It’s bad enough that we have to worry about the people who are supposed to be running this country, who appear to be doing so into the ground, when we have enough trouble with the people we pay money to do “services” for us. Even though Microsoft says it is laying off “low-performing” workers, we may suspect that this is just code for cost-cutting that targets departments that don’t generate revenue, like human resources or “communications.” This is apparently what Amazon, Google and Meta is doing these days.
Of course in the case of Amazon, they could fire 90 percent of the people in its “customer service” department and you wouldn’t know the difference, since even when you connect to a living, speaking “agent,” they only know what you can see yourself, and when you ask them to tell you something you don’t know (like where the hell is this package), they just pull out the handbook and read off some canned response that only upsets you even more for taking you to be a fool.
And speaking of Amazon…forget the notion that if you happen to be a “regular” customer, don’t think for a minute that gives you any special “consideration”; you are just as low as the customer who just makes a random purchase every few months. Amazon says it is laying-off “office” people, but how that is supposed to be improving delivery performance I have no clue.
Amazon’s business has expanded from $34 billion in revenue in 2010 to over $600 billion in 2024, causing that "Amazon Effect" which has left many downtowns looking like ghost towns full of abandoned storefronts due to lack of foot traffic; heck, even those places that are still surviving, like this dry cleaner on Capitol Hill in Seattle, only “survives” on its reputation by an older generation, but not much so by the new generation, as one can tell by all the graffiti that makes it look "abandoned" too:
Unfortunately for Amazon, growth means more—not “better”—deliveries. And no, Amazon does not have an “in-house” delivery system. It contracts with “delivery service providers” who are provided with uniforms for drivers and those “prime” vans, or rent vans from Uhaul or allows a few to drive their POVs.
Customers have been complaining for years how unreliable Amazon delivery service is, although some drivers complain that they are not allowed enough time to “plan” their routes and organize their packages for more efficient delivery. Yet I recall a time when drivers could be counted upon to keep to a schedule once their GPS tracking was turned on, so that you had a good notion of when they would make their deliveries.
Now, they just hire anybody to do deliveries as they do its warehouses, just having people pass a drug test, attend an "orientation," have an ID picture taken, and then wait for that phone call that you will be sure to get if you got that far. It is now the "norm" if you see GPS that indicates a driver has been sitting in one spot for hours, or are right across the street but still “9 stops away” as if they have no clue what they are doing or where they are. When “confused” they either “temporarily” turn off the GPS, or simply say they have to make “a few more stops” between each “stop,” so it is impossible to have even a clue when or even if a package will be delivered.
Regular deliveries to Seattle mainly congregate at the delivery facility in Tukwila from sort facilities such as that in Fife, outside of Tacoma. It sounds like a long way away, but apparently it is not. How long does it take to get from Fife to Tukwila?
20 minutes shouldn’t be a problem at 4:30 in the morning, right? I had an order that likely arrived by 5 AM and was “misplaced” or simply left in a pile by a lazy warehouse employee or driver, which prevented it from going out on the usual delivery van between 10 and 11 AM. So the order didn't "officially" arrive in Tukwila until 6 hours after it left Fife, and then goes out with the “back-up” driver, with just 2.5 hours to make the delivery to a business that closes at 7 PM.
Of course the “permanent delivery instructions” tells the driver this, except that I am told that they don’t actually read the instructions until they arrive at the delivery location.
This driver, who has the balls to show his face and name, “arrives” on GPS 15 minutes after the store closed:
It is still possible that an employee will be there to take packages if the driver arrives before 8 PM, but "Kelvis" is apparently completely oblivious and somehow winds up “2 stops away” clear on the other side of town:
He ends up making a “delivery attempt” at 8:41 PM:
This was on the scheduled delivery day of Friday. So they are going to try again Saturday? What? That would be against the new “business model” of Amazon, which spells incompetence and laziness. They won’t send this out again until Monday, and here we see a different driver appearing on GPS at 1:30 PM “7 stops away”…
…and then goes into hibernation mode (aka “a few more stops” away)…
…and then at 4 PM, 2.5 hours later, he is still only “5 stops away.” So how many “few more stops” between each stop, exactly?
I had enough of this. I went to investigate, and I watched this driver park by a church...
...and with one solitary package in hand, taking a leisurely stroll south down one street, and then back the other way on Broadway to that hotel: He could have parked in the hotel lot, or simply crossed the street and cut his stroll by three-quarters. I took this the screen capture from a video I of him taking his sweet time walking back to the van...
that I intended to email to
Amazon delivery, at 1635, meaning it would take him 40 minutes to walk to the
hotel, and then back to his van. Why didn’t he drive to the hotel to make one
measly delivery? No, this guy (probably on a "baby route") just found a convenient place to park and then wandered all over the
place, wasting as much time as possible, awaiting his “rescue.” This package,
which already 3 days late, wasn’t delivered until 5:41 PM, 4 hours after it was
“7 stops away."
Amazon apparently believes that providing GPS tracking is a “convenience” for customers who can plan their pick-ups, but the truth is that it is a constant source of frustration and anger watching drivers who apparently have no clue what they are doing, making it impossible to make plans around an “expected” delivery time. It is much less frustrating waiting for a USPS, UPS or Fedex deliveries because they could arrive at “any time” and don’t give you any false expectations or “WTF is this driver doing” moments.
Now, I suspect that most people are so consumed with their day-to-day tribulations that they really don't give much thought to what their elected leaders are doing, expecting them to know their “trade” and do what is “best.” If they notice that certain things annoy them every four years, a majority assumes that a “change” will “fix” whatever the problem is, not realizing 95 percent of what they are told is just rhetoric and not serious. But things are different with Trump; he basically wants to drop an nuclear bomb on government and start starting building a “new world order” that likely will last as long as the “Thousand-Year Reich” did.
The world is bad enough that we have to worry about what Trump is doing, a man who is far worse than Warren Harding 2 because Harding was just a lady’s man who “couldn’t say no” and was too trusting of his “friends”—and Trump is more in love with himself and whose “friends” are anyone who doesn’t question his commands, no matter how idiotic and common senseless.
Trump is about as “presidential” as any—in his case, largely inherited—billionaire in mostly real estate (he was an abject failure in selling “product,” particularly that which carried his “brand”) who has never had to work with a board of directors or answer to shareholders. He behaves like the same de facto dictator he was in business, issuing forth royal decrees as if they are actually “laws” and not just a constant stream of brain farts from a man who believes in nothing, has no real “ideology” but just reacts instinctively to outside negative stimuli like an amoeba.
Given the most powerful office in the land, Trump uses it like a playground bully picking on the “little” kids because he knows they are afraid of him and what he will do to them. They do not yet know if they stand up to him, Trump won’t know what to do, just as Canada and Mexico did when he threatened tariffs. He doesn’t realize that two can play his game, as Canada is already looking to make trade deals with other countries and reduce its dependency on the free trade agreement that Trump dislikes simply because “cooperation" on any terms that don’t solely benefit himself is not in his dictionary.
Trump, the playground bully, enjoys kicking allies in the teeth because he thinks they need him more than he needs them. But just as those allies joined forces to economically isolate Russia, they can work together to do the same against the U.S. if there is no alternative to safeguard their own interests, which at least Canada appears willing to do in the expectation of more of Trump’s juvenilia.
Yeah, Trump the bully wants to “occupy” itty-bitty Gaza after the Israelis—aided by money and weapons supplied by the Biden administration—have done all the “heavy lifting," and can now watch the “Trump Plan” pay for the “rebuilding” the strip just to hand it over to the Israelis.
I suppose this is the Trump version of “road and belt”—which the U.S. has never done in Latin America, when U.S. companies in the “banana republic” days simply destroyed infrastructure when they were done with it so it could not be used by the local people in Central America they virtually enslaved.
But Russia—now, what is his “plan” about ending that war? Well, not much so far—except that he is now trying to extort from Ukraine more “rare earth” minerals instead of “dirt” against political rivals in exchange for not to start talks with Putin, but for arms to keep the war going, regardless of who “wins.” Again, like in his many business bankruptcies, Trump won’t be the “loser,” but those who "trusted" him to have their interests in mind.
And then we have to wonder what the hell is going on with megalomaniacal oligarchs like Elon Musk and his “genius” DOGE “hires” not looking to cut government “waste,” but are using their new security clearances and coding skills for fun and games, to see how much damage they can do. Musk and friends should be called what they are: computer hackers and human malware, stealing or disrupting both private and government information and funding, and destroying lives and careers because they are just inhuman bots.
Musk sounds and acts like the tech billionaire Jason Volta in the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English Strikes Again; Volta wants to take control of all Europe through control of its data servers and Internet. He is defeated when after he mocks English’s lack of tech savvy, English tosses an iPad at his head and knocks him out:
The Trump reign is not just a dictatorship encountering a few court speed bumps along the way, but an oligarchy in the making. It is positively shocking how fully without guardrails that the unelected Musk thinks he can control and manipulate the government. Just as bad is a creator of Project 2025, Russell Vought, likely to be head of the OMB and will be using that office to defund programs that have been approved by Congress but don’t “fit” Trump’s agenda. Government will only "serve" the interests of the "American People," although how Vought defines who falls into that demographic is likely only those who fit into the "white christian conservative" camp.
We are told that Trump also wants to depopulate the CIA and replace agents with political functionaries who fit his “priorities,” mainly concerning those millions of brown-skinned "terrorists" in the country, and which apparently does not include Russian cyber criminals trying to aid Trump in disrupting the country, or the real terrorists in this country, some of them those "white christian conservatives."
If we want to know what kind of country Trump wants this to be, we only have to look at Russia today. If you want to know an example of a man who started out with modest means and used his power to procure billions in ill-gotten gains, look at Vladimir Putin. And of course if you want to know who is a dictator whose governmental title is “president” left over from a hijacked “democracy,” well there you go. Putin, by the way, approves of Trump’s defunding of USAID, because now countries who were recipients of such aid will look upon the U.S. as just as abusive to human rights as Russia is.
Of course the media is still too busy talking about “mass deportation,” just not the kind that the India Today is talking about here 1. The story is not talking about those brown-skinned people the media talks about, but their “brown-skinned” people. It notes that as the Pew Foundation reports, the country with the third highest number of illegal immigrants in this country is India, with over 700,000. However, it points out that Trump and his brown-shirts are only interested in the ones they catch trying to cross the border; the rest are not “targeted” or racially-profiled if they don’t look like “Mexicans.”
Every freaking day it seems like there are dozens of new stories about how playing the “tough guy” is supposed to fix all the “problems” in this country—except that trying to figure out an “unpredictable” madman eventually leads one to realize that they are playing chess with a complete novice who not only doesn’t actually have a “strategy,” but doesn’t even know the “rules” of the game, and is just making things up as he goes along. When he realizes that his random moves are going to be defeated by those who play by the rules, he just sweeps his arm across the board and knocks off all the chess pieces, and declares himself the “winner.”
But as long as you have a craven media (including social media) afraid of being sued by Trump for telling the truth about him, it’s one big jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces may seem newsworthy, but few venture to speculate what the “big picture” will look like once the “puzzle” is completed. It may take to the very end, but by then once we “see” the “big picture,” we will wonder why it took so long to see what it was building up to.
Trump meanwhile tells us that inflation, the primary economic issue he ran on, isn’t his “number one priority.” I mean, it’s easier to play Mr. Tough Guy against defenseless human beings, sending out his armed brown shirts to round up working people who Trump voters claimed they didn’t know it would be the “good” people that they knew personally…
…than to tell his billionaire friends how to run their businesses when they expect him to do what they want him to do for them for all that dough they spent to get him elected.
Whether or not
people merely feel their common sense is being abused by Trump and his thugs (and
what he calls “common sense” is just a new cover for his habit of lying about
things he knows nothing about), when they are consumed by the nitty-gritty of real life that has an actual
reality to it, remains to be seen. But we should already know that Trump doesn't give a shit about that while he's playing golf or signing off on another decree that has no positive effect on the lives of the vast majority who voted for him.
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