A plate of boneless wings, celery and salad dressing

Sign 1 - Unlimited Internet Is Not, In Fact, Unlimited

My Internet service provider sent me a nastygram today, or rather they sent a snitch letter to Wonder Woman because technically the account is in her name. They wished to inform us that we (meaning me) had FAR exceeded the normal amount of bandwidth during our current billing cycle. As a result, according to the nastygram, they will be throttling our connection speed during "congested hours" until the cycle renews. Did I mention that we pay an extra fee each month for an upgrade to our connection speed? Or, that our plan is called "The Unlimited Ultimate Plan"?

I went and looked at the data usage for the month. It's a lot, slightly over 3TB. I haven't been downloading torrents. You think I'm 12? What I've been doing is retrieving my data from Amazon and Google, primarily a lifetime of photographs, but also over 1,000 book purchases, split almost evenly between Kindle and Audible formats. After removing the limits that Amazon tries to impose on usage through digital rights management, I uploaded all the information to European servers.

Well, I guess a billion (trillion?) dollar bloodsucking corporations stick together because Verizon is now discouraging me from making full use of the service I pay them for.

Sign 2 - Ad Free Television Actually Contains Ads

I quit watching ad supported television a long, long time ago. Only once, in 2015, did I watch regular TV and that was only to follow the (almost) undefeated season of the Carolina Panthers. The amount of adverting in a football game, along with the collusion against Colin Kaepernick and the epidemic of brain damage put me off the game shortly thereafter. I pay less for the premium streaming channels than I paid for cable television, even with all the price increases. I opt for the ad-free experience because life is short, and I just don't want to waste it enduring marketing. Now that the fascists are in power and corporations can do anything they like without repercussions, one of the things they are doing is inserting advertising into the feeds of people who pay to opt out of it. What are we going to do? I know what I'll do. I'll go right back to the Lou of the early 21st century and start sailing the high seas again. I gave up the pirate life in 2006, but war is war, and I'll not be trifled with by Peacock, Hulu, Netflix, or anyone else.

Note to "Steve", the anonymous coward who left a comment and thinks that my mockery of torrents and my planned re-embrace of them are worthy of a confused face emoji. You might have a point. I haven't needed torrents in almost twenty years because I am willing and able to pay for the entertainment I consume - as long as I get what I pay for. If the mega-corporations who take my money don't deliver what they promise, then all bets are off.

Sign 3 - You Can Choke to Death on the Bones in Boneless Chicken

Dissenting justice: “The question must be asked: Does anyone really believe that the parents in this country who feed their young children boneless wings or chicken tenders or chicken nuggets or chicken fingers expect bones to be in the chicken? Of course they don’t.

“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people.”

Yeah, a man in Ohio had a bone from a plate of "boneless wings" served to him in a restaurant get lodged in his throat, causing a serious infection. A jury, using what we normal people call common sense, found in his favor when he sued the joint for false advertising. Not to be deterred from protecting pretend people (corporations) from actual real people with, you know, families and jobs, the Republican majority on the state appeals court decided that "boneless wings" describes a cooking style and is not offered as a description of the food you are paying for. They took away the damages that a jury of his peers awarded him in a decision decided by a one-vote majority, One of the dissenting justices was pretty scathing in his critique of how much the court Republicans suck.

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