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09 March, 2024

Criminal Supermarkets

Supermarkets justifying record profits because of the many employees they have is bullshit. 

Supermarkets are "criminal."

It's not just me saying it, it's more or less official now. This post has had to be updated before it was even scheduled. The original post was everything below from the heading "Profit(eering)" to the "And Now - UPDATED:" heading further down. The post has also gone from "scheduled" to "for immediate release" status. 

I urge you to share this everywhere, share it often, and discuss it widely if you want food justice for Australians. (And Americans - unless your goverment stops a few "strategic mergers" from taking place, you'll be in this effective duopoly situation soon too - share the hell out of it everywhere!) Please read all the way down to the "Call To Action" and take action. Australians need the supermarkets to be reined in and punished. 

Profit (and profiteering)

They do know, don't they, that profit is what's left AFTER all outgoings have been paid, and therefore blaming employee payrolls is total bullshit? They HAVE record profits. AFTER having paid all outgoings. All outgoings includes wages last time I looked it up.

That means they've paid all their employees fairly - HAVEN'T . THEY? - and then they STILL have this mountain of money left over. The wages aren't paid for out of the profit, they're paid before they declare the profit. Either that, or they're lying right in our faces and hoping none of us has ever done maths.

And saying people are just trying save - when those people are still earning the same or more than last year but are having to choose the cheaper generic versions - that seems to me to say that it's more likely that the price on the original thing they wanted HAS gone up. Really. They could afford it last year and the years before, their budgets are still broadly the same; - but this year that nice ham is out of their price range. In plain terms, that nice ham has almost doubled in real price. 

What Can We Do?

Take the stores back. If you see anyone flogging a pack of mince - no. No, you didn't see anything. If they'd kept their staffing levels up to the point where it made their profits merely reasonable rather than rapacious and greedy, they could have a staff member standing alongside every customer and checking their baskets out for them to prevent this. 

In fact, they could have re-installed much cheaper and simpler things called "staffed checkouts" - as they had 20 years ago. Because you know what? Back then "stock shrinkage" was far lower than it is now with self-checkout. It's been a stupid, profit-motivated, unremitting and stinking stuff-up that the supermarkets made and we (the customers) have been paying for ever since. 

So, if you have a docket from last year, find the items you bought back then on the shelves today and write the old price on their price stickers with a fine felt tip marker. Be careful not to mess up the barcode though, because we don't want to cause any hassle. Also don't cover their price, just add the old price you paid and the date you paid that price. We just want other shoppers to see the price increases and decide for themselves if they want to buy that item there or perhaps just find another store where the two label amounts are closer together... 

Or print yourself a bunch of labels and take them with you to put near label holders - alongside the current price label, not covering it. Again, it's just nice to let other customers know how it's apparently us that need to change our budgets because of the rampant price gouges, rather than that the supermarkets make less profit so we can afford that item.

Print some nice notes or posters explaining that this doubling of some prices in less than four years is not acceptable, and put them near the worst rip-off items in the store. Nothing rude, just facts. Other people need to know, so that they can decide if they want to be ripped off or treated fairly. 

Get creative. Drive home that we are tired of being bent over for our wallets. And maybe someone that sees one of your posters will also start taking action. And the ripples will spread.

Retrospect

This whole situation happened because way back when, when someone decided that Australia didn't need competition in the supermarket sector, the "free market will take care of it." And so chains like IGA, ALDI, Costco, and a whole swag of other potential competitors weren't really welcomed into the market in Australia despite the healthy competition they'd have generated, back when it could have made a difference.

America - for once - is following us down the chute as they try to prevent a similar duopoly situation occurring there. You can see how our stupidity and docility in allowing a duopoly to get so stongly established and so deeply embedded has emboldened the same behaviour in other countries. It's time we showed them the other side of the coin. And 

But bear in mind - no matter where it is, a duopoly is exactly the same thing as a monopoly with two trading names. It was shown in interviews and questions that our two supermarkets actually do tacitly fix prices between them, develop the same anti-competitive practices between them to keep other players out, and work the same - let's call them what they are, scams - on their victi-... their customers. When more than two similar corporate bodies collude and collaborate between them to fix prices and scam their customers, the term is "a Cartel." We have those in Australia and all over the planet, too. But that's for another article.

In none of those scenarios are the customer's interests considered. Only our wallets.

So Keep The Bastards Honest, get activated and irritated, and let them know we won't take their thievery for much longer. Every store manager has a name and an address, write them a nice letter explaining why you think they should be working for the sake of their customers more than their shareholders. Oh and of course those upstream people also have names and addresses - write them a nice letter too. But do write letters, posters, labels, stickers. (Oh, and I forgot to mention that they have email addresses too...)

And Now - UPDATED:

The latest senate enquiry into the conduct of the supermarket duopoly robbing Australian consumers to within an inch of their lives has labelled their behaviour as "criminal." Colour me unsurprised because this is what I've been saying for over a decade already.  I'll hand you the lede now:

"A senate inquiry into supermarket pricing has heard that people are turning to dumpster diving and stealing to combat the cost of living.

The first of three hearings, held in Hobart on Thursday, also saw the conduct of Coles and Woolworths labelled “criminal”." -- https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/03/07/supermarket-inquiry 

People are scrounging from dumpsters items that the supermarkets would rather throw away (showing very clearly that their profits are wayyyyy too high, otherwise they'd at leats make an effort to sales-price these items and make some money from them) and some are turning to petty crime. 

What I may not have seen stressed enough in articles about this deplorable greed and rapaciousness the supermarkets are displaying is: if you saw someone steal an item at the self-checkout - NO! No, you did not see anything at all. Their actions didn't cause the supermarkets to record record billion-dollar profits, should indeed have caused the supermarkets some losses, and yet - lo! - for they STILL make record profits despite throwing out a significant proportion of perfectly within-code products, despite stock shrinkage being on the rise.

They Are Making Far More Than A Fair Profit, They Are Profiteering At YOUR Expense!

Remind everyone - once more, with feeling - Keep The Bastards Honest. Especially remind your local MPs and Ministers that every store manager has a name and an address, every CEO and COO and CFO too. Ask your Minister to write to them on your behalf, perhaps, or to forward your concerns via a new item of legislation being tabled or some such governmental magic. Because - and you should feel free to let those government persons know this - you will definitely support them in the next local election, by-election, and State or Federal election, and you just don't know if that would be the case if they didn't act... 

Call To Action

I know - I'm a tiny insignificant blogger writing on a tiny insignificant blog and yelling at the clouds. But even such a tiny voice can be magnified if it's taken up by many. And right now we need not only Senate enquiries and ACCC looking into the actions of supermarkets, we need EVERYONE  to get activated, be informed, read about it so that they too can make their feelings known. Share this post (https://bit.ly/store-rage) so that many others will see it. Ask them in turn to share it too. Just please get the word out there - our supermarkets are just the tip of the iceberg, fuel companies, energy companies, real estate and landlords - they're all chowing down hard on the record profits they've been building up to, and consequently reducing our lives to just being cash machines for them. It's time at least one country stood up for older more human values again. Help the change along


As always, stay awesome and

KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

Got a tip? Questons? Want me to email you? Go here for contact details.

20 February, 2024

Enshittification 101: More F-lockin-tech

I've used the word "flockintech" a few times now, most of you will have gathered it's a portmanteau word for "F'ing Lock-in Technology," but how many people are aware of just how much flockintech we are actually stuck with already? And this also goes ,for our techie/geeky focus in my blogs, particularly for technology products and software.

I've pointed out the matter of John Deere tractors (and yes they are "technology" because technology is inextricably tied up with almost every machinery technology) and a Polish railway that had to hack a piece of carriage-disabling malware that the carriage manufacturer introduced into the carriages to ensure they had to always be heavily used and regularly "serviced" by the manufacturer, which caused significant downtime for the railway and was eventually fixed by an anonymous hacker group removing the malware from the carriages. 

There's a video platform where people have paid to save videos and as the company founders, are unable to keep the videos they've saved on the platform. There have been several other online properties that sold a permanent product to their customers and then said products became unusable when the company went tits-up and the servers were switched off. 

Got A Fitbit? 

I'll start off, for now, among the first items on this week's "Download This Show" podcast is the Fitbit Update Bricking And upRoar incident I'm choosing to call FUBAR. (Yep. Look FUBAR up if you don't already know what it means and where it came from...) Marc mentions in the podcast that Google are being a bit coy about the update possibly/possibly not causing the fitbits to go from a battery life measurable in days, to a battery life measurable in around 60 minutes. 

I can tell you what I think. Enshittification. That's how you add or subtract features to an existing successful product, and (as the name suggests) turning said product into ka-ka. My newsletter software is a case in point, offered a free-forever low volume product,realised that meant a lot of small bloggers like myself, and at first began adding bloat features I'll never use, and finally, when they realised after a year that we who can't afford it, simply can't afford to go to the Pro version, so they've introduced a "we're turning this server to a Pro server and you'll have to follow this five thousand word guide to move your existing newsletter to another server just for Free tier users.

I voted with my feet, I have few newsletter users, very little free time to be moving them to another platform or whatever, the newsletter will have to wait. If I had a few donations I could just Pro-ify the existing account again but as I have neither I'll get to it when convenient. 

Back to the Fitbit:- Google bought the company and began integrating it with their own ecosystem, which was fantastic for the fairly basic thing the Fitbit was in its infancy. (They mention this in the podcast.)

They also mention that Google now has a smart watch product of their own that does what the Fitbit does among a host of other features. I'd be enshittifying the hell out of the Fitbit if I was the person marketing the Google Watch which is purpose-designed to work in their ecosystem, and mayber that's what's just happened. Stay tuned to this - will a new update be able to reverse and fix the last update, or will it turn out that the software update overdrove some components that then shorted out and will now the affected Fitbits now be rendered unusable?

Got Windows? 

This has to be my favourite example of enshittification and flockintech ever. Windows 2 - almost no-one knew about. Windows 3 - much the same. But there wasn't an upgrade path. You bought each version. Windows 3.11 (the first one with networking and thus the first natively Internet-capable Windows operating system) I think was the same. 

And it's not like you could afford to keep using W3.11 to this very day. For a start, it's well-known and has well-known exploits. Microsoft started offering some security updates but of course support stopped because they wanted us to buy the next great OS from them. For a another, the hardware it ran on is hard to get. (Although I have to note that just recently, a job opening for a Windows 3.11 Administrator has become one of the most rarified jobs in IT, and probably the last workplace to use this version of Windows which would by now be over twenty years old, and replaced by Windows 95 in 1995.)

There have been 27 versions of Windows since W95, some upgrades, some for different tasks (server vs workstation etc) with 14 just being upgrades of W10. Until W10, you bought each new version of Windows as it cam out. W10 offered free installation to owners of approved older operating systems, so not quite as much money was made on W10, and some enshittification resulted, where things were added to W10 to allow exfiltration of the "owner's" usage data, and a whole lot more details. 

W11 has been described as a "Spy in a trenchcoat" it exfiltrates so much user data. Losing so much of my personal information constitutes enshittification to me. 

Also, even if you own one of the earlier Windows versions and are still happy with it, Microsoft tries to lock you into their upgrade cycle by ending update support for the old version. You may say "Big ****ing deal" to that but Internet security is one of the things that you'll no longer get updates for. And the older an operating system, the more vulnerabilities are found, even after Microsoft stops patching. Due to the fact that while you notionally "own" that version of Windows, you have no access to the code, so you can't fix new vulnerabilities yourself. So in that sense you're either locked-in to their versions cycle, or locked-in to being hacked within five minutes of putting your new re-installation of your OS online. 

EverNote

I've had an account on Evernote since before forever or even further back. The free account was fine for me, I didn't turn that much traffic or quantity on the servers, I used it well within the usage limits for a free account. I only used it to keep blogging notes current between my laptop, my PC, and my phone. Not long after I got it working for me the way I needed, They reduced the number of devices I could use it on. No longer useful. And the other day I wanted to download my notes for historic reasons, and I have to install the PC app just to make an archive. I will. But then Evernote will see one less user for their enshittification, lock-in, and general bait-and-switch tactics.

I'm just listening to another enshittified product:

TED Talks Daily

This one isn't flockintech but definitely enshittified. I've been listening to the 'cast for ages, and ads. And I cast them to the TV when in the lounge because it feels more natural to me to listen to stuff on speakers while working. (As I'm doing right now, listening to a TED  Talk on climate technologiews that are worth supporting.)

Ads. TV and radio have long been legislated into keeping the audio and colour saturation levels down to normal levels. The audio level of a commercial must be the same as the program material, preventing those SHOUTY!!! ads on TV that used to shake the house in an effort to get your attention. 

Apparently, there's no such restraint placed on TED Talks Daily. While my wife's unwell, she needs bed rest. It's all the way at the other end of the house from the loungeroom, but in order to hear the program 3-4metres away from the screen, I need a certain volume level. 

That level is inaudible in the bedroom, but the ads on the podcast are loud enough to wake a person in the bedroom. So in a way TTD has locked me into earhpones or earbuds. 

Others?

I said earlier that I'll go back and find a few more of the thousands of great technologies that gradually enshittified and locked-in their users bit by bit to the point of killing their business, and I will. I suggest you bookmark this page and come back to it in a few weeks. Also maybe share it, and maybe make a small donation to help me keep things online, maybe afford a better newsletter provider, and pay for the subscriptions I keep so I can keep up with the news I post here. 



05 February, 2024

Supermarkets Are Overflowing - multiple updates!

Please scroll down for an announcement, take action, and scroll back here. Cheers!

- with profits! Profits! Glorious profits! Money! YOUR money! The only difference between supermarkets and Uncle Scrooge McDuck is that Scrooge has a pang of conscience at the end of each episode and stops some of his exploitative behaviours.

EVEN MORE UPDATE: Four Corners these supermarkets are the gift that keeps on giving - if you wanted material to string them up by the privates, at any rate. The CEO of Wo - that one supermarket - walks out of his Four Corners interview because he heaped shit on a professional in the industry, and wasn't allowed to ask to have that bit edited out. Oh and then a few days later he conveniently resigns. 

(Probably to get his golden handshake before he was pushed, but. And even though he claims it was planned all along, Wo - that place - obviously were NOT expecting him to resign because they're now scrambling because they had no succession plan. Sucks to be an incompetent money-pilfering slug...)

And the CEO of Co - the other place - adjusts their lipstick to "incandescent" setting, and bald-faced declares that they're not actually on a rocket ride of profits. How can you tell a ColeWorths CEO is lying? They just are. Always.  

UPDATE 14/Mar/2024: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/03/13/supermarket-woolworths-coles-theft how the supermarkets are reacting to desperate people who resort to shoplifting to pay for supermakets' price gouging. I wonder how long this will last? 

AND ANOTHER UPDATE!: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/11/coles-woolworths-senate-inquiry

UPDATED AGAIN AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/30/supermarkets-government-profits This is becoming the spectacle of the decade!

UPDATED AGAIN: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2024/02/06/price-gouging-report 

UPDATED: There may be some activity afoot. (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/16/grocery-prices-inquiry) I asked in this older article whether the probe will have teeth, i.e. will it be able to actually compel the corporations that own the thieving supermarkets to act with humanity, and this update seems to suggest that the probe will get teeth. Unfortunately, legal action in a year is still a little bit too late for people already doing it hard...

You may know the back-story to this - over a year ago, meat producers (farmers, basically) got bent over and shafted, as the prices of meat were wound back by large amounts. I imagine this reduced their ability to purchase things, and because some fairly large communities' fortunes rise and fall in time with the primary producers, that starts to be a bit of a large number of people who suddenly have fewer dollars, while simultaneously their costs went up as supermarkets raised prices. 

It's all very well to say "but they live in a farming district, they can get their meat / vegetables locally at farm prices" but you lose sight of a few factors there.

  • The farmers will need to make a profit on their unsold meat animals. 
  • Most people in farming communities lack the skills to butcher and dress meat
  • The butchers in those communities need to make money too.
  • If the community is centered on meat, then vegetables and cereal products are still at the mercy of the supermarkets.
  • Vice-a-versa in the case of growing districts. In their case, they need someone to process the grain and produce goods from it. The supermarkets again.And they're at the mercy for anything related to meat.
  • Vegetable (market garden) regions are probably best off in one sense, but also their market gardeners need to make money so prices will go up when the prices they get from supermarket buyers goes down.
  • On top of that many farmers/growers have draconian contracts with the supermarkets that prohibit them from sell surplus to third parties, many many many penalty clauses, and so there are a lot of things they can't do even if they wanted to... It sucks.

There's unfortunately not much that many people can do about that - "food deserts" are engineered into local planning by design, making it hard to get anything but fast food or some supermarket foods. It means the fast food places and the supermarkets have a huge customer base that doesn't have any alternatives.

It's also down to some selectivity by sellers, of course. You'll find upmarket grocers and butchers and bakeries in upmarket suburbs, because there, they will get the prices they need in order to stay profitable. Same with farmer's markets etc - if they're set up in a suburb that has two McDonalds, two KFCs, a Hungry Jacks, and four chicken fast food places, they don't do well.

Jaks Sisko in Star Trek focuses this problem perfectly - he cooks his own meals because he considers them superior to the replicator-generated meals - but where does he get his ingredients? Wouldn't that also be from the replicator? 

So people shop at supermarkets where the growers and suppliers have been stretched to the limit to supply nutritious food but - under that kind of financial stress, they can't afford to do all the things that would be needed to make the food truly nutritious. That kind of farming requires far more land, land that can be regeneratively and ecologically soundly managed, and even then the soil will lack some of the nutritional components needed to make the produce truly nutrition-packed.

Even if you go to farm gate stores, they're still in the same situation, so whether they sell it to the supermarkets or to you direct, it's still no longer what it was. The world population is showing the effects of slow nutrition deprivement. 

But the story I'm showing revolves more about the sheer extortion supermarkets are engaging in at the moment. They've always found ways to extract more dollars from a given kilo of produce, but now they're just going "fuck it," and charging extortionate prices. 

I can think of one way to end that, but it's not pretty. We could also end it by boycotting those supermarkets for a month or two, but as mentioned, that isn't an option for anyone wanting to feed a family unless they have their own homestead or farm, or access to farmer's markets and farm gate stores. 

The other way is for farmers to void their contracts with the supermarkets and only sell direct to the public or to independent grocers and stores. And they can't afford to do that because of the logistics involved. 

Also, automated local vertical farms can produce many of the vegetables and fruits within their local suburbs, but this is a) unlikely to be profitable for the first five years or so until it starts hurting the big supermarkets and people get used to them and b) - come on! This would be like living in a colony ship or a colony on another planet with carefully-maintained agriculture and a limited range of produce, and this is supposed to be our home. 

But there's also the other way - write to your local Members, to the ministers responsible for finance and food security and anti-competitive practices by corporations and let them all know that you'd like them to use their powers to fix this piracy. Start petitions or sign them, have meetings with others in your suburb, decide on some action before food becomes unaffordable to you, too. And trust me, it can easily happen. 


Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there. 

That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.

You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.


23 January, 2024

Flockintech

First I have a favour to ask you. I probably won't have time to post as regularly as I have been. Family / health problem, yes serious. But it means I'll need your help - please share this post, share the News Stand link, and help others to find my articles.

What kind of tech is "flockintech?" Stick around. What do Polish trains, premium EVs, and farm tractors have in common? Stick around. What does flockintech have in common with - no, hang on. Just stick around...

John Deere

So you probably know about the John Deere vs farmers saga. If you bought a John Deere tractor and got your local mechanic to change a filter, the tractor would probably shut down. John Deere designed this and other gotchas into the machines. The idea was that a JD technician would come to the farm, change that filter with an identical filter that your local mechanic would have put in, typed in a secret JD authentication code, and the tractor would work. 

The JD technician would cost the farmer thousands of dollars, the mechanic probably only a few hundred. Can you say residual income rip-off? 

Premium Vehicles

Many premium cars and especially EVs, come with dozens of features included in the construction by default, but you can't have them unless you pay extra fees for them. This is a particularly vexing ... umm, let's call it what it is, a total fraud - because you bought the car with all those features in it but the manufacturer is holding you to ransom if you want them enabled. Worse still, some of those features are only available by subscription, meaning they can deny you them if you don't provide them with that residual income rip-off. 

There aren't all that many ways around this issue unless you're extremely good at writing a whole new management program for the vehicle, and of course if you muck it up you void any warranty...

Polish Trains

"Newag, the company that manufactured the trains, had software in place that put locks on the carriages if they were serviced by third party mechanics or if the cars remained stationary for too long."

Seeing a familiar theme develop here? Gouging goes deep, and there needs to be some kind of solution. 

Worldwide, "Right To Repair" laws are being drafted and enacted, that will force manufacturers to allow a person who buys a product, to perform maintenance and repairs on that product. Many manufacturers are pooling their resources to fight these laws being introduced, but as you read, John Deere have been wrestled to the ground on this, and once more RtR laws are enacted, so will most of these other thieving bastards.

RtR laws will also require that devices are not "permitted" to be repaired but then physically obstructed, that is, no "proprietary" fasteners to prevent access, no filling the electronics with potting resin except where a product's Ingress and Explosion ratings require it. 

And as for the Polish railway line, their fightback has involved a rather strange ally. Read it here.

Anonymous Assistance

The precedents have been set, before JD were forced to relinquish their ransom booty, a few farmers hacked their own tractors and faced legal action from JD, and in fact was one of the factors that shaped the JD-farmers outcome. 

It would now appear that the few hacks I've found online for unlocking the premium features of your car, may soon be legal, and there's not a thing BMW will be able to do about people unlocking the massage feature and heated seat options of their cars, because the car was sold with those things already built in, and you can argue that the manufacturer locking them down amounts to sabotaging the vehicle and introducing faults that it's your right to repair.

There's another name that sprang to mind when I read those articles, and it's "Lock-In Tech." They lock you into a system and then charge you a premium price or subscription to unlock the features. In the case of JD, there may be a case for charging them with sabotaging a farmer's livelihood, I'm not sure on that point. 

But now when you read me writing F Lock In Tech you'll know exactly what the title means...

Come on - share the link to this article, share the link to the News Stand where people can see my latest twenty or so posts, and maybe make a donation to help me pay my server and sundry online fees.


10 January, 2024

Supermarkets And The Nuclear Option

First - please scroll to the bottom to see what's happening in my life, and take action. Then come back up here. Thank you.

Okay, what? Nuclear? What are the supermarkets up to now? If that was your first thought, then congratulations, you've proved one of my points. We wouldn't put anything past supermarkets, including - stuff to do with whatever nuclear whatsname I'm referring to.

If you thought maybe there might be more to this than just one of the supermarkets serving berries with a side of Cherenkov radiation, then I'm betting you know more about me and my radical recommendations... 😸

UPDATED: There may be some activity afoot. (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/01/16/grocery-prices-inquiry) I ask in this article whether the probe will have teeth, i.e. will it be able to actually compel the corporations that own the thieving supermarkets to act with humanity, and this update seems to suggest that the probe will get teeth. Unfortunately, legal action in a year is still a little bit too late for people already doing it hard...

What's The Story?

This is. The Reserve Bank keeps raising interest rates because inflation isn't going down, and the supermarkets - by some strange coincidence - are making billions of dollar more per quarter which could possibly raise inflation...

Supermarkets are making record ten to twenty billion-dollar quarterly profits and the Australian government has "had enough of it" and is appointing Craig Emerson to head a "probe," a "Code of Conduct review." I don't think this goes anywhere near far enough. 

This "probe," this "review." Does it have teeth? And by that I mean, does it have any power to not merely "make recommendations" but to compel? Somehow, I doubt it'll have those teeth. And yet it should - WAY more teeth. If you know me, you know...

Note how they only release QUARTERLY figures because if we actually saw the annual figures we'd be torching their fucking stores and lynching anyone above the level of floor manager. Here - I'll do it for you:

"Coles posted $10.25 billion in first-quarter sales in 2023, a 3.6 per cent rise compared to the first quarter of the 2022 financial year, while Woolworths’ revenue grew by 5.3 per cent for a total of $17.2 billion."

That was 2023. Their costs have gone down even further since then, and - as we're all to painfully aware - their prices have gone up inexorably. But just extrapolating those figures for the last year:

Coles would have made between $41bn and $45bn depending on how many more opportunities they took to screw their producers and consumers. 

Woolworths would have made $69bn - $72bn. In a year. 

If I projected a steady 3.6 to 5.3 percent per annum growth they'll make between $43bn to $49bn and $73bn and $79bn, roughly, this year. 

That's not only not right, I think that's criminal level fraud and pricing scams. There ought to be jail terms attached to this investigation, AFP-level search and seizure of paperwork and documentation. 

Possibly, if some amounts of deliberate malfeasance is established, the installation of government officials as the final arbiters of policy in the corporate offices of those supermarkets.

THAT is my nuclear option. Whattya reckon? (Note the UPDATE at the head of this article - it seems I wasn't the only one thinking the time for the carrot was over...)



Family facing health crisis. I may not be able to post as often, meaning fewer announcements, meaning fewer visitors. I'm asking you to help out. Share this post to all your social media, share it by email. Go to the image just below here, find the rolled-up newspaper icon, and share that URL too, so that more people get to see my latest 20 posts. Maybe even donate to help out with server and domain fees. 

As always - please share this article and others like it, share the URL of the News Stand, help my posts be seen by a wider audience.

09 November, 2023

Netflix And No.

I recall reading recently - no, watching a longish video - about Netflix's slow crumbling. But they now reckon they have the problem in hand. So anyway here's that video. It's a year old so form whatever opinion it brings you.

But Imma have my doubts about this though - in this recent article they say "added 8.8m subscribers" but how many are just waiting out their current subscription and then hauling ass? I know I would be. If I were a Netflix customer, at any rate. 

I've enjoyed my entertainment as much as the next person when I was somewhat younger, but started my teen years looking for the few techie shows like The New Inventors and Julius Somner-Miller. What I'm saying is that I never really considered Netflix a service I'd pay for, and going to the movies once every few months was enough for me to satisfy my need for blockbusters and amusement. We now have some streaming and watch a few entertainment shows but our day includes a lot of background of news and podcasts and techie articles and politics and ... 

What I'm saying is that to us, Netflix has always been a bit of a waste of bandwidth and money, so we've found ourselves with a better-value subscription that has a good selection of entertainment and documentary and informative content, Nebula, Youtube, and whatever other indie sites there are out there.

But now they've gone and done this bait-and-switch, removed a subscription level that people obviously liked, and are faffing around as though they're going great guns when as far as I can see their existing subscribers will be looking for a platform that's more honest and stable. I would.

I just finished an article about Patreon doing much the same things, adding things people don't want, trying to wrangle more money out of their creators. And how many of them are as a result disillusioned and thinking about Ko-Fi and other alternatives. That instability and level of BS is what kept me from having much to do with Patreon at all.

What about you? Netflix freak or Netflix-freaked?


08 November, 2023

The Fat Bears Story

The Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bears Story.

I'll report it like a mainstream media article first:

Sisters Breaking Traditional Molds On The Road To Reproductive Success

Two Alaskan Brown Bears are going where no others of their kind have gone before. And it's proved successful for them.

Factoids You Need, To Appreciate The Story

Unprecedented Fat Bear extended family first spotted in 2022. 

909's cub goes to live with auntie 910

909jr is into its 3rd year of life, 910jr now in its 2nd year.

So The Story So Far

909, at a year older than her sister 910, has her first cub, 909jr. The year started ordinarily enough, but when the following year proved to be a rich and successful year for Fat Bear contestants, and when her sister 910 also had a cub, 909 and 910 did something that other Brown Bears never did  - they moved around together, foraged and fished together, and their cubs played together through the entire season.

It's unknown if the group hibernated together but there may be a non-zero chance that they did. (Ed: this is supposition on the part of the reporter and was not a confirmed scientific opinion.) The following Spring, the amazing thing that happened was heartwarming: 909jr stayed with auntie 910, freeing 909 to go off and (presumably) mate again. 

If true, and if 909jr and 910jr learn a newfound sense of society, then the reproductive advantages of such a strategy may prove a turning point for the 909/910 group and perhaps one day for all brown bears.

Now I'll go back to my own style.

I'm going to be looking for one particular Fat Bear Tale in 2024, the one about 909 coming back with another cub and probably that cub also leaving her in 2025 to go live with auntie 910 while (presumably) 909jr goes out on its own. And then returns to a social group it remembers fondly. 

Just imagine - by being free from her cub, 909 is able to have another cub sooner than she would normally have been able to. By forming a family unit, these two ladies have created a way to fit more cubs into a given period of time. By being together for various generations, the cubs will begin to form habits conducive to more social behaviour, and if they stick it out for a few more years, their group will begin to grow, with "nursery aunties" and "mother aunties" making a noticable bump in fecundity. 

This shows several things:

1. It's generally the females of solitary species that form socially cohesive groups because they're bound to raising infants, and many paws make light work.

2. It only takes a "right" combination of genes to create a greater likelihood of social cohesion emerging.

3. Since such social groups are more likely to be closer genetically, the trait concentrates in the group.

4. Also, since the cubs have been reared and raised in atypically larger groups, they'll themselves begin to form social groups like this more readily.

And I think that perhaps it's also a good overall simile for how ANY organism becomes more successful through being more social. Why isn't it seemingly working for us any more?


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