representing the buyer. (How much ‘representing’ the buyer’s agent can do when paid by the seller is an interesting question. I’ve had good experiences with the two I’ve worked with.) A good agent will help the seller set a realistic price, recommend any needed repairs, and coordinate showings with other agents. It may look like just a few hours work from the outside, but a lot of jobs are like that. And then there is the question of how many sales does an agent make in a month?
The court decision was not based on the size of commissions but on the various agencies conspiring to set them. My experience in covering real estate is that the Realtors who make big bucks put in massive hours, not simply showing homes but in building a reputation that helps attract listings and in becoming known w/in both their specialized neighborhoods or housing types and w/in the overall industry. However, agreeing to set commission rates and refusing to negotiate on them is price fixing.
Right, Mr. Peterson. The court case was about how commissions are set, not (directly) what they are set to.
I saw a great parody weather report the other day on the internet. It had days of the week and showed:
Mostly sunny (Monday) Mostly Stormy (Tue-Sun)
I was a real estate office manager for years. Yes, those agents and brokers that are diligent engage in more legitimate work. However, most of the dozens of licensed real estate agents I encountered never earned what they were paid. And, there are so many additional companies demanding that the trough they all feed at be constantly overflowing proves there is too much waste in that system. I worked with a number of agents that billed buyers and sellers they worked for by the honest hours they put into the transaction with a reasonable overhead to cover advertising. The results of their work created their reputation without spending massive amounts for flashy publicity.
I have asked bars/restaurants to change the channel from Fox News. Yes, I have also walked out when they didn’t.