Things that totally suck
From Reader Carl M. (because I don’t see enough of this idiocy every day all by myself):
“This is the news that the Jewish State, in tandem with the US, has launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its aim is to get foodstuffs and other essentials to the benighted people of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. You would think the activist class would be pleased at this news. They’ve been renting their garments for months…”
All Hail SpelCheck!
[This item was brought to you by National Tuxedo Rentals]
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.
In my last lengthy solo car trip, back in 2018 (Plano – Las Vegas, described in full here), I spoke of seeing small towns on the map, expecting to find a gas station so I could fill up the Tiguan’s tank and not be stranded in the middle of Nowhere New Mexico in sub-freezing temperatures, and getting to the “town” to see… nothing but a few houses.
So this little comment by Jeremy Clarkson rang several bells for me:
“Loneliness is a big issue in rural areas and part of the problem is villages losing their soul. You don’t have a village doctor anymore. He’s in a health center 30 miles away and you can’t get an appointment. There’s no village bobby on the beat. There’s no village vicar, there’s no village shop, there’s no village school. If we end up at a point where there’s no village pub then what is a village? It’s just some houses. Pubs are the hub and it should always be that way.”
I bet it’s the same Over Here, too. We’ve read all sorts of stories about how small towns can’t find doctors who want to work in tiny communities, how young people are quitting the towns of their birth and childhood for cities because there’s nowhere for them to earn a living as singles, let alone as a family, and how the arrival of a Walmart ends up with the “downtown” becoming a ghost town.
It’s all very well for one to take the “survival of the fittest” attitude towards this phenomenon — that such places shouldn’t be supported because they’re economically unviable — but that seems to me to be very harsh.
Then again, if a municipality is incapable of supporting even the most basic of services necessary for survival — auto repair shop / gas station, restaurant, doctor’s consulting room, post office, or even a school, for example — then there really is no reason for its existence. (We’ve never really had a “pub culture” to the extent they have it in Britishland, but that doesn’t mean a local bar should be excluded from consideration, either.)
Moreover, when those establishments don’t exist there are no employment opportunities either, even at the most basic level: waitresses, auto mechanics, receptionists, mail carriers or schoolteachers. No wonder the kids clear out.
And yes, things are a lot easier in the U.S. for people who choose to remain in small, secluded villages because our infrastructure is so much better here. A ten-mile trip in, say, rural Tennessee is no big deal, a ten-minute drive or so; but it’s a whole ‘nother situation in rural Britishland, with their narrow roads that meander all over the place before (eventually) reaching the chosen destination. Back when I was living Over There, getting from Free Market Towers to the local village of Melksham, for example, was a journey of only a few miles, but it was a full half-hour’s drive involving no fewer than six different roads and directions. (Rural Wisconsin, incidentally, has the same problem with minor roads marked as “KK” or “UU”, but at least you can cane it along them because they’re relatively wide and straight. You are likely hit a deer, though, something highly unlikely in rural Britain, but that’s not the point.)
And from a pub’s perspective, you’ve got that added issue of the dreaded Driving Under The Influence, but when if you’re just going to the local for a pint or six, you have only to stagger home, no car necessary. (Ask me how I know this. #KingsArms #EnglishmansFarm)
What, then, creates a community, if there are no establishments where one can see neighbors and which can foster some kind of community spirit? As Clarkson says, if it’s just a bunch of houses — which are insular by definition — then there is no community, and no soul.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any solution to the problem.
Tom Knighton has written an article which resonates with me, for obvious reasons:
By now, we’re all well aware of the Biden-era “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which has some very troubling language in it.
As Just the News reported earlier on Tuesday, the criteria included buying guns, being a veteran, and what was termed as “‘xenophobic’ disinformation.”
I’m a veteran and gun owner, and I was pretty critical of China during the whole pandemic, at least on social media. Now, I’m curious as to whether my own government was monitoring my lawful activity simply because I wasn’t a raging leftist loon willing to toe the progressive party line on these issues.
Was I considered a threat to become a domestic terrorist?
Anyone see any parallels between Knighton and me? The only difference between us is that I’m a veteran of another country’s army — but I’m still a veteran. (As for the criticism of the foul ChiComs, and buying guns: ipse dixit.)
I have no idea what is/was meant by “xenophobic disinformation”, but if it means saying that I heartily dislike furriners who creep illegally over our borders to take jobs away from U.S. citizens, commit other crimes, engage in espionage or otherwise try to undermine our country, then I’d have to plead nolo contendere*.
Knighton goes on:
I’m sure I could file a FOIA request and find out, and part of me is considering doing just that, but another part of me would rather not know.
I do have one hint that I may be on such a list if “undesirables”: back in 2017 (that would have been under the Obama administration), I had the dreaded “SSSS” designation appear on one of my air tickets, but it was for one flight only (among several others in that year and the year following), and Obama had only been in out of power for a few months at that point.
I’m fairly sure that I was “noted” by some government apparatchik during the latter years of his presidency, and if not then, I have absolutely no doubt that I was flagged during the Biden era.
This website is my only “online presence” (no Twatter, no Fecesbook, no Instagram and certainly no ChiCom-based Tik Tok either), but over the years several of my posts have engendered (shall we say) some notoriety, and it wouldn’t take much for those to have got me noted and monitored by some DHS/FBI drone.
Anyway, my interest in such surveillance by the .gov is minimal, although I am a kindred spirit of Tom Knighton’s in that:
Finding out that I was monitored because of my views and lawful behavior might just be too much for me to tolerate, and I’m seeing too much that I’m incapable of tolerating as it is.
Amen, Brother Tom.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range. My AK-47 is feeling all neglected and stuff.
*Whole lotta Latin in this post… sorry.
…and I’m not talking about Porsche’s new gearbox, either.
Consider this, which arrived on my recently-acquired laptop w/Windows 11:
It’s the scrolling button on the extreme right of any open window, and Alert Readers will no doubt have realized that it replaced the old square one that we all grew up with.
I have two questions about this shrunken silliness.
Firstly, as any fule kno, I use a Logitech Ergo Trackball:
…whose giant “thumb ball” controller gives one plenty of ability to steer the pointer over to the tiny space in the top right-hand side of the window with relative ease. How do people achieve the same goal using the sloppy and imprecise finger pad of a laptop?
Secondly, and this is a question for the propeller-heads out there: is there any way one can change the shape / size of the scrolling thingy back to its old appearance? (I’d bet there isn’t because Microsoft, but I’ll gladly be proved wrong in this case.)
I get by okay with the LogiTech mouse, but even so it’s not as easy as it used to be, which irritates the shit out of me, and I can’t be the only one thus affected.
As always with Microsoft, change seems to come not only unrequested and generally unwanted, but also in such a manner that it requires considerable effort to manage it.
It began, as these things so often do, with the banks. “Bank tellers cost money”, they realized, so they looked at the data: which showed that something like 95% of a teller’s job involved handing cash to customers.
So: ATMs. And instead of talking to a human when collecting your money, you had to rely on remembering a personal identification number and hoping that the mechanized teller wouldn’t screw up the money count. Of course, there was a “benefit” to the customer: 24-hour banking (provided there was a working ATM where you needed it). So one more little dent in human interaction, because who doesn’t want convenience?
Supermarkets did the same thing, eventually, when scanning systems became good enough to work more or less unsupervised — well, one supervisor to oversee eight checkout terminals was cheaper than paying eight checkout clerks, after all.
Here, the benefit was not customer convenience, because it takes the average customer much longer to process their own transaction than it does a trained cashier. But screw the customer’s time and inconvenience, as long as we don’t have to pay for it, went the retailers’ thinking. (I know this, because I was there when the self-checkout systems were first tested.)
But what about the long waits in line we had to put up with before self-checkouts? Well yes, there is that; except that the long lines were caused by supermarkets not having all the registers manned in the first place — the first of such cost-cutting measures, you see.
In both cases, fewer human employees meant lowered expenses and higher profits. (It may have been sorta-kinda-excusable for retail supermarkets, who run on impossibly-tight profit margins — but far less so for banks, who have no problem charging usurious rates on credit card balances, for instance, in an industry which has never had to deal with tight profit margins (remember: pay 5% on customer investments, charge 12-19% for loans and 27% for credit card balances — and those are just the most obvious ones).
Anyway, some folks in Britishland, of all places, have decided that enough is enough:
Campaign by senior citizens to boycott automated tills aims to protect local jobs and fight isolation in the community.
Myself, I use cashiers most of the time, provided that I won’t have to wait for too long in line.
But what really gets up my nose is when there’s a waiting line in both automated and cashier points. That is when I go all Old Phartish and find a manager to yell at. And I mean yell, because frankly, it’s past the time for politeness and it’s what they respond best to.
My line: “I was in the supermarket business for over thirty years, from stock clerk to cashier to store manager to senior executive in Head Office. I know how supermarkets run, and you’re running this one really badly. Now are you going to open another register or must I get in touch with your district manager or Area VP?”
And if he whines that there just isn’t another cashier available, I yell: “Then YOU open the till and run it until one does become available.”
Sometimes I just identify as a woman. Named Karen. And it doesn’t feel too bad.
Finally, from the above linked article:
The backlash appears to be even bigger in the US. Under new laws proposed in February, supermarkets would have to comply with rules that would limit self-checkout use to when a regular manned lane is open. Major supermarkets including Walmart, Target and Costco have begun limiting or banning self-checkouts.
That has not been my experience locally, but I wish it was. I’d better end this post before I get really cranky.