The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

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I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.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.

Microsoft Death Spiral: Microsoft fires 200 employees “working to win back customers”.

Microsoft Death Spiral: Microsoft’s latest layoffs (there have been many thousands and entire divisions in the past two years) fires 200 employees “working to win back customers”.

They were told to find another open job at Microsoft (during a hiring freeze) or take the severance pay.

The customers who they were trying to “win back” were apparently the ones who fled to the Mac, Chrome OS, and GNU/Linux. It’s been enough to reduce the Windows desktop marketshare to only 64.4% according to PornHub’s statistics from the end of 2021.

My guess is they’ve probably lost another percentage point or two since then.

The Windows 11 rollout was such a disaster that Macs, Chrome OS, and GNU/Linux are converting more Windows 10 users than Windows 11 is.

On top of being the biggest piece of shit operating system from Microsoft in decades, in ways that even Windows 10 wasn’t, Windows 11 also set high system requirements like TPM 2.0 and Intel processors no older than 2018, which has further hampered uptake.

(Also: Internet Explorer 11 is still embarrassingly present and usable as a Web browser in Windows 11, proving that trash never gets taken out once it’s part of the OS.)

More people are on to this scheme than ever. Wondering why they should throw out a computer that’s plenty fast, during a dead economy where they could be the next layoff (and even if they aren’t, their landlord, utility companies, and the grocery store want ~11% more money this year), just so that Microsoft and Intel can stick it to them again.

Microsoft always downplays how bad things are really going. They’re basically on a hiring freeze, so the tens of thousands of layoffs only tell part of the story.

(Chicago was doing the same thing as it went broke from years of horrible Democrat mismanagement. As people left their city jobs, the mayors have quietly come back and cut the open position so they can get payroll down without fighting the union or making it obvious what they did.)

The article also mentions that Microsoft brought in a former Uber executive (Uber broke the laws all over the world to illegally undercut public transit and cabs and then jack up prices, then destroyed the evidence) to manage the Consumer products division.

The Microsoft brand is already toxic. They bought Skype and people stopped using it for the most part. I haven’t had a Skype video call in years.

They lock Firefox out of it (even though a user agent hack lets you back in) and behave like it’s a product people are actually using, but it’s basically a failed acquisition.

If they buy Discord or TikTok the same thing is going to happen. Trump tried to destroy TikTok to force a Microsoft acquisition at fire sale prices so that Microsoft could be hoarding your data and misusing it instead of the Chinese government.

Discord is a malicious mess.

IRC can’t “centrally ban” you. You could be banned from a “server”, but since IRC has real servers and real people own them, you can still use the rest. Discord already does nasty things to spy on their users and mistreat them, and would not likely get better under Microsoft.

I get greatly annoyed when Mom sends me something on Pinterest assuming I can access it on my phone. It wants me to install an app, which is even worse than their Web site, which is a pile of JavaShit that demands you to log in and identify yourself, like Twitter.

Microsoft tries to paint a rosy picture of XBOX and “Office 365”, however their Office division lead told hiring managers that they’re on lockdown too and be very careful how many you hire. Why do that if you’re doing well?

When I had an XBOX 360, I went through 8 consoles before finally selling my eighth refurbished unit on Craigslist. I wrote about it on my old blog.

The things were overheating junk. But the XBOX One is actually even worse. Now they want you to download or install entire games which won’t work on other consoles (DRM) and where you can’t have an unlimited number of them (due to hard drive space).

The other day on one of my chats, someone said he was looking to buy a used XBOX One “if someone still has one that works”.

My Sega Genesis still works and it’s more than 30 years old and this guy is going “if it still works” to describe something that can’t be more than 9 years old even if it was a launch unit, which they have “updated” several times and still sell.

In addition to Microsoft infesting the XBOX division with “SKU-itis” like they do with Windows and most of their other products, they encourage you to use battery-operated controllers so the controller can randomly go dead.

(I still use an XBOX 360 Wired Controller with my PC.)

PC gaming (most XBOX games are bad PC ports) has become a soulless cash grab. We used to be madder than Hell if we spent money on a game that was just bad or needed to be debugged some more, but now they’re usually $80 and then require micro-transactions as well.

Many of my games on the PC are classic console emulators.

Unfortunately, everyone who has sat down to rewrite the Genesis stuff in modern C or C++ and release it under some sort of Free Software license has given up and KEGA Fusion is proprietary and abandoned and does not appear to recognize my controller, forcing me to drop the Windows version into Wine, which can map the controller to whatever it is shit API Windows is using this year.

Some others are Steam games that have been “broken” by me deliberately such that they can’t reach out to the network and self-update.

I think Microsoft’s days of growing consumer markets are over, and that’s why they fired this entire division. They’ve been paying them for 4 years already and it hasn’t helped them on any front yet.

XBOX division has got to be capped by now and their entire strategy for growing profit is to grab the same consumers they already have by the balls and squeeze harder.

It’s difficult for the public to actually know what “Cloud” computing is, so Microsoft has rebranded everything to say “Cloud” so they can disguise what’s doing poorly from their financial reports.

US taxpayers are being forced to repeatedly bail Microsoft products out. They fired their entire “HoLOLens” division after Biden’s plan to make the US Army buy “HoLOLens” units it didn’t want fell through, but they can keep figuring out ways to shove billions into Microsoft like that bullshit “JEDI” program the Pentagon (which has unlimited funding with no scrutiny) has in mind while our actual military readiness continues to suffer.

In many ways, the “big picture” of Microsoft, to me at least, is failing company that’s still sitting on some cash, but is radically downsizing by stealth and staggered layoff rounds to try to keep the act up for a while longer.

Successful companies don’t slam the brakes on hiring, shut down division after division, and tell allegedly successful business units to be “very careful” about hiring while saying in their SEC report that they expect that division to do well in the future.

They have been busy committing public corruption and trying to shuffle things around to become Too Big To Fail.

So in that regard, they probably won’t go out of business even with a seemingly endless parade of consumer product disasters like Windows RT, Windows Phone, Kin, Kinect, Skype, the entire Microsoft Retail division, “HoLOLens”, Zune, Groove Music, TerraServer, Band, Bing (which bribes people to use it and still can’t gain marketshare), dozens of others big and small, and the declining revenue stream (and relevance) of Windows itself. (Wine and Proton copied most of the important Windows APIs and let you use them on a reliable OS base.)

However, their consumer market outlook is laughable because consumers have choices now and they don’t like the products they’re being offered, and they’re not a government that can steal Other People’s Money and use it to buy things that aren’t any good.

When I evaluate something for my own use, it obviously has to work. I don’t want halfassed operating systems full of decades of bloat and virus-enabling cruft like Internet Explorer, which is STILL there. So apparently, there’s enough people who think like I do that Microsoft realized they were wasting their time.

Intel and companies like Lenovo are married to Microsoft because they’d only sell replacements for hardware that broke down if everyone switched to GNU/Linux. Profits would be halved overnight. They’d be ruined without all of the e-waste that Microsoft causes.

This is why they’ve been such a reliable partner in crime with things like UEFI and “Secure Boot”.

But finally, at long last, even that’s not enough.