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For most people, travel has always been looked upon as the necessary evil, a thing you get through in order to get somewhere. That week on the beach in Florida during the winter means a day of torment at airports to get there. The trip back is extra miserable because you are tired from having fun all week. Experienced travelers, on the other hand, figure out the system and it becomes a habit of mind. You know how it works so you know how to make it work for you.
Before Covid, the thing I could see was that the system was simply overloaded at various key points. The security system, for example, had broken down. At some airports you would wait over an hour for totally disinterested TSA workers to process you through the system. In Europe, you would hustle from line to line to clear passport control, when the only actual check was a zombified worker looking at the millionth passport that day and waving you along.
Covid cured that by first reducing travel to the absolute minimum and then conditioning people to not want to travel. An overlooked result of the almost two years of stay at home orders is people got used to staying home. In overgrown metro areas like Washington DC, working at home is common. Business travel never bounced back because everyone is used to Zoom sessions now. Now, economic concerns have put a damper on the travel business.
You see this at airports. I have been on the road a a fair bit this year and the one thing I keep seeing is light traffic at airports. There are fewer flights, so they are just as full, but the number of people in the concourse is still below the pre-Covid days. The travel industry claims things are bouncing back, but they lie like everyone else these days, so I trust my lying eyes rather than their lying mouths. This year on my travels I have not run into the volume issues anywhere in the system.
I just returned from Nashville, which is a sprawling metropolis full of strangers from other stranger lands. That is a recipe for a mobbed airport before a holiday. In the old days, the Sunday before Thanksgiving would have been nuts and got increasingly nuts through the week. The reason is all of the newly arrived mountain folk would have headed back to where they belong for the long holiday. Instead, the airport was as quiet as I have seen an airport in ages.
On the other hand, something else is happening. At BWI on Friday I tried to buy a beverage at one of the shops and the non-English speaking clerk just said something that sounded like “no work” to people. The payment system was down, as best I could tell, so she was left to chase away customers. I was reminded of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the heroes arrive at Costco. The great thing about that scene is you realize the system can stagger on a long time.
On the plane, one of the flight crew sounded like a satirical version of how a waifu would sound if it came to life. The other was a local girl, for sure. Her accent and heavy use of local slang was oddly amusing. There was a third person on the crew who was the greeter at Costco in the above clip. I got the sense that he was in training, but it could simply be that he was not allowed to work unsupervised. He liked tossing packs of snacks at people from a few rows distance.
At Nashville, the crew at the Alamo rental counter was another collection of extras from that frighteningly prophetic movie. There was no line but a mass of people waiting, so I knew right away they were out of cars. The three clerks just stared out into space like they had been smoking weed prior to my arrival. Finally, one acknowledged my existence and waved me over to his station. He silently processed my order and then grunted about the wait and pointed to the mob.
Ninety minutes latter I was handed a rental agreement by another silent type who pointed to the door. He was a tall white guy so I think he was American, but I never saw him speak to anyone, including the weed smoking fellow clerks, so maybe he was a mute or possible an automaton from Europe. They have those now. I then headed through the garage to the rental car area where there was another mob of people waiting for their rental car to arrive.
The local attendant was a black guy and judging by his accent I deduced he was a local guy, rather than an automaton from the very southern Europe area. He realized that his company was screwing these people, so he tried to make up for it by being extra nice and apologetic, suggesting he had a soul and cared about his work. It turns out that the main delayed was they were out of car washers. That was the bottleneck in the system and he said it has been a problem for weeks.
Now, I could see the check in lane. I could see at least a half dozen Alamo workers there doing nothing as there were no cars to check in. Sunday morning is when lots of cars arrive, but Sunday afternoon is when the cars leave for the week. There were, of course, the crew of zombies at the rental counter. No where did I see anyone that would be in charge of anything. What I was experiencing was systemic break down due to a collapse of the smart fraction in the system.
On the return trip I got to the airport quite early. I had booked extra time in the trip back because of what I saw Friday. I was imagining the Alamo crew running TSA and me missing my flight because of a three hour line. Instead, the airport was weirdly quiet, even for a Sunday morning. Having extra time, I asked the Southwest person if I could change to an earlier flight. I had checked on my phone and saw a flight I could get on that arrived in Lagos much earlier than my current flight.
She silently took my ID and stared at the screen for an uncomfortably long time, which did not fill me with confidence. She then said the only thing she could do was put me on standby, so I said no and expected to get my ID back. Instead, she said to me that I was no longer on my original flight. After some back and forth, I learned that she had cancelled my original flight first and then tried to book me on the new flight, without bothering to tell me what she was doing.
What I realized was the woman was not malicious or disinterested, but that she was simply too stupid to perform her job. She was clearly panicked by what she had done as she now had an angry customer in front of her. Since I have a million points with Southwest and belong to their club, I called customer service while standing in front of the woman and explained the deal. They had me hand my phone to the woman who then followed instructions to fix my flight.
I was now booked on the earlier flight and pre-boarded. Because I only use Southwest for domestic travel, I always get the A-group and usually top-10. On this flight I had been checked in as A1, so I guess they thought bumping me up to pre-board was the required compensation for the screwup. I could not help but notice that they then announced that the flight was overbooked and one person would be asked to give up his seat in exchange for a $500 credit.
In Lagos, I learned that my bag had been sent on a separate journey. I expected this given what had happened at the other end. I went to the baggage claim office and was greeted by a local girl listening to very loud hip-hop music. She silently tapped on the screen for twenty minutes and out popped a single sheet of paper with about fifty words of original content. That is right. She needed twenty minutes of concentration to enter my information into the system.
Like everywhere in the system, the thing I noticed was not the low quality of human capital at the front end. That has not changed all that much. Most frontline jobs at an airport are filled with people who show up. The real issue was a near total lack of supervision all along the way. There was no one riding heard on these people to make sure they avoided error. The 21st century has begun and the evolutionary process has changed and is going in the opposite direction.
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50 years ago, being the manager of a car rental operation at BWI would’ve been a solid gig with the ability to support a large family in a nice neighborhood.
Now I suspect it’s a chump job filled by some guy always looking for other work, another management position, and the pay is certainly not keeping the wife happy.
22
Not that long ago you rented a car at the airport and saw a supervisor on duty. They kept an eye on the counter and made sure the customers were informed when there was a delay. When you got the car there would be another supervisor running herd on the attendants to make sure things ran smoothly. You do not see this anymore, so maybe they have just eliminated this whole layer of workers to save money.
Chuck Schuymer wants to open the migrant spigot to full blast on the claim we have a worker shortage, but the real labor problem is in areas that cannot be “fixed” with more migrants. The great baby boomer retirement is going to create a massive talent gap in the middle of the labor pyramid.
35
Seinfeld did a great bit on car reservations years ago.
https://youtu.be/ZTvtSKXwu0o
It’s funny cause it’s true.
2
Yep, soon enough it won’t just be that these are jobs Americans don’t wanna do [lol]; rather, there with be a surfeit of jobs the new American cannot do.
6
I laughed at the recent headline “Layoffs mount, and Main Street still can’t find any workers to hire for open jobs.” So, they are simultaneously laying off workers and experiencing a job shortage?
They are being forced to lay off white collar workers yet can’t find enough laborers to work at poverty-level wages.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/19/layoffs-mount-and-main-street-still-cant-get-anyone-to-take-jobs.html
6
It may not be chump change. There is a high likelihood no one will take the job at a substantial salary. Congress, of course, wants to import more foreigners to do the jobs the non-American workers that have flooded into the country won’t do. As 3g wrote below, the collapse is now. While people claim, perhaps correctly, there is lots of election theft, people are too stupid and idiotic to count and work the polls, too.
1
Absolutely. Here in the (once) great State of AZ, stories abound of the mistakes made at the polling centers by the controlling staff on duty—they simply do not know their job! And no, it does not “come out in the wash”.
Again, whether or not there was enough provable *fraud* in the balloting and count, their is no doubt that the system is corrupt.
1
My favorite part was one of the Maricopa election officials proclaiming the count a remarkable success. Admitting failure is not an option in any realm of American life. I didn’t vote, of course, but if I had it would have been foolish to think it would have been tabulated correctly.
1
I have noticed it too and as these IQ-ly challenged folks have probably been terrorized into not making any kind of independent decisions, I find it easier to simply TELL them what they have to do in order to get through my transactions with them. It’s actually painful to me to watch someone tentatively picking out change slowly at the register while I have already calculated my return change amount in my head (and yes that’s why I still use the cotton rectangles, stickin’ it to the man). I also notice the words please and thank you are missing and if I say loudly “–you’re welcome??” after have completed my purchase, I just get the blank uncomprehending stare. At this point I am starting to remove myself from as many public exchanges with these folks as possible. The politicians have gotten exactly what they wished for, there are no more competent auto mechanics, you can’t find a plumber or electrician or home repair expert to show up in less than a year. My fondest wish is to see a G20 attendees Learjet go down due to faulty maintenance by a recent vibrant arrival to this country.
PS, along another line, the things I am thankful for this year are: intermittent windshield wipers, frost free refrigerators (remember chipping ice out of the freezer compartment and folding towels to catch the drips), PIZZA, and online Christmas shopping.
13
Body shop owner I met said he’s unable to find anyone willing to do the apprenticeship to learn the trade. Guy makes big money, but said he would have made double if he could find the help. His youngest worker is 50. “No one wants to work anymore.”
5
it’s not that they can’t find labor, it’s the stifling government regs that prevent people who have made ONE mistake from ever ever being able to get hired again in their life…
1
“No one wants to work anymore.”
What he means is that cultural attitudes have changed and young people are no longer willing to go through the slow and arduous process of apprenticeship, with the close attention to detail that that involves. Today’s cultural outlook is the diametric opposite of the kind revealed in Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”
2
No one has ever wanted to work. He needs to pay well over $20/hr to compete with McDonalds across the street – and he needs to train guys.
I’ve offered $40/hr for untrained apprentice handymen and had no luck. Frankly, that’s barely enough to live in my metro area.
3
Here in Croatia, I am seeing a very concerning trend towards what I experienced in Egypt when the system broke down there. Trash is beginning to pile up in quantities that were unheard of before. I sense that there is a breakdown here, maybe just a nervous collapse because of years of unending crises. And the inflation is such that no one is working because their pay hasn’t risen to match the inflation so they are just, like you said, showing up. Lots of anger, frustration and exasperation in the air.
10
I imagine places where joggers are abundant are going to have more of these types of issues. But even in the relatively jogger free area where I live, the decline is becoming more evident. A new store I’d never heard of – CAL Ranch ( similar to Tractor Supply) recently opened. When I checked out, the overweight, nose ringed cashier was blabbing with a couple of co-workers. She looked at me, scanned the items, put them in a bag and got back to her conversation w/o saying a word to me. I don’t recall that ever happening before, especially at a new place where they usually go overboard trying to impress. It won’t happen there again, that’s for sure.
14
“the overweight, nose ringed cashier”
I like to be friendly with clerks if they reciprocate. A problem that I’ve had for the last ten years is that some of them are too repulsive for me to look at.
11
try not pulling out any form of payment until they make eye contact and speak to you..
1
One of the most shocking experiences for me was comparing airport experiences in different countries. My local airport luckily isn’t terrible aesthetically, but with only mediocre staff. The problem is you are always connected to another American airport that is a complete hellhole.
Then you fly to Amsterdam, where everything is immaculate looking and completely streamlined, with competent staff and clockwork efficiency. Italy was efficient, even if the staff could be rude.
Our airports I would put on par with the one I took out of Bangalore, India or Lima, Peru. If you flew into the U.S and just went by our airports, you would assume our GDP and Crime rates was around the level of Colombia..
I just talked to a guy who flew to Israel on a pilgrimage who made the same observations as to airport quality. It’s truly an American embarrassment, especially for people who think hospitality to visitors (the right kind) is important.
20
This. I had traveled a lot inside the US before ever having gone to see the world. I had this range of how I judged airports with O’Hare and LaGuardia at one end and small airports like Manchester at the other end. Then I went to Europe and discovered that my standards were way off. The more I travelled abroad, the closer all US airports got to the third world end of the scale. Even what we consider to be the third world is often better than the US.
That’s the thing. We assume we have high standards of living, but it is the opposite in reality. Remove the super rich from the equation and America is mediocre. Remove the whole managerial class and the American middle-class is now toward the bottom of Western nations.
29
You think O’Hare is fun? Try Midway.
If you can get to it. 🤦🏻♂️
Flew out of both when we lived in Silly-nois. O’Hare FTW.
1
Actually no, I put O’Hare on the crap end of the scale. LaGuardia has always been bad too. I recall when Midway was a nice alternative if you were going to Chicago, but it was a hassle to reach by car.
4
True, we used to get stuck on I-55 trying to get to Midway.
I flew into and out of Logan this year for business. Did you ever have to travel through there and if so, what were your thoughts?
Not only did I fly out of Logan a lot, I once had an office there for a short spell. Logan was my airport early in my life as I lived in Boston. After 9/11 I flew out of Logan and literally was made to go through a metal detector that clearly did not work, because the rules said everyone went through a metal detector.
Logan airport exists so connected state troopers can make enormous amount of overtime.
5
Logan is awful to get in and out of. As big airports go I think the port itself is good. TSA being terrible I think strongly correlates to volume. I use TF Green from now on. Easy to drive to and from or take the train. No long lines, no TSA hassle. It’s like Manchester with a closer location.
Strange thing: Portland International in Oregon appeared to have the highest awards from TSA in consecutive years. Don’t know what that means in reality/practical terms.
2
Yeah, TF Green is a great option. Whenever I go to visit friends I use it because they are south of Boston, so the trip is actually shorter than Logan. Manchester is a great norther option. It used to be cheaper for me to fly to Manchester, rent a car and drive to Canada, than to fly into Canada. It is a great drive so that is what I did.
5
@Z
State Troopers: Yes
MassPort: Big Yes
2
For the full experience fly into Midway and take the Orange line to Millenium Station and then the South Shore to South Bend.
2
Same with internet speeds abroad.
Same with cell phone costs abroad.
Same with restaurant service (esp in Europe…better service, keep the table all night, no tipping)
Americans who travel notice things.
(European hotels are tiny and the A/C sucks though)
5
PoZNoV: 35-40 years ago I found it ‘quirky’ that I had to specifically request ice water at all English and European restaurants. Now, unless we’re deep into White, rural AINO, we have to do the same here.
3
“Even what we consider to be the third world is often better than the US.”
Morocco — in North Africa — now has high-speed rail.
The key metric is investment in infrastructure — new infrastructure and, equally importantly, maintenance of old infrastructure. The USA is lagging in both. It also, incidentally, does not invest in human capital. For decades the US ruling class has been looting and plundering — but not investing anything back. This is the neoliberal model. That’s why the much ballyhooed “Build Back Better” rhetoric of eighteen months ago was such hollow baloney.
9
The Minnesota muslims at Minneapolis/ St. Paul certainly bring that friendly Mogadishu vibe to weary travelers.
11
“Inshallah”…coming to an airport near you.
4
Chet, the airports in Lima and Bogota’ are way nicer than almost any airport in the US now.
8
Likewise for Panama City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. These are not large airports like O’Hare or JFK. But they’re well-maintained. There is no miasma of fear and paranoia. And the quality of people — passengers, customs and immigration people, ground personnel — is superior.
1
The airline industry started in the US. So the Airports are older than most other Countries, adding I diversity now is making it worse
O’Hare is the most soul-crushing place on Earth.
LAX and JFK are giant parking decks.
The entire Third World flies to JFK and clogs the baggage claim. Returning from Paris or London, you are far better off flying to Detroit, since the airport is the one thing that still runs fairly well in that misbegotten city.
8
“or Lima, Peru.”
What’s wrong with the Lima Airport? I was there in 2014 — perfectly fine airport, albeit with perhaps only one runway.
The airports in much of the rest of the world are head and shoulders over anything the US now has — e.g., Istanbul’s new airport.
4
You’re right, it was incorrect of me to consider it equivalent to U.S. airports.
4
The best part about flying coach is the cultural enrichment.
Now some would say using an iPad/iPhone to listen to music and watch TikTok at full volume without headphones would be annoying to fellow tube-travelers, even rude, and possibly against clearly posted airline regulations.
Thanks to the miracle of infinite high quality recording devices linked to a world internet, airline crews are terrified to tell these noble cultural ambassadors to put on a headset or shut the damn thing off. Might cause an internet sensation requiring (additional) cultural sensitivity training and massive fines. Disrespectin’ might be implied….can’t have that for those trying to “represent”.
Fortunately, they will offer YOU a pair of foam earplugs.
Travel is awesome.
24
We thought that traveling entirely by automobile would save us the hassle of an airport,.
Wrong.
The Interstates are so packed with trucks the inevitable accident happened up ahead jamming the roads, that accident was finally was cleared up only to encounter a long stretch of closed lanes due to construction.
There is more money for the Ukraine than improving our transportation system, we are fully in the looting phase now.
27
I’ve taken to using less traveled Interstates, like the NY Southern Tier rather than the Thruway.
Heck, I’ve even returned to using two-lanes. You’d be amazed how little traffic is out there. Yes, it adds a bitvof time, but the entire driving experience is far less stressful.
21
Interesting post as this year was the first time I actually had to fly somewhere in over nine years. The Lovely 🥰 Mrs. is a white knuckle “Death Grip” flier so if we can’t drive there in a day’s time, we ain’t going. Ironically enough, I had to travel for business as my client wanted all staff on site. So in August and November I’ve flown from Flatlandia, USA to Boston, MA, and then rented a car to drive up further into New England to my client’s HQ. Here’s my experience:
1) Airlines have reduced everything to the lowest common denominator. And then nickel and dime you for everything.
Check a bag? $30
Want more legroom? $60
Want to board earlier? $90
Want preferred check in and skip TSA? $100+
I flew a regional jet back and forth and a DC-3 from the 1930-40s would put it to shame in terms of comfort and interior materials finish.
At least I got a full can of soda. The child size bag of pretzels was a joke.
2) TSA is, well what do you expect from the Government? As you point out with the lower volume of travelers you do get through the lines quicker, but conflicting directives exist. For example on this last trip since it was fall I wore my heavier wool fedora to keep my head warm. Get to Logan and place my jacket and hat in a bin. Get told “Oh no, take the hat with you, it could fall off the conveyor and get damaged.” Wear hat through X-Ray, get met by TSA agent who takes my hat and manually inspects it. Hey Buddy, I just went through the X-ray, what could I possibly be hiding? 🤦🏻♂️
3) Rental Car Firms: It’s a crap-shoot. Went Avis both times. In August got a literally off the car carrier KIA K5. 11 miles when I picked it up. Base car with the 1.6 Turbo 4. Needed some guts but ran well for what I needed.
This November? A beat up Toyota Camry with nearly 50K miles and a body that showed every foot it travelled. Oh, and some jackasses smoked in it because there was a cigarette scorch mark on the center console and the car smelled like a pack of wet cigarettes. At some point someone smacked the front bumper on something and the mechanics half-assed the fender liner back into shape. Chipped paint and missing emblems. Your stereotypical rental car.
I noted at Logan the back office staff (porters, check-in staff) are Third Worlders. Friendly folks, but obviously not from here.
The desk folks at Logan must be union since they take their own sweet time checking you in. A sense of urgency is completely missing.
It’s not all kvetching though. Some things I DO like:
– Automated check-ins for the Airline and Rental Car, and kiosks that allow you to check-in and go, and get your baggage claim ticket.
– Yes, they nickel and dime you, but if I wasn’t watching expenses, I’d be upgrading like a fiend and bumping myself into preferred customer check in and First Class, such as it is on a regional.
– I really didn’t have any weather related delay nightmares, and my bags showed up at the same airport I did, so that was a relief.
That said, these little forays between airfare, rental car, and hotel, even watching my budget, have cost my client over $5K this year, directly billed to them since they wanted us all in the same building together. With Joe Biden’s sparkling economy one wonders how many more trips I’ll be taking.
18
Small signs of ongoing devolution in these parts:
This weekend, a couple with a young child at my storage facility who piled their possessions in front of the only elevator door as if no one else would need to use the elevator that day.
Ironically, this particular elevator has been on the blink for weeks.
At the post office, I attempted to buy stamps to mail some letters at the self-serve. It was out of paper so only e-mail receipts were available. Then, the machine failed to print any stamps whatsoever.
12
The thing that gets me laughing ever time, is when that Pete guy Starts talking about what a great job he’s doing because he’s convinced 60% of the airlines to get you a free meal and a blanket if your flight is canceled. Nothing about the system being examined or changes being made to fix the actual problem. Hilarious
7
Zman: the drive from Nashville to Lagos in one of the nicest in America this time of year and it’s only 10 hours. You should have driven and caught up on back podcast episodes of Cotto-Gottfried haha….
I have a “6-hour rule”: If I can drive it in 6 hours, I’m not flying. If it’s a nice drive, it’s a “10-hour rule”.
16
I have thought about doing that, but the main issue is the return leg. Saturday is a very long day. This year I was up with the cows on Saturday and did not get to bed until around 2AM. Even if I was not Old School at the party house and got tp bed by midnight, I would still be very tired on Sunday.
3
I think what made a lot of viewers uncomfortable with the “semi-banned” film, “Idiocracy” was that while it was ostensibly set five hundred years in the future, it was too uncomfortably close to current reality to laugh at.
There has been at least one sci-fi story relating to declining human quality — Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” comes to mind, which I recall reading as a teenager in the mid-’70s. There may be others. That you don’t want low IQ people reproducing is what was behind the eugenics movement of the initial decades of the 20th century. Or at least you want to get the mix of low IQ and high IQ people right, as in Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
With regard to the airline and car rental businesses, in my exceedingly humble opinion, both are in a state of slow-motion collapse. The Covid hoax gave a fillip to this collapse. The airlines have fewer planes in the air and have mothballed the rest. The car rental companies possibly can’t maintain their fleets (spare parts), can’t upgrade their fleets (lack of new cars on the market) and, come to think of it, probably have fewer customers (as there are fewer air travelers). But why confine oneself to these two sectors? The rest of the economy is in similarly bad shape — i.e., a dead man walking. At least at a subconscious level most Americans know this.
The future is going to be simpler, less complex, with less tech, and there are gong to be fewer of us.
23
I just read “Marching Morons” in the last week due to a recent reference by Z Man. The story, written by C.M. Kornbluth in 1951, is an angry story about the consequences of dysgenics. It feels less like a work of fiction and more like a platform for the author to make his point. Finally, I can’t help but note that the author drops many signals of his membership in the tribe.
“You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied.”
“… while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
3
You are absolutely right about Kornbluth’s Tribal membership. No matter, it’s a masterful story and relatively short. I recommend a read even if SF is not normally your thing.
I’d agree that in general, most fiction incorporates at least some version of an author’s prejudices. Fiction is often allowed to utter truths (“gets away with” might be more accurate) unpopular (in a “free” society) or downright prohibited in ages of authoritarian censorship
For those interested, follow LineinTheSand’s link and search for “Wait a minute”. This is immediately past the earlier quotes. In Kornbluth’s future the intelligent feel some compassion for the morons and struggle to keep the world running even though they “are their slaves.” Compare and contrast with Rand’s heroes in Atlas Shrugged, who were quite content to retire and let everything grind to a halt.
Yes, Kornbluth’s story is an indictment against eugenics and Nazi atrocities. But he also foretells in no uncertain terms the dystopian world where morons rule.
3
Arshad Ali: Read “Harrison Bergeron.” Says a lot in only a few pages.
4
Okay, I’ll give it a go.
1
3g4me, exactly. HB is more closely on spot wrt our present situation. A mixture of high performance and low performance individuals is what we had three generations ago, prior to the Civil Rights act. Ignoring for now the influx of low IQ “immigrants”—we heretofore had groupings/pairings of like with like. If you were gifted enough to educate yourself at the college level, you were likely to meet and married another of your level.
That there are innate differences between people, i.e., inequality, is anathema to the Left so now we have the “great dumbing down of the institutions”—public and private—in order to produce “equality”. A speeded up “Idiocracy” if you will.
This is the essential theme of HB.
4
Before travelling this Thanksgiving, make sure to stop off at Saint God’s Hospital for your sixth Covid booster. Bring a friend and you’ll get fifty FTX credits for the referral. Also, make sure to report anyone not wearing a mask as an “unscannable” and you’ll get a coupon for a full release latte at Starbucks.
And remember: Brawndo’s got what plants crave, and many things are a threat to our democracy.
Actually things are much worse already than in that movie. At least President Camacho could read what was on the teleprompter, and because he was all roided up I doubt he’d have trouble climbing the steps of Airforce One.
19
Nice. I arrived at the in-laws a couple of days ago. I don’t think the G-20 learjet is going down. When I see a tv screen, do an internet search, see a billboard or a magazine, my stomach now automatically goes into revulsion and my gut into a rage. They are the revulsion and rage of seeing The Great Replacement.
My in-laws are people for whom money is status and status is money, even if they live in a way that they can’t afford. I entered a high-rise beachfront apartment and saw a, “Palm Beach”, magazine on the coffee table. It is a magazine made for the Cloud people – globalists who live the opulent life designed to cover for the fact that they are really a bunch of money munging rabble. I despise these, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, magazines, and the vulgar culture they depict.
However, from front cover to back cover I rather enjoyed the magazine this time. That has never happened. As I got a quarter of the way through, my well trained instinct to revulsion and rage had subsided to a very tolerable level. You see, for them, life has gone on as normal. It is still 2019 in their world. They are as blond and beautiful as ever. Even the many charity self promotion ads are full of people like them. There is nary a trace of vibrance. I, for a brief moment, stepped into their time machine.
So, our cabins and terminals and service counters are going to be very very vibrant, as will our political institutions. Our mechanics and safety checkers will be very vibrant. But, they will never fly those flights or stand in the, TSA jobs with cushy bennies and retirements for the unemployable stop and frisk lines. No sir. That is our white privilege. No stop and frisk on the streets, but lots of pointless stop and frisk and luggage rifle throughs for us. They are and will carry on like it is 2019; at least until the Visigoths have had enough. That is why they dilute them into tribes that cannot be united. Tick Tock ticks the clock.
26
> They are and will carry on like it is 2019; at least until the Visigoths have had enough.
Friendly reminder that the Visigoths were high-IQ peoples who set up functional successor states to the collapsed Roman Empire in the areas they eventually settled. Have a nice day.
5
That was the exact point of my comment. I believe it is the point of ZMan’s picture heading too.
2
Some time post-2015, Trudeau seems to have fired all the white staff working airport security. They are every flavour of foreigner, and most don’t speak English or French as their first language. There is usually one token lesbian white woman. The airport ground staff appear to be entirely Somali in many airports.
I’ve been questioning the fitness and safety of the whole system based on this alone. Most people don’t seem to be bothered though, they aren’t supposed to notice these things.
15
Yup. I have a buddy who flat out refuses to fly now. He had the same problem with blown flight schedules and lost luggage that Z did…and apparently it’s been going on for a long, long time.
I was shocked to hear Westjet has gone to the dogs.
6
Ha. I was in an Canadian airport coming back from abroad and it was completely nuts. Come to think of it I ended up in two Canadian airports that trip due to some snafu. Quebec and Toronto. The Toronto one had no English speakers working, while the Quebecois all spoke both bad French and good English.
10
Pattern recognition is a bi&%h ain’t it, read the book version of The Running Man by Richard Bachman aka Stephen King, there’s a section where the protagonist sees people slowly and subtly drifting into attack positions and goes on high alert looking for an escape route, that’s me every day walking to my car–eyes on a swivel all the way. The master door lock gets hit as soon as my butts in the seat, and I have a apple corer (it has a razor sharp tip plus serrated edges and a wooden handle so you can both stab and slash) in the cupholder, just waitin’ for a window knocker to try something.
11
Recently at Heathrow. Every security guard and customs agent is Pakistani. Had an off airport car rental. The airport shuttle came only once per hour, and it looked like ours had departed minutes before we got there. A shuttle stopped and we asked the driver to clarify if the shuttle/bus for our destination came once per hour. She was dressed like we were in Rajasthan as were most of the passengers. We needed a passenger to translate.
We took an Uber to the rental car joint. Drove up and it was a Holiday Inn. It was about 1:15 on a weekday. Sub-Saharans were sitting on the park bench idling. Rental car place was across from the Holiday Inn entrance. Two pakistani security guards were in front of the entrance. Brown men would come and go – all wearing gym workout clothes. After an hour wait, my lady went to the Holiday Inn to find a restroom. The guards harshly told her she could not enter. More sub-saharans exited the Holiday Inn. The sat on a bench just outside and smoked from a giant bong. The pakistani staff at the rental car finally got us out of there.
Traveled around the Yorkshire countryside. I saw maybe three white men in any form of advertisement. In museums of incredible art and history, the staff are run by degenerates and spiteful mutants. At the periphery of the exhibits, (in Cambridge no less), they are introducing alternate, fake Afro-centric history, and celebratory sodomite/gender-as-construct, “art.” Once the old guard running the show dies off, what will they do with the unfathomable rich cultural heritage of Britain?
Returned the rental car at pre-dawn. From the return we walked past the Holiday Inn. The kitchens were completely visible through glass siding. There was no equipment, loose wires hanging everywhere. Long glimpses of the lobby revealed former shops and conference rooms boarded up.
It was not a hotel. It was a subsidized white replacement transfer center. Leaving, at the airport security, the packing of liquids and solids from the US airport I departed from, were not valid at Heathrow. An unending stream of sub continentals and sub-saharans rifled through my luggage to confiscate my toothpaste. If things ever went down here or in a major European city, and you had to catch a flight to leave, think about who controls and mans the “security.”
Is this intentional? Is FTX intentional? Or, are they the result of idiots who want the spoils without the responsibility? Are they the result of blood libels with evil intent? I’ve met with London based financiers through friends of friends and they are convinced immigration is the solution to what ails the West. They think their job is to manage us to never have another depression. Of course, what that is, is what we call managed decline. You just keep an unending stream of new consumers and tax payers and you can keep the ponzi scheme going forever. They can only think quantitatively. Labor and consumers are variables in equations. All people are equivalent. If x is the number of people and x makes the model fail, plug in more people to make x the right number and continue. They can’t or refuse to think qualitatively.
For all of the endless books and TED talks cheering how critical failure is to learning and to success, they refuse to permit the system they have created to fail. Yet, the system is dying to fail. And so, they heap failure after failure after failure onto each successive failure. In 1971, that failure was financial and geo-political. Then Kissinger and some behind the scenes smarmy rabble came fully into power, and in every aspect of governance and leadership they have lead the the peoples and the nations, to whom they do not identify or hold any loyalty to, to a ruin of epic proportions.
May the greater ponzi scheme blow up soon so the most nefarious part of the project, The Great Replacement, is halted in its tracks.
16
PeriheliusLux: A glorious civilization and nation brought to its knees. My heart breaks for the heritage English.
6
Excellent, no TDLR, read the whole thing.
1
The humiliation ritual is internationale food court now. It used to be just the curdling aroma of Panda Express violating Cinnabons behind the Sbarro’s but now the pungent vapors of all the dark continents linger well past security. No need to go to India for that yoga retreat or Africa for that safari. Just book a flight from LA to JFK with a long layover in DIA or HOU. If you want truly authentic – and to make some friends in coach, grab the Combo #3 and eat it in flight.
This scenario of incompetents repeats itself nearly everywhere. Gas stations, supermarkets, big box stores, et all. These job functions used to be basic skill-sets that most 16 year-olds could master, yet now all we see are low IQ people in their 30s unable to perform elementary operations of business.
How we haven’t started seeing Cholera breakouts and more lead exposure in water supplies is a small miracle.
The link below is from the Tracey Ullman Show where she portrays a teenager starting her first job at a taco restaurant. It used to be a funny skit on a dysfunctional workforce, but now it is another past glimpse into the present we find ourselves.
“Francescas First Job – Tracey Ullman Show”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5YhAH2V16g&t=239s
10
Wasn’t it The Tracey Ullman Show that premiered “The Simpsons”?
3
Why yes it was. They were short “bumpers” between the main skits before The Simpsons the series started for 1990.
2
Space travel will go the same way. In the 60’s, the Apollo astronauts had to be the best of the breed – academic excellence, top physical condition, acute situational awareness. All the astronauts had to be pilots, all had to be electrical and systems engineers, all had to be chronic overachievers.
The mission parameters for Artemis are going to be much different. The vast majority of the effort will be run from Mission Control on earth. On board computers capable of incredible scan cycles, complex algorithms and advanced data acquisition will reduce the crew to little more than passengers. You can bet that the first Artemis crew will be people with names like Shaquilla, Rebecca Nosenberg, Goopinder, and Wang.
Can technology support and counter an idiocracy? I have my doubts. I see a Darwinian cull happening first.
20
I know for a fact there was a basement full of colored waymins doing all the hard maffs to make it happen!
23
I have a co-worker that believes that movie to be fact. He is actually an intelligent guy in his field. I told him actually it was the imported Nazis from Germany that got us there.
10
That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me wj. Why would Hollywood lie to me, I bet you have another intricate conspiracy theory to explain that too. SAD
3
Strange. I had heard from a trusted source close to the matter that Popeyes delivery drivers had to sign pretty airtight NDA’s.
I was wondering what the big deal was with Artemis essentially doing what the US did nearly sixty years ago. You have stated it perfectly. Alas, I fear the same diversity you speak of is behind the entire program with all the potential unhappiness that entails.
6
Hmmmm…. now that I’ve turned my powerful intellect on the problem… no, we will never see an idiocracy. We will destroy ourselves first – or at least, cull the legions of unsustainable stupid people.
Consider: for a time, we were seriously considering a nuclear exchange with Russia – over what basically amounts to an illegal money laundering scam run by a pedophile president and his crack headed son – and his closest fart catchers and sycophants. Kerry, Pelosi, Romney et al. They are all geriatrics suffering from varying degrees of dementia and/or moronacy.
We may get lucky and survive the Kraine disaster. But – institutionalized faggotry? Endemic perversion? Mass mental retardation?
No empire can survive that for long. God, Darwin and Murphy will not be mocked nor denied.
5
1
I don’t like to travel anywhere I can’t go in a pickup truck with a .357 under the seat. That means I don’t fly very much.
I’m not afraid of flying, I like aircraft. I’m afraid of being completely at the mercy of the airline system and being herded around like an animal by very stupid, apathetic, and usually nonwhite cowboys. The push toward more “diversity” in the cockpit isn’t exactly a selling point for me either.
I’ve only flown commercially a handful of times, and while I’ve never had any bad experiences — never lost luggage, never missed a connection, never slept on an airport floor — the “good” experiences were distasteful enough.
There’s nowhere I really need to go or want to go by commercial aircraft. I would much rather buy my own Cessna and do my own damn flying with my own hands on the yoke… some day I might just have to do that.
19
Xman: This. Husband and I both flew a lot, domestic and international, for many years. His first flight was at age 6 months; mine at age 5. Neither of us fear flying and used to enjoy the convenience and little luxuries of travel.
Now, we share all of your concerns. The diversity in the airports and on the plane – and moving into the cockpit. Concern about maintenance. Placing oneself at the mercy of a system one no longer trusts. Covidiocy. Driving now sucks too, of course, and then there are those pesky rules about crossing state lines with firearms.
13
… another thing – I hate mingling with all those ugly, dressed like ragbags, slobs out there; the airport, restaurants, concerts, the mall. What is the matter with people that makes them choose to look like beggars rather than civilized human beings taking pride in their place at the top of the evolutionary ladder …
19
Uglification. Clothes, tattoos, speech, thought, art. music etc.
It interlock at all levels.
12
Yep. I still remember when folks actually dressed up for an airline flight. I’m that old…. 😉
8
I’m old enough to remember when you could simply walk into any airport and walk right up to the gate to greet arriving relatives or say goodbye to departing ones — or just to look at the cool airplanes twenty feet away outside the window — without running a gauntlet of tattooed, surly, armed government thugs herding you through naked body scanners and searching your luggage and demanding you remove you shoes and belt as if you were in prison, and even then ONLY if you have a “boarding pass” and three forms of ID and everything monitored from every angle by video cam.
Any airport bigger than an uncontrolled rural country facility with Piper Cubs landing on the grass is basically a prison. Fuck all of that.
19
Thank W Bush for that. Thank the Israelis for supplying all of the equipment that you pay for and the training in anti-terrorism to the TSA as well.
I suspect that someday, if the evidence emerges, we’ll have them to thank for the mass immigration undertaken while they were building their middle eastern ethno state.
1
Funny how everything always distills down to freedom of association, or lack thereof. Restore that right and suddenly we can put together an airline by and for white people. Or a car rental agency, retail shop, hospital…
4
Never be allowed to happen. White people are the cause of all of the plight of black people, yet when we voluntarily want to get away from them, it makes us monsters. They all realize that without white people to build and run things, they can’t survive. This is why I openly hate them. They are parasites that prey upon every society they are a part of.
2
Indeed, being at the mercy of a system you no longer trust is awful. I get out of the rental car parking garage on to the road and breathe easier.
Another poster mentioned the horribly attired. One thing I noticed was all the american blacks dressed like they were ready to play Emergency Basketball (EB). Basketball shorts, basketball shoes, t-shirt. You know, just in case, while standing in the TSA line, someone tossed a basketball into the throng, these guys are willing and able to play some round ball to save the day.
African blacks were usually business casual, though their women were all freaked up with african hair styles & attire.
1
“One thing I noticed was all the american blacks dressed like they were ready to play Emergency Basketball (EB).”
Saw some black kids doing that very thing in the middle of Walmart a few days ago… they grabbed a basketball off the shelf and were dribbling it and chasing each other through the aisles while their mother ignored them.
Of course the white employees literally looked the other way…
Agree. I’d rather belly land in a pumpkin patch with a blindfolded White man at the stick than have to walk from one terminal to another in most major US airports.
Getting on a plane these days is like parachuting behind Normandy but without your boys bobbing in the bay with full bandoliers. Situational awareness and make yer peace.
I only arrive early at the gate as to assess which of the pox, mutants, and invaders I will have to vent with my sandwhich toothpick first should things get strange.
But to Z’s point, the last few years just mean that the “cabin crew” make my top ten as often as not. That tube takes a dive or a ‘water landing’ and NFW that lispy twink and his poxy porcine boozecart shufflers are going to be accretive to my survival.
The problem is driving is not much better. The tennis bag riding shotgun is nice but all roads are the road to Baghdad these days. Even here in the sticks every third car is chitty-chitty-meth-bang waiting to present me with a paradox.
Zman, this all fits with my comment last week about AINO’s ‘future collapse’ . . . happening NOW. This is constantly kept front and center for me in daily life in diverse DFW and reinforced by my online skimming. My husband has always verbally agreed, but personally experienced it this weekend in a way he’s hitherto avoided. Since things still pretty much work as usual in his job/field, and people follow the rules, regulations, and workarounds, he just subconsciously assumes the same situation applies in other white collar businesses.
Quite a rude awakening. And he’s now fully accepted that none of the usual ‘rules’ apply at financial institutions, and that USAA is as woke as AINO’s military and definitely not worth the extra $ we’ve paid for their services for decades. It’s one thing to tell someone of your own daily dips into idiocracy, but sometimes it takes that one personal engagement to truly bring current ‘reality’ into clear focus. Nothing works as it should, or used to, and those who remember when it did are derided as out-of-touch ‘geezers.’
Of course, we both stopped flying long ago. His employer just accepts that’s my husband’s personal ‘quirk’ while still requiring him to attend a couple of trade shows a year. Even driving himself, my husband loathes dealing with the diverse and incompetent staff at hotels and conference venues. He’s particularly dismissive of all the still oblivious White people he has to work with, who assume they still live in a relatively safe, rule-of-law first world country – and then get burned by reality and still refuse to acknowledge and adapt to it. It’s now an iron rule that someone will be robbed big time at the venue due to this failure to adapt.
Everything is steadily breaking down . . . and in real time it seems slowly – but in retrospect it’s like the drip building a stalactite in fast-forward mode.
17
Did someone say “convention”? Here’s a darkly humorous social commentary by 70s punk rockers The Dead Kennedys: “The Prey.” Not a punk song at all, musically it’s more in the style of jazz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceObPBJsO5M
1
1
I was astonished to see how much Dallas had changed since I was last there in the early 2000’s. I was at a convention at the DFW Sheraton back in March and a fella from Arkansas whom I hung out with had his truck stolen right out of the hotel parking lot. Must have been pros to be that quick and brazen. They even had one of those retarded security robots roaming around the lot. Of course it was fired the next day, haha.
1
Been thinking about knee replacement? Cataracts removed? Cruise around Tahiti?
Do it now!
Do it now before before they put a hip in your knee, operate on the wrong eye, or your ship springs a leak. Things are only going to get worse.
23
WCiv911: Yup. This is why we had our 22 year old recently get laser eye surgery (he’s healing nicely, thank you). Same thing with a friend’s extensive dental work. Do it now before the last of the White professionals vanish, or their services are reserved solely for the diverse and woke and vaxxed.
15
Agreed. I’ve moved to a new city and am now looking for an old white mechanic to replace the old white mechanic I had in my old city. Pretty soon they’ll all be dead.
10
It’s a shame that we—at least me—hopes to die before falling prey to such fears.
5
You mentioned this in a thread previously. What I don’t understand is why would you send your 22-year-old who is just beginning life and who would benefit from accumulating cash at this point to get a cosmetic medical procedure which is not covered by insurance /and has the expected attendant surgical complication risks when eyeglasses are perfectly fine .
3
Yo – eyesight surgery is not cosmetic. Glasses break; prescriptions change. They no longer make the lenses on site in the big box ‘vision’ stores like they used to. Precision lens grinding is not exempt from diversity and idiocracy.
And while he has quite a tidy sum saved up from working (he has few needs or wants, unlike his older brother) we paid for it; we aren’t ‘spending our kids’ inheritance;’ we are using whatever we can to benefit them NOW.
9
An older gentleman I deal with is going through some intense medical treatments. Although rough, it’s hard for me to feel any sympathy for him since when I get to be his age the hospitals will just give me a piece of charcoal to burn in my car for my “treatment”. We won’t even get to watch TV while we die like they did in Soylent Green.
8
1
Something is definitely going on in the STEM labor market because for the past few weeks I’ve been getting 1 or 2 unsolicited recruitment contacts a day from my LinkedIn profile.
4
Yep, I’m beginning to believe we are experiencing proof of the “Critical Fraction” theory—or alternatively the ”Peter Principle”. We simply are running out of folk with the ability (IQ) required to handle even the most mundane jobs in a 1st world, technological society.
CF proof may be a bit premature as it’s confounded quite a bit by or poor education system and “Prajeev” imports, but PP seems to be apparent and is expressed at all levels, particularly the day to day interactions we all must encounter to live.
5
The Indians and Chinese are staying at home. There’s absolutely no value for them to come to the United States. Nor does the US lose any value by them staying in their home countries.
The nonsense over the years that has been spewed that they come to the land of the free, and the home of the brave has been exposed as meaningless.
Everyone knew that they came to get rich. Now that they can’t get rich here they stay in their homeland and not have to change their habits and customs.
Oh they are still coming but it’s at least in these 2 ethnic groups, clearly trickling down.
Especially in the medical field. They live like kings And queens in their home countries.
You can see this coming from a mile away
From my experience with Indians, their options are come to the US and work your ass off in some big technological hub and live in an apartment for 10 years maybe afford a house or with the same salary stay at home and have five servants and a big mansion.
Unlike the past the foreigners now have the iPads, the iPhones, the big screen TVs, the fancy cars and can live among their own people as their elite.
They don’t need to come to United States to get any of that bling
4
3
Yo: Perhaps in your mind or your locale, but they’re still pouring into DFW daily. Husband was the only White in the bank the other day. I’m routinely outnumbered at least 5 to one in the grocery store. They aren’t coming for Chinese-made ‘bling;’ they are coming for Whitey – and his women and his civilization, which they now claim they built. They are taking your children’s spots in higher ed, in jobs. They are running in elections to ‘represent’ you. They are determined to have it all.
20
We’re getting the trash from around the planet, people who couldn’t cut it back in the home country. Literally Mexicans who couldn’t figure out the high-demanding lifestyle of being Mexican. Along those lines there’s that Taliban dude on alt-social media who was taking some grief about his fellow “countrymen” living in the U.K. and he was like “you don’t get it, they’re there because if they were back in Pakistan these people would be put to the sword”.
1
There was that college comedian, no idea his name, who got in trouble for his joke on campus about five years ago. The joke boiled down to: “All these women are taking gender studies and telling other women they need to become engineers. While don’t they stop lecturing and just do it themselves?”
8
@Wild Geese
Yep, same here. I’m an iOS developer and I get inundated with recruiter messages daily. What’s funny is it probably pains them because I am everything they hate. Straight white males who won’t fill their desired quotas. The truth is, they can’t find any black engineers. I’ve been at my current wokeness center, er, I mean company for 3.5 years and we have interviewed exactly one black candidate. Ironically, he was decent and he decided to take another opportunity.
4
The smarter the technology gets, ie. Shiny gadgets doing the thinking for us, the dumber we get. Previous technological leaps spared us physical toil, which was not causing much intellectual devolution.
I will see Z-man’s tale and I will raise even more idiocy with my experience with iirc Northwest Airlines.
This was in the 90s when I loooooved to travel, checking in was so easy, changing flights ditto, I could carry on the giant turkey and champagne my employer gave all staff for Thanksgiving, flights always on time even when there was weather.
So here I am having wrapped up a job interview in Chicagoland with a side of Giordano’s pizza, some partying in Greektown, and front row seats at the Blackhawks game at the new barn, about to fly out of Rockford to my connecting flight in Detroit. I have three hours to kill after I surrendered my rental.
I go to the airline counter, pretty please is there an earlier flight to Motown? Much rather kill 3 hours at a big airport girl-watching and hitting the bars, than in deadsville Rockford.
The lady says absolutely, next plane leaving in 10 minutes.
I get on the plane. Some huddling of flight stewardesses up front. Announcement: the plane is overbooked, would any passenger give up his seat to get a $250 voucher for a future NWA flight? Not wanting to appear too eager, I look around, no hands raised after 3 seconds, so I raise mine.
Back to the counter. Same woman. ‘Oh welcome back!’ I tell her I was the one who overbooked the flight as my original flight is in 3 hours. Her reply? ‘Well, we’d have to give the voucher to somebody else anyway.’ After a head shake, and a furrow of my brow, I was about to say something but decided against it. For the boomers and xers among us, picture Larry from Three’s Company when Chrissy says something dumb.
My trip to the Big Apple the following Christmas on that voucher was a blast.
14
I’ve always hated plane travel. One of the first times I ever got on a plane was in the 90s. I got seated next to some 400 pound man whose body mass was spilling all over me. He coughed non-stop from Dallas to Philadelphia. I was down for a week and a half. Couldn’t even get out of bed. I was in my 20s then.
7
Despite regarding work much as a garden slug might view an approaching salt shaker, Layabout has some familiarity with the working world. In most cases the firm posts its most attractive and at least passably competent hires as receptionists, counter staff and suchlike as they are what the public mostly sees. The less appealing are in the back office, the warehouse etc. So to summarize today’s pessimism, if my observation be generally true, it means that as bad as Z’s experiences in airports may have been, just imagine the cretins that lurk unseen: the convicted felons that handle the luggage, the Dalit punching buttons in the IT department (he doesn’t speak very good English but at least he had some IT experience, unlike the other applicants) or the dregs of affirmative action hiring in nameless office roles.
“You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone…”
— Don Henley
20
From the Taki post: “The thing that pushes the story into the land of make-believe is that some of the world’s smartest investors were suckered into the scheme.”
“World’s Smartest Investors™”
In keeping with the theme of the day, “Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s one of the ‘World’s Smartest Investors™’ now.”
16
I travel 2-3 times a month and can relate to this except it’s American instead of Southwest and Hertz instead of Alamo. At this point, despite me being at the upper tiers of their rewards program, it no longer provides me with any advantages. I get to stand in a special line but I don’t get special attention that theoretically happens for being at their platinum or five star loyalty programs. The only reason why I haven’t moved on is because the competition isn’t better. So I might as well keep accumulating meaningless points and get the occasional free first class upgrade.
12
I think there are actually only two rental car companies at most airports. Like cereal, we have the allusion of choice. Alamo and National are the same company. I think they own Budget too. I think Hertz and Avis are owned by the same company. I used to stick with National for the points and upgrades but then they started putting me in Alamo cars when they ran out of cars. The upgrades were never available anyway so I dropped it.
Southwest is a major hub here and they put me in business class so it is worth the small additional cost. I have Hyatt and Marriot deals too and they are not worth much, but the cost is trivial. I think it was Hyatt that gave me a free dinner coupon for my trip, but the place I was at did not have a restaurant. Thanks guys.
15
Alamo, National, and Enterprise are owned by the same company. Not sure about Budget.
2
There are only three rental car companies in the west (I’m not sure about Asia).
Avis,
Hertz, and
Fox (which is owned by EuropeCar)
Every brand you have heard of is owned by one of those three or is only in a few markets (Advantage).
The collapse is coming, however. New five year asset backed debt for these issuers has gone from less than 2% this time last year to 3.8% last spring to over 6% today. What can not continue will not continue.
7
Nonsense. All of my asset-backed paper, regardless of coupon, is rated AAA. I plan to retire next fall, and nothing is going to get in my way.
One of the visible contractions of commerce el collapso is that so much of the ‘diverse’ economy defined by perpetual growth is that its like a one man play in real time.
There’s a huge production of money and little hats behind the scenes but it can be acted out under a dim bulb by a guy making day scale. Yet the actor is the only real part. The rest is in the cloud. And is none of your business. Its also encrypto’d so don’t even try.
We reached that future where all corporations are just a man, a dog, and a computer. Except even that joke assumed the man would be a 120 IQ White guy with a family to feed and the dog would be a working breed.
Now we have a million brands of the same flavor of grossly obese angry black woman breeding pitbulls in her basement for chronic snaps who just slides back and forth from the Hertz counter to the Enterprise counter on a $5000 ADA-mandated ergonomic chair for her diabetic gravyleg syndrome. They don’t even make her change hats anymore.
Read the fine print on your contract. It clearly states that if you have a problem with any of this to “TALK TO THE HAND”.
I have the Hilton Honors program and at the platinum level, I get a Nestle Pure Life water and a couple of Lorna Doone cookies. I get to park a little closer too but the spaces are usually full so it doesn’t matter.
You are right that Hertz and Avis are owned by the same company. The last time I got a car, there was just one guy manning the Hertz desk and despite being in the Hertz Gold line, the guy treated it like first come first serve so I waited a good 15 minutes. I did provide some feedback to Hertz and got a “we’re sorry you feel this way” stock response.
5
Just tried to renew my passport, and found out the renew online options is still more or less in the experimental phase.
It says:
“We are temporarily opening our online renewal service to new customers beginning on Sunday, November 20 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Thank you for volunteering and testing our system during this limited release.”
In the Year of Our Lord 2022 the most rich and powerful government in the world hasn’t streamlined renewing a Passport online yet, it still being in essentially beta. I think of Twitter releasing 2/3rds of its employees and things actually improving, including shutting down a child groomer network that ran with impunity for years.
For the gov, increase that to 9/10ths and remove layers of management in the resulting surviving people to actually get tasks done and we might, just might, be able to renew our f^&*ing passport online.
12
logically that would mean it was being run out of twitter itself.
2
Chet. It is no longer BC and AD. No. Christ is no longer the marker. It is BCE and CE (Before Current Era and Current Era). It is a nowhereville, bereft of cultural markers.
I suppose that presents an opportunity for us as much as them. They clearly want to impose a new marker. However, this is the moment where maybe that sad sack from Judea is replaced with something more closely related to our history and pre-history.
In the meantime, like the holidays, I will always say and write BC/AD as I always say and write Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Easter. I am researching European pagan alternatives to add some spice to it.
6
Christmas is celebrated around the same time as Saturnalia, with a feast and gift-giving, if not sacrifice 😆 Easter has its fertility motifs on top of the Resurrection, not to mention how it’s dated according to astronomy (astrology?).
Point being, the West is the merging of the Christian and the pagan, both of which pre-date it. We already have our own tradition, staring us all in the face.
4
Time to watch the annual playing of WKRP “Turkeys Away” episode on YT. “as God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly”..Happy Thanksgiving all, and don’t forget the use one, buy one mantra, get the Easter turkey now..
4
So you have the smart people working at home because their work is so important it can be done at home. Let’s call it the crypto economy.
Then you have the real economy, which is falling apart because of the dumbing-down and smart people doing the crypto economy thing.
The crypto part, I’d wager, is that nobody can explain what real value there is to. I’d expect the crypto economy to be exposed as another scam, like the crypto markets are.
Society is splitting between neglect and scammery. Neither is very smart imo. Kind of goes back to what I said about reason having become retarded. Cunning isn’t necessarily indicative of intelligence.
13
Agreed. The physical basis of our civilisation is key — water supply, sewage, growing food, transport, housing, and so on. We need plumbers, electricians, technicians, and engineers. We can’t all be writing Python and C++ code, or trading in financial derivatives and crypto.
11
Friends in the Orwellian named “hospitality industry” encourage me to complete all international travel in the next few years. What you experienced with car rentals and flight staff will spread soon enough to cockpits and air traffic control. It is hard to stay attentive while you are tending to chartreuse talons and prayer beads, apparently. Domestic travel has arrived at its predictable destination now. I have expanded my default car travel time from eight to twelve hours. Living in a hostile society, it is sort of comforting to know low skillsets mark most of its potential foot soldiers.
13
As an addendum: the decline has been ongoing for nearly 40 years. As a young guy, I traveled and worked to and in East Asia and Oceania. The two primary carriers to that region then were Northwest and United. Northwest, at least, would use its shoddiest equipment within the lower 48, and upgrade to newer, shinier things to travel between San Francisco or LAX to Singapore, for example. The quality of the crew went up markedly on the leg between the West Coast and Asia as well. LAX was an utter disgrace and even the airport in Port Moresby was superior.
4
“…one of the flight crew sounded like a satirical version of how a waifu would sound if it came to life. The other was a local girl, for sure. Her accent and heavy use of local slang was oddly amusing.”
Brings back memories. Waaay long ago in the good old days of regulated air fares, I joined the German-American club in order to cheaply fly a chartered Lufthansa flight to Frankfort from NYC. The passengers were Americans from all over the country—and of course, many were German and spoke the language. So the stewardesses, yes female—stewards were for ships, spoke German and pretty soon one heard little English.
The woman next to me was from Nashville and we proceeded to strike up a conversation. Problem being her Southern accent was so heavy, I barely understood her. The communication problem was solved when the stewardess stopped by to ask us if we wanted refreshments in German and we both answered in German. From then on we conversed in that language.
Now I’m not fluent in German, but it sure as heck beat Southern “English”. So here we were two Americans seated next to each other ‘united by a foreign language’. Reminds me of the Churchill quote. 😉
12
9
I live in Appalachia — near the Ohio/WV border and even I sometimes have trouble with the accents. I’ve been at the livestock auction, the lumber yard or the tractor repair shop and literally needed a translator. I remember one time this guy was talking to the clerk at the latter place and I couldn’t understand a single word he said, but the clerk seemed to understand him fine. Not everyone’s like that: it’s mostly the old folks or the ones who live waaaay in the backwoods and don’t venture out for much.
Another time I was at an airport bar with a very attractive young lady from Tennessee (but, OMG, she had “trouble” on her forehead in neon lights — confirmed as she related her romantic history to me.) and we were discussing the merits of various bourbons. She told me, “You got to try you some Mike-ers.” What? Mike-ers? It took me about 30 seconds to parse out …. Oh, “Makers.” Makers Mark! Gotcha.
8
1
Ah, Maker’s Mark. I believe they came out–so to speak–in favor of heauxmeaux “marriage” a few years ago.
5
No doubt. They’re owned by Suntory, a big global corporation, and all big corporations are globohomo.
6
“Strine” (Australian) is the hardest to understand, their ay sound is pronounced as I, so for mates, they say mites, and for weight they say white. The same for I, it’s pronounced oi, as in oi’ll be goin now Mite..
5
In all my trips to Germany, the most common language in use, second to Love, was Progressivism. But then Germans are pretty well equipped with English, as it is the globocommerce language – and the native tongue of Baywatch.
So, stumbling with German quickly leads to that funny look on their face and then ‘in English please’. They have little patience for Rosetta German 1.0. Even better if you happen to learn German in Swabia or Bavaria, which the Berliners love to remind you is not proper German.
Could be worse. You could be speaking French in the Alsace. Or English anywhere in France. Luckily, the quran is printed in French so everybody knows when to kneel, when to burn cars, and how not to notice the after-school cultural enrichment of little girls.
Its a small world. Extra small post-“covid”. Which my prog friends lament. Traveling to Europe has been difficult. And so they slum it in places like Belize. Where I guess they also speak English, but with a very southern accent, which is still better than Dixie because we are all in racisms together.
3
Reverse-Flynn-Effect + schools that teach nothing + universities that teach grievance studies = what we have today.
10
Related:
A local convenience store chain has installed a self check-out station. It’s actually pretty cool. You only have to sit your items down in a square area within the check-out machine, and then the camera system scans the items and gives you your total.
There is still a clerk behind the counter, and technically they are still required to manually check you out if that is your preference. However, this sort of prerequisites that they still be attentive, perhaps offer to check you out if you wish, at least acknowledge that you are there. Instead, I’ve seen two instances recently where a young black male with pants down below his buttocks and dreadlocks is sitting behind the counter staring at his cellphone, kinda daring someone to ask him for help before he will volunteer to do anything.
This is the new normal.
And pretty much anyone below the age of 30 will totally accept this as perfectly OK, normal behavior and not expect anything more than this. While those of us in the over 40 crowd are scratching our heads, wondering WTF happened to this ridiculous country.
24
That hasn’t worked out well for Target. Between the first $1000 of merchandise free raiders and easily gamed self-checkout, they found out the hard way that while they loved 3rd world immigration, they forgot about high trust vs. low trust societies.
I guess that is something missed in the MBA programs.
14
Like board management cares.
They still get the bonus payments and if it all collapses get to move on to other similar positions until they have consumed the entire company capital, as do the other senior non function roles like HR etc.
They risk nothing. Shareholders and employees get stiffed.
This the result of the removal of merit based hiring. Now all that matters is that you like to bang children, you have a beard and wear a dress or that you are part of the criminal race. Check those boxes and the standards are removed. Everyone I talk to recently has been noticing this, even left wing people.
5
No one wants to manage working class employees anymore. It isn’t just a job Americans are no longer willing to do, no one wants to do it. It is maddening, I have talked to people who have been in middle management of fast food and gas stations. Finding a reliable store manager is even harder than finding front line employees. The elites are so far removed from the problem, their plan is just to automate everything and hope the rest sorts itself out. I assume on the air travel side, they have stopped using regular commercial air travel and don’t rent cars so they don’t care how bad it gets.
Similar experience for me flying through Seattle last year. Long lines, fat, surly Women Of Vibrance at the desks with no apparent management, “fast-track” check-in kiosks down en masse with apparently no IT person to fix them…a scary glimpse into our future.
9
This essay very clearly illuminates what I experience all the time, most often several times a day, in my little corner of the Globohomo Empire. in line with the old saying that “the Devil’s in the details” this experience, by way of singling out the various details, describes it perfectly. It’s a good reminder that it’s not just me, being overly critical, cynical, cantankerous, etc. It really is this awful, far below par as the general rule, as standard operating procedure. This crap is fully entrenched at the broadest level and is everywhere going on all the time, even though each of it experiences it (each time) at an isolated and very local level.
One aspect of this trend, rapidly trending worse and ongoing all the time, is the insidious way that applied ideology has a (perhaps counterintuitive) way of manifesting the exact opposite of what it preaches, and the more insanely and fervently it is pushed, the worse this manifests. Here, the ideology is managerialism. Because of this opposite-effect quality of ideology, it is actually no surprise that managerialism, that flows from a class that originated in management of large business organization, has led to a reality in which large business organizations cannot manage the core basics of their businesses. That is, under managerialism, the managerial class for whatever reason no longer achieves the even the basics of business management, such as employee supervision 101.
The big car rental companies no doubt spare no resources in sensitivity training to ensure that no employee is an istismphobe … yet they are unable to have cars ready and available to rent. The social phenomenon of ideology, in and of itself, is really something to behold.
6
My son works for a large res a car company. He’s smart and hard working. He sees the kind of stuff described here all the time.
Some of you guys might enjoy reading this:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/a-grand-unified-theory-of-the-ftx