Postmodern Serfdom and the EULA

Google maps navigation will never come to Palm Pre because Palm and Sprint have an antitrust agreement in violation of law to pressure users to buy subscription services from Sprint.  Sprint’s navigation “service” is “only” $10 a month, which equates to $600 over five years.  Google maps navigation is free and a lot of third party vendors haven’t bothered to make navigation software for WebOS because of this antitrust baloney.

All of the cell phone makers with their locked phones and myriad of plans that tie certain phones to certain plans is criminal.  Even the fact that Sprint advertises “unlimited GPS” on some of its plans is so awful.  GPS is free.  Our tax money paid to put those satellites in orbit and to maintain them.  Yet Sprint offers “unlimited GPS” for a fee.

Then there is “unlimited text messaging.”  Text messaging takes up a 155 character empty space in data packets that none of the carriers have to pay for at all.  A two minute YouTube video is equivalent to about FIVE MILLION text messages.  But the YouTube video is free on your data plan and the text messages will cost you about $250,000 at $0.05 each.

The primary reason this is possible is because Americans are on average as stupid as dead wood.  The second reason it is possible is because there is ZERO meaningful government regulation of industries like this that are using public airwaves — they bought the space and so we can’t use it and with that purchase and right they should be subject to meaningful regulation and that means not tricking stupid impoverished Americans into paying onerous fees for things that are otherwise free like GPS, or text messaging — it’s something that is free to the company and they charge you for — it’s like if Sprint started sending you a bill for breathing.  “We’ve determined that you took approximately 165,000 breaths during this months billing cycle and so we have a breating surcharge.  If you would like one of our Free and Clear Unlimited Breathing Plans, we can let you breathe all you want at no extra charge!”

Sprint doesn’t pay for GPS and they don’t pay for text messaging, but both are major revenue centers for them.  Palm doesn’t have third party VoIP or navigation because Sprint bought off or threatened any third party providers.  The cellular companies are so big that they can dangle a carrot in front of any small software/service company like Skype.  Verizon did a deal with Skype to put it on Verizon phones, but it charges you for Verizon minutes while you are using the application!  The whole thing is a criminal cabal.

The reason there is no enforcement is because the United States government is completely corrupt — both parties.  They’ve been bought off and the average American is nothing but a stupid child and so they can’t even figure out how they are being screwed.  90% of Americans stumble from one catastrophe to another tricked and drained of funds, paying penalties, fees, usurous interest rates, locked into contracts they they don’t know how to read, or in the case of the cellular companies that aren’t even written down.  Cellular companies, credit card issuers and others have contracts that state, “We have the right to change the terms of this contract at any time without notice” and this is supposedly enforceable.  And Americans sign these contracts because they are stupid livestock.

The postmodern landscape is one where people have been reduced to the same status they held in the dark ages — most people are simply livestock, an asset that is fed, occasionally given medicine and exploited to the maximum extent profitable.  Actually, peasants during the dark ages worked shorter hours and probably enjoyed significantly more autonomy than the postmodern middle class because the peasantry wasn’t so closely monitored and managed.  Postmodern exploitation isn’t merely work, it’s everything else that makes people work, which requires that they are contstantly tricked and conned and pushed into situations that take them months, or years to get out of.  When the whole thing is over, there’s death.  Death is when the cons and exploitation stops and not a moment before.  The months leading up to death are when the biggest cons get pulled from nursing homes that distribute brochures with of picture of happy old people dressed in tuxedos at parties.  But inside of those death houses underpaid foreign born nurses lord over the feeble elderly waiting to die.  They push and shout and drug and restrain them to tears and then the poor old man’s own relatives ask him to be sedated for visits so that he can’t scream anymore “please take me home, I want to leave here.”

And this end game is hugely profitable just like text messaging and GPS because even dying isn’t free in America.  It will cost you and your family several hundred thousand dollars to die and in return for the money, they will talk down to you and be quite mean and rude.

whoa.