They put the personal information of their customers into Amazon AWS, and then like Microsoft’s Azure “cloud” also usually does, it spilled everything out in a data breach.
In the case of Capital One and Amazon AWS, it’s just yet another way the bad guys will have my personal information forever.
I was expecting maybe $10-20 and it ended up being a lot more than that. You almost never get any amount of money for these things. They just comply with meaningless “regulations” from the government about informing you and giving you “credit monitoring” for a year. So I’m surprised they paid anything at all.
When I woke up and got the E-Mail about the size of the check I was….well, you always need money, right?
Unfortunately, the terms of the settlement did not require them to ditch Amazon AWS and develop some method of storing data that has some security to it, so there’s nothing preventing it from happening over and over again.
Microsoft Azure is hardly a choice either. After endless breaches, for its part, Microsoft usually screams that its customers are to blame for misconfiguring Azure.
If Microsoft can’t even configure it to protect Microsoft’s own trade secrets, who can?
The only reason companies choose these “solutions” is because they get to outsource from having proper IT and it sounds good to a bean counter, and it’s your information they’re exposing anyway.
Microsoft overbuilt and loses money, and burns through excess capacity with “AI”, and even that comes up to bite the user in the ass.
Yesterday, my spouse told me we were going to his friend’s house.
When we got there, it was yet another friend with one of these damned Ring Doorbells.
I don’t recall the part of the Illinois Felony Eavesdropping Law or the Biometric Information Privacy Act, where I gave Amazon or random homeloaners (they usually don’t own their house, they owe debt to banks) permission to record me, my face, my voice, or my conversations.
Yet it seems the government is promoting these. Chicago even has a program that pays people to put them in.
Something that causes the homeloaner and Amazon to commit felonies every day and open themselves up to civil lawsuits for stolen biometrics at $5,000 per incident be damned, the police have people to spy on!
The people who install these things have been hoisted on their own petard before, like that dude in Michigan who got convicted after he filmed himself shooting at the black kid who “missed the school bus” and ended up with video footage from his own doorbell, which they pulled from Amazon’s server, which he could not delete, center stage at his own trial.
Typically, they tell people who don’t like Ring that we are paranoid nutcases.
No, the paranoid nutcases are the people who install the Ring. They are committing serious crimes, at least in Illinois, just by having it there and doing what it does, and they are all freaked out that someone will break into their house and steal from them and rape them by a hyper-sensationalized news media, which is working with the government to make Americans suspicious of each other.
Where making them fear a crime wave that isn’t actually going on hasn’t worked, the media has started blasting more garbage about COVID.
The situation in America benefits when people don’t want to know or care about anyone else, and adopt a bunker mentality where it’s all about them and the things they need….to protect their television set, or something, I don’t know. It’s fucking stupid, isn’t it?
I have never installed a Ring and I never will.
This is Surveillance Capitalism and police state horseshit.
Anecdotally, my ex was mugged in Chicago and the mugger actually grinned real big at the camera. The Chicago police gave us a report number and nothing ever happened after that.
The Ring doesn’t solve crime.
The Ring turns you into a criminal for recording me.
(720 ILCS 5/14-4)(from Ch. 38, par. 14-4) Sec. 14-4. Sentence. (a) Eavesdropping, for a first offense, is a Class 4 felony and, for a second or subsequent offense, is a Class 3 felony. (b) The eavesdropping of an oral conversation or an electronic communication of any law enforcement officer, State's Attorney, Assistant State's Attorney, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General, or a judge, while in the performance of his or her official duties, if not authorized by this Article or proper court order, is a Class 3 felony, and for a second or subsequent offense, is a Class 2 felony. (Source: P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14.)
The “Intellectual Property” Stage of Capitalism and the Modern American Economy.
I saw a video on YouTube (Invidious Proxy) about where “managers” came from.
Today, most low wage hellholes like Taco Bell and Walmart call everyone a “manager” to placate them with a job title, give them tons of extra work, and take away overtime pay, in exchange for another 50 cents an hour or something.
The video went into more detail about how it was a Capitalist response to various leftist angers about the unfairness and inequality in the system.
However, modern management theory is not the worst manifestation of this problem.
One of the biggest modern inequalities in the system today is the inequality and unfairness of “Intellectual Property”, especially as it pertains to “digital works”.
There’s no costs of producing copies. This should make digital works cheaper, but it usually doesn’t.
There’s also no workers making the copies that even have a chance at a middle class life.
It’s, at best, in book publishing, one author (sometimes two), some executives at a publishing company, lawyers, and some other slime. I say slime because most of them are extremely rich and constantly complain it’s never enough.
In software, there’s usually not many programmers employed. Very few by the time the product has “matured” and only needs tended to.
Then in exchange for propping up a few rich assholes who get another heated driveway for the Lexus, you get to bust your ass at Taco Bell or Walmart, so you can “buy thangs for mah iPhone 19 Pro Max OMG I’m gonna cum herrr derrr!!!!!”, which actually was produced in a factory, in some low wage cesspit, with suicide nets, which puts up two coal-fired power plants for every one America shuts down (due to not having the factories here).
Then all the crap made in this hellhole gets put on a big diesel boat and shipped across the world.
So this is clearly the “They’re just screwing with us now.” stage of Capitalism.
You own nothing and will be happy with it.
But you’ll do real work to pay for it.
Your credit card bill will be real too.
Oh, yeah, and they might hire some software programmers to make some sort of nutty copy control system that’s illegal to bypass. That way if you take a copy for after the company goes under or shuts down the “store” or “activation server”, you’re a felon.
But the other use for the nearly $2,000 phone that needs replaced every 2-3 years is to view native advertising disguised as entertainment on TikTok.
Nobody is making money on TikTok without a moneyed interest’s hand up their ass using them as a shill. Quite often, these “social media influencers” are directly on the payroll of some Chinese sweatshop, promoting products for Americans to buy.
I’ve only purchased several books this year. I didn’t get them on some “digital platform” where I’m not even allowed to own the copy after the platform shuts down.
I bought them from the author directly. They printed them out and took them to a convention, and I got to hang out with them for a while and shoot the shit over some snacks, and they were all nice enough to sign a copy for me.
Microsoft has outright stolen people’s money several times with DRM-encumbered music files.
In at least one instance, Walmart “sold” the files to people, then shut down the store.
Since the files were all tied to the PC and copies of Windows Media Player that bought them, when those machines running Windows XP died, they stopped working.
They kept trying to get people to take the bait, like MTV “URGE” in Windows Vista, or “Spiral Frog”, or Zune.
It wasn’t that people were smart enough to “Just Say No!” to DRM, it was the cumbersome menial labor of moving around digitally encumbered files that needed to be “managed” by some really terrible computer software.
Apple did one better.
First they sold people music that had the DRM, then they sold it to them again (at a partial discount if they already had a copy with DRM) to remove the DRM.
Then they automatically deleted the entire music library of thousands of songs ($1.29, each!) from the person’s Mac and told them they could download the files again, one at a time, from iCloud, or just pay $12.99 a month forever to use Apple Music.
DRM is particularly nasty because you’ll never have a copy of your own of any of the things you’re paying for. Even if you do have a copy, there’s no legal way to share it with anyone, or make a backup, so it’s very anti-social.
When Apple said it was yours because it had no DRM, people fell for it again, then Apple planted a malicious command that had the Mac destroy their music library, and the notifications said your money is gone, now rent the things you “bought” that we destroyed.
Book publishers hate public libraries, but the concept has been around so long that they can’t just shut them down overnight.
But what they can do, what they are doing, is convincing library managers to use limited taxpayer dollars to foist DRM’d “ebook lending programs” on people which put the publisher in control of what’s even available.
Like Netflix, if they want to take it down, and it was on your list, well, tough shit.
You can’t use it now.
This is why I never agree to DRM. I turn it off in all my Web browsers. It should have never been allowed on the Web.
DRM is essentially a way to rob people who go to work of their money, in exchange for absolutely nothing.
Five iPhones and $10,000 in the trash, and 10 years from now….still nothing.
DRM and the tyranny it promotes make trying to deal with “digital goods” like holding onto sand, or water.
Apple also has the most successful scam in the entire software “publishing” industry.
They charge software developers 30%, essentially for doing nothing more than hosting it on servers, which they mostly rent from Google, and wrapping it in DRM. They then force authors and users to deal with this store by abusing both parties with App Store lock-in.
If they didn’t behave this way, I might even purchase an iPhone because I could actually use it to do useful things. Apple discourages authors from giving me software without charging me something for it, by charging them a considerable amount of money, per year, if they want to register as a developer, only to turn around and give me software for free. And their App Store is entirely incompatible with most Free and Open Source Software licenses.
They’ve done me a favor. By making the platform so overtly useless and obnoxious, I’ll be sure to never have the temptation to buy one.
Thank you, Apple. There’s so little you can do with an iPhone after you pay so much for one that nobody could look at this arrangement and rationalize it.
It’s like a Jitterbug phone, only for teenagers and soccer moms.
It’s hard to make any real money on the Apple store due to the developer account fees and the 30% revenue drain. So when people put useful software in the App Store, like VLC, they make the platform more attractive to users, which in turn hurts the same users.
The workers are totally alienated from their labor, they are directed at meaningless pursuits that cost them money and life happiness, by the owners of the means of production.
DRM hands the means of production to the wealthy elite with no benefits to the workers who pay to use the digital goods. They don’t even get to work in a factory for a small paycheck along the way.
If it were possible to dig up Karl Marx, and horrify him into dying again immediately, you would show him America, and especially how Americans are pressured into parting with valuable capital in order to do minor, trivial, computing tasks.
The alternative to handing the means of production, in terms of computing, to the wealthy elite, is to seize the means of production yourself with Free Software and a sharing culture.
Richard Stallman as a de facto Marxist both makes me cringe and inspires me, it really and honestly depends on the topic. In terms of computing, he’s often correct.
It actually wasn’t even Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation that made me decide that I didn’t like the concept of bring parted with a lot of valuable capital every time I needed to do a small computing task.
In the 1990s, at least software publishers had to publish something. They gave you a box with a disc or some diskettes in it (a physical copy of the software), usually in a pretty box, that came with a printed manual about how to install and use it. And although the software license said to only use one copy at a time, if I wanted to put a copy on my other computer, in the bedroom, there was no technical measure (DRM) that would prevent me from doing it.
So the metaphor of buying something, which was yours to keep, and paying for a service (the disc/diskettes and the manual), and being free to use as many copies as you wanted, generally rang true for proprietary software that you paid for. It also had no built-in “time-bomb” like Product Activators that will de-authorize the product if Microsoft shuts down a server (or has it go offline unexpectedly), or you pay as you go and when your “subscription” runs out, MS Office goes into “read-only” mode.
There was none of this. Your binaries would always work. Today, it is still possible to install Office 95 on a PC, but if you pay for Microsoft 365, all you get is another month.
Why is Microsoft so insidious?
The American government doesn’t literally send the police out to stick a gun to the back of your skull and say, “Now you listen here, you, and you listen good! You’re going to work for for free, to buy Microsoft Office, and pay taxes on the earnings! Every year!”, no, they’re more subtle.
Got a petition to file with an Illinois court?
Need to interact with US Immigration or the Patent Office?
Got a course to take at the local government university?
Well, they use Microsoft formats.
So you’re being told, “In theory, you don’t have to work for free to subscribe to this intangible thing you don’t even want, but if you don’t you can’t interact with your own government or go to one of its schools if you can’t handle their stinking office formats, which are so badly designed that their software can be the only thing that touches it, and it still gets corrupted eventually.”
What Apple or Microsoft represents is an extreme worst case of alienation of labor.
In many cases, people are forced to buy poorly made software, which they don’t even want, and can’t easily put down once they have it, like some sort of a cursed object.
Depending on what the minimum wage is in your State, it might cost you 10-12 hours of working at your job for free, each year. As another cost of dealing with your government.
The court system is already very expensive to access. They have filing fees, and you’ll need an attorney, and now they’re pressuring you to subscribe to lousy office programs you don’t even want.
We already have open standards for office formats, called Open Document Format, but Microsoft has successfully paid off, bribed, corrupted, the Illinois State government to demand Microsoft forms.
The government even demands that you edit PDFs using Microsoft Edge. But I edited them with Okular in KDE and the court accepted them, so it’s not even necessary to use Edge, they’re just giving Microsoft free advertising on a .gov Web site!
The costs of dealing with Microsoft percolate throughout the entire economy.
Because all the businesses you interact with and governments you pay taxes to are also dealing with this parasitic drag.
There are at least some minor positive benefits to employment in a sector that actually produces things.
There are no positive economic benefits of dealing with Microsoft. It’s a parasitic loss to the economy, which snowballs into many billions of dollars, and to the capital you personally could otherwise spend on housing, food, gas for your car, and a pair of shoes.
We already have software that meets or exceeds Microsoft standards and doesn’t force me to squander valuable capital, so in logical conclusion, what else could Microsoft be considered other than a parasite?
So I refuse to pay anything for it.
Microsoft Office could bleed me for $1,000 over ten years and I’d still have nothing, really.
At least I could pay a month of rent on my apartment if I don’t subscribe Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice has made it possible, and this is why Microsoft is leaning on their partners at IBM Red Hat to defund it and delete the packages.
Overall, the fear of going broke and starving is what motivates people in the US.
They try not to make everyone absolutely furious, -or- so comfortable that they don’t need to do a lot of work.
It’s a balancing act. You need to have some people eating out of the dumpster and living in cardboard boxes. Not enough to revolt and change anything and gain a power base, but enough to scare others when they see it.
There’s this “ideal amount of suffering” to compel the public to not do anything to kill the bastards, revolt, and start running the place. You have to always make it enough to scare people into working, but not enough that the police can’t quash them.
You want to keep the people who only barely subsist as distracted and apathetic with nonsense as possible.
That way instead of rage and people burning shit because they’re all starving and have nothing left to lose, at least they can go to McDonald’s and watch some porn.
The problem is that this is all America aspires to be now.
The people running this place almost couldn’t have duplicated Orwell’s Ninteeen Eighty-Four any better if they tried, including “telescreens” to monitor people.
The government literally pays people to put surveillance cameras in their house. The police don’t use them to solve crimes, they just want to be able to tap into the cameras when they become interested, and it won’t be because they’re interested in your home invasion.
My mother even asked me if I could install an Amazon Ring into her front door. I told her I knew how to but I wouldn’t ever do that to her. She sincerely wondered why not, then I explained how the police can access it without your consent, and they’ve rarely solved any crimes with them, but they have arrested the homeowner and used their own camera as evidence.
The government does not want to raise a big stink about how your own camera can be used against you, and you can’t actually delete anything it sees.
Illinois is one of the worst States in America, especially for “right to self-defense”.
If someone shows up, hopped up on crack, trying to break my door down, do you think I want a camera aimed at me?
You can go further into Orwellianism to describe America today, including the point where everyone should be in the middle class, but the government takes their valuable labor and throws the excess into something like, the War in Iraq, or Syria, or Ukraine for that matter. Always war. Never a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage.
No prosperity, just drugs flooding the streets.
The floorboard has rotten out from under the country.
Having children is generally a mistake because it keeps the cycle of exploitation going.
The government is panicking because of this, insulting people who choose not to have children, because they finally have no money to do it with, by having the media throw about the term “infertility”.
Like you’re a eunuch. Like you need to lay on your back and think of America. A country that has abandoned about half of its own citizens.
I think we should do more to educate potential immigrants coming here in caravans that this country isn’t even taking care of its own citizens. It’s falling apart, and it’s a giant real estate scam. They won’t like it when they get here and nobody will hand them a work permit if they want one.
Of course, the whole point of not handing them one is actually so they will have to work for some crook, for less than minimum wage, with no rights, while the system looks the other way.
I wish I could say that I knew exactly what to do about all of this, but I don’t. I know what to do in regards to my computing.
Don’t let them control that too and don’t let them turn me into another drone who might as well have a $2,000 iPhone sewn into my skin, which needs to be replaced every couple of years.
Don’t rely on proprietary software.
It only has one point, which is to addict you and make you dependent, so that they can demand any price.
I ran into a Web site in the late 90s called “Completely Free Software”.
It had nothing to do with Free Software (as in Freedom), it was written by a man in Australia named Graham Pockett, who admitted that he used to be a “software pirate”, but “reformed himself” due to Fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and then he only used “freeware” (which is an all encompassing term for things that may be proprietary, binary-only, but free of financial cost).
Ironically, this all runs on Windows and DOS, which cost a never-ending pile of money to use (although DOS has since been cloned).
I would say this misses an important point.
Using this “freeware” might alleviate the loss of useful capital, but you still depend on single authors.
You can’t fully seize the means of production and produce a different version that does things you want.
All you get are binaries that will rot.
If Google lets you use “Docs” for free, then it is “freeware”. But you don’t even get the binaries. They can change their mind tomorrow and say it costs $100 a year now.
They can change it, but you can’t. It’s “freeware”, but without even the benefit of “rotting binaries” that you can at least copy exactly how they are now.
Many people give up when they see obstacles like the ones that Microsoft has built in order to ensure their hegemony of Office and Windows, but obviously not everyone has.
Microsoft 365 is as much of a reaction to the decline in Windows usage as it is anything else. I would say it’s even the typical Capitalist response to anger. You adopt the points of the reformers, but only as many as you need to in order to quell the insurrection.
It became necessary to decouple Microsoft Office from Windows because the PC sales are worse every year, and Microsoft only has 69% of this shrinking desktop market for Windows anyway. (StatCounter August 2023)
Porting their software to “Linux”, the Web, or the Mac is a necessary strategy for Microsoft, if it wants to survive the collapse of Windows at all (which they barely invest anything into anymore and manage to break somehow almost every month).
While establishing a beachhead is a tactic that an enemy military might use to make further gains, we should see what Microsoft is doing as exactly that, and refuse to entertain this idea of meeting them on the platforms that we use.
The S&P 500 is off to a relatively tepid start for “Earnings Season” while the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregated Bond Index continues to reverse last year’s losses.
While it is perhaps too soon to take a victory lap, the first two days of the week didn’t go over so well for the stock market.
In my last post I pointed out the bloated valuation of Microsoft and “tech”.
Today we have to turn our attention over to companies like UPS and First Republic Bank.
The Wall Street Journal and Insider report that the loss of deposits at FRB were $72 billion dollars since SVB collapsed, but were really over $100 billion dollars if you don’t count the $30 billion that Chase and other large banks deposited to try to keep it from flopping. The WSJ reports that things got so bad today with FRB that it triggered a circuit breaker several times, halting trading, and still ended the day down another 49%. It’s a disaster. Meanwhile, Yahoo Finance is running articles saying there’s no problem with the liquidity. LOL (I won’t even link to that. They’re full of shit.)
The main source of First Republic’s problem turns out to be the fact that they wrote sweetheart mortgage deals at low rates to people in finance and tech (both of which are experiencing layoffs and deposit outflows now) and even threw in terms like “interest-only mortgage payments for the first ten years”.
In other words, what we have is almost a return of the 5/1 ARM crisis, only this time they wrote mortgages with sweet intro rates to a bunch of (now) unemployed tech workers and those who continue to face the prospects of losing their jobs. And the trap was set to spring on them ten years in.
They found out a way around the safeguards by finding people who could pay the mortgage, at the time they wrote it, and then got around the regulations that way.
Unfortunately for the bank, you can’t pay the mortgage forever on no job and they vastly under-rated the risk to write the damned things, and continue to under-state risk to try to find someone dumb enough to buy them as an “asset”.
Some of the people who signed these face deportation from America if they can’t find a job within three months of being fired, and then who do you even sue?
I can’t imagine someone in India caring that a bank in the US that can’t even garnish them because they got fired from Microsoft and aren’t ever coming back here will care what the bank does with the house when they get it back.
The people who can still pay their mortgage have no reason to change terms or refi, but they are taking their deposits out of the bank.
Personally, I would not be surprised if the FDIC is having meetings NOW about seizing First Republic at the end of the week. Since they’re in deeper shit every time they have to come clean about something and Chase Bank isn’t going to keep depositing unlimited money there, there’s going to be some sort of takeover and bailout of First Republic and probably soon.
A lot of UPS business is handling people’s Amazon returns so they can end up on a pallet of merchandise heading to a dump. Or some “mystery pallet”.
Amazon is doing badly. I gambled on ordering some HEPA filters for one of my air purifiers through Warehouse Deals last week. The first two packages came in and the filters were clean and factory sealed. The third package came and one of them was factory sealed, but the other was someone’s dirty air filter they threw in the box and Amazon said “Used-Like New”. It had dirt and crap all over it. I chucked it and they gave me a refund.
You never know what you’ll get. I ordered coffee from them last year, they ended up refunding a third of the bags because they burst at the warehouse and Amazon workers just literally put them in plastic bags with coffee dumped out everywhere and shipped them to me. Used-Like New
They sent mother a portable washing machine that got hit by a forklift. Someone had gone through the trouble of replacing the box where one of the forks had hit the washer, impaling it and denting the drum. They refunded that. Used-Like New
Amazon is trying to discourage people from using UPS for returns by imposing fees now. If they’re going to charge me fees to send back trash that they didn’t even inspect before saying it was fine, I’m not going to shop Warehouse Deals and take the risk.
My sell order for the S&P 500 and buy order for the Bond Fund for my spouse’s 401(k) went through Friday evening.
In the past two days, it has made hundreds of dollars in appreciation (recovery in the Bond Fund) while the stock market is slumping.
Earnings season is about what is unsaid or what is buried in opaque language (Microsoft loves doing this) in forms the SEC requires be made public as much as it is about what makes it into the news.
And there’s a difference between the news investors pay for and what they let out “for free” to the public. So I’m probably better informed than the average person right now as to what is really going on.
I had no confidence in this stock market on Friday and I’m even more skeptical of it now.
Walmart is best positioned to take advantage of dying retail sector.
Walmart is absolutely the best positioned company to take advantage of the chaos in retail right now. Even though total sales are way down and some stores are filing bankruptcy, Walmart’s Gross Earnings and Net Profits have been on a tear in the last several weeks.
Look for them to pick up business in everything that Bed, Bath, & Beyond sold immediately. In the next quarter or two.
In the longer run, Amazon. But Amazon is dying a protracted death. So BB&B will benefit Walmart faster.
P&G reported the other day that sales of their baby products and Gillette division are down due to “weak demand for diapers and shaving razors.
Less people having kids because of lack of resources. Less people with jobs means fewer people need to shave.
Alan Greenspan looked at men’s underwear sales to figure out what the state of the economy was. I look at P&G.
If P&G can’t sell diapers and razors, the diapers are both a short and long term problem, and the razors indicate to me what the unemployment trends really are.
Shaving supplies are expensive, or at least an expense. Most men sort of let it go while they’re on unemployment.
But the US unemployment figures are a total scam. They count you until you didn’t find work for so long that your benefits end, whether you have a job or not.
We need to be looking at things like the long term trend in sales on personal grooming products. In a strong economy, you don’t cut prices on Tide.
Most of P&G’s higher profits were due to “greedflation”, and it seems they don’t think that strategy is going to continue to work.
Up until now they could sort of get away with it because with consumer staples, they tend to have the better quality stuff, but there is only so much that people are going to take.
Finally, GM’s profit was down 18.5% in the first quarter vs. last year.
I see that big bet on $70,000 electric SUVs is going well.
As big as a house and about as aerodynamic, and with a battery the size of my gasoline Buick.
It’s back. Big is back. The 6000 SUX EV. (Hummer EV)
It seems like the Democrats will call anything green and throw a tax credit at it as long as it’s “electric” no matter how bad it is for the planet.
We’re in the “cigarettes with health claims” era of vehicles.
I tried to load Matthew Garrett’s Dreamwidth blog and Twitter account in Lynx. He says he’s an “Open Source” developer, but you can’t read anything he says without running proprietary software. (Which is just as well.)
Here’s his blog:
HTTP 401: Forbidden / I can’t read it because of ClownFlare demanding JavaScript, cookies, and images for a CAPTCHA puzzle.
And here’s his Twitter:
No Twitter because he’s on a platform that makes you log in and use JavaScript.
The modern Web is crap, because it’s unusable if you value your sanity. Mr. Garrett claims he’s a Open Source developer, but at the same time uses platforms that don’t even allow you to read his blog without proprietary software (JavaScript programs are usually proprietary software), images (bandwidth hog), and other nasties.
This highlights one important difference between Open Source and Free Software people.
Open Source people don’t give a damn about Freedom, to the point where they will demand that you use proprietary and nasty things just for their own convenience, like JavaScript, logging into Twitter, or Microsoft document formats.
Most of the time, if you load my blog on WordPress using Lynx or NewsWaffle, it works as well as can be expected. There won’t be any images with Lynx, but I wouldn’t use something that gives you 401 Forbidden, hard requirements on JavaScript, or has a ClownFlare blockade. NewsWaffle may not be able to format it 100% into GemText properly, but with more work to handle WordPress it can be adapted.
The only way to get at Twitter on Lynx seems to be to use something like Nitter, which mirrors Twitter and doesn’t demand that YOU use their proprietary JavaScript code. This way you can read people’s tweets as text if you like.
Here’s a Twitter account in Nitter on Lynx:
President Biden @potus on Twitter, through Nitter.it, in Lynx. I don’t know why you’d follow it, but it’s a government account subject to open records laws….yet it’s on Shitter and you can’t read it without JavaScript and you’ll get a demand to log in and identify yourself if you scroll. This is a big problem!
Many Web sites are difficult to use in Lynx on a good day, but I’m trying to drastically cut back on my dependence on graphical Web browsing because it’s so incredibly frustrating. When all you want to do is read some text, they waste time and screen space with JavaScript, images, videos, style sheets, and more.
If people have something important to say, they should be able to use their words and publish it in a way I can scroll through and get at the text.
I recently blogged about using NewsWaffle in GeminiSpace to get at the news. This often works out better than loading the Web version in Lynx, but Lynx is not totally useless, it just appears to be harder to get around in most of the time than turning a Web site into Gemtext.
How “news” works in America.
CNN is unusable in Lynx, but you lose nothing because it’s CNN. It works in the NewsWaffle though.
“These are the Amazon Products we love!” “January 6th Commission January 6th Commission January 6th Commission…..JANUARY 6TH COMMISSION JANUARY 6TH COMMISSION JANUARY 6TH COMMISSION!” -CNN News
I noticed NPR is total crap lately too. It works in the NewsWaffle and in Lynx though. I came across an article today that blames people for being poor and saying it’s all about their reckless spending on a can of coffee, living in a home, and subscribing to streaming.
They then proceeded to say you could listen to NPR by purchasing an iPhone and subscribing to their Spotify podcast.
I noticed that neither CNN nor NPR are listed in the NewsWaffle, but they work with it if you type them in manually.
Maybe the person maintaining it doesn’t want to get involved with the Amazon News and Bill Gates-sponsored White-shaming and poverty shaming that’s going on over at NPR. Who knows?
Much of “the news” is credibility zero these days, especially the ones you don’t pay for. I’ve noticed the ones that have their hands out and paywalls actually have better stories that usually have some point to them once I get past the paywall. NPR takes so much money from people like Bill Gates, and outfits like Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Koch Industries, Exxon, and more and gives them shout outs while you’re in the car using them for background music.
“This article about Amazon workers trying to organize brought to you by the company that is threatening them for organizing. Amazon…..When you need a tuba, some blu ray discs, and three packages of chocolate covered cherries at 4 AM….Amazon.”
I’m very concerned with what’s happening to “the news”, at least as much as “the Web”. They’re in a state of terminal rot and corruption to the point where it’s almost a gift that you can’t read some of this bullshit in a way that preserves some of your sanity.
For example, many are reporting that Senator Joe Manchin of Virginia is blocking a new spending deal because he’s “worried about inflation”.
What they’re not reporting on is that taxing the rich to reduce the federal deficit would LOWER, not increase, inflation. By refusing to tax the rich, the Senator from West Virginia is forcing the federal government to create and borrow money, INCREASING the inflation he is complaining about, to spare unproductive billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett from having to pay taxes while they get to play “Who can die with the most money and leave it to kids who never did a damned thing?” during the most screwed up time in American history.
Elon’s dad just had another one with a woman 45 years younger than him and then stated “the only point of being on Earth is to have kids”. That’s disgusting and the media praises this. Rich pervert, good. Rich people have better genes and make better babies. (sarcasm) If you do it, people will look at you like “Oh man! Sick!”
The only advantage I’m seeing here, other than the guy owns an emerald mine and can leave them money, is that when she’s up in the middle of the night she can change both their diapers at the same time.
More alarming, however, is the fact that there’s more “Billshit” than ever in the news this week.
A total “Billshit” overload.
I use the shorthand “Billshit” and “Bill Sez” to describe articles that Bill Gates has corrupted “the news” into publishing as puff pieces and reputation laundering. It’s almost always some sort of “Duh, that was obvious.” aphorism that for some reason managed to go on for 8 pages, or how he’s “giving away his money” even as he’s doubled it in the last ten years.
The latest Billshit that was in the “news” was about Gates “donating” $20 billion to his fake charity, the Gates Foundation. His ex-wife, Melinda, is still on the Board and in the Foundation’s name, even though she divorced him and cited his close friendship with Jeffery Epstein as one of the reasons. If Gates is donating $20 billion, it’s because he has a plan to make $40 billion with it.
One of the things Gates is doing that is finally gaining some attention, although not nearly the “red alert!” level of attention it deserves, is buying up American farmland and becoming one of the biggest absentee landlords to people who actually work the land. The only thing he does contribute is a loss to Americans in the form of higher grocery prices.
The rents that farmers have to pay to Bill acts like a “tax” that goes to him and increases the price of food, during an already terribly shitty year of high inflation and societal breakdown.
This isn’t philanthropy. It’s larceny. It’s one of the greatest thefts and crimes ever committed against the citizens of the world, which rely on American agriculture.
By paying the media to either not cover it or not cover it for what it is, he gets away with it.
Microsoft, the company that he co-founded, is embroiled in all sorts of scandals, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, for a huge foreign bribery scandal going into at least the hundreds of millions of dollars.
They know exactly how to get away with crime.
Crime pays, but to get away with crime, you have to pay the people who enable you to commit the crime, who so seriously misinform and “un-inform” the public, who write tax codes and patent and trade laws, and who avoid passing laws to prevent things like parasites from owning farmland.
It’s tragic to see NPR turned into another crack den where the American public goes to be gaslighted. George W. Bush put them on this track when he passed a bill that mostly defunded them.
Countries that mandate that their news be neutral and 100% funded by tax receipts get something far less corrupt than the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And no, you made no difference to the level of corruption at NPR, at all, for donating $20 15 years ago to get a coffee mug. Sorry.
Shaming people for buying food and paying rent now!
Like these are luxuries that they should have “planned better” for when they can’t get a good job and the cost of living is going up twice as fast as the government admits to. Putting an adulterous pedophile associate on a pedestal and dubbing him Saint Bill of Gates.
Saint Bill of Gates has a reading list, and a solution for everything. The Billshit and the Bill Sez told me that he knows how to solve COVID and Global Warming. So it must certainly be true. Causing global hunger is “Philanthropy”. The Billshit said so. 😉
Netflix thinks that the solution to its financial woes is a deal with Microsoft to put ads into your TV shows.
Netflix is in major financial crisis. They’re doing huge layoffs. They’ve spent years mismanaging the platform and have only themselves to blame.
Even though the DRM is malicious, and encourages people to be jerks who can’t share with their friends, it’s not the cause of their financial problems.
Back when it wasn’t so expensive and had shows that people wanted to watch, people would pay the money to subscribe and then keep paying, usually even if there wasn’t anything on that they wanted to watch that month.
However, with the state of the economy being pretty lousy, and hyperinflation causing people to struggle to put food on the table, and gas in the gas tank, Netflix seems to have figured out what the solution is to losing a million subscribers per annum.
No, the solution is not canceling all the good shows, it’s not raising the price another $3-4 a month every year; it couldn’t possibly be paying $50 million for a documentary about Michelle Obama that nobody wants to see. But they’ve done all of this.
Michelle Obama’s main accomplishment as FLOTUS appears to be ruining school lunches to the point where what I had to eat as a child in school was a gourmet restaurant by comparison (and it was basically on par with what they fed Indiana prisoners back then!).
Then there’s the fact that streaming has become a highly competitive market with lots of contenders that have gigantic war chests dumping cash into programming investments, and that people simply aren’t going to subscribe to the company (Netflix) with the weakest content portfolio when there’s nothing on and the price is spiraling out of control.
(Sarcasm) No, no, what people really want is this horrible streaming company with nothing to watch except a documentary about Michelle Obama, plus advertisements from Microsoft. (/Sarcasm)
CNBC: Netflix partners with Microsoft on ad-supported subscription plan
Microsoft is in a position to spy on the majority of desktop and laptop computer users through spyware that they have built into Windows, Edge, and Bing.
Of course, that’s the mistake of the people who use these things, but “interest-based advertising” built upon what Microsoft learns by spying on you elsewhere will almost certainly pop up during your Netflix shows, if you subscribe to this tier.
Seeing has how there’s rarely been a business partnership with Microsoft in the tech world that ended well (AOL, Novell, Nokia, SEGA, Spyglass, etc.) and when Microsoft can’t corrupt, they do a hostile takeover, patent litigation threats (Samsung), or just make some crappy cloned and stolen product (Windows NT is essentially stolen from DEC and IBM, and they twisted and contorted their agreement with Spyglass for Internet Explorer, and then both got settled out of court for undisclosed sums…), I think that a Microsoft partnership is just yet another sign that Netflix is a company in serious trouble.
It’s not good to be a tech company that is not earning a profit during a bubble, during a period of high inflation, during a downturn in the business cycle, and during rising interest rates. Netflix and others now find themselves here.
Either they’ll go to bankruptcy court and be sold for scrap (patents, etc.) or someone buys them for scrap. Maybe even to Microsoft. They’ve bought worse.
Netflix is probably heading this way, though it may take a few years.
I don’t see how putting ads in Netflix is going to do anything for their bottom line though. Consumers are pinched.
Consumer discretionary is going through Hell at the moment.
Amazon has quietly killed warehouse construction all over the place, sometimes with half a building standing.
TheRealDeal: Amazon binge ends in hangover, halt on warehouse deals amid $4B loss
What’s bound to happen is the same thing that happened in the early 2000s. Ad revenues are going to crash in a major way. They’re going to start paying pretty much nothing after years of running hot based on the notion that the consumer would spend a bunch of money that turned out to not really be there in the end.
Yes, companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have sharpened their knives and have better ways to target and psychologically manipulate consumers than the relatively blunt instruments there were before, but a broke working class is a broke working class and a tightening Fed is a tightening Fed.
TechRights has noticed that on Phoronix, a site about “Linux” news which has always been the subject of ridicule over the ad bombardment that takes place if you turn off your ad blocker, Michael Larabel has additionally started taking “free gifts” worth many thousands from companies like AMD, his to keep.
And he’s been writing incredibly favorable “reviews”. So it’s clear that he’s diversified away from obvious advertising and straight into “sponsored content”.
Worse yet, now many articles are not even about “Linux”. They’re about Microsoft. Leading us to call him “Microsoft Larabel”.
This came after years of entire articles begging people to subscribe to read his content churn.
Perpetual Comedian Jim Cramer (“Buy Bear Stearns!”) said today that he thinks that despite the fact that the government’s inflation figure for the year went from 8.6% to 9.1% after the latest monthly report, that the Federal Reserve “Is getting a handle on inflation.” and that we’ll see it soon. Also, that the bottom for the market is close.
Of course, there’s an investment strategy I call the “Reverse Jim Cramer”. If you listen to Cramer and do the exact opposite of what he just said, you usually make a lot of money, and if you do what he says, you usually lose money, while he’s reversed his position a couple weeks later and acts like he never said to do that.
4/6 bags arrived intact. I duct taped one that had a puncture and froze it. I guess I’ll see if it is drinkable. I unwrapped this one and duct taped it too.
Amazon refunded the two bags that ruptured as store credit, but how could this be “Inspected” and deemed fit to ship to a customer, for money, in the first place? I mean, really.
CNN was one of the last few holdouts insisting that we were in a “strong economy” with “robust growth” and “record job creation levels” and that high inflation would be “transitory” in America.
Sometime around yesterday, they changed their minds and finally started reporting what investment magazines and CEOs were saying for months, that a dire recession is coming. (It’s already here, though.)
I’ve said over the last few years, repeatedly, that we were in a “second tech bubble”, with the first big one of course being the Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s where investors were willing to throw at and lose money on anything vaguely tech related that sounded like it might have a business plan, no matter how insane.
But even I didn’t see what’s happening now coming. We’re in uncharted territory on gasoline prices (for the United States….Europe has always had very decadent and corrupt politicians who subscribed to this green new deal insanity, but it’s a pretty new concept here).
There’s a shortage of baby formula, and the president of the United States refuses to do what current law authorizes him to, in order to get it under control. Because he doesn’t want to go too hard on the oligopoly that produces it all.
There’s pretty much every major company laying off or going into a hiring freeze at about the same time.
Carvana is about ready to collapse and has lost their license to sell any cars at all in the entire state of Illinois.
And streaming companies like Netflix are seeing record cancellations and the end to subscriber growth, and admit it will accelerate.
Walmart has had its worst trading days since the 1980s this week, losing 19% of its share price in three days. Target and Amazon got hammered much worse.
The whole thing is an epic disaster. And where is the news? Trying to tell people that “this millennial in their 20s just bought a $700,000 house….so why don’t you have one?”. (CNBC bullshit)
I’m just so sick and tired and goddamned disgusted by it all. I’ve tuned out advertising completely. I don’t have any streaming disservices in my house. I watch movies and stuff on discs. Usually ones I borrowed at the library, which I have to pay taxes for whether I use it or not.
I’ve blocked advertisements from appearing in my Web browser since 1998, when I got on the Web and found out there were ads and that they were slowing my browsing down a lot (images on a 56k modem….and now videos on my cable that I didn’t consent to watching).
I couldn’t really care less about their damned “economy” aside from how it bleeds into our household and affects our lives.
So far, we’ve weathered this better than a lot of people I know, who foolishly take on lots of debt over things that aren’t even remotely important and then plead bankruptcy for the fourth time.
That’s where advertising leads people. They go “There’s a scratch on my car…Get rid of it!”, “I bought those jeans last year….I need new jeans!”, “I’m so sick of this TV. It only has the features from 2020, I need the 2022 model!”.
And so a lot of what people spend money on isn’t only unnecessary, it’s ridiculous, it’s corrosive to their actual wellbeing.
They can’t afford healthcare, they can’t afford rent, they can’t afford groceries or transportation, because they’re sitting around a mountain of crap that doesn’t do any useful work for them, that they bought because the advertisers told them they were entitled to it.
The Democrat Party and the Republican Party that let laissez-faire Crapitalism dictate trade policy, who bankrupted us as a nation, who convinced us all we could “just go shopping” to cure what ails you, have no answers for how to fix anything, because they’re the ones who don’t really want to fix it.
Even Trump said he opposed NAFTA, then he got in and made it even worse.
But tech is the most interesting point of the economic collapse in my opinion.
Where are all of the people who were saying Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon had these trillions of dollars in “value”? Fake value which is starting to be erased. They’re silent. They’re going away.
And it turns out that the biggest fools of them all were the ones telling people to invest their money in the companies like Tesla and Netflix, which deserve to fail.
They deserve to fail for many reasons, including defrauding their investors and their customers, but they also deserve to fail because their customers have no control over their products.
Even now, you buy TVs with a “Netflix” button that paid to be there. After the company goes bankrupt, it’ll just be something you accidentally hit that doesn’t do anything anymore.
Like how Webvan left all of those empty tubs and that turns out to be their assets after the bankruptcy.
Speaking of Webvan….Instacart, Doordash, Grubhub.
I believe that economists will eventually call this the “app” or “smartphone” bubble, because it seems like everything involving those is shit hitting the fan, but there are lots of other bubbles too, like “cryptocurrencies”.
I remember when there were going to be “internet currencies” called flooz and beenz, and they got Whoopi Goldberg as their spokesperson, and that’s starting to sound a lot like Matt Damon doing cryptocurrency ads at the superbowl this year before those cratered, right?
I suppose we’ll see how long the IRS goes on auditing those when they mostly turn up losses that lower people’s tax liabilities.
I’ve also heard “Everything Bubble”. Since it has infected banking and even low end retail that mostly deals in toothpaste and underwear, like Walmart, I think maybe this is also a fair assessment.
However bad you think this will get, it’s going to be worse.
Walmart online delivery is turning into a major disaster thanks to Doordash.
Today I had a $10 Gillette Mach 3 razor starter kit go missing. I should have just done store pickup since my spouse works there anyway.
But “Justine” “delivered” my order. And by delivered, I mean what normally happens with Walmart+ deliveries that go through Doordash instead of some real delivery company. I opened the door, looked everywhere in the apartment building and in all of the mail rooms, and couldn’t find it.
And when it said “Click here for picture.” it didn’t show me a picture, it just showed me the order, saying it was “delivered today”.
You never know what Walmart will decide to ship through FedEx or DoorDash, and so part of my order (the refill razor blades) are supposedly arriving on Thursday via FedEx.
In the mean time, I called Walmart and talked to a robot and told it my order went missing, and it resubmitted a replacement order (no additional charge). It’s not showing when that will be delivered, if it is delivered.
At least Amazon can deliver their packages. Haven’t had one go missing yet.
Talking to my spouse, I found out that with Doordash, a lot of Walmart orders go missing, and when I finally talked to a human at 1-800-WALMART, he said they get a lot of complaints about Doordash too.
If they want to compete with Amazon, they need a real delivery company where half the packages don’t go missing. Whoever is running Walmart today just doesn’t know how aggravating the customer experience really is and that they are literally throwing away business to Amazon Prime.
If I had just ordered the razors off Prime, they’d be here now, and I’d be happily shaving with them, but noooooo. Walmart sent half my order through ghetto Doordash and it was the part that I can’t use the other half without.
No, not Creepy Uncle Bill Gates, but rather Gates gas caps. I bought one on Amazon going “Hey, it’s $8.47 and it says it works on the 2008 Buick LaCrosse CXL.” because my Driver Information Center (DIC) said that I needed to “Check Gas Cap”.
The woman who owned the car before me somehow found a way to lose the OEM gas cap from Buick, even though it’s tethered for morons who drive off without their gas cap. (Which has somehow never happened to me in over 20 years of driving a car, even though I’ve never had a tethered gas cap before.).
So she bought a Gates gas cap. Nowhere on the cap does it say “Gates” on it, but when I examined it by request of the computer (and because you can’t pass emissions here with a loose or broken gas cap), I saw that the Gates cap on the Buick did not actually fit the filler neck properly. So I ordered the Gates gas cap from Amazon, and I ended up with the exact same cap as was on there. I put it on and drove the car around, and “Check Gas Cap” on the DIC displayed again.
Aside from not being able to pass emissions and getting an aggravating message you have to do something with before you can see the odometer again, a gas cap that does not fit properly can leak out up to 30 GALLONS of fuel from your tank in a year.
That’s right. You lose almost two full tanks of gas every year to a poorly-fitting cap or a broken seal. And if you’ve pumped gas since Bidenflation started, you know they’re not giving it away!
Today I filled up on E15 with my Walmart+ discount at Murphy. It cost $4.15 a gallon. I paid with a gas credit card that gives me 5% back, so we’ll say I actually paid $3.94 a gallon.
Now, if I lose 30 gallons of gas to a cheap gas cap that does not fit right, then that costs me $118.20 a year in gas that gets me nowhere, and contributes to smog. And that’s assuming Bidenflation doesn’t continue raging and leaving us with gas going up again.
So, kind of a problem.
The good news on the gas front is that my Buick LaCrosse has an upgraded 3800 V6 engine. Series III. So I was expecting it to be a gas guzzling monster like my 2003 Chevy Impala.
When mom gave me the Impala, I had to fix SO MANY THINGS with it I’ve lost count. I logged it all into Carfax and it’s like almost 60-70 things that I had to have repaired. The gas mileage in town was only 9 mpg, and when I had the car fixed and tuned up, I saw about 17 mpg on average.
And mom’s one of those people that doesn’t pay attention and then screams because gas costs a nickel more, and then while she’s letting the car fall apart and get half the mpg, she also runs up on stop lights and slams on the brakes, which wastes gas, and damages the brakes, causing the need for….more brakes. Which are like $450 per axle each time you get new pads and rotors.
So we can’t control that the President is an idiot. But what we can control is how well tuned our car is.
I run the cars with 0w30 full synthetic energy conserving motor oil, both of them got new Iridium spark plugs and new spark plug wires, and new filters all around as soon as I got them. I keep my tires at the appropriate pressure (always filling them while they’re cold to make sure, and adding a couple psi to account for a little bit of leakage between checks).
But the Impala has never been GOOD on gas.
The Buick today registered at 20.08 mpg on E15, and I think it will do better next time. I had to do a two axle brake overhaul while also getting both the front wheel hub bearings replaced because one started to drag. Without that drag, I think I’ll do better next time.
Plus, of the computer was sensing a leaking gas cap, that was costing me something too. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could do 22 mpg in the city in this thing now, and that’s actually not bad considering that stupid 2018 KIA Soul+ never did better than 25 mpg in the city, in ECO Mode, and that was with a car that weighed half with an engine half as big.
But KIAs are crap and made wrong and I keep getting one letter after another about airbags not going off and engines exploding, and I wish my ex the worst of luck with that death trap. I really do.
On Techrights IRC, Roy laughed and said Bill Gates would be jealous of me because I’m riding a 14 year old (car, that is!).
(Bill Gates is a prolific sex pervert and was a friend of Jeff Epstein that throws his money around to control what is said about him.)
But this car doesn’t like Gates, the gas cap company. They make lousy gas caps, and they’re not OE quality and they look nothing like the GM gas cap for this car that I bought on ebay and installed this afternoon.
Gates seems to do store brands too, even though they’re the same junk. I went to Advance Auto Parts considering another aftermarket gas cap and asked to see it first, and Carquest gas caps are just another Gates.
More gas cap company bullshit!
Don’t buy Gates.
Many people on Amazon buy cheap gas caps, and it looks like they fit, but they don’t, and then they leak, and some cars don’t even say “Gas Cap”, and just turn on the Check Engine light. And then some people go to a mechanic that bills them an hour of labor to plug in an OBD device and tell them they need a new gas cap. Aftermarket gas caps can cost you a lot more than the $8.47 that Gates and Amazon charged me.
I have a return pending, but most people wouldn’t bother. My spouse works right next to the UPS store, which handles Amazon returns.
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