When I was a child, we had video tapes. When parents wanted their children to watch Disney movies, there were tapes and there was the movie theater. That was it. That was all we had.
But it worked.
Disney was a business, and in business to make money, but it wasn’t the obscenity that it has turned into today.
Walt Disney banned alcohol from his parks. He said, “It would lead to a certain element frequenting our parks that you’d really rather not have.” Today, they sell alcohol (almost certainly at obscene price points, because captive audience). Nothing says “$6,000 vacation” like watching some drunk people get into a brawl at Disney, I guess.
Their creativity is gone, they’re morally bankrupt, the freaks and weirdos have taken over and even better yet, Communist China gets to approve the scripts because they’re a “more important market” now than Americans.
The asset Disney has is a massive back catalog from when they were….more.
Practically every release they’ve made lately has been a box office bomb, something unthinkable for a major Disney release when I was a child. There have been huge layoffs at divisions like Pixar, and even at their parks and management. The morons that run the company even managed to screw themselves by picking a fight with the government of Florida and losing badly.
When you went to the parks, it was at a relatively “high” price, but it wasn’t thousands of dollars a week like it is now. When you went there back then, society had not yet collapsed, and there weren’t drunken people in their parks, and a lot of perverts that, in modern times, you just have to “pretend not to see there” as you watch your children like a hawk.
But Disney is exploitative in other ways. They have pushed for “forever copyright” laws, and although they haven’t quite gotten them, they’ve more or less accomplished everything they’ve wanted due to widespread political corruption in the United States.
Their more recent scheme is “Disney Plus”, or as I like to sometimes call it “Disney Minus”.
With Digital Restrictions Malware, they’ve taken everything from you that you used to have, including the ability to make copies, or even just have a copy, and they’ve slowly been dialing up the cost per month, and stuffing it with ads.
Like most things you “stream”, as soon as you quit paying them, no matter how much you paid them, you lose everything. This means that your subscription turns into a “curse”. It keeps taking more and more.
When Disney Plus was new, Disney only charged $8 and there were no ads, ever. This wasn’t a long time ago, only five years. Today, the “ad free” tier is $20 a month, and it just keeps getting more expensive.
According to some people on Reddit, even the ad free tier has a few ads.
The $9.99 tier with ads has become so overrun with ads, that some people on Reddit have taken to complaining that every five minutes, there’s a minute and a half full of ads.
When you pause the video, the pause screen is another ad, and that’s with the intro ads of course.
So it’s clear that the only purpose of the $9.99 version is to annoy you into paying for the other half of the cost, to avoid having your evenings and weekend free time being filled with ads.
Disney Plus is so nasty that my credit card company would reimburse me for most of it, and I still don’t use it.
I read an article today that says that very soon, Walmart will make money on Disney Plus, by selling Disney your shopping history at Walmart so they can figure out what ads to play. Of course, the reason that this targeted advertising works so well is because Walmart never forgets what you buy, and Disney never forgets what shows you watch.
So they can ink a deal and trade lists, and figure out how to burrow into your head, and sell you stuff, and put you deeper and deeper into debt. They want to know what makes you tick, so that you spend beyond your means on products advertised on Disney Plus.
When you run ads, you are psychologically manipulating a person. You might make them feel like dirt for not having a thing, or make them think they’ll be very happy if they buy a thing, but then they buy the thing and they’re no happier than they were.
As one person on Reddit put it, it doesn’t matter how many times you run an ad for a $60,000 Ford truck, if I can’t afford the truck. Advertising will only make you feel bad.
Back to Disney Plus, back to more ads.
The truly horrible and dark part of this is that people using Disney Plus as a babysitter are plopping their kids in front of these ads while Disney Plus (the bait) trains them to be a “consumer”.
How everything you buy is designed to make it difficult to repair properly.
I never thought it would be so difficult to find a replacement set of pads for my eyeglasses, but apparently Walmart makes non-standard nose pads now.
The goal of this must certainly be that if you have one pop out and can’t find it anywhere, the glasses will dig into your nose until you break down and buy a new pair.
Walmart used to offer a full one year repair or replace guarantee, but now they want to sell you what you used to get for free, for an additional $60 per pair.
Obviously, that’s not happening. I have a habit of just letting old eyeglasses pile up and I tag them with what year I got them and what the prescription was when I’m finished with them.
So I ended up washing and wearing a pair of last year’s until I could get some nose pads. It turns out that nobody makes them with the push-in retainers of the original size.
And they’ve also made it so that if you try to use stick on adhesives, it’s just a temporary fix at best. They come right back off the next time you wash the lenses.
So I got a standard set of 15mm nose pads and a bottle of super glue, and pressed a replacement into the frame and propped it up on a set of pliers until the glue dried everywhere.
I don’t know how long it will hold but it seems fairly permanent.
The vision insurance pays for a new set in 9-10 weeks anyway and I’m obviously not going to replace an entire pair of glasses, at full price (over $400 USD), at this point.
I think it’s fairly dirty of Walmart to resort to making common replacement parts that people will need of a non-standard size, just to have this happen and aggravate them into buying another pair to make the nose irritation stop.
If my State had any sort of right to repair law, I’d probably complain to the Attorney General. I may do it anyway.
Luckily, the screws are still in good shape because it looks like they’ve used an uncommon size there too.
This makes me wonder if this isn’t some scheme not only to sell more eyeglasses, but an attack on the “eyeglass donation bins” where you can put old prescription glasses that don’t fit you anymore. So it is also an attack on charities that help the poor.
Meanwhile, Chicago churches are coming together on Saturday – when another large teen gathering is planned – to walk Michigan Avenue. Their goal is to round up 500 men to send a message to the youth.
“Black men owe it to our younger counterparts to say this is not the way, and that we grew up in some of the same conditions, oftentimes, but again, for whatever reason, by the grace of God, we will be given alternatives and when we listened, we found out that our worth was not in violence and negative things,” said Bishop Horace Smith, Apostolic Faith Church.
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”.
The New York Times finally posted something [paywall] worth stopping and considering.
In 2003, a man named Greg Marston did some voice work for IBM.
He signed a contract “figuring they would be on the up and up”, and then 20 years later, they took his voice and used it to make “Connor”, a digital clone of his voice, as a product that they could sell, without paying Mr. Marston anything.
He came across “Connor” when he was watching Wimbledon (brought to you by IBM), and heard himself as the announcer. He was not amused.
He and his attorney are said to be “in contact” with IBM, and he says he knows that he has lost work due to this “digital clone” of his voice which was made without his consent.
The question to ponder here, is whether the practice should be legal at all.
If we assume that all a company like IBM has to do is arrange for ongoing royalties, then eventually they won’t need any voice actors.
Without any need for new voice actors, a job disappears. Eventually, the ones that agreed to the contracts will die and the royalties will go to their heirs, which never did any work at all.
Another part of the article that I enjoyed, is that apparently, now there is a Web site (or maybe an app?) called Boomy which lets people crank out a bunch of low effort music, perhaps too nice of a word, let’s say “content”. They like “content”.
They’re always looking to fill up “streaming” with “content” now, and it doesn’t matter if it’s any good or not. If it costs basically nothing to make and you can get some people to stream it, hey, it’s a big world and you’ll make some money.
Of course, this leads people to copy and paste this crap into Spotify, which I’ve read tries to prune some out, but only if they prove that other bots are “listening” to it (streaming it for just barely long enough to get “royalties”.
So, the “Dead Internet Theory” is continuing to prove itself.
You have a bunch of “Chaff Bots” making garbage for other bots to “stream” over and over again until Spotify realizes what’s happening and boots the “content” off, but there’s so many ways to game this system, right?
It’s basically just a high bandwidth version of, “have curl grab your Epinions articles on a loop as the pennies pile up”.
Spotify is very much a DotCom Era 2.0 product. How much Internet bandwidth is this using?
The music “industry” has hit rock bottom. There is literally no effort anymore. I actually listened to one of these “AI” tracks called “Heart on my Sleeve”, I think, last night, and it was so bad that I turned it off.
I mean, it wasn’t discernible from other “mumble rap assclowns” I guess, so they’ll lose their jobs first. You’ve gotta start somewhere.
The vegetables who create this “content” will lose their jobs and the vegetables who listen to it will keep clicking, along with the bots.
I’m glad that there was a lot of good music for hundreds of years before it stopped, all at once.
My spouse wonders why I listen to, almost exclusively, music from the 1950s through about 2000, and I guess he just doesn’t get the whole “golden era” thing. You know?
Everything had a “golden era”, and for animation, in the US, that was like when my grandparents were alive and in their 20s or 30s, and again in the 90s.
Movies? Used to go twice a week. Now we go twice a year.
They had to haul Hayao Miyazaki out of retirement to make one more to have something fit to go to the movie theater over.
Nobody will easily replace Hayao Miyazaki, or at least not a robot designed to run a “content farm”, which is what Netflix and Spotify have been for a while, but even those get worse.
As long as people keep “subscribing”, nobody at the company cares if the “content” is good. A while back, Netflix laid waste to their animators and said that there will be “robots” for this now too. It’s a very “corporate” product.
They have “algorithms” to read the audience and what they respond to, then they go back and have robots to draft scrips to show the audience things they liked before, over and over, and then yet more robots to animate it.
I am pretty sure that Japan will not go this route with its animation industry for a long time, if ever.
The movie theaters are dying.
Marcus Cinemas has switched to anime and sporting events because they can’t draw in ticket sales with Hollywood crap anymore. The writers may be on strike. Who cares?
Anime and sporting events are how you get people in who don’t want to see all this junk from Hollywood. Nobody wants to see that. The theaters know it. They built all these multi-plex cinemas they can’t fill (look at that graph) and now they need to find people who have money in their pockets.
The reason anime is taking over the theaters in the US is because the United States is a culture that is in terminal decline and cannot compete on quality.
The society in the United States accepts, all sorts of garbage. Not just culturally, but it’s depraved in almost every sense of the word. Criminality is tolerated. People openly flaunting their corruption. The country is finished. Tent cities? The politicians made everyone so selfish and jaded and high on themselves that nobody cares until it’s them.
Anyway, the movie theaters don’t even charge for tickets for the sports. Sports fans are the other demographic with money to spend. You go in there and they hope you buy twenty dollar popcorn, ten dollar Pepsi, and seven dollar hotdogs.
Worth a shot, for the theater owner. There are people who don’t want to burn to death in the sun watching a game. Have you ever tried to go see the Cubs at Wrigley Field? I’ve lived close enough for years and it’s absolute madness trying to get in there, and out.
That’s if you can get tickets. They have robots that buy all the tickets at the list price, naturally, and then they can sell them much much higher.
Nice big movie theater screen. Just pay for expensive snacks, which you’re going to do at the stadium.
Some say that a culture in decline excessively values entertainment.
Entertainment is always valued. When a culture is in decline, it will accept lower and lower standards of entertainment because the entertainment is a reflection of the culture.
I suppose the tl;dr version of this article is a depressing “shower thought”.
There’s never been more people in the world than there are now, and there’s never been less creativity in it.
We’re finally at the “Give up on life.” chapter of the species.
There’s really not a lot left to do on the Web.
The companies have turned it into a sky high garbage dump with bots, walled gardens, and DRM.
Every year, the legal landscape in the US gets worse as well, and then we export it through trade deals. They think that threatening everyone who is utterly broke will make them suddenly want this garbage they’re producing.
I refuse to participate in this race to the bottom with garbage written by robots, designed to be “consumed” by idiots.
I have the privilege of knowing what’s going on, and if we don’t ever get good original works out of the American entertainment industry again, well, it was nice while it lasted, but there will always be voice acting to dub over foreign stuff, or at least subtitles.
Ironically, the resistance to the “bot garbage” is coming from the US copyright and patent offices, which are normally the enemies of Freedom.
Which normally issue all sorts of bogus horseshit that people in the Free Software world are threatened by simply due to being less moneyed than the people who get the patents and copyrights.
Even the purveyors of this bot-generated smut and garbage are hitting a wall with the authorities because the law pretty clearly states that only a human being can “create” a work.
So, we can expect the purveyors of garbage to use the money they are obtaining by the imbeciles consuming crap to lobby to extend the laws to apply to low effort “content” generated by bots.
Whether they succeed or not is, at this point, unknowable, however it would be the worst thing to happen since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
One reason the music labels and Apple stopped “selling” music files that were yours to keep and pushed Apple Music is that eventually everyone who wants a copy of music, from when it was good, has one, and this market ultimately becomes self-limiting.
If you pay Apple $13 a month plus tax to keep listening to 70s/80s bands (80 cents per CD when bought 7 at a time at the thrift store), then you never own it, and the market is not self-limiting.
Meanwhile, your kids can listen to trash generated by robots.
If the United States public schools were interested in giving children educations befitting a human being instead of a head full of mush, we may never have reached this point. Every time we let rich billionaires “reform” the schools, the next generation comes out worse.
McDonalds doesn’t want to pay people to take orders.
So they have a “robot” to take your order now. A kiosk, which runs Windows, apparently.
This one has been broken for a few visits now. Apparently, Windows can’t handle “showing pictures of hamburgers for people to tap on”. Big surprise.
McDonalds punishes people who go to a register. You can’t use a coupon. You need the app or the kiosk for that. If you go to a human, they punish you with a 20% surcharge.
They portray this differently. They turn it around on you. If you use the app or the kiosk you get a 20% off coupon or occasionally a “free hamburger”.
It actually works out to what the price used to be before they fired people and forced you to do the unpaid work of navigating through an app or a kiosk to do the unpaid menial job of telling someone what you would like to eat and paying, and then sitting down.
Other companies, like Walmart, did these a long time ago. The customer gets no discount and has to do physical labor that a cashier used to be paid for.
The company is now finding out that shoplifting has gone through the roof due to self-checkout fraud. Some of it isn’t fraud, some is that the user didn’t scan something right and could be arrested anyway on the way out the door.
Richard Stallman has an easy solution to the “self-checkout” problem. He said when he goes to the grocery store he walks past them and mentions that people are doing free labor and taking a paying job away from someone.
The McDonalds/Walmart GULAG. One more way people are getting screwed with robots.
There are so many examples of how companies are using this stuff to offload work onto others and not paying them, that the only real value of all of this technology is stolen labor and unjust profits. We should reject the bots. Especially in the case of the supermarkets.
When I go to Jewel-Osco and check out, I have my digital coupons loaded and they work at a cashier register when I enter my “loyalty” number. I’m not wild about this. You used to just go in and get the sale price.
But it’s better than going to “self-check” and busting your ass bagging $300 worth of food while the thing goes “bonk bonk bonk please wait for assistance unexpected item in bagging area bonk bonk bonk”, and of course everyone else got that too so wait in line for your chance to pay after the other dozen people who got jammed up just trying to remove full bags when they ran out of room on the scale.
How long does it take me to bag and pay for these groceries?
Even at minimum wage, I would have made about $2-3.
If everyone in town uses them, this replaces at least two dozen full time jobs per store.
Instead, we have homeless, jobless, people living in tents.
HP Stream Laptops at Walmart. How Much Computer Do You Need in 2023?
I saw some $179 HP Stream Windows 11 craptops at Sprawl Mart yesterday.
And I was like, “Really? HP is still letting Microsoft command them to sell computers that barely work? How big is the market of people who haven’t already fallen for these?”.
16 GB of RAM is “barely enough” these days, due to software bloat, if you’re using more than several programs at once.
They sell Windows 11 systems with 4 GB!
You can barely use Linux productively with 4 these days. Much less Windows.
With Windows 11 and 4 GB, you can barely even boot the computer and load one program. These things don’t age well because they can barely handle a single use case that people are going to take them home for.
They are not comparable to Chromebooks, where Google has at least made a Linux-based OS centered around the device, planning out that it MUST work well with 4 GB RAM.
Windows always needs a new PC, and a good one, because it’s designed to force people to keep upgrading hardware when Windows “slows down”. It’s deliberate. They make Windows slower and more obese over time to “feed the pigs” over at Intel and AMD, who could otherwise not sell very much hardware.
The reason why moving over to Linux feels like you’ve turned back the clock and bought a new PC again is because there’s nobody trying to sell you a new one.
By far, the worst and most bloated thing I do on Linux, is not even the fault of Linux, it’s this trend to bigger, fatter, Web browsers for a more obnoxious Web experience. Not the fault of the base OS, which has barely increased in system requirements in more than a decade.
This HP Stream funny business cannot possibly be as successful as it was to start with.
Thanks to the “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” concept, people who bought a previous model with Windows 10, and then didn’t even have enough storage space to upgrade to a newer version of Windows 10, probably don’t fall for this trap, again.
So the business model of fooling people who have never seen an HP Stream into buying another really bad computer is almost certainly self-limiting.
Other customers who bought the Stream complained of:
Poor battery life.
HP putting the keyboard buttons on in the wrong places.
Broken screens, from the factory.
Computers that suddenly booted up to a black screen, seemingly for no reason, one day, with no obvious repair. (Common problem with Windows.)
“45 minutes to load one [Web browser] tab.”
One reviewer, on Amazon, claimed that there was static buildup and every time he went to type something, the keyboard shocked him.
One more note: Have used this on a treadmill and there is massive static electricity on every key. On other laptops there’s some static on the machine at first so you can ground yourself and then type just fine. But this one delivers a shock for every. single. key. stroke. Ouch.
-“S Larson”
Multiple complaints that even if you don’t use the C: for any user files at all, you eventually can’t install a Windows update, even if all of your files are on an SD card.
For $80 less, you can get a Raspberry Pi 4 Personal Computer.
It’s contained in a keyboard with lots of ports. You get 4 GB of RAM and an ARM CPU, you load the OS and store your user files on an SD card of your choice in size.
It runs Linux OS images that are actually made planning on the fact that the thing has 4 GB of RAM instead of being an OS that was meant for 16 GB systems that was put on the HP Stream after-the-fact.
Hell, for $50 less you could buy a Chromebook. (With support for Linux and Android applications.)
I don’t know why, exactly, Microsoft continues to get away with convincing OEMs to cheapen and denigrate their brands to pretend it has something in the same league with small computers that were made to at least work properly.
HP Stream is a clear example of Microsoft convincing other companies to fall on their sword to serve Microsoft.
If you handed me one of these HP Streams for free I might take it and see if I could shoehorn Linux on it somehow, but I would certainly not risk $179 of my own money on one given the things I have heard from people who did.
From what I’ve read on Reddit, at least some people using the HP Stream have installed Arch Linux, but they couldn’t install Grub (the bootloader), and for some reason systemd-boot (LOL) worked. Maybe HP and Microsoft can “fix that” so that word won’t get around that you can at least use a real operating system if you have one of these things.
The HP Stream is a Microsoft panic response “but they still don’t GET IT” to the Chromebook. Which is $50 cheaper, runs faster, and is Linux.
Many people who get a Stream use it… to go back to whatever Web site they bought it from and talk about all the problems they have with it that make it impossible to use.
Which is exactly what you would expect from a <$200 thing that came with Windows.
The market for new devices is limited. Largely by Linux. It’s feasted off of the legacy UNIX systems and now it kills Windows too.
Corporations Offer People Jobs to Silence Critics and Shut Down the Opposition.
The other day, I heard a commercial on the radio where Jim Gaffigan was shilling Walmart’s prepaid cell phones, “Straight Talk”.
Even good comedians, like George Carlin, ended up doing advertising. Carlin didn’t apologize for it, nor should he have.
Doing a few commercials for a phone company trying to get people to take their collect call business there wasn’t particularly unethical, and nobody was trying to cancel him or his message.
(Besides, everyone knew how to use collect calls for free. You just hurried up and said the pay phone’s public phone number when it asked for your name and hung up after the other party declined the call. Then they knew which pay phone to call.)
Everyone knew that George Carlin, was a fairly crass comedian, he pissed some people off, but it was the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
So you had comedians like Sam Kinison, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks, and when they pissed people off, nobody cared.
It wasn’t career-ending, and most people just weren’t even pissed off, they shrugged and went about their way, like grown ups used to do before everyone suddenly got so soft.
Even when Gilbert Gottfried had a gaffe, he went to New York City right after 9/11 and said he would have flown, but they wanted to make a quick stop at the Chrysler Building, people shouted “Too soon, man!”, but they took it in stride. New Yorkers used to be tough.
Even though Gottfried would have never worked with material like he had in the 90s, were he to start today, Disney put him in movies. He was the parrot in Aladdin, alongside Robin Williams, who also had “interesting” material.
Jim Gaffigan is one of these “new” comedians. Not that funny.
Not his fault, honestly.
Society has become so thin-skinned that if you tell the wrong joke, you’ll never work again, so “comedy” is very sanitized now, and there’s really nothing out there that will make you fall out of your chair laughing.
Most of the “fall out of your chair laughing” jokes are raunchy, socially inappropriate, a lampoon of someone that is now considered “marginalized” and “needing other people to feel offended for them”.
As a gay man, I say that Married With Children was one of my favorite shows. Still is. It’s held up pretty well.
Al, the every man. Al, with “the Dodge with no upholstery, no gas, and six more payments”. Al where, “I can always have more kids, but we all know that’s the only car I’ll ever be able to afford.”
Al whose life went wrong because he “kept washing out and reusing a condom” which finally broke, causing him to get Peggy pregnant while they were in high school.
Mind you, this was on TV, not even “premium” cable, at a time when the Moral Majority was everywhere and Ronald Reagan was in the White House!
Also mind you, the United States CDC posted to “Twitter” just in 2019, I believe, that “We say it because people do it. Don’t put your condoms in the dishwasher.”
Al Bundy was conveying an important public health message almost 40 years before the CDC would openly talk about condoms.
When Married With Children “finally went too far”, it was the episode where Al and Steve went to a sex shop, and there were some jokes about transvestites and gay men, and I found them absolutely hysterical.
My parents didn’t even care if I watched this show when I was 7-8 years old, you know.
What makes Married With Children so funny is that it was a spoof of the Cosby Show. Where the Cosby Show was wholesome, and Bill Cosby was presented to people as the Moral Majority’s “TV Dad”, Al Bundy was dysfunction as all hell, not that bright, salty, and absolutely not a role model.
Later, we’d find out that Bill Cosby was putting roofies in women’s drinks and raping them while they were unconscious.
It’s always the people who are “too clean” that end up having the most dirty laundry, isn’t it? Bill liked pudding, in the commercials.
Bill Cosby was doing Jell-O and Jell-O “puddin'” commercials.
In real life, Bill liked pudding, pudding his dick where it didn’t belong.
In a statement about how sick the real world actually is, his convictions were overturned by a court and he’ll die a free man while people worry about what jokes a comedian might tell.
The truly great comedians are all gone.
You start saying shit like this, you lose advertisers, you get canceled shows in Vegas (Carlin was in Vegas a lot), and you just “don’t work again”.
So comedy has gotten rather un-funny thanks to “Social Justice Warriors”.
Nobody asked me, as a gay man, if I thought Al’s trip to the sex shop was funny or not. I thought it was hysterical. It wasn’t like, some vicious anti-gay assault. But it wouldn’t have flown today.
Why? Well, we have too many people like “Brandon Lobsta” (as we call him on Techrights, one of the trolls that harasses us…) claiming you can sue people for being impolite.
Anyway, “Brandon Lobsta” and the rest of the modern “Left”, are like that stupid lady in Michigan who complained about “Al Bundy” to the FCC, but even back then, the network just went to the producers and said “tone it down, just a little, okay?” and they went on to make fun of “some lady in Michigan” on a future episode.
But Jim Gaffigan, the closest he got to funny, the thing that made him notable at all, was the Hot Pockets routine.
You can’t roast people, but you can call garbage Nestle “food” products, “Diarrhea Pockets” and go into all sorts of vitriol about how much you hate the barbecue beef.
I read that after he started this routine, Nestle tried to hire him to do Hot Pockets commercials.
Control the opposition. “If we hire him, he’ll stop telling people how bad Hot Pockets are. His routine is bad for the brand. Hiring him will be cheap.”
It reminded me of when Apple tried to hire Linus Torvalds in 2000.
Steve Jobs said they’d give him a lot of money and an important title at Apple, and he’d work on “the UNIX with the largest user base”.
He refused. Linux is the “*nix” with the largest user base now. Across the widest variety of computers. Mac OS is falling apart and many of the people who attempted to use it as UNIX even admit it and switch to Linux.
The stipulation to take the job at Apple was he’d have to quit working on Linux forever.
Steve Jobs realized, years ahead of Android (Linux powers their iPhone competitor and has stopped Apple from gaining the other 86% of the global phone market), that Linux would be a problem for Apple someday and they should nip it in the bud.
It would have been cheap, and it would have been brilliant (for Apple), if he took the bait, and the appeals to ego.
Hell, the Mac might actually be a more serious operating system today if it had an actual kernel programmer that knew what he was doing working at Apple.
The time period also was around the point that Steve Jobs tried to convince Richard Stallman to allow Apple to violate the GNU GPL and create a proprietary Objective-C compiler for GCC. When Stallman refused and told him the FSF would take action, we got a Free Software compiler for Objective-C.
Later, Apple replaced GCC with a different compiler platform that does not generate very good compiled code, but it is under a license that allows proprietary compiler front-ends.
The threat of “controlling the opposition” and keeping things “corporate friendly”, with stuff that seems innocent enough, like “Codes of Conduct” will always be out there.
The powers that be have already done enormous damage this way. Being aware of the problems can help us avoid more.
Apple didn’t manage to kill Linux or GCC, but they tried, through sabotage and appeals to vanity and ego.
Clang has done enormous damage to the goal of having Free Software compiler tools.
Mozilla even defamed the GNU Project, lied and said Clang produced better binaries, and then sabotaged the build environment for Firefox if you use GCC.
(They don’t update the build system for that and so it’s basically lost its optimization options that way.)
While we’re dealing with all of these “Leftist Karens” who get mad about comedy, we face bigger issues. Real issues.
Today, I was listening to NPR while I was bored. They tipped me off to something Home Depot and Lowes are going to do.
They have “bluetooth” something-or-other, and of course it’s the future so “blockchain blockchain!”, and next it’ll be “AI!”.
Maybe they can bring Microsoft in and create DeWalt 365 or something, where you have to subscribe to your power saw and if you don’t pay them $6.99 a month forever after you buy it, you can’t work.
Also, no work for days when Azure crashes.
It can be just like Microsoft Office.
Sure it could start out as an anti-shoplifting measure, then you’ll have to pay a fee every month to keep using tools you own.
Crazy? Hardly. My mechanic couldn’t do an alignment on my car several months ago because the activation server for the computer that runs the machine from Snap-On wouldn’t respond.
When they called the vendor, Snap-On says “Oh we don’t support Windows XP anymore. So you’ll need a new machine running Windows 11, and we’re going to bill you for all the hardware on the rack, because it won’t work with the new computer. Also, it’s a monthly subscription now.
Their attitude is, you need it to work. What are you going to do about it?
Like Microsoft.
The CEO of Home Depot says that the change is supposed to be less visible than putting the power tools behind locked cases or something. That they don’t want to “Look like an armed encampment” to the customers there to pickup their “hammers and nails”.
The CEOs of the major hardware chains tend to be a bunch of MAGA people, really awful people. You know. “Spike the homeless, cut food stamps, kill Social Security! What? They’re stealing power tools? PRODUCT ACTIVATORS!”
Perhaps, eventually, they can be like Walmart, cutting my spouse’s hours while they pay off duty police officers to stand there and not do anything about the arsonists and looters, but they have plenty of time for writing my license plate in their little clipbook for parking in a yellow zone (not a fire zone, not a handy crapped spot) for 2 minutes.
When I go there to pick him up now, I just circle the parking lot following the arrows, at idle speed. Instead of getting out of the way, I can just let my car loop around a few times real slow until he comes out.
I’m really glad to know they’re paying these people $25 an hour to mind where I idle for a couple minutes, but the CEOs still scream of “shrink”.
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.
“Just put him in the ground! We have places to be! People to falsely accuse! Donuts to eat!”
-Waukegan Police Department
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.
Mozilla Bricking Firefox ESR Deliberately. This Code Breaks Tor Browser Too.
The Tor Browser, currently based on Firefox ESR 102.14, hasn’t been able to play any videos for about 3 months now on most Linux distributions. So everyone using it is now completely secure from maliciously crafted videos seeking to exploit your codecs embedded in Web pages. B-)
Thanks Mozilla! 😛
What seems to have happened is that they patched support for ffmpeg 4 out of Firefox and BACKPORTED it to 102 ESR for no reason, meanwhile they also didn’t add support for ffmpeg 6.
(Even though ffmpeg 4 is a currently supported stable branch upstream.)
Also, around the same time ffmpeg 6 landed in Fedora (close to the time I deleted Fedora and moved to openSUSE Leap KDE) and broke video playback in SeaMonkey, however I talked to the SeaMonkey developers on IRC and they quickly patched it so it can handle both versions!
It was one of the last patches that went in before the current release.
So now SeaMonkey has video playback with both versions, unlike any version of Firefox.
Which is cool, because no matter what you do, it works.
Also, SeaMonkey lets me shop at Walmart, which is broken in Firefox 115 ESR.
I could check Walmart in Firefox 116, but then I’d have three versions of Firefox (or derivatives) on my computer and they would all have different annoying and serious defects.
Mozilla is trying to brick things deliberately in Firefox, for no actual reason than to harass people trying to use something that’s not their latest and shittiest version yet.
The SeaMonkey people are actually really nice.
It’s unfortunate that Mozilla won’t actually commit themselves to keeping the major features of the browser functional for as long as they claim to support an ESR.
The Quest to Get My Spouse a Bus Card Because People are Vicious.
I drop off and pick up my spouse from work every day. It’s fine in the morning because nobody else is even awake yet, so I can get there and back about as fast as I feel like driving, with the occasional stop light. It’s great.
But then I have to get up and go get him in the evening when everyone is getting off work, coming in from Chicago, schools letting out, schoolbuspocalypse….
Then there’s always some jalopy that’s broken down or someone in another stolen Kia or Dodge Charger that was going 100 in a 30 and slammed into someone.
It’s impossible to make good time, and gasoline is like crazy expensive now on top of that.
Today, the security guard/rent-a-cop guy at Walmart that hasn’t had any effect on the shoplifters got bored and decided to chase me out of the place that’s not really a parking spot, but it’s not a handicapped or fire zone. He walks over, looks at the other cars, glances at me for a moment, walks back over, gets in his little rent-a-cop mobile, and turns his yellow flashers on and parks next to me and gets out and starts writing down my plate number in a little pad of paper. I decide I’m getting the hell out of there, and throw it in reverse.
People behind me, so the security officer just doesn’t want to deal with this and tears up the paper and told me don’t worry about it, just don’t park there again.
I told him he could have just asked.
Then when I went up the ramp to get home there was a rather large woman in a white van that threw it in reverse and almost caused a 4 car pile up because she lost a $10 blue Coleman cooler she could have replaced at Walmart.
So I rolled my window down and told her she was crazy and “What the hell does she think she’s doing?”, and drove off while she was trying to backtalk me because I don’t care.
I have a dashcam that records everything all around it because there’s a lot of insurance scammers in Illinois and there’s like three lawyers for every human that lives here.
Half of the entire state GDP is basically just lawyers in Chicago asking people if they’ve swooped-and-squatted anyone, you know, and gives them a fake neck brace to wear in court. Saul Goodman stuff.
Your insurance cuts them a check, they go after you, you can’t afford to drive again.
So I got on the Ventra Web site right now and loaded $10 on a card and they said it will come to my mailbox in 7-10 days.
I figure with the price of gas alone these days, it’s good to have.
Walmart keeps giving him a 5.5 hour shift here and there because of the ongoing national hour cuts, and it’s just not worth going through all of this, ESPECIALLY on one of those days.
Get 4 hours sleep and go through something pretty much like what I just described to try to get him home in the evening when the Pace bus is $2.
Even if I just go park in the abandoned pizza business’s lot over by the bus stop and drive him home the last bit of the way, it would still make more sense than dealing with people pushing and shoving and some crazy asshole backing down the up ramp.
In the past few years, the attitude of the American public has gotten to where half of them are crazy and will kill you just as soon as look at you (“Bish don’t tell me to wear a mask! BANG BANG MOTHERFUCKER!”) and the other half ready to stick a gun in their own mouth so they don’t have to deal with another shift at the McDonalds. (“Bish, don’t tell me to wear a mask!” *SMACK SMACK SMACK goes the COVID plexiglass on the minimum wage worker’s head!*)
The COVID masks are gone but the attitude is still there. “Don’t talk to me, or else!”.
Could you imagine having to work for minimum wage, getting your hours cut, and then deal with a public of crazies and idiots ready to go off on you, along with a stupid boss that knows less than you do, and an HR department that is cutting hours because they don’t want to say layoff?
That’s what these people go through. That’s why I never give service workers crap. Whatever you think they’ve done, be nice to them. Someone else will be so mean that they’ll have to deal with too much anyway.
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