Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

Same Here

Government Thugs, Rights, Surveillance Society

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.

Fine Motor Control

Technology

…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.

De-Humanization

Corporate Fuckery

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.

At the Marks and Spencer store in Bridgwater, 10 self-service checkouts are sitting in a row waiting to be used.
The one manned checkout, however, has a queue five-people deep. “If there’s someone on the till, I would rather wait four or five minutes to have a conversation,” says Antony James, a 59-year-old resident.
His sentiment is shared by many in the Somerset town where the Bridgwater Senior Citizens’ Forum has launched a rebellion against automated checkouts.
I just wish that everyone did this, and not just Old Pharttes.

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.

Perennial Speedbump

Grammar Nazism

Oh FFS… how many more times am I to be subjected to this linguistic atrocity?

“I was sat with Maura Higgins and Danny Jones at the star-studded BRITs Afterparty…”

No;  you were seated OR you were sitting next to these people.

Of course, this comes from the Daily Mail, so expectations are low.  Even so…

“I Thought This Country Spawned The Fucking Language, And So Far Nobody Seems To Speak It.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Quote Of The Day

Taxes and Theft

From Bill Hoge, in discussing POTUS’s plan to close over one hundred I.R.S. offices:

“Why do we need taxpayer assistance centers? Why are our taxes so freaking complicated that people with graduate degrees have to fork over thousands of dollars to their CPAs because the tax code is so convoluted that only a full-time tax nerd can figure them out?”

That’s a really good question.  My favorite story about the I.R.S. is the one where someone called a few of these “assistance centers” because he had a problem with something on his return.  Every single one of the centers gave a different answer to his question — in other words, the I.R.S.’s own staff couldn’t navigate their way through the code.

I remember Mr. Free Market’s tale of paying his income tax in Hong Kong, back when he lived there (pre-CCP takeover).  Every December he would go to the local tax office with the HK equivalent of an IRS Form 1099 from his employer (which stated only that his salary was $x — there were no deductions or withholdings whatsoever).  He would then write out a cheque for 5% of that amount, the clerk would stamp his 1099 as proof of payment… and that was it.

Frankly, I would have no problem with paying a flat (and fixed-forever) tax rate of 7% on that basis.  (“Why 7% and not 5%, Kim?”  Because unlike Hong Kong, we need to pay for things like naval carrier groups and interstate highways, which I like and support).  I would even support paying 7% of my Social Security, as long as everybody — including welfare recipients — paid the same tax rate on gross income, without exemption (or deductions).  Only if you have skin in the game should you be allowed to vote on the subject, e.g. raises to the rate, which I’d want protected by a Constitutional amendment anyway.

Feel free to explain to me why I’m wrong.  Good luck with that.

The PPV Phenomenon

Journalist Scum, Media Assholes

Making a living from writing is extraordinarily difficult — ask me how I know this — and I have often been tempted to put much if not all of my non-novel writing behind a paywall (SubStack, etc.).  There are two problems with this action:  the first is that my blogging has never been a serious attempt to make money, which is why I have to resort to the occasional ad hoc  beg-a-thon for crises, and Patreon for “subscription” support.  (And to those of you who participate in the latter, thank you again:  you have no idea how much it helps.)

The second reason I don’t charge for access is that to be perfectly frank, I don’t think my blogging is that valuable in the grand scheme of things, and charging for access would be somewhat… impertinent on my part.  Put baldly, anyone with a little spare time can find pics of beautiful women, cars, guns and so on for themselves.  As for my commentary:  well, I know that many people — in the beginning, anyway — told me that my blog made them realize that they weren’t the only ones who felt this way, especially whether it came to political outlook and social perspective.  Of gun love, we will not speak.  But is it all that valuable?

And that’s all I care to say about that.

What I really want to talk about is how the various online media are starting to charge readers, most often not for their entire opus, but for certain articles only.  Here are a few examples:

  • The Daily Mail:
  • The Sun:  and we all know about
  • PJMedia: 

This, as opposed to other outlets who have pretty much set upon putting their entire publication behind a paywall, like The New York Times (lol never gonna happen), The Epoch Times, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and so on.  In several cases, I would really like to read their stuff but I can’t afford the subscription — not individually, but cumulatively, all those subscriptions would add up to a considerable amount which I cannot possibly afford.  (Ditto TV/Internet streaming services, but that’s a story for another time.)

Look, I don’t have a problem with any of this.  It costs a great deal to run a media company — although I would argue much less than when they were reliant on newsprint for their distribution — but even with the economies of Internet publication, they still have to pay for content (writers, photographers) and production (editorial/site maintenance staff etc.) as well as hosting bandwidth, which means that they have to charge for access.  TANSTAAFL, and this is as true for them as for any other business which offers a product to consumers.

We consumers have been spoiled in this regard, because when the Internet started, so much of the content came free and we became spoiled thereby.  So now when we get confronted by a paywall, we get all huffy and say, “It ain’t worth it!” and in many cases it isn’t.

I know that many people find my reading of the often-dreadful Daily Mail inexplicable, but let me nevertheless use them as an example for how I treat the mini-paywalls.  Here’s an example of yesterday’s Mail headlines:

I find this interesting.  If the Mail thinks that Gold-Digger story is enticing enough to make me want to join their little subscription club, they are sadly mistaken.  (Given the profile of their average reader, however, they may not be altogether wrong.)  And the prurient reader will find several examples of the Pineapple Sack type, all for free.

The only one of the four example articles which interests me at all is the one about pay-per-mile driving charges, not because it would affect me or most of my Readers, it being a UK phenomenon;  but because if the stupid Green Nude Heel program were to be implemented Over Here by various Green politicians of the Biden/Harris/Obama stripe, it would very much be relevant.  And as I so often say:  stuff that happens Over There will often make its way Over Here at some point, so we need to be vigilant.

Anyway, while there may occasionally be a paywalled article in any of the places I frequent for my daily news, generally speaking the PPV aspect is mostly an irritant — and as I’ve illustrated above, often not even that because the topic, details and/or commentary thereon is of little interest to me.

What I’m discovering is that there are a few writers / commentators whose stuff I might be tempted into paying for on a subscription basis — Victor Davis Hanson and Jordan Peterson come to mind — but honestly, they are few and far between.

And Megyn Kelly would have to broadcast her show in the nude to get my subscription dollar, and maybe not even then.

I am not at all averse to media putting adverts and commercials in their product to generate revenue, similar to what newspapers and broadcast TV stations have always done — provided that said ads are not too large, too many, too obtrusive or too repetitive.  And the internet print outlets have only themselves to blame for the arrival of services like AdBlock, when the ads suddenly started shouting at me or auto-loading some fucking mini-movie which interrupted my reading.  I know the rationale for such commercials — I worked in the advertising business for years — but I reject it utterly.  There is a reason why TV channels could only run a few minutes’ worth of commercials per hour back in the day, and that’s because when the commercials became all-pervasive and a considerable irritant, then government had to step in and we all know what happens in such cases.

Anyway, what we’re dealing with now is a media environment which is constantly changing, much as the broadcast media changed with the arrival of cable.  All I can say is that everyone, from the DailyMail to PJMedia to Insty to humble bloggers like me, needs to be aware of their limitations.

I think I know mine, but I’m not so sure about the big guys.