Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Winter is probably a restaurant extinction event.

 
Everywhere I have been over the past month or two restaurants are building outdoor dining space. But this one made my jaw drop. It's literally bigger than the whole original restaurant. Which makes me wonder how much that crap costs. I don't know how any of these places are affording the extra costs. But it sure is making inflation look way hotter than it is.

I was picking up take out food a couple of days ago and noticed they had indoor dining. So I asked how long they'd been doing it. She said three weeks but obviously was stressed because "no one wants to eat outside". And we all know everything is getting shut down soon. If your takeout game isn't solid, you probably aren't making it.

I never thought this would go on as long as it has. Not in a million years.


5 comments:

  1. "I never thought this would go on as long as it has."

    It's straight out of the cultural Marxism play book: once these pricks obtain power, they won't give it up willingly.

    And so you're being out-voted by stupid people and by calculating people who want to implement some form of Marxism.

    It's no longer about the pandemic.

    Do you think this over-sized wedding after-party tent solves any specific medical issues with the pandemic?

    It really doesn't.

    And so because of stupid people having their vote, every bit of legitimacy in leadership that could have been applied to solutions that would benefit the truly susceptible has been squandered.

    What some people in power probably wanted was for quite a number of old people to die, for a few outliers with hidden medical conditions to die, and for everyone else to get scared by the deaths so they could amass more power.

    Why do you think Chickenshit Cuomo in New York sent all those Rona-carrying people into nursing homes?

    Fuck Cuomo, fuck De Blah-sio, and especially fuck New York City. Anyone still thinking they can do business there and not get any on them is an even bigger asshole than those guys.

    But with this loss of legitimacy in leadership goes the loss of legitimacy in everyone complaining about the lockdowns, the medical theater, and so on without actually pushing back.

    You may dislike those non-mask wearing people, but they're pushing back.

    Masks don't really protect anyone except from spittle, and the numbers for mask wearing versus non-mask wearing don't show any consistent correlation at all, meaning it doesn't seem to matter except perhaps in confined spaces.

    So it's essentially another form of politeness. They do this in Tokyo because of confined spaces, for instance, and it's part of Japanese politeness culture. If you've been on the trains in Tokyo, you've probably appreciated the mask wearing because of the confined spaces and packed trains.

    So I get it from that perspective.

    But American politeness culture consists of telling Cuomo, De Blah-sio, and New York City to go fuck themselves. :-)

    Christmas is effectively not happening in Switzerland and Italy now, BTW.

    France's amplified lockdowns are probably going to kill French cuisine in Paris good and hard for the same reasons that your local restaurants are getting a winter kill frost.

    Do you remember that part in "V For Vendetta" where V says that he knows why everyone agreed to Norsefire taking over everything and implementing old-fashioned English fascism?

    Because everyone was afraid of a pandemic.

    I think I'm going to abandon buying a house until I see things are going to be better here in these terms.

    Besides, you're always renting here, whether you want to or not, because of the valeur locative always being a factor.

    Also, I went by the local gendarmerie to show them the recently arrived documents since they require me to show them anything that might change the conditions of my stay.

    It didn't -- I didn't enter on that passport and it wasn't used to issue my visa. But they've seen enough of these documents to know that mine were genuine, so that's saying something right there.

    I then went by the US Embassy to deal with my US passport, figuring they'd want to confiscate it from me. They took it from me, keyed in a few things, quickly punched a hole in my picture, and handed it back to me telling me that I should keep it as a record of my past travels, insisting that it was now officially invalid.

    And, also, that I needed to leave the US Embassy.

    So there's possibly some kind of ban in effect.

    This is literally the result of doing a few good deeds and getting punished for them, BTW.

    Once 2020 rolls by, I can finish my US taxes with the help of my advisors and then be out from under this mess.

    Now I'm looking forward to it.

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  2. "You may dislike those non-mask wearing people, but they're pushing back."

    Whoa whoa whoa. Settle down there. I don't actually care if people wear masks. I am an adult. I can stay home or remove myself from an area. You guys can fight this shit out. But I get to place odds, and I'm betting on the virus.

    "Also, I went by the local gendarmerie to show them the recently arrived documents since they require me to show them anything that might change the conditions of my stay."

    Ya know... I've grown to like you - but it's always been my impression that "not America" has much more stick in your butt rules. There are no governments that don't want to hassle you. It sucks you can't reverse all of that.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeMonday, November 23, 2020 2:09:00 PM

    "I'm betting on the virus"

    I'm not. Over the long haul, it's just another kind of cold with a nastier worst case.

    Singapore coped with SARS, the Middle East coped with MERS, and The Rona is just the latest iteration off yet another factory floor in China as far as I'm seeing it.

    "... more stick in your butt rules ..."

    I'm in the country as a guest on a specific type of visa, so yes, I'll follow those rules, especially when it's easy.

    But I'm not worried about whether the legitimacy of the country's elections or even the canton's elections are going to cause everyone to lose their shit.

    "It sucks you can't reverse all of that."

    Maybe a future administration will, but I'm not looking for that, and at this point I'm really not interested.

    There's no concept under American law of having your residence outside the country for legal and tax purposes.

    Until some bureaucrats decided to uncitizen me (albeit at my lawyer's prodding), I was a resident of Florida for certain purposes. I was also a resident of Switzerland and Florida for other purposes. Sometimes these purposes overlapped in really weird ways.

    Despite such things as personal income exclusions for non-US income, I was still paying US taxes, although fortunately not enough to trigger the IRC 877 worst case scenarios.

    Nowhere else I've had to deal with has global unitary taxation and an extraordinarily long arm of extrajudicial meddling (which may or may not include targeted drone strikes).

    I'm now under the umbrella of another global arrangement, but this one's a bit more benign: a former empire's former colonies use the larger country's services now for emergency passport replacements.

    Otherwise, the Prime Minister has to sign mine when it's issued or renewed, and there's an actual ink signature in it along with the usual biometrics, chips, and so forth.

    But you probably don't care about that.

    So here's one thing you might care about: here I have some privacy.

    When you go to the CA DMV to do an address change, that information is then available for sale by the state, and they sell the driver's license databases and updates in bulk. You're reporting to the DMV instead of the police to inform them of your change in status, but it's essentially the same thing.

    Because of that, some creepy people can find your official address, and with that data they might have enough to crowbar your phone number and your actual location out of your mobile carrier with the help of a sleazy "PI firm" that abuses its access.

    What do you think that ex-employee situation was where I took off to Bermuda via Nassau for a while was about?

    It was about this guy finding enough information about me that he showed up in Miami with evil intent, then making his way to North Florida to track me down. I took off not because I was scared of him, but instead because I was concerned I'd need to shoot him.

    Versus how it is here where they don't try to make a few extra francs from your data, and so this absurd chain of events never gets kicked off.

    It's better.

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  4. I think the thing I'm most curious about is......what country did you start in?

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  5. I had a reply to this, I really did ...

    Blogger's crap software ate it.

    When this happens, I regard it as a message from Kannon (観音) that getting my comment smacked once was an act of mercy.

    And so: 逆質問.

    ReplyDelete