Splendid Isolation

Hooray– Oh, Wait

Here’s some good news:

Drugs used to treat cancer, diabetes and other chronic conditions are among 15 picked for negotiations that could result in lower prices for patients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Friday.

The 15 drugs selected by HHS are all covered under Medicare Part D and represent the second round of negotiations between drug companies and the department, with a goal of lowering costs for Medicare patients.

And the good news:

Popular diabetes drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, which are also used for weight loss are among the 15 announced Friday.

Hooray!  Let me tell you, as one who has to take Ozempic for diabetes (at $60 per shot per week), this is welcome.

But wait!  There’s more!

Negotiations between the government agency and drug companies will take place this year with any agreed upon price changes taking effect in 2027.

…by which time I could be dead.  How nice.  Even better:

Drug manufacturers can choose whether or not to enter negotiations with the government for a collective price for Medicare patients.

Any bets as to who will decline the offer?

Snoops

Yeah, don’t fuck mess with Texas:

Texas has sued insurance provider Allstate, alleging that the firm and its data broker subsidiary used data from apps like GasBuddy, Routely, and Life360 to quietly track drivers and adjust or cancel their policies.

Allstate and Arity, a “mobility data and analytics” firm founded by Allstate in 2016, collected “trillions of miles worth of location data” from more than 45 million people, then used that data to adjust rates, according to Texas’ lawsuit. This violates Texas’ Data Privacy and Security Act, which requires “clear notice and informed consent” on how collected data can be used. A statement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the suit is the first-ever state action targeting comprehensive data privacy violations.

How so?

According to Texas’ complaint (PDF), the data collected included “a phone’s geolocation data, accelerometer data, magnetometer data, and gyroscopic data, which monitors details such as the phone’s altitude, longitude, latitude, bearing, GPS time, speed, and accuracy.”

With that data—plus, in some cases, data from connected vehicles—Allstate could see when, how far, and for how long someone was driving, along with “hard braking events” and “whether a consumer picked up or opened their phone while traveling at certain speeds.”

Texas’ lawsuit claims that Arity incentivized—through “generous bonus incentives”—apps like GasBuddy, a gas price-tracking app, and Life360, which is intended to keep tabs on family members’ location, to “increas[e] the size of their dataset.” Under their agreements with app makers, Arity had “varying levels of control over the privacy disclosures and consent language” shown to app users, according to the complaint.

And now for the doublespeak:

“Arity helps consumers get the most accurate auto insurance price after they consent in a simple and transparent way that fully complies with all laws and regulations.”

But they’re not the only villains in this piece:

The suit also cites Allstate as gathering direct car use data from Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram vehicles.

And if these assholes shared data with Allstate, you can bet your house that they did so with other insurance companies too.

If you’re not into letting corporations do this to you:

…you may want to avoid any dealings at all with these bastards.  It’s not like Stellantis (Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati) are reporting a boom in sales, after all.

When the Texans win their suit, at it should, I would argue against fines because those bastards will just pass the cost into their customers and claim a tax deduction at worst.

What I would do as TxAG is get a list of all Texans with Allstate policies, and demand that Allstate provide free insurance to them for a period of time commensurate with the start date of Arity’s snoopery.

I know, that would just cause Allstate to cease operations in Texas.  That’s fine, too — take away access to the second-largest pool of drivers in the U.S.

Degradation

When I first moved to the U.S. back in the mid-80s, I was impressed by how well things worked.  I mean, you have to understand that all around the world — such as in Third World countries like Zimbabwe, India and Italy — things often just do not work as one would expect them to.  Whether it’s because they are badly made, or badly assembled, or just operated by fucking idiots (try doing a relatively simple thing like booking a flight out of Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport — which isn’t even in Rome but miles and miles out on the coast, a story for another time) and you’ll soon see that not much works as originally intended.

I am also familiar with concepts such as planned obsolescence, where corporations deliberately design products that will eventually fail or fall to pieces so that you will be forced into buying a new one as a replacement.

But there’s another factor in stuff not working, and this is the one which really, really sets my teeth on edge, and it’s embodied by an appliance which is common in households all over the U.S.:  the dish washing machine, or dishwasher.

When I first came over, I fell in live with the  dishwasher, because I had never owned one.  Most families in South Africa didn’t, either because they had Black servants to hand wash the dishes, or they were too poor to afford such expensive (and they were expensive) machines.

But these GE/Frigidaire/Whirlpool dishwashers?  Oh man, there were great.  You piled your dishes in, coated with caked-on gravy or food particles or whatever, added a little detergent, and switched the thing on.  All sorts of magic would happen behind the closed door, and when the thing stopped running, you waited about ten minutes and then opened the door, and there were your dishes:  clean, dry and warm (maybe even still hot) to the touch.

And that was it.

Sadly, that is no longer the case.

Now, you have to pretty much hand wash the dishes first, or at least rinse them into near-cleanliness before loading them into the dishwasher, then do the same stuff as above and then, when the buzzer sounds or a light goes on, you open the door to find that your dishes are not completely clean, still wet or at best damp, and in fact, many times you will have to rinse them off and do the whole fucking thing all over again — with no guarantee that the outcome will be any different.

And why is this?

Because the dirty fingers of government have been stuck into the operation.  Thanks to an excess of Green zealotry, dishwashers can’t use as much water as they used to so the spray can’t be as fierce (and effective), and the heating element has been turned from its furnace-like operation into something that wouldn’t keep you warm on a cool autumn day if you gripped it in your fist.

Our dishwashers, in short, have been turned from appliances that once worked perfectly at their intended function into flabby little things that are the equivalent of convict labor:  surly, unproductive and unreliable.

There’s no point in complaining about this because Green Worship has become so ingrained in our culture that anyone daring to rail against the Great God EnergySmart (blessings be upon its name) might well face severe sanction and even penalties.

Such as happened to my friend Patterson when he rewired his 2015-model dishwasher to 1980 specs and made it work properly.  Me, I’m too stupid to do something like that, and too old to want to kick against the pricks in that manner.

So my private little rebellion against this nonsense is that I just wash my dishes again and again until they are as clean as I want them to be.  (I do the same with my low-flow-low-use low-efficiency toilet, which requires two and sometimes three flushes to take care of the old #2 bowel movement discharge, and has been know to rise to five, after a particularly stupendous roast beef dinner.)

Or I power-rinse my dishes with steaming-hot water before loading them, using twice as much electricity (via the water heater) as I would have used to run the dishwasher if it was working properly.

End result:  I use twice or three times as much water and much more electricity to wash my dishes as I would have in 1986.

And all this just so I can have clean dishes to put away in the cupboard.  Or else I do my part for the environment by using paper plates which don’t need washing and just end up in the landfill.

I know this sounds like a really pointless and futile gesture, doesn’t it?  But it’s far less ummm radical than, say, were I to assassinate the CEO of Whirlpool or the politicians responsible for turning once-efficient U.S. products into pathetic Third World failures.

Isn’t it?

No Resistance

When it comes to hatred of corporations, I yield to no man thereof.  Having worked in the festering cesspits of same on more than a couple of occasions, I know how they operate, and the depths of corporate bastardy in which they have no problems swimming.

This is especially loathsome when it comes to rolling over and offering up the corporate belly for the godless government agencies to scratch (and even claw, sometimes).

Small businesses, by comparison, have shown a great deal more spine than their larger brethren.  One has only to recall that gym owner in New Jersey who, when overcoming the totalitarian state government agents and the governor during the Great Covidiocy, ended up giving all of them the finger when the eighty (80!) charges against them were all dismissed with prejudice.

Back when I was running a supermarket chain’s loyalty program, I always made it clear that individuals’ right to privacy was paramount when it came to their shopping data and habits.  On more than one occasion I told divorce lawyers to piss off when they came snooping around, a couple of times facing them down when they threatened me with a subpoena.  (When I shared one of these incidents with the guys who were in my share group, one owner of a small chain said, “Oooh, I wish that some asshole would come after me with a subpoena;  I’d go to jail with the greatest of pleasure, and the positive PR I’d get for the company would be worth millions!”  He was seventy-five years old at the time.)

Of course, the banking industry — to a man, it seems — shows no such defiance when the feds come a-calling:

A new report released by the House Judiciary Committee, in partnership with the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, reveals extensive violations and abuse of the law by the federal government.

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According to congressional investigators, the FBI abused the Bank Secrecy Act in order to work with banks to target opponents of the Biden administration and Trump supporters. 

“The information obtained during the Committee and Select Subcommittee’s investigation, and detailed in this report, is concerning. Documents show that federal law enforcement increasingly works hand-in-glove with financial institutions, obtaining virtually unchecked access to private financial data and testing out new methods and new technology to continue the financial surveillance of American citizens.

“Documents obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee demonstrate that federal law enforcement increasingly relies on financial institutions for highly sensitive information about Americans without legal process. Federal law enforcement has effectively deputized financial institutions to advance its investigations and to gain access to the information that financial institutions possess. As financial institutions’ capacity to track and gather data on Americans continues to increase, federal law enforcement will continue to be incentivized to rely on banks for easy access to sensitive information about Americans’ private lives.”

Now I can — sorta — see the point if the purpose is to track down gangster money-launderers or tax evaders (and even then, I’m skeptical in the extreme because nunya).  But that wasn’t the case here:

In a previous investigation done by the Committees, investigators found the FBI was flagging purchases that included “MAGA,” “patriot” and even bibles. As Townhall reported in January 2024: 

Federal law enforcement agencies partnered with a number of financial institutions to flag transactions with the terms “MAGA,” “Trump” and more. They also monitored transactions at stores like Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shop. Other purchases linked to religious texts, like Christian bibles, were flagged under the guise of “preventing extremism.”

Further, the FBI has conducted hundreds of thousands of illegal searches without proper warrants in recent years.

I realize that Trump’s DOJ is going to have its hands full for the first couple years of the new Administration.  But I hope they can spare a few moments to track down the bastards who authorized this nonsense, prosecute and imprison them.

Then again, as it was the FBI themselves who indulged in this un-Constitutional larceny, I’m not holding out much hope.

And they wonder why pics like these are so popular…

LOL No

If this doesn’t make you chortle, nothing will:

Executives at Ford Motor Company, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis are begging President-elect Donald Trump to keep in place President Joe Biden’s Electric Vehicle (EV) mandates. The plea comes as automakers have invested billions in EVs that have failed to turn a profit.

Aw diddums.  How my heart bleeds for your lost profits, you chiseling bastards.

What’s the old expression?  Oh yeah:  lie down with the dogs, get up with fleas.

Well, you kowtowed to the government stupidity, always forgetting the other old dictum:  what the government giveth, the government may take away.

Had there not been so much virtue-signaling from the auto manufacturers as they glommed onto those subsidies (#Jaguar #Volvo #etc), I might have had a little sympathy.  As it is, however, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

And I know the followup threat:  “Without subsidies, we’re going to have to close factories and lay off workers!”

Here’s a thought:  take all the executive bonuses you were going to pay your management — yeah, right down to junior levels — and pay those billions (and it is billions) into an independent investment fund, i.e. a fund that’s managed by a financial institution so that you can’t raid it whenever you feel like it (#PensionPlans), and let the interest payments go to the workers you’re going to lay off.

It won’t be enough, but it sure as hell is better than the alternative, which is continuing to make a product that nobody wants, partially (or mostly) funded by taxpayers.

You should have done your research before sinking to your knees — anyone with a brain could have told you that the whole eco-electrical boondoggle was doomed to failure, especially if it was going to be dependent on government building the charging-station infrastructure (and which we’ve already seen has been a catastrophic failure).

The best lessons are those which come through suffering;  so suffer, and learn.

You idiots.