Kim du Toit nails it on the head.
"So you're not going to lower your prices in your city stores?"Emphasis mine, and it really is that simple. Inner-city people complain about prices being higher, but they're higher because they have to be. The more stuff disappears, the higher the prices will go. And that's without considering that taxation is usually higher in big cities, too, and the costs for security are higher as well.
"No. If we do, we'll have to close the stores because they won't be profitable."
"But what am I going to tell my people?"
"Tell 'your people' to stop stealing from our stores."
It's not racism; it's reality. Get used to it, pinheads.
* * *
"Oh, gee, what a fuckin' surprise" department: communist dictator "delays" stepping down because of an "emergency". Uh huh. That friggin' crap is older than the Roman Empire, for shit's sake.
* * *
Here is what happens when you try to beat a train. Okay? What happens is that you end up in a wreck and people get seriously injured, maybe killed.
99 times out of 100, when there is a collision between a train and another vehicle, it is the driver of the other vehicle who is at fault. There are some circumstances where the crossing signal may malfunction, or something else may go wrong, but they are rare.
If the lights are flashing and the gate is coming down, stop. Whatever you need to do on the other side of the tracks will wait. Cripes, it was an Amtrak train. By definition those things are short. Learn to tell the difference and don't ever try to beat any train.
* * *
As usual, the addicts can get as much as they want, while the law-abiding people who need it cannot. My wife is suffering from foot pain again--took the day off to go to the doctor for it after being up half the night moaning in pain. Can she get twenty tabs of Vicodin? Oh, no! No, because opioid dependence epidemic and government prescription guidelines and-and-and.
...but the people who actually abuse the shit, addicts who take it solely to get high and not because they'd like to be able to go to work or JUST GET SOME FUCKING SLEEP, those people can get twenty tablets of Vicodin a day.
The war on (some) drugs is such a massive failure I simply cannot even any longer.
* * *
That's because there really isn't a lot of profit in resistors. I'm not kidding; they sell for pennies and you need to make a lot of them for it to be worthwhile. I can't blame a company for getting out of the business and seeking more profitable products to produce.
We're not going to run out of resistors, though. Someone will continue supplying them.
* * *
Mrs. Fungus wanted to watch some stuff on Amazon Prime, so we're trying it out. That and Hulu. We might end up ditching our cable subscription entirely and just pay for Internet; we'll see. But!
I've been watching The Man In The High Castle, and so far it's been pretty good, but for one thing. Spoilers ahead.
In one episode, a bounty hunter who calls himself "The Marshal" is after Juliana and Jack. He chases Juliana into a disused warehouse, and just as he's about to blow her away with his shotgun, Jack clubs him over the head. They run away.
I was yelling at the TV set: "TAKE HIS GUN AND SHOOT HIM WITH IT!" I mean, for fuck's sake: they're in a demilitarized zone where there is no real legal authority, which is why the Marshal can lurch around and hang corpses from streetlights and cut off fingers and stuff. And not to put too fine a point on it but this asshole was just shooting at you three minutes ago. You know he is out to kill you. You know he will kill you given the chance. You know he's not going to stop trying to kill you if you let him live. For fuck's sake, shoot him dead while you have the chance.
There was no logical reason for them to spare the Marshal's life that I can see. Jack has already shown himself to be a cold-blooded killer, having shot a Nazi soldier in his escape from a raid on the resistance cell he joined. (When, SPOILER, Jack is a Nazi spy himself, proving that Nazis will kill their own just as readily as they'll kill anyone else.) There's no sheriff or police or any law enforcement in the town where all this happens. Certainly no one says to the Marshall that he has to stop waving around his shotgun; and the douchebag threatens to kill someone three times before breakfast.
*sigh*
The country looks awful intact. San Francisco doesn't look like it was invaded or anything. What, the Nazis hydrogen-bombed DC and the US just gave up? The history of the Axis victory isn't very well explained here. Obviously the Nazis got the a-bomb first in this version of history, so I guess that's what happened: they erased D.C. and maybe a couple of other cities on the east coast, and that convinced the US to surrender.
Well, it's a good story, anyway.
* * *
Up too early on my day off to take my wife to the doctor--I'm going back to bed now.