Splendid Isolation

Category: Corporate Fuckery

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.

Hooray– Oh, Wait

Bureaucracy, Corporate Fuckery, Gummint, Health

Here’s some good news:

Drugs used to treat cancer, diabetes and other chronic conditions are among 15 picked for negotiations that could result in lower prices for patients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Friday.

The 15 drugs selected by HHS are all covered under Medicare Part D and represent the second round of negotiations between drug companies and the department, with a goal of lowering costs for Medicare patients.

And the good news:

Popular diabetes drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, which are also used for weight loss are among the 15 announced Friday.

Hooray!  Let me tell you, as one who has to take Ozempic for diabetes (at $60 per shot per week), this is welcome.

But wait!  There’s more!

Negotiations between the government agency and drug companies will take place this year with any agreed upon price changes taking effect in 2027.

…by which time I could be dead.  How nice.  Even better:

Drug manufacturers can choose whether or not to enter negotiations with the government for a collective price for Medicare patients.

Any bets as to who will decline the offer?

Snoops

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Surveillance Society

Yeah, don’t fuck mess with Texas:

Texas has sued insurance provider Allstate, alleging that the firm and its data broker subsidiary used data from apps like GasBuddy, Routely, and Life360 to quietly track drivers and adjust or cancel their policies.

Allstate and Arity, a “mobility data and analytics” firm founded by Allstate in 2016, collected “trillions of miles worth of location data” from more than 45 million people, then used that data to adjust rates, according to Texas’ lawsuit. This violates Texas’ Data Privacy and Security Act, which requires “clear notice and informed consent” on how collected data can be used. A statement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the suit is the first-ever state action targeting comprehensive data privacy violations.

How so?

According to Texas’ complaint (PDF), the data collected included “a phone’s geolocation data, accelerometer data, magnetometer data, and gyroscopic data, which monitors details such as the phone’s altitude, longitude, latitude, bearing, GPS time, speed, and accuracy.”

With that data—plus, in some cases, data from connected vehicles—Allstate could see when, how far, and for how long someone was driving, along with “hard braking events” and “whether a consumer picked up or opened their phone while traveling at certain speeds.”

Texas’ lawsuit claims that Arity incentivized—through “generous bonus incentives”—apps like GasBuddy, a gas price-tracking app, and Life360, which is intended to keep tabs on family members’ location, to “increas[e] the size of their dataset.” Under their agreements with app makers, Arity had “varying levels of control over the privacy disclosures and consent language” shown to app users, according to the complaint.

And now for the doublespeak:

“Arity helps consumers get the most accurate auto insurance price after they consent in a simple and transparent way that fully complies with all laws and regulations.”

But they’re not the only villains in this piece:

The suit also cites Allstate as gathering direct car use data from Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram vehicles.

And if these assholes shared data with Allstate, you can bet your house that they did so with other insurance companies too.

If you’re not into letting corporations do this to you:

…you may want to avoid any dealings at all with these bastards.  It’s not like Stellantis (Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati) are reporting a boom in sales, after all.

When the Texans win their suit, at it should, I would argue against fines because those bastards will just pass the cost into their customers and claim a tax deduction at worst.

What I would do as TxAG is get a list of all Texans with Allstate policies, and demand that Allstate provide free insurance to them for a period of time commensurate with the start date of Arity’s snoopery.

I know, that would just cause Allstate to cease operations in Texas.  That’s fine, too — take away access to the second-largest pool of drivers in the U.S.

Degradation

Corporate Fuckery, Eco-Crap, Engineering, Resistance, Two-Minute Hate

When I first moved to the U.S. back in the mid-80s, I was impressed by how well things worked.  I mean, you have to understand that all around the world — such as in Third World countries like Zimbabwe, India and Italy — things often just do not work as one would expect them to.  Whether it’s because they are badly made, or badly assembled, or just operated by fucking idiots (try doing a relatively simple thing like booking a flight out of Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport — which isn’t even in Rome but miles and miles out on the coast, a story for another time) and you’ll soon see that not much works as originally intended.

I am also familiar with concepts such as planned obsolescence, where corporations deliberately design products that will eventually fail or fall to pieces so that you will be forced into buying a new one as a replacement.

But there’s another factor in stuff not working, and this is the one which really, really sets my teeth on edge, and it’s embodied by an appliance which is common in households all over the U.S.:  the dish washing machine, or dishwasher.

When I first came over, I fell in live with the  dishwasher, because I had never owned one.  Most families in South Africa didn’t, either because they had Black servants to hand wash the dishes, or they were too poor to afford such expensive (and they were expensive) machines.

But these GE/Frigidaire/Whirlpool dishwashers?  Oh man, there were great.  You piled your dishes in, coated with caked-on gravy or food particles or whatever, added a little detergent, and switched the thing on.  All sorts of magic would happen behind the closed door, and when the thing stopped running, you waited about ten minutes and then opened the door, and there were your dishes:  clean, dry and warm (maybe even still hot) to the touch.

And that was it.

Sadly, that is no longer the case.

Now, you have to pretty much hand wash the dishes first, or at least rinse them into near-cleanliness before loading them into the dishwasher, then do the same stuff as above and then, when the buzzer sounds or a light goes on, you open the door to find that your dishes are not completely clean, still wet or at best damp, and in fact, many times you will have to rinse them off and do the whole fucking thing all over again — with no guarantee that the outcome will be any different.

And why is this?

Because the dirty fingers of government have been stuck into the operation.  Thanks to an excess of Green zealotry, dishwashers can’t use as much water as they used to so the spray can’t be as fierce (and effective), and the heating element has been turned from its furnace-like operation into something that wouldn’t keep you warm on a cool autumn day if you gripped it in your fist.

Our dishwashers, in short, have been turned from appliances that once worked perfectly at their intended function into flabby little things that are the equivalent of convict labor:  surly, unproductive and unreliable.

There’s no point in complaining about this because Green Worship has become so ingrained in our culture that anyone daring to rail against the Great God EnergySmart (blessings be upon its name) might well face severe sanction and even penalties.

Such as happened to my friend Patterson when he rewired his 2015-model dishwasher to 1980 specs and made it work properly.  Me, I’m too stupid to do something like that, and too old to want to kick against the pricks in that manner.

So my private little rebellion against this nonsense is that I just wash my dishes again and again until they are as clean as I want them to be.  (I do the same with my low-flow-low-use low-efficiency toilet, which requires two and sometimes three flushes to take care of the old #2 bowel movement discharge, and has been know to rise to five, after a particularly stupendous roast beef dinner.)

Or I power-rinse my dishes with steaming-hot water before loading them, using twice as much electricity (via the water heater) as I would have used to run the dishwasher if it was working properly.

End result:  I use twice or three times as much water and much more electricity to wash my dishes as I would have in 1986.

And all this just so I can have clean dishes to put away in the cupboard.  Or else I do my part for the environment by using paper plates which don’t need washing and just end up in the landfill.

I know this sounds like a really pointless and futile gesture, doesn’t it?  But it’s far less ummm radical than, say, were I to assassinate the CEO of Whirlpool or the politicians responsible for turning once-efficient U.S. products into pathetic Third World failures.

Isn’t it?