I haven’t bought anything via the Amazon site in years. At least three, possibly five or more. Anything I need I can get elsewhere either online or in person without supporting Amazon’s anti-union, worker-exploiting policies. I won’t even use AWS for business purposes because of how they treat their workers. Boycott away, there are plenty of Amazon options that are “good enough” if not actually better.
Ah yes, the fumes. That “Waste To Energy” incinerator is west of town in the area known as “West Plains”, near I90, near the airport, and not far from Fairchild AFB which these days is a locus of refueling operations and other support functions. Huge, 4-engined planes coming and going all day long. Long ago the AF firefighting ops polluted the groundwater there with PFAS chemicals and much of it is no longer fit to drink. Between that, the air pollution from military and civil air operations, and whatever comes out of the stacks at the W2E plant, I have to imagine the denizens of the area have evolved some powerful pollution-resistant genetics. Or maybe they just die young from cancer and respiratory and neurological diseases. Fortunately it’s a pretty low-income zone (think ‘typical military town’ - old skool Bremerton-ish) so all that disease can just be blamed on personal poor decision-making (like the decision to live there). A shame really, West Plains now has a ginormous Amazon warehouse that the residents could slave at (in addition to the super-Wally’s and the casinos) if they’d Just Say No to cancer and all those other tempting diseases.
Spokane burns its ordinary trash. It also accepts plastics and other “recyclables” at an every-other-week curbside pick-up, using a separate bin, just as you’d expect. Then they burn it. Yes, just like the trash. But wait, they do the burning at a facility they call the “Waste To Energy” plant, so that makes it all OK.
It’s all a big expensive greenwashing game, but everyone seems perfectly fine with it. La di da di da.
What’s this about John Cleese? Nevermind, I wish to register a complaint. I wish to complain about this presidential campaign that my techbros purchased not six months ago. It’s stone dead.
A “quick haircut” sort of place (kind of a barber, sort of , but super-high-volume and just one worker, the owner) that I’ve been using for a while now has a super-annoying dark-pattern in their payment flow. They book appointments, and take in-person payments using Square. After your cut, when you’re paying via their hand-held kiosk with a card, the screen shows you a bunch of huge “tip amount” buttons, and it’s implied that the customer has to choose one of them, while the provider looks on, in order to finish the transaction and leave (probably not true - they’ve already got your CC info by that point). Guess which button is highlighted/pre-selected and front-and-center! That’s right, 20%. If you want to select another tip, or no tip, you have to select another button while she watches you do so. The owner lists all prices on her square website, and it’s those prices you think you’ll be paying when you book an appointment online, but she still feels the need to be tipped. You KNOW that the provider/barber has configured Square to present that UI to the customer. Not quite the same as the restaurant fees scam, but it’s actually more manipulative though, in my view.
When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of the initial estimate.
The Christofascists won’t be satisfied until every school is a 100% Christian-run, 100% taxpayer-funded, stone-age-war-god-ideology fascist brainwashing center.
I actively boycott any and all ID businesses, because of the state’s shitty labor and reproductive-rights laws and its nurture of Christofascism. They can Gilead all they want but it won’t be with my financial support.