Free To New Subscribers

 The owner of Twitter, formerly known as "X," is once again pondering how he can get blood from the forty-four billion dollar rock he bought a year and a half ago. His latest inkling has been to charge users a few bucks a month to use the online gabfest. His initial sales job for users of his platform was to get folks to pay for a little blue checkmark next to the name they made up. Eight dollars a month for that little bit of added code. That added revenue isn't really making a dent in the losses Mister Mush has incurred, especially after he suggested that the advertisers who left following his nauseating support of anti-Semitists, "Your desire for attention is evident, and I encourage you to seek it within a more appropriate context." But in much more colorful language.

I'm not ready to help support the man who broke into what for many of us was our private funhouse and decided to let all the bad kids in. "Free Speech" at eight dollars a month reads like a pretty solid irony if not a complete contradiction of terms. 

So, much in the same way that no lunch is free, and even if the lunch itself is then the day you spend trying to find different ways to tell the Disney Vacation Club representative "no" is most egregiously not free, we are running out of "free."

Like "commercial-free." I got a nice note from Jeff Bezos over the holidays letting me know that my subscription to his Prime Video service was going to change very soon. When I say change, I mean devolve. Instead of watching a great many of the world's best and most interesting baking shows and bodice rippers without commercials, I would soon be able to watch a great many of the world's best and most interesting baking shows and bodice rippers with commercials. 

Unless I pay one of the richest men on the planet an additional two dollars and ninety-nine cents a month to take the commercials back out again. I'm no tech wizard, but it seems like putting the commercials into the programs is the expensive part. Leaving them out should be free. Or perhaps I should applaud Jeff and his engineers for discovering commercial TV in the same way that Columbus discovered America. 

This is the kind of genius we pay for. 

Thank you for reading this blog. That will be $4.99.