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Keeping our money from bad people

WARNING. RAMBLING POST

Things in this country just keep getting crazier. Y’all all know what I’m talking about. It’s really exhausting to think about, and yet we must think about it at least a bit. When to allow the crazy into your personal sensorium is a question we must all answer for ourselves, as well as how to react to the crazy. It is easy to feel helpless to affect any real change, and yet collectively we can. This week we told Hulu and Disney both to go fuck themselves by cancelling our subscriptions. Both are capitulating to the crazy so they don’t get our money. None of it.

In the meantime, I am finding the things that give me some peace and joy and peacefully enjoying them. Listening to music with my wife. Walking our dog. Chilling with our cat. Playing D&D and Traveller. Reading science fiction novels. Blogging.

Back a few years ago when my wife was diagnosed with cancer I increased our cable TV package to their maximum package I wanted to make sure she had any entertainment she wanted. Now, several years later, it is about $200 a month and we never use it. At most we watch the local and national news. We watch no shows. No series. Nothing. We have hundreds of channels and there is NOTHING on that I have any desire to watch. The stuff I might watch if the TV is on would be the original Star Trek and a few other things, but I don’t. So we are getting rid of it all. GONE. No cable TV. With the internet, the public library, our stereo, and our games, we have more than enough to have fun. That is $2400 a fucking year! Insane. That is a good portion of our yearly property taxes. Obviously I should have cancelled it years ago.

Basically we are cancelling a lot of subscription services that have been bleeding us dry. I got rid of Apple TV last week when they emailed to tell me it was going up from $9 a month to $12. I only had it to watch Foundation, and I will survive quite well without it. I just saw that they fucked over Jon Stewart, so I ‘m head of the curve.  Also cancelling Amazon Prime. I can’t say I’ll stop using Amazon. The damned Kindle is just too nice. I love my Kindle eBooks, and theirs is the only eBook system that doesn’t suck. Sorry, that is not one of the hills I’m willing to die on. Yet.

It is really impossible, unless you go live in a hollow tree in the woods, to avoid doing business with evil, or at best amoral, people and corporations. Most of the time the chains of ownership of the big companies is very convoluted, and when you get to the end they are owned by some scumbag “investment company” run by the worst tech and biz bros that can be grown in whatever evil labs they come from. So my point isn’t to be perfect in cancelling or simply not buying things, or to even be consistent, but to be better. All these  money grubbing rats care about is more money. So deny them as much as I can.