ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 97

As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselessness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Here is a minor but odd data point.

I recently went to rent a carpet shampoo machine but three different places had no usable machines. Inquiring, I learned that Rug Doctor, the company that franchises many retail store-based carpet cleaner rentals in the US, was recently acquired by some holding company that stopped all maintenance services for the machines, hence their disrepair.

The result of a staffing shortage? I've also seen other subtle but noticeable drops in the reliability of different services. Having to call someplace a dozen times to get through to someone who seems to have no idea what they're doing, that sort of thing. Is anyone else noticing this kind of thing?

Oh yes, I have to call many times to get anything done these days. And they don't call back. It seems worse then just a year ago.

Yes, I have noticed it myself-- my bank has become impossible to deal with for any problem their online interface can't handle (and there are a lot of those), and calling gets a convoluted telephone tree and ultimately, a call center employee in India who has no idea how to solve the problem, whatever the problem is.

Have also heard myriad complaints in the same vein from family and friends: can no longer contact tech support on the phone, can't get a rep on the phone who knows anything (maybe can't get through the telephone tree at all, and often voicemail boxes are full), the local branch office still exists, and still has employees, but now their lobby is locked and there are no in-person services.

I don't know if that represents a labor shortage, or if there's more to it. TBH, I think there's a bigger-picture thing going on that we are just seeing little glimpses of-- I wonder if it is related to the news items popping up, with companies like Budweiser, Target, Cracker Barrel, etc going and willingly alienating large portions of their customer base by swearing public fealty to wokedom. It's like the entire mega-corporate world, that seemed like an un-stoppable juggernaut back in the 80s and 90s when it was all "main street/mom and pop" Davids vs. the Big Box Goliaths. And now... something freaky is happening with the Goliaths. They're not invincible after all. Are they sappuku-ing themselves? Are they rotted in the trunk and sprouting mushrooms? Are they forest bears who've contracted rabies and are going irrational before dying? It feels like some clearings are about to open up in the commercial landscape.

At any rate, I've maintained an account with my hometown credit union since I was a child. And even though I have to do any banking with them by mail, in the slowest most low-tech possible way, because they have no branch locations where I live... I've always been able to reach an actual person in the actual bank, on the phone, when I needed to. And that person probably knows my mom. That is becoming more valuable every day, and from what I hear, more and more people are seeking out such institutions and are willing to pay more to deal with them, because everything else has become some kind of electronic purgatory when anything goes wrong.

Those are fascinating conjectures, methylethyl, thank you.

As to hanging on for dear life to any service that still has "faces" involved in its delivery - gosh, yes!

"I think there's a bigger-picture thing going on that we are just seeing little glimpses of"

Yeah, FUBAR* customer service, medical "experts" who are usually wrong, my new fridge that doesn't work right; all these things seem to rhyme.

That's why I don't buy the conspiracy theories about the recent madness. Everyone's putting all their chips on hypercomplex systems that break down in ways that afford no explanation. Of course the result is a pandemic response that just makes everything worse!

Sawdust

*I think this term comes from WWII; it's probably a general property of complex systems, which we just have so much more of nowadays.

My sibling is an appliance repairman, and I hear a lot of this from him-- it's becoming more difficult to get any kind of customer service from the appliance companies, over the phone. The parts companies are having supply-chain issues and are also getting more difficult to contact. And the appliances themselves, as they get more high-tech, are also declining in quality and lifespan. It's just a bad idea to put a delicate circuitboard into a device whose purpose is to generate *heat*-- such as an oven, stove, clothes-dryer, or even a dishwasher. Eventually, the heat fries the circuit-board, and often the circuit-board costs most of the price of the appliance. The more recent trend is high-end "retro" appliances (think stoves/ovens), that have no circuitboards and all-manual controls (no digital readouts or buttons). That exists now because people are willing to pay *more* for it.

https://bigchill.com/collections/retro.aspx

There's also a growing market for actual antique appliances that've been repaired, repainted, and restored, like these:

https://www.retrostoveandgasworks.com/for-sale

Hilarious story on YouTube of a guy with high end, home automation recently. He had Alexa and Amazon controlling most aspects of his home.

Of course, we all want Amazon, Google et al monitoring our conversations and controlling our homes - progress at its finest!

Anyway, Alexa heard him say something that it interpreted as racist, so it shut down his whole home.

Cracked me up.

Seen the rise in retro appliances and the usual suspects calling for their being outlawed due to “the environment.”

Speaking of the call for "retro appliances" to be outlawed...

The grinch will be very happy this Christmas in Ireland, due to all the chimneys that have been blocked off and or removed entirely, as part of "environmental retrofitting" policies. Although it does make sense to add insulation to houses to stop heat escaping to save energy waste, it does not make sense to take out stoves and fireplaces on the basis that electricity will *always* be available to provide heat with.

Oh, yes.

Let me get a bit tangential and say that there's a sense in which everything that has happened has shown that worldviews have real consequences.

If you spend too much time on the internet engaging in petty arguing, it can be easy to forget this. But what we've seen is that your worldview on things like whether to trust authority figures really had very serious life consequences for you over the past several years.

And it bears on the economy. I don't know how interested folks are in the economy and so forth, but if you don't follow that topic, I can assure you that there are talking heads telling us "the economy is fine because unemployment is low."

They don't get it that one reason unemployment is low is that so many people are missing from the workforce after being killed or disabled by the f0xx.

So we're out of the realm of the theoretical internet argument, and into real impacts on personal health, the economy.

I read this the other day, and I agree with it, it's getting so difficult to get a tradesperson out that if you aren't "handy" or willing to learn, you might wanna re-think being a homeowner.

(As an aside - oh dear, if the Rug Doctor has gone awry, all I can say is I'm glad my kids are past a certain age! Parents everywhere must be freaking out...)

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 97

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The End of Reliable Services

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