RumDood 🍹

@besttrousers I see what you did there.

Very excited about this potential trans pacific partnership.

Do we actually know each other and you would like to vacate Txitter for BlueSky? I have invites!

Clicked over to watch a 2-day-old @4stringboy_ stream from the other day and switched tabs away to clear something and then switched back and it happened to coincide with Sammy literally saying "HI MATT" and my brain collapsed in on itself for a moment.

Just an FYI that I am pretty much never active here anymore. I'm on bluesky as @rumdood as well if you're there. Also on IG but not threads. I'm pretty much @rumdood everywhere, so hopefully I'll see you folks in those other places. This place sucks.

An unexpected problem with getting more into ukulele has been dealing with @UKRumfest going on and my brain keeps freezing every time I see "ukrumfest" as it tries to figure out which FOMO to activate

Flipped over to YouTube and immediately saw that @4stringboy_ has his signature @flightukulele out and it LOOKS GORGEOUS. Congrats, sir!

@RobertMSterling People by and large aren't saying that shoplifting isn't a big deal, they're saying that the insistence that it has gotten completely out of hand in the last 3 years is crap.

@RobertMSterling This ignores what the companies are saying is the actual reason they're closing stores: the INCREASE in shoplifting. Shrinkage is not $1B more than it was 3 years ago. Shrinkage is up from 1.4% to 1.5% or 1.6% in most cases.

I’ve lost all patience with the gaslighting about shoplifting—it’s just 1% of revenue, it doesn’t hurt anyone but rich investors, blah blah blah. Using numbers from Lowe's 2022 10-K, here's a quick analysis showing how destructive it really is, including killing 1,500+ jobs. 👇 (1) For retail chains, 1% of revenue is an absolutely massive number. In the case of Lowe’s, inventory shrinkage—most of which is consumer shoplifting or employee theft—cost the company $997M in 2022. That’s right: One company lost nearly a billion dollars from theft. In one year. If that $1B were the revenue of a company in its own right, it would be large enough to be publicly traded. And, again, this is just Lowe’s. Think of the scale if you added in Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and all the grocery stores and drug stores across the country. Imagine how many billions of dollars that must be. All of a sudden, 1% doesn’t seem that trivial anymore, does it? (2) Even if you still believe that 1% of revenue isn’t that big a deal, let’s look at it in terms of earnings. In 2022, Lowe’s generated $11.9B in EBITDA and $6.4B in net income. That $1B in shrinkage represents 8.4% and 15.5% of those numbers, respectively. In other words, for every $6.50 in earnings for Lowe’s shareholders, they’re losing roughly $1.00 due to theft. If Lowe’s were able to eliminate all shrinkage, EBITDA would grow more than 8%, and net income would grow 11%. The company would generate an extra $710M in earnings, all without having other sell a single extra item or grow sales by even a dollar. (3) For investors, that $710M of foregone net income is massive. In 2022, Lowe’s paid out 36.8% of net income in the form of shareholder dividends—actual cash payments to its owners, including mom-and-pop retail investors and the pension funds that represent a large portion of its shareholder base. Assuming that Lowe’s kept the same payout ratio, eliminating shrinkage would create another $261M available for dividend payments. (4) More important, though, is the earnings that Lowe’s doesn’t distribute—the cash they reinvest back into their business. In 2022, Lowe’s had $1.8B in capex, in the form of new stores, improvements to existing stores, and other strategic initiatives. This $1.8B represented 28.4% of earnings. If Lowe’s kept the same ratio and applied it to an incremental $710M in net income, that would represent an extra $202M available for capex. It costs Lowe’s about $22M to build and stock a new store, and the company has an average of 173 employees per store (inclusive of employees working in corporate-overhead positions). In other words, stolen merchandise is costing the company the opportunity to build another nine stores, which would create 1,500+ new jobs. (5) To summarize: $997M in shrinkage turns into $710M in foregone net income. This foregone net income, using 2022’s ratios, means $261M in shareholder dividends missed out on, nine stores not built, and 1,500+ jobs not created. So you really want to say that shoplifting isn’t a big deal? You really want to justify it and say that it’s a victimless crime? Go tell that to the senior citizens not getting the dividend checks that they otherwise would have received. Go to nine mid-size towns without a Lowe’s and tell them that. Go find 1,500 people looking for retail jobs and tell them that the only people getting hurt here are fat-cat shareholders. Really, go on.

This is... a wild stat. 37 percent of all US children are subjects of CPS reports (28% of white children and 53% of Black children experience CPS involvement before their 18th birthday).

@RottenInDenmark You're going to get sued by @jdcmedlock for trademark infringement!

Sometimes you just need a 3:1 cognac and Jamaican rum Sazerac

A reminder that "you can just force the central government closed and hold all its public services and workers' paychecks hostage in budget negotiations" is not how a functional country operates and is another way in which the US political system is uniquely terrible.

I'm just the son of an old farm boy, but isn't Paul literally saying he will hold the government hostage over Ukraine funding?

@jdcmedlock Stop leaking that you're thinking about it and just do it. FFS

Do it do it do it

Looking forward to the GOP platform of nationalizing the auto industry and firing all the blue collar workers.

That only took like 5 tries to post. Thanks, Twitter for the vast improvements to UX

Amazing artwork. Incredible writing by @AshleyEsqueda. Fantastic food recipes by @jed_b. Also a few mocktail recipes from yours truly (but nothing is ever perfect). Pick up a copy as soon as you can.

@DFS4114 Yeah. You rejected solidarity and then cry foul for being "othered." YOU LITERALLY CHOSE OTHER OVER THE GROUP.

I spent some time thinking about it and scabs are scabs and if they don't want to be called scabs then they are free to refuse to scab

Imagine being hurt that people you are literally working to undermine the well-being of are mad about that.