Tag: Evil Bastards

Connectivity Assholes

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Two-Minute Hate

Normally I reserve the above epithet for people who have their phones surgically attached to their hands, or bosses who insist that employees Stay.In.Touch.At.All.Times., yeah even unto night time, weekends, and vacations.  (Just because you’re attending your sister’s wedding or mother’s funeral — requiring use of paid time off [PTO] instead of compassionate leave, FFS — doesn’t mean that your boss shouldn’t be able to demand your time to attend to That Pressing Corporate Need.)

No, the connectivity assholes I refer to here are “services” like GM’s OnStar, Hyundai’s Blue Link, NissanConnect, AcuraLink and Toyota Connect.  Via Insty, I see the following is happening (from the annals of Corporate Automotive Bastardy):

Connected services is a catch-all term for everything your car can send and receive over the internet. It includes features such as automatic 911 call-outs after an accident, roadside assistance after a breakdown, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, vehicle health reports which can be sent to your dealer, wi-fi hot spots in the vehicle, and phone apps that allow you to connect to and even control some of your car’s functions.

They’re also big business. Most connected services require a paid subscription once the free trail (usually three months to a year) runs out. As more and more of them are added to your dashboard, automakers hope to make billions of dollars annually just on subscriptions. That doesn’t mean older vehicles will be supported forever, though.

Anyone who’s ever touched a device with a computer chip in it knows that device will eventually be obsolete. Cellphones, even if they still work fine, will eventually stop receiving software updates. Right or wrong, this is the way of the world. The average American, though, keeps their car for much longer than they keep their phone, and the average age of a vehicle in America is nearly 13 years old. Meaning, a lot of people could potentially be affected if other automakers follow Acura’s lead in cutting off cars newer than the average. And that’s not to mention those who own used examples of older models.

While it’s arguably bad customer service, there’s no law or contractual obligation requiring automakers like Acura to continue supporting older models with outdated hardware and software. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Yeah, click HERE to accept the (300 pages of) Terms & Conditions Of Service.  (Wait;  you all do read those before clicking, right?)

Somebody tell me how many times I’ve ranted on these pages about people handing over their privacy and freedom of action in the name of “conveeeeenience”, because I can’t be bothered to look it up.

This is why, in all my lottery dreams, I am convinced that I would never buy a modern car, but would pay a premium (in service / maintenance costs etc.) just to own a car that is completely and utterly under my personal control.  I have actually come to the point where I would buy any car — in reasonable working condition — that has an ordinary key to start it, whose operating system contains not a single chip and does not send my usage data to just anyone who wants to see it, for whatever reason — which includes insurance companies, the police, the State, the advertising industry and all the other forms of bureaucratic bastardy that have infested our personal lives like some creeping fucking cancer.

A pox on all of them.

Wrong Target

Crime, Mocking Furriners

As anyone interested in trends would know, there’s been a surge in a specific type of city-center crime recently, one which involves a scrote whizzing past his victim, snatching their phone from their hand en passant.  This has made London, amongst others, a place where one should not walk the streets while catching up with an old friend on the phone, or even just calling home to make sure that the kids have not set fire to the house while one has been busy at the gym.

I’ve never understood this connectivity obsession anyway, especially as one shouldn’t talk on the phone in the street (for any reason) because believe it or not, passers-by are not really interested in your choice of wine for tonight’s dinner party.

But back to the phone robbers.  Britishland is applying the boot with a heavy hand in response to this epidemic:

E-scooters and e-bikes driven by brazen phone snatchers are to be destroyed by police within hours of being seized amid a crackdown on London’s mobile theft epidemic. 

Previously officers had to warn offenders before taking away and crushing a bike, scooter or any other vehicle driven in an anti-social manner or if it was used to facilitate a theft. 

But now, new powers will mean police won’t have to wait two weeks before throwing them away and will be able to do so in a two-day time frame.

Now far be it for me to rail against the crushing of these electric pestilences, which have been involved in so many pedestrian collisions because their riders are reckless assholes, not to mention the above assholes of the larcenous kind.

But it seems to me that the wrong part of this equation is being punished.  I’m no expert on the topic, but I have to feel that crushing a thief’s e-bike is rather pointless, in that said thieves having been thus dispossessed will simply steal a fresh bike with which to continue their little reindeer games.

Surely, for all sorts of reasons, it should be the thieves getting fed into the crusher’s jaws rather than their conveyances?  Much more likely to slow this modern kind of theft, I think.

But no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this, as would my followup suggestion that said crushing of scrotes be made a PPV TV event.

Background Story

Africa, Marxists, Third World

If any of you are at all interested in post-apartheid South Africa, then watch Rob Hersov explain it all.  He’s absolutely, positively correct in all his observations, and his brief summary of South Africa’s history is 100% likewise.

And by the way, he has a classic definition of all the elements of “genocide”:

…of which South Africa has seven happening as we speak.

What a disaster.

Checking The Numbers

Lies and Untruths

Over at TCW, Norman Fenton applies serious statistics (as opposed to lies and / or wishful thinking) to the mainstream media’s latest take on the murder rates of White South African farmers.  (For the record, the Guttersnipe Media is claiming that the murder rate of the above group isn’t that different from South Africa’s already-appalling murder rate.)  His final take?

Probability true murder rate of Whites is higher than Blacks: 99.99999997%
Probability true murder rate of Whites at least 2 times higher than Blacks: 99.98%
Probability true murder rate of Whites at least 3 times higher than Blacks: 96.95%

So, over the entire period [2017-2022] it is essentially certain (99.98% probability) that the true murder rate of Whites is at least twice that of Black and highly likely (96.95% probability) to be at least three times as high.

In other words:  State-tolerated or -approved mass murder.

And people still ask me why I left South Africa?  I left because I foresaw precisely this situation.  My only mistake was that I thought this would start to happen much sooner than it actually has.

FIFO

Good Stuff, Muzzies, Two-Minute Hate

I meant to comment on this little (non-)development earlier, but I forgot:

Becky Noble brought you the story in April about a proposed massive 400-plus acre development called “EPIC City” in East Plano, Texas, which some critics contend would be an exclusive Muslim-only community and would be governed by Sharia Law. (The backers deny these claims, but their promotional materials leave many questions about their true intent.)

EPIC stands for East Plano Islamic Center.

Lone Star state Gov. Greg Abbott said it’s not happening, at least not for the time being:

Texas has halted any construction of EPIC City.

There is no construction taking place.

The state of Texas has launched about a half dozen investigations into this project. That includes criminal investigations.

And, the US Department of justice is also investigating.

This matter, and similar matters, are taken very seriously, and actions are being taken to address all concerns.

Fuck me, even our crappy Senator John  Cornyn is alarmed:

A master-planned “community of thousands of Muslims” could violate the constitutional rights of Jewish and Christian Texans, by preventing them from living in this new community and discriminating against them within the community. I further encourage the Department to investigate whether Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslim minorities would receive equal protection under the law in this new community. Religious discrimination, whether explicit or implicit, is unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of our nation’s values, and I am concerned this community potentially undermines this vital protection.

Everyone seems to be pussyfooting around this issue, using Constitutional  concerns — which is fine and dandy — but it avoids the main issue, which is this:

Every time, every single time anywhere in the world that Muslims become a significant minority, bad things follow.

It has happened (and continues to happen) all over Africa, and the same is true in every Western nation where the local governments have allowed these fanatical bastards to set up shop.  Mosques, “cultural” centers (like their pathetic medieval culture is worth promoting) and attempts to incorporate shari’a law into national law are all, simply put, a cancer on free societies.

Allowing these Muslims to create a Muslim-only enclave in Texas will do no good at all for the state of Texas.  In fact, let me be even more blunt:  if these assholes want to live in an area where Islam is predominant, they should feel free to do so in places like Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran;  not in the U.S., and definitely not in Texas.

And by the way:  I think it’s time we looked at the First Amendment and inserted a little asterisk that says “Except for Islam”, because their malignant little death cult has no place in our free society.

Enough is enough.

The Full Story

Elections, Government Thugs

Sundance has a piece that everyone should read — Trump, Patel, Gabbard and Bondi most of all — concerning the whole disgusting political hit called “Crossfire Hurricane” (a.k.a. RussiaGate).

Using access to the NSA database, the U.S. Govt., specifically “FBI Contractors”, began doing political surveillance of Donald Trump’s campaign. This intel was then sent to the Clinton team. Clinton would benefit from knowing the communication inside the Trump campaign. All of that intel was in the metadata captured by the NSA and searched by the FBI contractors.

All of this activity was political surveillance, using govt resources to feed the Clinton team the info.

I know;  “This is such ancient history, Trump’s president now, can’t we all just move onnnn?”

No.  Now more than ever, the people culpable for the whole thing need to be rooted out, exposed and prosecuted — because if they aren’t, this bullshit is going to happen again, and this time, it might work.

Sundance, as usual, has the right of it.