Category: Rants and More Rants

Eventually it happens. Your perfectly functioning, twenty-year-old TV becomes obsolete. When it was born it was state-of-the-art. Great color. Big screen. A remote that had the channels, the volume control and the all-important mute button. There were other buttons but they were never pushed. No need. The game is on. Let’s make some popcorn. But that old SONY is not “smart.” It does not connect to the internets. Out with the old. In with the new. A rather large Smart TV is but $200 these days. A pleasant but rather laconic young gentleman at Best Buy will get you all set up. Bring in your old set. They will recycle it for free.

The new model is a Samsung. A very nice picture and when turned on greets you with an assortment of options for entertainment that would leave you with no time to bathe, sleep or go to work. YouTube. Netflix, Hulu, Disney, AppleTV – just for starters. Anything seems possible on this thing but as time goes by you realize that you begin to feel like Humphry Bogart in the African Queen, hacking your way with a machete out of the swamp, picking leaches off your back, regretting that Kathern Hepburn dumped out all that fine gin into the river. There is no way to easily control the menu items. No way to get rid of things you will never use. New things are marketed to you like you are in a Vegas casino. Go for broke. Roll the dice. Various shows you have no interest in automatically play while you try to figure out the search features. The voice activation only works with the proper remote (not included in the box). When you do click on a “platform” you get a spinning icon with a bunch of blue juggling balls. This can go on for a 10 to 40 seconds until things load. Evidently intelligence takes time. Could I have purchased the Moderately Smart TV? Did she graduate from Smart TV University? What were her grades by the way? And what is strange is that simply playing a slideshow of your Google Photos Album is next to impossible. Once you get it working, you realize that it only plays in portrait mode. No bueno.

After a few months, I began to reminisce about the old TVs. The ones with tubes, dials and knobs. As a user you were in complete control of these beasts. Finding your show was instantaneous and automatic. UHF, VHF. Two dials and you had your channels memorized. You could turn the dial and “bamm” you were there. If the picture got fuzzy or began to float up and down, usually a swift angry bang on the side of the box would fix the matter. Was is great? No. Did the technology work? Most of the time quite well. Was it smart? Seemingly more intelligent than many of the current models.

Recently Cory Doctorow came up with the term “enshittification” for the three-stage process whereby online platforms become progressively worse for users as companies prioritize profits. The companies lock customers in, often simply by controlling their personal connections and address book and then they begin selling more ads and littering your channel. To this observer, the new “Smart TVs” are really no different. Users get locked in, then they start selling subscriptions. In some ways this “enshittification” has been going on for a long time. I remember when cable TV first started, the big sell was no ads! That did not last long. Like cable TV your Amazon Prime subscription now lets you watch many movies with this same caveat: there are ads.

Many years ago, in the 1980s, out of pity, we were given a little fourteen inch black and white model. We watched Star Trek Next Generation on that thing. Jean Luc Picard took on the Borg and came out with his brain still intact.  Joe Montana made amazing fourth quarter drives, winning games with seconds left on that box. Somehow that fourteen inch screen was larger than life. The old black and white movies, late at night on Channel 9, obviously looked authentic. And when you had had enough, all you had to do is get out of your chair and turn the knob that controlled the volume counter-clockwise all the way to the left. You heard a decisive click and the screen would flash for a second and disappear. No one knew you had turned the dial. All was quiet. I miss knobs.

At one point it seemed that when you watched sports on television all you saw were either car commercials, truck commercials, insurance company commercials or fast food commercials. Everyone seemed to need both a Ford F150 truck towing off-terrain vehicles and of course – a Big Mac, fries and super-sized Coke. Some gravel road in a mythical mountain scenery with junk food trash strewn around the floor of your vehicle was the idea of nirvana. Those ads have not exactly gone away but now about a third of the commercials seem to be for pharmaceuticals whos names are as forgettable as they are sometimes impossible to pronounce.  Are these the new Greek gods of our era? “Dear Camzyos. Must I have this splitting headache for days? Ask my doctor?” Of course, at some point during the ads you get the warning about side effects. These always include nausea and dizziness, anxiety, diarrhea, muscle aches and frequently unfortunate side effects, things like death.  Oh well. Mortality has arrived, but at least my eczema cleared up and my poops were fine.

During the MLB Playoffs and World Series I have been keeping track of all the drugs advertised. Below is my running list. Remember to ask your doctor, provider or now prescriber about the list below and whether you need any of them.

Calquence – ask your doctor
Camzyos – ask your doctor
Dupixent – skin medicine
Ebdyss – skin medicine
Entyvio – ulcerative colitis
Keytruda – cancer
Panvorya – ask your doctor
Pluvicto – prostate
Ro – weight loss, Serina Williams endoresed
Skyrizi – chrons disease
Sublicade – opioid dependence
Tremphya – ulcerative colitis
Vandos – In the pursuit of happiness (this is a pharmaceutical company)
wegovy – weight loss
Xiafra – eye medicine

The irony of this advertising on such a large stage is that we live in an age of targeted advertising. Online we see ads dependent on what web sites we have visited and what products are in our “carts.” That a company has such deep pockets with niche “products” to buy ads in the expensive World Series market says something about the chicanery in our healthcare system. Health insurance premiums are going up.  Soon, many people will not have health insurance at all. Sorry for the buzz-kill folks. It may be time to pop a few Vandos.

We live in a time when everyone is a customer. People are no longer citizens, patients or students.

People do not see themselves as citizens. Sacrifices are just for suckers. Many people voted for Donald Trump because they liked his brand and product and did not like Harris’s laugh. They chose a president like they would toilet paper. They identified with his selfishness and saw themselves or a version of themselves.  Rich, selfish, scatterbrained, pugnacious, white, demanding and full of ego. Game the system. Look out for number one. Greed is the new virtue.

The health care world no longer has patients. Now they are customers. “Would you like a pill for that problem? On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level? After the visit, please fill out this survey to let us know how we are doing.” It is not about health care but more about money.  Customer satisfaction is our goal! Oh. Sorry about that opioid epidemic and all those dead people. We got them hooked on those funny pills.

In universities people are no longer students. If a professor can no longer entertain the class, she gets bad reviews. Make students read books. You must be out of your mind! With the advent of the cellphone, the majority of students go to college having never read a single book from cover to cover. I brought this up online about five years and the parents got quite defensive. It has just gotten worse.

No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Hilarius Bookbinder Mar 31 Guest post – Persuasion Newsletter

The student is now a customer. Anything that makes them uncomfortable and they simply do not show up. An opposing point of view? An angle that is perhaps rarely seen? Reading that is difficult with big words? Learning to expand the mind? No. Sorry. I am here because if I get this degree it will hopefully mean I will not have to work in fast food, microwaving hamburgers for the next thirty years.

The irony is that we live in a world when in past times you were actually a customer. Gas stations pumped your gas. Baggers in grocery stores were common. A travel agent would make sure you got the right flights when things got complicated. When you called a company for information, you could actually talk to a real person. Maybe now we are often just disgruntled customers.

Keep it small and in the neighborhood. That’s what I say.

That is my rant for today. I am sticking with it.