Timeshares are even worse than I thought

On the latest episode of his show Last week Tonight, John Oliver explains why timeshares (where one buys a period of time, say a week or so a year, on a property at a resort) is a terrible idea. He says that timeshares have been so widely ridiculed that pretty much everyone who bought one is now embarrassed that they got suckered into doing so. But they should also be skeptical of companies that say that they can get them out of their timeshares, for a fee of course, because they can be scams.

I was once staying at a hotel and was invited to attend a presentation in one of their hospitality suites with the promise of a free gift or lunch or something in return for sitting through a presentation. Such ‘free’ offers are always a warning sign and since I knew about timeshares, I declined. Besides, I couldn’t see the appeal of committing myself to go to the same place every year. But on another occasion my in-laws visiting the US went to Atlantic City. Being unaware of timeshares and this kind of pressure sales tactic, they succumbed to such an invitation and had to endure a long high-pressure sales pitch. My father-in-law finally managed to get away by repeatedly saying that he had to consult his son-in-law (me) before he could make any purchase. It was not true, of course but it worked to get the salesperson to finally let them go.

John Oliver on the abuse of TANF

The program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) “provides states and territories with flexibility in operating programs designed to help low-income families with children achieve economic self-sufficiency.  States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children, as well as a wide range of services.”

On the latest episode of his show, John Oliver describes how this program has been abused so that a lot of the money does not go to the people it was meant for.

Part of the problem is that although it is a federal program, rather than the federal government giving the money directly to needy people, conservatives lobbied to have the federal government give it in the form of block grants to states who were given guidelines on how the money could be spent. But the guidelines were loose enough to allow states to siphon money away to build things like a new college volleyball stadium. This is why proposals to convert federal programs into block grants to states should always be viewed with extreme caution.

Culture wars forever!

Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.

(Non Sequitur)

However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.

‘Anti-wokism’ as a distraction from the lack of any positive policy proposals

In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls ‘wokism’, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.

The golden age of grifting

During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.

This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Oliver’s success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.

It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.

Wanda Sykes on the abuse of speeding tickets

Sykes is one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show and she had a good segment about how some local communities use speeding tickets as a source of revenue, by adding all manner of other fees to the fine itself. They even put poor people in jail for inability to pay the fines, and then add on more costs to pay for their incarceration.

She says that these fines are hardly a deterrent for rich people and recommends the model of some countries like Finland where the penalty is proportional to a person’s income, and where a Nokia executive got hit with a $103,000 speeding ticket.

Hasan Minhaj on the lab leak and Dilbert stories

Minhaj returns as this week’s rotating host of The Daily Show where he was a correspondent for five years.

He argues that rich people like Scott Adams end up saying awful things because they are bored with their lives.

Minhaj said Adams is a prime example of “a certain type of rich person.” They have no problems of their own, so they invent new ones just to make their own lives interesting.

“I can guarantee you: J.K. Rowling had zero opinions about trans people when she was on welfare,” he said. He suggested a wealth tax would solve the problem.

“Rich people, this is for your own good,” he said. “The wealth tax is actually a shut-the-fuck-up tax.”

“Spend more time working, kissing your loved ones, getting groceries ― y’know, being a normal person,” he said. “Because normal people don’t hate Black people. We’re all too busy hating that one squeaky wheel on the shopping cart.”

Dilbert comic being canceled all across the country

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has long been known to have racist and homophobic views but his recent tirade about Black people was even more extreme than in the past. As a result, newspapers across the country have decided to stop publishing the daily and Sunday strip.

Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them.
…

The strip was founded in 1989, and at its peak about 2,000 newspapers across 70 countries carried it. Adams lit a fuse under the success of his own work in a recent episode of his YouTube show Real Coffee with Scott Adams.

In the course of the show, Adams misinterpreted a Rasmussen poll that asked people whether they disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”. As the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, the phrase originated with the extremist online forum 4chan as a trolling campaign and was then seized upon by white supremacists – but Adams took it literally.

On the back of it, he declared Black people “a hate group” and expressed his relief that he had managed to flee them by living in a neighborhood with a “very low” African American population.

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Childfree people are slow to gain acceptance

A few days ago, I posted a clip from comedian Chelsea Handler, that week’s host of The Daily Show, about her choice to be childfree and the nasty responses she received when she told people this, and I expressed surprise that other people would think it was perfectly acceptable to pass judgment on someone’s personal life choices that did not affect them at all.

Handler is by no means an outlier. As this article points out, the numbers making this choice are increasing, along with the backlash. The article also says that we need to distinguish between the term ‘childfree’, which is meant to “capture the sense of freedom and lack of obligation felt by many of those who had voluntarily decided not to have kids” and ‘childless’ which is used for “adults who don’t currently have kids, but want them in the future, or adults who had hoped to have children, but were unable to”.
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