Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google Attacks User-Installed Apps and Promotes Their Own Spyware in Bizarre Misuse of the Word “Security”.

Google has announced that it plans to start interfering with the user’s ability to install APK packages locally. To get other application repositories, such as F-Droid, means installing one of these APK packages.

F-Droid contains no spyware. It’s a Free and Open Source Software repository.

There wouldn’t be any reason to put spyware in software like this because everyone can see it, someone would take it out and make a version that doesn’t do that, and then if the F-Droid repository hosted it, people would quit using that and replace it too.

The Google Play Store, on the other hand, contains very little other than spyware.

See, Google is an ad company, and as an ad company, it peddles spyware libraries that are bundles with the majority of the “apps”, which are actually adware, and monitor what the user does with their entire phone, because almost all adware is also spyware.

The user, by installing things from Google Play, agrees to this, often for some functionality that is minor compared to the dozens and dozens of unnecessary (for the stated purpose of the “app”) permissions, which are intended to let it do things like monitor your use of the phone, figure out where you’re at on Earth to within 3 feet (1 meter), even when the “app” seems to be closed, monitor your phone calls and texts, and uploading your contacts list.

There are actually many more permissions in the Android permission model, and these are just some of the creepier ones.

“Apps” like these can be anything, from McDonald’s, a car insurance company, or even just a program that says it has wallpaper images.

If you try to sign into a particular “app” called Grindr, which is an app for gay people to find sex partners, you may not see everything it does in most countries, but if you have an IP address in the European Union, you will get a “consent” screen about several hundred other “partner companies” they may share your data with.

And if you have a Facebook account, you can go to your “off Facebook Activity” screen, which is hidden rather well, and see that Grindr has been talking to them.

In America, they don’t even ask before they do this.

They’re telling Facebook and Google your HIV status and when the last time you were tested were, and they (allegedly) keep logs of who you are having sex with, and all of your nude photos, even after you delete your account. Seriously!

This was according to a high ranking executive named Ron DeJesus, who was let go recently.

Ron DeJesus claims that he was responsible for trying to keep Grindr compliant with multi-jurisdictional privacy laws, and Grindr basically flouted them all and fired him so that it could continue. He is suing them.

Almost everything in Google Play is some form of malware.

It’s so much worse than what we used to call “spyware” back in the Windows 98/XP era, when it was just something like Bonzi Buddy or Conducent, or New dot Net.

Almost everyone walking around with a cell phone in their pocket has “apps” like this, because they use the Apple App Store or Google Play.

But now Google is saying that the malware problem exists “outside” of their malware store. Which is quite clever.

Soon, according to the plans already revealed by Google, there will be no way to “sideload” (install something yourself) without letting Google “Play Protect”, which is rapidly turning into malicious software pretending to be an antivirus program, like Windows Defender is.

The choices listed are “allow scan” or “don’t install”. That’s it.

And I say “malware pretending to be antivirus” because when you click “allow scan”, it sends Google bits and pieces of the program, to a remote server.

So they know everything that’s on your phone, and they can block modified APKs that you get where someone has removed the spyware libraries from things that are in Google Play.

They can block anything they want and say “malware”, and who are you to stop them? Peasant!

Make no mistake about this, the timing is impeccable.

Right after Google apparently came down hard on people for using ad blockers (I haven’t seen the demand to turn off my ad blocker because I use Brave and they just bump it to deal with f***ing Google for me.), we get this announcement about “sideloading”.

“You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. […] It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”

-George Carlin

There’s no telling what all is in store for Android.

Like I said in my article about Samsung falling apart, Android was designed to gain marketshare. To do this, part of the deal was that it was somewhat less bogus than iOS about not letting you use it as a real computer.

They let all the other OEMs fight each other over crumbs building up the marketshare, and then Google came in and cleaned everything up and makes the “best” Android phones now.

Well, “sideloading” is the same. They needed it, to gain marketshare, and now they’ll be wanting that back.

I suspect that within five years, the practical benefits of owning an Android phone instead of an iPhone, such as local music playing and the option to use F-Droid, will be gone.

And, basically, Apple gimps the iPhone so bad, that if you have one you might as well just get the cheapest because it doesn’t really do much of anything anyway. It can’t even play music without the network. Without the network, it’s an expensive brick.

The iPhone calls people and has an “app” that makes fart sounds for $1,800.

Google probably won’t take such action until they defeat this fake Anti-Trust Trial in the federal court (the judge is a corrupt stooge who is working with them to hide almost everything from the public) but they will do it.

The media is so bad that instead of criticizing this and calling it what it is, they repeat Google’s press statement. However, there is much more going on than we are being shown.

Taco Bell Raises Prices Between 10-25% In App, but Not In-Store. Changes Them Back on App if You Go Inside.

Taco Bell raised their prices in the app by 10-25%, but when I went into the store today, everything on the menu and ordering kiosks were still at the older prices.

After raising prices by 14.8% on average last year, Taco Bell has come back to impose more price hikes, but for now, it’s only in the app.

When I logged in today, all of the prices had gone up on the combos by between $2-3.

However, when I went inside, the prices were all the old stated prices in the app.

So I made an order on the kiosk and paid the old price, and entered my email so I’d get my rewards points.

Then as I was sitting here about to type this up, I logged in and the new prices were still there, until I tapped around a bit, and then they reset to the older menu price, as-if nothing had ever happened.

So basically, what are they doing?

I think they’re testing to see what people will pay for Taco Bell.

If you’re using the App, it’s unlikely you’re going inside to compare the menu prices, and they can see how much these price hikes will harm sales without committing to anything, yet.

The fact that they changed my app prices back to the menu price, but only after I went inside, ordered from the kiosk, and entered my rewards email, tells me that if the customer figures this out, they will quickly try to walk it back and pretend like nothing ever happened.

This is one example of how Apps can manipulate. If they decide you eat at Taco Bell a lot, maybe that puts you in the side of the A/B test for price sensitivity, and you just go “Oh well. It went up, but whatever.”

If Taco Bell keeps raising prices, ironically they will be more expensive than El Famous Burrito, a Chicago regional Mexican fast food joint which not only has no App, but is cash-only.

And down the street from Taco Bell.

So I will just take my money and walk. Taco Bell is only worth a certain price. If I’m going to pay $26 instead of $20 for me and my spouse to eat out (we do admittedly eat out a lot), it’s going to be at El Famous, which has higher quality.

There’s only so much that the market will carry.

The local Taco Bell chain is down to maybe 3 workers per shift, and they’re always very busy. They might be paying them $15-16 an hour now, but they’ve compensated for this by getting rid of a worker or two.

How is it that El Famous has a full kitchen staff, people at the registers, and cleaning the restaurant, and pays them more than Taco Bell?

Taco Bell pays a lot of money to run apps and franchise costs and credit card fees (which El Famous doesn’t because they’re a cash business), and so Taco Bell is taking this out on the workers, and making the customers pay to fund their own loyalty program.

And Taco Bell isn’t alone. Most fast food companies now have gigantic annual price hikes and Apps that can divide and manipulate people, and collect data and run experiments, like seeing how much each person will pay.

Taco Bell and McDonalds have plans to further automate where they may no longer let you inside the restaurant to see a menu. Then you might pay $5.99 for a Big Mac, while someone else pays $7.99 because McDonalds is tracking them and sees they go there several times a week and are more likely to put up with it.

This is part of the nightmare that data collection and automation are giving us.

Right now, they are advertising apps as ways to get “rewarded” with “free food”.

Free with 15% annual inflation, that is.

Walmart Grocery Pickup, Walmart App, and Walmart+ is getting more frustrating.

Walmart Grocery Pickup is getting more frustrating.

Walmart has been looking at ways it can convince more people to pay for Walmart+, which is their answer to Amazon Prime.

Recently, Walmart decided to ditch DoorDash because the “partnership” wasn’t working out, and by “wasn’t working out”, I mean that DoorDash doesn’t actually pay their slaves enough to bother, so orders would just sit forever until Walmart canceled them without delivery.

On the off chance that your order went through, Walmart basically discouraged tipping the driver, which created even more bad feelings towards the scheme from drivers, which caused even more drivers to stop taking Walmart orders. Some had stories like “I just carried in like 100 gallons of bottled water up four flights of stairs for $3 and the cheap fucker didn’t even tip me!”.

So that didn’t last long, and now our local Walmart has its own delivery van and a store employee. (You can tip them, but Walmart has to pay them the legal minimum wage, and it’s Walmart’s van and gas money. This is a win for labor.)

I usually pick up grocery orders. I don’t go inside much because I have a Walmart credit card which gives me 2.5 times as many points to have someone else do my shopping.

When Walmart Grocery Pickup was new, they were very eager to please and almost never just said “We’re out of that particular brand and size so here’s a bigger item or the national brand at no additional charge.”.

Lately, they just say they’re out, and then you have to go park the car again and run in for one thing.

On top of that, recently they shoved my grocery order into someone else’s car and then the app told me I had already picked it up. Nobody fessed up as to who pulled the order because they didn’t want to get written up for doing that.

Several times, they shove part of someone else’s order into my car and I may not realize this until I’m home with the stuff.

But they also like to hand me produce that has obviously gone bad, damaged cans, damaged meat that’s bleeding all over the bag, etc.

In these cases, you tell the Web site you want a refund and usually it just says refunded and no need to return it.

Walmart also has a “Scan and Go” app for Walmart+.

Wegman’s just got rid of this in their stores because they said it caused grocery theft to increase by 18%.

At least I saw another article saying 18%. The New York Times doesn’t offer a figure. But 18% sounds like what would happen. This article cites a university study that says up to 10% of what walks out the door with Scan and Go apps might be stolen merchandise, and that Walmart gave up on it for a while but brought it back.

So we get to pay even higher grocery prices during hyperinflation while Walmart tries to figure out what their business model actually is.

They recently started spamming me about some streaming app that they bundle now.

Streaming is just like Bittorrent (or checking out DVDs from the library for free) apparently, only with commercials, monthly fees, “HDMI errors”, and having to download something every time you watch it.

I find the concept of having 10-12 streaming apps quite amusing. Like, that anyone would do that in THIS economy.

Thoughts on Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first. Plus: Why Monkeypox is in the media in the first place.

Thoughts on the “gay community” and Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first.

WARNING: This post will be controversial and likely offensive to LGBT people. I’m gay myself, and I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really wish I didn’t feel compelled to talk about this.

I consider myself to be the product of when we could still sit down and watch hard-hitting fact-based journalism, and talk about things like adults, without a total media circus, or worry that someone will take offense to facts.

George Carlin warned about “soft language” in a video from a long time ago that I believe everyone should watch. It hasn’t gotten any better.

So, I’ve sat down and thought a little bit about Monkeypox and how it spreads. I’ve decided that I won’t be getting my vaccine in the foreseeable future.

Why? I’m not at much risk.

A NewsWeek article says “experts” are recommending vaccines go to gay men first.

Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle)

I’m married, and neither one of us are cheating on each other or in an “open relationship”, so these kinds of things are very unlikely to hit home for us, and most of the people getting Monkeypox who have been interviewed by the news describe themselves as the “village bicycles”.

You know, “Everyone’s had a ride.”.

I’m sure that they had enough fun for 10-15 minutes with someone from Grindr, which they won’t be able to identify to the Health Department contact tracers as they’re sitting there in “debilitating pain” looking like the Elephant Man, to be worth it.

NBC News ran an article, interviewing a bunch of gay men who got themselves in a whole heap of trouble, and they pretty much all had a similar story. Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle)

My personal favorite was the guy who went hoebagging his way across Europe, having sex with men in seven different countries, capped off by a stop over at the bathhouse in Germany. He speculates that he may now have Monkeypox because someone wasn’t wiping down the sex swing.

A close runner-up, of course, was the guy who described lesions on his anal area and said, “I do remember there being a little hard spot [on that particular man’s] penis.”.

Stories like these anger and frustrate me in a number of ways, but mostly at fellow gay men.

I’ve been around long enough to know that at least half don’t value being in any kind of a relationship at all, and that half of those that do are usually cheaters or pressure the other one, or agree to, having an open relationship.

My thinking on being in an “open relationship” is that it’s just a total lack of respect that people have for each other.

It’s like telling each other “You’re not important to me and I’d rather you just brought home some money and didn’t say anything while I bring all of these other people in to bang me like a Salvation Army drum.”.

The reason why Monkeypox vaccines and the disease itself do not concern me or my spouse is because we don’t “get around”. We respect our marriage vows.

If you care about your “partner”, you should get married and agree to exclusivity. It’s a part of this overall mental maturity that I see so often lacking in the “gay community”. I respect my spouse and I respect the legal contract that I swore to uphold in a court of law.

Unfortunately, as a sign of the times, many states in the US either decriminalized Adultery or don’t enforce it, even if it’s a felony or misdemeanor.

In Illinois, it’s a misdemeanor, and nobody has been charged with it since 1997. It’s there because no politician wants to say they’re the ones who took it off the books. I think they should go back to enforcing it as an offense that involves a fine payable to the state, some probation, and grounds for the other party to dissolve the marriage and leave with 100% of the assets.

Marriage is a great and stabilizing factor that benefits society. People who are too immature to enter into a commitment like that are people you probably want nothing to do with anyway.

There’s some free advice from someone who had to learn that the hard way.

Back to the pox….

There will be victims of Monkeypox who didn’t bring it on themselves.

The media is drawing attention away from the people who should get the vaccine first.

Healthcare professionals, school children (shared playground equipment, toys, etc.), and the Homeless.

Not people who go on sex vacations across Europe, Thailand, and the Philippines, and use Grindr, then blame the bathhouse for not bleaching down the communal sex swing.

The “gay community” has known that there were way worse things out there than Monkeypox since the AIDS crisis, 40 years ago, and I’ll bet you most or all of the men in the NBC article didn’t wear a condom.

Not that they bothered to report such, because it would just confirm that these people are as gross as you suspected already.

If you’re not afraid of what’s already out there, why would you be creeped out by Monkeypox?

Is it because it could leave lesions all over you and that doesn’t sit well with your sense of vanity?

Monkeypox is just going to be another animal at the zoo by the time our idiot President is finished eating ice cream cones while it spreads across the United States.

The entire shortage of vaccines is due to the corrupt Biden Administration.

The Smallpox vaccine that they used to administer with a bifurcated needle is still around. They actually have a Strategic National Stockpile in case Putin or Xi (most likely) release it again as a bio-weapon, and there are enough doses in there for every American.

Just rotting away in a government warehouse, while Biden, Chuck, and Nancy dole out contracts to a company, Bavarian Nordic, that has patented a different vaccine and can’t produce it quickly enough to get out ahead of the disease.

They don’t have to.

They can make a fortune from the monopoly while the entire city of Chicago has to stand in line for an hour on Mondays until that week’s allocation runs out.

(After the politicians buy shares in the company, naturally. Because insider trading….wooohoo!)

If they cared about this being a “global emergency”, Biden, Chuck, and Nancy would open up the government warehouses and get the forklifts rolling and get the Smallpox vaccine rolling out. We know it’s safe. My mom had to take it in 1963 when it was a routine childhood vaccination.

Another upside would be, if Putin and Xi decide to throw the United States into further chaos by releasing a Smallpox pandemic onto us, we’ll already be vaccinated.

(Although I believe such a situation is unlikely. Diseases are hard to control. The Chinese couldn’t stop COVID-19 even with all the options of having a brutal Communist dictatorship on the table. It was far easier for them to control the narrative by throwing out journalists from free countries.)

I’m certainly not “anti-vax”. I get vaccinated or boosted for something at least every year, even if it is just a flu shot.

I just don’t think that rushing to get a Monkeypox vaccine that hasn’t been tested is for me. It’s not like the guy sitting 3 rows back at the movie theater could cough and you’d get it, like COVID-19.

Like all medicines, vaccines are a risk / benefit situation. The risk of Tetanus is not worth foregoing a vaccine. The risk of Pneumonia isn’t.

Something that is mostly going around among a bunch of slobs that the media digs up that are all on a gay f**k app, and the healthcare professionals unlucky enough to have to take care of them when they show up and want their butt lesions tended to, just doesn’t sound like a me problem at this point in my life.

When AIDS was new, public health experts asked for the bathhouses in San Francisco to be shut down, which was mainly where gay men at the time went to do drugs and each other, and they got booed off the stage.

Worse, many gay men accused AIDS of being “trumped up” by the Reagan Administration to “put gay men back in the closet”.

Yes, the first AIDS deniers were gay men who didn’t want to cope with the mess they’d gotten themselves into. Later came the people who wanted to sell worthless supplements. Many of the AIDS deniers who got AIDS were the first to die, since you can’t treat a disease you won’t even admit you have.

Instead, gay men in the 1980s blamed a Republican President that they just didn’t happen to like already, and said that anyone who told them to to wear a condom, and to shut down the bathhouses, was being “sex negative” and “homophobic”.

They didn’t spare gay men who just wanted to put a lid on the AIDS crisis and save lives from the abusive conduct.

There’s absolutely no reason to expect that to change now that the new pandemic is Monkeypox.

I won’t lie, like most young people, I was more “active” when I was younger, but it also wasn’t bathhouses and bonking my way through seven different countries in a couple of weeks, and capping it off in a communal sling in a German bathhouse. Usually it was just with people I knew fairly well.

Honestly, I think that Grindr is one of the worst things to happen to the “gay community”, and I say that as a gay man, and a person who absolutely loves new (open) technologies and is often one of the first people you see using it.

Thing is, Grindr isn’t an open source program. It’s a proprietary program.

It has had so many scandals that it would be difficult and out of the scope of this article to even name all of them. Mostly data privacy issues. Selling HIV status and things to Facebook and drug companies, compiling blackmail for the Chinese government on US citizens, people who have met up with freaks and been raped and tortured.

In many ways, Grindr is actively harmful, and in no way is it ultimately satisfying.

My opinion of the app was already not high, and now the latest gift it gives to the people who use it and the victims of those they touch is a disfiguring ailment.

In Star Trek: First Contact, which is still the peak of Trek movies in my opinion, Captain Picard screamed “Don’t let them touch you!” when the Borg were slowly meandering a swarm. Good advice for dealing with Borg. Good advice for dealing with men on Grindr or at Steamworks Chicago.

The Borg have all the time in the world. Q described them as never being in a hurry because they would just drain the fight out of their victims and then assimilate them.

Monkeypox isn’t spreading quickly, despite the media panic that would have you believe otherwise, because the people most likely to get it are basically self-selecting in order to get to the front of the line.

For most people, reaching the vaccine (especially an untested one) quickly is not an emergency, and the media should quit trying to alarm everybody and just report facts.

But that’s not how the media works anymore.

For most people in America today, the important issue isn’t Monkeypox.

It’s inflation, job loss, problems finding adequate housing if you can even find housing at all.

Corporations spying on them and selling the dirt to their employers and landlords so they can get thrown out like some kind of a felon before they even get an interview.

It’s government gone mad.

But the last thing the media wants is a concerned public about a country that’s falling apart, overrun with crime, with a failing economy, that’s designed to “keep people in their place”, running around like a hamster on a treadmill just to stay where they’re at.

They have to panic people about stupid shit that doesn’t concern them and is only on the periphery of possibly happening to them in the future.

The lengths that the media is going through to try to protect a President that’s so clearly incompetent and a Democratic House Speaker who says what we really need is a “strong Republican Party” is, well, aggravating.

“They don’t believe in governance.” -Pelosi

Well, she’s not wrong. The more I watch her party in action, the less I do believe in the government. Not believing that the government will help you is not a problem the Republicans are making. It’s one they’re winning elections with, after the Democrats have been in office for years and, don’t help you.

While Madame Speaker has blamed being “ungovernable” on the far-right, it’s a problem with people in general. If there’s a problem here of people being “ungovernable”, it’s because they’re being encouraged.

Her own party is encouraging people to flout their state laws. If you find it’s easier to just flout laws regarding abortion, what other law will you respect? It’s not like blue states even manage to govern.

Illinois has some of the worst gun crime in America with some of the toughest gun laws. It only affects people who aren’t a threat and turns them into a criminal by mistake sometimes. (Expired FOID card….while they’re off issuing a valid one to Robert Crimo II)

Summarized: “Sorry about the hyperinflation. Here’s a coupon for the Internet so you can get brainwashed for free!” -Democrats.

I literally have about three or four Web sites that are not my bank that I even open anymore. I can’t remember a time when the Web was worse than it is now. With how boring it is, how much crap and propaganda, how much “content” you can’t use freely because some asshole stuck it behind DRM.

We’re well beyond a time when open source software could access the Web and do much of anything with it. Which is a major reason why Gemini is being constructed.

It’s almost not worth having, and they’re on a mission to finish things off to where it’s not worth having, and now they’re giving it to poor people to distract them with porn and propaganda. It’s Orwellian.

Meanwhile, companies in America complain there’s “nobody to hire” because young people have figured out that they can make more than minimum wage with sex work. (This feeds into the hyperinflation.) The government is also fine with this because porn keeps people stupid and distracted. Anything that keeps you stupid and distracted is good. Anything that informs you must be incinerated.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, my cousin had a job at the Indiana State Department of Health. STDs spreading across Internet/Web hookups was just starting to happen, and at that point in time, contact tracing didn’t have as difficult a time at keeping up with it, and notifying people that they need to be tested.

I think states have mostly given up on contact tracing. There’s an unprecedented explosion in Sexually Transmitted Disease in the United States, and while we can speculate as to why, I blame a lot of it on these apps that tell you how close the nearest person who has had sex with everyone else already is. Short of banning these apps, I doubt we’re really going to do much to put a lid on it.

The states could just buy all of the contact tracing data from Grindr about who you’ve been having sex with. No warrant. Grindr does sell it. To anyone. The state doesn’t want to spook people by admitting it can contact trace that way, I guess.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement buys a ton of data from these app companies.

The government “knows” everything it cares to, because you’re leaking it all over the place. They just don’t want to make it so obvious that it creeps you out. You getting Monkeypox isn’t really a problem for them.

I was talking to a Chicago Police Detective about Grindr and he said they love Grindr because they can just serve Grindr with a warrant and get all kinds of stuff and that they do it all the time.

That’s in addition to the fact that undercover cops hide out on it.

You’d think that not admitting you’d do something illegal into a box that popped up in a smartphone app would be a given, but apparently not. 🙂

Like the majority of “smartphone apps” and “social networks”, Grindr is effectively an arm of the state. Why would the state cut off their arm?

“All day long, beating you over the head with their media. Telling you what to think, what to believe, and what to buy!” -George Carlin

The price of a man’s haircut is $30 plus tax and tip because they have “The Legendary Hot Towel”.

The price of a man’s haircut is $30 plus tip because they have “The Legendary Hot Towel”.

Actual Image from SportsClips.

When I was 11 years old, in 1995, we had a barber. His name was Max.

Max the Barber (not to be confused with Joe the Plumber) cut hair for about $6.

In the $6, he even pulled out a hot towel and then after a couple of minutes of you reading the sports magazine, which he had, while Max went and worked on someone else, he’d come back and do your neckline with a straight razor.

I’ve never seen a corporate franchise salon come at me with a straight razor to get my neckline and sideburns like Max the Barber did. I think straight razors are cool. I guess corporate lawyers don’t.

Which is why I always came out of a Great Clips and still had to go home and use my own shaving razor to really finish the job, after I already paid them.

Great Clips moved in at the local mall in Marion, Indiana (the mall is now empty and rotting away because nobody could afford to shop there due to foreign outsourcing and Walmart) charging about $8 by 1998.

By the time Great Clips, SportsClips, and MasterCuts, and the other chains pushed out the local barbers, they kept increasing the price of a simple man’s haircut, until today where it is over $30.

Granted, some of this is inflation, but $6 in 1995 is $11.50 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI.

So if Max was still around, he may charge more, but $30 is still high even in 2022.

There are two of us in this house. Me, and my spouse.

$60 for a haircut each month is $720 goddamned dollars a year plus taxes, tips, and gas. Also, time and trouble of finding one, and then waiting an hour for them to get around to you because you didn’t use an app to check in.

Someone had to pay someone else to write a goddamned app because a simple FIFO buffer and a piece of paper on a clipboard was too easy, I guess.

And in the end, since the app costs them money, it costs you money.

An app on your phone spies on you, which is why everyone wants to litter your phone with apps and turn it into a dumping ground for apps.

You’re being punished for rejecting this by wasting your own time if you don’t use one.

Now, in the era of COVID, you also go in there, pay them the outrageous fee, get spied on by apps, and then literally have someone breathing down your neck who may very well have COVID.

During the brief phase where the government pretended to care about COVID so they could create corporate welfare programs and remind everyone who was in control of our lives, they shut down all of the haircut places around here, so it was either buy a home haircut kit or look like Cousin It from the Addams Family.

At first, we were just buzzing each other’s hair off, because we weren’t going anywhere anyway. It was quick, it was comfortable, etc.

But then COVID dragged on, and I wondered to myself why we were ever spending this much goddamned money on our hair. Even slightly more complicated men’s haircuts than buzzing it all off aren’t that complicated.

But you have to pay for the expenses of the salon, as well as 1,800 hours of the person cutting your hair going to a school that mainly teaches them how to do women’s haircuts (which are more difficult and should cost more).

Then they have to pay the state for a permission slip to cut hair, because it’s practically brain surgery and a bad hair day can literally kill you. /s

Then the state says “Gee, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we also made them take training to recognize domestic abuse or people who are depressed and report that to the police?”.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that Illinois forces hair stylists to pay to learn how to spot depression and get the cops after you. It’s not just your psychiatrist you can’t have an open discussion with anymore, it’s the person cutting your hair!

In the case of a simple and cheap, functional, man’s haircut, Max the Barber went the way of the dinosaurs, and men are actually up-charged so that women don’t shriek about having to pay for their haircut, which is only about 20 times more complicated.

Let’s call it a “blue tax” (since women can call anything they don’t like the “pink tax”), because if everyone paid based on how complicated their hair was, mine would still be $11, and women would be paying $80 or 90.

It’s the problem of what to charge people, when charging everyone the same, average cost, is easier.

Some cars take longer to do an oil change than mine at the shop I go to, but I have to pay the same $50 for an oil change that anyone else does. (Except foreign cars that take special oil, I guess.)

I just pay it and don’t complain. The last thing I want to do is jack up the Buick and get oil all over myself and risk having 3,700 pounds of car land on me to save $10.

Back in the 90s, this concept in hair of everyone paying for what they used was normal.

Men didn’t go to a “salon”, usually, and since men didn’t go there, they had to charge based on how much work they did considering that women were 95% or more of their clients. I remember my Grandmother complaining because she took my cousins to the Sears hair salon so that they would look good in that year’s Sears family photo. (And for some reason, I still remember the photo from 1990 pretty well even though I don’t know where I’d get a copy of it now.)

She complained that they had the lady cut about 1/4″ of hair off and they billed her $100, in 1990!

The problem of “salons” and charging men more to subsidize women’s haircuts must be a problem that started in big cities, because there was an entire episode of Married With Children about this from the 1980s, where Al Bundy (a man from Chicago) complained that his barber died and the only way to get a haircut was at a “salon”, which is where all the gay men were going, and which gave all a perm and charged him $60.

Al was delighted at the end of the episode that his barber’s dad who was in his 90s was still in business in Cicero, and so Al had a place to get his haircuts.

Unfortunately, at this point, it’s my Wahl haircut kit or bust.

With the price of everything going up, we’ve learned to not only do our own haircuts, but we’ve gotten pretty good at it.

And since we started doing it 25 months ago, we’ve saved over $1,500 so far.

The kit only cost me $50, and it’s a nice kit. It even has non-standard guides that go up in half-size increments.

The thing pays for itself every month.

It doesn’t come with a “legendary” steamed towel, infused with tea tree oil, but it gets the job done.

I think that “Legendary” steamed towel is going to go down in history as my second favorite marketing bullshit after Ricardo Montelbon’s performance in the Chrysler commercial, touting the “Corinthian Leather”.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

I got a $397 check for my spouse last week and a $397 check for myself this week.

Facebook had been tagging us in our pictures and storing our facial patterns in their facial recognition programs. That turned out to be a big problem for them that cost them nearly $700 million in the resulting class action settlement.

Scumbag corporations have been losing big time due to the BIPA, and they want it repealed. There’s pending lawsuits against at least a dozen major companies, and lots of settlements too.

The only thing corporations understand is losing money. Facebook has already had a lot of fake stock value erased this year.

Facebook blamed the loss mostly on Apple’s alleged new “privacy” functions on the iPhone, even though Facebook already has patents pending on how to avoid those features and track people with iPhones anyway. As long as their apps are even on your phone, you’ve lost already whether you use an Android or an iPhone.

I use a Free and Open Source app called Frost from F-Droid that gives Facebook no significant access to my phone. It’s basically a blinged out webview that tricks Messenger into working. So it’s very likely that Facebook has less access to my Pixel 6 than anything Apple has done to box them in on an iPhone, where all you can use is Facebook’s apps.

Facebook’s financial problems have more to do with laws like the California and Illinois privacy statutes.

The only safe way to operate is to assume that anyone you track could be in Illinois or California, which is why although BIPA is an Illinois law, and Illinois is a state of 12.8 million people, Facebook disabled their tagging and facial recognition everywhere in the world after losing $700 million dollars.

Another source of Zuckerberg’s heartburn is the state of the economy in general. Major stocks of companies with real products are down 30 even 40%, and not even Walmart was spared.

Most of the ads I’ve seen go by on Facebook are from lawyers suing app companies.

Since the economy is so bad right now (Maybe call it the “Don’t Say Recession Recession”?), consumers have to tighten their wallets, and while that may or may not eventually break the hyperinflation (since most of this is due to Biden and Congress throwing around trillions of dollars we don’t have, that came at the expense of your bank account), it means the value of advertising is collapsing.

This is what set off the DotCom Bubble Collapse in the early 2000s.

Eventually, investors get sick of losing money, the hysteria wears off, and reality sets in.

Usually in an environment where the Fed loses its appetite for entertaining that round of mania.

Like what’s starting to unfold now.

The reason why Elon Musk wants Twitter isn’t because he has a plan to turn a profit. His Tesla company is down 41% YTD, you know.

It’s because he wants to be able to say whatever he wants without any censorship, and invite Trump back to scream and yell, but there will still be “content moderation” and spyware tracking the people foolish enough to have accounts there.

I’ve never really understood how a company that lets you post 140 characters from the toilet that disappear into the void quickly has managed to stay in business. Pretty much the only thing on Twitter are influencers, “brands”, and politicians. The 1% can say whatever they want unfiltered.

Do you even want to be on this thing?

I barely even have a presence on Facebook anymore. It’s not generally worth using. You hope other people will hate like your vacation or something and there’s a lot of stress to be fake popular on it.

I tried to tell Roy Schestowitz that he’d be a lot happier and lose nothing if he got off Twitter years ago, but the only reason he left was because they shoved him out the door for criticizing Bill Gates.

Merely criticizing the rich and powerful is enough to get you thrown out.

It is dangerous to have “social media” replace the Web, because then they can throw you out when they don’t like what you say, even if it’s not illegal to say that. And that’s why corporations and the governments want the Web to die. They can spy and censor better that way. It was much harder to do this in bulk when everyone who wanted a blog just got their own Web site.

Google even crawls my blog and I get readers. When you post to Facebook and Twitter, your thoughts just die immediately. It gives the illusion of having spoken, even though nobody is really listening.

I wonder if Elon Musk will let him back in. He is a “free speech absolutist”, or so he says. 😉

CNN stops bothering to hide that the economy has turned sour.

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.

Location tracking company selling data on “smartphone” users who visit abortion clinics.

A location tracking company is selling “smartphone” location tracking data on people who visit abortion clinics.

For now, it could be used for all sorts of nasty reasons, but after Roe v. Wade is officially struck down, states such as Texas could, and probably will, buy the data to collect evidence to criminally prosecute women who go to another state for an abortion.

Previously, something like this would have been difficult to prove, but in the age of iPhones and Android phones, all the government has to do in order to short circuit the Fourth Amendment is buy the data like any other parasite or criminal would.

Eventually, people will know that the states are using geolocation data to prosecute abortion seekers, but it will be too late for the first hundreds of women that Republican prosecutors turn into political prisoners.

Since many phones, such as the iPhone, only pretend to be turned off, it’s best to just not have one, or to leave it at home if you go somewhere you wouldn’t want the state to know about.

The government getting into phone records isn’t new. They have a lot of options to get your course location or GPS coordinates. Google and your phone company have both.

People already get caught violating probation and COVID restrictions because their phone leaks so much data. During the COVID restrictions in the US, the federal government was purchasing location data from in-app advertisers to monitor “compliance” with the restrictions without having to explain to a judge on what grounds they wanted a search warrant.

Now iPhones are another tool against women for Republicans that are looking to scalp them for a trophy so they can run for higher office later, while the women are in prison.

GEICO DriveEasy dings safe drivers constantly. Including penalizing for avoiding accidents while draining phone battery.

GEICO DriveEasy Review dings safe drivers constantly. Including penalizing for avoiding accidents.

After years of declining “telematics” for “safe driving discounts”, I put it on my policy with GEICO for the Buick. I figured that since Root Insurance said I was a very safe driver (9 out of 10) that GEICO would too.

However, their app is completely full of bugs and drains your phone’s battery quite rapidly.

Today I got my score dinged for “distracted driving” while I was parked with the engine shut off waiting for Walmart to bring out my grocery order. The distraction, according to GEICO, was for telling Walmart where I was parked.

Yesterday, on the way back from Indiana, it penalized me for hard braking three times. The app is incredibly sensitive and sometimes even dings you for coasting to a stop and then gently pressing the pedal along the way.

It also dinged me for not driving smoothly when I had to pull into the middle lane and let a police officer with his lights and siren on pass me on the tollway.

Then of course, my favorite, you make a turn at five miles per hour, pissing off everyone behind you along the way, and it says you’re flooring it on those turns and can barely control your vehicle at such an unsafe speed, you maniac.

The app is a battery hog too. Quite often, you look at “Battery” and find out that not only is GEICO the top offender, but it’s using twice as much since your last charge as your Web browser, and even more than Waze.

Overall, I doubt this app is worth it. Alongside all of these issues, it constantly threatens to disenroll me from the program unless I prove my cell phone number is mine with a one time code, even though I already did that like three times so far.

Also, you can have your score dinged or get removed from the program for not driving your car at least once every 5 days, but it also dings you for driving too many miles.

It also dings you if it thinks you were driving in the rain or snow, even if you had no choice, and then tells you that you should plan whether you need to drive to work or not depending on whether it is snowing or raining that day.

Put it all together, and this is a VERY poorly designed app. According to most people, it behaves this way on their phone, but most of them say they get a decent discount at the renewal so “What the hell?”.

I’m just really not sure it’s worth it. Especially if you’re not paying that much for insurance regardless. It seems like all of the really bad drivers who know they’re really bad drivers, will simply opt out of the program so GEICO won’t know anything about how to bill them for their risk, and the people who are good drivers will sign up and then have things happen like the app logging road trips while their phone is on the charger in the middle of the night. According to Reddit, this also happens. Although, not to me.

Although…..it has gotten the starting point of a trip wrong before.

Is DriveEasy worth it? I’ll definitely let you know in six months when I get my renewal quote, but if I don’t like what I see, I may go to a different insurance company.

On the GEICO subreddit, it’s mostly people who work there complaining about lousy management and layoffs right now, but there’s also chatter from customers who don’t like how badly DriveEasy was designed.

The next time I go to pick up groceries at Walmart, I may just force stop GEICO before I head out so it won’t ding me for picking up my groceries in a parked vehicle with the engine off as “unsafe driving”.

It obviously has no idea what in the hell is going on out there and that it’s penalizing you for avoiding accidents and filing insurance claims that cost them money, and so if this is the best they’ve got, they need to yank it until they can do better.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

-/r/Walmart post about DoorDash contracting to deliver Walmart+ orders.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

The employees at the local Walmart all had to attend a meeting today where it was stated that all Walmart employees get “free” Walmart+, which basically is free delivery of any size order to your house and 5 cents off per gallon of gasoline at Walmart or Murphy gas stations.

I guess it’s not nothing, but Walmart says that the Internal Revenue Code causes the “fair market value” of the Walmart+ subscription to be reported as taxable income.

So congratulations. Instead of a raise you got another way to spend money at Walmart, and you owe the government another $15-20 when you file your taxes next year.

Normally, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I doubt they’d be doing this unless they figured it benefited them more than you.

We’re already so tethered to Walmart at this point, it’s hard to shop anywhere else. Between the discount card (which works on some groceries, but not most) and the 5% back on my Capital One Walmart card for doing online orders, there’s hardly a point to shopping my groceries myself anymore, so I use the store pickup already.

The upside of having Walmart+ is marginal. I already know from Online Grocery Pickup employees talking about it that DoorDash drivers hate Walmart+ (verifiable through this article too) and they complain that they have to put groceries back that they’ve already picked and cancel the customer’s order all the time. Walmart probably pays more to have that happen than if they kicked a few more bucks to the drivers.

Walmart for their part says that a tip after some guy got $4 from them to deliver tons of groceries and a 50 pound bag of dog food up three flights of stairs is “optional”.

I just don’t see myself using it often unless I’m laid up in bed with the flu and absolutely cannot go out and pickup my own groceries, have an order for pickup that does not meet the $35 free pickup minimum and would normally be charged a $5.99 convenience fee (I’m there every day anyway, so this DOES happen), or an at Murphy filling up my gas tank and want to use the 5 cents a gallon off (in addition to my credit card, where gas always has 5% back).

The upside for an ethical person with Walmart+ is low. Ethics dictates a sizeable tip. Most Walmart customers are terrible people who don’t tip well, like the folks who already complain that their food arrived cold from restaurants with DoorDash. So the only ethical thing is tip or don’t use it.

With gas prices through the roof lately, I can’t imagine that Walmart+ isn’t on its last leg already.

If nobody wanted to make $4-5 taking a grocery order when gas cost $3 a gallon, who wants to do it with gas at $4.30 a gallon?

The whole thing is obviously in a death spiral because some manager at Walmart bought into this gig economy bullshit instead of paying a professional delivery driver in a Walmart truck to make the rounds (like Amazon Prime does).

And when we say “gig”, it’s a nice way of saying “slave”. People who work inside the store, for Walmart, make at least $17 an hour without having to drive all over the city not getting tips. They also don’t have to pay the employer share of social taxes at the end of the year.

The “app economy” has created a permanent underclass that cannot afford childcare (leading to Walmart warning that it won’t release orders to people with young children in the car) and do not make the legal minimum wage (which is $15 an hour in my state).

I’ve complained about these apps before, and how it’s dangerous for these “gig workers” from DoorDash to have their kids in the car.

Very recently, in the city I live in, a guy got into a running car and pointed a loaded handgun at a 16 year old in the back seat. A week before that, a guy stole a running vehicle and then ditched it a few miles later with some toddlers in it.

And you know how these app companies are. “We’re just a facilitator! You can’t sue us!”.

This is what comes out of San Francisco, folks. The most illiberal non-progressive system imaginable.

A return to plantations working slaves for subsistence living standards.