What Could You Get Away With

No. Seriously. Dear worst-reader. What could you get away with if there were no rules? For don’t you know, just the other day, I came across something that blew my mind. It was about getting away with things. Or was it about there being no rules (in life)? Nomatter. While scanning the news and perhaps listening to a podcast here or there, a rational human, who is proficient in the ways of the dark-arts better known as Economics, was going on and on about Neoliberalism. Out of the blue he said something along the lines of: Neo-liberals aren’t so much about small government and deregulation but instead they are about authoritarian government and re-regulation. Hold the presses! What did I just hear? Re-regulation…what? Talk about being thrown for a loop.

Yeah, I worst-thought. That’s it. That’s the word-game-link I’ve been missing for years regarding all worst-thought about what it is that makes/facilitates my beloved & missed #Americant, the land of FREE TO BE STUPID, post Ronald Reagan. #Americant politics in my life-time has never been about cutting and/or reducing government but instead it’s been about increasing it, infiltrating it in the name of a certain ideology, and then making it stealth so that an already dumb downed public won’t know the difference here or there as moneyed grubbers and their ilk get on about bidness that rides on the backs of others. And then, after they’ve done all that, thanks to the likes of Limbaugh and faux-newz, there is no such thing as deregulate, but there is/has been lots of re-regulate. Get it? No? It’s ok. Go back to your couch. A bag of chips is waiting. A favourite tv show! Or run off to your favorite third-world country where you can abuse women younger and stupider than you because, well, you’ve got a dollar or three in your pocket–and your mortgages are being paid by the military industry complex.

And that’s not what I wanted to get-on about today, dear worst-reader. Or is it? No. Today we want to get-on about some tech krapp–that is, perhaps, related in someway to re-regulation galore. Specifically, let’s have a go with smart-tech. For don’t you know, dear worst-reader, smart-tech ain’t and has never been what some may think it is. At the least it ain’t smart. Look where it’s from? It’s from the land of… that’s right. Regulate or deregulate or… Wait for it. Re-regulate. Indeed. The greed $hit$how that is my beloved and missed united mistakes of #Americant, in desperation to find more and more and easier and easier profits, is always hastily hoping to find the next hit, the next wunderkind, another Steve Jobs, albeit one without all the drugs, and in doing so, mega-unearned-profits ooze out of the ether like a stupid man’s religion.

Anywho.

In the last ten or twelve years I’ve consumed two refrigerators. Wait. Is that right? Yes. I’m on my second fridge which I bought within the last ten years. I think my mother has a fridge that is well over twenty years old. Nomatter. The first fridge I bought was an LG standalone¹ fridge. It was a piece of shit. But it had some bells & whistles. You know. It had a water dispenser, a special beer rack, and an ice maker that would deliver three types of ice: whole, crushed or ice with smiley faces. The problem with the fancy fridge, though, was that within a year it started leaking at the bottom. I put up with it for a few years while having to put a towel underneath it to soak up the leak. And while it ruined the wood floors it stood on, I cursed it and this consume-to-survive life of hell I’m forced to live in. After that I bought a Liebherr fridge. It has no frills or bells and whistles but works great–and it doesn’t leak. So hang on a sec as I try to bring this post around to a cohesive subject.

Anywho.

Anyone remember that smart-fridge with the Windows 8 screen on the front door? I remember staring at the thing while buying that piece-of-shit LG fridge. “This can’t be good,” I thought as the sales guy pitched me about a fridge being a IoT device for the home. “You want this thing to hook up to my home wifi,” I asked. “Sure,” was his response. Little did he know that I had worked at the end of the Dotcom boom for a company that created a tool that allowed online retailers to parse URLs and thereby alleviate the need for cookies and still track users. Wonder what happened to that company. Nomatter. And let me not even get into the experience of buying my last flatscreen TV and how I tried to tell a salesman to stop trying to sell it as a “smart” device. “There’s no such thing as a “smart” device,” I said. “And IoT is gonna bomb,” I added. Yeah, the lie of IoT sucks as much as IoT sucks. Which brings me to…

I’ve solved both my fridge and TV problem. How? I bought devices that are not “smart”. But then the “smart” speaker thing hit. Or were you not impressed with Sonos when it first hit the market, dear worst-reader? I was most certainly impressed. Reason? I was sick & tired of multi-speaker surround systems. I had fiddled with them for years. More on that here. The main reason I never bought Sonos, though, was simple. IoT sucks! And. As soon as I looked at the software controlling the Sonos speakers, I knew it wasn’t for me. Like the smart-fridge or the smart-TV, these things are not in a anyway regulated and yet they are a total and complete compromise to my home network system. Above and beyond that, I have absolutely no control over the software that makes them work. I’ve long since adopted open source in my life. But that’s another worst-post.

Anywho.

Not only was Sonos charging delusional prices for stuff that should have cost a third their price, there is no waaaaaaay that they would be able to maintain the software if they were creating a device that was supposed to compete (mimic) what someone would/could own for half a life time. I’m worst-writing, of course, about the product life span of speakers and stereo systems. Obviously Sonos put marketing before product. It probably also thought it could mimic Steve Jobs’ success with having done the same thing. But. Again. The problem is, playing with computers isn’t the same as sitting down and listening to music. Sonos tried to make something smart that was already way beyond the marketing hype. Long story short. I knew at the get-go from Sonos that it would have a problem in the future maintaining speakers as it also tried to improve the customer experience. Lo and behold, Sonos recently announced that its solution for that experience. Again. Dear worst-reader. We are at a cross-road of forced corporate obsoletism.

Indeed. This is what happens when sales guys run the greed $hit$how. Or am I the only one to have given up on Microsoft as soon as that whack-job took over after Bill Gates? Nomatter. Although Sonos was/is a great idear, it was/is doomed to fail on account, well, the software that makes those speakers function sucks bat-balls.

1. All proprietary software sucks²
2. Updating upgrading hardware software = can only lead to forced obsoletism of older devices³
3. What do you do when competition starts to kick your ass?⁴
4. To this day Sonos speakers can’t play FLAC files⁵.

Worst-writing about companies that are run into the ground because ship builders shouldn’t sail ships–or–sailors shouldn’t build ships… Here’s yet another example of it. Boy am I glad I never bought Sonos speakers. Lesson to be learned? You betcha! Can anyone say Boeing?

Anywho.

Rant on.

-T

Links:
– https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51206604
– https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/23/sonos-to-deny-software-updates-to-owners-of-older-equipment