Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.
One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.
This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.
Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.
It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”
This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.
The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.
That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.
Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.
Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.
One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.
Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.
When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.
In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.
In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.
What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.
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Seems clear the idea is to make life increasingly difficult and expensive, and in so doing, create a population of indentured servants. Problem is the indenture will never be paid off.
(Minor correction: Three Rivers Stadium was blown up in 2001, replaced by two new stadia. First order of business was to auction off the names to the highest bidders – Heinz and PNC Bank. It was Heinz Field that changed name to Acrisure.)
Today’s essay is quite thought provoking. At the end, I am left hanging: If the entire nation is indeed repeating the mid-20th century experiment of the cities, it leaves unanswered the question of this time, where do the businesses (or citizens) relocate to? Z gives a hint: “Ungovernable.” Well, the essay makes clear that it’s not directly governments trying to govern in the present case. Perhaps “difficult to market to” is the new escape.
Z-man, you and the Worthy House guy are wrong. This can go on forever, and will. Just like politics. There will be no Red Caesar. There will however be a Blue Pol Pot. And a Blue Terms of Service Regime. Structurally, the West is rapidly moving towards the old Babylonian model of productivity but in reverse. Then, it was raise an army (that was loyal), raid and capture neighboring peoples, deport them as slaves to Babylonia to work the fields and crucial canals till they died, then raid more peoples. This produced great wealth at the top, obvious dynastic churn… Read more »
Well said, but I take an exception to rapid and collapse without bottom Not going to argue the point extensively, but point to some recent examples from 3 levels of societies. USSR (1st world), Venezuela (2nd world), Zimbabwe (3rd world). These societies collapsed for various reasons, but the people endured and did what was needed to survive. I don’t see us as different in this ability.
whiskey — Mark of the HildaBeest lol. Spot on tho. I’ve said for decades that the New World Order is the New Woman Order. She is Leftism. An XX future, don’t ask Y. A feminine demon of vexation and terror rules over America and the anglo nations (Strong’s Hebrew 6869, tsah-rah: female adversary, female vexation). This is the beginning of what Scripture and eschatological Christians call ‘The Tribulation’. The dominant, and still rising, power in the West is the ‘divine feminine’ under various fronts and guises. Spencer Smith does a good job covering this in his vids. The rising power… Read more »
That’s their perfect world, but the rub is that there’s still way too many white folks to pull it off, also too many “Trump supporters,” and will be for the foreseeable future, unless they can find some way to reduce them and only them. If that was the intention of the jab, it seems to be a very long process. Without getting into the crisis of competence such a dusky regime would inevitably suffer. Is already suffering, I think. Besides which, I am not seeing a lot of solid camp commissar/guard material out there among the baizuo. The CBDC angle… Read more »
“This can go on forever, and will. Just like politics. There will be no Red Caesar. There will however be a Blue Pol Pot. “- Whiskey
I think we all know this. But it’s a good summation.
@Whiskey
Outstanding post sir. I salute you. This is about as spot on as it gets.
It seems history is rhyming so hard the bell is about to break. Robert Silverberg is both a grand master of science fiction and an excellent historian. He put out and anthology based on the Cultural Revolution…of the era spanning 600 B.C to 400 B.C. Priestly class zealots overthrew the engineering class and rose to power. Instead of a scientific-industrial revolution, that part of the world got a cultural revolution. Note, that was the period in which the Babylonian Talmud is supposed to have been written, as well as other political events occurring in New Babylon. Who created the Mad… Read more »
America is the ‘whore Babylon’ or ‘Babylon the Great’ cited in Scripture. N.Y.C. is the ‘great city’ of Revelation.
The satanic concept of ‘equality’ was born in Old Babylon, the first gender-bender culture.
The ‘Babylon spirit’ is generally dispersed in the world, but concentrated in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, N.Z., Western Europe.
When I talk to people who don’t just pirate everything on primewire or watch dog washing videos on youtube, it always turns out that they’re spending twice as much as before to have a dozen streaming services compared to just the cable package they used to have. All that just to watch Captain Picard as an old man crying like a little girl. Blech.
This gets to me talking about Slick Willy yesterday. He famously said that the era of big government is over. What people didn’t realize is that there was fine print attached. He made the government look smaller by using f500 and NGOs as cutouts. This is what I think Haywood means when he says “unlimited means for limited ends”. A GOP president effectively dissolving all the megacorps and NGO would be seen as betraying the idea of limited government but at the end of the day, you would effectively have to do those kinds of things if you wanted any… Read more »
Way off topic. This is more one for the Beautiful Losers category, but in case you want this one for a podcast Z: https://americanmind.org/salvo/white-pills-for-the-new-year/
I ordered one of those little wafer batteries for my car key fob from Amazon recently. It cost $2.87 and was delivered overnight for free. How is this a sustainable business model? Well it turns out the USPS heavily subsidizes Amazon’s shipping costs. Why would they do that? Because the increased volume, justifies the bloated USPS bureaucracy, even though it causes huge annual losses. The only loser is the US taxpayer, who keeps both ridiculous business models afloat.
The USPS is one of the few things the government does that it is constitutionally mandated to do. To the extent it loses money, so what? Nobody ever complains that the courts lose money or that the police lose money. I don’t think they lose money delivering packages. If anything, its probably first class mail they lose money on because they are required to deliver mail to all postal addresses in the US at the same stamp rate. There are thousands of things the government does far worse and where there is no legitimate role of the state to be… Read more »
family member works for post office. The least of our worries and something that is still worth while. Of course it not run well and loses money, as Tars says, which one of our hundreds of fed operations does any better. They are all worse. Pay scale is way less than any other government operation.
“The USPS is one of the few things the government does that it is constitutionally mandated to do.”
Subtle quibble. It’s something the Constitution authorizes, not mandates.
“Congress shall have the power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads…”
Same with the later clause, “Congress shall have the power…To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia…” They are not mandated to supply M-16s and M-2s to the citizenry, but they are authorized to do so if they choose.
No doubt there are bigger government wastes. But you don’t have to be a libertarian to question an organization that, with a monopoly, lost $6.5 billion last year, all so you can receive junk mail. If the main function of the courts/police was to deliver paper ads I don’t want, I would question their losses as well. One further knock on the USPS. They are overwhelmingly left-wing, while also allowing for mail-in ballots, which is the primary reason we cannot vote our way out of the problems we face. But yeah, the few times a year I need to paper… Read more »
DLS: Varous maternal aunts and uncles worked for the post office. None of them were particularly bright or capable; one has been drawing disability for years claimimg to have hurt her back. Mail service in DFW sucked. We often wouldn’t get mail until 6 pm. We often got others’ mail and they got ours. A visit to the local post office was a nightmare – a line of dot Indians chatting with the Indian post office employee, a line of east Asians talking with the Han employee, a black supervisor. I used Fedex exclusively instead. My local rural post office… Read more »
A mandate to deliver mail (if that really is so) is one thing, but nevertheless separate from a mandate (?) to deliver such in an inefficient—and therefore—more expensive manner.
When discussing the USPS, one should separate the two. I see no reason for the USPS to not be farmed out to the lowest bidder for operation.
3g4me: Agree on the demographics. I live in a white suburb and have no complaints about the service or visiting the post office. Though I will note that we lived next door to a mail carrier who said a lot of the carriers consume marijuana gummies every day. Could just be anecdotal for this area. I thought a little further on my earlier post regarding politics, and it occurs to me that allowing a heavily Democratic leaning union to deliver and collect mail-in ballots is a recipe for fraud. I have no evidence, but it would be pretty easy for… Read more »
A Republican director under Trump “reorganized” the USPS, selling off much of its sorting equipment, etc., preparing for its customer base be taken over by private corporations such as Fedex or UPS. Privatization and DEI hiring is an attack on the USPS core function from both flanks. One of my mail carriers, harried and overworked, told me about what a hot mess her workplace had become- to the point she was seeking anxiety meds- a couple of years before I found a comment detailing what the Trump selected director had been doing during his tenure. He might still be there,… Read more »
Amazon isn’t exactly subsidized. It doesn’t make any money on its shipping business. Like covid lockdowns and the crime wave brought to us by “Soros prosecutors,” it exists to obliterate the local general/department/drug store. It’s government-*maintained* for that purpose. The rhetorically Marxist part of the ruling class is obsessed with destroying the “uneducated” petit bourgeoisie—and the possibility of its ever arising again. To accomplish this they align with finance capital, multinationals, etc., outright stating that it’s because monopoly/monopsony is more state-controllable than “free enterprise.” And in fact Google, Apple, Pfizer, Amazon, et al. are all-but-nominally nationalized. And the government is… Read more »
What we see in AINO is unbridled greed and commodification conjoined with ideological monomania. Henry Potter (It’s a Wonderful Life) may have been a cruel, avaricious bastard, but he had no interest in affixing a naugahyde vajajay to your son and submitting your daughter to gangrape by a pack of baboons. In other words, what we now see is raw capitalism impregnated with perverse, anti-white poststructuralism. I don’t know about you lot, but I can think of better arrangements.
“capitalism” requires creative destruction IE you run your business badly you go out of business. We don’t have that. If the banks had gone down in 2008, they would have taken all the mega corporations with them. They can’t function without each other, and neither can mega government. That is why they bailed them out, to bail themselves out. The market was trying to enforce the nearest thing we have to “democracy” in this country. Our economy died in 2008. We’ve been juicing a corpse with 0% rates and QE for 15 years. You guys think its bad now, wait… Read more »
Mark my words, some sort of “crisis” will come up next year and they will have to cut rates to 0% again and print a few trillion more, just like 2020 and 2008. Those were both election years by the way. The half life the printed money has is getting shorter and shorter. The end is near, thank god!
In the Fed era, have we ever had a market crash in an election year when a D was up for re-election? I don’t believe we have. In all that time, the tape says that 2008 and 2020 have been the only two real election year crashes. (the market crested in 2000 but didn’t really start down in earnest until 2001).
In all that time (back to 1913) there have really been only 11 crashes, the way I define it. So I don’t know if this tells us much.
2020 wasn’t even a crash. The market ended the year higher then it started and the god damn economy wasn’t even open. What does that tell you about the stock market? I don’t think it matters anymore which party they prefer to have in office. The monetary system is coming to an end. Prepare accordingly.
This is the only thing that matters for the stock market:
I love how everyone here decries the fraud of society and blah blah blah, but when it comes to the stock market, its as pure as the driven snow!
The safety net you describe applies to a handful of corporations, not the vast majority of business entities that comprise most of AINO’s economy.
The NFL is even worse than mentioned. The actual time when plays are being run is only 11 minutes. Replays account for 17 minutes, and watching players stand around is about 75 minutes. The remaining 80-90 minutes are mostly spent watching ads. What a colossal waste of time. Not to mention the absurdity that the best part of the whole charade is spending 11 minutes watching negroes chase a ball.
https://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-commercials-and-just-11-minutes-of-play
Tangentially, how about the Texas Rangers paying that Jap sportsballer 700 mill? It is a moral obscenity.
Sorry Otsei, your racism is not appreciated.,
We refer to them as Nips.
I prefer Nine Irons.
Had to look that one up. The most slanted of irons. LOL
Incidentally, the obscenity has to do with the money, not the fact that the guy is a slope. It would be just as abominable if the Rangers shelled out all that dough to Z because he could hit a curve ball, although it might do the DR some good.
Correction: It is the L.A. Dodgers, not the Texas Rangers, shelling out the huge contract to the Jap. Hey, it’s their money and it’s not as if it would go to some truly worthy cause if Ohtani didn’t get it. Would you rather the Dodgers’ owners just keep that money? Not sure why that’s any better. Now, if you want to argue that sportsball teams make way too much profit due to our society’s lame priorities, that I could probably sign off on.
“Hey, it’s their money and it’s not as if it would go to some truly worthy cause if Ohtani didn’t get it. Would you rather the Dodgers’ owners just keep that money? Not sure why that’s any better. Now, if you want to argue that sportsball teams make way too much profit due to our society’s lame priorities, that I could probably sign off on.” I could be mistaken, but I believe this was Ostei Kozelskii’s point. It really is obscene that anyone in our society pays 700 million for anything related to sportsball. It’s also obscene that CEOs rake… Read more »
Its about getting the nips to pony up.
https://dodgersnation.com/dodger-branded-merchandise-is-already-booming-in-japan/2023/12/26/
Though Ostei may well have been making the same point I made, it wasn’t clear. A lot of folks seem to believe it’s better for sportsball owners to make off like bandits rather than have the athletes get too much of the loot. The athletes provide the actual product (facilitated by the owners, of course). I recognize that I may have misconstrued what Ostei was getting at.
Right. I thought my point was rather obvious.
Yes to your final sentence. It is society that is depraved. As to the owners, no idea, although they’re probably members of the Power Structure and as such, anti-white.
Amazon Prime is a scam. I signed up for it once but cancelled after a year. I didn’t notice any difference in benefits. They make you jump through a few hoops to NOT sign up for it anytime you order something but that’s the main inconvenience. You get the same customer rewards discount if you pay attention and select that at checkout. If you’re willing to wait a few extra days for the delivery, you usually get that option for free. Then it’s almost always delivered before the projected delivery date anyway. I don’t know anything about the ads because… Read more »
the ads on youtube are out of control. Want to listen to a minute and a half long song? First you have to watch a unskippable 6 second ad (usually for something that doesn’t apply to you) and then you get the 30 second skippable ad. If they’re collecting so much data on us, how are the ads still not even relatable?
I think about this a lot, usually in the context of equities markets, how at some point the cost of managerial compliance and dead weight pink hair/vibrancy exceeds the productive capacity of the company/corporation/system. And like they say about markets, “nobody rings a bell at the top.” When we arrive at the “managerial event horizon,” nobody will know it in real time. There may not be a “crash,” per se, but just a long, slow “downward” grind into the idiocracy oblivion. Something that is real and ongoing yet largely unseen and definitely underreported is that when an organization becomes “woke”… Read more »
Don’t overlook the extent to which corporate tax policy affects things. The effective corporate tax rate is hovering around 18%, which means if you hire some green-haired tranny to ru(i)n your HR department, on average, you are credited back in taxes 18% of it’s salary. Of course, the feds aren’t the only ones who levy corporate tax. Cities, counties, special taxing districts and states all take “their” share. Unless you chose your business location with this in mind, you may be facing marginal rates of over 50%, i.e., buying ads or any other expensible items costs you less than half… Read more »
Ah! Here is another one that is the result of making software more diverse and inclusive. Schedule a meeting on Google’s Calendar. Change the time zone of the meeting. Look at all of the various places in South America you have never heard of between you and central time zone. Now, I promise you their usability and QA teams filed numerous bugs about how unusable this became with the massive scroll down. I am sure some of them said, can’t we use some simple algorithm to determine the user’s country, current location, to give them a limited number of options?… Read more »
Yep. Here at my “ugly teller” I see the scrolling of ad’s for my bank’s services. I exaggerate not, there are a series of pictorial ad’s displayed that show only Black faces. Not a single White to be found. The exception was that the bank was sponsoring the Youth Soccer Team of Mexico! In that were smiling Hispanic faces in front of a Mexican flag. 🙁
Yep. Yesterday I went to get the New Year party favors that I signed up to contribute. The giant window photos had a black boy in the center, a SoAmerIndian to his left and a blonde/blue girl to his right. The entire staff inside was black – something I am seeing everywhere. First packaging I saw was a brunette and a blonde to the left and right of a smiling sub-saharan. It took a while but I did see a happy white couple on one set of packaging. Happy New Year!! You will almost never see a white male. He… Read more »
That is it is a recent show, but it is set in the early 80s – when Reagan was shot.
Why are there no black spies???
You forget “Undercover Brother.”
“ Why are there no black spies???”
Because there are no Black countries worth spying on. 😉
Banks appear to be at the forefront of negrolatry/whiteophobia. It’s gotten so bad on my bank’s website that whenever I check my checking account, I punch in the wrong password/username in order to speed past the diversity as quickly as possible. When I do this, it automatically forwards me to another login page where no faces, negro or otherwise, are to be seen.
It would be an interesting (and funny) experiment to put together some diverse ads but with the various ages, sexes, and races so obviously wrong that everyone would notice. I’d like to make an ad featuring a “family” at the dinner table. Maybe it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas. The dad is a 10 year old Asian kid, mama is a 500 lbs black woman, the kids are all Mestizos, except the oldest son, a fine 6’5″ Aryan. His albino pygmy sister is next to him. She is only visible because she’s standing on the chair. Finally, we have a 105 year… Read more »
It’s not just that all the smiling faces are black. I have no doubt that Shaniqua needs a credit card and Chulthuvius requires an account for his “business” proceeds. No, it’s the laughable presentation of an intact nuclear family celebrating the bank-financed purchase of a million dollar home. As if.
Inclusivity, yes. But it’s also about eschewing “Americacentrism.” Don’t want to let on that AINO is somehow more important than Zambia, wot.
Accompany I once worked for used the translation service, and the phone operator would always ask. What market are you calling from and I would answer I’m not calling from a market and I would insist and finally the phone operator would have to ask you you know like what city are you calling from like New York Houston Chicago at which point I would answer cheerfully oh Brooklyn New York
This is one of the many little insults you endure when job hunting. You need to stay vigilant to make sure you don’t end up applying from Afghanistan for that job in Florida. Once you finally get to the u’s they also seem to REALLY want you to be from the UK, the United Arab Emirates, or just about any other place with “united” in the name. Some companies are also so pozzed now that it’s quite a challenge to figure out how to pick “I’m straight goddammit!” from the list of 57 genders. Then again, you could say this… Read more »
“One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content.” They’ve been doing this for a while now. When they bought up IMDBTV and renamed it to Freevee, they moved almost all the back catalog content to Freevee (or just removed the vast majority of the free, adless content from their streaming and went with Freevee’s back catalog). All the new second tier stuff is released on Freevee, which has ads. The only things you can find on Amazon without ads now are a handful of their premier “Amazon Originals” items,… Read more »
I have had amazon prime for years and there were no ads when I rented a movie. Ever.
Today I get a notice I must pay 3 dollars a month more, or they will insert ads in order to help me out with my viewing experience etc. etc.
It’s new.
I was talking about the “included with Prime” content, and there have been ads on that for quite a while, unless I’ve been hallucinating.
There will still be no ads on content you specifically pay to rent:
“Ads will not be part of content that is purchased or rented. Live events on Amazon Prime, like sports, already include advertising and will continue to do so.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/amazon-prime-video-will-start-showing-ads-in-january-will-you-have-to-pay-more/ar-AA1m9D3p
OK appreciate the clarification.
“Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads.”
I simply cannot fathom paying a monthly fee to watch television, ads or not. I watch almost no television at all other than the weather forecast. Sometimes I catch enough of a glimpse of the “news” just to hurl obscenities, profanities and vulgarities that the propaganda.
Television is basically a sewer pipe discharging feces into your living room. There is almost nothing on it but Negroes, and the content is controlled by Jews.
We watch YouTube and we do fork over money to have it be ad free. The only time ads enter our lives is when are in a city or my husband watches a sportsball game. When we do watch ads, it’s clear the worst of the culture war has landed ther.
It is possible to live an ad-free life if you are not interested in traditional TV viewing. Further, some of the worst instances of forced TV viewing, such as the MD’s office/airports/gas station pumps seems to have been rolled back recently.
I think I prefer to see some ads, sometimes, just so I have at least a vague awareness of what’s out there. Yes it would probably be better for my mind, in an ignorance is bliss kind of way, if I saw none of them, but not in a situational awareness way.
When I’m in a restaurant–and the vast majority of them are bedizened with TV screens, alas–I sometimes watch the ads in much the same way many people rubberneck at a car accident. One’s eyes are drawn, almost inexorably, to the horror.
Indeed. My job requires me to watch sportsball on the sewer pipe, September through March, so I subscribe to Youtube TV for those months. But those events are all I watch, and I cancel my sub as soon as possible.
Requires you to watch sportsball? Why don’t they require you to get repeatedly punched in the groin by a midget for the remaining 6 months of the year? What’s the difference?
I tread a stony path…
Interesting. We wonder how apps and google-twitter-facebook make any money, being free; yet, we lived with free rabbit-ears tv and never asked the same question.
“In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks.” And what supports all these costs? The surplus profits of monopoly and cartels. The Woke/DEI stuff has grown in direct proportion with the cartelization of American business. Every day, most Americans wake up, work for and do business with monopolies and cartels all day long. Banking, education, insurance/healthcare, Amazon/Netflix/cableTV, pharmaceuticals, government, etc. – all monopolies or cartels. The competitive sphere has been reduced to fast food/restaurants,… Read more »
That’s why a parallel system that a lot of people talk about will never help us break free of this corrupt system unless it’s done in person with the people around you… Online Parallel systems are just illusions of the real thing and won’t bring the change you are looking for…
I’m going to sound like a broken record, but there is a fairly straightforward way to avoid much of this: Consciously secede from GAE kulture. We don’t watch tv so have no worries about ads. Like Felix, I use the Brave browser so no ads. I watch YT videos but I am not subscribed or signed in to anything, so I see no ads. The only time I am subected to online ads is when I waste time by playing ‘free’ online card games. They are miserable and woke but generally last 1 minute and I use that time to… Read more »
Clarkson’s Farm season 2 is definitely worth watching. He basically cannot do anything without government approval. The yeoman farmer in the Tudor era had more freedom. But having a beautiful farm has to be close to the pinnacle of human achievement.
Which is why you need a Community of your people so you don’t have to worry about permits and fees…
DVD players have gotten extremely cheap sometimes under 20 dollars and even some that work just on batteries, I have been accumulating a library of watchable movies and tv series on dvd’s (including some for children, and some holiday classics that haven’t been tainted yet) and so can basically ignore the television except for local weather and crime and a few PBS Masterpiece things that don’t feature diversity. I may be able to entirely cut the cable cord next year. Also, I never buy the kindle or online reader versions of books, I always opt for the actual paper copies… Read more »
I began collecting CDs and DVDs back in the 90s and still do. Have never used Netflicks and wouldn’t know Spotify if it sidled up to me and bit me on the ass. Then again, I’m something of a collector, by nature. I like to possess the physical things, and streaming/play lists just wouldn’t scratch that itch.
“I watch YT videos but I am not subscribed or signed in to anything, so I see no ads.” Also don’t sign in to online platforms on principal. But it’s the Brave browser, not the fact that you’re not signed in, that’s skipping over the ads. YouTube actually experimented with blocking Brave for that reason but seems to have given up after a short while. Ad blockers can also be helpful, and they’re browser agnostic. Frankly don’t see any reason to pay for Prime. I mean, people just need to plan their lives a little better. And learn patience. Even… Read more »
The little bitchlings just sent me an e-mail telling me how they were doing me this tremendous favor by expanding their catalog and creating huge opportunities and bs bs. And oh yeah serf you gotta pay another 3 bucks a month, or we are gonna stuff ADS into the service you already paid for on the implicit assumption that it disallowed ADS. But not to worry valued serf, we will impose LESS ADS on you than network television. Now go dig up your password and get it done. If they’d sent a message saying we’re raising fees 3 dollars a… Read more »
My wife was watching It’s a Wonderful Life just before Christmas and it hit me, Pottersville, and we are now a country run by Henry Potter’s.
Complete with local girls being lured into the sex trade.
Actually, I don’t know who was worse, Mr. Potter or George Bailey. Potter’s faults are obvious. But George Bailey basically mismanages his bank’s funds by handing them over to his loopy uncle, tries to commit suicide, and then gets a big public bailout. I am probably the only person on earth who thinks this is a horrible movie.
No, the Ayn Rand Objectivists hate it too. Careful the company you keep.
Bailey is a GrillerCuck in other words. You could make an updated version with not-so-subtle analogies between the bank and America. Replace the loopy uncle with a flock of stronk-independant wammen and Potter with pozzed elite WASPs and Jews. Maybe the twist is that when Clarence shows up he realizes the situation is FUBAR and Bailey is a fool and he’s the one who kills himself.
Funny coincidence department. The wifey got IAWL on DVD for Christmas, and we watched it last night. First time I’d seen it, believe it or not. At any rate, yes, crass, ugly, tawdry Potterville in 1946 looked very much like Louisville in 2023. All that was missing was the dieversity.
How ironic that a message of anti-capitialism in 1946 looks very rightwing in the here and the now.
You guys never saw this?
https://youtu.be/Icqrx0OimSs
Came out in 08
I’m not sure how this could be done, but big tech and big ad are surely searching for some way to guarantee that the volume cannot be muted or even reduced on their ads.
Meanwhile, I’m praying for a technology that shuts off the screen as soon as the ads appear and turns back on when they cease. Something tells me I’ll be waiting a while…
It’s called “the Off button.” Not to be too condescending, but these conversations of how to best consoooome mass media from those who hate us sounds a lot like the waiting room ofba methodone/narcan clinic. Maybe stop putting the needle in your arm.
As I made abundantly clear upstream, I’m required to watch a great deal of sportsball, and that’s all the television I watch. It would be nice to be able to avoid propaganda bombardment while doing this, and no, the “Off” button doesn’t solve the problem because it doesn’t turn the boob toob back on once the ads are through.
South Park had an episode back in 2015 I think it was. It was Season 19 Episode 9. It was a great season in general as it covered the service economy, gentrification and the rise of consumerized SF/Berkeley hippie culture. They lampooned it better than any article ever could. The above mentioned episode is the best, “everything is an ad”, statement I have ever seen. Ads were always a terrible and soul crushing thing. I remember when they introduced ads into the movie theaters. For me it was during the LOTR-II back in 2002. They had 45 minutes of commercials.… Read more »
Movie theatres are really bad…When we went to Oppenheimer, it was more than 30 minutes of adds for horrible new pictures we wouldn’t dream of watching…At a very high sound level…
I go to the flicks once very several years to watch the newest Bond movie. That’s it. And now that they’ve killed off 007, after first having replaced him with a sassy mammy, even that may be kaput.
The word you’re looking for is propaganda.
This is why I’ll never buy a new computer. You get to pay over a grand for the privilege to subscribe and pay money to microsoft and adobe for what should be free functions of the computer that was just purchased.
This is why I will never buy a new car..The old one is trouble free, doesn’t spy on me or order me around, and is made by an extremely reliable Japanese manufacturer with a solid local dealership…Soon, new cars will monitor and report your driving, and subject you to being shut down at the whim of “authorities”…No thanks!
I tried this. My Adobe is no longer supported on Windows 7 and crashes my computer. Not reading my work-related PDFs is obviously not an option for me. I think Ralph Nader called this “planned obsolescence”.
My grandma gave me her old laptop with windows 7. Microsoft gave me an “update” which essentially removed all of microsoft office because it was still free when she bought the laptop and hadn’t been connected to the internet. Isn’t it funny that old versions of windows didn’t need weekly “updates” they now try to ram down your throat? I found a way to shut them down though for the time being 😉
You can download Open Office from Apache software, it has programs similar to word and excel except you can only print them on a home printer as most commercial print/copy shops are locked into their service agreements which require them to ONLY use Miscrosoft office and they will not even open anything else..
As today’s post makes clear, the deck is stacked against us and getting worse with each passing day. But it’s the slow boil technique, which is carefully calibrated to keep normie on the couch and not rioting in the streets. And voting harder is not going to fix this; only a collapse can trigger the eventual cure. So instead of endless erudite analysis (or whining), why not get busy and find a way to survive the interregnum following collapse? That is Step One. Now you have to come to terms with the reality that only tangible actions can save us.… Read more »
Eighteen months, huh? Alright, I’d better mark that down on my calendar.
This is a fun topic mainly because last night during dinner my adult kids were talking about this very problem. They’re all home for the Christmas holiday week, which is a treat for Mrs. Hokkoda and I. Anyway, they were lamenting that they now pay for a premium streaming service and the darn thing is now showing them commercials. The worst part is that regular old commercial TV from the 1980’s or 90’s would time the drama to align with the commercial breaks. The producers at least had the good sense to build up the tension and cut to a… Read more »
“Wayfair”
They have any of those $10,000 throw pillows?
How many milliseconds does it take you to hit the “skip” button when presented with an ad on “free” programs?
You can’t skip the ads on Prime. They call it FreeVee or FreeView or something. Basically, you don’t have to pay to rent the program if you agree to watch the commercials. But you can’t skip them. They’re mostly using the ads on programming that is not enough of a draw – not enough people would pay outright to rent it. So instead of charging $4.99 to rent it, which nobody would do, they give it to you “for free” if you agree to some ads. IMO, it’s a reaction to the declining quality of streaming content. Nobody will pay… Read more »
I’d push a button that kills everyone who’s ever bought or sold an advertisement before I’d watch a single second of one.
sometimes they allow you to skip after about 5 seconds or more of watching. So about 5,000 milliseconds (more like 5,450 to allow for reaction time).
Off the topic of the post, but this morning at work, in the break area, a large number of black coworkers were gathered and talking about some current events in the ghetto. One of them said, and I kid you not, that a gun that was found by police in a local black neighborhood was “planted”. (Which garnered a response akin to “yeah like crack was”) This led to one of them piping in on the “opioid crisis”, and how “this wasn’t a problem until it started affecting white people”. Akshually, Shaquishia, white people only started talking about it when… Read more »
What they don’t understand is that if you put 10 white people in a room, we don’t talk about whiteness or blackness. We mostly talk about our families or the weekend or hobbies or sports. If you put 10 white people in a junky old storage room and locked the door so they couldn’t get out, by the time you unlocked the door 6-7 hours later, they’d have cleaned up the room and somebody would be serving as the unofficial leader of the group. They’d mostly know each other’s names and a lot about each other. The concept of race… Read more »
That’s why every black run city functions like a Rolex watch, they are problem solvers and really good at solving their own problems, yeah right.
It’s interesting to watch programs featuring science or archeology explorations like dinosaurs, nature programs on volcanoes and hurricane research, in these tech type programs nowhere is a black or brown or even yellow person to be seen except as a diversity plug-in. We seems to have been cursed or blessed with a bigger than normal amount of curiosity and inventiveness and own-group high trust genes. If a POC had been locked in the cupboard what do you think they would have done?
I have to disagree with your demographic observations on these documentary type programs. If you went back more than 20 years ago, you’d be scarce to find anything but token blacks. Nowadays they ram “black science guy” up our asses like a dildo at Barry’s bathhouse. I don’t watch much TV, but I do watch documentaries on various streaming platforms. Just last night I was watching a documentary on Pluto TV about the origins of Robin Hood. Not a black in sight, but do you know who made a cameo appearance? The Sheriff of Nottingham! But not just any old… Read more »
You’ll be pleased to note that the current Sheriff of Nottingham is Shuguftah Quddoos.
A few years ago I was in a museum in Taiwan dedicated to electricty. The first room you entered was dedicated to the scientists who made major breakthroughs in that field: Franklin, Watt, Ohm, Ampère, Edison, Tesla, etc. It took me a minute or two to realize why I felt odd. Then I realized it was because every last person featured was a white male. They didn’t even shoehorn an Asian into the exhibit, much less a magical negro.
The blessing of an ethnically homogenous nation…
This sums up why I despise them with the intensity of a 1000 suns. Unlike some here, I openly despise them with a hatred that is immeasurable. If I had one wish granted from a genie it would be to eradicate their entire existence right down to the last molecule that could eventually reproduce them again. I hate them that much. They are the single most destructive force on earth and their existence makes life much harder and more difficult for the rest of civilized society. They cannot be fixed.
It’s one of their species more nauseating traits, they want to be worshiped because they believe all of their own bullshit.
I have to say that I used to badmouth the “go woke, go broke” mantra. It just didn’t seem to be true. The big companies were becoming increasingly anti-white, but it seemed to have no impact on their profits nor did their white customers seem to care. But, a few years back, I began to question my original opinion. Being independently employed, I don’t get a glimpse into the day-to-day workings of companies, so I assumed that they remained reasonably normal. Sure, they’d have a DEI department and normal white people would be forced to sit through stupid lectures that… Read more »
It’s becoming a glaringly obvious problem of competence, which I think Zman has written about before. You can’t bring people like that in and indoctrinate them in DIE and make that their reason for being and expect them to be competent in the work that needs to get done. The military has always had shiftless idiots woven into the mix. Herman Wouk was writing about this in “The Caine Mutiny” in 1952. “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only… Read more »
An example of that is the destruction of the Assault Ship Bonhomme Richard, in San Diego in 2020. The ship was undergoing a refit and a disgruntled sailor started the fire. The crew failed to activate the fire suppression systems for a very long time allowing the fire to get out of control. The whole ship was written off.
So just as I suspected Herman Wouk was tribe. And this snarky hyperbole about geniuses and “idiots” is typical. For example, in aviation, a pre-flight checklist isn’t designed for idiots it’s designed for those of ordinary intelligence because sometimes the systems are too complicated to rely on memory alone to make things work smoothly. Sometimes the rules are there for reasons that the average person doesn’t see but which are potentially disastrous under the wrong set of conditions.
Note that in The Caine Mutiny it’s Jewish lawyer Barney Greenwald who saves Maryk from being hanged, even though he doesn’t want to. He’d rather support Queeg, who signed up to defend The Tribe before the draft made it mandatory.
To be fair, the character who makes that statement about the Navy is Tom Keefer who was actively poisoning the well aboard the USS Caine. To some extent, he is the villain of the story. The guy who actually should have been court-martialed. It’s been a few years since I read the book, but I think that the dissent he was sowing may have even come up during the trial. I spent 10 years in the USAF flying spacecraft and training to end the world with ICBMs, so I’m pretty confident that I understand the importance of procedure. My point… Read more »
> and appeared not as customers leaving but the companies/agencies having a harder and harder time providing the service/product in a reasonably cost-efficient way.
Thus the pivot to “advertising” as a new revenue stream everywhere. Unlike an actual product, “advertising” is the one thing you can sell that doesn’t require you to actually deliver tangible benefit to your “customer”. It is basically corporate money laundering, where funds magically appear to people pushing the correct political narrative (like the beer tranny), and disappear when assets stray from the collective (rocket man’s freeze peach platform).
It’s actually clever. You’re getting payment from the customer without having to ask for more money. There are still a few smart people in these companies.
Silly Country — ‘The same seems to be true in the FBI, CIA, State Department and the military. Decades of hiring women, minorities and white soy boys indoctrinated into the modern religion is now taking its toll.’ Cuckservative medea never talks about WHY the CIA, FBI, NSA etc. all are increasingly woke-totalitarian. The answer is too discomfiting to the millions of parents of hard-charging daughters. . . parents who still imagine themselves conservative or Christian. Obvious reason is what you stated. Forty years of forcing masculine males and whites outta education/employment, and stuffing females and ‘other minorities’ in. The FBI,… Read more »
I work in software for a large company that isn’t a software company. We have a DEI Vice President – who is an angry, fat, black sheboon who has been doing the diversity grift since the early 2000s at large companies. This woman literally does nothing to increase the bottom line. She builds nothing. She creates nothing. She generates zero revenue. What she DOES do is collect a 500k base salary plus bonuses while admonishing evil white males who do all of the heavy lifting at the company. Costs are going up, business is slowing and expenses are starting to… Read more »
You can go to jail for speaking harshly to your wife. But the powerful can abuse you and your family in every which way. The government is bought and paid for and not by us.
The good news is that this cannot go on. The bad news is, when it gets u governable, strange, desperate people from all over the world will be right next to you.
Great post today. Congress should pass a law making it impossible to surrender constitutional rights, like access to the court system. This already applies to crimes. You cannot consent to a crime. All of these godawful contracts force you to give up your rights and agree to have any disputes settled by the company’s good friends over at some arbitration firm which the company has financial relationships with. Worse, an arbitrator can do anything, they are not bound by the law and you have to move heaven and earth to get an arbitration overturned. Now they are expanding this system… Read more »
What good has having access to the “real” court system done for Trump or the J6ers? Or any of the various people and entities who tried to stop the steal before and after the election?
[…] ZMan looks behind the curtain. […]
The good thing about this is it opens the Regime up to a new twist on the good old-fashioned “work to rule” strike the labor unions used to pull. Back in the days, you could totally disrupt an industrial process simply by complying with ALL the rules, to the letter, and refusing to do anything that isn’t spelled out in detail in the Policies and Procedures manual. You’re not “striking,” because you’re still at work — indeed, you’re making safety job #1, just like it says on the posters! In a similar way, you can turn the Apparat’s constant lectures… Read more »
Malicious compliance is a useful tool!
But consider the second order effects of “work to rule”. It drives up labor costs, which incentivizes moving operations to somewhere with a more work-friendly populace. Initially, Southern and Midwest states, but soon the culture permeated there, too, so it became Mexico, Malaysia and China.
So long as people keep buying their crap, these kinds of stunts only further marginalize the US worker.
Financialization and offshoring has the same causal nexus to labor difficulties as having ads with perverts taking bubblebaths has to do with the target demographic for bud light.
Give “The Fateful Nineties” a read, October 2023 First Things.
So Peter Turchin’s work, especially his recent book End Times, seems ever more on target.
That is a name I have not heard in a long time. I must admit I have never read any of his books. Years ago someone sent me a link to a site I think he was maintaining, but it has been a while so I may be misremembering. I must not have found it compelling as I remember nothing about it. Is there a good first book of his you would recommend?
Historical Dynamics is a good one to start. You will probably get frustrated with his pseudo-mathematical attempts to “prove” his theories with data. They are pretty thin. But the main theory of societal surplus causing Elite (and self-styled elite) over-production thereby leading to intra-Elite competition and violence I think stand on their own.
I have been telling y’all to read Turchin for a long while now.
He also has some lectures up on Youtube.
“Cliodynamics” just sounds like a myth, difficult to find, hard to understand, impossible to manipulate with any regular certainty or replication of results.
Like other things that begin with “Cli.”
(Enjoy his books though. It’s like he’s trying to update Spengler or Toynbee only with modern “science” language.)
Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs. Oh Z, you are thinking too low. BMW floated, then retracted, a plan to charge you a usage fee to use the heated seats on their cars: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/7/23863258/bmw-cancel-heated-seat-subscription-microtransaction The theory was sell every car wired for heated seats and they’d be “activated” by paying a fee and the Benevolent Bavarians would send an over the air update to allow the onboard software to open the seat heating circuit. That’s an MBA and not an Engineer thinking. An engineer would design… Read more »
Everyone involved in the software as a service scam belongs in a camp. There is a was picture posted online recently of an electric Ford that was inoperable because a software update failed to install correctly. The corporate mentally is not “how can we best serve our customers” it is “what can we get away with.” They got pushback on charging you for using features of your car this time, to them that simply means that will wait and try again.
Not only car manufacturers. Look at software companies for other examples. Microsoft wants you to subscribe to their Office package, although you can still buy your own copy of a version of it. As far as I know, you can’t buy Adobe anything, it is all subscription. “You will own nothing”; you will rent everything. That is the goal.
It’s a bit different with Microsoft, though, because their customers expect product support over time, and it’s quite difficult to cover operational costs when you have single-instance revenue and continual overhead. In this case, selling a subscription for software makes sense, as it aligns seller’s costs with buyers benefits.
That is one side of the story—their side, but there is another. That one is expanding the software “features” to encourage more purchases. Something akin to the old saw of “planned obsolescence”. If I am a minor user and have “Office 97” and it works (and I do) just dandy for the one or two “official” letters I need to write per year, why must I subscribe? That used to be the case, i.e., I simply froze my software at a current version and went on with my life and level of usage. This was not enough for greedy corporations… Read more »
I might also add that Bill Gates a couple of decades ago signaled the above when he famously said, “if every PC user gave me $200 a year, I’ll give them all the software they could ever want…”. (The above is paraphrased slightly due to context limitations.)
That is what we had been doing with Adobe. For the minor projects we needed it for, a ten year old version of Acrobat was working just fine. Now they made that impossible. The whole thing is designed to extract as much money out of you as possible.
“Support” used to constitute free minor updates (quashing bugs in the original release, maintaining compatibility, etc.) and paid major version updates adding significant features. The new features were perfectly useless to most buyers and simply moved the product closer to the status of being practically unusable. Therefore, said users avoided upgrading for as long as possible, thereby depriving the companies of revenue. The subscription model gets around that problem by forcing the buyers’ acceptance of features they neither want nor use. The company, however, benefits by selling essentially the same product multiple times (since each individual buyers’ use case will… Read more »
All the more reason to move to a Linux platform and use the packages available to Linux users.
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the populace has come to accept the subscription model.
That is similar to the reason you can’t buy a car with crank windows without special ordering it. The car salesman makes the pitch that it only costs you 4 cents per day (spread over 7 years) to give yourself the luxury of electric windows. “After all, you deserve it.” Repeat with enough “features” and you arrive at a median price of $50k or whatever it is. All a nickel at a time.
That is similar to the reason you can’t buy a car with crank windows without special ordering it. The car salesman makes the pitch that it only costs you 4 cents per day (spread over 7 years) to give yourself the luxury of electric windows. “After all, you deserve it.” Repeat with enough “features” and you arrive at a median price of $50k or whatever it is. All a nickel at a time. Not really. First off salesmen and dealers HATE special ordering vehicles. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass to them: 1) I already have a lot full… Read more »
My wife likens subscriptions to a bunch of drinking straws stuck in our bank account, constantly sucking money out of it.
@mmack, “On options though, there’s a reason vehicles don’t come with manual locks and windows… “take rate”” Right. Standard equipment is whatever salesmen talk the majority into buying. Largely because of the “monthly payment”. The last time some salesman’s first question was not, “How much per month can you afford?” was probably 20 years ago. And never in my life have I not had a salesman try to tell me how little it would cost per month or per day for an option I didn’t want. “I did own two different four door sedans with manual locks and windows.” Sure.… Read more »
The real kick in the nuts is the realization that BMW has concluded it is cheaper for then to install heated seats in every vehicle rather than have it as an option. But instead of just going for the costs savings amd everyone gets a nicer product, they want to double dip and squeeze the consumer as well.
To have a warm seat in your BMW you first need to watch a five minute video on how Helga becomes Helgum and is much happier now.
MEIN GOTT! Verbrenne es mit Feuer!
Bringing back to the tax point in the column, keep in mind that most new cars in 5 years will be hooked into the “internet of things” which means the government will be able to tax you on how many miles you drive and your insurance will be based on how safely you drive. Those “safe driver” programs are the prototypes. I asked my kids if they use them and they tell me it’s a rip-off because the systems are so sensitive that normal driving is considered dangerous, so you never get a discount. As my son put it, “Imagine… Read more »
Bingo! I can second this. Wife’s new Lincoln has this software built in and appears on the screen with a rating of your driving. Took me by surprise the one time I drove it. You get a rating for “hard stops”, “quick acceleration “, too many “lane changes” and lord knows what else (iIdid not scroll down the list). Sure enough on the way home a some joker cut in front of me to make a right on the road turnoff he missed. I jammed on the brakes and my “rating” went down from 96% to low 80’s. None of… Read more »
Interesting but not surprising that in corporate America’s effort to “gamify” everything, the model games they’ve chosen aren’t the ones people enjoy but the most punishing gacha-grind psych experiments. China has been in the news lately for trying to outlaw those—not least because it wants a state monopoly on tech-terrorizing its population, but also because digital addictions are crippling the minds and lives of too many men, and the country might need them for something someday. The English-language stories are all about game company stock prices: China is DESTROYING ITS ECONOMY by not letting companies destroy its citizens. America would… Read more »
In the near future, your “rating” will be directly connected to State Farm’s database and your premium will be adjusted accordingly lol.
Your “miles driven” will be reported to Klaus Schwab.
It’ll be part of your social credit score. If you drive a gas-powered car too much, you’ll have to pay higher interest rates for a mortgage and maybe TSA pulls you out of the line for “additional screening” when you fly.
Good old Ford… If we still had a functioning Constitutional Republic, we would need to have Amendments added to the Bill of Rights allowing for things like freedom of movement within the country (transportation). Even back in the 70’s and 80’s my dad was talking about how the government would come after guns, but that would be camouflage for coming after our right to get in a car and go where we want. During COVID remember how they were using cell phones to track whether people were obeying the lockdowns? It was broad-based not targeted on individuals…but easily could have… Read more »
Every car’s dashboard screen now displays some Nanny Statement about how you will drive carefully and be a good and safe little consumer. I wonder how many dents are caused by someone clicking accept to get it off the screen and see the map. For all we know, they know this and there is a revenue share with the National Association of Body Shop Owners and the auto company. That is where this is all headed. When growth can’t be had by productive means, then we get The Commodization of Catastrophe. ‘To start the car fasten your seat belt. Should… Read more »
I had a GMC truck, in order to use the remote start feature you had to pay 15 bucks a month. This is a thing.
A bit off topic perhaps, but some of the points you raise here are related to my conviction that this “AI” and “Machine Learning” you’re hearing about all the time are just over-hyped bulls**t. I’ve been in the stats game a long time now, so I’ve seen the hype about this grow massively over the last few years. Companies are now hiring so-called “data scientists” right out of college at six-figure starting salaries to run their fancy new computer algorithms. Now don’t get me wrong, because many of these kids are very very bright. But why are they running these… Read more »
What kind of economy do we have when the career aspirations of our best and brightest STEM graduates center around finding better ways to sell you d**k pills.
“The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.”
Idiocracy, like 1984, is NOT a How-To Manual.
Idiocracy, like 1984, is NOT a How-To Manual
It’s becomes one though so to no one or not enough wanting to do the solution to stop it which is getting together with others who want to stop it and enacting the solutions needed…Tribe Up or Die Off White Volk…
AI is automated B.S. But half of human existence consists of B.S. so it does have some utility.
There are still aging tv-less Gen Xers out there, ripping the labels off of their clothes before they wear them because it is impossible to buy new clothes without labels.
Silly maybe. But they were and remain on to something.
lol, I do that. Nothing a razor blade or a sharpie can’t fix.
I think there’s a few other drags here that add to this confluence of effects… My brain is soft mush in these days between Christmas and New Year’s; apologies in advance… The “line must go up” mentality of that dark science of economics forces the hand here as well. The age old question of how to beat last quarter, last year drives these ‘innovative’ price structures. Similar to the using GDP as the measuring stick of civilizational best allows a number to replace the qualitative measures of human flourishing. In hundreds of years when (if) people look back what high-culture… Read more »
“And further, I think the shift from producing something tangible as an economic engine to consuming something is profoundly negative.” That’s just an accounting tautology. You can’t consume something which has not been produced. So long as your formula accounts for savings, all is well. The problem is mashing everything down into dollars when there is clearly a difference between buying a capital asset which is used to produce more, and buying a true consumer good, which is destroyed in its use. That’s the major thing GDP doesn’t capture — eating the seed corn is assumed to be a good… Read more »
I was once a GDP purist, thinking that is the measure of the best policies. But now I look around and our jobs are in China, and we are surrounded by brown people to do the shitty jobs that are left, for lower wages. Does the tradeoff of a few more GDP points actually make my life any better? It just made CEOs lives a lot better. I would give up a huge chunk of my wealth to live in a high-trust, low crime country with my own people, where one salary could support a large family.
Good post. The reason inflation/prices/costs are going up is, everyone has a big guy; and they gotta get their 10%.
With the dawn of the Internet I expected an online ad bust of the same magnitude as the dot com bust, but it has never happened. Ads will become 50 percent of a sports broadcast within my lifetime and people will lap it up. The reason you never see a no ad pro football game is not because it is not possible, but because it will lay bare the abuse these corporations inflict on the fans.
Off topic, but today is Kwanzaa. Be sure to leave some fentanyl under the tree or George Floyd won’t come down the chimney.
In our home, we leave Skittles in a bowl by the fireplace.
When we hear “Oh shieeet!” downstairs in the small hours of the night, we know he’s arrived, and we will enjoy Kwanzaa blessings!
No grape soda? Karenga will not shine upon your Kwanzaa!
Be sure to leave your fentanyl there until the first. “Kwanzaa” (from a phrase supposedly meaning first fruits) is at least six days long, just enough to ruin the otherwise wonderful time b/t Christmas and New Year’s Day. In Chicago, the weakwilled degenerates who operate the classical radio station, 98.7 WFMT, have been dedicating their broadcasts to this festival of first fruits, supposedly a creation of the FBI, or so says Ann Coulter. Maybe the explanation for this abomination is that there’s an informal overlap with the management of the local NPR affiliate. Still, it’s a good time to remind… Read more »
In Chicago, the weakwilled degenerates who operate the classical radio station, 98.7 WFMT, have been dedicating their broadcasts to this festival of first fruits, supposedly a creation of the FBI, or so says Ann Coulter. Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Ron Karenga as the first “pan-African” holiday, with the goal of giving “[b]lacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give [b]lacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” (Wiki) Apparently, he broke 2 of the candle holders off of a menorah to create the…kinara (like Dave Barry,… Read more »
“According to Louis Tackwood, a former informant with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracies Section and author of The Glass House Tapes, Ronald Karenga was knowingly provided financial, arms, and other support by LAPD, with Tackwood as liaison, for US operations against the Black Panthers. Karenga enjoyed a level of trust among figures in government, including LAPD Chief Thomas Reddin and California Governor Ronald Reagan.” — Wikipedia
They’ve hated you and wanted you dead for a long time.
I remember him well from the LA ’60’s scene. He was scary, and this at a time when my girlfriend was hanging around with Eldridge Cleaver.
I worked with a South African woman a little over ten years ago. During Christmas some of the other blacks in the office were carrying on about “kwanzaa” and they decided to try and enlist her as an advocate as they attempted to sell some of the people in the office on the legitimacy of their “holiday”. You should have seen the looks on their collective faces when after being lectured on the BS, she looked at them with an expression that was a combination of disbelief/disgust as she said, “Oh, this must be one of those things you American… Read more »
In the early ’90s, trying to be “politically correct” (how quaint), I made a reference to “African-Americans” in the course of a conversation with a very well-dressed, elegant-appearing black woman with a slight Caribbean accent.
She drew herself up to full height, looked me right in the eyes and said “sir, not all of us are from Africa, and you might want to keep that in mind when speaking with black people.”
Several olympics past, they had to come up with a term for blacks in other countries. When one was the first black to win a gold medal in a particular event, they said, “she is the first African-American from any country” to win that event.
She drew herself up to full height, looked me right in the eyes and said “sir, not all of us are from Africa, and you might want to keep that in mind when speaking with black people.”
I might have told the story of meeting a Haitian woman in my teens who EMPHATICALLY reminded me she was Haitian and NOT Black!
And then gave me her views on American born “People of Color”. Let us just say it was not favorable. Something about lazy and complain too much.
I might have told the story of meeting a Haitian woman in my teens who EMPHATICALLY reminded me she was Haitian and NOT Black!
And then gave me her views on American born “People of Color”. Let us just say it was not favorable. Something about lazy and complain too much.
Because the blacks in Haiti have covered themselves in glory with their industriousness, prudence, virtue and good government!
I know you’re a science fiction aficionado so you must have seen this dystopian scenario sketched in Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and “The Diamond Age.” Probably in other cyberpunk novels as well. Corporate governance, where the formal government has shrunk to an ineffectual shell and camouflage for the real corporate government. Hence Joe Biden as a front man for the military-industrial complex and the other corporate complexes that dominate US life.
I highly recommend a SF trilogy beginning with “The Red” by Linda Nagata. A global corporate tyranny running ‘small wars’ planet-wide is thrawted by an AI – quasi-sentient?- created by an agglomeration of…… advertising AI s …..
Somewhat related to this, has anyone else noticed that fast food companies don’t advertise “combos” any more? They’ve “updated” their marketing lingo to “bundling”. I noticed this on a McDonalds billboard recently. You can “bundle” an egg McMuffin with a hash brown for just $4.99 (or whatever). I have no idea what the psychological motive is behind this strategy, other than it amounts to an adoption of e-jargon from the younger online generations. You “bundle” a subscription to your cell phone plan with an internet subscription, or you “bundle” a Disney+ subscription with another Disney owned streaming service. I’ve even… Read more »
Your explanation makes sense. Young people are accustomed to that style of marketing.
“Combo” is a Latinate word and “bundle” is Germanic in origin.
My only guess is that since we’ve entered the migrant invasion period of our imperial history, our vocabulary will inevitably be debased by the tongues of intemperate and brutish migrants from barbarian lands.
ITA INQVIT MARCUS
Had this discussion last night when I received email from Amazon about ads in Prime movies now. It did say you can bypass it by paying another $3 a month. I made the same analogy with cable slowing breaking the promise of no ads decades ago. Since most of my content is youtube based I finally went with a trial premium on Youtube to avoid ads etc. Nice, but given all of this I’ll probably not continue. Michigan gave every car owner a $400 insurance rebate a few years ago based on some (i forget) spurious charges. Everybody is happy… Read more »
Let me add this little tidbit. After years of leasing various vehicles from Ford I finally decided to buy a good used vehicle instead spurred by the crazy high payments now. They informed me there is a little known charge for ending lease contract (small print , page 9) of $418.00.
Screw them, six months and they are still calling for payment. Turned in a loaded F-150 with 15,000 unused miles which according to them has no value. Go over the mileage and see what happens.
My wife has Amazon Prime to have various household product shipped to the house rather than having to go get them at big box stores with the kids. Occasionally we would watch a movie off of Prime, there will be no reason to do that anymore. I could see this one backfiring on Amazon, their choices weren’t very good to begin with, I doubt they will get many people to pay them the extra fee for commercial free shows. I have to wonder how they are doing in general compared to their rising competitors.
I’ve been trying to figure out if I can cancel the prime free shipping if I bundle my Amazon purchases to say one large shipment per month.
You probably can. I think they still have free (but slower) shipping over $35. My Dad does not have Prime for that reason.
Free shipping i. 2-3 days for orders over $25. But, of course, that may end or be adjusted depending on the outcome of their latest Prime shenanigans.
They were clever to announce the change a week after the second season of their immensely popular Reacher series dropped. I rather doubt the Rings of Power fiasco would have sufficed as a setup.
Hmm. I guess your governor is also an Indian (feather). Who knew?
Since most of my content is youtube based I finally went with a trial premium on Youtube to avoid ads etc.
I use the Brave browser myself, it has an excellent built-in ad blocker.
Youtube is addressing that now. Watching on television is not an option that way also.
So I’ve heard for some months, but I haven’t noticed anything yet. Brave works very smoothly for me, I only see the in-video promos.
Yes, Brave. I first heard of it on this comment section. It makes You Tube watchable or if in a car listenable. I use the Smart View feature on my phone to broadcast it to a tv, and watch any one of the thousand of old movies or documentaries. Between this and Pluto and other free stuff there is no need for cable or satellite anymore. In fact, the non-fiction content on these services in vastly superior to any cable package out there. And they don’t bundle anything with CNN and force you to pay for their propaganda.
Brave also blocks the ad on paramount plus and hulu. It makes watching their channels bearable and you can pay for the cheaper ad based service without having to watch the idiotic and stupid ads.
I can why many dream of a day of reckoning. There is a reason why the Christian tradition includes an Apocalypse.
Yep, at this point, the blob has become so massive and encompassing, the only practical solution is the proverbial cleansing fire that burns the system to the ground, allowing new shoots to sprout through the ashes. That’s the only way there is even a possibility of ending this nightmare…
The “Christian tradition” includes an end times prophesy because Jesus said it was going to happen. Apocalypse is the name of the last book of the New Testament.
Further, the default assumption for most of human history was that time had no beginning or end. Both Judaism and Islam assume this world can be fixed and makes no comment on the end. It’s a distinctly Christian assumption that there is an end of the world, even to this day. (Ha!)
“The “Christian tradition” includes an end times prophesy because Jesus said it was going to happen.”
Strictly speaking, it’s not an end times but a transition. New Heaven and New Earth.
Can’t reason them away, can’t bargain them away, can’t sing them away, can’t even love them away.
So instead they’ll get angels, in bad mood and beyond all appeal.