“Now, Daddy he was makin’ money hand over fist, and y’all was gettin’ screwed but you wasn’t gettin’ kissed.”

-from the song The Ballad of Hank Williams by Hank Williams Jr.

If you are someone who used to buy things from sellers in Europe or China on eBay or Etsy before the unpleasantness of the tariffs kicked in last month, I hope that you weren’t caught in the crossfire between having ordered before the tariffs began but not receiving the purchase until after they were applied. This happened to us, and it was terrifying to wait and wonder how badly we were going to get screwed on having to pay up when we did receive the item. Information on the internet about what to expect was all over the place regarding how much we were going to be on the hook for on an item that only cost $8.99 to purchase. Some sites said $0.89. Others said that it could be as much as an $80.00 flat rate and there could be an additional tariff for every post office that the package was sent to as it made its way across the country to the final destination. This is the stuff of financial nightmares for people who are just barely scraping by already. We are those people.

It was a monumental relief when the package finally arrived yesterday and we actually didn’t have to pay anything, believe it or not. Apparently, few people really understood how the tariffs were going to be handled early on and many of them jumped the gun in relating what our responsibilities would actually be. I am extremely relieved to know the reality now, but my god, until yesterday I could not be sure how we were going to manage it if there had been a large flat rate attached to a small purchase like a compact disc  I’ll tell you, this is a time of dreadful uncertainty here in America because finding honest and accurate information on the internet ain’t what it used to be and previously reliable news sources aren’t so reliable anymore either. Things change here so quickly that what you thought you knew and understood 10 minutes ago could be completely wrong when you look again. I get headaches just thinking about it, and if you use Google search now to find a homeopathic remedy for the type of headache that you are suffering from you will discover that they will direct you to sites that don’t always know what the hell they are talking about or they will recommend an obscure remedy that isn’t available anywhere locally and you have never heard of it even if you have been trusting your health to homeopathy for decades. It is a headache on top of a headache and forget about going to a doctor because you cannot afford it.

Since the pandemic began here in 2020, we have been ordering our groceries online once a week and picking them up curbside at the store. Recently this has become more of a frustration and a (another) headache as well. They will charge you a certain price on the store app for something that is not actually the in-store price. What you pay will be higher. On the other hand, (literally) you can be in the store and find an item that you want that doesn’t have a listed price so you check their website for the price and they will tell you that they do not have that item when you are standing there physically holding the item in your hand that they say does not exist.

Our monthly electric bill amount has skyrocketed in the past year, and I keep hearing that the cause for it is that we are paying for data centers that power AI. I don’t know why anybody thinks that AI is a necessity in this world. The existence of AI has become the new adored child for the corporate capitalists. They are thrilled to be able to throw human beings out of their jobs in favor of the wonderful new alternative that they now have to produce their wares and take over their customer services. I won’t go into how badly this is working out in reality but if you are interested in finding out you do not have to search very deeply to read the ridiculousness of the outcomes. I see more and more videos on YouTube that are AI generated and to believe that you are getting anything spectacular from them when they are full of incorrect information and incorrectly pronounced words and names is lunacy. 

If you thought that our future was going to be like on Star Trek, you need to look again. We do have iPads like Captain Picard had and maybe a few other technological gems have made their way to us from the 24th century but a great deal of it is a pain in the ass when you consider how often they screw up. Scotty said it best in the film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, “The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” Even more accurate than that is what Dark Helmet said in the film Spaceballs: “Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!”