Happiness – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

What Wal-Mart Taught Me About Being Happy

“Dredd, there’s no way in. Are you even listening to me? We can’t just knock on the wall and say “Hello, Cursed Earth Pizza”.” – Judge Dredd

If I had a nickel for every time I’d been cursed by a one-eyed Romanian gypsy after midnight at a 7-11®, I’d have two nickels. That isn’t a lot of money, but still weird that it happened twice.

I remember when we lived in Houston, we went shopping in Wal-Mart®. Once. We walked into the store and it was simply depressing. Not a person in the place seemed happy to be there. The clerks at checkout seemed to be quite angry, to the point where I wondered if the store’s policy required them to rub six tablespoons of Frank’s Red Hot® on their genitals before each shift.

It also showed on the shelves: towels, instead of being neatly stacked, were on the shelves in a random and sloppy way. There was residual trash in the shopping cart that we selected. Why not pick a different cart? Do I have a fetish for pushing trash around in a shopping cart? No, there was some sort of trash in each cart. I chose one, on purpose, that didn’t have liquid-y trash in it.

When my dog is cold, is he a chilly dog?

As is recall (and it’s been nearly two decades ago now) we were there to buy something kid-related that the store we normally shopped at didn’t have, so we had to trek all of the way to the back of the store to see the most random assortment of mis-stocked shelves that made me wonder if this Wal-Mart© had a store policy against hiring anyone with OCD.

I seem to recall we did buy something, and quickly left.

We never went back. The store wasn’t in a bad section of town, but it seemed oddly . . . cursed. It’s like they built the whole store over the pit where the hospital used to bury all the severed limbs that they amputated when the leeches and bloodletting didn’t work.

I’ve thought about that Wal-Mart© more than the one time I visited it. The place seemed so . . . off it’s hard to describe. It just made me want to leave that store faster than the Secret Service closes an investigation into exactly whose cocaine was in the White House.

After moving to Modern Mayberry, the experiences in Wal-Mart® was drastically different. It’s a small detail, but when I go in there, the towels are always neatly folded and stacked. There is no, and I mean zero trash in the carts and the floors are always entirely spotless.

Where’s Arnold’s favorite spot in a Wal-Mart™? Aisle B. Back.

And the people who shop there and the employees who work there seem happier. Sure, some of the employees grumbled, but they grumble at me because I’ve known them for years. The checkouts are fast and efficient, and if the store policy requires rubbing anything into their crotch, it’s not Frank’s Red Hot®.

I don’t mind going to Wal-Mart™ in Modern Mayberry because it’s not a gloomy place. It seems to be a happy one. People smile while they buy their ham and mayonnaise and potatoes and chicken thighs. They’re polite to one another, and I’ve seen more than one adult talk to a kid they didn’t know to tell them to stop shenanigans in the aisles. And I’ve done it myself.

And the kids stop the shenanigans.

Wal-Mart© isn’t home, but it is a hometown store here.

I think part of the reason that Wal-Mart™ here is different in Houston is that none of us are anonymous. We walk into the store and see people we know. Be a jerk to a clerk? That might just be your friend’s kid who is just having a bad day.

Congrats Whitney, you’ve been drug free for years now!

The other part is I think there is a much greater sense of community in a place like Modern Mayberry. We’ve been here a decade, and while I’m not the new kid on the block, many people I come into contact with have been here for generations. Oops! That makes them sound like vampires. But parts of The Mrs.’ family have been in this area at least since the 1890s. When Pugsley goes out with people, we ask “who” since you can generally infer if the family is trouble just through the last name.

We never let him hang out with anyone named Clinton. I mean, the parties are great, but bad things happen if you get on their bad side.

I knew someone would want an Epstein joke, and I didn’t want to leave them hanging.

But all of that aside – what I’ve found to be a good idea is to avoid places that suck. No, I don’t think that Wal-Mart© in Houston was cursed, but I do think that the people in there didn’t like their work, and didn’t want to be there. They were unhappy. They were victims.

In my experience, people on the Right are happier (by far!) than people on the Left. In study after study, it’s weird that people on the Right are more tolerant of the viewpoints of others. One recent study (LINK) of college kids (is it bad that I assumed their species?) showed that Leftists absolutely hate people on the Right and are scared to be exposed to their ideas. 62% of Leftists said they would probably or definitely not room with a normal person. 28% of students on the Right said they were fine rooming with a commie.

Leftists also show much higher rates of mental problems (I could link a study, but you have search engines and also know Leftists) and are generally far less competent. I think the “far less competent is why they’re Leftists in the first place.

My county voted 85% for Trump, so by inference we’re happier, more competent, and far more tolerant than any Leftist enclave.

What do you call an Italian Chad? An Alfredo male.

Regardless, once again the pathway to being happy proves to be devastatingly simple: avoid cities, be on the Right, be competent, and don’t put Frank’s Red Hot® down your pants.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.

Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars

“How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.” – Fight Club

Bach used to be a composer. I guess he’s now a decomposer.

I remember listening to the radio . . . you remember the radio, right? That’s where people take a part of the Internet and send it out using big towers and as many watts (ounce-inches per fortnight in non-commie units) of power as is used in the The Mrs.’ hairdryer so that this faint amount of energy can be picked up by a metal strip and then amplified a zillion times so you can rock out while cruising Main.

Sorry for the digression. I remember listening to the radio way back in the before time, and hearing a song that sounded pretty good. The singer mumbled most of it, but the big, brassy chorus of Born in the U.S.A. was pretty strong.

Made me feel good, made me think that in 1985 we were ready to unite as America. Then I finally made out the lyrics. Hmmm. After listening to them, I came to the (correct) conclusion that typical Leftist-Simp Bruce Springsteen was just another Leftist-Simp who made a bunch of money because he had a good chorus and everyone thought he was on America’s side.

I’ll leave you with this, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” – Bruce Springsteen, talking about Trump to Australians in 2016

I have not changed that position. If you like him, fine. You’re wrong. Springsteen is a tool.

Another song like that was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow. When I first heard it, all I heard was they chorus, and figured it was some empty-headed pop song. Meh. I’ll skip it.

Then I listened to it. Wow. Deep. I was shocked. I thought it was vapid pop, but here was a song that had some soul, and talked about people drinking beer at noon on Tuesday in a bar because that’s all they have. The lyrics . . . “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” is shocking – it jarred me because these people were a contrast to the gloom and despair on display in the bar.

Another one that I just found out about was Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonny Tyler. What’s it about? Vampires that want to share more than blood (wink wink). Honestly, I didn’t really care about this song ever, and still don’t, but like it a bit more now that I know that it’s just a bit weird.

Did she have to book a second ticket on the flight just for the hair?

Don’t even get me started on Squeeze Box by The Who® since when I heard it I was certain that it referred to a particularly musical family and even made the defense of the virtuousness of the song to a friend’s mother with all of the innocence of an entirely ignorant 10 year old who is smarter than he is experienced.

My Friend’s Mom: “That song . . . is that song about . . . sex?”

Young John Wilder: “No! That song is about a family and the mother has a concertina, an instrument played by compressing air and passing it through a series of reeds to make a melody like an accordion. She plays it and the house is filled with glorious music all night.”

My Friend’s Seventeen Year Old Sister, Butting In: “No. The song is totally about sex, Mom.”

Barbie? If you’re reading this? Yup, I got that one really wrong.

And don’t get me started on how badly I misunderstood Lola. I’m ashamed to say that I was over 21 before I got that joke. In my defense, that wasn’t a thing anywhere around Wilder Mountain, and the only burned-out old tranny I was familiar with was the one in my 1976 green GMC® truck.

Good news! It just needed a new clutch. Sometimes young drivers get a awkward and anxious and burn out clutch pads by popping the power too soon to the drive train.

I miss the days when working with a difficult tranny meant it was an automatic transmission.

Life, and experience, changes interpretation of events. Like a song, an experience may have one meaning when young, but yet another experience when older. The very experience of living life changes the message we get from those experiences. All through life “we see through a glass, darkly”, but as we age, we see the world differently.

That is natural. We age, we learn, we understand. Our innocence is, especially in 2023, horribly brief.

Cell phones and the Internet bring knowledge to children long before they can really come to grips with what they are seeing. In my age, a furtive glimpse at a Playboy® was how we gained forbidden knowledge. In 2023, 10-year-olds know all about Lola and are even taught in class that what once was forbidden is now exalted – there’s even a month for pride, yet not even an afternoon set aside for humility, but I guess if you’re Hunter Biden there’s a 20-minute plea bargain case with the DOJ.

So, I read today Hunter didn’t pay taxes on over six million dollars, and deducted the amount he spent on whores as business expenses. I wonder if he ever paid Lola?

Change is part of growing up. I am certainly not the person I was at 18, nor the person I was at 38. And wisdom has a price – innocence is free, but innocence is also harmless. As we grow and learn, we learn what is worth passing on, and what is worth fighting for.

I also believe this one weird thing, that this knowledge is not without structure. When I look back at the hard things, the difficult things, the things that seemed like a catastrophe at the time, all of those things led to better things as I grew up. I just had to live through them to understand.

My life will probably never go back to the simpler days. Like a character in a spy movie, I now know too much. But I can still, on a summer day, roll down the window and listen to a song and sing too loudly as I drive.

But it certainly won’t be Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a tool.

Choose. But Choose Wisely.

“Yeah, yeah, it came in the shape of a bottle? We’re from the Kingsman tailor shop in London. Maybe you’ve heard of us.” – Kingsman, The Golden Circle

During COVID they said I needed to wear a mask and gloves to go shopping. They lied. Apparently I needed clothes, too.

There was a time in my life when I had to make a choice. It was a dark time for me. Let me give some background. Please, everyone pretend that there’s a swirling motion and fuzzy stuff as we go back in time . . . to a land before cell phones and Google®.

In my first semester at college, I did pretty well. I studied for a few hours and got a 3.4 at a college that had the reputation as being the toughest one in the state. Life was good. I believe that I spent more time with Coors Light™ that semester than I spent studying calc, physics, or chemistry.

My second semester wasn’t the same.

In my first three tests (within the first two weeks of the semester) I got three Fs. These were the first three Fs I had ever gotten in my life on tests.

Ever.

They asked me to describe failure in two words. I replied, “I can’t.”

They weren’t horrible Fs, but the percentages were all in the 50s, except for physics 2 which was in the 40s. To be fair, the average score for the physics 2 test for all students was in the 50s – physics 2 was a designated “weed out” course.

Right before spring break, I had midterms. I didn’t know the scores that I had gotten on the next tests, but spring break was not fun. I had a full ride scholarship, and it required that I keep my grades above a certain GPA for both semester and cumulative to keep the scholarship.

Yikes. Do you mean there are consequences for my actions?

For the first time in my life, I was looking real failure in the face. It was the long, dark, Kobayashi Maru of the soul.

I got 8 out of 10 on my driver’s test. Two jumped out of the way.

I sat on the hood of my car at the end of spring break for a few hours at an Interstate rest stop under the gentle spring Sun, still hours away from the school. I figured I had two options:

Go back to school and tough it out. Nine more weeks of hell, and no promise that I’d do any better than I had done in the first nine, but if I did, it would mean studying harder than I ever had studied anything, except those times I studied the rare illicit Playboy® that came into my hands.
Drive north. It was before there was much of a border, and I could just drive into Canada, get a knit hat. I already knew the language, I could say “aboot” and “take off, eh” as well as anyone. I had a Visa® with a $500 limit, and a car that was owned free and clear, I had half a can of Copenhagen®, and I was wearing sunglasses. I could drive to Saskatchewan and become a lumberjack. Yes, this was my backup plan, even though I’m not sure Saskatchewan even has trees.

After a long time thinking, I . . .

There are several strategies in life, just like there are several strategies in a supermarket. Oh, sure, I could shop like everyone normally does here in Modern Mayberry and cover my nipples in yogurt while I’m in the dairy aisle (because nipple yogurt is free here), but I’m not talking about the shopping part, I’m talking about checking out.

The first option is to pick a line and stick with it, even if the lady in front of me has 43,238 coupons and price matches every item on the sale flyer from the competing grocery store and ends up getting $983,365.55 worth of groceries for $1.98 plus a raincheck for sour cream. For the nipples, you know, if you’re allergic to the yogurt.

What’s the most important culture in the world? Agriculture.

Okay, that’s not a great option, because every other line in the grocery store will cycle 43 times while the lady does one checkout and the clerk silently fantasizes about going home for a few gallons of gin.

Option 2 is a different one. In this one, I could flit from line to line like a politician being:

against gay marriage during election season
to being for gay marriage in special circumstances when election is comfortably far away
to being silent before election season
to sponsoring mandatory hormone treatment for toddlers because toddlers can’t consent to choosing their gender.

Yeah. While that might get a politician lots of money and votes, it just gets me moving from a stopped line to a moving line that stops as soon as I get in it and I don’t even get appointed as an ambassador to the Swedish Bikini Team.

I sold my Swiss watches to a friend in Mexico. Adios, Omegas!

Option 3, however, is probably the sanest one. Look around for the best line. If the coupon lady gets in, or there’s a price check, or the clerk is obviously on some sort of depressant medication because they’re not at home drinking a few gallons of gin, move to the next best line.

In my career, I jumped lines a couple of times. My first job was into an industry that was in the middle of a slump in the region I lived. So, I jumped. In this case, I jumped to an entirely different industry, and had a pretty good career. When that industry slumped, I jumped again, and then jumped back.

All of the jobs were basically related, except if you looked at them from the inside – they were all different. The combination of those experiences led me to a career that turned out to be a pretty good one, though there is the possibility that if I had jumped one fewer time, it would have been even more lucrative.

Or not. I might have ended up as a clerk who was missing their evening gin. I’m not going to worry that I might have done better if I had or hadn’t jumped a line, because life is far too short for that type of regret.

Also?

I’m going to try to not let the choices I’ve made in the past make me too timid. As many of the readers here, there are likely more years behind me than ahead, and it’s far too early to stop trying to kick a dent in the Universe, which in itself requires risk. I may win, I may lose, but I’m still in the game.

Looking back, I’m fairly happy with the progression that developed from my choices. And it’s because I stayed in line at the first opportunity to jump: college.

I made a paper airplane that wouldn’t move. I guess the problem was that I used stationary.

Back to that Interstate rest stop, far away in time and space . . . . (imagine the swirly thing again)

After a long time thinking sitting on the hood of my car on that warm spring day so many days ago, I decided that I could pack up my stuff and go up to Saskatchewan any time to be a lumberjack, even at the end of the semester if things didn’t work out. I could also take the time to learn if there were trees there or if I would have to fight the beavers for maple syrup so I could be strong when the wolves come.

But I only had one shot to try to see if I could dig myself out of the hole that I had made for myself.

I did. I got two Cs and a D – the best-looking D (and still the only D) that I’ve ever had in my life. My scholarship was safe. The semester after that one was okay, and then every semester after that I got great grades. I had learned that I could come back from failure, and though I changed lines later a time or two, I decided to see if this line would move for me because I was only risking failure, and only risking nine more weeks of my life. The line moved.

In life, pick your line. Move when you need to. And realize that the choice is yours.

33 Things To Think About On A Friday

“I didn’t know there was a no train list.” – Archer

If you would like a list of ways technology has made life worse, press one for English.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a list post, so, why not?

Here are some things I think:

The struggle is important. If every day were placid and peaceful and there was no want, life would become dry and boring, and we would choke on our luxuries. The Garden of Eden could never last.
When I come home my dog is always happy to see me, but then I remember he also gets happy sniffing the cat’s butt and chewing on furniture.
Risk is important, too. Judging good risks and bad risks mainly comes from taking bad risks. Avoiding all risk is perhaps the worst risk.
They say a penny saved is a penny earned, but it really takes a few million to buy enough crack and prostitutes to make Hunter happy.

Again?

Women are best when they’re being women, not crappy imitations of men.
Men are best when they’re being men, and masculinity isn’t toxic.
If the glass is half empty, there’s probably room for some vodka.
The biggest fights are over the smallest things. A trillion-dollar budget shortfall? No one on Earth can even understand it. The neighbor’s lawn being an inch too tall? That’s a fight.
If men are strong in the balance of power, civilization endures. If women are strong in the balance of power, civilization is imperiled, in the end for lack of children.
If Life give you lemons, look Life right in the eye and say, “I want beer instead.” Life should know better by now.

If you put root beer in a square glass, do you just get beer?

Moderation is good, because there should be balance in life.
Moderation is bad, because there is power in passion, and no progress was made by anyone being reasonable.
Both 11. and 12. are true.
They say money can’t buy happiness, but it bought Hunter Biden so many laptops he forgot where they all were.
I find the most peaceful sleep I have is when the thunder is blasting out a constant tattoo against the night sky, the worst when it is utterly silent.
All things must end. This is good. Without an end, there is no new beginning.
That thing about all things must end? I forgot revolving doors.

That door hit me as I got out. It was a pane in the butt.

Success is often more damaging than failure.
As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forwards, but understood in reverse.” The worst things in my life have always led to the best things in my life.
Corollary to 19., if you don’t have a plan to go somewhere, you won’t go anywhere. If you have a plan, you might not end up where you thought you’d be, but at least you’ll be moving.
Corollary to 20., I might be lost, but I’m making good time.
Corollary to 21., don’t just follow your dreams, chase them until they file a restraining order.
Of course the game is rigged. What’s bothering you now is the idea that they’ve stopped pretending it isn’t.
They say, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” What could be closer than locked in the crawlspace?

I wish I had a wine cellar with an elevator. That would lift my spirits.

A large part of the last few decades has been spent in trying to convince Americans that their culture is entirely based in commerce and pop culture. That is not true – the values that built America rely on neither.
What are you doing today to make sure that today matters?
Kindness is free. So is sarcasm. I found out that one of these works better at funerals than the other last week.
As I’ve said before, happy is easy. Not being bored is easy. Standing up for something that matters is the most important thing.
One of the saddest things about today’s society is that young people find more challenges in the virtual world than in reality. When reality catches up to them they won’t be prepared.
Jenga® would be more interesting if the pieces exploded when the tower fell.
Beauty exists. Truth exists. Goodness exists. Those who would rule you would blind you to those simple facts.
It’s called work because they pay you to do it. If it were always fun, it would be a hobby.
I think Elon Musk has a lot of hobbies. And ex-wives.

If Musk started making robot lawnmowers, would he call them E-Lawn®?

If you have a choice about your attitude, be positive. Enjoy the moments you can, and you can enjoy most of them.
You have a choice about you attitude. Sometimes it’s your only choice.

Self-Experimentation And Leisure

“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade

I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat. She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.

Seth Roberts is dead. I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014. He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley. Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.

What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself. He even wrote a paper about it (LINK). It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood. I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.

In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.

Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.

The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:

Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire. Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things. He noted that these included:

Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it. Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things. I think the BLM® riots might count here.

I can’t wait for their final show. Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?

Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way. The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.

It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up. He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians. They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world. Darn it for those guys. And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.

I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.

Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials. It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him. He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself. He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously. Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter? Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.

Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life. To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall. To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment. And most of them have worked well. 20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep. Now? I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.

Someone asked me what my dream job was. “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”

How long did that take? Years. An experiment here that worked. An experiment that didn’t. I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep. I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby. It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow? Is it a blanket? No, it’s Slumberman™.

My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful. For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.

This was a 100% solution. Every time, it worked. No theory. No real reason. And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.

Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems. And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.

People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.

But most of my life is in my hands. I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are. If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.

So, is self-experimentation good? Yeah, mostly. I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.

Choose Who You Are. It’s Easy.

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

If someone named David is a victim of ID theft, do I have to call them Dav?

“As I’ve gotten older . . . I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to the people – if you just sit and listen – you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that the tell – always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who is always kind of the hero in every story they tell. The smart person – they deliver the clever put down. There are lots of versions of this. And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so, I did at some point decide: I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I’m the happiest person anybody knows. And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

-Michael Lewis

My first question after I read this was, “Okay, which Michael Lewis?” I’m thinking there might be a million of them, but the A.I. refused to even guess and then pouted and now won’t open the pod bay doors for me. So, I’m guessing that every other person in Michigan is named “Michael Lewis”. Regardless, the most famous author named Michael Lewis is the guy who writes interesting financial books, so I’ll assume it’s him.

The nice thing about water from Flint is that you can use it to make a Pb and Jelly sandwich.

Regardless of who wrote it, it’s a good and fairly true quote.

Why?

Attitude is everything.

If you believe you’re happy, if you talk about being happy, you’ll . . . be happy. As I’ve written before, being happy is really the easiest thing in the world. Many mornings I’ll run into the secretary administrative assistant at the door. Regardless of the weather, I’ll greet her with, “What a beautiful day it is!” It could be sunny and hot, rainy, cold, snowing, or even volcano-y. My greeting is the same.

Because it is a beautiful day. And, one thing I’ve learned is that the weather absolutely doesn’t care about me, at all. The snow doesn’t care that I love it. The hot day doesn’t care that I like cold weather, though I think it might be personal with the volcanoes. But I’m alive, breathing, walking and talking. If I spent all day hating a temperature reading, that wouldn’t leave me time to hate people who deserve it, like communists, leftists, and mimes.

How could the day not be beautiful? I get to choose how I feel, so why not be happy about it?

My insurance agent told me I can jump in an active volcano. Once.

I read the Michael Lewis quote and immediately recognized it to be a rule I’d been living with. I’ve written before about how absolutely horrid victims are to be around. Everything happens to them. They are at the center of their own story, but initiate no action. They have all the resilience of a bean bag, and are psychic vampires that attempt to suck emotional sustenance in the form of pity from their unwitting prey by demonstrating how mean the world has been to them. The technical term for this affliction is “Antifa® Member”.

They sing their own lives with their story. I avoid these types of people as if they were constructed entirely out of George Soros’ toe cheese, which I guess explains why he’s long been called the “Creamy-Fingered Puppet Master”.

George Soros wants to destroy our culture? I knew he was behind American Idol.

The Hero? I can live with them. Often, they’re really newts who brag about being distantly related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. They get their ego from being the one who has done the most, has the most gifted child, the cousin who went to Harvard®, and that they vacationed on Mars last summer. The Hero does this this because they feel awful about themselves, and need to bolster their ego by telling these stories.

Again, I’m okay with The Hero, since if you listen to their stories and don’t try to top theirs, they eventually can be good people to hang out with, and as they get older or develop trust with you they drop the act. They want to be liked, and if you like them for who they are, they often stop the Hero stuff.

The person who puts people down? I don’t meet that guy (or gal) often enough to have any sort of read on dealing with them. They just aren’t any in circle I’m in since I’ve been an adult. I guess that tells me lots about how successful the strategy of “being a complete tool” is.

What’s the difference between a Hoover® vacuum and a limo carrying George Soros and his son? The Hoover™ only has one dirtbag in it.

But there are lots of other ways to tell my story. The best part is that I get to choose. I get to choose to be the happiest guy people know. I get to choose to be the guy in the room that is calm when everything is going to hell (I really enjoy that one, and it comes naturally). I get to choose what I’m afraid of.

To be clear, this isn’t the Lefty talking point about “Your Truth®”. That’s bogus, and denies objective reality. Me? I don’t deny that it’s snowing. I don’t deny that it’s 103°F out. I don’t deny that that pesky volcano keeps following me around. But I do get to choose how that fact fits in with how I feel.

And so can you.

And so can those 5.04 million people in Michigan named, “Michael Lewis”.

What Do You Value?

“I have been in the service of the Vorlons for centuries, looking for you. Diogenes, with his lamp, looking for an honest man, willing to die for all the wrong reasons. At last, my job is finished. Yours is just beginning. When the darkness comes, know this; you are the right people, in the right place, at the right time.” – Babylon 5

What is the most common question asked by philosophers nowadays? “Do you want fries with that?”

Diogenes is dead. When he was up and kicking around, he lived in a wine barrel at the end of town, and often was caught on the streets stark naked. Sometimes he was, um, enjoying himself. Oddly, he was also thought of as a respected philosopher. When I try to emulate him, though, all I get is a restraining order and some embarrassing YouTube® videos.

The reason we remember Diogenes is for two reasons:

First, he invented the chicken nugget, but sadly was unable to invent any tasty dipping sauces.

Second, he walked around making pithy little statements like this: “We sell things of great value for things of very little, and vice versa.”

It’s a very short, and very wickedly to the point piece of advice. Frankly, it points out many of the problems we are facing as a society today.

Let’s take consooming for today’s topic.

Hipsters used to burn their mouth on pizza. They ate it before it was cool.

Billions of dollars are spent attempting to convince people to purchase one product or another. These advertisements are hard to avoid – and they have one thing in common – a desire to get the consoomer to spend money. In some cases, the ads provide the ability to match a need with a product. If I’m cutting down trees using axes and handsaws, knowing that a thing called a chainsaw exists is providing me a real value. So, ads inform.

But ads also are used to create desire in customers, playing on emotions to drive purchase decisions for things that aren’t needs, but frivolities. I have plenty of those! I’m a sucker for some things in particular. In the sitting room (where I’m typing this now) I look around and see a map I bought as artwork a few years ago. It shows all the undersea telegraph cables in around 1871. So very cool! I walked into the store, saw it, and bought it. I consoomed.

I can’t cut down a tree with it. I can’t drive it to work. It’s just . . . there, stuck to my wall.

I gave The Mrs. a dart and told pointed at the map. “Where ever it goes, we’ll go on vacation.” So, we spent two weeks behind the fridge.

Is the map of great value? No. It’s a print. It doesn’t make me better, more complete, important, or accomplished. We can look in terms of multiple ways to value things. Dollars are only one. In this case, the picture cost about what I made in about an hour or two.

Was it worth an hour of my life to own that map? Yeah, I guess so. But when I start to value objects that I own, and look at how much of my life I traded for them, my equation starts to change.

If I didn’t spend that hour at work, what could I have spent that hour on? How could I have changed my life? Could I have spent more time brushing my teeth, so they were 2.3% brighter? Should I have spent that time waxing my dog?

Maybe this is why the Kardashians don’t shave?

What did I overlook or not spend time on? And which of those things might have been more valuable?

I understand that money is important – those who say that money isn’t important haven’t gone without it. But money isn’t the goal, it’s what can be done with it that’s important. The true currency of our lives isn’t gold, silver, or even PEZ™. It’s time. Each of us on this planet have a finite number of hours left on this rock, and that number goes down by one each hour that we spend.

It goes down by one if I spend it at a job I don’t like. It goes down if I spend it writing the best post I’ve ever written. It goes down by one if I’m sleeping. It goes down by one every hour.

Yes, I know, exercising and other positive things might extend that life, but I’m still going to die.

In the endless summer of a life when I was, say, 12, I didn’t think much about time and how I spent it. Even then, though, I didn’t try to just “pass the time” since there was so much to do and see and learn in the world. Now as I’m on the back side of life, I can see that those hours I have left cannot be wasted.

They’re all I have. And learning is great, but now it has to have purpose. Will it help me write? Will it help me crack a puzzle that I can share? Will it help me with some project I’m working on?

Can it help me change the world?

Again, as I get older, it ceases to be about me. It’s now about what I can do to help others, how I can help make the world a better place.

You’re welcome.

Thankfully, during my career I’ve been able to do work on things that matter, and have made the world a slightly better place. If I’m trading my life for my work, I’m glad that it’s work that matters.

Diogenes? He’s still dead, but he changed the world, just a little bit. And I can, too. And so can you. Time is still all we have, but it’s up to us to make the most of it, each and every day, just like Diogenes showed us. But, I don’t recommend you do it naked.

Now, I wonder how Diogenes dealt with the restraining orders?

Don’t Waste Time, That’s All You Have

“Yes, I see, Captain. They would’ve learned to wear skins, adopted stoic mannerisms, learned the bow and the lance.” – Star Trek: TOS

I guess I’ll admit I’m a Marxist. A Groucho Marxist. (All memes but the first one are as-found.)

One of Seneca’s (Dead Roman Philosopher Dude) most famous quotes is, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” What surprises me is that Seneca wrote this before Twitter® existed. But even back in the time of Rome, there were ways to waste time. I’m thinking Facebook® might be that old.

Regardless, his message is timeless: every moment that we’re breathing here on Earth is precious. We may not always get a choice as to how we spend our time (Ted Kaczynski seems to be booked every day) but the true crime is to waste time. Oh, and blowing people up.

I wonder if that dog goes to the vet if he’s not peeling well?

I have been as guilty as anyone of wasting time. And one of the biggest wastes of time is to become consumed by negative thoughts and emotions. In reality, most of the time (most) the things that irritate me are small. How small? So small that if I pack up my emotions, and really assess as to why I’m mad, it just looks silly. When Hillary reflects on why she’s mad, well, she calls the Suicide Hotline and places an order.

But that reflection is crucial. It’s called self-control, and although it appears to be unfashionable in certain locations (Chicago, I’m looking at you) it is the only way to be successful. If I threw a temper tantrum when (spins wheel) I drop a sock on the floor, I think there’s a simple word for that in the English language: Leftist feminist the ATF unstable.

No, when I’m upset I stop. I take a deep breath. I ask myself, “Does it matter?” Most of the time, it doesn’t. At all. Very few of the things that have irritated me matter at all over any rational timeframe. The old two rules apply: 1. Don’t sweat the small stuff. 2. It’s all small stuff.

The second question is, can I control whatever the situation is or influence it? If the answer is no, then that’s like being mad that the Sun is coming up in the morning. Even if it’s my mistake, it’s sillier than being angry over the English coal minimum price subsidy in the 1800s or . . . anything that happened in 1619.

Why do they call childbirth delivery? It’s really takeout.

One concept I’ve come across recently is “amor fati,” which is Latin for “put armor on fat people”. Oh, wait, my translator was wrong. It really means, “love your fate.” I think I first heard a variation of this when I was a kid: “You get what you get, and you’ll like it, and grease up the fat people so we can put plate mail on them.”

The reality of amor fati is this, though: I am where I am, and I have a choice. I can get up every morning and be mad, or I can be happy where I am. Does that mean I’m content? No. Does that mean I’m not going to fight like hell? No. Does that mean I’m not going to try to change certain things with the fire of a thousand suns? No.

Sesame Street® is a rough place.

It does mean that if life sucks, I can still find meaning, still find purpose, and still try to create the change that I seek to create. It’s not complacency. Heck, Seneca himself was one of the richest dudes in all of Rome. That didn’t just happen. He didn’t just wake up one morning, and say, “Holy crap, I have an amazing amount of money. How did that happen?”

Seneca embraced what he had, and tried to better himself, and change himself. He did okay.

Our choices are our choices, but even more than that, we always have the choice how we feel, even Ted Kaczynski. We may have lost everything else, but we always retain that. We should not be overcome by fear or despair. To be clear – those are just about the most negative things we can let into our lives, unless you know one of the women on The View.

Is Justin worse than Whoopi? You be the judge.

The only proper way to deal with tough times is to face into them. Our obstacles make us stronger. Each obstacle we face with virtue and excellence improves us. Except for bullets. Those sound like they really suck.

Regardless of all of that, the first point is still the most important: our lives aren’t too short – our lives are exactly as long as they are. Deal with it. Love it. Use your time – every minute. Every second you waste? It’s wasting your life.

Now, go make something happen.

Scott Adams And Two Filters: The Race Filter And The Success Filter. Choose The Success Filter.

“Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” – Return of the King

Does it make me racist if I hate the 100 meter dash? (all memes today are as-found)

Scott Adams has been more in the news in the last month than perhaps during his entire career. I think it’s entirely on purpose, since last summer he ran a poll on Twitter® that noted that at some point he was going to retire, and he had the choice on how he was going to go out. The winning choice was to go out with a bang.

Most golfers poll as swing voters.

And so he has. With $50 to $100 million in the bank and after having both his comic strip and his new book deal cancelled, he found something interesting: he was freer than he ever had been in his life. He has all the money (none of which was in Silicon Valley Bank™ – his quote, “Why would I put my money in the 19^th largest bank?”) and now he can’t lose his book deal. It’s gone. He can’t lose his comic strip. It’s gone.

Scott Adams can say whatever he damn well pleases.

He also seems genuinely interested in helping black people do better. Since Adams normally tries to look at the world through the lens of “systems” rather than goals, he ended up analyzing the normal system that black people use. Not surprisingly, he found that the systems that they use are, well, awful.

The results have been abysmal, except for the Race Grifters and politicians on the Left. But I repeat myself. And, using their advice, black people are doing pretty horribly. And they’ve been taught that white people are the problem, rather than anything else that black people are doing. And it shows. Here is one of the comments about Scott that I found online after his initial comments:

I don’t think Wildin (no relation) has anger issues, he has an anger subscription.

Black people thinking white people are the problem has obvious advantages for a politician. I recall when I was in Alaska – the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) was thought to have lots and lots of sweet, sweet oil nestled deep in its rocky bosom. But both the Left and Right used drilling there as a fund-raising opportunity. No one really wanted to solve the issue, since Greenpeace® could use it to fundraise from Lefties, and Congresscreatures on the Right could use it to fundraise from ConocoPhillips®. As long as both sides were unhappy, the money flowed.

The last thing anyone wanted to do was solve the problem. I think the Right would be just fine if the problem were solved, but the Left makes too much money, and gets too many votes.

But Adams would like to work on the solution, which has nothing at all to do with marinating in past tales of slavery. Adams graphed it out. The mindset that the Left has worked to instill in blacks is what Adams calls his Race Filter. It consists of:

Grievance,
Critical Race Theory,
Group Rights,
Spot Racists,
Systemic Racism, and
Reparations

When wearing Spandex® is a war crime.

I’ve written before about Victimhood. If you look at Adams’ distillation of the way that race relations have been put forward to blacks, well, they’ve been spoon fed a diet of Victimhood from both their own leaders as well as every “well-meaning” Leftist.

For decades.

The problem with Victimhood is that it is nearly like a self-devouring concept. It starts to fill every bit of a human soul with greed, envy, hate, and the idea that vengeance is the answer making the person small inside. That’s why when “how much” is brought up in the context of reparations, the answer is simple: no number will ever be enough. For there to be an answer, that would mean that the black people who have given themselves over to Victimhood (and their Grifters and Leftist politicians) would have to let it go.

What do you call a magician without magic? Ian.

Given the current relationship status, they will never let it go. Adams made the comment that he would cease “identifying as black” and would avoid black people because of the relative dislike of white people that showed up on the Rasmussen® survey that showed that 47% of black folks didn’t think that “it’s okay to be white.”

The comments that showed up in social media responding to Scott (as shown above) tended to confirm the polls.

But Adams isn’t done. There is another filter that he suggests can replace the Race Filter – the Personal Success Filter. I generally use the Personal Success Filter, but I never called it that. I endorse Mr. Adams’ thoughts entirely, and I’ll spend much more time talking about his success filters than I spent on the Race Filter, since the Race Filter sucks:

Replace Grievance with Happiness.

Being happy is generally the easiest thing in the world. Most people who aren’t happy, don’t want to be happy. It’s cold out? I like the cold. It’s hot out? What a bright, beautiful day. Circumstances don’t care about my feelings, so why should I let a flat tire make me mad? A flat tire just is.

I had a friend in college that I’ll call Greg (because his name was Greg) who got absolutely hammered on a very large quantity of alcohol one night, which wasn’t unusual – our school was known as “a drinking school with a college problem.” I had class with him the next morning. I looked at him and was shocked. He was dressed in slacks and button-down shirt. I said, “Dang, Greg, you were smashed last night – I thought you’d feel awful. Yet, here you are, and you look fine. What’s your secret?”

“Yeah, John, I felt awful when I woke up, so I showered, shaved, and dressed up. You can’t feel awful when you look great.”

Why not be happy? Be happy. It’s like pouring river water in your socks: it’s easy and it’s free.

Replace Critical Race Theory with Gratitude.

I could go back in history and look for all of the things where I was slighted. Where my ancestors were cheated out of something they deserved. Where I should be third in line to be King of Wisconsin. Why?

I’m adopted. I was adopted by great parents, put in a loving family, and worked like a borrowed horse to make me strong. I appreciate each and every bit of it. I’m grateful for even the bad things that have happened to me, because those ultimately made me stronger.

Kierkegaard said that life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse. I look back, and I’m grateful for nearly everything that has happened to me. And you should be, too, because otherwise you wouldn’t be the stunning example of humanity with enough taste, intelligence, and discernment that comes here every week.

What gratitude doesn’t look like.

Replace Group with Individual.

As groups we come together to create great things. If Elon Musk was trying to build rockets, he wouldn’t even be halfway done with his very first one if the tried to go it alone. So groups have their place. But when we look to set relations based on groups, we get stupid. Why would Michael Jordan’s kid be more disadvantaged than me? Why would Jesse Jackson’s? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s?

Obviously, they were born with much more privilege than me and more money than me. Yet, in getting into college, they’d have a huge advantage over me based on just their race. Hmmm.

When I go to work on a daily basis, I don’t look to what my group does. I look to what I can do, what I can contribute, what I can write, what I can create. This makes me more successful. There is a double-edged sword here, however. Individual makes me more successful, but faced with a group that hates a group I’m part of?

Again, these are Personal Success Factors. Group factors may vary, and that’s another post.

Replace Spot Racists with Network.

In the Soviet Union, there were huge numbers of jokes (and real stories) about how the Soviets would go to great lengths to spot those that were going to undermine the revolution. Racism had disappeared in the United States to such an extent that Race Grifters had to come up with nonsense like “microaggressions” and even redefine the word “racist” so that black people couldn’t ever be called that.

I once looked up “opaque” in the dictionary. The definition was unclear.

It would have been better, however, to find people and make friends with them. I have dozens of people in my phone that I call or text on a semi-regular basis. Why? Mainly because I like them. I don’t want anything from them other than to be their friend. Yet, I call them when I need advice. And they call me when they need advice. All of my friends plus me are way, way smarter than me.

And I like them.

Replace Systemic Racism with Optimism.

Let’s pretend that Systemic Racism exists. To believe that, you’d have to ignore that 58% of NFL® players are black. That 35% of assistant coaches are black. That 72% of NBA players are black. And the black actors that people pay money to see. And the black musicians that people pay money to listen to. And Oprah. Also of note – race relations appear to be best in the Deep South where black people and white people have somehow figured out a way to live in peace.

If Systemic Racism does exist, it seems like the easiest thing in the world to overcome. And the solution is Optimism. Every day I get up thinking that things are going to be okay for me. And, mostly, they are. Being an Optimist means I’m disappointed sometimes, but I’m also happy, so I look for the silver lining. Have I lost a job because of Systematic Racism? Not that I’m sure of. But I was told, point blank, that I wasn’t hired for one particular job because I wasn’t a woman. I was okay with that. And that place? Well, it’s shut down now, and if I had started a career there, I wouldn’t have the skills I have today.

Be Optimistic.

Replace Reparations with Reciprocity.

Reparations are nonsense. Check out the meme for the list of ludicrous demands coming out of California. Note this: every one of them is about “how I can get mine” rather than “how can I improve the world for others”.

“Oh, and we also demand matching t-shirts.”

I write these posts not because I get paid. Indeed, it costs me money to write these posts beyond my time, about $2 a day. I’m planning on increasing my revenues in the coming year by 200%. Let’s see, twice nothing is still . . . carry the two . . . still nothing.

Reciprocity means doing things for others, not because they can help you, but because you’re not a tool. Has Reciprocity helped me? Absolutely. But that’s not why I do it.

Conclusions.

I can’t fix black America. I’m not going to try. Every one of the black people that I know personally are okay and I get along fine with them.

Adams is trying to fix race relations in America, but I think his efforts will ultimately be futile for several reasons – the drug of Victimhood is stronger than heroin. It is also certainly not in the interests of the Race Grifters and the Politicians. Those are two reasons, among many.

What I can do, however is my little bit in the Universe, being a happy warrior fixing what I can, warning when I see dragons ahead. Scott’s Personal Success Filter is a good one for anyone who wants to achieve.

And, like Scott, I’m not leaving my money in the 19^th largest bank.

Oh, wait. The 19^th largest bank is gone.

Note: Moderation may be tighter than normal (I’ve only nuked 78 out of nearly 21,000 comments)- keep it positive, folks.