Akron Truckers Fucked Right Before Christmas
Not in the good way either!
Reading some horseshit in the Washington Post right now and getting extremely mad online —
Millennials, the generation that loves to dine out, is also the generation that doesn’t like to tip servers as much as older diners do. According to a new YouGov poll, 63% of millennials always tip servers at full-service restaurants, compared with 89% of baby boomers and 81% of Gen Xers.
In restaurants across the land, you can almost hear the cry: not OK, millennials.
Then again, millennials appear to feel worse than other generations about their tipping habits. When YouGov asked, “How frequently, if at all, do you worry about improperly tipping someone for a service provided?” 55% of millennials said they often or occasionally fret about it. By contrast, 38% of Gen Xers and 29% of boomers felt the same way.
First of all, I always tip 20% at minimum unless I see you spit in my food in which case here’s 15% because frankly that’s disgusting but hey everybody has a bad day now and again.
I tip bartenders, servers, housekeepers, valet workers, and on and on down the line because I used to work for $2.13 an hour plus tips and I know what a tenacious grind this is and that was before I had a family (I still don’t have a family).
But I must say the entire culture of tipping is bullshit and propagated to offload payroll expenses from business owners to customers. I paid $60 this weekend to valet my car in downtown Cleveland because I live in a state that hates public transit and doesn’t believe in the power of trains. Was most of that money going to the worker in charger of walking back and forth to the parking lot and retrieving my car? Absolutely not. That guy is probably lucky to be making $10 an hour.
Millennials also don’t have any money because we’ve been squeezed by the older generations who elected Ronald Reagan and put us on the road that obliterated the middle class.
Anyway… Merry Christmas Eve! That’s my rant. But for real if you’re going out to eat and stiffing servers you’re a real piece of shit. Even if you got “bad service!” Your crusty ass isn’t the King of Denmark so sit your ass down and realize that everyone — even millionaire NFL players — have off nights at their work.
And if you can’t afford to tip then stay home and learn to cook for once in your life it’s honestly not that hard if you can follow directions which come in proper text and not hieroglyphs like furniture assembly instructions.
TRUCKING COMPANY STIFFS WORKERS BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS
Businesses that realize their days are numbered will do their best to wring every last penny of a doomed operation and that requires keeping employees in the dark for as long as possible until the rug can be pulled from under them at the last possible second.
For an example of this we turn to Akron where a 30-year trucking company closed a week before Christmas and stranded workers on the roadways who were stunned to realize they were out of a job.
From Doug Livingston of beaconjournal.com:
An Akron freight company with 75 semitractor-trailers abruptly closed a week before Christmas, leaving several drivers out on the road without paychecks or credit for the fuel they need to get home.
GDS Express Inc. is out of business, according to a company message picked up by multiple trade publications that closely track the trucking industry. The company operated for nearly three decades on Hilbish Avenue just south of Waterloo Road in Akron.
It’s unclear exactly how many employees are out of work, or if the last few drivers made it home. A U.S. Department of Transportation database lists the company with 75 drivers and 75 rigs.
Truckers News first reported on the Dec. 17 closure announcement that stunned not only drivers but managers trying to get them home.
“We were blindsided,” Jacob Keaton, GDS eastern operations manager, told Trucker News. “We’ve heard no rational explanation in the last 48 hours.”
People who think a “kindler, gentler” capitalism is possible are living in a fantasy world. This is how the system works. The people at the top get to decide to pull the plug a week before Christmas and then loyal workers get blindsided and stranded on the side of the road.
I swear to God if this happened to me I would either pawn my company truck for scraps or burn it with a Molotov cocktail. Would that help my family by going to jail during the season? Probably not. But damn sometimes you can’t let the blatant disrespect slide like that.
FLU RUNNING WILD ON OHIOANS THIS YEAR
It’s important to get your flu shot. Even if you’re like me and healthy as an ox and somebody who only gets a minor cold every three years in which they spend 12 hours acting like they’re on the verge of death.
The immunity obviously isn’t as important for young, healthy people. But herd immunity is important for children and senior citizens who can be sent to the hospital by the flu.
From Max Filby of dispatch.com:
Hospitalizations for the flu in Ohio are up 53% compared to this time last year,but something local health leaders say they expected.
There were 404 flu hospitalizations across the state as of Dec. 14, compared to 264 in the same time period last year, according to the Ohio Department of Health.
“This is higher than we typically see this time of year,” said Dr. Mark Hurst, the department’s medical director. “We’ve really seen a pretty dramatic escalation of flu activity over the last month or two ... it’s affecting every corner of our state right now.”
This year in particular was expected to be a rough year for the flu because of how Australia fared with the disease, said Dr. Ben Bring, a physician at OhioHealth’s Dublin Methodist Hospital. Australia’s flu season comes earlier because the southern island nation’s seasons are the reverse of the United States.
It’s cool living in the only industrialized country in the world without universal healthcare because the added horror to stories like these is — how many of these people are insured enough to not be financially bothered by a trip to the hospital? And how many sick people are out there that need to go to the hospital that are putting it off because they know they can’t afford it?
Get your flu shot.
AMERICA’S RACIST HOMELOAN INDUSTRY IN FULL DISPLAY IN CINCINNATI
A lot of white Americans think racism ended in 1968 with the Civil Rights Act. That’s why they’re comfortable having no black friends and think Donald Trump couldn’t possibly have amassed such a business empire by being racist in his personal life.
But what many people don’t know is America’s racism goes much deeper than black-and-white photos of german shepherds mauling peaceful protestors. It goes deep into our banking system where black people were basically quarantined into “undesirable” parts of cities, which is why you can basically draw a line down I-71 in Columbus and know 90% of the city’s black residents live to the East.
It’s also still evident in places like Cincinnati.
From Nick Swartsell of citybeat.com:
Buying a home is often framed as a quintessential part of the American dream.
But data shows that the dream doesn’t manifest itself equally for everyone in Cincinnati. About 24 percent of black households in the city owned a home in 2017, for example. Meanwhile, roughly 50 percent of white households in Cincinnati lived in a home they owned that year, according to an aggregate of five years of American Community Survey results from the U.S. Census Bureau.
…
In the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration drew up maps categorizing neighborhoods made up of minority residents as “high risk” for lending — a practice called "redlining" that set socioeconomic patterns of segregation in many cities for decades to come. If a neighborhood was redlined, the federal government often wouldn’t insure private loans made there.
That drove widespread disinvestment in many predominantly low-income and minority neighborhoods. For decades, families couldn't get loans to buy homes, and couldn't finance renovations on homes they already owned, playing a part, along with white flight, in the physical and economic decline of many inner-city communities.
“Generally speaking, we always go back to redlining,” says HOME CEO Jeniece Jones. “That’s our jumping off point — did communities develop as integrated neighborhoods that allowed African-Americans to build wealth? Mostly they didn’t due to overt discrimination.”
Compounding the racial lending gap, and later the wealth gap, the federal government underwrote many millions of dollars in low-interest home loans to returning GIs following World War II — almost all to white home buyers and almost all in the suburbs far from where black residents were concentrated.
If you’re interested in stuff like this — and how for example the American highway system was used to obliterate black neighborhoods like the Near East Side in Columbus — then check out The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
Because it lays out why I support reparations to black Americans. Yes every enslaved person and every enslaver is dead. But America’s screwing of Black America didn’t stop when Lincoln freed the slaves. The ramifications of those actions are still wildly present in this day and age and I feel America owes a debt to black Americans that it has never once come close to repaying.
IT’S POSSIBLE OF DYING OF NATURAL CAUSES AT 38? SIGN ME UP
I was reading a story about another prison guard caught smuggling drugs into his place of employment because that’s how drugs get into every American prison. Then something caught my eye.
From Jim Woods of dispatch.com:
A state corrections officer has been charged with bringing drugs into the Ross Correctional Institution after the investigator who found them Monday in a search died of apparent natural causes, authorities said.
Bradley L. Danner, 44, who worked as a corrections officer, was arrested for possessing Percocet, a prescription painkiller drug. He was charged with conveyance of a drug into the prison, a fifth-degree felony, and is being held in the Ross County jail.
The death of the investigator, 38-year-old Brandon Collier, was “very coincidental” but not connected with the discovery of the drugs, said Lt. Robert Sellers of the State Highway Patrol.
“Mr. Collier did collapse today while at the facility. The cause of death appears to be natural causes, not due to drug exposure,” said JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Obvious condolences to Collier’s family but my God I had no idea it was possible to die of natural causes at 37. This bit of information has opened a new world of positivity in my life that did not previously exist.
MAN WITH CLEAR SUBSTANCE-ABUSE PROBLEMS SENT TO JAIL BY SHERIFF DISPATCHER WHO COULDN’T MIND THEIR BUSINESS
Listen if you’re at work clearly feeling the effects of your poor-decisions from the night prior and a cop walks up to you and asks what the hell is this all about? Please don’t immediately confess to doing cocaine the night prior and then going home to sleep. That’s not how cocaine works and now you’re going to the clink and losing your job.
From TiffinOhio.net:
TIFFIN, OH — A coked up FedEx driver was arrested Wednesday after telling cops he had used cocaine at a party the night before.
Matthew S. Carmel, 40, of Mansfield, was making a delivery to the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office when a dispatcher noticed he was acting strange. The dispatcher told a deputy of the sheriff’s office that Carmel was walking around in circles and swaying.
Carmel also struck a box he was carrying, according to the police report. He was charged with physical control, a first-degree misdemeanor, after telling Deputy Mark Lawson that he had used cocaine the night before at a party, and then went home to sleep.
Big shoutout to the writer for this “lede” which is fancy nerd journalist jargon for the first sentence in their article.
The man by his own admission (and subsequent charges against him) was not “coked up” after using cocaine the night before. Again that’s not how cocaine works! It does not last that long.
Or, uh, that’s what my friends tell me anyway!
THOSE WMDs. Feral hogs, Baby Yoda, and Kidz Bop Karen: 2019 in memes… Video: The Alt-Right’s playbook: You go high, we go low… 10 things likable people don’t do (and why you’ll like them for it)… Pentagon warns military members that DNA tests pose “personal and operational” risks… Any oral history of Any Given Sunday.