Baltes 🎮

@baltes on hive. husband, gamer, streamer, NFT right-clicker. he/him

[Rocco Botte @rocco_botte]

Masters of The Universe was guaranteed to be a flop SPECIFICALLY because they didn’t use this as the closing credits song

[Baltes 🎮 @baltes]

@DragoonKnight25 @Elocin_712 I’ll bet a copy of the game that Chad will set up shop on the Highwind

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

“I’m Jake Tapper, tonight correspondent Laura Loomer dives into Hunter Biden’s deranged trolling, Kellyanne Conway reveals Joe Biden fell asleep watching TV again, and Ian Miles Cheong confirms Biden is the reason he’s never left Malaysia. Those stories and Catturd, tonight.”

[crazy ass moments in nu metal history @numetal_moment]

@aguycalledjared So there's this shoe company

[crazy ass moments in nu metal history @numetal_moment]

"fake" by korn (1994)

[Baltes 🎮 @baltes]

The temptation to pay for X premium to DM @HunterBiden is almost great enough but not quite

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

“You picked Johnny Cash’s picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.”

@HunterBiden putting on a master class

[Baltes 🎮 @baltes]

I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced customer service and communication failures as poor as Talkiatry
I guess I’m going to go somewhere else and pay for yet another psych appointment

[Elijah Wood @elijahwood]

For the first time yesterday, I experienced the new @alamodrafthouse QR code ordering system and I can tell you it’s truly awful. Rather than making ordering food and drink more efficient, it actually adds steps to the process AND if you want to order additional items during the film you HAVE to open your phone. No, your cute reference to that irony in your How To Alamo video doesn’t negate how ridiculous this is. Please don’t cut corners with your staff and revert back to physical menus and order cards.

[Gus @Gus_802]

Republicans: Retard! You're gay! Fuck you! Fuck them! Fucking cat ladies! Fuck woke! Fucking ugly feminists! Fuck your feelings!

Democrat: Stephen Miller is fucking ugly.

Republicans: OMG WHERE ARE MY SMELLING SALTS I HAVE BEEN OFFENDED OH LOOK AT MY DELICATE LITTLE HEART!

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

Ken Paxton is throwing everything he has at us.

He’s called me a radical leftist. He’s called me a fake Christian. He’s even called me a vegan!

I’m an 8th generation Texan — I've been eating BBQ since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.

[Baltes 🎮 @baltes]

@DSKoopa Ever since my dogs destroyed the grass my back yard is practically a mud pit that they track in and out all day. It’s not even dust I blew my PC out a week ago and it was just dirt. Guarantee my controllers are gonna look like that inside 😭

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

Reporter: Ken Paxton has taken to calling you ‘Talafreako’

@JamesTalarico: If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles. This is the guy who just released Adam Hoffman from jail, an admitted child rapist, after one of Ken Paxton’s wealthy lawyer friends got involved in the case.

Ken Paxton even kept him off the sex offender registry. Adam Hoffman was supposed to serve 25 years to life, but instead he served less than a month. As of this week, he’s now back on our streets because of Ken Paxton’s corruption.

Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America, and it is costing Texans, it’s endangering our children, and it must end. The Epstein class has no place in Texas.

[Drew Harwell @drewharwell]

The longer you look at this, the worse it gets

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

At 9:15 this morning, a judge in Houston sentenced a nineteen-year-old girl named Destiny to eighteen months' probation and a felony record for stealing $87 from register 4 at a gas station.

I know this because my phone sent me a news alert. I read it at my desk. Then I put my phone down and opened the correction queue.

I process payroll corrections for National Staffing Solutions. We have 14,000 client employers. I have a dropdown menu with four options. Corrected. Disputed. Escalated. Closed. I select one. The ticket resolves. Last quarter I processed 2,300 corrections totaling $4.2 million in wages that employers took from workers and kept until someone filed a ticket.

There is no fifth option. There is no option for Charged.

That's a correction.

At 2:47 PM, a woman sat down at my desk. Her name is Maria in our system. She works the night shift at a warehouse. She has been logging 47 hours per week. She has been paid for 40. For 156 consecutive weeks. Three years. The system owes her $6,300.

She brought a notebook. A composition book. The cover was falling off. She had calculated her overtime by hand, every week, in pencil, because she did not trust the pay stubs. I looked at the numbers. Every line was correct. She had been doing the math in her head every Friday for two years before she started writing it down. Two years of arithmetic in her head while mopping floors at 3 AM because the company that owes her $6,300 rounds down and she wanted to be sure.

I scanned the notebook and attached it to the ticket. She asked what happens to the ticket. I told her it goes into the correction queue. She asked how long. I told her ninety days. She asked if she would get the money. I told her the employer would be notified.

She asked again. I did not have a different answer. She knew that. She asked anyway. I think she wanted me to hear myself say it twice.

I closed the ticket. I selected "Corrected" from the dropdown. The system auto-generated a thank you email. Her first name is misspelled in the email. It has been misspelled since intake. We correct wages. We do not correct names.

American employers steal $50 billion per year from their workers. I want you to sit with that number. The FBI says all robberies in America total $482 million. All burglaries: $3.4 billion. All larcenies: $5.4 billion. All motor vehicle thefts: $7.5 billion. Every piece of property stolen by every criminal in America totals $16.8 billion. Wage theft is three times that. I learned this at a compliance industry seminar in 2022. The slide was titled "Market Opportunity." The room had 340 people. Everybody wrote it down. Nobody left.

The Department of Labor has 611 investigators for 165 million workers. That is one investigator for every 278,000 workers. It is a 52-year staffing low. There were more investigators in 1973. Last year, the DOL recovered $259 million. That is 0.5% of what was taken. We call the 0.5% enforcement. We call the other 99.5% the correction window.

That's a correction.

The same week Destiny stole $87 from register 4, an employer in Houston withheld $340,000 in wages from 280 workers over two years. The Department of Labor assessed a civil penalty of $14,000. The employer paid it the way you pay a parking ticket. The employer is still operating. The employer does not have a record. Destiny will have hers when she is twenty-nine. She will have it when she is thirty-nine. She will carry it into every job interview for the rest of her life. The employer will carry a correction.

My daughter turned nineteen last month. I spent $87 on her birthday dinner. I was typing Maria's ticket number into the system when I thought about that and my hands stopped on the keyboard for a moment I cannot explain to you except to say that $87 is a very specific number when you have processed 11,400 corrections and not one of them has been referred for criminal prosecution. The category does not exist in my system. I have looked. There is Compliance Remediation. There is Classification Adjustment. There is Closed — No Further Action. There is no category called Theft.

I looked. It is not there.

That's a correction.

The correction queue closes tickets in ninety days. A closed ticket is not an open crime. The window closes the case before the worker opens one. Every quarter I present the metrics. The number of corrections is rising. We present this as improved compliance. The slide is green. Green means we are catching more theft. We are catching more theft because there is more theft. The slide does not show the second number. The slide is green because we designed the slide.

$87 is a felony. $6,300 is a ticket. $340,000 is a correction. $50 billion is a slide.

I eat lunch at my desk at 12:15 because the correction queue empties briefly when the East Coast offices close. I have eaten lunch at my desk for seven years. I have a lucite block on my desk that says Compliance Excellence. I received it in 2023. It is the only award I have ever received for anything.

It is heavier than it looks.

[PropaGandalf 🌾 @xghostnotesx]

Imagine being the head of the FBI and helping to orchestrate a false flag to save the president’s political career but it just results in your girlfriend getting dicked down in a supply closet and reported on national television

[Baltes 🎮 @baltes]

@FBIDirectorKash you ever get tired of leading such an Abbot & Costello life?

[connor @ConnorEatsPants]

@FBIDirectorKash @FBI hey man i just read in the new york times that your girlfriend is cheating on you