Category: Capitalist swine

Gimme shelter

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Doomsday bunkers are making a comeback!

Boy, that’s a stunner, hey? The same folks who can pay cash for an RV that costs more than your fixed location and a Caribbean island stocked with preteen girls to drive it around on are springing for upscale hobbit-holes in case Ginger Hitler fumbles one of the various crises on his plate between cheeseburgers.

According to The New York Times:

The 12 apartments in Mr. Hall’s Survival Condo, as he calls it, begin at $1.3 million. When he started selling the condos around 2011, he said, all the units sold within months.

To Mr. Hall, and to many in his field, this is a calling, not just a business. “I’m saving lives,” he said during a recent visit to his bunker, the exact location of which he insisted be kept under wraps. He entered the building’s elevator as it began its long descent into the earth. “To me, this is something to feel good about.”

Uh huh. Especially the part about “representatives of the Saudi Arabian military, who have asked him to draw up plans for an on-site heliport and underground mosque.” You want to frisk those dudes for box-cutters before giving them the code to Watership Down, Bubba.

When we got transferred to Bibleburg from San Antone the folks looked at a house with a bomb shelter, just northeast of the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex. This felt not unlike Wile E. Coyote deploying a parasol to ward off the falling boulder.

Can you imagine all these rugged individuals sharing a shelter, however well appointed? Better bro-deal one of the smaller units to a couple of cutters from the local Level 1 trauma center, because every HOA-board meeting is going to end in a gunfight.

Meanwhile, in the back of the bus. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Have we got a job for you. …

Bus we mus’? Maybe not.

The two companies ’Burque has dealt with while trying to improve its mass-transit system are facing charges that they failed to follow through on their end of wage-and-benefit deals, according to The New York Times.

BYD we’ve discussed before. Now New Flyer, the outfit the Duke City turned to after its deal with BYD wound up on blocks, faces a fraud complaint in California.

Says the Times:

In a 2012 proposal to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for an order of up to 900 buses, New Flyer said it would create more than 50 full-time positions that paid $11 to nearly $50 an hour.

New Flyer won the contract, worth about $500 million. But the company did not pay the wages it said it would and misrepresented the value of the benefits it was providing, according to pay stubs and corporate reports recently unsealed in the fraud case.

“It was a commitment — it matters,” said Madeline Janis, the executive director of Jobs to Move America, the nonprofit group that filed the complaint against New Flyer in California state court. “This case is about holding a huge company’s feet to the fire. … They make deals with public agencies and promise whatever, and think they don’t have to follow through.”

Is it just me, or does the invisible hand of the free market seem to spend a lot of time jerking off the rubes?

It’ll all come out in the wash

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Well, I’d say that load is done.

The Wall Street Journal and Daring Fireball consider the clusterfuck that is the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Ho, ho, etc.

Samsung didn’t give a rat’s ass about their top-loading clothes washers exploding like land mines in laundry rooms. What makes anyone think they’ll lose sleep over $2,000 smartphones that snap like Olive Garden bread sticks when the rubes try to fold them?

We owned a Samsung top-loader once and it became the subject of a Radio Free Dogpatch episode. After dogpaddling across that customer-service vale of tears I wouldn’t buy a life jacket from the sonsabitches if I were standing on the stern of a sinking ship in the North Atlantic, surrounded by sharks wearing bibs with my mugshot on them.

But I’m sure somebody would. And so is Samsung.

• Editor’s note: Speaking of washers, Kevin Drum explains that tariffs caused Americans to spend 12 percent more on these devices than they might have had Beelzebozo kept his big bazoo out of things he doesn’t understand, which is mostly everything. MAGA, etc.

Hard reign in Swamptown

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
What a blockhead.

The pestilence of the Benighted States, Wally O’Steele, a.k.a. Artie Deal, wants a Big, Beautiful Wall® at the nation’s southern boundary to keep brown people* from crossing the border to work anywhere other than at his hotels or golf courses.

Unable to procure funding for same, he has instead walled off the feddle gummint from its own tax-paying citizens, idling more than a few of them in the process and forcing others to work without pay while selling their Christmas presents on eBay to keep from freezing to death in the dark.

It’s a hard reign, and the water — if that’s what it is — just keeps rising.

Man the lifeboats and rig for heavy seas, matey — it’s the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.

* Russian oligarchs and Saudi princelings get a pass, of course, along with a coupon for a complimentary fluff and fold at Artie Deal’s Motor Inn & Money Laundry.

 

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with a Shure SM58 microphone and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Additional bad noise via an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic and a Sony ICD-UX533. I edited this hot mess using a Behringer XENYX 1200USB mixer wired to a 2014 MacBook Pro with an external LG 24MP59HT-P monitor and Apple’s GarageBand. Obligatory Cultural References From Bygone Days© courtesy the Bard of Hibbing.