And:
Not much has changed, has it?
Category: Two-Minute Hate
Disgusting People
Quote Of The Day
Whiny little Commie bitch TV interviewer: “So just bottom line, Mr. Secretary, do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?”
SecTreas Scott Bessent: “No, I don’t. You’re quoting Goldman Sachs… I made a good career of trading against Goldman Sachs.”
ASUS Delenda Est
Quick recap of my laptop woes:
- Several weeks back the thing bricked on me. One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive. All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff. Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
- The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold. Nice. So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
- It isn’t. [50,000 very bad words redacted] So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally. So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas). This was yesterday (Monday) morning
- Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home. That’s about the only good news.
- Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput. On a brand-new computer. Cost to replace: $380 (part) + $150 (labor). For a machine that cost around $500 new. But:
- None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.
My options seem to be:
- Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
- Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
- Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function. (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
- Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.
To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.
And oh, by the way: if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future; DON’T.
*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.
That Consummation
…devoutly wished:
Spanish officials have admitted that a relentless campaign of anti-tourist protests in Majorca is ‘scaring away visitors’ – with locals claiming some resorts are now ‘completely dead’.
With British holidaymakers seemingly among foreigners turning their backs on the island, its tourism industry is in panic mode as officials overseeing the nightlife sector and tour companies warn that guests no longer feel ‘welcomed’.
The restaurant association president, Juanmi Ferrer, gave a stark warning that the messaging of the protests is ‘scaring visitors away’.
Ya think? Then there’s this priceless bit of wisdom:
Miguel Pérez-Marsá, head of the nightlife association, told Majorca Daily Bulletin: ‘The tourists we’re interested in are being driven away; they don’t feel welcome and are going to other destinations.’
Well, yes; except that those tourists you’re interested in — the hard-drinking, hard-partying Brits and Germans — are the ones who sparked all the protests in the first place.
Rock, meet hard place.
Here’s the ironic part.
I don’t actually blame the locals for trying to end the seemingly-endless summer invasions of their home towns — it’s as true for Amsterdam as it is in Majorca — but if your sole income is pretty much derived from tourists (unlike Amsterdam, for whom tourism is important but not critical), then I guess the full-time residents of the party places just need to endure… or move.
Unsaid in all this is the fact that young people (the partiers and drinkers) are almost by definition going to be louts and sluts when far from home and full of cheap booze, and so of course you can’t expect them to behave themselves. While older tourists may be more desirable socially, the old ‘uns don’t spend anything like what the kids do — unless of course they’re buying themselves a holiday apartment, thus driving up the prices of local real estate and making the place unaffordable to the locals.
See where all this goes?
Equally ironic is the fact that a huge proportion of the local population are greatly dependent on those tourist dollars to stay alive, whether cab drivers, bartenders, waitresses, tour operators or restaurant owners. And they’d all be harmed financially — i.e. bankrupted — as well as the rest who reap the “soft” benefits of tourism such as lower taxes and civic improvements, all made possible by the dollars / pounds / euros of the hated turisti.
Like I said, about those rocks and hard places…
Priceless
Okay, the bullshit is strong with this one [Brian Stelter alert] :
Trump’s victory over PBS and NPR ‘bias’ will be ‘devastating’ for rural areas, station leaders say
Of course, given that “rural areas” happen to be where conservative talk radio programs find their biggest audience, I think we may safely say that the disappearance of these pore rural NPR broadcasters will hardly be missed.
One could test this hypothesis, of course, simply by polling said audiences to make a simple choice between “NPR federal funding” and (say) “federal funding for rural road improvements”. My guess:
(sent to me by Reader Mike L., thankee; I would never have seen this, coming as it did from CNN)
