Category: Entertainment

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So Sirius & I are done.

I’ve had  Sirius for more than a decade.

Originally, they were pretty cool and the variety of programming was a delight to listen to.

Then slowly things changed. The “News” Stations got more and more left and I just stopped enjoying the spin that was on everything.

I tried the conservative stations, and they were mostly people screaming all the time.

I settled on the Spa Channel and enjoyed it. It was pretty much the only channel I listened to. LA Freeway traffic is stressful and that channel seemed to be mellow all the time.  Except when Sirius decided to stop playing Spa and play something they thought was important. A George Michael week? Ugh!

As to many of their other stations, I simply wasn’t interested. I don’t like RAP. I couldn’t stand their ideas of a nice Rock & Roll set. Talk radio was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, and many of their other “Themed” stations were either annoying or completely mis-named.  No matter what, I always ended up on the Spa channel, and after a while, I stopped even checking out the other stations.

I’d purchased a lifetime subscription for my 1 Series and enjoyed never having to think about the Spa channel being on if I wanted it.

When the car was totaled in 2017 Sirius told me that I couldn’t have the subscription transferred to another car. (More on that later.) 

I went ahead and activated Sirius in the new car, and when I changed to the 440 I transferred that subscription. 

That transfer process was a nightmare and I really thought about pulling the plug more than once during that call.

Late in December 2020, I got an email saying that there was a class action lawsuit regarding Sirius and their lifetime subscriptions. With all the chaos around the election, my life, being unemployed, and oh yeah, my health insurance being cancelled. I never got back to the Sirius email. There is, after all only so much time you can spend on the damn phone before you’re over it!

What I didn’t notice was that the deadline to respond was Jan 12th 2021. Somehow I thought it as the end of January… I missed the deadline of Jan 12th. DAMNIT!

But I got to thinking about the Sirius subscription. 

With fingers crossed, I went to their site and OMG! My id and password actually worked. 

(This was surprising since the last few times I’d tried to log on, I was met with password and user ID issues.  These issues persisted even after multiple password resets. This is part of what made my last phone call to Sirius such a pain in the butt. Well, that and the fact that like so many companies they’ve put their call center in the Philippines so with a static filled connection and sing song English. Having a conversation is a challenge.)

Once I was logged into the page I saw the last bill which looked normal. Then I happened to notice that Sirius had changed the billing cycle from 1 year to quarterly. 

They were clever… They kept the amount the same but increased their profit X 3 with the quarterly billing. Great way to rip off your customers Sirius! 

Obviously, they were counting on the amount being familiar, and people’s short term memory being completely overloaded to hide what they’d done.

Now I’m very interested!

I call their customer service number, (conveniently hidden 3 menu items deep, with a warning popup that said, “Beware of Tiger!”) 

I waited on hold after dealing with the genuine people emulator call routing AI.  After a time, I was connected to a cheerful lady in the Philippines and asked her what gives?

I’m told that I was on some kind of promotion and that this reflected the end of the promotion. Uh Huh… When did the billing cycle change?  No answer. Uh Huh. 

Then I asked about putting my lifetime membership back in place which is what the lawsuit provides for. 

I get a bullshit line about that. In 2017 they claim they weren’t allowing lifetime subscriptions to be moved. I told the little lady I knew that, but that the lawsuit says they will now.  She doesn’t know about that.

She offered to give me a promotional special for a year on the two radios (Portable & Car) of $200. I tell her that since I only listen to one channel it’s still not worth it. And that Apple CarPlay works just fine in my car meaning I don’t have to have Sirius and that I have greater control over the music I want to hear.

She asked if I’d let her check another promotion.  I say sure why not?  She comes back and tells me that I have have both radios for $120 a year.

I think about it, and decide that I just want to not have a subscription at all. I tell her that and that I want the subscription to terminate as of the March 1st billing cycle. She fiddles around a bit more and tells me that she’s sorry she couldn’t keep a valued customer like me. I’m Like Whatever… I obviously wasn’t all that valued a customer.

So come March 1 2021 for the first time in many many years I won’t have Sirius.  Unless of course the court decides I can have my lifetime membership transferred. In that case, I’m calling them back with the case docket number in hand and demanding they re-instate the account.

In reality, I’d pay $60 a year for Sirius in the car. But now it’s a matter of principal.

I’ve said it before, If companies would just provide the service they’ve contracted to provide at a fair price, and not screw around with the billing because they think they can get away with it, they’d have a lot more customers and those customers would be a lot more loyal and happy.

On the plus side, It’s one less online account for me to fart around with.

Update 1/22/2020

I got one of those little “How did we do” surveys fromSiriusXM

When I answered that I was not satisfied, the survey opened a tex block where I could freely type. I do hope that someone who reads this is able to understand the words written on the page. I’m not hopeful. There’s that old adage, if you don’t want to know the truth… Don’t ask the question.

I never got an answer as to who authorized or when they authorized a change to quarterly billing. 

I was told that I couldn’t reactivate that lifetime subscription on my new vehicle because the transfer wasn’t available in 2017,  regardless of the fact that I had a lifetime subscription, and there is currently a class action lawsuit pending about not allowing people transfer those subscriptions to new vehicles. 

Then when I said that for the 2 stations that I listen to (1 in my car and the other on a portable radio in the house) wasn’t worth $423 a year and that I wanted to cancel the account, I’m told that suddenly there’s a discount of 50% and when that wasn’t good enough the yearly cost was reduced again. 

Frankly, if you’d offered your service for a fair price in the first place and been upfront about your billing practices I’d still be a customer. 

However, given that you won’t let me transfer my former lifetime subscription and apparently have no trouble charging outrageous fees for your service it makes me question your business model.

I have Apple CarPlay in my vehicle which works just fine. I have Apple music and can use it throughout my home on all my devices. This ability makes your service redundant and excessively expensive.

For many years now, the few times I’ve called your customer service department it is difficult to understand the representative. In part due to the accent but the greatest part of the problem is static on the line or background noise in the call center’s environment.

The young lady I spoke with, to her credit tried to do the best she could and aside from the noise she was well spoken. My dissatisfaction is in NO WAY with her. 

My dissatisfaction is with SiriusXM’s corporate policies and practices. 

My feeling now is that I will not be purchasing a vehicle where I pay for the SiriusXM option installed. I will also not be turning on the SiriusXM option if it is supplied with a vehicle.

I will continue to seek out Apple CarPlay or some similar option.

I can only imagine that as your satellites age, and you continue to alienate customers that you will find it harder and harder to maintain service. Perhaps that is a good thing and your company will go the way of the dodo.

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Enough Already!

That’s it! Let’s take all social media platforms down! Yeah I said it!

All podcasts, Twitter, FaceBook, Gab, and all the rest!

I’m sick of seeing yet another self righteous pundit, news organization, or whoever the hell else, BITCHING about people espousing views that they don’t agree with. We’re supposed to be a free country, we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, we’re supposed to respect people whose views are different from our own. RIGHT?

Apparently NOT!

The latest two examples of violation of free speech is this article in Breitbart. Followed by this little gem from The Washington Post.

The Breitbart piece talks about the AP, yeah, you read that right… The Associated Press making the case that Podcasts should be de-platformed due to “incitement” on these podcasts.

The Washington Post article describes Apple being sued in federal court to force Apple to de-platform Telegram. Telegram, don’t ya know is where all the Parler users went after finding out that Parler was going to be screwed over by Amazon Web Services.

Here’s a idea. Shut it all down. Our phone batteries would last longer.

That would have the benefit of keeping all the village idiots in their own villages. If you stop them from talking to each other, you’ll prevent them from gathering steam. You might also have a side benefit that if they never meet, we don’t have to worry about an every increasing number of idiots that we’ll have to put up with and take care of.

Then we have this brilliant Senior News analyst from CNN (Communist News Network) who’s trying to float a balloon about censoring OAN & Newsmax.

Both of which appear to be conservative oriented news broadcasters. I’ve not watched either of them, because by the time I learned about them, I was too disgusted by the way the country was heading after the 2020 election to give a rancid fuck.

This is so similar to the way that the NAZI party came to power I can’t stand it. If they actually taught history in schools today and didn’t sanitize the brutality of various regimes people would know this.

First control the narrative, then control the media, then censor anyone with differing beliefs, cast everyone who doesn’t agree with you as anti-(insert the noun de jour) BLM, ANTIFA, Left, Progressive, Equality, Woman, blah, blah, blah. Then take over the country. Next build the camps, then try the re-education, and finally kill EVERYONE!

But… humanity appears doomed to repeat the horrors of the past.

A couple thousand years from now, in a barren wasteland some guy will find a TESLA buried in the sand. People will oooh and ahhh and decide it’s from Aliens. One curious person in the group will recognize that it was made by humans, be curious about how we fell so far, and the whole process of a civilization crawling out of the muck will start over.

Maybe they’ll get it right the next time.

The fall of America to communism or socialism won’t destroy all civilization. But the pervasive backwards thinking cult of leftism in the world just might.

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Sadly Portland you’re dead to me

Much like Seattle and San Francisco.

Portland at least grew it’s own roses for the funeral.

It’s really simple. As beautiful as these cities are from the air, and they are beautiful, I have ZERO desire to visit them. Why the hell would I knowingly walk into cities where I’m not only a target, but where I can’t be responsible for my own protection and the police have been gutted?

Why would I want to visit one of these cities now? Places where the wrong word or the slightest of incorrect reactions could get you beaten by a mob?

Doesn’t do much for your tourism does it?

57 Days and nights of rioting? Really?

You people are out of your damn minds. And even if the rioting stops (and it will), the people responsible for all this civil unrest will still be there, just below the surface, waiting for another excuse, or opportunity to mete out their particular brand so-called justice.

Seattle, and San Francisco are no better. Los Angeles is heading the same direction. Los Angeles is slightly different because it’s always been a dangerous place. You know what you’re getting into there, and you never travel in certain districts alone or at night.

I remember a scene from Logan’s Run. The hero and pretty girl are heading to a part of the city overrun with rabid children. There’s a voice from their conveyance repeating, “Warning, You are now entering a personal hazard zone,”

That’s how I feel every time I go into Los Angeles. A similar message should be playing on every flight landing in cities in the Pacific Northwest.

I don’t know anymore what these people are rioting about. I don’t know the cause of their lawlessness and further… I don’t give a shit. They can burn their homes and cities to the ground, then start slaughtering each other, over scraps of bread or some imagined insult or lack of respect. I don’t care.

If the feds march in and just start shooting the rioters, I won’t shed a single tear. Nor will I be shocked. In fact I might make popcorn and watch the show.

This is what happens when stupidity, lawlessness, and anarchy are allowed to go on for too long. It loses its impact, and the original message is long since forgotten.

All I see now is people who look and behave like they’re straight out of Fallujah. In my eyes they are no longer human, or worth saving. They’ve become rabid animals and the only way to deal with that, is to put the animals out of their misery.

I would enjoy seeing the Mayors, Governors, and so called city leaders literally ripped apart by the very rioters they’ve been making endless excuses for. They’d serve as an object lesson to other weak willed political leaders.

I know I sound harsh.

I worry for my friends in Portland because the bullshit is happening right there outside their apartments. I’ve told them it isn’t going to get any better until someone steps up and says “NO MORE”.

My friends respond with, “It’s better today… The ‘protesters’ only burned one dumpster and broke only a few windows.”

That blows my mind. My friends are starting to exhibit Stockholm Syndrome. They’re grading the quality of their days not by there being no violence, but by the level of violence that has become constant.

That’s like saying it was a good weekend in Chicago. There were only 35 shootings instead of 37. What!? That there were any shootings in Chicago is a concern, more so since shootings are so commonplace that no-one takes much notice. That speaks to a much more serious problem.

A rather large problem that no-one is talking about.

What about the rights of the people who live at ground zero? Don’t they have the right to live in a safe and secure place? Why do “Protesters” and I use that term loosely get a pass to make everyone suffer? How insane is it that normal average people are fearful leaving their homes?

It’s way past time for LAW AND ORDER to be reinstated. If that means bodies of protesters in the streets, so be it. At this point while the media would loose its shit, I bet that the majority of America would stand up and cheer.

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Finally! Who’d have thought it would be a Michael Moore production?

My brother sent me the link to this film.

Watch it soon, there’s no way of telling how long it will be up on YouTube especially since it blows the hell out of the New Green Energy deal.

I’m sure YouTube will find something in it that violates their terms of service, and take it down.

I watched it all. It’s an exposé about how so called green energy isn’t actually all that green. To make batteries, and solar panels, you have to mine and refine rare earth elements.

A lot of folks may not know that solar panels come in varying efficiencies. The most efficient (hence expensive) panels only convert about 20% of the light falling on them to useable electricity and that is at maximum. Add some clouds, haze, or if sun isn’t striking the panels dead on, and the efficiency drops. Solar panels also degrade over their life and have to be replaced.

Here’s a personal example, I have a portable 20W solar panel. It does indeed produce 20W in full direct sunlight if it is angled so that the sun is striking the panel at 90 degrees. But that requires realigning the panel about every 15 minutes or so.

Realistically my 20W panel in normal operation produces 7  to 12 watts. That’s enough to recharge my phone or iPad directly from the panel. It’s not enough to charge my computer. So I connect the panel to a battery pack. The panel charges the pack and the pack charges my other devices.

However, you’re almost always in a diminishing cycle. You’re pulling more power from the battery pack than you can replace.

One solution is to get bigger panels.

Yep, I can connect my 20W panel to a 30W panel and between the two I can charge my battery pack in a shorter amount of time, or if it’s overcast I can charge the pack in 6 – 12 hours. What I can’t do consistently is charge devices and the pack.

It’s a rare day indeed if I can stay on the positive side of the charge curve. It’s not that big a deal since this rig is for camping. I’ve not even talked about camp lights.

My point is this. It takes a large solar surface area to generate power. And that power generation is only working when the sun is out. At night or on a dark rainy day you’ve got no power generation.

In my case with proper energy management this solution works fine for camping. After all I’m camping to get away from technology right? The problem is, it’s not really all that scalable.

I can say this because I’ve actually experienced the process.

I’d guess that a large percentage of the population hasn’t actually worked with a solar panel and because of this, they simply believe that solar power is a 100% solution.

It’s not the average Joe’s fault that they don’t have experience.

I can hold the rabidly Green Deal people to account because they should have actual facts before preaching at the rest of us. (Greta, I’m looking at you.)

When you start doing the math, it becomes obvious quickly that you need a large array of solar panels in an area of the country where you get sun 99% of the time and you need some kind of very efficient storage medium (battery) to store what you don’t use so that you can use it later.

For instance, the roof of a house provides a large surface area and can give you a big array of panels. Without storage, at night you’re going to be dependent on the standard electrical grid.

That’s how most of the home solar installations work. In daytime the roof panels power most, if not all the house needs. At night the house switches over to the normal electrical grid. After all you don’t want your fridge, or heater not running at night or inoperative during the winter. 

The practical upshot of this is you’ll always need to have a big generator running at a public utility somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I think houses should all have solar, if for no other reason than it would allow the reduction of power demand on the power plant, meaning overall, less power demand would mean less pollution.

It should also be pointed out, research into solar panels is ongoing and at some point we might be able to get panels with much higher efficiencies.

However, this comes at a cost. Solar panels are made of some pretty exotic materials and creation of panels means mining and processing those exotic materials.

Guess what? There are some really nasty chemicals involved in solar panel, computer chip, and battery manufacture. Not to mention the strip mining, pollution, and deforestation required to obtain and process those raw materials.

Solar is not a complete solution and it may never be.

Wind turbines have essentially the same problems, they don’t produce power if the wind isn’t blowing. With turbines you also need a very large amount of space.

As an aside, I personally enjoy pissing off the smug, rabidly green electric car owners. I do it with a simple question, “How is the electricity you charge your car with being produced?”

The ensuing conversation is often a wonderful demonstration of faulty logic, and lack of understanding about science, or how things work.

Again don’t take this the wrong way, electric cars are great. They’re fast, zero emission, and quiet. In cities they’re probably the best way to reduce air pollution and contribute to the overall health of the folks living in the cities, especially, in the case of those folks with respiratory problems.

But the solution isn’t perfect. Somewhere, there is an electric plant burning something to spin generators to make the power to charge that car.

Somewhere there’s a strip mine that’s produced the lithium used in that car’s batteries. At the end of the batteries usable life, there’s going to be a toxic dump stacked high with battery packs that no-one wants.

Most of us notice our phone batteries start not lasting the whole day after a couple of years. Imagine that in your car. What happens when you can’t make it to the grocery store and back on a full charge? You either get a new car, or new batteries. Either way, something is going to end up in a dump someplace.

I’ve always asked, “Just how green is that?”

I tend to keep cars 10 or 20 years. I maintain them and drive ‘em until they fall apart or are totaled by some idiot driver hitting me. I tend to keep my cellphone for much longer than other people. Though not as long as some of my friends. 

For me it’s about cost versus return on investment, and factored into that is also responsibility. Do I need to have a new car, phone, computer, or TV, every 3 years? Do I want to add something substantial to the pile of waste?

Usually, I find myself saying nope, and I’m good with keeping my good old reliable stuff for another few years.

I’m not even particularly Green. I’m simply a guy who thinks we shouldn’t be wasteful. Call it a philosophy of trying to live my life like a backpacker. Pack out your trash… Leave it as you found it.

Many electric car owners are smug and often self righteous about “being green” until you point out where the components and power come from. They get really pissed off when you point out that all they’ve done is shifted the problem to another part of the country or world.

It’s not that these people are mean or stupid, they’ve just never connected the dots. They’ve bought into the illusion that green energy is reducing pollution. A lot of these folks are content to live in an “out of sight, out of mind” vision of the world.

When they do connect the dots, they’re usually pissed off and never look at their 65K electric car in quite the same way again.

That’s why I was pleased to see a movie like Planet of the Humans, it’s probably not all 100% accurate, but it points out that shifting the issue isn’t solving the issue.

I really enjoyed the part about biomass.

Somehow that group thinks that burning wood is better than burning oil.

On its face that makes no sense!

One need only look at the energy density of wood versus oil to see that we’ll deforest the planet in short order, maintaining our current energy output with wood. 

Ask yourself this question. What is oil?

Oil, in its purest sense is concentrated biomass. So theoretically burning oil efficiently is going to be better than burning wood to generate power.

I’ll admit that I thought the biomass generation plants were burning stuff from landfills. If that were true then every kilowatt from that source is a win. (Assuming there was no increase in toxic chemicals being released into the air.) But if you’re cutting down trees to fuel the biomass plants then you’ve lost your mind.

There was one glaring omission from this movie. Nuclear power.

I know that all the green activists, and even those who are not so green are opposed to nuclear power. There are indeed risks with nuclear.

That being said, I’d suggest that you watch Pandora’s Promise with an open mind before you categorically say no to nuclear power.

I saw this on Netflix a while ago, It’s currently available on YouTube for rent, and Amazon Prime.

Planet of the Humans, indirectly suggests that population control is the only way out of the climate problem. There is one person in the movie that mentions we think technology will save us. Then the movie kind of brushes past the technology issue.

Pandora’s Promise presents another option. It may not be the best option but it might be a viable one that could substantially reduce our consumption of, and reliance on fossil fuels.

There’s another type of reactor that essentially uses the waste materials from the reactors we’ve been using for decades. Guess what? They may have the potential to help solve the problem of spent fuel rods that are currently in storage around the world.

These spent rods are radioactive and hazardous. Wouldn’t it be better to get rid of them, generate power doing it, and not have to worry about leaking fuel rod storage? Just asking…

In a perfect world, we’d feed our nuclear warheads into these reactors and metaphorically beat our swords into plowshares. Again, just a thought…

I should mention I’m not convinced that Climate Change is anything under our control. For me, these issues are more about clean air, drinkable water, and living in a beautiful world.

Let’s face it we’ve been teenagers leaving our shit all over our room. I think it’s time that we grew up and recognized that a clean room, house, or planet, is simply a better way to live.

That belief doesn’t require you to agree with any political agenda or pick any sides. It’s a belief that probably most of the people on the planet can agree to without any coercion.

Give it a thought. You don’t have to agree…

Have a great day.

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While we’re all locked down

I have a suggestion, watch some things that challenge your beliefs. 

Find a documentary that you’d never watch and give it a go.

Since a lot of these documentaries are available as freebies on your streaming services, what have you got to loose?

If it offends you turn it off and move on.

I’ve done a lot of this over the past few weeks and there have been some that for one reason or another I couldn’t watch to the end. 

Some cases were that the subject matter just didn’t hold my interest. Others were boring beyond belief, monotone narration, and subject matter or conclusions that were akin to an Ancient Aliens episode. Don’t get me wrong, watching Ancient Aliens is fun when I’m in the mood, but a steady diet comes up short.

Here are a few of the documentaries that actually kept my interest.

Hillarys America documentary film posterHillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party – Amazon Prime: This one is interesting because the film-maker Dinesh D’Souza tells the story from his first person viewpoint. He was convicted and sent to jail for an illegal political contribution. Then he begins an re-examination of how he, an immigrant thought about America. I’m sure that some of the film is apocryphal, nonetheless it was thought provoking and served, as art should to make the viewer re-evaluate their beliefs.

HoaxedHoaxed – Itunes: I’ve been questioning the veracity of the media since before Trump. I was questioning journalism during the Bush administration. I believe that journalism shouldn’t be editorial or opinion printed as fact. When I started noticing that there were two truths depending on what your news source was, I had questions. This was especially true for me, when the “Truths” were diametrically opposed.  Mike Cernovich explores the dichotomy from a conservative and personal perspective as well as the perspectives of other conservative journalists or film-makers who have been on the receiving end of journalistic inequity. The most interesting piece was the story of Documentary director Cassie Jaye.

KeepandbearKeep and Bear – Amazon Prime: This one is interesting. It’s the story of a California family who moves to Idaho. Once there, the director Darren Doane discovers that most of his neighbors have guns. From there Doane decides to learn more about the gun culture and discovers that it’s not what he thought it was.

Pandemic: How to prevent an Outbreak – Netflix: This is a timely series. I’d started watching it about a week before the Wuhan Virus gained national Pandemic new on netflix january 22ndattention. This is a docu-series. It details the precautions and research that’s always ongoing to prevent influenza. The people in this series are heroes and they put a lot of their lives into trying to predict where outbreaks are likely to happen. It’s worth watching because most of us never know what’s going on behind the scenes when we get our flu shots.

ChasingCoralChasing Coral – Netflix: This is a documentary that follows researchers looking at the effects of oceanic warming on reefs. It’s got beautiful scenery of coral reefs with a before and after juxtaposition that’s jarring. Ocean warming and pollution does a lot of damage to reefs. Most of us don’t notice because the reefs are in places that we can’t reach. If this film makes you pay more attention to reducing your impact by recycling, extending the lifespan of something you own or properly disposing of chemicals it will have served its purpose.

I don’t necessarily agree with all the claims made in these documentaries I think that each of them makes good points and is food for thought.

I’m not really that much of a documentary kind of guy. Generally speaking I find them boring but every once in a while I’ll happen upon something that keeps my attention. These did the trick and also helped me fight some of the lock down boredom.

Give ‘em a whirl if you’re of a mind. Draw your own conclusions and think for yourselves.