I have found Facebook (now, I guess, Metaverse) at times helpful. It kept me in touch with an few old friends and it let me know folks were looking for some lost dogs. But I have deleted my account.
You should too. Mark Zuckerberg has enough of our money. He’s one of the many billionaires, a new one is made every day. And I don’t remember sending him a dime. Maybe that’s how we get sucked into vile stuff. We swipe our card or click on “buy now” and they send an armored car to our bank.
It’s not armed security people robbing us, it’s more like the guys in Office Space who figured out how to round up the decimals and become millionaires. Back then, in the 1990’s, millionaires was a big as it got. Now we have a new billionaire every day. The worth of these folks (though it’s hard to consider someone with more wealth than I could accumulate in a lifetime as a “folk”) has more than doubled in the past year. And we, the sheep of the world, keep sending our money their way.
We just can’t see why they get the bucks and we lose it. They are so smart they can somehow tap into our measly median salary and then buy a rocket trip to space. All hail the job creators.
Do you happen to know what the median household income is in Idaho? If you ask Google (there’s some more rich guys who don’t charge you a penny) it’s about $56K. The same data mining site (who pays those guys to mine data?) tells us the AVERAGE (not median…remember high school statistics?) is $74K.
A little high school statistics reminder. The average is everybody added together, then you divide by all the people. The median is all the people lined up and you pick the guy in the middle. So here in Idaho, and in this country and the world, there’s a lot of us below average.
Do you happen to know what is calculated to be a living wage in Idaho? MIT has these calculations for you, but Google helped me find them and I didn’t have to send them any money. If you are a single adult with one child, or two adults, one working with one child, it’s right at $57K.
Back to high school statistics: half the folks in Idaho, if they have a child, are living at or below what is considered the living wage.
Some of these poor folks are spending too much money on their cell phone plans. Some should consider spending less on their car payments, and maybe trying to earn more. Maybe we should all be buying less beer.
But it’s a good bet, here in this beautiful state, most of these folks either don’t vote, or vote Republican.
I don’t. I sure wish it mattered.
And I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg will feel any pinch at all that I fled his Meta Morass. He’ll figure lots more ways to siphon off way too much money. Those “likes” and clicks and seconds you spend scrolling will go into their data mining machine and they’ll sell you to somebody who wants your profile.
Step off the carousel and walk around the park.
All the small-town local papers use Facebook in an attempt to drive folks their way. They require you to use Facebook, oops, MetaVerse, to comment of see their up-to-date postings. It may not cost them anything, it may be a service Facebook offers. Sorry, nothing is free.
I’m glad I’ve stepped away from the loud music and flashing lights. I think I’ll just walk around the park and say “hi” to the folks I meet.
