ChrisLicht

Dixon.

It’s kind of amazing that we don’t hear more stories of abused ex-students retaliating against specific teachers and administrators when the kids get older.

When I was in high school, many decades ago, we had an 11th grade teacher who treated students like shit—and took a kind of delight in her cruelty. A year after having her, a group of six seniors broke into her car, late on a Saturday night, and totaled it by destroying every bit of the interior, dash, stick shift column, and windows. It was a testament to how despised she was that it was pretty well known who had done it, but no one ever ratted them out.

This isn’t a a gotcha: Are you gay or trans? Have you lived in a deeply red, effectively theocratic area of the American south or west?

When I see actual GAAP accounting that demonstrates this, I’ll believe it. Until then, it’s Elon horse shit.

On Breaking Points, on Thursday I think, they said 13 Hamas fighters have been killed.

I was at a company where something shitty we did was eventually fined seven figures by federal regulators, and the CEO laughed because we made that in a month of doing it.

Here’s how it works:

1. You commit the shitty act for as long as you can, until the regulators finally catch on and/or have enough of the violation(s).

2. You hire a specialty lawyer who was a senior attorney or management at the regulator before shifting to private practice. That lawyer negotiates with his former co-workers/employees for six to nine months, then comes back with your deal.

3. Your fine in the deal looks like a big number in a regulator press release, but is usually <25% of the profits you’ve made off the shitty act.

4. If you’ve been particularly bad and you’re considered to be dicks, your deal might include a consent decree that attaches to the company and sometimes the execs personally. This is often just an annoyance for big companies, but can be bad for smaller companies whose execs really don’t want to be personally named, so you’ll sometimes see companies negotiate for a higher fine in exchange for removing execs’ personal names from the decree.

5. You pay the fine, sometimes in installments, and do the lightest possible rework of your business practices to bring you into compliance, and drive on. If you’re under a consent decree, you’re a bit more disciplined about reforming your practices. Otherwise, you look forward to the day when the consent decree ends, and you can backslide into the bad behavior again.

Professionally or morally?

Def my fave of that series too.

Smith has set up the cleanest legal shot possible against Trump, removing as much complexity as possible from all aspects of the prosecution. He is against cameras because they introduce unforeseeable complexity.

There is a feral quality to SF that is starting to remind me of NYC in the late-‘70s and ‘80s.

You can see the establishment of other ways of being that assume zero input or oversight from organized systems. For example, the red-light running is legion and increasing. I regularly pop out for a single errand on my bike and witness three different drivers blowing through solid red lights.

I’m O-Neg. They’re relentless.

The process used to be nice from the ‘70s to the ‘00s. You’d pop by a blood drive or your local Red Cross spot, and you could be in and out quickly and have a pleasant experience. Now, it takes 20+ minutes, just to deal with the paperwork before giving, even if you’ve filled out the app ahead of time, and the phlebotomists mostly seem disaffected and over it.

Not to mention the fact that the Red Cross stacks up the whole-blood appointments, so that if you do have some free time in the next few days to give, the only times available are for Power Red and platelet donations. You have to go out of your way to schedule a couple of weeks ahead, or let yourself be dunned to death by their constant calls, emails, and texts.

You can feel the MBA gears at work, driving up nominal stats and revenue, ruining an experience that should be made as convenient and pleasant as possible for folks who are giving their time and something you charge hospitals hundreds of dollars for, particularly for O-Neg donors who donate every 8 weeks.

I used to love to donate blood and felt great about it. Now, I dread the depersonalized, corporatized experience and only drag myself to do it because it benefits other people at some point.

I was 45 years old when I finally mastered the difference myself.