A few weeks ago, I saw a movie called Normal. It was a violent shoot-em-up set in a small Minnesota town named Normal, starring Bob Odenkirk as the new sheriff. I guess his new standard role is as a more humorous, laid-back John Wick. Anyway, the premise of the movie, which was rather unbelievable, is that this town was a quiet, secret storage place for vast sums of yakuza money. Ha ha, very likely. The new sheriff discovers the hoard of cash and gold, and hijinks ensue, hijinks that involve the citizens of the town shooting and blowing things up to protect their lucrative local industry.
It was entertaining, but not great, and nothing like the small town Minnesota I see. Except…
Today I went downtown to pay my home insurance bill at a local bank. This bank has always felt weird to me — there are never any clients inside, it’s got these gigantic high ceilings and very classy decor, and I only ever see one or two tellers at “work,” that is, doing nothing but sitting at their desks looking bored. Suddenly, the idea that this bank could be a front for yakuza treasure seemed a little more probable.
Then I discovered that the bill I was paying was not for 6 months coverage, but for one month. Eeep. This was way too high for me, or for most people in this little town, so now I’m thinking that the idea that we’re under the yakuza seems much more plausible.
Bob Odenkirk, come save us!
That’s so 20th century of you!
How many bills do you pay by walking to a physical location ?
I’d never get anything done if I didn’t have autopay.
Yes, the reason there is nobody at the bank is because everyone is handling their transactions remotely. But maybe you do it for exercise?
I live in 19th century America.
Odenkirk was in that Nobody movie which I didn’t see, except for the bus scene. I did recently see a Korean movie that influenced John Wick, called The Man from Nowhere. That was intense and very emotional. Some dude on Youtube said it was one of the best action movies ever, so I stopped watching his video and found the movie. Next level.
I have seen some pretty entertaining yakuza themed movies including Kate and Yakuza Princess.
Why be normal?
According to that poster, 6/7 of the people in that small town are packin’.
Coming from the small-town South, I find that plausible – just not that everybody draws at once and aims in different directions.
I see Henry Winkler in the poster. The Fonz would have had the town cleaned up in 1/2 an hour.
One of Jethro Tull’s best albums was titled ‘Living in the Past’.
We don’t use the word ‘normal’, it is not appropriate, and cannot be defined, in this plutocratic, magat run world in which we are trapped. There is nothing wrong with living in a physical world, especially if it is a city that is of a manageable size with some decent people in it. When we see the mainslime news on broadcast TV, it shows the many daily shootings and deadly car crashes in phoenix.
We do not allow crapitallist corporations to control us with ‘autopay’. Too many people I know have not been able to stop ‘autopay’ when they dump one of those abusive crapitallist corporations.
I just dumped windows 11 from a laptop and made the owner happy with Linux Mint running on it: simple, clean, free, does everything they want without the constant microsquish anguish of being interrupted and waiting updates to finish.
re shermanj@9: I have been looking to migrate from Win10 to Linux Mint, and granted I haven’t done much research on it, did the recent exploits affect Linux Mint?
in reply to @10 Johnson Catman: Linux Mint, until it puts out a version with the Linux Kernel of 7 is still vulnerable. However, that client won’t use that computer for sensitive data. The 26.04 versions of all the ubuntu variants is safe from that vulnerability, as is Linux Lite 8rc2 and others. Distrowatch has a search so you can find which Linux has kernel 7. However, there are now more complications caused by the windows-centric ‘bios’ setup settings. If you are running win10 on a computer that is older than 2019, you may have luck installing Linux without a lot of hassle. You can download a Live Linux at many of the various ‘distributions’, put it onto a usb drive and try it without ruining the existing win10. There are a lot of websites with info on how to transition to Linux. I hope it works out well for you.
in additional ireply to @10 Johnson Catman: Distrowatch has ads for companies that sell laptops with Linux already installed. But, they are often somewhat expensive. Some offer long warranties and lifetime support. Also, the new versions of Linux require more RAM than before, sometimes 8GB just to run it. However there are ‘distros’ that run on older computers. just look for kernel 7 in the specs of Linux and those computers.
I’m with PZ here.
I don’t have an internet bank account.
I still pay most bills by checks put in an envelope with a stamp on it.
I occasionally walk into my bank branch and cash a check written to myself for spending on common transactions. Like lunch today.
A lot of merchants prefer cash because the credit card companies take their percentage cut. Google says the average is 2.5%.
The bank is usually deserted and I’m the only customer when I walk in.
The last time, the bank teller helpfully told me that I could do all this online.
I pointed out that no one could hack my bank account because…I don’t have an online bank account.
My insurance, government, and health care accounts have all be part of hacks, none due to me, where the agencies send me a letter saying 1 million accounts have been sent to Russia or Transnitra or wherever and they are sorry and I should change my Social Security number and all my passwords.
Well, OK, maybe they should change their security procedures first.
@ ^ raven : Yup.
Banking and so much more is now so terminally totally online.
So reliant on computers and so locked away inside a literally intangible virtual world – and so vulnerable to another Carrington Event* an EMP and or just hacking, beings swamped in AI slop nonsnse, etc..
It does just seem. well, strange and unwise are understatements.
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Maybe that Canvas data that was stolen is being used by the insurance company’s AI (I’m kidding of course*) and its analysis determined that your upcoming retirement and moving your spider experiments to your home is excuse enough to up your rates. Tell ’em to up their rates where the sun don’t shine.
It is only a matter of time before actuaries are replaced by these kinds of shenanigans.
I’ve lived in Pasadena, CA for 48 years. There’s a corner restaurant not far from my house that has never seemed to have much business – always strange ethnic food, no parking, and on a bad busy corner. The restaurant has changed hands many, many times over the years, presumably because of inescapable business failure. I used to joke with my wife that it was a Mafia front. Now I’m not so sure it was a joke.
@16: There was a restaurant — Italian, as it happens — near where I used to to work, that never seemed to have any cars in the parking lot. Not the greatest location, nothing else around it, except for the large tech place just up the road. The one time my department went to lunch there, we were the only people in the place, but somehow it stayed open for many years. So the local folklore at least is that it was a Mob front.
Went past there the other week, the site is now being redeveloped into medium-density residential.