kaizen
what's been floating my boat lately:
  • nothing

    • "How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
    -Hitler-
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    -Albert Einstein-

    5/8/26 (15:15)

  • Draymond Green continues to look like an idiot. Now he's talking shit to Charles Barkley and saying he doesn't want to look like Barkley did when he was playing for Houston. The implication being that Barkley looked weak chasing a championship or didn't play well at the end of his career. What a punk.
  • Barkley's final season: 14.5 pts, 10.5 reb, 3.2 asst. per game. Draymond's best season: 14 pts, 9.5 reb, 7.4 asst. per game.
  • I think Billy Joel is better than Elton John. Stuck in traffic, I listened to each of their greatest hits and I have EJ with six 5* songs and BJ with five 5* star songs. EJ with seven 4* songs and BJ with ten 4* songs. EJ with two 3* songs and BJ with four 3* songs. Overall, I think Joel is better and he also didn't have a writing partner to do the lyrics, so I give him the edge for that reason alone.
  • A 5* song is great or classic, a 4* song is very good, a 3* song is good, a 2* song is one that is okay, but not very memorable or worth finding to listen to, and a 1* song is bad. I have a playlist with 6* songs, but there aren't many of those. Those are transcendant songs that make you believe in god.
  • I got to thinking about this because the NYT came up with a list of 30 best living American songwriters and somehow Joel didn't make it on there. Pretty bad list overall. If I were to come up with my own list without having looked at this list, I think there would be an overlap of about 12/30. If I made a list of the top 300 living American songwriters, I think the overlap would be about 25/30.

    • Nile Rodgers
    Lucinda Williams
    Stevie Wonder
    Jay-Z
    Paul Simon
    Taylor Swift
    Brian & Eddie Holland
    Missy Elliott
    Lionel Richie
    Dolly Parton
    Young Thug
    Diane Warren
    Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane Mcanally
    Fiona Apple
    Babyface
    Stephin Merritt
    Romeo Santos
    Carole King
    OutKast
    Mariah Carey
    Willie Nelson
    Kendrick Lamar
    Valerie Simpson
    Bob Dylan
    Lana Del Rey
    The-Dream
    Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis
    Bad Bunny
    Bruce Springsteen
    Smokey Robinson
  • Curt Flood gets a lot of press because of what he did in baseball. For those who don't know, he fought for the right to be a free agent and took his case to the supreme court. Basically, he wanted to play for another team and was told he couldn't, he fought his team's owner, and lost, but it was a big deal nonetheless. But his legacy comes as part of a line of other people who did the same thing in sports and entertainment well before him. I think he gets a lot of credit because his was the case the finally broke dam on the issue, he was black, his quote "a well-paid slave is still a slave" gets a lot of eyeballs, and he missed out on some of his prime years fighting for his right on this issue.
  • Here's the thread I would connect on the broader issue of entertainers being allowed to control their own destiny and not be owned by their team/studio/label: Olivia de Havilland, James Stewart, Ray Charles, Rick Barry, Curt Flood, followed by several others after that.
  • Olivia de Havilland fought Warner Brothers' control over her career. It used to be that studios could control your contract for years and years. She challenged this and ended up winning in court so studios couldn't have contracts lasting longer than 7 years (the de Havilland rule).
  • After James Stewart came back from the war, he didn't want to be owned by MGM anymore. His agent came up with a workaround to his being owned by MGM ...he took no salary for his work on Winchester '73...instead he got back end points. Thus making him a sort of acting free agent and opening up the door for others to do the same.
  • In the 50s Ray Charles fought for ownership of his own master recordings and more control over his music...something almost no one else had at the time.
  • In the 60s Rick Barry didn't want to play for the Warriors so he challenged their ability to own him and ended up jumping to the ABA. The NBA tried to block his moving to the ABA and he ended up having to sit out a season before moving to the ABA. After some years there, he came back to the NBA.
  • I think it's best for society if capital and labor can both easily work where they want and hire/fire who they want. Unions basically make the 2nd one as difficult as possible and cartels like the NFL make the the 1st one as difficult as possible.


    • 5/1/26 (12:39)

  • Video issue with computer may be more complicated...sound issues now as well...maybe a motherboard issue? Computer continuing to have issues. May need to replace mb and cpu soon. Lovely.
  • Losing the new guy for the next 4-5 weeks. Good timing because we're slow, but, in my experience, if you let guys stay busy on their own too much, then they will leave. Keep them busy or lose them. Which is why I've always prioritized keeping good guys busy, even if it means having them work on my house/warehouse.
  • The latest would-be assassin of Trump was a Cal Tech student living with his parents. He took a train from CA to DC and the best plan he came up with during that time, was to run through the front door and hope for the best. This seems extremely odd. Anyone who gets into Cal Tech has powers of logic that exceed my own by at least 10x. I'm an idiot and I couldn't even get into Cal Tech if my dad gave them a building or whatever. This guy gets in and this is the plan he comes up with? All 3 assassination attempts have weird things about them. I just don't know what the hell is going on anymore.
  • CA is going to pick a new governor soon and I'm sure we'll make a bad choice there. Mahan is the most reasonable one I've seen so that's who I'll be voting for. There's also the prospect of a wealth tax brewing in the state. Basically it taxes UNREALIZED wealth of the top 200-250 people in the state. Pretty much a no brainer from a political standpoint because you can claim it's a one time tax and they can afford it and it's only a couple hundred people. Of course, it would just be the beginning because once the precedent is set you know where it goes from there. Plus, it has already caused several people to leave the state. 1% of the earners already contribute about 40% of the state's income tax revenue and the bottom 60% of the tax payers contribute about 2% of the state's income tax revenue. Give these people enough reason to leave and they will (and have). But the bigger issue here is that it's a tax on unrealized wealth. That means that farm land or art or stock a person owns is valued at some theoretical value and then taxed, regardless of how much cash a person actually has. A founder of a company that takes off and is worth a couple billion, could be subject to a tax, regardless of how much cash this person actually has. When do you take this magical measurement? Elon Musk left CA long ago, but when do you measure his wealth? He gains and loses billions in wealth a day based upon the whims of the stock market. Of course it's all theoretical because in no world could a person dump all of Elon's TSLA stock into the market and sell it off at anywhere near its current valuation. It just doesn't work that way. And do you think they won't find a way to game that system as well? They tried it in a few European nations and it doesn't work. Just a bad idea all around.
  • The biggest problem with any of this talk is that G just spends too damn much. G always wants more of your money. Yes, I want a rebalancing of wealth and think the G is the best entity to do that, but 1) it's going about it all wrong 2) it shouldn't use that as an opportunity to spend an ever-increasing amount on pet projects. I've listened to this podcast a few times...it should be mandatory listening for anyone interested in funding the government or ever having a conversation about the federal budget. But, politics is the issue that somehow people feel the most emboldened talking about without any background knowledge whatsoever, so I guess whatever.



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