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I’m with you on this, totally. I am a 100% “thank you” person and maybe a 30% “please” person, which is probably higher now than, say, a decade ago. My version of please has long been to turn up the request phrase significantly at the ends as you do a question. I get that clerks have thankless jobs—most people have thankless jobs—but that said, I will not thank the store for taking my money, and in the moment, the clerk is the store. If the store does say “have a good one”, I generally reply, “you too”.

I’ve moved rightward toward Marxism. 😉

A high percentage of people like the kind of newly-manufactured, clean/antiseptic Americana that is found in Texas, Arizona, Florida, and a few others places. The kind of folks who dream of retiring to The Villages. It’s all a matter of taste.

I know that's what it evolved from. Just being prickly for laughs. 😁 I do think both expressions just sound weird to the ear. I've always felt a little weird saying either of them and I can't quite put my finger on why. But not even 1993 Matthew McConaughey can make either sound cool.

One of the underrated awful parts is just how for granted we are taking this kind of inane mother****ery.

I cannot begin to tell you how happy this makes me. I feel vindicated (so far) for giving them my money earlier this month.

The one I hear, invariably, is "have a good one." So irritating. Have a good what, exactly? I think the practice of clerks saying please/thank you at the retail level have fallen out of favor because it implies servility, and no one wants to be made to feel servile. I would bet they also reason they don't even have to say "thank you" because, after all, you're giving money to the store, not them. They just work there to transfer it from your hand to the till. They do not see themselves as representatives of the store, even if you in all fairness regard them as such. One habit I have refused to fall into is to thank them when they give me a receipt, because that's when I hear "no problem", as though they did me some favor. I hear customers thanking clerks all the time. I can only hmph, smile, and shake my head when I see it. Back-asswards, as they used to day.

Never forget that Christian conservatism, Christian nationalism, the Christian right, whatever anyone wants to call it, is not a religious or moral or ethical movement. It is a political movement, with all the cold impersonal machinations that implies.

You might change your tune on this if you ever have your insurance company deny you coverage on a major disease because you bought cigarettes and alcohol on your credit card over the course of a number of years.

This is consistent with a concerted effort to get people used to worse and worse so they accept it as their lot in life. It's why food tastes worse and is more scarce, products are made cheaper and meant to throw away when they break even as prices rise on them, and customer service has become nearly extinct and practically impossible for average people to engage. Trust me when I assert to you that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will never deny himself a single thing even as he exhorts millions of his own acolytes to do the same. In fact, he'll almost certainly ratchet up the luxury as precious diminishing resources continue to get diverted from the great unwashed to the elites.

That means only a few thousand.

Go back to 2006 and tell 30-something you that you will be typing this on the Motown board in twenty years.

There is no reason a player should be guilted into taking pity on a major league team and doing them a "solid" by retiring to save them a little money. Owning a franchise in the only legally-protected monopoly in America is as risk-free a venture as there is on this entire planet. I see no reason every last risk factor must be removed from the game just to protect those poor hedge fund owners and private equity firms who own the teams. They want to own a big league ball club and bask in glory among their peers at Bilderberg and Davos and epstein islands while raking in even more billions from them? Fine, then let them have to continue paying players while they are injured. **** those guys.

Back in the old days, what we call "forearm tightness" would be the precursor to "dead arm".

This one can be easy to forget. Talent distributed among all 2.3 billion males aged 20-39 in the world may be on a Bell Curve, but at the very top of any profession, which in baseball represents the top 7,500 or so men in the world who make an actual living at it, talent is more accurately represented as being the tip of a pyramid.

Works for me

So I took a hack at trying to figure out how many net runs the Tigers gain through their taking extra bases. I gave it the situations from this table: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2025-baserunning-batting.shtml And run expediencies from this table: https://tangotiger.net/re24.html And ask it to determine runs gained and lost depending on whether the runner stopped after one base, made it an extra base, or got thrown out at that extra base. I asked for a sortable table and got this, at this link: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ae435d12-66cf-4f68-a634-73b59162a9cb Here's a pasted table. Bottom line: Tigers are second in runs gained but last in runs lost. However, that works out to having them rank fifth in net runs gained, behind Brewers, Dodgers, Jays, and Reds. pretty good company, and substantially above the league average. That means that despite leading the league in outs lost trying to take the extra base, it was a net positive for us.

No, that's not me saying that, that's them saying they want their money back. That's why it's in quotes.

eff it

God, what a great president she would have made.

"It's OUR money. We want it back."

Lawfare running amok.

Watching my first Tigers game of the season, at the Orioles, on MLBN. They’re wearing those new blue alternates. They are ugly and cheap-looking. They look like the kind of uniform you get playing for a team in amateur men’s hardball.

Come on, Claude, stay strong, man!

Please respect the people trying to avoid him.