The Enshittification of the World (but its for PROFITTTTTTTS!)

Enshittification is the word of the year, it means to make worse while extracting greater profits. It is shrinking serving sizes while raising prices. It is adding unwanted features and charging more for them because users have no choice. It is squeezing users for more profit while telling employees there's no budget for raises this year despite the banner announcing record profits. It is an AI rejected your cover letter and resume in .00000005 seconds and calling it efficiency. It is allowing job vacancies to remain empty so long that the work ends up being distributed among the remaining workers and that departed employee's pay becomes a little more profit for the owner class.

Back to today's rant... 

Ebay has decided in their infinite wisdom that users MUST HAVE a new module on their homepages imploring whether users are Ready to Resell items they purchased through Ebay over the years. Okay. Seems stupid as fuck since I buy a lot of consumed and no longer existing items so they're simply not resellable. 

But my own special Ready to Resell box has decided that I am 100% committed to reselling underwear I've bought through the site. Its the only thing it shows. There is no means to turn it off. There is no means to change what it stupidly tries to suggest I resell. There is nothing I can do if it decides to display embarrassing items I've bought over the many years. There is NOTHING users can do to prevent this invasive, unwanted, stupid as fucking hell "feature" Ebay shoved at users without the slightest regard for them.

Even going to the individual listings in the purchase list and hiding those things DOES NOTHING. There is no way to control what EBAY decides I should want to resell. This is beyond crazy, this is like cutting crack with fentanyl and then rolling it in PCP. It also serves to make the site completely NSFW if you have happened to, I dunno, have bought a medical device or sex toy through the site because hey, you want to resell that dildo, don't you? Sure you do!

The reality is I am not reselling anything ever and this absolutely MORONIC forced garbage makes the site unusable. 

As such, this is probably what makes me give up on Ebay for good. They've gotten worse and worse over the years and this could be what puts them over the line, the one reads More Trouble Than They Are Worth. A line that many places and products are finding themselves these days.

Related bullshit has forced me to leave Twitter, Bluesky and Reddit, there are probably others that I'm forgetting. Sites that treat their users like crap deserve to fail. Twitter is run by a loser Nazi richest guy on earth and everyone who knows him up close, fucking hates him. Bluesky is run by liberals providing cover for Zionists and Reddit is run by straight up Zionists. Much like our government, a wholly owned and controlled subsidiary of Israel somehow with pledges of fealty from sitting Senators, Congresspeople, Mayors, Governors and more. 

Enshittification is likely to be the word of the year and might become the word of the decade. That or the new capitalist maxim, Profit Uber Alles.

There is also a movement by the fascist powers that be to age-gate access to the internet and websites under the guise of "protecting the children" when it is, as always, about control and censorship. The scum pushing age-verification on the internet rape children, they literally do not fucking care about children at all but will happily use them as a wedge to foist their agenda on the nation and, by extension, the world.

It is hard to not feel overwhelmed by the colossal forces of darkness and greed that are seemingly consuming the planet. Very tempted to change the name of this blog to Vox Clamantis in Inanis, a voice crying out into the void, because that's very much what most of my online posting feels like these days.

Fun With Words

Did you know if you pronounce the U in UPS like a Scandinavian "oo", their name becomes Oops which seems pretty on point for a package delivery and mangling service.

I'm also regularly tickled by the smashing of uniformed and uninformed. Also that resign and re-sign mean opposite things while being nearly the same damned word.

While we're on the subject, I strongly dislike when people use whilst instead of while in a failed attempt to seem smarter or British (the same thing to most Americans which is funny as hell because the Brits are just as dumber than dirt as we are).

I might even publish this one since its been sitting in drafts for nearly six years. 

The Lack of an Actually Real Digital Public Square is an Actually Real Problem

When Elon Musk bought Twitter it was the beginning of the end of the platform because there's no such thing as free speech when one capricious sack of dicks is the arbiter of what can and can't be said and he's a bit of a Nazi-loving freak (just a bit). Aside from all of that, he's a greedy weirdo that can't ever be satisfied by the billions he already has.

It took a while but I got away from Twitter, I'd had three active-ish accounts there and the last to go was my baseball one.

But I moved to BlueSky and made the best of starting over again, going from a couple thousand followers to a couple hundred and engagement dropping by 70-90%. And it isn't like BlueSky's an ideal new haven, its got some serious flaws that are being ignored, its got a reporting problem, its got a labeling problem, its got a shitty milquetoast centrist problem.

To that end, I had an abrasive weekend dealing with Zionists and other genocidal scumbags and pushed back hard enough on them that BlueSky has applied a label of Rude to my account which severely limits its reach, exposure and engagement, effectively killing the account without actually banning me. Which means I am once again looking for a social media home.

Looking at supposed alternatives and keep hitting the same problems. Threads is owned by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, that's a non-starter. Other platforms suffer from other issues including size and access and being owned by greedy fuckbags like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg. Mastodon has some promise but is fractured and very empty. Reddit is another rich asshole's playground so its out. Discord is just a big fucking mess and makes zero sense to me

Of course, if there WERE a digital public square it would be dominated by the bombastic sack of ignorance, hubris and self-absorption that is Donald Trump because this stupid, stupid country handed him the keys again. 

Unfortunately, for the present time being, we're fucked and there's nobody coming to save us.

Hey Hey

 Just a quick howdy and hey and maybe I'll circle back to add more as time permits.

We're still kicking, I wouldn't exactly say thriving but we're still surviving and that's something. Knocking on wood, we have remained a Covid free house since the outbreak of the pandemic..

The world is an absolute hellscape of rising fascism but also rising worker strikes and increasing solidarity among the lower classes (which bodes ill for the very fat and very rich cats at the top). 

That's all for now, its hard to not feel the psychic burden of knowing our government is extremely super complicit in committing genocide. It will definitely make Thanksgiving next week a very, very different feeling for me.

The Cacophony

 There was another horrific gun massacre in the only country on earth where this happens regularly and literally nothing is ever done to stop them because the gun nut lobby has some deep ass pockets and they own enough elected types to stop any efforts to reign in America's rampant gun massacre epidemic.

The American people want and demand changes but the leaders of America don't march to our orders, they march to the orders of the Military Industrial Complex that requires billions spent on tools of death rather than the fraction of that money on building a sustainable, just and humane world for everyone.

I've said it in the past but what if America's nearly $800 BILLION for so-called defense was spent on humanitarian aid, building housing and working together to solve what are increasingly looking like doomsday scenarios for the human race? Think about how different the world would be if capitalism wasn't the overarching (and toxic) mindset. 

Capitalism is economic cancer, it requires constant expansion or it implodes upon itself. It requires constant improvement or it falls apart, capitalism is a giant pyramid scheme built on the exploitation, subjugation and desperation of the lower and working classes. 

Anyway, the noise and furor of the latest tragedy will fuel alot of anxiety driven tweets and speeches and then it will all die back down again and nothing will change. Because the powers that be love their profit margins more than slaughtered children and innocent people.