FTC investigating why McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken

14 thoughts on “Your tax dollars at work

  1. This is actually a big deal.

    This is part of the whole “you don’t actually own the thing you own” movement that’s out of control. You can’t repair your own equipment. Someone came up with a tiny addon that made it so the mcds ice cream machines were easy to use and always working, and they got shut down…by the people who sell the ice cream machines and the maintenance contracts for them. There was a great story out there about this in the spring.

    But there’s a movement in the Biden admin to crack down on this stuff. Things like farmers who can’t repair their own tractors or risk getting sued for (wait for it) copyright infringement because they have to tinker with software they claim is copyright protected. Of course this is not what intellectual property rights were intended to do, make it so predatory corporations could force people to buy maintenance contracts and pay inflated repair costs rather than do them themselves.

    So it’s a big investigation, and the company behind the mcds ice cream machines is in deep shit. They used straight up mob tactics to shut down this small company that made their machines better (aka “fixed” the one thing that made it so mcds franchisees had to pay them thousands for “repairs” that amounted to pressing a button) and, um, that’s illegal.

    1. Right to repair is a major issue. At present, you don’t actually own anywhere near as much of ‘your’ stuff as you think you do.

  2. Wow, thought for sure it was going to be an Onion article, after I read it, I still thought it was an Onion article.

  3. People who WANT to work can get the shot. For free. Fraud is a crime. Personal responsibility used to be at least pretend-important in certain circles.

      1. Yup, you never hear anyone talk about their OWN personal responsibility – probably never will.

  4. The world is out of control

    What about prosecuting people that WANT to work in NY for a fake vaccination card while we set records at the SO border or the $83 billion we left in military equipment in Afghanistan?

    I didn’t ever think we would become this dysfunctional

    1. I see you’ve been listening to the misinformation channels again.

      First of all, there is no $83.9 billion worth of equipment in Taliban hands.

      That figure is the GAO’s figure for the total amount spent on training and arming the Afghan military forces since 2003. “Equipment and transportation” is estimated to be about $24 billion of that, according to the inspector general’s report (18 billion) and some estimates of the years not covered by that report ($6 billion estimated). That includes the cost of getting it there, so the actual value of the military equipment is less than that.

      Now the value of what is currently extant must be much less. Obviously, most of the ammo we supplied to them through the years no longer exists. That’s why we kept supplying more. Many of the vehicles must be out of service by now. On the other hand, many other things have probably kept working over the years.

      Nobody knows exactly how much fell into Taliban hands. It’s probably somewhere between a half and a third of the original supply, so maybe eight to twelve billion at most – a far cry from 83. It might even be much less, because the Afghan government was so corrupt that almost all of that equipment could have been re-sold and the cash pocketed. Clearly the Taliban picked up supplies, but the amount is indeterminate.

      Second of all, that was going to happen no matter what we did or what timing we chose to do it.

      All four Presidents have known that the Afghan government could not survive without being buttressed by America. Trump said so in so many words. Whenever the USA would pull out, the Afghan government was going to fall, and the Taliban was going to get everything the old government had. Yet the US presidents all talked about how we needed to end it, despite knowing that was part of the price to be paid. It would have been the same if Obama or Trump had withdrawn. It would have been the same if Biden had chosen some other way or time to withdraw. It was a given.

      —-

      That is not to say that Biden didn’t totally fuck up the withdrawal in other ways. The USA should have been patiently evacuating Americans and sympathetic Afghanis BEFORE we started pulling out. Why did we do nothing for seven months, then try to empty the entire country in two weeks under the twin pressures of a deadline and Taliban control of access to the airport? I don’t get it. I don’t think anybody gets it. We knew that a rapid Taliban takeover was a worst case scenario, and we did not have a game plan to cover it. And why were we dithering around with the immigration red tape for those translators? Evacuate them first, shuffle the papers later. We needed to spend all of 2021 getting ’em to Qatar or Guam or Texas or some other god-forsaken place and then we could have shuffled the papers and sorted out the niceties.

      And finally, while the Taliban didn’t get the $83.9 billion, we taxpayers still lost it. Over the course of 18 years, that’s the amount we poured into developing and training a government security force for that country, a force which dissolved the moment we pulled away, leaving us absolutely nothing to show for it. That’s the story of Afghanistan in general. In return for thousands of American lives, plus a total cost, considering everything, of some trillion dollars, we got … ?

      Well, what did we get?

      I guess Afghanistan made some progress into the 21st century, for whatever value that has to the USA (certainly not enough to justify the American lives and dollars it required). And it remains to be seen whether even that tiny accomplishment will be reversed under the Taliban.

      1. The United States put in a lot more than $83.9 billion in Afghanistan over 18 years. Somewhere between $1-2 trillion seems to be the total amount. My guess is most of the difference is whether to count the full cost of the soldiers, or just the incremental cost, since, presumably, they’d still be in the military anyway.

        As to why there was not more done to get people out of Afghanistan over 7 months since Biden took over or the longer time since Trump started negotiating with the Taliban, this certainly isn’t an excuse, but it does seem to show how governments work. This isn’t even necessarily to blame governments or bureaucracy since the reality is there would need to be much more government to do everything that might be necessary.

        This is from a book written in 1956 that covered Truman’s post war economy and especially the international agreements that buttressed the economy (like Breton Woods.) The book, Sterling Dollar Diplomacy was written by a lawyer and economist named Richard N Gardner:

        “National policy is rarely influenced as much by impressive blueprints for future action as by daily expedients contrived to cope with current problems.”

        1. You could delete the words “national policy” from that quote and substitute “human behavior.”

          Be that as it may, the evacuation was totally bungled, whether or not it is typical of national policy or human behavior.

      2. 83billion, 23billion it doesn’t matter the fact that this happened is an embarrassment.

        I’m glad you got caught up on facts presented 2 days ago and backed up by Google (all on the internet is true right?) And not on the embarrassment that our administration has become on an international stage

        1. Midwest Conservative said: “83billion, 23billion it doesn’t matter….” (sic).

          See, UncleScoopy? Facts don’t matter. Being wrong or right doesn’t matter. Bellowing out GOP talking points matters. Forgetting all about the 4 year international humiliation that Trump was while in office matters. Not facts. Not reality. Being wrong? Who cares. as long as you yell the right lies?

          1. It’s not fair to say that facts don’t matter to them. They matter very much, just as Lex Luthor matters to Superman.

        2. It’s not an embarrassment in the sense that we knew it would happen as a consequence of withdrawal, but we chose to withdraw anyway, and we all agreed that needed to be done. All four Presidents knew that the Afghan government would collapse, and therefore that whatever belonged to the government would belong to the Taliban, which would soon be the government. This had nothing to do with the administration’s actions. It was a given, no matter how the American withdrawal was done. If we planned the withdrawal in the best possible way, whatever that was, the same thing was going to happen. The only way to prevent it was to stay.

          In other words, the entire point is nonsense, not just the numbers. It’s just one of the usual misinformed right-wing talking points, ala Crowd Strike and Uranium 1.

          But for the record, the real number now possessed by the Taliban is unknown, but is probably somewhere around 10 billion, maybe less, definitely not 23. That’s a big difference from the original misinformation claim of 83 billion!

          Now if you want to make a case against Biden, there is certainly a legitimate one. While the weapons thing is totally bogus, the evacuation thing is a real issue.

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