Category: Business

Sidestep

Corporate Fuckery, Marketing / Advertising

I’ve spoken about this topic before, but this is a parallel thought.

Whenever I click onto a link which leads me to a PJMedia outlet, I’m often  / always confronted with a message blocking the article, said message requiring me to turn off my ad-blocking software before I may proceed.

Uh, no.  To quote Dubya, “Nahguhdoodat.”  It’s not that I have anything against advertisements, per se — hell, I’ve worked in the ad agency business myself, and I know that ad revenues help media companies remain in business.  What I object to, with a screaming passion, is that digital ads don’t just announce, they shout at me and intrude on my reading with pop-ups, loud audio and all sorts of other bullshit.  And let’s not talk about ads which have tracking software built in, which leads to all sorts of unpleasantness and bastardy down the track.

Side note:  To be frank, I also don’t want to be led to other ads which “relate” to any specific product in which I might show an interest.  Fucking Amazon’s “if you bought this, you might also be interested in this” trope heads the list, but other websites — e.g. Bud’s Guns FFS — also perpetrate this nonsense, even when my interest in, say, a .22 Beretta pistol generates a “suggested list” which includes a Glock 17 and Bergara rifle.

Anyway, I’m not interested in “allowing” ads into my reading of news items, thank you very much, because my indulgence does not extend to being abused by the advertisers.  So fuck you.

Now there are ways to sidestep this little device.  The one I use the most is to Ctrl-X the link, and in the blank thus created, type in “archive.is/” and then CTRL-V the original link and hit enter.  This generally leads to a page like this:

Click on the blue link, and voilà!  you get the article:

Now some websites have found ways to confound this method or the alternative archiving software products, in which case I do something radical.

I just close the page and OMG forget reading about the topic altogether, in that form.  Why?

There is no topic in the news that is so important.

PJMedia is not the only culprit, of course:  it seems as though almost every “newspaper” has created a PPV setup on the basis of:  “if we can’t derive income from ads, we’ll have to get the moolah from membership.”

Fair enough, I concede the point.  It always made sense back in the old print media days, but even then there were work-arounds.  Buying a magazine each week for $1.25 gets spendy — so the print companies made insanely-discounted offers such as “Get two years’ worth of magazines for only 25c per edition if you pay $6!”

And yes, the magazine contained ads — but those ads didn’t require you to read them before you could turn the fucking page, which is largely what digital media requires.

Finally, let me be completely honest about this.  If I’m going to pay to read a publication of some sort, my polymathic nature demands that I don’t confine myself to a single topic, unless it’s a topic I’m insanely interested in.  It’s why for many years I had subs to Gun Tests, G&A and the like.  (I also had a sub for TIME magazine, back before they became irretrievably leftoid, because they carried articles on lots of topics, not just political ones.)

But if I’m going to pay for a daily read, I want the publication to contain topics on just about every topic — and this is where Breitbart News  and PJMedia  fail, because there it’s 90% politicspoliticspolitics — and politics only constitutes about 40% of my interests.

And to be brutally frank, finding out someone’s guess about Georgia’s next senator is woefully insufficient for me to consider paying for the privilege.

Even more to the point, Redstate‘s top 6 articles have so little interest to me that I’m not going to bother opening any of them, regardless of whether there’s a paywall / ad unblocking demand involved.

Okay, #3 might be sorta interesting but hell, we all know that the Democrats aren’t going to give an attaboy to the good guy with a gun, so why bother?

So that’s why I do the digital sidestep.  And if the sidestep is eventually completely blocked, well then fukkem:  I’ll just go to the range or watch an unblocked video on why military pistols don’t matter.  Way more fun.

Sanity Returns, Part XVIII

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Eco-Crap

Then:

GM CEO Mary Barra said in 2021 that the company would exclusively offer EVs by 2035, citing carbon emissions.

“For General Motors, our most significant carbon impact comes from tailpipe emissions of the vehicles that we sell — in our case, it’s 75 percent,” Barra said. “That is why it is so important that we accelerate toward a future in which every vehicle we sell is a zero-emissions vehicle.”

From another GM management dweeb, Dane Parker, former GM chief sustainability officer:

“We feel this is going to be the successful business model of the future,” he said in 2021. “We know there are hurdles, we know there are technology challenges, but we’re confident that with the resources we have and the expertise we have that we’ll overcome those challenges and this will be a business model that we will be able to thrive in the future.”

Yeah, about that:

General Motors has announced plans to expand production of gasoline-powered vehicles and SUVs in Michigan as well as the manufacturing of pickup trucks.

The Detroit-based auto manufacturer said in a statement on Tuesday that it will “begin production of the Cadillac Escalade, as well as the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra light duty pickups at Orion Assembly in early 2027 to help meet continued strong customer demand.”

Yeah, it seems as though not that many people want to buy their, or anybody’s Duracell cars after all — at least, not enough to keep once-mighty General Motors in business.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to borrow Sarah Hoyt’s Shocked Face.

Perfect Sign-Off

Management

It’s a good thing that a) most of the time I worked in Corporate World, there was no email;  and b) I only discovered this gem at Kenny’s yesterday:

There’s no telling how many times I would have used this as a response to 80% of the office memos I got.  (“Only once, Kim.”)

Yeah, but it would have been totally worth it.

Handing Over The Reins

Control Freaks, Corporate Fuckery, Science!

Read this story and see if you don’t get a slow burn, or even an RCOB:

An Australian small business owner says she lost about $50,000 after Instagram suspended her accounts over what she describes as an innocent photo of three dogs.

Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australia, recently received an email from Instagram’s parent company Meta stating her accounts had been suspended because the image breached community guidelines relating to ‘child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity’.

The photo had been mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator which confused the image of the dogs with those of children.

She appealed the decision and sent 22 emails to Meta, but received no assistance from the global tech giant, which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Ms Marinato claimed her story was just one of many and that the problem was widespread.

She also said it was impossible to talk to a human at Meta to explain her situation.

‘I couldn’t get a human to look at it. Clearly any human that looks at this photo is going to know it’s completely innocent,’ she said. 

‘You can’t contact a human at Meta. There’s no phone number, there’s no email, there’s nothing and you’re literally left in the dark.’ 

To paraphrase Insty:  And Skynet smirks.

Here We Go Again

Retailing

In another one of those “Custer Having Difficulties With The Sioux” headlines, we have this nonsense from the Truly Ignorant:

Supermarket bosses are under fire for charging higher prices in shops serving the UK’s poorer communities while customers in leafy suburbs pay less. An investigation by MPs found food can be up to 38% more expensive in smaller “local” or “express” stores, which typically serve lower-income customers, than in full-blown supermarkets owned by the same company, often in wealthier areas or accessible to customers with access to transport.

There’s so much foolishness in this article that I even hesitate to talk about it.  But what the heck, here we are so I might as well.

Actually, as I’ve said before, “zone pricing” is not only common, it’s ubiquitous.  That policy is very much driven by market forces — whether it’s a higher incidence of shoplifting, or the higher cost of doing business (compare the rental cost of a city vs. suburban store, for example) — the simple fact remains that in order to maintain profitability (e.g. sales per square foot at x% gross profit), some stores will have to charge more for the same items than others.

Ignore too the wealth envy in the article — “poor people aren’t as mobile as wealthy people, so they’re trapped into paying higher prices” — because it isn’t relevant:  organizations don’t charge more because of profit opportunity unless they’re a monopoly and can afford to do so.

Of course politicians (and journalists) are going to get involved because it’s an easy way for them to garner both publicity and popularity.  The facts of the issue aren’t important as long as they are Seen To Be Doing Something.

And of course when inner-city stores are forced to close because of government action, the Pore Folx are going to find themselves in a “food desert” that is entirely of their own and their politicians’ making — and I for one will have a simple reaction to this situation:

Stupidity should be punished and not rewarded.

4-Bangers Aus

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Eco-Crap, Morons & Idiots

Yeah, with the demise of EV Duracell cars, it wouldn’t take long for Mercedes to notice that their other pet Green project wasn’t too popular with their client base:

Mercedes-AMG is transitioning away from the four-cylinder plug-in hybrid powertrain and back towards the inline-six and V-8 powertrains more traditionally associated with the brand. That isn’t to say that AMG had a change of heart concerning the merits of the four-cylinder powertrain, but rather that the automaker is responding to customer criticisms. “Technically, the four-cylinder is one of the most advanced drivetrains available in a production car. It’s also right up there on performance. But despite this, it failed to resonate with our traditional customers. We’ve recognized that.” 

“Failed to resonate”, as in “WTF do you idiots think you’re doing?”

Yeah, forgive us if Merc fans don’t care about the gee-whiz technology when it replaces the brilliant engines that have served Mercedes since the 1920s.  And the same driver skepticism that accompanied the stupid EV-only diktat  would apply no less to the plug-in hybrids too.

I couldn’t be bothered to look up the numbers, but I bet the technology R&D costs for both Green projects will have run to the billions of dollars:  all wasted.

And just add to that the cost of bringing nuclear power generators back on line after the most un-German-like panic following the Fukushima disaster, which was caused by a tsunami — last time I checked, the likelihood of the same affecting the German nukes was.. what? oh yes, zero — and which took place halfway around the world.

Yeah, that Green eco-thing is really working out well for the Krauts, isn’t it?