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The pet peeve thread


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1 hour ago, chasfh said:

I think this is probably right. My four-year-older brother heavily influenced 11-year-old me to discover Jethro Tull and Alice Cooper and Cream, none of which I would have discovered on my own.

I am of the impression that there are a lot of kids, meaning millennials and Gen Z, who like certain kinds of classic rock because their parents would play it. When I say “a lot” I don’t mean the majority, of course, but a certainly a far higher percentage of them like that than kids of my generation who liked big band swing music, which was basically zero. I would guess probably because classic rock sounds way closer in basic style to today’s pop music than swing ever did or could to 70s pop music.

I think the whole question of the way music genres come and go is fascinating. There has been a change in popular music style pretty much every generation since Bach. Some eras have produced music with a lot more staying power and it looks like 60s-70's period may turn out to be one of them. I've seen music historians speculate that a big surge in music education in the post WWII era  (US and Europe) led to a lot of very high quality musicianship, plus the boomer cohort creating enough market for their down generation's musicians to break through early when their creativity was still high.

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29 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think the whole question of the way music genres come and go is fascinating. There has been a change in popular music style pretty much every generation since Bach. Some eras have produced music with a lot more staying power and it looks like 60s-70's period may turn out to be one of them. I've seen music historians speculate that a big surge in music education in the post WWII era  (US and Europe) led to a lot of very high quality musicianship, plus the boomer cohort creating enough market for their down generation's musicians to break through early when their creativity was still high.

Slightly related.... I heard Roger Daltrey on a podcast say that US Servicemen stationed in England, bringing over records like Elvis and Chuck Berry and those guys, along with the old timer Blues legends feeling safer in Europe than in the South in the US contributed to the heavy influence of music during that time period in that location. 

Throw in the radio consolidation has made things pretty stale commercially.  Do people under 30 listen to the radio?

 

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3 hours ago, oblong said:

Slightly related.... I heard Roger Daltrey on a podcast say that US Servicemen stationed in England, bringing over records like Elvis and Chuck Berry and those guys, along with the old timer Blues legends feeling safer in Europe than in the South in the US contributed to the heavy influence of music during that time period in that location. 

Throw in the radio consolidation has made things pretty stale commercially.  Do people under 30 listen to the radio?

 

Spotify or some other platform.

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26 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think the whole question of the way music genres come and go is fascinating. There has been a change in popular music style pretty much every generation since Bach. Some eras have produced music with a lot more staying power and it looks like 60s-70's period may turn out to be one of them. I've seen music historians speculate that a big surge in music education in the post WWII era  (US and Europe) led to a lot of very high quality musicianship, plus the boomer cohort creating enough market for their down generation's musicians to break through early when their creativity was still high.

I do know that the quality of rock and roll has been both helped and hurt (e.g., pretentious prog rock) by the rose in music education, but I wonder whether and how it’s affected hip hop? I would imagine the same direction to some degree. 

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I forget if I have gripes about Stand Up To Cancer here, but it is a pet peeve and I feel like I am on an island there. It's just a giant ad for Mastercard and money being diverted from research to those stupid signs.

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Just now, Edman85 said:

I forget if I have gripes about Stand Up To Cancer here, but it is a pet peeve and I feel like I am on an island there. It's just a giant ad for Mastercard and money being diverted from research to those stupid signs.

I'm with you. A multibillion $ org donating $5M? It's a joke. They spent more than that to make and run  the commercial.

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1 hour ago, Edman85 said:

I forget if I have gripes about Stand Up To Cancer here, but it is a pet peeve and I feel like I am on an island there. It's just a giant ad for Mastercard and money being diverted from research to those stupid signs.

You are not. And I feel the same way at Tiger games for other things. 

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For whichever (or whatever) reason, Charity Navigator has no information on Stand Up To Cancer, even though they have been around since 2008.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/884115555

STAND UP TO CANCER cannot currently be evaluated by our Impact & Measurement methodology because either (A) it is eligible, but we have not yet received data; (B) we have not yet developed an algorithm to estimate its programmatic impact; (C) its programs are not direct services; or (D) it is not heavily reliant on contributions from individual donors.

Note: The absence of a score does not indicate a positive or negative assessment, it only indicates that we have not yet evaluated the organization.
 
I find it interesting that a charity with as high a profile as this is completely absent from the most trusted charity aggregator website known.
 
However, they do post an audit to their website as a charity. This one is from 2022:
 
 
Stand Up To Cancer is a subsidiary of a group called The Entertainment Industry Foundation, so named, I suppose, because Katie Couric and Sherry Lansing were among their the celebrity founders. In addition to Stand Up To Cancer, they also operate charities called Defy Disaster; and Delivering Jobs (for people with autism).
 
I don't see where the audit breaks out expenditures by charity within, so it's basically impossible to gauge just how big the SU2C portion of it is, but they do have to break out their donations and expenditures by type, and by a mile, the leading assets that gets donated and spent is, I kid you not, in-kind donated media.
 
Of the $410 million in reported donations in 2022, $354MM of it, or 86%, was donated media; $37MM was corporate contributions; and $19MM was direct contributions. Of the $398 million in reported functional expenses, $351MM (88%) was donated media; $29MM was grants to charities; and the remaining $18MM went to other expenses, chiefly payroll, professional services (I assume legal, accounting, and investing a big part of that), and other office-type expenses.
 
So, removing the in-kind media out of the equation, Stand Up To Cancer appears to be one of three charities operated by The Entertainment Industry Foundation which, all together, took in roughly $56 million in cash contributions and gave $29MM in grants to actual charities. For a charity that is as high-profile as SU2C is, at least to us baseball fans, that seems underwhelming to me, but maybe I'm not assessing that correctly, I don't know.
 
But I don't think the size of the in-kind media contributed and spent can be ignored because it is just so massive, way into the 80+ percent of the organization's activities. So one could be forgiven for feeling as though the main purpose of the enterprise is to generate attention for itself, with the actual grant aspect of it seeming to take a back seat. But again, maybe I'm not looking at all this the right way, so I'd be interested in the take of anyone who has actual experience working with charity finances, because I have practically none.
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Speaking of ad campaigns for charity... ASPCA's extra long ads showing a series of neglected, shivering dogs (with the occasional token kitten and even more occasional token horse) to sad carols while an even sadder narrators begs people for money makes me never want to give them money. 

St. Judes and Shriners also have the extra long ads, but at least they often show positive outcomes.

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12 hours ago, LaceyLou said:

Is anyone else trying to travel this weekend? What a mess.

I was lucky, though-I managed to get my money back from the airline and the hotel. Sounds like others did not.

We got very lucky.  Flew out Saturday morning from Detroit to Tampa. We saw people at the airport sleeing on floors. Near one terminal eceryone had complimentary blankets.  Our flight was on time but when we got to tampa we had to wait about 45 minutes for a gate to open up.  But I was very anxious Friday checking our flight status and wondering what I could do. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Like a lot of communities around here, our garbage contract was under GFL, who got bought out by Priority Waste.   It's been kind of a **** show.  But that's not my problem. My problem is the compaints.  Get over it.  I don't care if my can sits out there another day.  These workers are doing their best.  It's been hot as balls and it's not a glamorous job.  I'm sure it's hard to find employees.   

I just wish that worrying about the garbage pickup was the biggest concern of my day.  Life must be great if that's on your mind.  

 

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2 hours ago, oblong said:

Like a lot of communities around here, our garbage contract was under GFL, who got bought out by Priority Waste.   It's been kind of a **** show.  But that's not my problem. My problem is the compaints.  Get over it.  I don't care if my can sits out there another day.  These workers are doing their best.  It's been hot as balls and it's not a glamorous job.  I'm sure it's hard to find employees.   

I just wish that worrying about the garbage pickup was the biggest concern of my day.  Life must be great if that's on your mind.  

 

We had a silimlar thing happen in my city. New company comes in with rock bottom contract bid. City does not look passed the dollar amount signs them up. New compamny cancel current contracts. Have all drivers re-apply for a 1/4 of pay they had before. Most leave to neighboring communities with competitive pay packages. You have to have CDL class A (basically 18 wheeler) so these guys are in high demand. City dealt with these jokers for about a year, 2 weeks or more of missed pu's total routes left uncovered etc... Put it back out to bid and ended selecting Republic paying 30% more than the intial contract they started the whole mess with.

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37 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

We had a silimlar thing happen in my city. New company comes in with rock bottom contract bid. City does not look passed the dollar amount signs them up. New compamny cancel current contracts. Have all drivers re-apply for a 1/4 of pay they had before. Most leave to neighboring communities with competitive pay packages. You have to have CDL class A (basically 18 wheeler) so these guys are in high demand. City dealt with these jokers for about a year, 2 weeks or more of missed pu's total routes left uncovered etc... Put it back out to bid and ended selecting Republic paying 30% more than the intial contract they started the whole mess with.

I've always thought this was the kind of thing where cost-plus contracts make sense. Vendor documents exactly what the costs are, the buyer pays the costs plus reasonable profit to the vendor. With a public entity as the buyer it provides more transparency to the public and it makes it easier to show what any low ball bidder is leaving out of his bid. (like a workforce!)

Edited by gehringer_2
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On 7/23/2024 at 8:35 AM, LaceyLou said:

One thing I do know is that I'm glad I shelled out a few extra bucks when booking hotels so that they'd be refundable. 

You have to get screwed on pre-pay only once to get religion on this.

 

Edited by chasfh
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On 7/18/2024 at 12:31 PM, oblong said:

So they got $354M in donated media, and doled out $351M in donated media?  I think I know the answer... but what is donated media?  I guess I see that as a wash.

 

I think it’s more they got $354MM in media donated to them, and they ran media valued at $351MM. It’s an accounting thing, I guess, but point is, all the charity seems to exist for is to generate attention unto itself.

Ever been to a playoff game where you are supposed to write the name of someone you know who has had cancer and flash it at the televised moment of silence or whatever it is in the fifth or so inning? That whole exercise felt so icky to me, I didn’t do it, even thought my mom and brother both died of cancer.

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I guess it fits here, but I came home from a week long trip working at Gen Con and our neighbors across the street have apparently started building a.......pyramid in their front yard???

 

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Doesn't seem like it should be legal to me, I'm so confused over it haha.

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57 minutes ago, slothfacekilla said:

I guess it fits here, but I came home from a week long trip working at Gen Con and our neighbors across the street have apparently started building a.......pyramid in their front yard???

 

spacer.png

 

Doesn't seem like it should be legal to me, I'm so confused over it haha.

I don't see a permit posted on it.

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1 hour ago, slothfacekilla said:

I guess it fits here, but I came home from a week long trip working at Gen Con and our neighbors across the street have apparently started building a.......pyramid in their front yard???

 

spacer.png

 

Doesn't seem like it should be legal to me, I'm so confused over it haha.

Building a sculpture for Halloween?

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