Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.
There’s been a steep decline in Google News on my phone, and now it recommends stories saying “Life hack, put your toilet paper in the freezer.”
This after Google laid off at least 50 people from their News division. So why wouldn’t it behave more like MSN floating garbage and nonsense to the top now?
I’ve noticed a sharp increase in sources like the tabloid sites as well.
In just a generation, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, to Lester Holt and Bill O’Reilly, to THIS.
The billionaires bought the news figuring they could run it as a propaganda rag that people would pay money to read. Then when they erected paywalls, they noticed they lost their ad revenue with very few subscribers, thus losing more money than they gained in subscriptions, and then after that they decided to do mass layoffs or even put the companies into bankruptcy and walk away from it.
The news is dead.
I was on the phone with my mother, who is a nurse and so hasn’t had trouble finding work since the early 1980s recession.
It’s so long ago now, plus my dad confiscated all the money and paid the bills himself and kept it all in his checking account, so she had no idea what inflation was running in that era, but I did manage to finally get through to her what finding a job is like now.
The U6 unemployment rate, which counts workers working REALLY bad jobs that are way beneath their skill set, or a few hours a week because they can’t find anything else, and “discouraged” workers is over 7.5% in Illinois right now. (October 2023, latest data, BLS)
It’s over 10% in Los Angeles and New York City.
7.2% in the US overall.
The early 80s recession was considered horrific, but the worst that unemployment ever got was near 11% by this measure, which they don’t publish conspicuously anymore, and in 1981 when she became a nurse it was about like it is now.
I asked her “So how were you doing in the jobs market in 1980 and 1981 when you weren’t a nurse yet?”
She said, something like “Oh it was terrible out there. All I could find was a waitress job at Richards (a restaurant in Indiana, I don’t know if it’s still there, but it had decent food in the 90s), and it barely paid me $2 an hour after I counted my tips and I had to go in for 10 hours every day to be on the clock for 7 because they did split shifts where I had to sit 3 hours with nothing to do then clock in for the next rush.”
I said, “Did you try to find anything better than this?”
She said, “Oh yeah, I was out there pounding the pavement. I tried to get a job at GM and they wouldn’t hire me. I went out to RCA and they hired both of your dad’s sisters but didn’t call me back.”
My dad’s sisters both have severe mental illness, so I can’t imagine they even had that job 3 months later knowing them. But they wouldn’t hire mom.
She said, “Finally I spent $1,600 on nursing school.” ($6,000 in 2023)
The State was running some sort of program where 160 people applied for 24 spots where the State would help them with some of their expenses.
My dad tried to sabotage her by not allowing her to study during the evenings “Because you have other things to do.” and turning off her alarm so it wouldn’t ring. Knowing that if she missed one day that they’d kick her out.
At first, he said “If you can find $1,600 you can go to school.” and walked off laughing and puffing a cigarette. He never figured she would. My grandmother and great-grandmother pooled the money together and paid for everything, so he resorted to sabotage saying “You’ll leave me if you become a nurse.”
He was always paranoid that she’d leave, but he would never treat her well so she figured out a way to leave. Her next two husbands were much worse.
But she got around the alarm clock sabotage by setting a second alarm. He can’t be woken up by anything so she set that for 3 AM and got a couple hours sleep, woke up, studied, and slipped out the door, and he never figured out what was going on.
But, it was bad out there in the 80s, real bad.
The news SAID it was bad, which is something they won’t do today even though it’s as bad finding a good job as it was in 1981.
The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.
It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.
Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.
They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”
So, all they did was walk through a jungle in a caravan, sneak into the US, and realize that it’s a real estate scam with bad winters, bullets flying everywhere, no jobs, and a lot of people who REALLY don’t want them here (including Chicagoans after they passed a “Welcoming City Ordinance” and then got 20,000 Venezuelans), and now they want to go back to Venezuela, where they will be treated worse than if they had never left for “failing to support the revolution”, which has left them with money worth so little that they “throw it in the trash because it’s not worth the trip to the bank” and “we still owe De La Rue millions and millions of dollars for printing it” according to one of the SeaMonkey (web browser suite) developers I’ve spoken to, who is in Venezuela.
I asked “tomman” what he thought about the mass illegal migration to the US, and he said “The last thing we need is more defectors.”, he seemed to be distraught by the idea that they’ve given up fixing anything and left.
In my opinion, this whole thing probably started because a few people spread rumors that in America the streets are paved with gold, and instead they’ve come to ANOTHER third world country that’s only “rich” because there’s about 1,600 people in the entire country that have amassed nearly all of the wealth. They hide in the shadows, control everything, buy the government you see, and don’t pay their taxes, so everything has been falling apart HERE too since about 2003 (five years later than Venezuela).
I also asked “tomman” how they could be so poor when they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said, “No Latin American country has ever been smart enough to do anything with that.”
Racist New York Times Calls South Korea “World’s Largest Baby Exporter”; Says Country With Terrible Unemployment “Burdened” By Low Birth Rates.
So this is what I saw on the New York Times today.
Then they go on to say this…
The South Koreans are so ashamed over a situation of high unemployment, that it has become a euphemism to describe over half a million unemployed youth (just the youth) as “taking a break”.
But the New York Times says they suffer from “low birth rates”.
Apparently more than half a million unemployed young people are suffering…from not having half a million more young people competing with them for jobs,
In America now, we have millions of layoffs, hiring freezes, reduced hours (involuntary), but they also tell Americans we “suffer” from less people to contend with for jobs and housing and everything else.
Capitalist systems have to grow forever even though it’s not possible. First they insult you, then they take away your reproductive rights and continue insulting you.
Next, they’ll probably send armed police to make random people get each other pregnant. Or scale it, and have breeding farms.
The tone in the United States is getting darker every year. Less freedoms, less of the politicians in charge even pretending like they care how you’re doing.
Why should Korea be any different? They have millions of unemployed and the government wants more people. Wow, just like America.
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 Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.
Yesterday when driving my spouse to a medical appointment in the south suburbs…
I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.
For a 50 mile stretch in the Chicagoland area, things are dead. The city proper apparently even has several empty Sears Tower-equivalents of empty office space.
The other day, Grindr (the gay sex app) made the news for a “not layoff layoff” whereby half the company (over 80 employees) resigned en masse over a “return to the office deadline”.
Some of them said that they wondered how, without their presence in the office, an app where people have been kidnapped and stabbed to death by a stalker, which the app told their location to, will “remain safe”. Yes, I wonder.
Roy Schestowitz commented that this is getting fairly common.
The managers impose deadlines and anyone who doesn’t come back is not technically a layoff and doesn’t qualify for any benefits.
We spoke of Walmart cutting people’s hours and how pressuring them to quit “also isn’t a layoff”.
I told him, Walmart absolutely lays people off and gives them severance, but only when they’re closing the entire store down with three days warning and they stick up a sign that says ‘Dear Shoplifters and Arsonists, valued Chicago customers, the store will close on Friday. Employees who can’t commute three hours to the nearest store will get a little bit of WARN Act Money. It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. C’ya!’.
(Not what the actual sign says, but it’s the thought that counts.)
Then we discussed the movies. I said, they wheeled Hiyao Miyazaki out (for those who don’t know, he’s been called the Japanese Walt Disney, because everything he touches sells like hotcakes) to make one last movie and the local theater has been hitting my email inbox hard with it because they know if people like me and my spouse go out to see a movie twice this year, one of them will be that one.
It’s just getting harder to justify movies.
It’s not only that barely any of them are worth watching at all, it’s that money is suddenly so tight for many Americans that something that costs $12 for two people on Tuesday isn’t even justifiable on a weekly basis anymore. You look at what’s out and 4-6 months goes by before you even consider watching the movie.
The local Marcus Cinema theater used to do $5 movie tickets on Tuesday, now it’s $6 and you have to use an app, and no Holidays, and some movies (the good ones) are special and are never $6.
So the “$6 Tuesday with an app that has dozens of spyware libraries in it” is a way to make theaters showing bad movies “not empty” so that they might sell a bucket of popcorn.
What I see unfolding in America right now is like the Second Great Depression, but even during the Depression the federal government admitted to everyone what was happening and enacted programs to help them muddle through.
Today, they cut programs. They tell disabled people in their late 50s “Go find work, bum!”, and with the cost of everything spiking, those lucky enough to have any work find themselves with almost all their money going out to rent and food and gasoline.
This last couple of months my electric bill was running 10% higher than it normally does this part of the year. I looked on my bill this month to find that the Democrats added $10 a month to my bill to save us from “the carbon”. Oh no, not carbon!
My extra $10 a month on the electric bill will certainly make the smog in India and China that’s as thick as pea soup better, and save the planet, the trees, the bees, the whales and snails, and the endangered horny toads.
His Excellency J.B. Pritzker, Lord above us in the high castle, is a very Progressive man.
He made $5 billion the old fashioned way, by inheriting a hotel fortune.
He strongly and earnestly believes in redistributing the wealth to people who don’t do anything except make babies.
Not his own wealth, but if I have an extra five bucks in my pocket that week, not for long if Morbidly Obese 400 pound “Health Expert” Lord Farquad (Seven COVID Shots and Counting) has anything to say about it.
This country is basically dying. What’s going on is the Democrats benefit from people who are too illiterate to understand the issues finding their way into a voting booth, so they enact policies where people who litter the place with unemployable children who will shoot at each other, deal drugs, and scare the taxpayers out of the State don’t have to use any of their own money to reproduce.
They then reduce school by getting rid of the arts and literature, and replacing an increasing amount of actual education with propaganda.
Then they make college so expensive that most people can only dream of going there, even though you’ll also be poor if you don’t.
They’re also the Party of Lockdown Fetishists who basically have wet dreams of killing more businesses, which still employ a few people, with taxes and another winter of discontent, because once all the businesses and taxpayers are gone, you can run a corrupt welfare State on nothing but loans from the Central Bank why not?
It’ll be paradise. Just wait and see!
The Democrat answer to the criminals shooting up the place is to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to arm themselves and shoot back.
The police around these parts are so dumb and corrupt, that the other day, a black man was shot in the head, and the cops ignored the bullet hole in his window, and the bullet in his head, dumped him on the funeral home, and wrote down in the police report that he fell and hit his head and died accidentally.
Yes, they will protect us all from the bad criminal people! You do not need a FOID card, dear friends!
Anyway, there’s hardly even a reason to leave the house anymore.
They’ve ruined just about everything you could possibly want to see. I mean, some people still walk around in the forest preserves because the Democrats only took the trees in open air parks away from people during “COVID Lockdowns” which they want to bring back this winter. But trees are still there. They don’t employ very many people, but the trees are still there.
At least the ones that didn’t get knocked over to make the suburbs, which are now rotting malls and empty offices.
It should be very interesting to see how long anyone keeps reading the KrugmanBot3000 in the New York Times and doesn’t wake up and see with their own eyes what is actually going on in America.
Our black and white “tuxedo” cat is sick with hyperthyroidism and a tumor. The vet figures the tumor is probably benign, but we’re not going to wait and find out. We’re going to have it surgically removed.
She also did the labs and found hyperthyroidism starting to develop.
She informed me that my cat was probably older than I guessed (~9 or ~10) and that most cats don’t develop this until they’re around 12.
She said that for the hyperthyroidism we can do pills, which are cheap, or surgery to remove a different growth (which is almost exclusively benign), which is expensive. Like $3,000, which is a LOT of pills. More than the cat will ever need.
Fortunately, I bought a handy dandy secret weapon. A pill giver you load and then push into the cat’s mouth and pop the pill in with a plunger so you’re not getting bitten twice a day trying to keep the cat alive.
Twice a day, come pill time, it’s like the opening of Ghostbusters. “GRAB HER!”
Things are going in a bad direction economically due to the “Economic Miracle of Biden”, as told by “KrugmanBot3000” (with a Volvo) in the NY Times.
I too am sick, of being told of this “Miracle” that is unfolding, as people lose jobs, get their hours cut, and have to wonder how long they can even afford to take care of their pet cat or fill up the tank of their car.
It makes me depressed to read it even though I know it’s propaganda that would make Goebbels or Stalin blush.
The other day, they went so far as to blame people with low interest fixed-rate mortgages for still being able to spend a lot of money while the Fed bangs the poor into bankruptcy due to the wealthy panicking about inflation. This situation with the American media has never been worse.
What level of Freedom and Capitalism are we in where the media gleefully shouts “HAHAHAHAHA!!! It’s all working as planned. The Central Bank is killing American families with rigged interest rates. They can’t afford to buy a can of beans and they are losing their jobs! This will bring inflation to a very manageable 3% eventually!”
A troll in IRC told me he believed copyright should be abolished.
(If it was to be, then Microsoft can commit more code theft using Plagiarism as a Service, AKA CoPilot.)
Then another sockpuppet in IRC shamed me for reading the Times via Links or the Newswaffle.
I mentioned that their paywall is pretty much just there so that people on a Mac with Safari, or on an iPhone, can’t do anything about it. It was never going to stop smart people who can just drop to the terminal and type “links nytimes.com”.
The WEI “attestation” of Chrome is there to stop people from doing this. There will be two or three Web browsers that are “trusted”, and they will be “trusted” to prevent the user from doing anything at all to alter the display of “content”, on the client-side.
So in layman’s terms, no more “KrugmanBot3000” and “Miracles” because the browser has to attest that you have not done anything clever.
The only benefit is that these sites tend to be so bogus that nobody should pay for them anyway which is why they’re really dying.
Let me be frank, that considering that these places only ever post propaganda that benefits the wealthy elite and the American government’s gaslighting, you’d think taxpayers would be on the hook to directly subsidize all of them and not just NPR.
They could have packed it into the “Inflation Production Act” or something.
Microsoft fired 50 people at MSN News in 2020, then turned the “content” over to an “AI” Chaff Bot that told vacationers to Canada to visit a food pantry while they’re hungry.
This is not surprising. In fact, it’s to be expected. “AI” spew doesn’t cost them anything to post, they can put ads on it, and the audience is people who aren’t smart enough to remove Windows from their PC and get a real Web browser.
Microsoft is barely investing in their products and MSN News isn’t really even a corner case. Windows is decrepit and fading into irrelevance. They fire people tending to that corpse too, but can’t simply turn it over to a bot because bots don’t even know how to answer simple programming questions, much less replace programmers.
(Although many lose their jobs because of a bad economy, and the fact that they only had work because of low interest debt.)
Unfortunately, actual news sites are also looking into the “cost savings” side of Chaff Bot “content”.
The Chaff Bot Problem is helping the Dead Internet Theory along. No humans, just PR firms and Chaff Bot spew.
It’s not quite there yet, but the bots don’t have to sleep and can spew things all over the place that are morbid, stupid, incorrect, and low quality for corporations such as Microsoft to slap advertising on.
The article, which Microsoft removed, about Canada, was so low quality it was essentially a word salad like no human would ever write, cobbled together with random and low quality (even pixelated) images. (The one of the food bank was just a maple leaf.)
What’s also not helping is the fact that real Web browsers that are not designed by billion dollar corporations, are choking on an enormous amount of garbage invented mostly by Google. It’s amazing that SeaMonkey’s view of the Web platform is hardly a few years old, and already so much falls apart. Even trying to keep the Web working in a year under a still-supported version of Firefox ESR starts to become a problem.
The Web must be replaced.
It’s terrifying, depressing, how we all just walk around hitting up the same 5-10 sites, few of which are even people anymore. Most of them hosted on CloudFlare, which is the enemy of your privacy.
It takes no effort to flood the Web with crap, and companies like Microsoft (and their useful idiots) obviously have no reservations about doing it, which is why we need to take our cheese and leave.
It’s really aggravating to see what even the New York Times has decayed into, and they still expect you to pay money to read it. Imagine what happens when they replace Paul Krugman, who is a propagandist, who writes utterly predictable “content”, with a “KrugmanBot” that just blasts how, hey, sure your husband is losing all his hours at Walmart because nobody buys anything anymore while plenty of people are stealing things and setting the place on fire, and the economy under Biden is a miracle.
All day long, miracle. (No sleep. Just miracles, and ads.)
My Ex Texted Me About An Emergency Meeting on the Seattle Housing Market. (Going Down the Toilet.)
My ex, John, texted me about an emergency meeting.
He works as a real estate agent in the Seattle, Washington area.
He says his bosses are panicking because “luxury” tenants are not paying up, they’re having to start evicting people who were seen as a “very safe bet”, and the number of new leases they’re signing is down by 2/3rds.
They run a very large leasing operation, so I suppose this is Biden’s “Economic Miracle” at work with the “Cooling Inflation” and the “Enormously Strong Jobs Market”.
No Partial Unemployment While Walmart Cuts Hours, Says IDES
We went down to the Illinois Department of “Employment Security”, where everyone goes when they’re unemployed…no irony there….
They told us that my spouse would have to be cut lower than 24 hours a week to qualify for any unemployment based on his work at Walmart. Things haven’t gotten THAT bad yet, but we at least have an account and can file from home quickly now if things get that bad.
I don’t have a Reddit account anymore but still read it sometimes through a libreddit proxy. Many workers in various stores went from 40 hours to like 12-16, so it’s not like it can’t happen. I just prefer to think that it won’t.
Walmart claims that its profits are at record heights, and even as it cuts hours at the local store, it has a now hiring sign out. I noticed that the starting wage has dropped.
Must be this “strong economy” where nobody is unemployed. Very robust. The dementia patient in the White House who trips over his own feet says 3%.
Must be why workers can negotiate to start out $5 an hour less than three years ago even though inflation has taken another 20%.
It’s hard to ask for unemployment benefits, and I don’t mean just because the state forces you to go into abject poverty before they’ll give you anything, and closes all but 20 offices, where you have to physically go to create an account.
I mean, it’s hard to ask the government for “favors” because those favors have a habit of coming at too high a price later.
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who actually sees what’s going on. People in America are struggling. Most of us have been kicked in the balls by our own government, repeatedly.
The government has done nothing for most Americans, and therefore most Americans owe the government nothing. The idea that there’s an oath of citizenship is comical at this point.
The government has repeatedly slashed taxes for the rich, given them perpetual bailouts and payoffs in exchange for bribes, and whatever jobs haven’t been automated or sent to China and Mexico either require college or don’t pay enough to make rent even if you have two of them.
Then STATE OF ILL leaves you wading through its broken Web sites full of Microshit ASPX and SalesFARCE (bailouts) and wasting gas to ask for a few unemployment pennies you can’t have.
Nobody who has been brainwashed by Cabloid News even sees the irony that the only good jobs left are at state prisons, where most people go because the state took away their jobs and they still need money.
Walmart Brags About Record Profits, Then Makes Life Hell for Employees With Reduced Hours. Forcing Them to Beg the Government for Assistance and Unemployment Benefits.
Walmart’s profits since COVID have been absolutely through the roof.
Walmart does well when America’s economy is doing very badly, so it’s not surprising they’re having their best years ever when I’ve never seen as many people eating out of the trash and standing at stop lights with what dignity they have left, selling roses for whatever people can spot them as they drive by.
As this has happened, Walmart stores across the country have been slashing employee hours to fatten up the bonuses for greedy managers and executives.
There’s no rhyme or reason to this. It hurts Walmart. After all, what are employees for? They are for work. They are to help your customers buy things, by putting those things on the shelves, ringing them up, unloading freight, making sure there are enough shopping carts.
But the management at the local store is so incompetent that they’ve made shopping there all but impossible.
On top of the security guards they pay to sit and watch the shoplifting and arson, who have no power except to get on the phone and hope the real police show up (and it’s Illinois so haha fat chance), they’ve cut deeply into the muscle tissue that operates these stores.
When you make an order or go in, the merchandise is out of stock.
When you go to check out, they try forcing you to do unpaid labor for their store, by replacing all but two or three checkouts with “DO IT YOURSELF!” where they can accuse you months later of shoplifting, even if you didn’t, and waste valuable court time and policing resources.
Hell, half the time you visit the local store, there’s no shopping carts because they even cut all the cart pushers to the point where they’re either not there at all or if they are, they are so thoroughly unmotivated that they’re just shuffling their feet while they look for a new job.
Recently, Walmart has made things so hellish that their employees can’t even pay the rent, and the whole thing as Roy Schestowitz (TechRights) pointed out on the IRC channel, is an “HR trick” to make it impossible to keep working there, so people leave and you have attrition and you don’t have to call it a layoff.
Recently, they cut my spouse’s hours. Sometimes now he’s only scheduled 4 hours for a shift, which isn’t even worth the fucking gas money to get there and back much less my time to wake up and drive him.
Like many of their best employees, this has a demotivating effect and reduces productivity per labor hour. Think about it. How hard do you work when all you can think about is how you’re going to pay the landlord or put gas in your car?
They’ve been showing themselves to be the employer equivalent of a Machiavellian partner. They don’t care how you are doing. You’re there to be used.
And Machiavellianism itself is quite common in the world, but when you pair it with absolute stupidity, you get this. Machiavellianism without an intellect equals a Walmart manager.
So we’ve been trying to get through to the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
The STATE OF ILL (which it calls itself when it deposits our tax return at the end of the tax year) has apparently gone and dug up George Orwell and put him in charge of naming things all over the place.
A state with 11% real unemployment has “employment security”.
The Department that decides if you can eat that month and how much (food stamps) and is in charge of the insane asylums, and has your therapist spying on you to take away your FOID Card (firearm owner’s permit) is called “Department of Human Services”.
They should just combine these two because between just two organs of the STATE OF ILL, you have MINITRUE and MINIPLENTY.
Why just the other day when I was contemplating how broke Walmart was going to make us if this keeps going on, I bought some Victory Bread, from Walmart.
Now, IDES has obviously made your employment “secure” on paper by making it impossible, nearly, to actually file for benefits when you need them.
Let’s start off with offices. The nearest office to us is in Wheeling, Illinois, which is 42 minutes from my house with the toll road.
That’s because there’s only about 20 unemployment offices left in Illinois, maybe less, for 13 million citizens. And you have to have an appointment in person to apply for benefits.
To make an appointment, you have to call a scheduling hotline. They say they’ll call you back and then hang up and never call you back.
When you call back you can keep trying to hit buttons until it asks if you would like to cancel Waiting for Godot.
When you cancel your callback, it will put you on hold and eventually a guy who says he likes Penn and Teller, from New Jersey, will answer eventually. Despite sounding a little like Carl Brutananadilewski he’s actually really nice and schedules you an actual appointment at the “Employment Security” office, which you have to go to because you lost your job or had your hours cut.
So that’s where we’re going on Thursday.
It’ll probably only be like $30-40 a week in unemployment benefits until Walmart decides to stop doing this, but it’s the principle of the thing.
If they’re going to make his hours unpredictable and without sufficient income for us to make ends meet around here, then I plan to make them remunerate us for at least as much as the law permits.
Walmart always tells employees to go sign up for government cheese (for our foreign friends, this is a jocular term for welfare benefits, owing to the fact that the American government has massively subsidized domestic agriculture to the point where we have butter and cheese mountains sitting around that they might as well give to the poor….it pre-dates food stamps even).
It might as well be something Walmart is paying for.
Walmart recently closed down four locations in Chicago after doing nothing but losing money there. Think about it. The Democrats have ruined Illinois. Empty buildings and trash floating around doesn’t have a payroll, and if you have people with no money and a store full of things, you’ll have a shoplifting problem. Still, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel talked Walmart into opening up stores there.
The reason that Walmart is a success in rural areas but not urban areas is that urban people are violent and insane, and almost all of them feel that they are entitled to things they didn’t work for. When everyone in a city thinks like this and votes that way, you lose the lifeblood of your economy. Jobs. Good jobs that pay salaries which pay taxes.
When Illinois collapses, it collapses because it’s up to your eyeballs with politicians who think that government paper-pushers create prosperity and you don’t need a real economy to bear the weight of any of it.
Think of it this way. When my Aunt was still alive, and this has been thirty years ago she did this, she DIY’d a hot tub in her bathroom. It wouldn’t fit so she cut out a wall. The wall was a load bearing wall, and she got her hot tub. While she was sitting in it, the ceiling fell in with her.
The Democrats and the urban folk manage their cities and states like this. You cut out the load bearing wall to make way for a hot tub and end up with the ceiling falling on you.
It would be nice if we could all have what we wanted. Prosperity without the need to earn it, but we can’t. That load bearing wall might be inconvenient, but it’s holding the ceiling up. That load bearing wall is the real economy. Work, private employment.
I’d like to think that nobody really wants to risk prison or a car falling on top of them cutting catalytic converters, but thanks to the Democrats making it impossible to do business in our state, the joblessness is the second worst in America, and people resort to doing what they have to do. In turn, the court system can’t handle it and is incapable of punishing it, so law and order breaks down.
So people escape the state with whatever they can carry if they can afford to move at all.
Possibly us next. For the state government’s part, none of them seem to care if there’s enough people left to tax to deal with all of the promises the government shouldn’t have made to people who now do no work for the state, and spend their pensions in Florida.
The mentality of a problem that is too large to solve has fully set in among the public.
My spouse is from another country with no safety net.
Sometimes I have to explain things like you would to a child. He does not understand what unemployment insurance is. He thinks it’s a way of “stealing” or living off the government, and something that makes people bums, not an insurance program your employer pays into for when they fuck you, which is what’s going on with Walmart right now. Hard as I try, I can’t really seem to get through to him on this.
They said I could get a fairly good (4.75%) rate on an 11 month no-penalty CD.
I’ve never bought CDs before. I have some Treasury Bonds that I bought last year while inflation was raging and before the Federal Reserve raised rates pretty high.
Now, if I buy new Series I Savings Bonds they only start out paying 6.48%.
They do have a higher interest rate than the no penalty CD, but the bonds are less liquid.
If I buy a bunch of bonds and need the cash, there’s just no way to get that back out of the Treasury Direct account until 12 months have gone by, and there’d be a 3 month interest penalty if I didn’t wait 5 years.
So going forward on fixed-income investments for now, I still want to play it safe and will tolerate this slightly lower rate of return lending my money to the bank.
I only have to let them hold it for 7 days each time I buy a CD and then I can cash it all out, with interest, and no harm done, if the SHTF later and I need access to a lot of money.
The news says that people are yanking their bank deposits and going “all in” on Treasury Notes, but to be honest, today’s rates on Treasury Securities are just not blowing my skirt up considering the kind of liquidity I want out of this.
I’m going the opposite direction and doing bank deposits now because they’re still very liquid and earning “enough”.
What disasters could be out there? I don’t know. There’s Corporate America, even Walmart(!) doing mass layoffs while the government and the new lie to everyone to keep them calm and under control.
There’s the fact that the Republicans in Congress (seem to be) serious about defaulting on the national debt and playing “Who gets screwed the worst?” and their plan is to pay China. They’re planning to prioritize payments to China. What do you think they’re going to do with your Savings Bonds?
My reading of the SVB, Silvergate, and Signature collapse is that the government must be broke as Hell because when have you ever seen the US federal government tell the bankers and the investors in those banks that they’re going to eat their own shit instead of Congress bailing them out and borrowing from China to do it?
I was reading an article about Crocs (the alleged shoes) today that I was sharing with Roy in TechRights IRC.
In this article, a woman was boasting about how many pair of Crocs she owned and how she was getting her kids into it too. Just hundreds of Crocs. The Imelda Marcos of Crocs, I guess. Imelda on TikTok with Crocs.
I started thinking to myself “Goddamn these people are dumb.” because when you lose your job in the mass layoffs that both are and are not happening, what will you pay your bills with?
I doubt your landlord or the supermarket wants your blinged out pile of Crocs.
So I’m in a holding pattern with my savings.
The stock market hasn’t returned anything significant in a long time. I read another article that Americans are tearing into their retirement accounts, and are projected to drain $750 billion of their retirement money and their children’s birthrights to buy, Crocs and standing two hours in each line at Disney World, I guess?
You can’t replace actual fiscal security with trinkets and “experiences”.
I don’t know what kind of experience Disney is these days. I’ve heard from other people who are still paying the prices, which have quadrupled since I was there, along with the lines, that the “magic” is gone. I talked to Roy about this too. How in the 90s, when the US was a largely middle class country with opportunities, and Disney was an affordable getaway. It was pricey, sure, but it wasn’t like $8,000 for a couple of weeks.
That’s before you even get me started on what a fascist dump Florida itself is, with Ron DeMentis down there trolling people. You don’t want my gay tourist money? That’s fine.
Tour your own state! Illinois may not have a lot of star attractions, but it has nice things to do, and can be very economical.
I do know one thing. I’d much rather be hiking than standing in line in some increasingly sketchy theme park, in the middle of America’s Russia, with swamp ass, paying $20 for a hotdog.
Anyway, so some of my family members are at Disney World as I write this.
They go 2-3 times a year. Meanwhile, back in reality, people are standing outside the local conviction mill, I mean debtors prison, I mean, totally fair US court operated under the highest standards of legal ethics in the world, waiting to take their turn for garnishment. They’re in Florida not even bothering to defend themselves, so each of the “creditors” just takes turns getting whatever it wants in default judgments.
(I don’t know if they have any Crocs though.)
In this environment, I have just totally clamped up except my continued vice of going out to eat, on my restaurant rewards credit card (which I pay off immediately, and usually only if there’s another special coupon offer).
I’ve been tapping into those gas rewards apps, like Upside, and stacking my gas credit card on top, so I get about 7% on that back.
Then I have a 2% on everything card, for the other bills.
If you do it right, the rewards from the credit card schemes (which are typically funded by people paying cash and not paying their cards off…but don’t hate the player, hate the game!) will go right back into your Savings account and help fund more Savings Bonds or CDs.
When you cushion yourself with savings, and life happens, it’s more like pulling out your checkbook and gritting your teeth instead of sweating bullets. Where you’ll die if they cut your spouse’s hours this week or if the dog gets sick. (Or if you get sick.)
You should never ever spend money unless you are just overflowing with savings and have no debts, and then maybe if you want to splurge a bit. Many people in America don’t want to do any of the hard work so when they’re in debt and they want to spend, they just take on more debt.
I mean, Congress is talking about taking a meat cleaver to Social Security and Medicare and they’re not even being subtle about it, and here’s all these people about to drain $750 billion from their retirement accounts so they can stand in line to go on whatever they’re calling Splash Mountain now.
Congress isn’t even hiding that they don’t care if you die in old age from running out of money, and we’re off to see some sweaty pervert in a mouse costume.
Roy and I talked some about SVB going under.
All those people driving up in Teslas (keeping up appearances) to bang on the glass of a failed bank.
My opinion, not Roy’s, is that being based in California and some of the “DEI” crap on their Web site was the first clue that the bank was up to some sketchy shit.
A bank should make profit and protect depositors. Not throw $75 million at a bail “charity” that springs murderers and people who torch my spouse’s workplace and run out with some televisions.
I keep my money in FDIC insured accounts, at a well capitalized bank, that doesn’t charge fees, and has assets underneath the bank that I am fairly confident in.
I’m not really getting the vibe that this bank is under-capitalized, stupidly managed, has millions going out the door for liberal hogwash, etc. If it was, 100% of my money is in the statutorily defined deposit insurance limit, and would be available to me again days later.
To an extent, we’re all at the mercy of others.
In my case, usually people who are over-educated in all of the ways that don’t apply to a life situation and want their student loans forgiven while they drive to a failed bank in a Tesla to bank on the glass. That’s in-between trips to Disney.
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