Category: Corporate Fuckery

Adding Profit

Corporate Fuckery, Travels

If ever we needed more proof that Big Air (not Congress, that’s a rant for another time) are a bunch of chiseling bastards, here’s the latest:

American Airlines announced Tuesday that it plans to add seatback screens to its aircraft and to increase the number of premium and extra-legroom seating in some aircraft.

I don’t care about the screens because I seldom if ever use them unless it’s to follow the flight’s progress on that little map thingy.

I really care about the seat issue because lest we forget, some twenty or so years ago airlines began reducing seat sizes and cramming the smaller seats into ever-smaller spaces within the planes.  Yeah, the feeling went in Big Air Finance, that’s fine, especially as that enabled them to buy smaller-and-yet-smaller aircraft without losing passenger count.

Now, of course, to ride in their cramped aluminum tubes you have to have the approximate body shape of Victoria Hervey to fit in the seats, coupled with the approximate height of Peter Dinklage to have any kind of legroom.


(photos not drawn to scale;  Dinklage actually comes up
to just above Hervey’s navel)

Now, as customer discontent has grown to a fever pitch — most especially, of course by those poor souls (i.e. everyone who can’t afford the bloated fares of first- and business class) thus cramped into a fetal position for a lengthy flight — American is now installing “premium” seats with “extra legroom”.  (The “premium” refers to the prices they’ll be charging, and the “extra” is how much more you’ll have to pay.)

How much extra?  Here’s an example:

Note that the departure times are different — i.e. different flights — because the earlier flight had sold out of Premium Economy seats.

If the above doesn’t give you the Warm & Fuzzies, then you obviously aren’t an American Airlines accountant.

For the rest of us, however:

At this point, I need to warn y’all that at some time next year I have to fly to the Old Racist Republic — details unimportant, because personal — and I’ll be raffling off several guns to be able to afford the Economy fare (don’t even think about Premium, of course).


(Delta because I refuse to fly on any Muslim airline, fukkem)

Wheeee… eighteen hours in steerage:  I can hardly wait.

Please set your budgets accordingly.

Sneaky Stuff

Corporate Fuckery

From Reader Steve S. via email:

“This is the next step with the ‘add a tip’ option on the kiosks & checkout pads. Shake Shack’s kiosk demonstrates what happens when you don’t have a printed menu, but instead the kiosk displays what the computer is programmed to do. It asks for a ‘tip’, and if you chose ‘zero’, it increases the price of every item ordered by $0.50. As he notes, the kiosk in this case put up a pop-up noting the ‘price adjustment’, but how many kiosks are programmed to do it in the background where you will only see the total?

“I note it is Shake Shack, but have to believe that other vendors will do the same thing as long as they feel they can get away with it.”

I know a basic response to this bullshit.

Pay cash instead of using a card.

This, by the way, will actually have two effects.  Firstly, you won’t be caught up in this little bit of highway robbery.  Secondly, paying cash — actual cash — will remind you just how expensive so-called “convenience” food has become, which may result in you visiting these places on fewer occasions.

Just another way that “convenience” + “technology” = “ripoff”.

Oh, and one last thing:  for most retailers, the extended cost of handling cash is actually higher than paying the card transaction fee.

Yer welcome.

On a personal note, I have to say that I last bought a burger from Shake Shack about four years ago, and was thoroughly unimpressed.  Never again.

Our local BBQ joint has a menu item called a “French Fries Plate”, which consists of a hearty portion of pulled pork, mixed with cheesy fries, for about $14.  That may sound like a lot;  but when I say the portion is “hearty”, I mean that it’s enough to feed both New Wife and me — and $7 each for a takeout meal is not all that bad.  Plus, the food quality is excellent, something few people can say about takeout burgers, from any establishment.

Inevitable

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Management

As with so many of their articles, this one at American Thinker does an admirable job of delving deep into the minutiae — this time of the European car manufacturing malaise — and comes up with the inevitable conclusion.  First, though the writer tees up the argument with a statement that is obvious to most of us:

Looking at the global automotive market, one conclusion is unavoidable: the end of the combustion engine is nowhere in sight.

When I say it’s obvious, I mean that anyone with a brain could see that the constraints of the combustion engine’s purported replacements — electricity especially, and ditto hydrogen power — had just too many negatives to make any replacement a lengthy (and super-costly) affair.

So why, then, did the Big Brains in the German automotive industry go so hard after electric cars, devoting billions of dollars into the creation of manufacturing facilities dedicated to the Big New Thing?  Here’s AT‘s take:

But one thing is clear: an energy policy detached from economic reality, driven by climate-apocalyptic ambitions, has harmed the industry at least as much as strategic mistakes at the management level.

We’ve looked at the climate-apocalyptics many times before on these pages, and once again, we all knew that the Watermelons had an agenda that, to be charitable, wasn’t just about Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, but also about crippling Western capitalism to “level the playing field” with Third World nations.

We also know that when it comes to that kind of neo-socialist government mindset of the German government — and most of the other Euro governments — the idea of central control is seductive, nay imperative.  So it would be logical, in their eyes, to mandate that electric cars constitute a large majority of the auto market by x date (2030), and therefore it had to happen.

Of course, when you set yourself against market forces — especially one as entrenched as automotive power — you’re going to fail utterly absent some massive and ummm super-costly infrastructure creation, even assuming that any government had the cash and resources to actually implement such a construction project inside that timeline (and none do, not even the U.S.).

Which leads to the question:  if this scenario is so glaringly obvious, why did German car manufacturers not stand up to their government and say, “No.”?

Well, all corporations are lickspittles to their respective governments in the end, so such resistance is of course unthinkable.  But Thomas Kolbe supplies another factor:

The tragedy of Germany’s automotive industry is not that it failed to recognize technological change. On the contrary: few industries have invested more resources over recent decades into researching new drive technologies.

The deeper problem is German overconfidence: a hidden statism and an arrogance cultivated by decades of undeniable success — the belief that Germany could not only identify the technology of the future but also predict its entire development path.

A mixture of technological hubris and a belief in unlimited manageability — a character flaw that prepares the ground for failure.

To believe one can outsmart the market, to know more than millions of economic actors operating through decentralized information networks: Is this the German disease?

If so, it’s a disease that has infected Germany since Bismarck’s time — the auto manufacturing industry being just the latest manifestation (the earlier one was militarism).

I guess they should have just stuck to doing brilliant engineering — except that their political class (like most political classes) are just as wedded to the concept of social engineering as Mercedes is to automotive engineering.

There’s a broader lesson to be learned here, but I’m not at all sanguine of anyone actually learning it.

Future, By Subscription Only

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

Reader Stephen S. chimes in with this little piece of technological bastardy:

The rapidly approaching future of the Windows PC is no longer just about what’s on your desk, but what you’re permitted—by subscription—to access from the cloud. Microsoft promotes this as inevitable and, to some, the advantages are real. Yet for those uncomfortable with their digital world being defined and priced by a faraway corporation, alternatives remain.
What is worse is that Microsoft will have your data on their cloud (OneDrive) and you will need to continually pay to have access to it.   On the flip side, because it is on “their” computer systems (1970’s Supreme Court Decision), they will be able to scan it and use it for training their AI.  They will also be able to sell your data to 3rd parties, again because it is on “their” computers.  [Microsoft has already changed their EULA to reflect this]
How does the medical profession make sure the patients’s data is secure.  Although on a personal level, I’m sure Microsoft’s AI would love finding out about illness discussions, personal behavior, etc to be sold to 3rd parties.  That kind of info is what insurance companies would love to know, and the users would be paying Microsoft to provide it to them.
But a larger point occurs to me.  Microsoft would be getting the financial data for people and businesses smaller than the DOW 50, and that is a gold mine for them (Wall St spends millions to collect it).  Again, the users are paying Microsoft to provide their financials to Microsoft, and then Microsoft can then use it.

How nice.

It has taken me a Herculean effort to stop this OneDrive bullshit from imposing itself on my paltry online existence, and I’m not even sure that I’ve been that successful.  I get the occasional “warning” email that my OneCloud subscription has expired or my storage allocation is full, and that they can no longer store any more of my data — to which, of course, my unspoken response is:  I never wanted you to store my data anyway, so fuck off.

I have no idea how this is going to end, or if it ever will.

Long Time… Gone

Corporate Fuckery, Entertainment, Management

I have been a fan of Formula One racing since my early teens, which makes me older than just about everyone involved in running F1 today.

Just recently, I had a problem with my AppleTV account and couldn’t change the payment method — no need for details, but it’s a fucking nightmare and would be easier if I just created a new account.  Why am I subscribing to AppleTV, you ask?  Well, late last year F1 told me that their own website (F1.com) would no longer be streaming races because they’d sold the broadcast rights to AppleTV.  Fair enough:  it’s their absolute right to do so, and the AppleTV sub was actually cheaper than the F1 sub;  so that, coupled with my desire to watch the Slow Horses TV series (read the books, loved them), I made the change even though once I’d watched all the episodes, I found that AppleTV doesn’t have much worth watching anyway.  But there was always the F1 racing, which (did I already mention? I’ve loved since my early teens) so what the hell.

Of course, the modern F1 is no longer the F1 I used to love.  Gone were the earsplitting roar and howls of V6- and V12 car engines, and in their place came hybrid engines, using pathetic little 1500cc turbo motors with laptop batteries to “boost” performance because Green Is Mighty and Internal Combustion Engines Are Evil, or some such nonsense.

Then this season saw new rules (a.k.a. the “formula” in the product description), which made the cars even MOAR BATTERY, except of course that batteries when used to propel cars at 300mph run out of spark within yards not miles, so we were greeted with the spectacle of the world’s finest drivers and the world’s most accomplished engineers becoming software managers.  Put in plain terms, cars would overtake other cars, and then immediately lose their position because their batteries were drained whilst their competitors had recharged theirs so could take back the position:  repeat ad nauseam.  Not only was the spectacle unsatisfying, it became outright dangerous, as was seen in the last race where a driver with a full battery was about to move to overtake, but the car in front suddenly lost 25mph because his battery had just gone flat.  At a closing speed of 275mph, no human reactions are quick enough to address that impending crash — but amazingly, young Ollie Bearman’s were almost that quick and he pulled off the track to avoid a massive collision.  Unfortunately, his car’s battery was still in flat-out mode, and Bearman hit the barrier head-on with a force of 50 Gs.  How he survived is a miracle;  how his electric motor didn’t catch fire and turn him extra-crispy is a credit to the engineers who built the car.  Nor did his car crumple like a newspaper and turn his skeleton into soup.

Of course, the F1 organization recognized all this for the disaster it is, and have hurriedly put through a massive rules change.  They were fortunate in that next two Grand Prix races in Saudi Arabian peninsula had been canceled because Trump’s merry war on Iran had resulted in the latter sending missiles raining on the Gulf states — and nobody wanted to see battery-powered race cars having to take action to avoid incoming SCUDs, let alone their competitors’ cars, and F1 audiences in the stands deciding that watching electric go-karts play swapalongs would not be sufficient spectacle to keep them from being turned into hamburger by the aforementioned missiles.  So F1 caught a break, and having three weeks before the next race (Miami GP), changed a whole bunch of rules, making the thing even more complex than before.  (Please watch this video — it’s less than ten minutes long — to see the absolute clusterfuck that F1 racing has become.)

Why am I telling you all this?  Because after sixty-odd years of F1 fandom, I’ve decided that enough is enough.  I’m not interested in watching what F1 has become, I don’t like what F1’s owners, the foul Liberty Media, have created — four races in the Saudi Peninsula?  WTF? — and even worse, losing various countries’ Grand Prix races because European organizers can’t match those of the oil-rich Arabs.  I mean, the entire Grand Prix concept began in France, and there’s no room on the calendar for a French GP?  WTFF?

So I’m walking away.  I would say that I’ll content myself by watching the “highlights” videos on EeewChoob, but honestly, I don’t think there will be any highlights worth watching, anymore.

Here’s a thought:  throw away the stupid hybrid engines and go back to racing with real engines, the aforementioned V6 and V8 monsters, let the drivers race these cars to the utmost limit of mechanical and human performance, and make F1 watchable again.  Like it was in, say, 1975.  (And yes I know, the cars were deathtraps.  I’m not suggesting throwing out the entire car, just the stupid engines.)

I know, I know:  “You can’t stop progress, Kim;  you can’t go back to the old ways.”

And don’t suggest I try to follow other motor racing types, either.  Once you’ve watched Formula 1, all other car types resemble tortoises and hippos racing.  Even Le Mans, which I watch every year, all 24 hours at a time if there’s no highlights video, doesn’t begin to compare.

I think I’ll start watching horse racing instead.  That is, until Liberty Media buys them out, makes the owners strap rockets to their horses’ asses “to improve the spectacle”, and gets fifty racing tracks built in Saudi Arabia to host the new F1 Horse Racing Circuit, doing away with Belmont, Saratoga, Aintree and Epson in the process.

And speaking of horses’ asses:  so long, F1/Liberty Media — and AppleTV.  Neither of you is worth the trouble of supporting anymore.

Owning, Or Being Owned?

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Technology

Several Readers (thankee) have pointed me to this article at American Thinker:

There was a time — not very long ago — when the automobile represented one of the clearest expressions of individual choice in a free society. Limited only by fuel, roads, and imagination, a person could choose where to go, when to go, and how to get there. The car was not merely a machine. It was mobility made personal — an extension of autonomy and freedom.

Sadly, that is no longer the case. Increasingly, this same instrument, once a tool to facilitate individual independence, has been repurposed into a system of monitoring and control. Though advertised as safety measures for the consumer, these measures were clearly designed to empower the state.

Modern vehicles are no longer just mechanical devices; they are computers on wheels. Embedded sensors track speed, braking patterns, seatbelt usage, location, and even driver attention. Event Data Recorders — commonly referred to as “black boxes” — have been standard in most new vehicles for years. Originally justified as instruments to reconstruct accidents, these devices record data in the moments before a crash. Few object to understanding the causes of collisions. But it is worth noting that once data exists, its use rarely remains confined to its original purpose.

Insurance companies now seek access to driving data to adjust premiums. Law enforcement agencies have used vehicle data in criminal investigations. Courts have admitted such data as evidence. Each of these developments can be justified in isolation. Together, they represent a quiet but unmistakable shift: the automobile is no longer simply your property — it is a source of information about you.

More recently, legislative developments have accelerated this trend. The federal infrastructure legislation passed in 2021 includes a mandate for advanced impaired driving prevention technology to be installed in all new vehicles within the coming years. While often described in benign terms — systems that passively detect intoxication or driver impairment — the practical reality is that these systems must continuously monitor driver behavior in order to function. Monitoring creates data. And data, once created, rarely remains unused. It takes on a life of its own.

Proposals and discussions around remote vehicle disablement — popularly referred to as “kill switches” — have raised further concerns. While proponents argue that such features could prevent high-speed chases or stop stolen vehicles, the existence of remote-control capabilities introduces a fundamentally different relationship between the individual and the machine. A car that can be disabled remotely is clearly not under the control of its owner.

I’ve ranted about this little bit of rampant evil on many occasion, and the gist of all my screeds has been all around this concept:  giving up control — to anyone, for even the most laudable purposes — will, inevitably, end your freedom.

I’m unlikely ever to buy a new car, and certainly not a “modern” car which would contain all the electronic snoopery and filth as discussed above, and most especially at today’s bloated and excessive prices.  But if I were ever to be forced into buying a replacement for the Tiguan or the Fiat, and given that no matter what I buy, it would carry a horrible price tag withal, then why would I just not get a much older car that while expensive, at least allows me the freedom that cars of yore gave me?  Something like this one, for instance:

I know, fifty-odd grand for what is in essence a gift-wrapped VW 2300cc engine may seem excessive to some;  but I don’t need much more than 145hp (especially on that featherweight chassis), and it least it doesn’t look like every other car on the road (#WindTunnel).  But most of all:

…please note the refreshing absence of all the modern electronic geegaws which bedevil today’s automotive offerings.  The only thing missing (which I’d add with alacrity) is air conditioning. (#TexasSummer)

For the faint of heart, let me point out that a new VW Tiguan base model will set you back close to $40,000, and a Jetta (with a stick shift!) only five grand less.  And you can bet your ass that both the VWs will come equipped with all the latest in snoop-‘n-control electronics.

Sorry, but no.  To hell with all that.  I want simple, and I want freedom.