The Downsizing of America

I was preparing dinner tonight as I usually do every night. Took out a box of rice of roni for side dish. The package says to brown the rice/vermicelli mix. I noticed not very much filled the bottom of the skillet like it used to. When it came time to serve it up...no doubt.... Corporate downsizing at work. There was barely enough for two adult portions, in fact there wasn't enough and we were still hungry despite the meat and vegetable side I prepared as well. I remember making rice a roni and feeding 4 people with one box. Now it takes two boxes to do the same thing. Who the hell thinks up of those ridiculous serving/portion sizes on the packages anyway? I just went and looked at the box of rice of roni...Servings per package..."About 2.5" Now who the hell thinks of these things?? and how in the world do you go about feeding 2½ people? Does a small child count for half a serving?? No doubt the package size and contents have been downsized.

Not to run off on a tangent... if any of ya'll have cooking spray go and look at the serving size.... 1/4 second spray..now COME ON!!!! what is a 1/4 second spray?. I think just saying the word PSSST!!!! takes longer than 1/4 second!!!. They do that to make you think you are getting lowfat..horespuckey!!!!!...that's another weekly gripe for another time...low carb, low fat and serving sizes.

So now were are on the subject the downsizing of America.
Let's start with coffee. Remember the good ole days of a pound of coffee??... Then I remember back in the late 80's when those funky vacuum foil packages came out which never keep your coffee fresh after it is opened. Coffee size has been steadily decreasing.... 15 oz, then 14 oz, 13.5 oz. Now I'm seeing those vacuum foil packages that with 11 oz of coffee and the can size averaging about 12.5 - 13 oz but we are paying more!!!.
I never got used to that, I had no choice as I enjoy my morning coffee.

Moving on has anyone tried to buy the inexpensive 16 oz pound of bacon???... they are still there but the cheaper brands are all being replaced with 12 oz size. The 16 oz sizes are still there for the expensive name brand stuff that costs up to $6 bux. The 16 oz cheapo brands are quickly disappearing..SCHMUCKS!!!!.
The newest fatality to downsizing is kielbasa/sausage, ya know the one that is like snake in a vacuum package? Always comes in 16oz size. I was outraged to see smaller downsized versions sneaking and snaking there way in just like they are doing with the bacon. Do these schmucks think our stomachs are getting smaller?.

Just about every grocery item is being downsized yet you pay the same price if not more than you did for the full/normal version. They make you think the price is staying the same but you sure the heck know the package size ain't!!!.

How about a bottle of bleach???... I can no longer find a 1 gallon bottle anymore..the one gallon went to 108 oz now it's down to 3 quarts (96oz) and a $1.50...ON SALE mind you for Clorox brand. The cheapo brands literally rot your clothes. Nothing worse than putting on socks in the morning and having your big toe go through them during the day while you are working trying to wiggle that big toe back in through the hole. We know what a pain in the arse it can bee to have to take your workboots off at the jobsite.
The list goes on and on of all the products that have been downsized. Sooo.... you buy the Family Size, Economy brand thinking your are getting more for your money. Look very closely at the labels folks on the shelves and compare the cost per oz..you pay more per oz for the bigger size then the smaller!!!. You buy the big size thinking you are saving by buying in bulk. You buy two of the regular sized ones and they got ya buying more than you planned. Two of the regular sized one equates roughly to the economy size or you get a few oz more in economy and maybe save 10, 15, 20 cents, big Flippin deal!!!!. Corporate gets you either way.

I can just picture some Corporate pee on Schmuck putting his fingers to his mouth as he's brainstorming his ideas in the big meeting with head bosses. He comes up with..."If we cut the size of the package by 3 oz...keep the price the same that would translate to X amount of dollars per year the company saves" Big boss looks at the Shcmuck pee on and says...."I like that" Little pee on walks out of meeting feeling all good about himself as the knife turns in his back. He just fattened his bosses wallet even more and Mr. Big Boss steals the idea to make himself look like the hero. Maybe Mr. Pee On maybe gets a .50 cents raise...an hour raise at his employee review.

Get this!!!, On the back of my toilet tank sits one of those crocheted/knitted poodles that fit over a roll of toilet tissue..no sh*t!!!....LOL.... remember those!!!. We had one too in my home back in the 60's. My other says it's been around since since youngin days back in the mid 60's. Sitting on the pot one time I reached behind to examine Mr. Toilet tissue poodle. He's no doubt got decades of dust collected in his fibers. So I pulled the roll of toilet tissue out...Holy Rolly!!! an antique roll of PINK!!!! toilet paper..Charmin!!!. Well sitting in the ...I hate to say it...PLASTIC!!!! toilet paper holder box are rolls of 21st century Charmin. Today's rolls are very loosely wound, puffed up they say to feel good on our tooshies but we really know it's puffed up for less sheets per roll!!!!...The 1960's version was very compact, tightly wound. No doubt lasted longer even for those gastro intestinal blow out days. I wonder how our grandparents/great granparents survived wiping there arses with the Sears catalog out in the outhouse?

How long must we be bullied, bossed around, dictated and forced to live with what Corporations dish out?. They literally have us by the Gonads. We know it and They know it in this ultra materialistic, throw away society dominated by corporate socialism. Do you think America would go very long boycotting coffee??...I know I'd be a very cranky S.O.B. without my morning cup of Joe. Same for the price of gas. $2.18 a gallon at time of this writing for 87 Octane in my neck of the woods. We can't boycott gas...it's a necessity if we are to drive to work, shuffle the youngins back and forth to school, get grocery etc. Big Oil Corporations knows we will pay the price no matter how high. I bought a diesel truck in 2002 as then diesel was way cheaper than gas. Used to be a 1.13 a gal in 2001, 2002... today I saw $2.35 a gal..costs me about $75-$80 now to fill my truck.

Everything now is made from cheapo, chinso, meaterials and out of plastic nonetheless. OHH!!! how I just loathe that bastard product of a natural resource we call plastic. That crap should never have been allowed to have been invented. Again Mr. Corporate shcmuck says let's replace this metal part with a plastic one and save the company big bucks...let's see..we save 4 cent's per part multiplied by 10 million.....wow that's $400,000 a year the company saves just on that part. On the subject of plastic. In the landscaping business a plastic wheel barrow is useless. The plastic is unstable with heavy loads and the wooden handles break...there goes $80 bux down the toilet and back to Home Depot I go for another. AHHH plastic!!!! that's another topic for my weekly Gripe. I hate Plastic!!!! A good part of the worlds energy supply is now locked into this true genuine "Bastard" product.

Everything is made to break, fall apart, wear out just so we can go out and buy new while we keep feeding the corporate Illuminati run machine so that this matrix run dimension can continue in existence.
The cheapo brands fall apart and how many of us have the $$$ to pay for the expensive, top name brands?
We all have been mind controlled, programmed, conditioned that we MUST have many things to enhance or enjoy a quality life.
Is anything made like it used to?. America is truly being downsized and controlled by the corporate world.

I still see the things around today since my youngin days 35-40 years ago. I didn't realize they were that small and so poorly made. I always say "They sure don't make things like they used to" Oh wait...they downsized those too with lesser grade materials, cheaper grade plastic no doubt. Even the cans of play dough are smaller!!!, Shmucks!!!!. I hope the play dough monsters hide under there beds at night.

Until I find something else to Gripe about...

The Demise Of The Internet

Well here we go on another thing to gripe about which often nobody can do anything about same as the weather. Everyone talks about it but us folk in the lower echelons can do nothing about it.

I remember my first time getting on the Internet. I had arrived back to the United States in January 1994 after a 1 year stint in Seoul, Korea. It was in Korea in 1993 at the Army PX I bought a brand new computer and monitor. I thought I was pretty high tech to just have a 2 MB computer in 1993. My digital watch holds like 2 MB of information now and God only knows the memory capacity much my digital/video cell phone. I'm sure it surpasses that wonderful techonlogical innovation of the 2 MB of RAM that my computer had at the time. The newer computers were coming out with 4 and 8 MB and that was top of the line for 1993-94. I was only introduced to the Internet via Military and was shown how to use Email. GADZOOKS!!!! what a complicated contraption and mind boggling just to get into the email system, let alone write somebody as many systems in the military had yet to be retrofitted with Windows. Windows was a new concept for the average home computer user anyway with it's debut sometime around 1990-1991. How I thought we were so advanced.

Too intimidated with Email using the military's system I never bothered. Now it was 1994 and I was stationed in Biloxi, MS and I had brought along my computer purchased a year before in Korea. I went to the Base PX and bought Prodigy Internet service as I heard the Internet from a few folk was the big whoop tee do. I also had to buy an internal modem so I could get on the then NEW information superhighway. I knew nothing about computers but bought the Prodigy Internet Software and the purchase of my new Internal modem. How I was going to hook it all up was beyond me. I think that the Internal modem card came with the Prodigy software. I don't remember now.

By some miracle of fate and easy to follow instructions I managed to install the modem and the software without crashing my computer. During those wee hours in my private room in the military barracks I followed the tutorial for account setup which was easy and was now for the first time connected on the Internet to the outside world in July 1994. What a Marvel it was to look at News, weather on the computer. It wasn't long before I was browsing other venues on that slow 2400 BPS rate..hey that was good for the time. I remember seeing a photo come along with a news picture. Stupid photo must have taken about 10 minutes to download but it was a techological marvel. Now I get ticked off if that photo takes 10 seconds to load on high speed DSL...how things have changed.
The next day a call to my best friend up north telling her about Prodigy. She too had just obtained it and we exchanged email addy's. What a marvel to write a letter, hit the send button to have it pop up on someone elses computer in an instant and it was so easy.
Soon I was off to a remote area in Texas in late 1994 and hooking up to the Internet was now a 150 mile long distance call to connect to the nearest modem server. They didn't have the various local ISP server connections that you could crosslink with other services...such as I use my phone company's ISP to access America Online today.
I used Internet for emails only. All replies and composing of email was done offline. Then using doing flash mail that took less than one minute to send/receive. I had a calling plan of 10 cents a minute for long distance then so it wasn't too bad. Internet Surfing was out of the question having to pay long distance fees. Yet again in those days you were billed by the hour for your Internet use by Prodigy and America Online and I think they had various package deals. Like today's cell phones when you went over your alloted time the charges were steep.
Tired of Prodigy and it's garrish screen colors and limited capabilities I switched to America Online sometime in 1995. WOW...big improvement and yet easier to use.

1996 I was out of the military and moved to South Florida and I once again had a local connection and I had X amount of online hours on my plan. Now I was seeing what the Internet was all about. I was in heaven!! at the wealth of info out there on my 2MB computer. Computers were advancing faster than I could keep up. I think I had a 286 and now they were coming out with 386's and 486's with the advent of the Pentium processor. Then Amercia Online went with $14.95 a month for unlimited online time. We all know all the other Internet Service Providers soon followed suit. A practical meltdown with phone communications occurred as everyone then was getting second lines for there computer since being on the Internet tied up the primary phone line. Additional lines were needed in household and by ISP providers tomeet the demand and an Area Code number explosion began...those were the days.

Phone lines wes so jammed it was impossible to log onto the Internet during peak evening/weekend hours. You learned once you logged on you didn't dare shut the thing off, at least during peak hours. I was in the world of chat rooms, bulletin boards and Yahoo...WOW this was just icing on the cake.

The things availabe on the Internet in the mid to late 90's was archaic in today's comparisons but unlimited in scopes of information one could obtain..

The World Wide Web was growing exponentially daily as we entered the dot.com era. Trying to upgrade my then 5 year old dinosaur computer was a vailant waste. It was time to purchase a new one. 1998 I purchased a 486..WOW.... I forget the MHZ speed it was and I think we had progressed up to now 56K speed modem...Wow this was much faster than waiting minutes for a web page to download on the old computer I had. That computer was soon replaced in 2000 and again in 2003 to keep up.

Whatever I wanted to look up it was there. If it was on the World Wide Web one could certainly obtain it easily via there favorite serach engine. Remember there were no pop up ads then, no Ad-ware data miners and if you typed in the word tonsilitis you weren't automatically brought to a screen full of lusty, big bodacious ladies promising to show you more. You got to where you wanted to go. One could access anything from looking up about a dog breed, to health concerns to the far out and beyond and even to the extreme with schematics on how to build a bomb. One could look up anything without fear or retribution from prying eyes of the outside world.

Then to my surprise one day I typed in something on search engine that was rather benign and I was shocked to see naked pictures of topless women performing oral sex or other variants of adult consexual sex acts on the screen. I didn't ask for this crap!!! and when I tried to close out of the program it woudln't let me. The screen kept popping up and no matter how many times you tried to use the back button or red X button on upper right corner of your screen. Only way out was to shut down and reboot. Fortuanately it didn't happen that often..not yet anyway.

It only got worse from there. One could access an adult site and see ALL. There was no Adult Check back then and young children were seeing the same thing as us Adults and seeing things that they shouldn't be seeing. So Adult check came out that involved using a credit card for age verification purporses but the sites were still free. I was hip with that as I didn't agree with children being able to access adult sites. Soon the free of charge thing went by the wayside and every adult site had there own version of adult check and you paid your subscription to acces for just about every site sites. I heard of folk spending countless amount of $$$ a month just to view adult photos. Wouldn't just a few $$$ movie rental at the adult video store do??...NOPE!!!!. We now had the priavcy from the world via screen and made up user names. I never liked accessing those sites anyway and I certainly wasn't going to PAY to see adult pictures on the Internet only to have it lock up my computer anyway. The Interent very quickly became a Giant Pornographic Haven.
Then the sickos came along with child porn. The Govt had to step in and start monitoring both the sites and now using technology to track peoples Internet activity. That too only gets worse.

I was surfing the Internet daily and purchasing all kinds of things as we closed out the last century/millenium. It was so wonderful to purchase things on the computer only to have it arrive at my house a few days/a week later. We were in the height of the Dot.com boom. Corporations down to the little guy soon found out the Internet was a very fast, simple way to make money, lots of money..honestly and dishonestly. Then came SPAM (Unsolicited Email) that filled out email boxes to capacity with advetisements usually comprising of snake oil schemes to loose weight, get rich, loan schemes, where to buy prescription drugs and for men to to increase the size of there genitailia...
There has been huge public outcry over this.

We are all assured that this is going to stop but it's only gotten worse and this is 2005 unless you have an aresenal of protection on your computer to stop all this.

Then these annoying popup ads starting showing up while surfing the Internet..They STILL DO!! despite my Pop Up Blockers, Firewalls. They were so bad at times one had to then again shut down computer and reboot to stop the bombardment.

I'm an info junkie so I was was able to access most online newspaper sites with just one click of the button and most other sites as well.

Following 9/11/01 things drastically changed. The far out good stuff and the extreme on the Internet was being wiped off as quick as the websites popped up...thanks to Homeland Security. The pop ups only got worse and typing in a simple, benign word on your serach engine brought a plethora of Adult Porn sites..that hasn't changed.

Then many and to this day are an increasing number sites are requiring you to register a user name and password. Holy Christ!!! I have pages of typed papers of the websites I visit with the user names and passwords. I got smart there and used the same user name but over the years my tastes for user names changed so now there is a plethora of user names. It was only for registration or should is say "Tracking" purporses but still free. That too in 2005 is changing.

I went to look up a newpaper article the other day in the LA Times...WHAT!!! not only do they want a user name/password but now they are charging access for the exclusive news info. Well I ushered out a few expletives outloud basically telling that website where to go and exited out of there web page real quick.
Another night I went over to one of my favorite conspiracy web sites. It now required registration and a subscription fee... SCREW THAT!!!! many other sites I can obtain the same info from. This was a top primo site for a plehtora of knowledge too. I refuse to PAY for it though.

The past couple of years I've noticed my private emails I sent to my friends, family or what I write on the Yahoo Forums key words are popping up in my SPAM email. Not to say that whatever you search on the search engines you will get SPAM. The past few days I was searching about Firefighters, looking at various photos of fire fighting appartus, photos of fires and accident scenes. I wonder how long it will take for the Data Miners to put some junk email relating to my recent search topics.

I looked up snow pictures some weeks ago, I got ads for skiing vacations and warm weather retreats!!!. I live in a tropical climate and if I want to see snow I have family members that would be more than happy to have me come and visit.

Fortunately the arsenal of SPAM blockers, Pop Up blockers I've employed have eliminated about 95% of that crap. It's these damn firewalls in my computer that are messing up other online applications though like my online radio!!!.

How far is it going to go?. How low are they going to sink. Must we be bombarded by Junk Email, Spam, and Popups?? and Porno sites? If I want a service I know where to go and look for it. I don't need the crap bombarding me. When I type in looking for "INNOCENT" information must I see something relating to the human genitalia or copulation??!!!

The Internet is on the Demise in my opinion. It's gone from the information superhighway it once was. More and more sites that once were free you now have to pay for!!!. These folk figured out they were loosing money in the real world and now are regaining it thorugh cyberspace. I REFUSE TO PAY!!!!...I'll go broke!!!. It's bad enough I pay for access to the Internet and then have to pay for the info???... I know a nice place where the sun don't shine they can stuff it!!!!!.

There are many free sites out there STILL but it's slowly being eroded. Just the other day I tried looking up some old military buddies. No matter what white pages source I typed in...i was automatically linked to Intellus.com... For $39.95 I could find out EVERYTHING about them. I only wanted to see if they still lived in there home towns was all and no intentions of calling them. Ironic...I typed in my own name and the address and phone number showed up without the Intellus.com referall.

Capitalism and Corpoarte socialism are quickly enroaching and have been enroaching on the very internet. The greed for money and the people who are so willingly part with it. I know there have been various Bills trying to be passed by the U.S. Post office to charge each email we send. They are loosing money and have been with snail mail. When the day comes I have to pay for sending email is the day I unplug this technological marvel called a computer.

Isn't it bad enough our own Government is watching our every move with Big Brother technology on the so called Information Superhighway? Big mainframe computers scan the millions and millions of computer users every second searching for Keywords. Once they get a ping off your computer of whatever plethora of Keywords they are searching for you become closely scrutinized!!!! and pegged!!.

God forbid you should talk about how you Bombed out with the big deal at the office or you had gas and farting so bad you referred it online as to dropping bombs left and right...OOOPS...I used a keyword there...."bombs"..oh well I'm pegged now. TRUST ME!!!! I know!!. Not to mention the technology is there that logs your every keystroke..even if you delete it from the screen and only you see it...guaranteed if your are "pegged" Big Brother has seen it.

I miss the old days of the Internet. Yes it was slow but we got where we needed to go. I just fear the day when that big bodacious woman comes out of my screen in a hologram in my living room inviting me to come and see her Hologram cam.

The Redneck Cowboy