Know Your Corporate Grift - Subscription Scams

 

There’s nothing from that screen that clearly identifies the source, which is great for plausible deniability.  But here’s how I got there including the why I went there.

A sane thing to do in this regime is to suck it up and cut back on expenses.  Whether a resolution is in the near future or not, everyday life affordability is a problem.  As a middle class-ish type, I don’t need the cable package I have anymore.

An “employee” years ago twisted my desire to have my cable signal fixed into sending me another cable box.  And the attempted resolution to that had them subscribing me to a third cable box.  Both of those were sent back, which admittedly was at their (Comcast’s) expense. Yet to this day my monthly bill includes charges for three devices (boxes) when I only have one.

Now, I finally have the motivation to proceed with a final resolution.  I need to go to the brick and mortar store and I’m either switching to Verizon or maybe finally getting the bogus extra devices charges removed from my account and switching to the basic cable package.  There is a marked decrease in value received that I’m paying for for - the extra channels are increasingly useless.  The extra movies are about 95% inaccessible due to need for internet hook up on my TV, and the “Streampix” boldly touted as my labeled tier premium addition seems to be completely gone.  And the last straw, asking me to sign in when that screen comes up on the Xfinity app that I’m already signed in to.  Oh, you know my street address.  You’re just embracing the corporate strategy of making downgrades and lower costs as difficult as possible.

On a larger and more deadly scale this is how the health insurance mess exists in the U.S.  There’s enough material out there about Luigi Mangione and that whole kerfluffle.  No need to go into detail here about that.  But wondering if you will ever receive any real value out of a “subscription” to costly insurance coverage is a  huge concern.  Especially when the reigning voice in the administration seems to think vaccines can travel back in time.  (RFK has openly stated that vaccine research caused the Spanish Flu pandemic about 25-30 years before actual serious flu vaccine research began and was put in place.)

An easier subscription to drop is donations to livestreams for gematria sports picks.  The most recent video on Gematria Effect Sports was a month ago.  Anyone excited about paying to play is going through the Patreon subscription path.  Automatically getting a monthly deduction with essentially nothing of value in return.  Arguably my cable bill is a better value.  At least I can watch Fox News on my lowered tier and laugh at what clueless propaganda is coming out.  Once I finally get through the lack of customer service built into the system.

Just as big if not bigger than health care is the entire concept of capitalism.  Properly functioning capitalism allows the participant to feel like they have some skin in the game.  A reason to participate.  Enough people do well enough that they abide by a tolerable minimum standard of bullshit to keep interested.  And the lack of customer service built into the system is epically low.

Just another semi-random example.  Offering a career including pension is a thing of the past.  The company goes bankrupt or merges and structures.  Sorry, we aren’t The Gematria Motor Company any more.  Now we’re GM.  No more pensions.  Invest in 401k, he’ll even throw in a generous helping of employer matching.  Sorry, the stock market is the plaything of the morbidly wealthy.  You’re either risking losing it all on something terribly high risk (crypto) or lucky if you make a few bucks in safer investments after income taxes and accounting fees.  Employee owned company stock?  Maybe there aren’t payroll deductions, but that’s just a fancier way of saying pension with no assurance that the company will be around long enough.  That’s life in the gig economy with carrots being constantly dangled.  The 🥕 of today will be genetically modified and will be unpalatable in just a few years.

Lots of people have the skin in the game that they have invested in relationships and lives and children and a home, watching their subscription to the U.S. getting increasingly less valuable.  And to be clear, things are the same everywhere, it’s just that the unraveling of the U.S. market dominance is morbidly fascinating and high profile.  The phrase “banana republic” is being used as a possible outcome.  I think carrot republic sounds a lot more appropriate.

Oh yeah, the non zero chance that the social security taxes paid for decades turn retroactively into just another income tax are a lot of fun for trying to sleep at night for the working classes.