Month: September 2013

You should thank God [for bank bailouts]. Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies. There’s danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be,’ […] At a certain place you’ve got to say to [those] people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.’

Charles Munger, billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in a discussion at the University of Michigan on Sept. 14.

Would be breathtaking if the view weren’t so pervasive. The rest are just smart enough not to say it. We can all rest easy in the knowledge that Charlie will never, ever have to suck it up and cope about anything. Such a thing just wouldn’t be moral.

Source: bloomberg.com

We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town – Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were – with a couple of .38s Frank [Sinatra] kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cock-eyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.

Ava Gardner, describing a few of her days with Frank Sinatra circa 1949.

The NFL and Uber

The N.F.L. players association hopes to address [the recent rash in player drunk driving] in a new partnership it has formed with the technology firm Uber, which makes a smartphone app that acts as a digital dispatcher for people looking for a taxi or a car service.

[…]

Because Uber relies on G.P.S., players will not need to know the precise address of their location to get a ride home.

Further proof that there’s drunk, and then there’s drunk.

Players will be offered $200 in credits as an inducement to use the service, which begins next week.

Let’s all take a moment to recall that most active players in the NFL are a millionaire or should be in short order; I believe the lowest possible salary for a non-practice squad rookie player is currently ~$405,000 a year. This rises to over $800k/yr once you have put in any kind of service in the league beyond one season. Let’s face it: most, if not all of them could easily afford to employ a full-time driver. When you’ve already got a ready-made entourage of hangers-on, as seemingly all NFL players do, why not just pay one of them not to drink and do all the driving? Hell, pay two and they can take turns with the not-drinking. Who could refuse $60k/yr with benefits to haul Tim Tebow around between bars and shady “motels”? ‘Merica needs jobs, after all.

The NFL and Uber