CRAZY PANTS

 

 

 

 

GUNS

 

UN ASSHOLES

 

EPSTEIN

 

KENNEDY

 

KEGSBREATH

 

ICE

 

INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN: THE (CALL) CENTER WILL NOT HOLD

 

THE (CALL) CENTER WILL NOT HOLD

 

          It’s a race that no one running really wants to win. And while we continue to say that rapid, technology-driven change is accelerating in virtually every industry and that speed kills, the truth is that, in certain sectors these days (many comprising principally what I would call the “nuts and bolts” low paying jobs), the trend is readily apparent, but the pace of “progress” is painfully slow and it’s a little bit like watching a slow-motion, multi-car pileup on a black-ice covered highway.

            There’s an oppressive air of inevitability because we all know it’s coming, we’ve all seen this movie before, and sadly no one has the faintest idea of how to stop it. Massive job losses – whole lines of work which will no longer be relevant or economically viable – and millions of people looking for a better life, but lacking the skills needed to get them and their families there. I realize that you can’t spend your whole life preparing for future catastrophes, but that doesn’t keep many of us from worrying as we look ahead at a very uncertain future. It’s like sitting on a bed of tacks – it’s pretty hard to focus on much of anything else.

            And, as the media monitors and regularly reports on the latest slow and soul-crushing slide of some industry sector into oblivion, we also know that we’re talking about major structural and fundamentally irreversible changes which will adversely impact the livelihoods of tens of millions of employees. And while everyone is happy to blame the technology boogie man, no one is suggesting any concrete solutions to offset the coming displacements.

            And, to be brutally honest, it’s not just the technology that’s causing the trouble. The main driver of many of these seismic shifts isn’t simply the implementation of new and powerful combinations of big data, technology and automation; it’s also the fact that we’re seeing that the center will no longer hold.

            Consumers’ behaviors and expectations continue to change at an accelerated rate and the need to push the delivery of everything to the perimeter – all part of the “right now” economy – makes it increasingly clear that there’s no longer a need to be “there” wherever “there” used to be. Today, to compete, you’ve got to be everywhere – all the time – or you’re nowhere.

            In more and more cases, strategies based on concentration, centralization, and critical mass mean less and less because – through connected combinations of technology and mobility - we can distribute and decentralize functions in ways that are more localized, far more fluid and flexible, easier to staff, and considerably cheaper than trying to bring zillions of people together in overlit, sterile and sweaty places to spend 8 hours staring at a screen and trying to sound cheerful on the phone.

            Call centers largely grew out of a single invention – the 800 number – which enabled national, toll-free, inbound calling that didn’t become ubiquitous until around 1980. You could basically call anywhere for “free” if you had a question, needed service, or wanted to buy something from a mail order catalogue. At its peak, there were several hundred million 800 calls being made every day. To handle the call volume, huge physical facilities were built in certain parts of the country (and eventually in other parts of the world) which housed thousands of operators.

            But today, no one wants to spend more time sitting on their phone waiting for an answer for anything and most cellphone users don’t even understand the concept of a long-distance call. Just like we no longer want to waste any time standing in a line at the bank or supermarket. Everyone’s in a hurry today. And it’s clear that the race is on. Who really wants to talk to a human when you can text?  And who needs a teller when your phone’s a wallet and an ATM? 

            I’m not sure whether the first victims at scale will be those millions of retail cashiers who may have largely disappeared by the time we start to see the call centers in this country (yes, they are back in this country, but that’s another story) become empty shells of themselves. Or it could be that it’s the call centers that will fold first. We’ll have big sheds with rows after rows of desks, chairs and monitors and no one sitting there to answer the calls which no longer come. The big credit card companies are already reporting that inbound calls now make up less than 10% of their daily inquiries.

            But whichever sector sinks more quickly, we know that it’s simply not good news for anyone and that the unforeseen consequences of these changes may be even more draconian and have a far wider impact than we expect.

            Just some other simple examples – self-service machines and automated checkout aisles at the grocery store (not to mention online shopping and automated fulfillment programs) are killing the gum/candy business (and the sleazy tabloids as well) which depend greatly on the impulse purchases we make to reward ourselves for standing patiently in line while Mrs. McGreedy scans her 46 coupons at the supermarket.

            Why would anyone go see the doctor for a flu shot at his offices in the big old hospital building when you can get the job done at your neighborhood drugstore faster and for little or no money and at your convenience?

            Who needs to drive out to the suburban auto mall when there’s a Tesla dealership sitting on the main high-end luxury strip right between Tiffany’s and Tommy Bahama?  And frankly, who wants to go to the mall at all? This is why 90% of the malls in this country are in trouble and why a small number of extremely well-located ones represent almost all of the valuable real estate.

            The bottom line is that bitcoin and the ideas around distributed everything are only the tips of the iceberg of decentralization which we will see changing every part of our lives as the growing centrifugal forces generated by the promise of constant connectivity and limitless mobility conspire to pull whole worlds apart. 
           

 

JoJo

 

What The Fuck Was That?

A White House “Address,” a Penis Price List, and the Endless Theater of the Absurd

JoJoFromJerz Dec 19

What the fuck was that.

No really.

What the actual, clinical, OSHA-reportable fuck did we watch the other night?

That was billed as a White House “address,” which is adorable — like calling a Times Square Elmo knife fight a wellness retreat. What we got instead was a prime-time address delivered with the unhinged cadence of a ventriloquist’s dummy whose puppeteer wandered off to smoke behind the building, leaving Satan — recently lobotomized, to freestyle.

It wasn’t calming. It wasn’t steadying. Hell, it wasn’t even English half the time. Watching him try to string together sentences was like watching someone in oven mitts try to defuse a bomb—sweaty, desperate, and liable to end with a fire drill and a visit from animal control.

Honestly, if you told me that was Candid Camera on crack, filmed during a power surge, and nobody bothered to tell him the joke was over, I’d believe you. It was like Captain Kangaroo got blackout drunk, snorted a line of Metamucil, and wandered onto the C-SPAN set with a head full of Ambien, just making up words and numbers for the fuck of it.

I haven’t seen someone divorce reality this hard since Paul Stanley’s face stopped negotiating with physics.

And somewhere in there — buried between the yelling, the sniffing, the chest-puffing, and the baby-bogus math — was that familiar, unsettling feeling that we were all being scream-lectured by the political equivalent of a man arguing with a self-checkout machine that keeps yelling “unexpected item in the bagging area.” Not as a metaphor. As a mood. As a governing philosophy. As if volume alone could bully the scanner into submission and shame the rest of us into believing it was our fault.

This was supposed to calm us down.

Lower our blood pressure.

Maybe even let America collectively unclench the sphincter it’s had in a death grip since November 2024.

Instead, we got primal scream therapy delivered by a pile of government-issue laundry draped over the podium like it was the last vibrating sex toy at a fire sale for bankrupt perverts. His shoulders collapsed inward, spine curled into that familiar boiled-shrimp-meets-authority pose. Less Commander-in-Chief, more SpongeBob plucked from the ocean and left to cure on a countertop, muttering about tariffs.

The delivery didn’t merely undermine the message — it made the entire spectacle impossible to take seriously. Not that anyone paying attention for the last decade expected competence, but this was a special vintage of chaos. Not louder. Not angrier. Just more nakedly unmoored. The energy of someone who absolutely heard, “You don’t need to do this,” and replied, “Roll the cameras, I’ve got thoughts,” before launching into a nationally televised free-association spiral.

The speech itself was a slurry of incoherent babble — verbal oatmeal, rhetorical mulch, sentences dissolving mid-thought and reforming as bravado. Language flailing around like it lost its glasses and refuses to admit it can’t see. Arithmetic wasn’t stretched or spun — it was mugged in an alley and left for dead.

At one point, he announced that drug prices were down “600 percent.” Six hundred percent cheaper. By that math, CVS should be paying you to take insulin home and apologizing with free tacos. That’s not economics. That’s numbers wandering into traffic. But he said it loudly, and in Trumpworld volume substitutes for evidence.

Even his own people were rattled.

Matt Walsh — a notorious misogynist, lifelong Trump apologist, and essentially a bearded version of the gimp from Pulp Fiction if it were dressed in Vineyard Vines — openly wondered what the hell the point of any of this even was. When you lose Matt Walsh, you haven’t just lost the base. You’ve confused the people who clap when the plane lands.

Threaded through this entire tantrum was a shiny object he clearly assumed we’d be too distracted to inspect: the “warrior dividend.” A $1,776 bonus waved around like a stained casino chip fished out of a clogged Mar-a-Lago toilet and passed off as gold. There was nothing fresh about it. No secret stash. Not a cent of Trump money. Just housing funds Congress had already approved — skimmed, ironed flat, spritzed with cologne, and shoved back out the door with his name Sharpied on the side like a pawn-shop mattress signing autographs at Comic-Con.

Senior officers in high-cost areas now subsidizing others with their own housing support. A shell game dressed up as gratitude.

Same move every time: break it, rename it, partially undo the damage, insist you’re the hero while inflicting more damage, rinse, repeat. He assumes people are genuinely fucking stupid — and performs accordingly.

If Wednesday night felt like a stress test for the nation’s collective sanity, Thursday afternoon answered the question we didn’t want to ask.

Because less than 24 hours after that Crazy-Eddie-selling-broken-TVs screamfest, there he was again — this time in the Oval Office — barely upright, barely coherent, barely awake. Consciousness flickering like a dying fluorescent bulb. His body arranged into the approximate silhouette of leadership the way a pile of laundry can look like your ex if you catch it out of the corner of your eye at 2 a.m.

Surrounding him: people in white lab coats.

Actual lab coats.

Not metaphor. Not symbolism. Literal medical cosplay.

Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being performed by the world’s most confused improv troupe at a roadside Marriott. And while he drifted, slumped, startled awake, and drifted again, not one reporter asked about his health. Not one. The cameras rolled while the President of the United States visibly struggled to remain conscious less than a day after an unhinged prime-time rant.

That whiplash alone demanded explanation.

The question wasn’t policy.

It wasn’t optics.

It wasn’t strategy.

It was pharmacology.

What pharmaceuticals are currently doing the heavy lifting here? What cocktail of powders, patches, injections, lozenges, nasal blasts, tinctures, fixatives, or time-release mystery pellets turns a late-night screaming pitchman into a mid-afternoon narcoleptic prop? Because those two versions of the same man — less than a day apart — do not occur naturally.

Meanwhile — because this entire week unfolded like a dare — earlier that same day, reality-TV surgeon turned Trump toady Dr. Oz was on television earnestly explaining the cost of a penis. A “high-quality” penis. About $15,000. Balls cost extra. Add-ons sold separately. A Build-A-Bear workshop for genitals. Apparently there’s now a conservative black market: I got this high-quality penis for fifteen, but I can give it to you for ten.

You cannot make this shit up. The president is nodding off in a medical diorama while a former daytime TV doctor prices penises like aftermarket spoilers.

And as all of that unfolded — simultaneously, chaotically, like a blooming onion of bullshit — the announcement dropped that the Kennedy Center had been renamed in his “honor.” Unanimously. By a board he appointed. A board he chairs. Something he is constitutionally barred from doing. Constitution, shmonstitution.

This followed his earlier-in-the-week toddler-tantrum walk of fame: plaques installed inside the White House insulting former presidents the American people actually elected. Paid for with our money, naturally, because his insecurity is a bottomless pit that needs constant feeding like a Tamagotchi with daddy issues and a Costco-sized tub of Nutella.

This is the pathology. The compulsive renaming. The plaques. The self-awarded trophies. The grotesque ballroom mockups swallowing the White House like a flesh-eating fungus in a forgotten utility closet. He doesn’t build legacies — he leaves signage, hoping marble and branding can drown out the echo where substance should be.

And by the way — where the fuck is Congress? Seriously. Every week it’s the same broken record: he can’t do that without Congress, that’s unconstitutional, that violates norms, that requires oversight. And then he does it anyway. And nothing happens. No emergency hearing. No subpoenas. No consequences. We just refresh the feed and move on to the next abuse like we’re scrolling past a car crash because another one just happened three exits down.

Some days it feels like watching a punchline with a sledgehammer. Everyone’s laughing, but the clock is ticking to see how much damage he can inflict before someone finally cuts the power — politically, structurally, biologically, whatever’s left. He may never see another ballot, but the harm is real and it’s happening in real time.

All of it is designed to distract. To keep us chasing spectacle while the real damage grinds on — especially now, with the Epstein files due today and new reporting surfacing like bodies in a tide pool. Files. Photos. Details that don’t disappear just because you scream louder.

And that’s the real point of all of this: the spectacle never ends. It isn’t a glitch or a bad week. It’s the product. A permanent theater of the absurd, looping endlessly, prop after prop, outrage after outrage, so no one ever gets a clean line of sight on what’s actually being done. This is not chaos by accident. It’s chaos as choreography.

We have to do two things at once: laugh at the lunacy and hold on to each other through it. One burst of laughter. One fit of tears. One are-you-fucking-kidding-me moment at a time. Get to the midterms. And then turn the fuck out.

When I wished to live in interesting times, narcolepsy and penis pricing were not what I had in mind. Alas.

And for the record —

It’s still the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s still the Department of Defense.

And it’s still the Kennedy Center.

And they will remain as such long after that orange fucking idiot is gone.

And with that today’s song:

Oh and as I was writing this broke — Todd Blanche now says the administration won’t be releasing the Epstein files as required by law today, which is both illegal and entirely predictable.

Hello CONGRESS?!?!!

I love you guys!

Stay strong, stay sane(ish) and PLEASE stay safe out there!