Fuck you, Jeff. I’m halfway tempted to call and start a subscription request and then cancel it halfway through before you get a dime. And also, fuck you.
Meanwhile…
Hopefully, it’s because so many are canceling.
Bezos has been losing money on the Post since he bought it in 2013. It was always a vanity project, and now it is something that can embarrass him to our fascist overlords if he doesn’t reign it in, first from an editorial standpoint and doubtless by curating news content. Might as well not waste your time fucking with them; they clearly don’t care about subscribers.
Stranger
He always did; he was just better adjusted mentally.
I don’t know what the magic number is, but there is probably some dollar amount, some point beyond which super rich people start becoming post-human and start believing in their own mythology, their own greatness, their own ability to marshal resources…to design, develop, and implement complex systems. They stop relating to people, become bored with their money, and it stops being about the money and all about their power to impose their will on people to make some vision they have, no matter how batshit unnecessary it is, into reality.
One or a handful of these jerkoffs is probably something civilization can withstand, but when they multiply, they start taking up all the oxygen in the room. Pretty soon the rest of us struggle to breathe.
Am going to have to rethink my association with Amazon and Whole Foods as well. Whole Foods? That’s easy - there’s Trader Joes and Costco. Amazon’s admittedly tougher to break up with. Too easy to drunk-text on a Friday night.
Yeah, Amazon and whole foods are the hard ones to drop.
I just cancelled my WaPo subscription, too. I’m sad. It was a good newspaper, and it still has a few good journalists. But fewer than it used to, and i expect they will be muzzled.
There is another new thread mostly about the Bezos/Washington Post change:
Ugh. This finally got me to cancel my subscription.
As I said in November, not having a WaPo subscription I let my Amazon Prime membership expire. It’s been tough but so far (knock wood) I haven’t spent a dime there, shipping fees or no.
Whole foods is easier as the closest one to me is eight miles away in a direction I don’t often go.
Meanwhile, a company that sells tractors and fashion accessories for rednecks is now officially more woke than the entire billionaire class.
The guy has So. Much. Fucking. Money. that this may very well be a Bezos obeisance to The Great Orange Keister in Washington.
Which – for most of us – would be tantamount to writing an annual check for about $250.
“For whom much is given, much is required.”
And if Jeffie helps take Democracy down in the process? Well … "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible*, n’est-ce pas?
Boycotts that are easy are ineffective boycotts. It’s only when people commit to a significant change in how they spend their money that boycotts have a real effect.
We dropped Amazon Prime last year, and our orders have gone from a couple a month down to a couple a year (when we really can’t find another source for something). It’s definitely doable, but takes some mental readjustment.
I dropped it (for being American) and you know what? I don’t miss it at all. Don’t miss Facebook or Twitter, either.
I know some extremely wealthy people from my time in Private Equity (I am not one of them; I was their servant) and every single one of them puts their wealth first. Tax cuts and/or less regulation is all you need to say to get their vote. The rest of your platform could be kicking puppies and they would not care.
I like their news reporting, but we dropped the subscription back when they basically endorsed the current SCROTUS.
I was getting notifications on my phone (I hadn’t deleted the app) and it would offer to re-up me for 2 dollars a month for the first year (or I could prepay for the whole year… interestingly, that cost more than the per-month cost!).
I deleted the app yesterday.
NY Times for me, now (which is unfortunate, as WaPo is the local paper).
On the rare occasions the lottery jackpot gets really high, I buy a ticket and dream about what I’d do.
If I was to win some monster $50 million jackpot - in Canada they just give you the money right away, no taxes - you know what I’d do? Of course I’d get a lawyer and be careful about it, square funds away in various places and countries to be very safe. Id’ give some to my sister and Mom. But what I’d do with half of that is I’d start a charitable foundation. I’d have the lawyers help me set that up, and then distributing those funds to worthy causes - food banks, women’s shelters, helping the homeless - would be my job. I’d happily do that until the day I die. I wouldn’t bother taking credit for it. I want no plaques, no bricks with my name of it, no honors, no luncheons. I’d hardly even tell anyone what I was doing. It would make me so happy. I could look in the mirror every morning and think “there is a man I am, at least to some extent, very content to be.”
I don’t understand the mentality of a person with a huge amount of money who ISN’T helping others. I just do not get that, it completely doesn’t square in my brain. It’s like if there were people who sincerely believed 2+2 equalled 38.9. And I do know there are rich people who DO give the cash away, but I cannot grasp there are those who don’t.
But looking at the likes of Jeff Bezos, I think, maybe they USED to be human. Maybe, flawed though they must be for we are all flawed, as obvious as it is that the big oligarchs right now are men with really fragile masculinity, they were once people, but having too much money makes you go insane.
FWIW, In 2022, Bezos pledged to give away most of his $124 billion fortune before he died. We’ll see if he reneges on this commitment like he reneged on not interfering editorially with Wapo but he’s at least at one point signalled that intention.
Never mind, and thank you for the edit.
In the last six months I’ve canceled WaPo, gotten off the FB main platform (but am keeping Messenger because that’s where an event I attend is coordinated), and ended my Xitter account.
My wife and I are looking at Amazon now, and that will be tougher. Amazon Music is my main streaming source, the five of us spend thousands of dollars there every year, we have Echos all 'round the house, and we watch a lot of Amazon video content.
So, we’re thinking about it, but I don’t know yet.