Rants

“[Media Matters] released the first audio of Carlson on Sunday. In that, Carlson called rape shield laws “totally unfair” and was adamantly supportive of Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is serving a life sentence for child rape. Carlson also said he would “love” a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting and described women as “extremely primitive.”

The next day, Media Matters for America released another audio file just moments after Carlson’s show began. In that, Carlson said that white men deserve credit for “creating civilization,” called Iraqis a bunch of “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” and spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the “lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals.””

Tucker Carlson says he’s the victim of a powerful bully. Meet the 24-year-old who found the tapes. [Washington Post]

Side note: I recall posting Media Matters YouTube videos on my Facebook account all the way back in 2007. We’ve been dealing with the bullshit that Fox News creates for far too long.

When people ask me about the weather in Burlingame I tell them that it never ever gets hot. They usually remark that I must be exaggerating, but I am not.

In 2018, Burlingame experienced a total of just nine days where the temperature reached or broke 80°F. If I look for days where the temperature reached or broke 85°F, that total is only two days.

Date	Maximum Temperature
May 28, 2018	82°F
June 02	85
June 22	80
June 23	87
June 30	81
July 6	81
July 9	81
September 20	83
November 01	80

I miss the Summers I spent growing up just 20 miles south where the temperature was almost always at or above 80°F.

Sadly, in order to afford to live down there again, I would have to find a job that pays me a 6-figure salary and I’d also have to find a girlfriend/wife who also had a 6-figure salary. In reality, I’m nowhere near capable of holding down a job, let alone one with a large salary. And I’m even farther away from having a girlfriend, let alone one who earns a large salary.

I frequently run into less-than-excellent retailers on the internet given that I make most of my product purchases on the internet. Prior to placing an order, the product they’re selling looks fine. However, when I receive the product there will be some kind of problem, such as shipping damage due to poor packaging, providing me with a product I did not purchase, or shipping a product that differs from the description on the product’s website. In many of these cases, I provide a poor rating on the seller’s account or the seller’s product in order to warn other customers about the poor quality or service. What happens after this is quite troubling.

After leaving my review, I almost always see an email in my inbox the next day which states that the seller has provided me with an immediate refund. In this same message, the seller also states that I do not need to return the product, but they ask that I delete my negative review in account of the seller’s “generosity”. This is frustrating.

On one hand, yes, the seller has largely solved any reason I have to feel sour about the purchase I made. They gave me a full refund for the purchase and allowed me to avoid the trouble of running an errand to return the product.

But on the other hand, I’m still left in a situation where I need a product and expected to have it already. I still have to go through the trouble of ordering another copy of that product and waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Also, if I requested a return on the product I ordered because the website lied about the product’s description, I cannot simply go buy another copy of the same product. Rather, I have to perform research all over again to find the right product to order since the one I initially picked was bogus.

Online product reviews are tremendously helpful. Never before in history have consumers had so much information available to them prior to making purchases. However, if those reviews only tell one side of the story, the positive side, their utility decreases dramatically. The reason I leave product and seller reviews is because I find them so incredibly useful. Honest reviews are like gold. They save me an enormous amount of time and trouble. I want to contribute to this resource which I find so incredibly valuable. If I delete all of my negative reviews, other customers do not receive an honest view of the products and sellers they consider.

In the end, I’m stuck in the awkward situation of trying to decide whether a seller made an honest, one-time mistake and doesn’t deserve a bad review or if they’re a genuinely lousy seller and deserve a bad review.

“PG&E said bonuses have historically constituted 6 to 20 percent of employees’ pay and brought their total compensation “in line with the market and their peers in the utility space.””

Why doesn’t PG&E pay its workers a market wage to begin with??? Why do PG&E’s workers need to rely on unreliable EOY bonuses in order to round out their yearly pay?

This makes no sense to me. Pay your workers a full wage to do their job. If they don’t do their job well, terminate their employment. Why in the world would you pay someone a less than fair wage and then keep them employed at the company if they fail to accomplish the requirements of their job???

Bankrupt California utility wants to give $235M in bonuses [SFGate]

Paul Manafort sentenced to about 4 years in prison in Virginia case [Washington Post]

Caught selling or using drugs? You’re a dirty, no-good criminal who deserves to rot in jail for the majority of your adult life. This event will destroy your life and you deserve it.

Caught committing bank fraud and stealing millions of dollars from the United States government through tax evasion? You’re a “good friend” and a “generous person” who doesn’t deserve to be subject to “excessive” federal sentencing guidelines. We want to make sure we do not subject your life to unnecessary hardships.

This is the most insane explanation for a short prison sentence I’ve ever heard from a judge: Anyone who doesn’t think Manafort’s punishment is tough enough should “go and spend a day, a week in jail or in the federal penitentiary. He has to spend 47 months.”

Has this ever been a consideration when sentencing people for drug crimes? No. Never. Not once.

The message is simple: If you are wealthy, you do not deserve to be subject to the same punishments as others in society. If you are wealthy, you are a better human being than a person who is poor.

Our justice system is fucked.