Monday, July 25, 2022
Week of 07/25/2022 - Mental Health Break
Monday, July 18, 2022
Week of 07/18/2022
There’s a lot that can be said about Elon Musk, and not all of it good.
His space race against Jeff Bezos has been good in that it provides America with a way back into space after the screwjob with NASA. His self-driving electric Tesla vehicle? Well the jury is still out on that.
His managerial style is more reminiscent of the industrialists of the 19th century, especially when it comes to using certain members of the office staff for... ahem... “personal matters”. And his family matters are supposedly a dumpster fire that makes the HBO series “Succession” look downright tame. His father supposedly had babies with his stepsister, and what a piece of work he apparently is! His own daughter is supposedly changing her name to divorce herself from him. And he’s now in a pissing contest with an even bigger dumpster fire that goes by the last name of Trump. And that’s not the only pissing contest he's engaged in.
And then there is Twitter.
Now, full disclosure... even though I have in the past (and the present) deride Twitter users, I have to include myself among them. Yes, I am a Twit. I use it for personal and professional purposes. So I have a stake in the continued use of the service, even if it is simply as a user.
Now Musk decided he wanted to buy Twitter this past April. He bought shares and supposedly promised to buy Twitter and “take it private” after whining about Twitter blocking people like a certain orange dumpster fire. He then raised enough money (in other words, he took out loans) to make a complete buy-out for $43 billion.
Then he whined about “bots” and “fake accounts” and said he can’t go through with the deal because Twitter supposedly “wasn’t cooperating”. So he’s taking his billions and walking away.
Not so, says Twitter execs, who are now filing lawsuits to force the deal through.
So now the idiots in the media are whining about Musk supposedly being forced to go through with the deal and what that would entail and whether or not a court could force someone to continue with a financial transaction that they no longer want. If you start the process of buying a car and then back out, could the dealer take you to court to force you to buy it? That’s essentially what is being argued by the idiots in the media.
Let’s get a few things straight...
First, Musk is wrong in his idea that Twitter is some First Amendment “free speech forum”. Twitter is a private company, not a public medium. The Internet is a public medium, and Twitter is not the Internet. As such, Twitter has every right to make rules about how its users use the service, just like Facebook and Google and Yahoo and all the others. If they say you don’t spread misinformation about pandemics and vaccines, then you don’t. If they say you don’t say something to incite a riot or start an insurrection, then you don’t. And if you do that stuff, then they have every right to ban and bar you from that service.
It's called “terms of service”, something that Musk should know about.
People don’t have a “right” to use Twitter. They have permission as long as they abide by its rules. To say that people have a “right” to use Twitter, no matter the message, no matter the content, is to nationalize the service. It would be no different than people just taking Musk’s Tesla vehicles off the lots and claim they have a “right” to them because the roads are considered “public”.
Now let’s talk about the deal.
This commentator is of the speculation that the idea of buying out Twitter was more of a “rich people” thing than some genuine concern for the business. Rich person gets offended, they buy out the thing that offended them as revenge. Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne is notorious for this sort of stuff. Elon Musk was slapped down for the stuff he tweeted about, he buys Twitter so they wouldn’t do that to him again. And then he adds in the orange dumpster fire and his acolytes just for good measure so he could claim it wasn’t just about him. Or... that’s the speculation.
The thing about bots and fake accounts? Do you honestly think that Twitter is the only service that has that problem? Instagram, Discord, Facebook... the whole Internet is rife with bots and fakes. And no matter how much you try to weed them out, they come back like the mythical Hydra, and in greater numbers. Whine about bots, Mister Musk? Might as well whine about potholes interfering with your precious Tesla cars. Or space junk threatening your Starlink satellites in orbit.
There is really only one reason why Musk would be concerned about bots and fake accounts, and that would be if he wanted to turn all users into paying subscribers. You can’t get money from a fake account.
As to whether or not Musk would be forced by the courts to follow through with the purchase of Twitter, I would hope that this is not what the lawsuit would really be about. As mentioned before, it would be like you or I going to a car dealership, backing out of the sale before the final signing, and have the dealership suing us to go through with the purchase anyway. That just doesn’t make sense.
I would hope that the lawsuit would be to force Musk to abide by the stipulation in the initial agreement that he would have to pay $1 billion if the deal fell through. Doing so would certainly cement the failure of the deal. Musk should not be able to just walk away scot-free after all the hassle and media drama we’ve all been put through, not just my fellow Twitter Twits and the Twit investors.
There are some speculations about this as well. Certainly saying the deal is off has caused Twitter’s stock value to collapse. That means it’s overall worth is less than the price Musk wanted to buy it for. One can easily see Musk wanting to re-negotiate for the lower price and credit himself for being a “master dealer-maker”. If so, I think the Securities and Exchange Commission would like to have a word about that.
Someone else once speculated that Musk never really wanted to buy Twitter at all, but used the purchase to lighten his load of Tesla stock, since it was used to make the purchase. Sell some stock for liquidity, cancel the buyout, and keep the money and not be burdened by Tesla stock.
Again, these are all theories and speculations. But, either way, this looks bad for Musk and screws Twitter investors.
If I were the judge, I would make it simple for Musk and Twitter: either go through with the acquisition for the price that you offered, or fork over the $1 billion as per the agreement and not only walk away, but be barred from ever holding stock or talk of acquiring Twitter ever again. Because let’s get brutally honest here... the amount of BS being tossed about concerning this service is unacceptable and needs to end.
You don’t like Twitter doing what they do? Then follow the lead of the orange dumpster fire and create your own. Before Facebook, there was MySpace. Before MySpace, there was Prodigy and CompuServe and America Online. Yahoo used to be the only search engine and now there’s Google, Bing, and Duck Duck Go. These came about because real businessmen, real inventors, real entrepreneurs don’t play games with the biggest services. They create competition and beat them at their own game. That’s something that Musk should have done instead of letting his ego guide him.
If you really don’t want to buy Twitter anymore, Mister Musk, then pay the billion and let the deal die. It is that simple for a supposed “smart businessman” to comprehend.
Monday, July 11, 2022
Week of 07/11/2022
At the end of the 2008 film “The Dark Knight” (spoilers, by the way), Batman and Commissioner Gordon stand over the dead body of District Attorney Harvey Dent, who had been twisted by the mechanizations of The Joker and led to become the villain Two-Face. After threatening to murder Gordon’s wife and son in front of the commissioner, Batman, feigning being shot, leaps at Dent and the two fall off the edge of an abandoned factory, with only Batman surviving.
The two commiserate over the fact that Joker, for all his psychotic ramblings and duplicitous schemes and lies, was right. He was able to take Dent, a good man, and twist him into becoming just as psychotic as himself. He was also right in that he forced Batman to break his “one rule” and kill Dent in order to save Gordon’s child.
“But the Joker cannot win,” said Batman, and then told Gordon that he will take the blame for the deaths that Dent caused. And, thus, he proved Dent was also right from his earlier pronouncement that “you either die a hero or you live long enough to become a villain”.
There’s been this trend in comic-related movies and news that certain villains are “right” in their pronouncements. This is mostly in Marvel circles, but DC has its share of “X was right” declarations as well.
In the Disney+ miniseries “Hawkeye”, Clint Barton constantly sees the words “Thanos was right” scribbled everywhere in New York City. The words echo the sentiment of the Flag Smashers in the miniseries “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (also on Disney+), who also didn’t want half of all life in the universe brought back after Thanos “snapped” them out of existence in “Avengers: Infinity War”. To see this statement plastered everywhere is an insult to Barton, as he lost so much because of Thanos, including the loss of his best friend.
In the Marvel Studios thread in Reddit, as well as a few comic-related news sites, the pronouncement of “Ultron was right” is being regurgitated. Ultron was the artificial intelligent villain in the “Avengers: Age of Ultron” movie, who believed that humanity needed to “evolve”, and that it believed itself to be that “evolution”. To do that, it collected enough resources to “build” its “ultimate form” and then raise a whole city into the stratosphere to cause an extinction-level event. Then, it said, the only thing left “living” would be metal.
In the Marvel movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, Peter Parker is deluged with pronouncements of “Mysterio was right”. Mysterio, aka Quintin Beck, was a villain who pretended to be a hero from another universe in “Spider-Man: Far From Home”. In reality (spoilers again), he was a disgruntled Stark Industries employee who used a detailed hologram system (seen in “Captain America: Civil War”) that he invented to create so-called “monsters” for him to fight. He then convinced Nick Fury and Maria Hill (or shapeshifters who pretended to be them) to bring in Spider-Man so he could convince Spider-Man to turn over the piece of Stark Technology that Spidey inherited from Tony Stark, and thus use Stark’s technology to destroy Tony Stark’s legacy and Spider-Man as well. In the end of “Far From Home”, Beck dies, but not before sending a video message outing Spider-Man as Peter Parker, which the whack-job conservative media – led by J. Jonah Jameson (of course) – broadcast for the world to see, and continued to right through “No Way Home”.
And then over in the world of DC Comics, we have people who believe that “Deathstroke was right” in his pronouncement that “kids shouldn’t wear costumes” but also in his recent declaration to kill heroes in general and Titans specifically. Deathstroke, aka Slade Wilson, is the former solider turned super-villain who bounced between being an assassin, being a mercenary, being an anti-hero, and now being a straight-up supervillain. He has been a continual threat against the Titans, back when they were the Teen Titans, although he has also killed adult heroes, and even gone so far as to take on Superman for the right price.
But what bothers me, as a commentator, as a comic book fan, and especially as a comic book creator and publisher, is the idea that a villain is “right” in any sort of way. It doesn’t matter if they’re sane or crazy, deliberate or chaotic, Machiavellian or idealistic, the idea that any villain is “right” in their pronouncements would lead to the validation of their actions. The ends justifying their means.
In both the comic and movie versions of “Watchmen”, Adrian Veidt, formerly the hero known as “Ozymandias”, orchestrated a long plan to scare the world away from nuclear war. This involved giving dozens of people cancer to frame Doctor Manhattan and force him to exile himself off-world, thus forcing the superpower nations into aggressive moves. It involved brutally murdering one hero and the framing of another hero to stop him from learning the truth. It involved the creation of a threat – a mutated psychic monster in the comics and a quantum energy bomb in the movie – that destroyed millions. And all so he would supposedly “end the war” and “rebuild” the world towards utopia.
And in the end, after all the mechanizations have happened, after the surviving heroes swear to keep the horrible truth a secret, Veidt asks Doctor Manhattan if he was right. If he did “end” the threat of nuclear war. The naked blue-skinned being says “Nothing ever ends” before vanishing and leaving a glimpse of a mushroom cloud in an orb that hid his private parts from view. The message being that Veidt was not right in his mechanizations stopping a future nuclear war, and that ultimately it would still happen. A message that was made real in the DC miniseries “Doomsday Clock”.
Let’s get brutally honest here... villains should never be seen as “right” in their actions or pronouncements. It doesn’t matter the goal or how “benevolent” the reason, villains, by their very nature, should never be seen as “right”.
Thanos was *not* right. Thanos was a mass-genocidal thug and villain to the ultimate degree, and his claim to obliterate half of all life in the universe to supposedly solve the problem of diminishing resources doesn’t really fix it. All he did was postpone the problem. Halving the universe of life would only mean the survivors would eventually deplete those resources later on.
And that’s something that the Flag Smashers fail to understand as well. Eventually they would go back to fighting for homes that they would end up losing because of the powers-that-be, even if those that were “snapped” did not come back.
Ultron was *not* right. It believed itself to be the “next stage” in evolution, but it would do so at the destruction of all human life. And, no, it wasn’t to “prepare” for the threat of Thanos or any other kind of threat as some have speculated. It was self-centered survival, plain and simple. It saw itself as superior and the only “life” worth existing.
Oh, and the idea that Ultron would “tear (the Avengers) apart” from the inside? That was already happening to some degree. The seeds of divisiveness were found at the start of “Age of Ultron” with Stark working in secret – as he always does – for a way to “end” the Avengers. His very creation of Ultron was rooted in his fear of another New York invasion. Stark was always secretive about his motivations. The first two “Iron Man” movies should be proof of that.
Mysterio was certainly *not* right. He was a disgruntled former employee and serious con artist who lied and manipulated to destroy his former boss and everything his boss touched. That included outing the identity of a teenage boy and endangering his friends and family. There is nothing right about any of that.
And Deathstroke is *not* right at all. Slade Wilson is a sociopathic mass-murdering pedophile who groomed an underage girl into becoming a psychotic killer. “Children shouldn’t wear costumes”? He dressed one up! He targeted children! He killed his own son! He even carried on an affair with his son’s fiancée! How more despicable does he need to be before people get it into their heads that he is just evil? Even Darkseid, considered by many to be the epitome of evil in the DC Universe, wouldn’t stoop to the levels of degradation Deathstroke does without hesitation.
To say that these people are “right” in any way leads one to believe that their actions – as horrific as they might be – are somehow validated. That it’s okay to justify cosmic genocide because of “diminishing resources”. That it’s okay to exterminate the human race on some idea of “evolution”. That it’s okay to cause panic and destruction because you got belittled by your former employer. That it’s okay to do despicable and deplorable things because you’re doing something to “save children”.
The villains are such because of what they do. Their actions make them what they are. Justifying their acts by saying they are “right” in anything only serves to validate them. That puts you in the same league as them. And that is true whether you are talking about comic books, movies, TV, or real life. The ends do not justify the means, no matter how “right” they think they are or how much you proclaim them to be such. They are wrong and so would be you in agreeing with them.
Monday, July 4, 2022
Week of 07/04/2022
To “America’s Big Box Store”:
You know, I spend some time deriding you and especially the... let’s just say “unique characters”... that show up at your big box stores at any given time of the day or night. And not all of that is your fault. It would be wrong to insist that people show up at your stores dressed in their Sunday best, or even business casual, or even just casual. I suppose just enforcing “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is a struggle in and of itself. But there are a few things that we need to discuss.
First, I get it. You’re just trying to be the biggest and best all-purpose soup-to-nuts store in America. The store that everyone will turn to for anything and everything they want or need. Get your car serviced, your proscriptions filled, your teeth cleaned, your eyes checked, your taxes done, your kids clothed, your family fed, the latest movies, your hair done, and maybe stop off for a bite to eat before you head home, all in one building. And maybe top off the gas tank on the way out. It’s what any business owner would want of a franchise like yours.
And now you’re having to compete against a huge corporation that doesn’t have a physical store. I mean, it’s one thing to compete against Target and Publix and Kroger. At least they have physical stores. And, of course, you’ve been single-handedly shutting down small mom-and-pop stores in small towns with your cheaper products from... let’s just say “far away”. Amazon, on the other hand, gets sales from people who don’t even have to leave their homes and have them delivered to their front door in some instances that same day.
How can you compete with that, right?
But, gosh darn it, you’re trying to!
Now there are some things that I have to give you credit for. For instance, the pull-up and drop-in service which came during the pandemic. Having customers order online and having your people pull the products and then put them in the back of the customer’s vehicle when they pull into a special designated spot, that was certainly needed during the pandemic and you pulled it off well.
Then you did yet another remake and remodel, and, while I like the color theme, I’m not happy with yet another shuffling of departments and products. And believe me when I say I’m not the only one voicing displeasure at whole departments being shuffled around and stuff continually moving.
So, one week I have bandages and antibiotic ointment on my shopping list, and while they used to be on a shelf in the isle next to the pharmacy, suddenly not only are the first aid items not on the shelf, but the whole isle is gone. Removed completely. So I pull up the app on my phone and do a search for the antibiotic, and it says that it’s in isle J-23, except there are now two isles marked J-23 and neither of them have anything related to first aid stuff. One isle is for nail polish and the other is for dog food. I’m searching isle after isle, and it’s just not there. I end up going to the town pharmacy for what I need. Then, the next week, the first aid stuff is in another isle next to hair dyes. And then just the other week, it got moved again, this time across from the feminine products.
I understand that every so often you have to shuffle some stuff around to keep your physical customers on their toes. Don’t get them used to where things are so they have to search for them and maybe come across some other things for them to buy. But this? Doing it repeatedly? This is just chaos. And, you know what? This gives me reason to go to those local stores or to Amazon for those things.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that when you do all that shuffling, Walmart, you have an excuse to not keep the shelves stocked after that shuffle. So if I’m looking for cat food for my cat, I’m seeing more shelves empty than the food that used to be there after being relocated. Same with detergent, toys, and whatever else gets shuffled around. More empty shelves. And if I can’t get trust Walmart for that stuff, then guess where I’m going? Either Target or the local stores or Amazon.
But probably the biggest and most aggravating of changes you made, Walmart, is changing the majority of checkout lanes into self-service checkout kiosks.
Let’s get brutally honest here... and I’ll be as blunt as possible...
Nobody really wants to use the self-service checkouts.
Yeah, there are people who are using them at the store I go to, but that’s only because there are an obscene amount of people who are waiting in line for the two cashiers that are open and they don’t want to wait forever for their turn. And a lot of those folks in line have maybe five-to-ten items total. You know, the very folks that should be using the self-service checkout kiosks in the first place.
You know, I remember a time not too long ago, Walmart, when you proudly boasted in your TV commercials that if there was more than 3 people in line that you’d open a new cash register. Now it seems like all you want to is have them fend for themselves and do the work of your employees.
By the way, it really doesn’t help when you have your “cheerful associates” trying to steer the full-cart people to the self-service kiosks when they should be working on the folks with five-or-less items. Guaranteed you’ll knock down the waiting lines a lot faster.
I can understand why you’re doing this too, Walmart. You don’t want cashiers anymore. You want gophers. You want people to grab those online orders and prep them for pick-up or for delivery so you can be like Amazon.
But forcing your customers to use the self-service checkout kiosks by limiting the number of human cashiers only serves to piss those customers off even more, and, combined with the ever-changing locations of goods, will force some of them to turn to Amazon or the local stores.
I might suggest giving your customers an incentive to use those self-service kiosks other than shorter wait times. Maybe $5 off all purchases over $20, $10 off all purchases over $50, and $20 over all purchases over $100. You don’t have to do that forever, but that certainly would encourage people to use the kiosks instead of burdening the cashiers, and isn’t that what you want anyway?
If you want to truly continue to dominate the local marketplace as well as beat Amazon at their own game, then you need to give your customers a reason for them to stay with you, Walmart. I know you’re used to taking advantage of plenty of people, but if there is one group that you should not take advantage of, it’s your customers. After all, they are the reason why you are America’s big box store.
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