#just not as a world class forward

[hardtchill]

He doesn’t rate Lynn nearly as much as we thought he did 💀

I mean, i don't even really rate Lynn but i am not insane to think that she won't work in a tie game against a tired defense.

[vyvansecrashing]

can russia and north korea just nuke us already this is hopeless

[slavhew]

im doing a drawtober of characters i think of through the day and will post in batches. day 3 solo because its already been derailed and todays blorbo is immunochemistry.

[pandora15]

life is cruel.

it's tragic, horrific, and unfair. it gives us the worst of things, causes us to feel and experience things that are so unspeakably painful that sometimes I can't even. I can't even.

and it seems even more cruel in those moments of pain and grief and loss when you see something beautiful, like fall colors, or the color of the sky at sunset, or how the holidays typically are meant to bring joy to people but all you can think about now is that every year when this time of year comes, you'll just think about how tragic it is.

and cruel.

and horrific.

and unfair.

and beautiful.

[lateseptemberdawn]

No but like. Men could be the lowest of the low, not be knowing the most basic shit, inept at wit or anything else pertaining to the brain or mind or conscious, and yet the audacity be there. Like. How.

[crossbackpoke-check]

about to be sooo nosy so. my apologies. but. morgan frost? girlfriend? do share (or don’t! again this is so nosy i’m sorry)

for legal purposes i can neither confirm nor deny anything about morgan and his girlfriend but afaik i think he’s single right now? at one point (within the past four years 😭) he did for sure have a girlfriend and that is the extent of my wag knowledge

[ghostcrows]

Y do I have to get college fomo I literally went to college...but I did it badly what if I had done a good job...I waste so many opportunities 😀

[star-spangled-man]

not me crying in the bathroom because my students said nice things about me!!

[chronurgy]

Maps I made for the dnd campaign I'm currently preparing for, of the Island of Ruanes, the Grand Dutchy of Iafril (the main country where the campaign will take place), and Iafril's capital and largest city, Tempasaer (covering the districts of the city). Maps were made with Azgaar's fantasy map generator and paint (for the districts in Tempasaer). The map of Iafril features provinces and provincial seats, mountain ranges, and the three large city districts. I'm really happy with how they've turned out!

[c0rpsedemon]

something abt realizing you're listening to someone sing for the last time really hits in an awful way

[roseband]

im in a few korea travel groups and like.... everything is about kbeauty and kpop and it's so funny cuz our entire itinerary is palaces and history/art museums

like i just saw "going to the national gallery" as something "off the beaten path" and im like....how do normal ppl vacation???

[theomencometh]

feeling incredibly melancholy that i start student teaching tomorrow and will have significantly less time to chill and vibe and also be a person

[usercelestial]

i love these geography quizzes cause as someone who just straight up did not have a geography class in school, it's very fun to test my knowledge of things i had to teach myself when i was 14.

[grayintogreen]

The Mighty Nein really are the “tonight we cancel the apocalypse” party, because that is the attitude of the patently insane and patently hypercompetent in ways that are too insane to be real and yet WORK. VM have Big Justice League energy. They’re saving the world by the book. They’re very much the epitome of their classes. This is not a knock. They are good at what they do, but their flair is extremely straightforward. Percy is gonna shoot fifty times a round. Keyleth is gonna archdruid her little heart out. Grog’s gonna smash. Scanlan is gonna sing a little song. That’s them! We like that for them! But it is very straightforward clock in/clock out heroism. They have day jobs now.

I’m not gonna be unfair to BH right now because I think they haven’t really figured out their niche yet and are constantly stuck in the mindset of not actually being heroes and being, and I say this out of love for their stupid little faces, selfish little turds. We might get a better idea later on when we come back to them as high level adventurers after how they shake out here, but so far they’re somewhere in the middle. A little Suicide Squad-y.

The M9 on the other hand are not clock in/clock out heroes. They’re barely heroes. They get told something could be a threat and they deal with it and they won’t just kill you, they will EMBARRASS you. They will act like you’re nothing and bet on fight outcomes mid-combat, call you names, hit you with lollipops and dicks, turn you into a fruit bat, whatever they have to. They’ll ruin your action economy, stun you, whatever. Not only did they come to stop you, you’ll be shamed so hard that your Lich won’t even want to rise again to seek vengeance because you know they’ll do it again. They’re canceling the apocalypse not because the one doing it is dead, but because they’re so demoralized there’s no gong forward. When the Mighty Nein come for your plans, your plans DO NOT survive because they’ve had dicks drawn all over them.

[classyrbf]

thinking about jerking off nerd!gojo with your tits in his dorm room. You couldn’t care less for the loser, forced to have him as a tutor because you were failing your chem classes and needed an easy way out of your parents bitching at you. Quite literally you’ve gotten tired of hearing him talk and talk about stupid elements, formulas and equations because you’d rather much see the look on his face when he’s about to cum and hear how he sounds when he’s begging.

So that’s how you ended up on your knees in front of him, shirt unbuttoned and your tits covered in his pre cum, his thick and veiny cock pulsing between the two mounds of flesh as you move it up and down his sensitive shaft. His breath hitches, cheeks flushed a bright red, hands shaking as he struggling to push his glasses back up only for them to slide back down. “F-fuck,” he so sweetly whimpers, licking his dry lips. He loves the way you’re looking up at him, like you’re staring into his soul while simultaneously taking it. His heart pounds against his chest, relishing in the feeling of your soft skin hugging his aching cock, your warm tits only giving him an idea of what your pussy might feel like.

“Nngh, oh f-fuck…we’re…supposed to be…studying,” he managers to croak out through his pathetic moans and whimpers. His sucks in a breath, eyes rolling back when you go even faster, the sound of wet flesh smacking against each other makes the perverted part of his brain go into overdrive. He’s so fucking close.

“Awe, but don’t you wanna cum, Toru?” You teasingly ask, watching the way his throbbing red tip leaks another bead of precum only adding to the lubrication. The nickname alone drives Gojo crazy. He fists the sheets below him, jaw slack, a dazed look in his eyes. “We’ll make a deal, yeah? I’ll let you cum and do this as many times as you want as long as you do my chem work for me.” You smile, holding your tits tighter. “Deal?”

“Ok, ok, ok.” He ferociously nodded, biting down on his bottom lip. “I wanna cum so badly, please.” He let out a ragged breath, falling back on the bed as his body began twitching, hips jolting upward to create more friction. Just in mere seconds, ropes of sticky, hot cum shot up, landing on your tits. “Shit, shit! Ah, ah, nngh!” Gojo’s eyes rolled back. This feels like the most he’s ever came in his life. His legs began to shake the longer his orgasm lasts, groans and whimpers escaping his throat, filling the small room. His raspy breaths fall short, finally coming down from his high. He can barely even think straight now.

“God, you made such a mess!” You huff, looking down at your coated tits.

“Oh, uh—I’m sorry!” Gojo quickly sits up, panicking as he searches around for something to help you clean up. He swiftly hands you one of his shirts, handing it to you. You snatch it from his hands, wiping up every last drop of cum before tossing his shirt to the side. “Are you…um—”

“I gotta go.” You stand up, buttoning your shirt. “Thanks for agreeing to the deal.” You lean over, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Gojo watches as you leave his dorm room without a care in the world, acting like you didn’t just milk him dry with your tits. At least he has something to look forward to every few days now.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates