"'cause you know I'd walk a thousand miles if I can just see you"
Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles
I seem to have acquired a handful of new visitors, so to drive them away my next post was going to rag on retards... but since it also explicitly deals with American politics (interpret that as you will) I'll save that for July 4th and instead close off this month with an anecdote prompted by my previous post's exasperation at free-market fanaticism and the naive claim to self-adjusting capitalist efficiency to minimize costs.
I ordered a webcam recently from a certain Swiss-based multinational. It came wrapped in a cardboard holder twice its size, itself packaged in a retail box twice the size of that, which in turn was cushioned inside a shipping box twice THAT size, so that it occupied at least an order of magnitude more volume than necessary. Never mind the retail box, deliberately oversized to prevent shoplifting, is itself superfluous since apparently consumer electronics companies haven't heard of online shopping yet.
I ordered it through a certain infamously monopolistic online distributor. Previously they had shipped all physical packages to my location through the government mail without any issues, but now they used a certain monopolistic multinational shipping service based here in the states. Their initial arrival estimate of two weeks was retconned to one week by an automated e-mail. On the Friday in question, the tracking system declared the package delivered... which it was not... with no information on where it might be held locally if not delivered, except for a facility 80 kilometers away.
No, they can't possibly be that stupid, I told myself.
So I called their automated info line which confirmed the package was supposed to be delivered to a local office.
Called them.
Check back next business day, they said, which is Monday, because they only get it the business day after.
Meaning someone drove those fifty miles, 80km, to my apartment building, then drove back 80km to store the tenfold-oversized package.
But wait, there's more!
I skipped Monday, opting to give them more time for any other shenanigans.
On Wednesday I found a "sorry we missed you" note on my door. So I drove to the local business... which told me, no, they only get the package on the next business day...
Which means someone drove all the way to my door and back, 80km, A SECOND TIME, with the stupidly oversized package wasting space in a gas-guzzling delivery van, for a webcam that fits in your pocket. After storing it on their own premises for an extra week. To fit some internal bureaucratic rule regarding what counts as "next day" for their own local shipping office.
Now that I have it, the best use I can conceive for it would be to send each and every one of these moronic wastes of oxygen a picture of my pert little hairy wolfman posterior.
And you're probably wondering why I'm making such a big deal out of such a mundane little story.
Because it's mundane. Each of you probably has dozens of stories like this. This is every day of our lives. Multiply this story by three billion people, a hundred times a year, and you're barely scratching the surface because we haven't even gotten to businesses' inefficient dealings with each other or the fact most of the cash they rake in isn't spent on production but on market manipulation and bribes to implement more neoliberal deregulatory policies.
We're being taxed for this capitalist "efficiency" out of our own pockets with every single product, and don't even dare try to claim you can switch to these companies' competitors, because the simple fact you can easily guess which "certain" business giants I'm talking about means you have no more choice in using their services than you do in paying taxes to the official "government" ... less in fact, since you can't vote Imperator Jeff Bezos out of office!
And you think national governments or the E.U. or the U.N. are stifling productivity?
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