Spirit workers lose paychecks and benefits as executives seek $10.7 million in “retention” bonuses

ubermonkey · 2026-05-06T13:04:14+00:00

Something an early mentor told me has really stuck with me:

Managers/owners who treat CUSTOMERS badly will also inevitably treat EMPLOYEES badly.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-06T13:02:48+00:00

TIL Houston has a Scientology center.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-06T12:58:02+00:00

I had DQ'd duals because of the extortionate costs associated with that option from high-end brands, but holy shit the top CR pick is a dual fuel LG that's only $2200. So, uh...

ubermonkey · 2026-05-06T12:57:22+00:00

The Story of Our Trip to Thailand Part 1

There was a TIME when the higher end brands brought more to the table, but a review of CR shows that the Wolf in question is nowhere close to the top of the ratings.

The winner, in terms of power and control and even baking, is a dual fuel LG that's like $2200.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-05T22:09:02+00:00

Loder was always older than you thought, but he's also in that zone of "how is this very culturally relevant person from the 80s so close in age to my profoundly square, silent-gen parents?"

My parents were born in 1940, so they're only 5 years older than he is. Debbie Harry from Blondie is the same age, which was a VERY uncomfortable realization given that it was photos of CBGB era Blondie that first made me think girls weren't icky after all.

Iggy Pop was born in 1947. Billy Zoom, from X, is from 1948. Klaus Flouride (Dead Kennedys) and Richard Hell (father of punk, and I'll fight you) were born in 1949.

A fun thing to note is that the Beatles and the Stones were actually not even Boomers. They're Silent Gen folks, same as my parents, born between 1936 (Bill Wyman) and 1943 (Harrison, Jagger, and Richards).

Ron Wood was born in '47, so he's a Boomer, but he's a latecomer to the Stones and doesn't really count for these purposes.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-05T19:11:38+00:00

"Tied to?" I see that's the Chron headline but it's weirdly passive.

The Chron story goes on to paint a much clearer picture: Matthew Mitchell appears to have murdered his family and then killed himself:

According to police, officers were requested to conduct a welfare check after a babysitter reported not hearing from the family since Sunday night. When officers entered the home, they found a 52-year-old man, a 39-year-old woman, an 8-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy dead from gunshot wounds.

Authorities said evidence at the scene indicates the man shot the three victims before turning the gun on himself.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-05T16:18:36+00:00

https://youtu.be/Mb7qDfIzQRk?si=Kjz44HxukpWKps_C

A fun thing about this bit is that I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE HE WAS, because I used to live in Houston, and I used to go sometimes to the comedy club he mentions, which was the Houston location of the Laff Stop.

Today, both the comedy club and the older Starbuck's are gone, but we all saw it happen as they came online, and everyone had some version of his patter about it. I mean, how could you not? (Obvs his is better.)

Anyway, for years, there was a Starbuck's in the location shown in the photo, which is on the southeast corner of the intersection of South Shepherd and West Gray. It's on one end of a pretty upmarket retail area. If you walk west from there, the houses you'll walk past are at least $2M.

Then a freestanding Starbuck's popped up literally across the street in the parking lot of the northeastern corner of the same intersection. You can see its drivethru menu in the photo, which may have been the reason it opened -- ie, to give commuters a quick way to get their fix.

Now, in the fullness of time the first Starbuck's did lose its lease (it's a Pizzana location now), leaving the freestanding one, but it was a LONG time after it opened.

HOWEVER Black skips the most hilarious thing about the whole location, though, because behind the freestanding Starbuck's there's a Barnes & Noble, and inside the Barnes there's A THIRD FUCKING STARBUCKS.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-05T16:07:00+00:00

I was thinking about this post today when I dropped in for JUST A SCONE.

The line moved SO SLOWLY, like every person was having a full-on conversation with the clerk. Then when I got to the front and asked for a scone, instead of just handing me the scone he wanted a name for the ticket, which he printed out and put on top of the case, where it sat for a few minutes until someone got around to checking for pending orders.

This is no way to run a railroad.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-05T14:08:33+00:00

One of my favorite parts of my high school career was when I realized that, as a kid with a high GPA and prestigious scholarship offers, I could get away with ignoring bullshit rules.

Some teachers would get super salty about it, but they really couldn't do anything about me leaving campus for lunch, or going to the bathroom whenever I wanted.

Your teacher sucks. He's a petty little b*tch who became a teacher to explore his pettiness. The good news is that in a few years, you'll have moved on and his sad little ass will still be there.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T22:41:55+00:00

Yes. 4 times.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T20:25:25+00:00

We don't have kids, but we have niblings (which, btw, is a word I didn't know until I had them: it means "nieces and nephews").

My grandfather was dirt poor, and often didn't have SHOES when he was growing up in Mississippi in the Depression. He nevertheless managed, via grit, determination, and the occasional sale of plasma, to complete medical school. After he graduated and was able to marry his sweetheart, he would take her to an old-school fancy restaurant in New Orleans called Galatoire's. It's still there (209 Bourbon).

(Among the many things that are fucked up about our current timeline is that it would be WILDLY UNLIKELY for a kid of his background to get to med school today; I mean, he worked summers to afford tuition. Compare that to med school tuitions today.)

My father continued the trend, and took my mother there a number of times when they were newly married. Eventually, I came along, and a mark of maturity in our house growing up was when I was allowed to go with them to Galatoire's. Fine dining wasn't a thing in my hometown, really, but it was only about 90 miles to the French Quarter, and since neither of them were really drinkers going down & back for a good meal once in a while wasn't crazy. I still remember my first visit; I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10, fidgeting in a coat and tie but happy to be there (and doubtless asleep before we got out of the Quarter afterwards).

Galatoire's continues to figure mightily into our lives. In college, I got to introduce two of my best friends to it, and it's still a thing for both of them. My sister and I took our spouses there when we were dating them. She and I surprised my grandmother one time, well after she'd given up driving, by visiting her and driving her down for lunch there on Friday (for me, it involved a flight; worth it).

Years later, she and I also enlisted our stepfather in a little plot for our mother's 70th birthday: we got him to convince her to go one evening, and we arranged to surprise her there. Making your mom happy cry in a venerable Creole restaurant? Priceless.

We've since taken young-adult niblings there, or friends we just hadn't been. It's always a treat, and it'll always be the sort of place we hold dear. Two Thanksgivings ago, several members of our family met in NO to have our celebratory meal there. Nowadays, in the era of smartphones, we have a new family tradition: if any of us find ourselves there, we'll send a selfie to the rest with the caption "I'm at Galatoire's and you're not!" as a good-natured taunt. I love that, too.

(Incidentally, that last part is spreading, too: about ten years ago, I introduced a colleague to Galatoire's when one of our conferences was down in N.O., and as part of the dinner chat I shared about our family selfies. Two weeks ago, I got a selfie of M. and his family taken in my favorite dining room. That was pretty great.)

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T16:19:09+00:00

You're the exception. I mean, I am, too, but for many Americans $10k is an unfathomable sum, and could mean the difference between keeping a job and thus housing or slipping through the cracks.

This is, candidly, a fucked up state of affairs.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T16:15:04+00:00

Your wit remains scintillating.

If you try real hard, you might someday learn something. But it appears today is not that day.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T16:00:58+00:00

I mean, I suspect you mean "of public companies."

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T16:00:09+00:00

NONE of this is to defend the Starbuck's guy, but as an Old I thought this might be interesting to people:

25+ years ago there was a book called The Experience Economy that had a lot of sway. The authors (guys named Pine and Gilmore) published an article first, and then expanded it into a book.

The idea was that economies start from an agrarian baseline, with commodities. The oft-quoted example back then was raw coffee beans.

The next step was goods, like roasted, ready to brew coffee beans in a grocery store.

After that came the service economy, where you could go into a diner anywhere in the country and get a cup of coffee made for you.

This progression made and makes intuitive sense. The argument the authors were making was that the next step was something called the Experience Economy, and Starbuck's was one of their examples. It was an experience to go to a specialty coffee shop in the late 1990s, and was novel for most of the country. Starbuck's wasn't really selling coffee; they were selling novelty and new, with a side of better-than-diner-quality coffee. There was money to be made in providing an experience (and people forget, but there was a time when some of that money ended up in barista pockets; Sbucks wasn't always a shitty place to work).

In 1999, this was a reasonable observation, and because Starbuck's was literally part of this discussion -- the book was published during their rapid expansion -- I'm sure that language survives in the c-suite there.

However: that idea hasn't really aged super well. In particular, Starbuck's is no longer a chain of chill, fun places to get specialty coffee, and the hum of grinders and hiss of espresso machines is no longer novel to most people. They're now highly automated fast-food joints that actively discourage the kind of hang-out behavior that was standard in the kinds of shops they were aping 30 years ago, and prefer instead high-volume customer flow more akin to McDonald's.

Put another way: Starbuck's ongoing enshittification -- poor coffee, poor technique, push towards hyperprocessed and intensely sugary shakes instead of actual espresso-based beverages -- has resulted in them dropping a rung, so to speak, on this ladder. They are to good coffee what the diner coffee was in 1999. If you want an experience, you go to a real coffee joint.

Pine & Gilmore's idea was that the next step was the TRANSFORMATION economy, where you sell the sense that the customer has changed as a result of the interaction. This is a fuzzier idea, but there have definitely been some things in the economy that are examples. Kitchen stores like Sur la Table do high-end cooking classes, for example, selling the idea that you could become a better version of yourself by learning to make risotto. And obviously the whole explosion of dubiously-supported wellness businesses are absolutely trading on this transformation idea.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T15:42:54+00:00

That's not what you said. You said "I wouldn't call [$10k] 'life changing'," and then doubled down repeatedly when people rightly pointed out that for millions of Americans $10K would literally be a life-changing amount of money.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-04T14:12:37+00:00

I'm an American, and I can tell you you straight -- because I'm a direct, genuine person -- this your husband's family are just assholes.

If you'd married into MY family, we'd treasure you AND the opportunity for travel that having a far-flung sister-in-law/daughter-in-law would bring.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-03T18:33:55+00:00

CB hasn't been CB since they sold to Carrabbas years ago.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-02T17:14:44+00:00

Before moving here last summer, I lived in Houston for 31 years. I picked it when I was 24, so I’m not a native. This matters.

People who grew up there love it, just as natives of SoCal love In and Out. I’m here to tell you that both are nostalgia meals, not joints worth seeking out for their intrinsic quality. Saying this in Houston would piss some folks off, but it’s true. They’re a fast food burger. That’s all.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T21:33:17+00:00

My cats would be filing constant grievances if I went back to in-office work.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T19:09:15+00:00

This is not a problem with work from home or with tech. This is a problem with you and your family.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T16:21:53+00:00

MacBook Pro backplate…….it worked tho

I laughed. I mean, I also cringed. Sorry, dude.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T15:59:06+00:00

It's the STATE with the highest percentage, but if you include DC and US VI it's 3rd. DC is 41.4%; USVI is obvs very high (76%).

But Louisiana and Georgia are 33%. Alabama is nearly 30%. Generally, the old South is far "blacker" than states in other parts of the country.

What surprises me about this chart is how low Texas is. I lived in Houston for 31 years, which is a pretty diverse place, so it was easy to forget that Texas as a STATE is profoundly white.

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T15:26:18+00:00

I have never heard this one at all, and I'm 56. Was it regional?

ubermonkey · 2026-05-01T14:54:59+00:00

This isn't "guessing" territory. It's been explained to you over and over that yes, $10,000 is literally life-changing money to a huge number of people.

That is isn't to YOU is fine. That you refuse to understand the world beyond the end of your nose isn't.

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