Facebook is dying. Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

The County Clerk’s office of Lake County, Illinois tried to “challenge” my ballot.

I was pretty furious last night when I read this on their Web site and may have let loose with some expletives. We Americans already have almost no control over the government, and now they’re trying to steal my right to vote too!

I spent half an hour trying to fix it this morning, before I spoke to the Clerk herself, Robin M. O’Connor, and cleared the challenge with a sworn statement that I really am who I say I am.

I showed my Illinois driver’s license and my Firearm Owner’s Identification Card, and the Challenge was cleared.

Along the way, a poll worker tried to get me to use a “Provisional Ballot”.

I said, “I know what those are…” with a tinge of annoyance in my voice. I continued, “The American Civil Liberties Union warns voters about ‘Provisional Ballots’, which are essentially fake ballots that poll workers give to voters who insist on voting, when you really don’t want them to vote, and that more than half of them go into the trash on election night.

I would like to speak to the County Clerk about curing my REAL ballot, not vote using something that Congress created in 2002 to trick mostly poor and Black voters into going away.

Furthermore, I’m frankly shocked, shocked and dismayed, to find that the dirty election tricks that we were told were only going on in places like my home state of Indiana are going on in a state and county which claims that the right to vote is sacred.

I also consider this a personal insult and stand ready to prove my identity using the appropriate forms of identification as set forth in the Illinois Compiled Statutes”.

The poll worker, who was Black, looked at me for a moment (So did the Sheriff’s Deputies sitting in the box next to her, but what are they going to do? Arrest me for Orderly Conduct?), and said “Go down the hall over there into the office and ask to speak to Mary.”.

Mary got ahold of the Clerk and I made a sworn statement. O’Connor said to me that the Web site should update “sometime in the next week” showing my ballot as “accepted”.

As Boston.com reported in April 2022, almost 60% of “Provisional Ballots” in Massachusetts were thrown out on Election Night in 2020.

The ballots are fake, they’re basically totally fake.

They just sit there counting them right before the deadline to finalize the results so there’s no challenging them, as a voter, at that point.

So if yours is one of the 60% that get thrown in the trash, there’s no way to cure it!

But the election officials at the Lake County, Illinois Clerk’s Office swore up and down that “they all get counted 14 days after they election”.

Also, they’ll probably sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for two dollars if you let them.

Some might even say that the poll workers throw them out to reach the final results that they are trying to get to in that County Clerk’s office.

Since we don’t know why they throw them out and can’t ask them to come up with a solid explanation for why some count and others don’t, we just don’t know why they do it, but there’s motivations for a stolen election no matter who is doing the stealing, aren’t there?

It’s not hard to imagine that if they have 10,000 “Provisional” votes, then they just say “This one good, this one bad. Because reasons….”, until “the right” candidate has enough votes.

“It is immensely frustrating that, in communities with the largest Black and brown, low income, and immigrant communities, thousands of individuals tried to vote, but did not have their votes counted,” Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, Executive Director at MassVOTE, said in the release.

I’m a White man and I was trying to vote for a split ballot with some Republicans, some Democrats.

I voted Republican for Governor, the Illinois Supreme Court, the Illinois Treasurer and Comptroller, and Lake County Treasurer, Sheriff and Appellate Court Second District.

Democrat for US Senate, US House, Secretary of State and Attorney General, as well as State House and State Senate, Lake County Regional School Superintendent, and Lake County Clerk.

YES on the Worker’s Rights Amendment.

I suppose that the “problem” might have been that the Lake County Clerk changed parties and I voted for her Democratic Party competitor.

But who knows?

I thought that they didn’t open those ballots until Election Day, so how do they know who I voted for yet?

Nevertheless, it’s wrong to say that Election officials only target racial minorities. This is Democrat bullshit, you know. “You’re only doing this because I’m Black!”. Clearly, they don’t “only” do it to Black people. They do it to White people as well.

I got challenged in Indiana at the polling booth one year because there was another voter with a similar name in the same county, and the poll worker tried to threaten calling the police if I tried to vote “again”, so I went and talked to the Allen County Clerk and sorted it out.

I’ve had it happen twice, in two different states, and I’m only 38. It’s troubling that this happens so frequently.

But, before this turns into much more of a meandering mess wondering who these folks target and why, let me just say with 100% sincerity….

Don’t ever let them give you a Provisional Ballot and then walk out thinking you’ve voted, because you probably haven’t!

I promised them that I would be keeping an eye on the status of my ballot and “I’ll be back if it doesn’t update correctly.”.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to Bailout Biden. Bonus: Lots of Democratic Party nonsense lately.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to “Bailout Biden”.

I was on the phone with my mother in Indiana last night and learned something very troubling.

Mom informed me that very soon, they won’t have to test or wear masks at the nursing home she works at because “Bailout Biden”‘s Administration won’t be buying masks and COVID tests for people who have to work where the 90 and 100 year olds live.

Instead, he gave Intel $20 billion so they could fire all those thousands of people today instead of buying PPE for nurses.

On the vaccine front, whatever Fully Boosted even means anymore in Vaccine Choose Your Own Adventure, your guess is as good as mine I suppose.

So I think we need to give up on trying to suppress every mild case of illness and just try to keep the more extreme outcomes away, and figure out what the minimum number of doses that does this is. The fact that they’re seriously talking about “four boosters per year” is very alarming. So, we need to scrap this idea and go to something that’s actually tenable.

That’s what an ethical person would say to do.

Unfortunately, anti-Free Software troll Matthew J. Garrett had a bad episode last night on IRC to try to disrupt the room, and the topic changed to vaccines for a while to distract from chat about the criminal activities of one Bill Gates.

(Garrett may be working for Microsoft soon if his employer doesn’t go under before that. Their CEO is trying to get Aurora Innovation, Inc. acquired. It’s currently running out of money, losing three-fourths of a billion dollars a year on barely a tenth as much revenue, having never turned a profit.)

There’s no evidence that the vaccines shape the spread of COVID much.

That seems to have happened mainly from damned near everyone getting it at once last winter (look at the graphs) despite being vaxxed and boosted.

The reason we won’t see a surge on a graph again this winter won’t be because COVID’s not spreading, it’s because “Bailout Biden” scuttled the tests, even for nursing home workers, and all the money for the masks too.

It went to the Intel Bailout instead.

By that, I don’t mean literally went to Intel, but that Congress could have chosen to put the $20 billion into COVID supplies instead of a failing chip company making buggy processors for Windows PCs that nobody wants to buy. CHIPS Act was basically like the GM bailout, except I don’t even think Intel will last 10 more years.

The several thousand getting sacked are largely marketing and R&D. They’re keeping the managers to preside over a smaller cubicle farm with less stuff in the pipeline. This is insanity.

Meanwhile, rush hour gridlock is back in Chicago because instead of shutting down the offices with the expensive rent and $5,000 coffee machines, CEOs adopted a “quit working from home, get your shots, and come back, or don’t bother coming back” policy, and now the Democrat Party wants to turn all freeways in Chicago into Toll Roads.

It’s amazing that instead of putting a lid on COVID, saving money, and reducing traffic fatalities, it was decided instead to cause a surge of COVID with lots of expensive offices, by bringing rush hour back in the middle of a global energy crisis.

If “Bailout Biden” really wanted to help the climate and punish the Saudis for colluding with Vladimir Putin on oil production cuts, we’d go back to mandatory work from home and be done with a terrorist state dictating our policies in exchange for some oil.

I don’t really like the term “government corruption”, because when you try to point something out as being an example of government corruption, you make it sound like it’s the exception rather than the rule.

It would be more notable to try to point at any examples of government virtue, if any such examples were to exist.

“Today in a shocking and rare case of government incorruption….”, the news from a parallel universe could say, “Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago was caught funneling taxpayer funds intended to help police beat up the homeless and burn their belongings into public housing.

When pressed for a comment, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said ‘I’m shocked. Shocked and dismayed! And I vow, as your Governor who packed that ballot box fair and square, to get to the bottom of this incorruptibility and alarming level of accountability involving taxpayer funds. This is exactly the kind of behavior that my Administration has been working very hard to root out here in the Prairie State.'”

It really does amaze me how obtuse Matthew Garrett can be when he wants to be. He tried to imply I was racist when I said people in Chicago are woke and the only reason Lori Lightfoot is the Mayor is because she’s a black lesbian.

I was saying that the “qualifications” aren’t the best policies, it’s ticking off boxes.

I said I’m gay and I wouldn’t want anyone to vote for me if it was only because I was gay. That’s not important. You have to worry about how they’ll run your city or state and affect your life.

I’ve passed up voting for two gay people (Lori Lightfoot and Pete Buttigieg) because I didn’t feel they were qualified to do what they were running for.

I don’t feel Pete Buttigieg should even be the Transportation Secretary. He had his “let them eat brioche” moment the other day when he said you’ll never worry about gas prices if you buy an electric car.

So many things wrong with that, like the fact that those cars are an unreliable burden with sky high maintenance costs and that California’s electric grid is on the verge of collapse and they already can’t beg, borrow, or steal enough of someone else’s electricity to run what they have now.

I say this because these crooked assholes actually had the nerve to bomb my email box this morning begging me to go vote for their candidates. Saying that “internal polling” shows they may actually lose the Illinois Supreme Court.

I already voted, for the Republican, Mark C. Curran.

If the Democrats keep up what they’re doing, the 40% surge in violent crime since Pritzker was elected in 2018 will look like a walk in the park.

I support knocking over the FOID Act and letting the people lock and load and shoot back if the police aren’t going to do anything.

Imagine how pissed I was when I found out that John Idleberg, Sheriff of Lake County, Illinois, supports the bill the state House has passed that would turn up to 3 grams of fentanyl, crack, or heroin into a Class A Misdemeanor.

(Three grams of fentanyl is enough to kill 1,500 people of a drug overdose. We do not need this bill in the middle of a drug crisis! This would benefit dealers, not people who are using.)

So I voted Republican for Sheriff too.

Illinois is giving up on having a justice system under the Democrats, and our state economy is almost unbelievably bad even by the abysmal standards of what’s left of this country.

Pritzker is bragging that we took out more loans to pay off loans from the Federal Reserve, that we in turn took out to cover his COVID spending, which honestly mostly had nothing to do with COVID anyway.

He’s spent the last two years with dictatorial powers and it’s time for that to stop. I doubt he gets voted out, but I voted to try to box him in. You do what you can.

Far-right Illinois Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey blames “high gas prices” for low rally turnout. One attendee was a January 6th rioter.

Far-right Illinois Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey blames “high gas prices” for low rally turnout.

As amusing as a failed rally may otherwise be, at least one attendee was a January 6th insurrectionist.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Bailey keeps trying to distance himself from January 6th rioters.

Recently, the FBI had to shoot and kill one of the rioters when he tried to break into their building to murder agents.

What does it say about Darren Bailey and who he would be as our governor that he keeps having to “distance” himself from these people, who keep endorsing him for some reason anyway?

As the first article also points out, people who believe in Darren Bailey are committing acts of domestic terrorism against Illinoisans and their places of business.

We know exactly who is supporting Bailey and what he is. It is a Neo-Nazi movement.

We know how to get him to run away though. Have reporters start asking him questions. He can’t help himself, just like most people like him can’t. Last time he let them put him in front of a microphone, he made the unforced and unprompted error of trivializing the Holocaust.

Google YouTube (GulagTube) removes incredibly racist and transphobic political ad from Illinois state Rep. Jeanne Ives.

YouTube (GulagTube) removed an incredibly racist and transphobic political ad from Illinois Rep. Jeanne Ives.

You can’t rely on Google to preserve the Web or anything that happened on it.

Case in point, when Illinois state Rep. Jeanne Ives ran against Governor Bruce Rauner in the Republican Primary in 2018, she released a a very racist and transphobic ad (which had an obvious man with a five o’clock shadow in a dress excited that he would be in “the little girls bathroom”) which also accused all immigrants of being criminals.

But you can’t see it on YouTube (GulagTube) today, because Google removed it, or maybe they allowed her to. It won’t say, only that the video is unavailable. I can’t seem to find it anywhere else.

So if Ives comes out of her gerrymandered state house district again and wants to appeal to voters, nobody can say “See what she did last time? Here’s a link to YouTube!” because it won’t work.

Google once again helps people do repulsive things in public and then hide the evidence later.

If you’re a public official, you shouldn’t be able to do this. It should be illegal. All of these things should be illegal to remove and exempt from copyright law.

And if you’re that proud of what you said, you shouldn’t try to remove it.

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.

Toyota keeps donating to Republicans who supported the coup attempt.

Toyota keeps donating to Republicans who supported The Bullshitter’s coup attempt, despite twice promising to stop doing so.

I doubt my business means much to a company like that. One reason I don’t buy Toyota vehicles is that they ride really badly. Unlike my Buick or even the Chevy Impala, the Toyota cars tend to make you feel every bump and imperfection in the road, and god help you with the potholes.

American streets tend to be too poorly maintained to have rubber band tires on your rims, but thanks to “kids” making rubber band tires popular, it’s getting almost impossible to find a car that rides well without laying more money into rims that can accommodate actual tires. The bigger the tire, the more air fits in it, and the more air that fits in between your rim and the road surface, the better the shock absorption.

I drove my ex’s dad’s Prius and it was the worst ride I’ve ever experienced in a vehicle, and it was only 6 years old. I’ve had lots of cars way older than that which didn’t make everyone in the car hit their head on the ceiling every time you ran over a bump at 30 miles an hour.

Now, Toyota may make “reliable” cars, I don’t know. I’ve known people with serious issues with their Toyota, and the repair costs are not cheap, especially with those damned battery cars where the battery packs alone cost $5,000 to replace properly, and that’s if nothing else is wrong with it, like the wiring, sensors, that kind of crap. Mechanics rack up a lot of billable hours with electrical issues and you’re still taking a shot in the dark by the time they tell you what it is.

Regardless, you can buy a lot of gas for $5,000, and those Toyota battery packs….a lot of them need replacing after 9-10 years and so you find a lot of used Toyotas on the lots because the last owner said “To hell with this!” and bought themselves a new car, and since Toyota has a “reputation” for “reliability” even though that’s based on all their 80s, 90s, and 2000s models, their owners don’t let them go at a fair price even if there’s tons of things wrong with them.

And normally, you won’t notice anything wrong with the battery because they had some guy replace the cells that were glitching out at that moment. Have fun next year with that improper repair job.

So people like my mom, who don’t maintain their cars and then blame the company that made them go “I want a Toyota! I want a Toyota!” and end up running into the same issues as they did on the car they got rid of.

Back to politics, Toyota is, of course, sympathetic to the Republican party, which is why they set up shop in non-union states where they can bust wages, work people until they’re injured and have nobody to fight for them while Toyota is firing them, etc.

So it’s not like nobody knew where their values are.

It just turns out that they’re worse than we thought, supporting the violent overthrow of democracy.

Which is interesting, if you think about it. Many “liberals” and “progressives” buy Toyotas because they don’t take as much gasoline as a Buick.

However, with a Toyota, you don’t be driving it for 30 years if it’s a hybrid. Most people will get taken to the cleaners just trying to keep the battery system working only to give up on it and sell it to you.

Breaking news: It’s not environmentally friendly to throw a car away every 10 years or so.

And this, of course, all leaves us without discussing the fact that Toyota wants you to pay $300 a year to subscribe to heated seats and a remote starter that are in the car, yet will be disabled from spaaaaaaaaace if you stop paying.

Both features of my Buick and Impala still work and they’re 14 and 19 years old.

The new Buicks followed Toyota’s lead in making the cars Digital Restrictions Monsters where you have to subscribe to things the car already has in it, but mine is a 2008, and it was also built right out of proven technologies. Not these trashy CVT transmissions that are no good and wimpy aluminum and plastic engines.

If Toyota manages to help topple the legitimate American government, they’ll also manage to ruin one of the most important markets in the world for their product. So much for the Japanese being good at playing the long game.

There are at least 8 potential Hitlers in Congress right now. All Republicans.

There are at least 8 potential Hitlers in Congress right now. All Republicans.

All eight of them voted against sanctioning Russia. Two of them are Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Green.

Cawthorn praised Putin and repeated Russian propaganda and called Ukrainian president Zelenskyy a “thug”.

Like Carlin said, the Germans lost the war. Fascism won.

Today we call the people who are the standards-bearers for Adolf Hitler’s ideals the Republican Party.

They have generally the same view on nationalism, on “genetic purity”, on Immigration.

The only thing none of them have said (out loud) so far is that we need extermination camps for the “impure”, but you wonder how long until that happens when it’s obvious their voters think such things.