Everything That’s Wrong With This Monday
It’s spring in New York and it’s freezing outside, so I’m going to list the the things that are bugging me.
Bloomberg, March 24, 2014
It’s a cold and miserable Monday in what was supposed to be spring. Winter was supposed to have ended last week, but it refuses to depart peaceably.
I don’t know about you, but I am sick of it.
I am going to use the nasty weather as an excuse to vent. What follows is a list of things I simply don’t care about. Far be it for me to tell you how to prioritize your life, but I suspect you will be better off if you stop caring about these things as well.
Battling billionaires: Yes, yes, I keep hearing that it makes for great television, but I simply don’t care about the feud that this 80-year-old billionaire has with that 60-year-old billionaire. I don’t care about their divorces, ex-wives, art collections, Securities and Exchange Commission troubles, yachts or gay lovers on the side. It is none of my business and, to be blunt, none of yours either. Yes, I know the news media has 24 hours of air time to fill each day, and this helps meet that impossible target, but I simply cannot believe there is nothing of greater import going on in the world.
Missing Malaysian airplanes: Speaking of endless filler: We get it CNN, your ratings have been in free-fall for a decade. But your hyperventilating about a missing plane is so ghoulish and inappropriate, so unseemly and ugly, that I have sworn off ever watching again. Even in airports, where paradoxically, most viewers are found.
The Robot Uprising: OK, so we have civilian drones (they are way cool) and Roombas that do a middling job of vacuuming rugs, and cars from Google that drive themselves, and the never ending blather about the Internet of things. That is a long way from Skynet blasting humans into the rubble in “The Terminator.” I for one welcome our new robot overlords. At least there will be some logic and consistency in what they do, a welcome contrast with the unpredictable behavior of human beings.
Herbalife: Is it a Ponzi scheme or just a mediocre dietary-supplement company? I am hard pressed to come up with anything I could possibly care about less than this idiotic story over a company with a $5 billion market value. Oh, wait, the billionaires are battling over it. I care about what they do even less than I care about this irrelevant company. Please make it stop.
March Bracket Madness: Thank you Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett for taking a sporting event involving the plantation system known as NCAA college athletics and squeezing what little joy was left out of it. Who ever could have guessed that dangling a billion dollars in front of already insane basketball fanatics would make the entire event a money grubbing festival of greed. Perhaps for your next trick, you can ruin baseball also.
Collapse of the Dollar, Coming Hyperinflation: OK, listen up: You have been warning about the coming inflation, inevitable collapse of the dollar, why we need a sound currency, blah blah blah for five years. When the dollar plummeted 41 percent from 2001 to 2008 none of you geniuses even noticed. So thanks for the warnings about something that already occurred in the last decade. Please go away. Better yet: keep pouring your capital into gold and bitcoin.
Anything involving anyone named Kardashian: Enough said.
Coming Market Crash: If you say a crash is coming every day for five years, when it finally comes, you get precisely zero credit for it. And if any of you doom mongers do try to take credit for calling the crash after getting it so wrong for so long, I promise the following: I will hunt you down, tie you in front of a 3D television, and run a 24/7 loop of squabbling billionaires on financial TV, CNN coverage of missing Malaysian aircraft, March Madness bracket color commentary and talking-head debates and, just for giggles, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
I doubt there is a judge in America that would convict me of anything worse than cruelty to animals.
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