Good morning. Hello. How are you? #772
Your vital Walmart info for the week, gardening, getting the feels from giving my car away, Twitter's not dead yet but is also dead already.
Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? Sorry I’m a little bit late today, you know the drill. Friday, so gotta take the recycling to the collection center and do the Walmart run. You might think that the Walmart content is a little boring, but I assure you, I could wrap just that content up in a subscription and sell it to urban financial analysts covering Walmart who really don’t want to go to the boonies too often. Walmart is right now doing what they call a store “remodel.” Everything’s getting re-arranged and there are boxes everywhere and it’s impossible to shop. Makes sense they’d want to do this before the holiday season, but Walmart is also a grocery store, and people gotta buy their thanksgiving shit this weekend, so I hope for their sake they wrap it up soon. Walmart radio was playing an album cut from Taylor’s Folklore, which is a smart move since, you know, they had some good distribution on those two records and there are no retail-exclusive editions of Midnights in the US. She seems really committed to this whole “there are four colored-vinyl variants, collect them all and it makes a picture!” schtick, which is both silly but also refreshing. You actually could, theoretically, collect all four, unlike a lotta albums these days that come in, like, fifteen color variants.
They did not have the Walmart-exclusive of Alice in Chains’ Dirt, which I’ve been looking for for, like, six weeks now, since I saw on the socials that a friend of mine got a copy. I don’t love Alice in Chains but I like them, and I have a soft spot for them since I met Layne Staley backstage at the Off Ramp in Seattle in 1996 and he was so, so fucked up, but he was a giant This Mortal Coil fan and I met him with Gordon/Cindy on the Cindytalk tour and he fanboy’d out which was really quite heartwarming, but then he hit us up for drugs, which was kind of sad, and Cindy said “You’re the rock star, shouldn’t you have drugs for us?” To which he said “Good point, good point. You would think.”
Walmart Radio, I realized, is also very clearly designed for the employees. Like there are DJs and call-ins and (fake?) employees call in and talk about how well things are going with the “remodel” in their store this week, so it’s clear the content is timely and focused. Man I would love to see any metrics on Walmart radio. Does it work? Do they have a single metric to prove this not-insubstantial expenditure is yielding a single positive result? So much fantastic marketing science data hidden away in brands, never to see the greater light of day. Another folly of capitalism, yadda yadda.
Started the Thanksgiving grocery shopping, but then realized it’s kinda hard because I haven’t gone to the garden and checked to see if I had any success in growing thanksgiving beets, potatoes, herbs, or carrots. I know my corn failed (but boy, it sure looked good). So I guess I’ll go out there and do that today. The forst is devestating any explicitly non-frost hardy plants this week. The tomatoes are gone, but I wasn’t protecting them so that’s no surprise. The luffa’s done, so I gotta go get all my luffa gourds and start the month long process of drying them to make my sponges. Man I hope this works. Sponges for GMHHAY readers. Name another daily email with official luffa sponges, you can’t, you can’t. I’ve been covering my peppers with a planket every night trying to get these last six or so green bell peppers red but it’s not gonna happen the frost is too relentless even for the planket so I guess I’ll harvest those today even though green peppers are so much yuckier than red peppers alas. But all the autumnal stuff is doing great: garlic, potatoes, wheat, snow peas, lettuce, carrots, napa cabbage. I think this is the last week for bok choy.
Also I figured out where my grapes are gonna go next year and I’m very excited about that but we’ll wait to talk about that for another day.
Before Walmart I went to the collection center to drop off the recycling and all of the freebies that were generated from the great re-org last weekend. Lotta tool boxes and bags: four toolboxes of tools went into that new workbench, so I put those in the free pile. Some Christmas lights. Some HVAC vents cuz our new system is a different size. Some of those Dewalt bags that come with tools that I don’t need cuz I’m a homebound handyman not a travelin’ one. The guys that work there were having a field day with the tool boxes. Actually it was kind of interesting because I always figured those dudes snag anything with explicit value and sell it off on eBay or something, but one of them said “I wish I needed this tool bag it’s really nice,” and didn’t take it, so I guess they actually let other Chathamites (no idea if that’s our actual demonym) take stuff. Either way, it’s charity. Charity don’t need a tax deduction, bro.
Though in any case I got a big one yesterday because, I am sad to report, the 2010 Mazda3 has been donated to the local food bank. The truck guy took it away yesterday. I was oddly emotional! I love that car. When Emma and I were first dating we bought that car in Seattle and drove it to Alaska by way of Prince Rupert, BC, and the Alaska Marine Highway System and Haines and Haines Junction in the Yukon and the Alaska highway. Then we left it in Wasilla for a year or so before my dad said “I’ll buy that car off you,” and he bought it. Then like six years later I flew to Alaska and my Dad and I drove that car down from Alaska all across Canada and back to North Carolina by way of his brother in Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge Parkway which was just so ridiculously gorgeous. It was the last long bout of time I spent alone with my dad - ten days or so. I didnt know he was terminal with PSP yet, but I knew he wasn’t well, and I knew our days were numbered. I’m so glad I did that trip. I love that car. I am sad it’s gone. I didn’t expect to be this emotional.
I would like to say thank you to the over a dozen men who contacted me to tell me that they, too, have had that problem peeing between the seat and the bowl when sitting down, so, you know, now we are a movement I guess. Except never join a movement that’s on a hill you’re not willing to die on, I guess. Choose your own fatal hills and whatnot, but I hope we can all feel a little bit better. And extra-speical congrats to the two or three of you who were willing to go (semi-public) on the FB version of this post. That take some (semi-erect and/or flaccid) balls. Methinks maybe today well cool it on the urinal commentary for a spell. At least until the magic pedal arrives and then, I assure you, I will be giving you a full report.
So Twitter did not go down last night, as many people were convinced it would. I actually think it’ll take a little time. I will be moderately, though not hugely, surprised if it makes it through the World Cup, which starts Sunday. Wouldn’t it be funny if the world’s half-assed boycott of the World Cup due to the host country’s deplorable human rights record was exactly enough of a lessened audience to make it so Twitter survived? Why not. Dark timeline and all. But anyway, I think it’ll peter out over November and December. But I do think there’s a chance it’ll make it with only some sporadic outages if Elon is smart (hahahaha) and applies a Victor-the-Cleaner type to track down very specific individuals and ply them with highly targeted bribes to keep the site up. I suspect that there are enough people who worked there that might be susceptible to this due to some mix of personal need and idealism about, like, Egyptian dissidents or something. The people stuck there due to visa issues are also a factor. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that everything so far is just early press reports. It’s quite possible fewer people quit than we are hearing. It is, of course, also possible that more are.
But Elon’s maybe accidentally bringing the site down was never his greatest failure of the last ten days, it’s just a byproduct. The dude is manifestly screwing up, even if you let Elon himself grade his work. He’s the one who says it might go bankrupt at any moment — it wasn’t going to go bankrupt at any moment before he bought it. He’s the one who decided the order of firing operations: to fire half the staff then do a loyalty test. How stupid is that? He explicitly says he wants only loyal peeps there, so maybe the loyalty test should have been first? There are very, very few “smart” explanations for this firing order. Presumably anyone doing layoffs has a target number of employees or a target payroll level. You want to choose these things, you don’t want other people to choose for you! So it is patently the only smart solution to first do the layoff operations which will result in an unknown number of departures: in this case, the loyalty test, and the new WFH policy. If those voluntary approaches do not work, then you you can do a specific-number mass layoff so you can acutually get to the number you want. This is the only way to guarantee that you’ll get to that number! Which, by definition, you want! There is no rational explanation for not doing things in this order! It’s sheer incompetence and antithetical to his stated goals. Either way, talent you need might walk out the door because of the blanket non-surgical loyalty test. Better to know how bad this is earlier rather than later. It just is! It always is!
And never mind — never mind! — that it’s more ethical to start with the voluntary.
There’s a similar calculus with the ad flight: he’s the one who told us he wants these advertisers, he’s the one who told us they’re leaving. There’s no secret master plan: it is manifestly stupid, in all situations in which money is tight (and he’s told us that money is tight) to kill off your current revenue stream before building your new one.
I still believe that the end of Elon’s reign at Twitter will end in financial disaster and probably some receivership or receivership-equivalent even if the site never goes down. Though of course if the site goes down for some significant length of time, that will speed things up. And I still believe it’ll be before the end of the year. People were really giving me shit for that prediction a while ago but now people think I’m the optimist, lol.
And, of course, let’s keep in mind that between the precarious financial position, the warrants on his Tesla stock, the warrants Twitter made on its $12 Billion debt, the monstrous GDPR regulatory exposure he now faces, the FTC consent decree violation and Lina Kahn being out there cracking her knuckles getting ready for a showdown, and the billion-dollar hole left from their completely whiffed up-fronts, surviving the next two months is the least of Elon’s problems. He’s got a $4-5 billion hole, and growing, even before the fines. If you believe he’s going to make that up through subscriptions, well, I guess start by congratuling Apple who will make close to $2 bil off of him.
Anyway, I enjoyed the twenty thousand person Twitter Spaces chat last night that Katie Notopoulos hosted, it reminded me of those Zoom funerals during the pandemic. But, then, if Twitter’s architecture can still withstand a 20k participant Spaces chat, it might be staying up for a little bit. Because, fun fact: People really all bought their bullshit conventional wisdom on Twitter’s management. Consider for a moment: They were wrong! Twitter was not any poorly managed than the rest of Silicon Valley, it was probably slightly better managed, aside from the Jack years, and the engineering team is actually pretty good!
Okay okay, I will stop.
I have today off, continuing my “every Friday off for the rest of the year” use of my vacation time that I cannot stop recommending strongly enough. Gotta get that gardening stuff done, and then return the massive garage re-org to get it so my truck fits in the garage. Thing was covered in frost this morning. BUT: man, the remote start on an EV is awesome. Turns on the heaters, the heated seat, the heated steering wheel. What luxury. Cannot fathom having had that in Alaska when I used to park my car outside at -40°F. BUT a funny thing about EVs and cold is that as the car runs, the frost never melts off of the hood. Because there’s no engine heating it up. It looks funny. Cognitive dissonance. Also the truck told me when I was in the Walmart parking lot “hey it’s cold out. Keep me plugged in when not using me” which is fine for me but maybe a hassle for other people? I did not know about this.
Hrm don’t have a clear new pic of Jane from the last couple days. This one’s a little blurry. But it’s cute so it’ll have to do.
Justa Mix for today. Good ole Justa store, I miss it so. Mostly new, this mix, three or four old ones, including one of the greatest songs every written, “Linda Ronstadt,” by AJJ. Man I love it when that song comes on randomly. New Order’s on here because I’m reading Stephen Morris’ autobiography still and he talked a good bit about the recording process for that song. I’ve been working through all the Jay Jay Jonanson late-period albums. Used to love that guy and lost track and he has like four new albums and they’re all great. I have a huge regret not seeing him at Mercury Lounge that one time. I think I skipped it for a girl. I hope that worked out for me. Late priod Violent Femmes song came on shuffle the other day and I forgot that it’s actually a pretty pleasant jam. And two local Boston rock heroes from days of yore have new albums - Leah Callahan of Betwixt and Turkish Delight fame and Paul Natale of many bands. They’re both great. Leah actually has three albums in the last year or so. I’ve only gotten through two so far but they are really taking me back. Thank you, Leah. Also the new Smashing Pumpkins is… not bad. I am as surpried to be writing this as you probably are reading it.
Have a lovely weekend. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for Twitter. If you have a spare Vulcuan Fal-Tor-Pan monk robe in my size, send it my way, thanks.
i’m kind of fascinated by walmart radio! i have only been to a walmart once. many many years ago, outside of NYC, on a road trip to, oddly enough, North Carolina. we had planned to listen to our iPods using my FM transmitter but it wasn’t working, so we exited the highway and bought 5-6 CDs. haha.
i know i could look this up but why doesn’t target play music in their stores? their ads are so music-driven….