Yearly Archives: 2022

Still alive after the month of Hell. (COVID and Shingles)

For the last month, I’ve been in bed watching TV.

I’m actually quite annoyed at how long this has all gone on.

It all started when I came down with COVID late last month and I went to the CVS when I got back into Illinois and used their clinic to get Molnupiravir to treat it.

After a couple days on that, I started feeling better. I completed my 5 day course and other than a post-viral cough, I felt fine.

A couple days went by and then more trouble. I had a blister in my mouth.

Then another one on the other side, both on my upper lip.

Before I knew it, I ended up getting a mouth full of sores and lips cracking and bleeding.

I called the doctor and she asked me to come by and she’d give me some Valtrex.

We had assumed that it was an HSV-1 outbreak because I’ve had it for about 20 years, and it never crops up except as a mild nuisance about once every 5 years, usually in the winter, and I go on some Valtrex for it and it clears back up quickly.

I ran out of Valtrex again, and my mouth continued getting worse. By last Saturday, my gums had turned completely white and I lost all of the feeling in them, and what I could feel stung, itched, and burned.

The doctor looked at the photos I sent and said I was having an oral outbreak of Shingles, and called in a lot more Valtrex, and here I am a week later, and day 13 of _this_ (day 7 of Valtrex) is the first day I’ve eaten and brushed my teeth without pain.

The correct color is coming back to my gums. My lips are healing. I can feel around my mouth again.

For over 10 days, I was popping pain medicine for my mouth every time my watch beeped. I had it set so that I wouldn’t take more than the maximum dosage, but as soon as each dose wore off, my teeth started to ache (all of them did) and the soreness came back, and I was laying here biting down on a cough drop on each side to help take the focus off of that until I could have more pain pills.

I think I went through more pain medicine between the two infections than I have in the past 30 years, for everything, put together.

I thought the COVID was bad until it let loose the Shingles, which was a fair deal more painful. Not that the COVID was pleasant. There were times when I was coughing so much crap out of my lungs that I kept a bucket next to the futon I’ve been sleeping on so that it could go directly into that.

I had to wear my nightguard even with all of the blankets in the house on top of me because I was chilling so badly that I was afraid I’d crack a tooth and need to go to the dentist when it was over.

The COVID was bad even with the vaccinations and the medicine. And as a bonus, it woke up some dormant infections that a healthy immune system normally suppresses without any help and caused a massive explosion of pain and suffering from that too.

There are still people out there joking about “going back to calling it the flu” or something and a media that runs stories like “Is it the flu, allergies, or COVID?” doesn’t help. You’ll probably know.

I wouldn’t wish this on most of the people I hate.

There were at least three points where if I was in a civilized country I might have gone to the ER out of an abundance of caution, but in the US, pretty much all they do is get you to sign financial responsibility forms, do a hell of a lot of nothing, and then send you home to wait for a bill that costs more than most of the cars I’ve owned.

If you can avoid COVID, avoid COVID. It’s probably not worth doing whatever it was that got you infected.

I get that people have to go to work, but we all need to continue to be vigilant and not take any extra stupid risks.

According to the CDC, I outlasted 97% of Americans as far as when COVID hit me the first time. I have no doubt that some day I’ll likely get it again, but I’d rather minimize it.

There are people out there getting it 3-4 times per year, and not even treating it with pills, and by that point it’s just absolutely devastated their body, and you can tell by talking to them that they’re not right anymore. Not good.

I keep rubber gloves in my car for the gas pump, hand sanitizer, we still wear face masks if we do go somewhere even if those around us don’t, and I don’t do any of my grocery shopping in the store anymore.

But it’s a given that my spouse has to work in person and the customers and coworkers are idiots who don’t understand that they are playing with fire. If I get it again, that’ll be why.

Now that I know how it’s likely to play out, I do plan to always have some COVID tests on hand so if I feel weird at all I can test and get to the medicine quickly, and I’m going to have a bottle of Valtrex ready to go so that if HSV or VZV outbreak follows, I can start on it as soon as the first blister appears.

I’ll at least have the advantage of it not being my first time down at the rodeo.

I do have no doubt in my mind that I may have been hospitalized or dead (or wishing I was dead) had I not gone on the two rounds of antiviral medication.

I’m luckier than most Americans in that I have decent enough insurance that I can see the doctor and get prescriptions filled without worrying too much, but like most Americans, we fear the hospital bill more than what sends us to the hospital. 😛

I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

When my spouse tested positive for COVID-19 on the 14th of this month (November 2022), I immediately took him to get Paxlovid at the CVS Minute Clinic.

I continued testing myself for the next 14 days and since I felt okay on Friday, I went to see my mom and cousins in Indiana for Thanksgiving dinner over the weekend.

Big mistake.

On Saturday night (actually early AM Sunday) in the hotel room, just hours after dinner, I woke up with all of the COVID symptoms. Mom took me and my spouse back to the train station, and we spent all evening on trains trying to get back home. I was starting to wheeze and gag and cough, but I had an N95 mask on and sealed it properly, and kept my head down and away from everyone else.

A simple carry-on bag felt like lugging around a dead elephant, and my lungs were on fire and filling up with fluid that had a “gritty, sand-like” substance in it.

We got home last night. I had been taking Tylenol every 6 hours on the way back to try to keep moving. I took a COVID test, and it was positive.

Since I had expected it to be, I scheduled an appointment at the local CVS Minute Clinic for this afternoon while I was still in Indiana.

I went to bed, and again, the COVID symptoms came back with a vengeance. Worse than Saturday/Sunday.

Sore joints, burning in the lungs, burning in the nose, sharp stabbing pains all over my body. Headache, extreme chills (so bad that I had to put my dental guard in to avoid tooth damage from chattering, and this while I was under two comforters and a winter sleeping bag splayed out as a blanket, and had a space heater aimed right at me.

Sinus drainage, sneezing fits. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

In such pain I was literally screaming, as best I could, before giving up and calling my spouse on the phone, dialing it with my nose, last night, to ask him…one….word….at…a….time to get me Tylenol, water, throat numbing spray, cough drops, and hot tea.

I had 3x monovalent Pfizer vaccine. For me it was 2/26/21, 3/21/21, 8/29/21, and then a bivalent on 10/6/22, and it was similar for my spouse.

Roy Schestowitz recalled that I drove across the state of Illinois and back 4x to get the vaccine sooner. I did everything I was “supposed” to do and still got it, and it’s kicking my ass.

I’m really not a complainer.

I’ve been sick before and just toughed it out, but this is next level shit. I’ve gone through more Tylenol in the last 3 days than I have in the 20 years prior to that. I usually skip it even when I have a headache because I don’t want to take the stuff. I don’t like taking a lot of pills. But now I’m even on experimental pills!

My spouse is now undergoing “Paxlovid rebound”, but the Nurse Practitioner wouldn’t prescribe me Paxlovid, because it interacts with three of my medications.

One of those I can’t stop taking and the interaction is potentially life threatening (came up on the screen in red).

Also, I have high blood pressure and am on medicine for it, and the Paxlovid can raise blood pressure.

So I’m not even angry at the NP for that. Handing me something that could put me in an even worse predicament than just COVID would be reckless and I’m glad she didn’t do it.

Most people, however, don’t even know what pills they are taking, or what they do. Mom’s a nurse, and she’s been one long enough to experience many people where if the doctor says swallow a pill, they swallow it, and if they say list your medicines, they shrug and go “uh nuh”.

So I know everything I’m taking and knew to talk to the NP about interactions. Many people are probably getting Paxlovid prescriptions when it risks damaging their body.

I ended up suggesting Molnupirovir (Lagevrio), which is currently under Emergency Use Authorization, in only the United States, iirc.

It’s not as effective, apparently, but it doesn’t have all of those drug interactions. It’s supposedly designed to screw up the virus by inserting the drug into the RNA, causing the virus to undergo catastrophic replication error.

Merck originally said it was 50% effective at keeping mild to moderate COVID from progressing to “hospital or death”, but later studies show it’s more like 30%. It still beats nothing. I took my first dose right away.

Pfizer brought a bunch of products to market that don’t seem to be leaving the people taking them much better off in the end. Bourla himself, I’ve heard, has had COVID twice?

To top it all off, I’ve never seen this many people in public, no masks on even, hacking and coughing. Usually not even bothering to cover it.

Mom’s starting to come down with symptoms, again. It couldn’t possibly past the incubation phase from when I was near her.

She said it’s probably that supervisor at work who wears her mask under her nose that stopped for 15 minutes to have a pointless conversation with her, and then tested positive.

Then I got another call today where she said COVID is in the building and bowling over everyone. Staff. Residents.

My cousin said it was in the facility she works in like that too.

But Biden said “Pandemic’s over, Jack!” and then got an ice cream cone.

And have you checked out these Black Friday deals?

Do your part for the ECONOMY.

Now, the mainstream media is bullshitting us and saying it’s “still out there” but “it’s very mild” and “deaths and cases are steadily going down”.

That has not been my experience in this matter.

Walmart COVID Leave Policy doesn’t pay employees if they get COVID.

Walmart COVID Leave Policy doesn’t pay employees if they get COVID.

I noticed that they stopped doing it in March, stating that the leave of absence policy had cost them $400 million in paid time off, so if it happens to you now, you’re just entirely on your own.

My spouse works at Walmart, so it looks like he just won’t get paid until he’s well enough to return to work. Lucky for us, we have some money in the bank and even if that wasn’t enough, I could keep things moving along until we get our tax check and cash out some savings bonds. This is very unusual for a household that has one person working at Walmart though. And so I can shrug and say “At least our income taxes won’t be so bad next year.”.

The CDC and the doctor (who prescribed Paxlovid) said take 5 days off and go back on Sunday.

The CDC bases the “5 days” advice on the 5 days where you’re “the most contagious”.

However, most Walmart workers can’t afford to take an unpaid week off work, so the two that came in and knew they had it were probably just trying to make money and hope that none of their coworkers, who now have it, would notice.

And they ended up causing a superspreader event that has several people at the local store out sick with COVID, plus however many of their family members come down with it.

The disruption to Walmart’s long term profitability of not giving any leave for vaccine side effects or COVID itself is going to be worse for the bottom line than just paying it out as a form of Short Term Disability, but we live in a society that’s being super cruel to service workers, and then the problem rebounds onto everyone.

One of the reasons I rushed down to Highland Park and got him on Paxlovid is that we have to get this under control as fast as possible. Every day he’s off work does cost us more.

The government didn’t make that easy. As I said in my last post, all of the test-and-treat centers are in rich cities. They don’t have a single one in the city we live in. Population 90,000.

I was already banned from Mastodon.social after three days for insulting the Chinese Communist government and talking about Bill Gates.

I was already banned from Mastodon.social after three days (of actually using it much) for insulting the Chinese Communist government and talking about Bill Gates.

My Mastodon.social account was “Limited” today and they cited “the rules” without actually citing any rules. But they did list three posts that were the reason they did it.

I have screenshots and you can decide for yourself if this is another Social Control Media site like Facebook and Twitter.

Fortunately, Mastodon is federated, so I’ve made another account at mstdn.social and pinned a “I’m not here anymore.” message for anyone who was following me to see, so they know where I am at now.

We’ll see how this goes.

Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.

“Mainstream” media, such as CNN and BBC, mention Mastodon as Elon Musk drives users (and advertisers) away in droves. Bonus: Facebook was also a fever dream that traded as a valuable stock.

The “mainstream” media is mentioning Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter.

CNN notes today that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Elon Musk officially took over Twitter. For a total of 655,000 active users. BBC also mentions it.

CNN failed to mention that while Twitter has more “users”, many millions of them are just spammers, bots, advertising accounts, and dormant accounts, some of which haven’t been logged into in years.

I also saw an account that monitors Mastodon activity which, as of around 1 AM last night was showing about 6 million total accounts, with approximately 6,000 new accounts being created per _hour_ in the past day, but now I’m having trouble locating that to link to.

At any rate, it’s impossible to deny that the Fediverse is growing and that Elon Musk is the reason why.

When Andrew Lee took over and ruined Freenode, he ultimately chased out 91% of the users, and dealt with the problem of people abandoning their channels and saying the new room was on OFTC or Libera.Chat by taking over and resetting channels.

So far, many Twitter users are saying their last post will be to advise people where to follow them on Mastodon. How long until Musk has someone detect this and ban the account for talking about leaving and where they’re going?

Musk has been furious at the pace at which Twitter’s largest advertisers have been bailing on him. He “threatened” a “Thermonuclear Name and Shame” if “it doesn’t stop”, so apparently “freedom of speech” means being extorted by Musk into propping up his company which loses “$5 million a day” and rising, “or else” he’ll put your company on a “boycott list” for his followers.

Musk is not a very smart man. Like most rich people, he was born into generational wealth.

Worse, the generational wealth in the Musk family was generated by slave labor in South African emerald mines.

When people are rich they can buy media coverage and cover up for the fact that they’re not smart, they just “have people” for everything.

TED Talks are a joke. When they have people like Musk, they don’t ask him hard questions. They ask softball questions, and he even has to flub his way through these.

Like saying that the biggest threat to humanity is “malignant AI”. Like, he almost recalls watching The Terminator or something. In reality, we have nothing close to “AI” at the present time.

We unfortunately have “voice assistants”, which are different. They “fake” AI by having a wide range of pre-programmed responses, and if it very nearly does sound like someone is sitting in your phone answering your questions, it’s because of this and the fact that a voice actor sat down for hours on end recording speech samples so that “Siri” could have a voice.

But it’s not AI. Not even close. It’s unfortunate that they can fake it well enough to have lonely and depressed people form emotional attachments to a phone, but it’s not AI.

“Siri” is a product of marketing scum and psychiatrists knowing how you’re wired and creating a product to exploit you.

(These voice assistants are “always on” spyware that can be a wiretap.)

Elon Musk is a clown. He gets away with faking “intelligence” because nobody ever forces him into a corner and asks him anything hard. He’s just really rich and he’s an attention whore with personality traits that are very much not unlike Donald Trump.

When Musk wants attention, he shows up in a bad cowboy costume smoking dope and saying “something something Mars” and people listen to him.

Back to Musk’s empty threats….Boycott lists almost never work. They just don’t.

People might say they’re mad at Coca-Cola and GM, but they all keep buying Coke and Chevy trucks, so what difference does it make?

Fox News is portraying this as-if Musk has the upper hand by making these absurd threats, and he doesn’t.

There’s better deals for advertisers out there. Even FM radio, because people still listen in their cars.

He’s also busy pissing off people with millions of followers who made Twitter popular as an advertising platform by claiming he’s going to get them to pay him $20 or maybe $8, depending on what mood he’s in, for a blue check-mark.

Stephen King said he’d leave if he had to pay Musk anything for a blue check-mark, and King has a lot of money. He’s offended by the idea he should pay Musk to make Musk’s platform more popular for advertisers.

What’s driving away all of the advertisers and users is Musk’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Literally the second day he owned the company, he tweeted a bizarre anti-LGBT conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Pelosi’s husband, and then deleted it.

Then he’s allowed hate speech to swell by over 500% without doing any sort of content moderation. Why would brands want to be associated with this? Twitter is becoming the official platform of right-wing cranks and Klansmen.

He defended laying off 3,750 people, in the middle of the night in some cases, by claiming the company is losing too much money to let them remain employed, without mentioning that his bid of $54.20 per share, a weed joke, was probably an over-payment of at least $4.20 per share, and would have allowed him to spare everyone who got laid off.

Not that he wanted to spare the people he let go. His first targets were the ethics team and the people who police misinformation, voting scams, and hate speech.

Put it all together, and not only is Twitter basically finished, but Musk has put on full display that he’s so incompetent that it didn’t even take him half a month to make it unsalvageable.

Proprietary “social media” with advertising, Russian (and other) troll farms, and government back doors are finally on the way out.

On top of Musk ruining Twitter (such that it was anywhere close to acceptable before) and leaving people scrambling to adopt Mastodon, Facebook has been losing advertising revenue while burning all of its cash on “Metaverse”, which is turning into a bigger joke every day, with investors more or less powerless to oust Mark Zuckerberg or stop him from burning cash.

(He controls 90% of the B Shares, which have 10 votes for each publicly traded A share.)

“Meta” (Facebook) stock is currently worth about a fifth of what it was just last year, and most analysts see a Long Term Negative outlook.

I notice whenever I do look at who is using Facebook these days, that it’s old people. People like my dad and Aunt (dad’s sister) who re-share their own posts because they don’t know how posts work, or make 8-9 accounts because they keep getting taken over by spammers.

Facebook hasn’t had anyone interesting on it for years, but the “mainstream” media says it’s “growing”.

It has every reason to want to be in denial. Billionaires and the governments (not just “your” government) have put a lot of money into these platforms.

They have back doors set up. If they fail, then the government is less effective at spying on you. They also let these companies into the major stock markets using fake valuations.

Facebook being in the S&P 500 in the first place was like the stock market version of allowing Greece into the European Union and Eurozone, and now the price tag is beginning to become known.

The losses won’t stop piling up at _only_ ~80% of what the company was said to be worth last year.

The people holding Twitter stock were lucky that a billionaire idiot came along to rescue them, because it wasn’t worth 10% of what he paid.

Had Twitter actually been worth anything like what he had paid on its own, there’s no way that the people running it would have sued him to force him to buy it, knowing they would all be fired. They got a good deal for their investors and themselves (as their shares vested upon being fired at the price Musk paid for them), and got out quickly.

Now Musk is furious because he’s such a narcissist that he thought he’d come in and fix everything because he knows everything, of course, and it’s just another failing Musk cash furnace. Already losing money, and now losing their advertisers and the people who would have been seeing the ads had the advertisers stayed.

Musk thinks he’ll charge people $7.99 a month for Twitter in the middle of the worst recession in global history.

If they don’t pay it, I think they’ll see “fewer” ads anyway until it’s down to the point the company is disbanded.

Now, Musk apparently thinks that he can _also_ turn Twitter into a YouTube competitor.

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t even use YouTube that much anymore. The drive to monetize everything has led to a lot of non-genuine content that you can only sort of roll your eyes at.

When Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips deliberately broke Pop_OS! to get “likes” and “views”, he knew what he was doing. No actual user is stupid enough that, when presented with a warning from a package manager that something’s not right and proceeding will most likely break the operating system, there’s no way they would type “Yes, do as I say.” and hit ENTER. But it generated a lot of attention, and attention (for advertisers) is all most people uploading YouTube videos are after.

So Musk says he’ll make Twitter an even more fake/synthetic form of “social” network than it is now, to drive “engagement”.

But Facebook is finding out that you can’t engage like this, even with “algorithms” except to a very stupid part of the population, and they’ve lost 4/5ths of their stock price to get to where they are today.

Similarly, YouTube (Google), responded to negative reactions to fake/synthetic “content” by neutering the Dislike button so you couldn’t look at it and see what real people thought.

It’s a way of gaslighting. You can still see “Likes”, but are they even people that are “Liking” the video? Who is clicking on this crap? Bots?

I don’t think there’s a future in the fake Social Network business.

Was it all just a meme that went on for a couple decades only to crash because they got too greedy and started squeezing too hard? It certainly appears that way to me.

I believe, and hope, that we’re witnessing the people swiftly rejecting this madness and forming actual communities, using open standards.

Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi.

As of Sunday, October 30th, 2022, Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi. (NewsWaffle proxy of Original.)

It also doesn’t appear that Mr. Garrett has made any tweets that acknowledge what’s going on in there.

I’ve reached out to Mr. Garrett on Techrights IRC to see if he has anything to say about why he’s still on a platform that is now 100% owned by a homophobe who is blaming gay people for the attack on Paul Pelosi (Quite an odd accusation, but when have conspiracy theories made sense lately?), which will now do pretty much nothing about far-right cranks.

I will note any reply I receive.

Musk later simply deleted the tweet, by which time it had over 24,000 shares and 89,000 likes.

Old anti-margarine laws resurface and protect consumers as food companies add water to the food supply to hide shortages and price hikes.

Old anti-margarine laws resurface and protect consumers as food companies add water to the food supply to hide shortages and price hikes.

In the United States, the dairy industry has been influential enough over that years that in many states, it was illegal to sell margarine, or at least yellow margarine.

In Wisconsin, there are still anti-margarine laws on the books. One of them makes it illegal for the Sheriffs and the state agency managing the prisons to feed margarine to the prisoners.

As part of the anti-margarine laws, butter became a highly regulated product. There are different “grades” of butter, but the only kind you’re likely to come across in the stores are AA graded, which is the highest possible rating.

Margarine, in comparison, has no legal definition, and many companies are eschewing the “margarine” label even if some state has a definition. Simply calling something a “spread” or a “plant-based butter” or “buttery tasting spread” is undefined.

So it should come as no surprise when ConAgra decided to fill their “Smart Balance” product full of water, except that they figured consumers wouldn’t notice as big of a change as they tried to pull off and be angry.

Many of the reviews I’ve read say that the stuff is now semi-liquid or semi-solid, and it takes twice as much to cook with, and it doesn’t properly melt anymore.

Margarine, in my book, is a no-go in the kitchen anyway. It’s something that most people only ever bought for economic reasons or some seriously misplaced concern for their health.

(Margarine is not healthy, it just has different health hazards than real butter.)

Since butter is legally defined, there’s never any surprises when I take it home. If the cost to make it goes up, the price I pay at the store goes up, but it’s still butter, and I still get four sticks per box that add up to a pound.

While I was looking around, I noticed that food I buy at Walmart is gradually being replaced with water.

Some non-margarine examples are Stouffer’s Stuffed Peppers, which used to be very flavorful (for frozen dinner) and covered in a viscous and tasty tomato sauce.

I just made them for dinner tonight and my spouse said “Dinner was not good.”. I said, “I know, Stouffer’s used to be the best.”.

The stuffed peppers are so watery now that I tried to get them to my plate as they splayed and fell apart, and the meat/rice mixture was so loosely held together that the fork went through it way easier than you should be able to cut “meat”.

Somehow, they added 10 calories per serving vs. the pictured item on Walmart’s Web site.

I also noticed that Hellman’s Mayonnaise is being watered down.

They used to be the best Mayo you could buy at the store, and now they’re just the most expensive. They’re doing these gimmicky rebates like Stouffer’s is instead of maintaining product quality.

On the “Hellman’s Mayo with Avocado Oil”, it’s not even 100% Avocado oil that they use. If you look at the ingredients, water is the first ingredient, and then there is still soybean and canola oil.

There’s only a tiny amount of Avocado oil in there. Just enough to make an issue of it on the product label.

Hellman’s Mayo has actually been run into the ground now to the point where the Walmart store brand is actually better, and has more eggs and oils and less WATER, and it’s half the price.

I think what’s going on here are two things.

They don’t want to shrink the packages further because they know that customers are getting tired of that, and they’re onto them. They don’t want to increase prices, but they have, because Congress and Biden have ruined the US Dollar’s buying power with inflation, and so their last card to play is slip some water in and see if anyone makes a big fuss about it.

In at least the Smart Balance margarine case, “consumer” feedback was so strongly negative and sudden that they promised to have the old formulation back in stores by Winter. We’ll see.

It’s insulting that these companies think that they can slip this by people and will ultimately have customers buying their products again.

In the case of Stouffer’s, they’ve always been a life hack for when you don’t have time to make dinner yourself. For now, the stuffed peppers were the only awful product we’ve come across. I bought some others, on rebate.

We had the salisbury steaks last night and those are still okay. I didn’t think they were watery or using tricks to bulk up the meat to an egregious level, like the stuffed peppers I have a chicken lasagna we’ll get to eventually.

But the general trend in the grocery store is 30% higher prices Year over Year, and when you get home, you find out that they skimp on seasonings and slipped in water to hide the inflation.

I also noticed this going on in lunch meat. Brands that used to say “Contains up to 14% of a solution.” (water) They’re now up to 20%.

This actually makes me a lot angrier than them just admitting there’s inflation and giving me their former recipes.

Facebook is dying as the tech bubble bursts.

Facebook is collapsing right in front of us.

All you have to do is look at their stock price.

It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.

This is Illinois and this is America under the Democratic Party.

Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.

Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.

But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?

Cat pictures?

Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?

Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?

They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.

Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.

Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.

Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.

Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)

I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.

(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)

He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.

I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available.

BaronHK's Rants