Different highs, mostly.
Also being a teenager; discrimination about how exactly to get wasted is not a high priority. I mean, we huffed chloroform for light entertainment. Effectively any drug was open season. We tried snorting nutmeg (mystrecin, precursor to MDMA), and morning glory seeds (lysergic acid amide)
Spoiler: formaldehyde is toxic
It may have been upthread, or on the radio, but I heard someone point out the better way is to keep the subscription, since it loses money anyway, and avoid using Amazon, which actually does make Bezos rich.
That works, assuming we come out the other side okay.
The people who lived during the Dark Ages took scant comfort that long after their lives had run their course the following centuries were better.
We can hope this is a couple-year bout of temporary insanity before the general public realizes what they did and the bums are dethroned before they can lock themselves into the palace. OTOH …
The Ayatollah took over from the Shah in 1979. The bulk of the Iranian people have wanted a regime change back to mostly-secular rule for most of the 45 years since then. It’s probably still 40 years in their future.
Lots of stuff is far easier to break than to repair.
While I’ve made that argument and both of those statements are ostensibly true, the reality is that a million objectors could cancel their Amazon Prime subscription without making a measurable dent in the company’s bottom line (the free shipping is actually a ‘loss leader’ for Amazon which is intended to compel subscribers to buy more stuff to make the membership ‘worth it’), and cancelling Washington Post subscriptions really just hurts the staff trying to put out (mostly) good journalism; The Post as been a cash loser for Bezos since he purchased it in 2013 and it is really just a vanity purchase and (presumably) a tax writeoff.
Stranger
@Stranger_On_A_Train and @OldOlds I understand, but I can no longer support a so-called newspaper I can’t trust to be truthful. Someone else will get my clicks. I am trying to wean myself from Amazon, but that’s hard. And Bezos probably makes more profit from the share of AWS GovCloud fees that my taxes pay than from my purchases. I just can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing and hope things will change.
That makes sense. I first read this as keeping the Amazon Prime subscription and not using it, which was incomprehensible (you’re giving Bezos money and not getting anything for it). Then I re-read. Believe it or not, I always got EXCELLENT grades for reading comprehension in school, LOL.
I’ve actually started looking elsewhere for purchases when I can, to at least reduce Amazon usage. I recently bought a few kitchen items from WalMart - they have a similar selection, all in all, nothing I needed “2 days from now”, and one item was about half the price it was at Amazon (in fact, last time I bought that item, from Amazon, it arrived in a WalMart box!!).
I’m debating whether to renew our Prime membership next month (I’m “the Mrs”). For shipping, WalMart’s plan (100/year) is cheaper but has fewer add-on benefits like videos. Their plan was half off in November - sorta sorry I didn’t jump on that then. WalMart is really the only viable competitor in terms of “everything under one virtual roof” - plus you can get a LOT of their merchandise same day pickup.
I did cancel my Audible membership - which I’d been meaning to do anyway, but the endorsement gave me an incentive to remember to do so. Then they offered me 3 months for 0.99 a month plus a 20 dollar credit, and they had me again. I feel dirty.
I can’t control other Amazon income streams (e.g. they use AWS for some of my work projects).
We’ve kept our New York Times subscription - I started that back in 2020. They seem sane so far.
Going back to the whole “won’t endorse” thing: it makes sense taking a broader view - WaPo is pretty influential and one could make an argument that they shouldn’t influence such a critical election. But that would be a lot more easy to believe if they had done so many months in advance - I could chalk that up to journalistic integrity.
To be honest, I’m quickly approaching the point of cancelling my Washington Post subscription (and cancelled the New York Times after they doubled down on not apologizing for having promoted the “Iraq has yellowcake/WMDs” stories that Bush/Cheney used to draw us into that war). I’ve cancelled Amazon Prime and minimized my purchases through Amazon (for what that is worth), and…well, that’s about it. It’s really more a point of satisfying myself that I’m not directly supporting any of these creeps even though it makes fuck-all difference and they’re getting my tax dollars through contracts and federal subsidies regardless.
Stranger
I just never thought that the media would capitulate so quickly. You hear all these stories of braves journalists opposing oppressive regimes. I understand that people don’t want to go to jail or be sued but I somehow didn’t think that the American media would proactively capitulate to an authoritarian government. This is how dictatorships gain power and I just had more faith in America.
Those brave journalists elsewhere, the WaPo of Woodward and Berstein and Deep Throat, or the NYT of the Pentagon Papers, are not the same thing as what’s out there today in the American press.
Most of the people with that mentality have long since retired or been laid off as the legacy media outfits have become shadows of what they were. OTA or cable TV channels and print papers are generally considered to be on the ropes anyway vs. “new media” and feel they can’t afford to become targets for finishing off. And the big “new media”, for all their vaunted valuation “on paper”, are acutely conscious most of that value is up in the cloud and can evaporate in a round of bad news – and that for all their free market talk, the RWingers will not hesitate to weaponize the regulators and the taxman to make that happen.
When Bezos bought WaPo it became just a matter of time for when it would be hobbled to protect the interests of Amazon/Blue Origin/Bezos personally. People just did not expect that it would be this way.
It’s not the journalists (mostly); it is the billionaire owners and corporate interests who are falling all over themselves to comply in advance because they want to be the first at the trough. It is characteristic of incipient autocratic and fascist regimes that unscrupulous people want to get in on the ground floor to share in the spoils.
Stranger
Don’t remember the Bush administration?
Colbert nailed it in 2006.
Stranger
And, with all the online and partisan outlets, politicians don’t need a hostile press to get their message out. Which means the press needs to play nice or they’ll never get another interview.
I can’t tell you how many times I find myself yelling obvious follow-up questions at the radio, questions the interviewer doesn’t ask
And now, this bullshit from the Editorial Board:
“Which of Trump’s nominees should get confirmed? We made a chart.”
Correct answer: none of them, but especially not professional motivational speaker Scott Turner for HUD, lobbyist and TV personality Sean Duffy for Transportation, wife of WWE owner Linda McMahon for Education, and boastful dog-killer Kristi Noem for Homeland Security. What is the point of this “thumbs up/down” list other than to normalize the extreme deviance of Trump in putting wholly unqualified people in Cabinet-level roles? By comparison, in the past The Post has presented more detailed backgrounds for Cabinet nominees without making any specific evaluations or endorsements, which I thought we weren’t doing, Jeff, because we don’t want the paper to be seen as biased, right?
Subscription gets cancelled today.
Stranger
Maddow has started a Public Servant Announcement series on MSNBC, saying since the Senate isn’t going to be vetting Trump’s cabinet picks she might as well do it. On YT each is a 10 or 12 minute video with 5 or 6 “things you should know” about the proposed pick. You can search for public servant announcement maddow or there’s a playlist on the MSNBC channel.
I find Rachel Maddow generally kind of tedious because she just seems to repeat the same obvious points over and over again as if she doesn’t trust her audience to get what she is saying but this certainly sounds more worthwhile than whatever it is the Washington Post is doing here; a full quarter of their list is just a nominees name, the department they will oversee, and not even a single sentence blurb. To call this half-assed is an offense to half-assers everywhere.
Stranger
Unable to read without creating an account.
Sorry, here is a guest link:
https://wapo.st/405btSQ
Stranger
Thanks for trying, but that says I have to create an account to redeem my free link.