DiazReportWEDFeb5

Hello and welcome to the Melissa Diaz Report. Welcome back. My name's Melissa Diaz. I'm your host and let's get into it. What's up with the news? What's going on? A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff and a lot of nothing also that they make look like stuff and we're gonna parse through and figure out which is which or not. We're not gonna figure anything out. Anyway, let's start with what I have on this list. First, we have some news from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta rethinks clearing homeless camps after a man is crushed inside his tent. This is according to the Times Union, the news article, timesunion.com. Atlanta rethinks clearing homeless camps after a man is crushed inside of his tent. And to the paywalls. All right, great. Let's see, love paywalls, but there are ways around it. Basically Googling for something that's free. We'll see, AP News, there we go. All right, according to the Associated Press, this happened January 3rd, a few days ago. Atlanta leaders are reconsidering how they dismantle homeless camps after a man was crushed inside a tent as a bulldozer destroyed makeshift homes in preparation for Martin Luther King Jr. holiday events. Yay, that's right, get these homeless people out of here. Bulldoze them out of the way. Don't they know we wanna have a MLK Jr. Christmas market here, or whatever, holiday market? Don't they know that? Don't they know that this will trickle down to them eventually, the benefits of this holiday market that we're, and events that we're going to be putting on? This programming could save these homeless people's lives. So all we have to do is bulldoze them out of the way so we can help these people already. I don't understand why they don't get it. I bet a lot, I bet a fair number of them are black, and they don't get it? They don't get that what we're trying to do for them in Atlanta here for MLK Jr. Day, how this programming is gonna help them? I don't know, man. That's the thing, we just live in these silos and echo chambers, so echo, well, I guess in the case of the homeless people, they live in echo tents, and it just reverberates with just ignorance. They don't even realize that if their homes get bulldozed, they can benefit from the MLK Jr. holiday programming events that this money will go to the state, and then the state can come right back around like a boomerang and just throw that money right at them. Pow, and there you go. Maybe a brand new tent, perhaps. But it seems more likely it's a brand new bulldozer, is what they'll be. Putting money into that for Cornelius Taylor. That was the homeless man's name, let's say his actual name. He was living in a camp a few blocks from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family's congregation. I guess that's why they wanted to clear that part out, because it was by the King family's Baptist Church, where dignitaries gather each year for each year's commemorative service. A march was held from downtown to the church that same weekend. See, seems like that march, instead of a march, would have been better to have been reorganized into a homeless encampment cleanup crew, and that way they could have not used bulldozers. But, you know, what do I know? I don't know anything about organizing. Now, Taylor's family is planning a Monday funeral at the same historic church. That's right, you show them his mangled corpse. And then a horse-drawn carriage will carry his coffin to City Hall so that people there can see who they killed, said his sister, Darlene Chaney. Well, okay, I guess, but I mean, he wouldn't be in that tent if you let him sleep on your couch. But anyway, I mean, yes, people have problems. It's like, you can't have them in your home sometimes. Sometimes they're a danger to you and your family. They're too toxic. So you put them in homeless encampments, right? That's kind of like the waiting area for, you know, dysfunctional family members of people, is what nobody talks about. These people belong to families often, but their families are just, you know, it's just the last straw. You just can't have this person in your home because they keep stealing your TV and trying to touch your kids or something, or teach your kids how to smoke crack. So you put them, you know, you just kind of let them go. You let them go free-range, and they go free-range to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, you know, parking garage, or wherever the hell they were. And everybody knows it, and that's where you deposit them. I mean, that's where you could even drop them off, probably. And that's what should be, that's kind of like all you can do as a person, right, is put that family member in a community of like-minded individuals who live in tents. And then just kind of, I don't know, maybe his sister would drive by and just kind of look to see if she could see him or something, and then just keep going, right? Maybe throw a sandwich out the window on her way past, like a drive-by lunch or something for her brother. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that cities across the country can enforce bans on homeless camping, but clearing the camps, as New Orleans did ahead of Taylor Swift concerts, which is another thing. I mean, hello? This helps the economy. The more the state economy is, you know, bolstered by events like Taylor Swift concerts and MLK Jr. events, holiday events, right, the more money they can use to help homeless people, right? Isn't that what's gonna happen? Isn't that what always happens? But these are controversial. Solutions are scarce, and it's soaring rents, natural disasters, and an influx of migrants that drove homelessness up 18%. Mm-hmm, yes. Well, okay, I guess we have ice on part of that, so let's see how it goes. Let's see where this goes. Family supporters hope his death can be a catalyst for change. Something's gonna change. Maybe just, you know, the location of that tent city, but, you know, whatever. I mean, they're just gonna move those tent cities to the woods, basically. If you go to any city, whenever they clear those encampments out, those people just have to, they basically have no other recourse than find some camping trail and walk off it and keep walking and then just pitch a tent there, and then they all do it, and that's just kinda what you do. You live in the woods in a tent, like Robin Hood, but with crystal meth. Anyway, moving on, another news. CVS wants to help you spend less time in CVS. Isn't that amazing? The CVS wants to help you. According to the Wall Street Journal, this was published, and it reads, super long pharmacy lines and locked up cabinets, does that sound familiar? Are among the areas that the healthcare company is targeting with a new app. Yeah, you know, if you're a healthcare company, lines, super long lines, and locking up the cabinets of goodies that people are there to get is not the best front-facing image that you wanna project to your customer base. These are sick people, and they want their hernia medication, their creams and potions and lotions and pills and droplets and talismans and various other good luck charms, which constitute our healthcare system. So here, let's see what CVS is trying to do. So CVS Health today unveiled a revamped app that aims to shorten long pharmacy lines, deliver more transparency on prescription costs, and ultimately make visits to the retail pharmacy chain quicker and less painful. I mean, this sounds amazing. How do they propose to do something like that? Let's see. The new features include a barcode that lets pharmacists quickly look up a prescription and receive a payment. Oh, so they're getting money faster. A way for customers to view prescription status and costs. And in pilot mode at three stores, the ability to open locked cabinets. So with app, the solution is an app. As usual, I think since 2010, every single solution to every single problem in this country has been some Silicon Valley startup proposing an app, designing an app for somebody. And they've solved so many problems for us. Let's see. They've solved dating and friendship, right? They've solved food security and they've solved the gig economy. They've solved it, right? Now they control gigs for us through the app. And that's worked out great, hasn't it? Aren't we really happy with the new gig economy? Uber Eats and such and so forth. Aren't we happy with that? That's so far, so good. So far, this all sounds great. So far, this sounds like one of the best solutions for relinquishing your data to a company in Silicon Valley that I've heard so far. Those are great, let's see. So Tilak Mondati, Executive Vice President of Ventures at CVS Health and its Chief Digital Data Analytics and Technology Officer said the app refresh is designed to tackle some of the common pain points associated with the retail pharmacy and health business. So, squeezed by drug pricing and lower fees, and traffic in the wake of the pandemic, along with an ongoing pharmacist shortage, retail pharmacy chains have been forced to engage in a number of cost-cutting measures in recent years, including shutting stores, which I think we all know we've experienced it. While the S&P 500 saw a near doubling over the past five years, CVS's stock remained basically unchanged. I don't give a fuck about your stock. What's going on? Mondati said he believes a better customer experience could make a difference. Yes, a better customer experience through an app. Everybody knows that the best customer experience is when you're not able to reach a human being, and instead you have to tangle with some kind of AI chatbot that's still in a beta mode. That's great, I think this is wonderful. And a barcode, and every time you press a button, you also have to agree to share your privacy with, who knows, probably just CVS and the insurance companies that they're affiliated with. And that's way more efficient and warmer, and it's just an overall better customer experience. I mean, this is amazing, love this. Amazing, also, to touch back on homelessness, this distances us more from homeless people. This is great because if you can't have a phone and an app and get into a place with those things and make your order and you have a bank account and a credit card and a Venmo account and a Zelle and this and that, then you can't go to CVS, isn't that great? So now we have a sort of lower tier cast system that we can benefit from, that we can feel, at least you can always look at the homeless and look to them and drive by their homeless encampments and console yourself with the realization that you have an app. You have an app and that separates you from total ruin. And this is good, an app where you can't talk to a human being ever if you need help, if you're locked out of your app, you know what I mean? This is the bold new future we're really experiencing right now. So that's great, I can't wait to see how that develops. Wonderful, that's wonderful. Anyway, in other news, what else is going on? Google Maps will rename the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in the US. This is a really important distinction because there is a lack of nuance, I think, with this news story because basically, they're changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. However, Google seems to be doing that only for people who have IP addresses located in the United States. For other people, probably people with IPs in Mexico, it will still look like the Gulf of Mexico, but to us, it would look like the Gulf of America and that's what really matters, right? It's self-deluded patriot gratification and that's what this is really all about. Google said it would display Gulf of America in its maps for US users as soon as government sources made the update. Users in Mexico will continue to see the Gulf's original name, while the rest of the world will see both. Isn't that interesting? Interesting. It seems like we're just getting more and more hyper-localized. Everything is just gonna be what you want it to be and nothing more and nothing less and that really makes for a good customer experience, I think. If you can only ever walk around the world with a sense of inflated ego and constant self-gratification in various subtle ways, I think this will really be good. This is a good development. This is something you can now constantly walk down the street more and more each day, knowing that you are buffered from reality by all of your apps and that that's not gonna change if anything, it's gonna get more precise and more, it's gonna wrap around you more and more like a shroud. Just, this is your reality and nobody else's and that's really what, that's what this is all about. It's about your reality and nobody else's. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess. Kind of makes it difficult with dating apps though because that's two people with two different realities. Coming together to try and make it work. But anyway, yes. So the Trump administration declared on Friday that the Gulf of Mexico had been renamed the Gulf of America, but popular mapping services from Google and Apple have continued showing the old name. So that's Google and Apple both in cahoots with that. On Monday, Google said it would update its maps to display Gulf of America as soon as the US government updated its official maps. This is according to the New York Times. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources, the company said in a post on X. Yeah, but those are usually, I think, happy incidents where people are like, let's rename it this. This sounds more fun. Let's call this mountain Hot Dog Mountain. Mount, Mount Hot Dog. And everyone's like, yeah, it does look like a hot dog actually if you look at, if you kind of squint with one eye and look at it with your head cocked to one side, Hot Dog Mountain. Yes, we've always said this. And then everybody celebrates, they drink champagne, and then it gets changed on the map. But, ooh, you know, what are you gonna do? This is not based on happiness. This is based on trade wars, basically. President Trump signed an executive order on January 20th, his first day in office, to rename the Gulf in addition to changing the name of the tallest mountain in North America. We're changing mountains, too? Is it Hot Dog Mountain? That peak, which had been known by the Alaska native name Denali, which since 2015, was renamed Mount McKinley, an earlier name. Oh, well, Denali kind of sounds better. Okay, whatever. I bet it means hot dog, and I bet it matches the shape of the mountain better than Mount McKinley, whose face, you know, whatever. I don't know. I don't even know Mount McKinley. I don't know who McKinley is. I'm an idiot. The US Department of the Interior said on Friday that it was implementing the executive order, but that official government maps had not yet been updated from the Geographic Names Information Systems, or GNIS, which is a part of the US Geological Survey. Isn't that interesting? Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. And everybody else around the world's gonna see both names. Mm-hmm. When the Obama administration changed the name of the Alaska mountain from Mount McKinley to Denali in August 2015, Google updated maps to reflect the name change three days later, once the US government had officially updated its own maps. Yeah, okay. What is it? Was McKinley just a, I bet he own slaves. I mean, that's basically it, right? Let's see. McKinley. William McKinley, President of the United States from 1897 to 1901, just so you know, and me. 25th President of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Oh yeah, William McKinley was that president that was killed by an Italian anarchist, I think. 1901 he was killed. Pretty sure that's true. Let's see, fought the Civil War. You know, yeah, you don't wanna even be affiliated with the Civil War. I mean, you know, you know why. There's no way to look good during the Civil War, I don't think, nobody. Nobody, nobody, nobody. Let's see if we can find something about this assassination. Cuba crisis, war with Spain. Oh yeah, the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Let's see. That came a little later, though. Or did it? Okay. Civil rights, probably didn't do too well there. The 1900 election. Let's see. He was on a six-week tour in 1901, traveling from, through the south to the southwest, up the Pacific coast, east again, right? He was gonna conclude with a visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. But then the First Lady fell ill in California, causing her husband to limit his public events and cancel a series of speeches he had planned to give urging trade reciprocity. Oh, and then he was assassinated. Do, do, do, do, do, do. A man in the crowd named Leon Solgols. Solgols. He was an American laborer, an anarchist, who assassinated McKinley. Where's he from? This doesn't sound like an Italian name. Oh, he's from Detroit, Michigan, though. Okay, but ethnically, what is he? Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Polish-American. Yes, the Polish-American. Yes, the Poles. Yep. Well, that's just kind of, those are the terrorists of yesteryear. These were anarchists, socialists, nationalists, whatever. And so he assassinated McKinley. They named a mountain after him. That's racist, Denali, back to McKinley, whatever. Anyway, let's move on. Let's see. Let's see. Expository dialogue often viewed as cringe may be Netflix's new engagement strategy. The streamer has reportedly been telling screenwriters to have characters announce what they're doing so that viewers can follow along while scrolling TikTok and folding laundry. This is the opinion they have of us now, and it's probably not an untrue one. This is gordonoffastcompany.com. Yes, that we are not home watching anything in particular. We are completely schizophrenically ADHD-ing out on all of our devices all at once because we're crazy, and we love data and information. We love it, and answering questions, and looking at things, and being diverted, looking at a dog wagging its tail. I mean, it's everything, and it's driving us insane. And Netflix is making the choice to, rather than make content that is so engaging that it competes with your phone, they are like, hey, let's make it work with your phone. And so they're basically lowering their assumption of the average IQ of their viewership, and that is, because that's what it really comes down to. If you have to tell your screenwriters for each show to, and this is basically what's happening, to have more expository dialogue in each scene. Basically, you walk into a room as a character, and then you have to reiterate every scene that came before that scene in that room to explain why you're in that room and what you're doing, and you have to do it again and again and again, right? That's how you talk to stupid people, okay? That's how you talk to people who have trouble following along. So they are doing that for us because supposedly they are concerned, and this is according to this report, right, that people are too busy doing laundry. There was a lot of that. They use that as an example a lot. You're doing too much laundry, so you can't possibly be paying attention to the show, and you're looking at your phone, and this and that. But really, what this kind of comes down to, it's kind of like when you watch somebody driving a car on their phone. They drive like a complete moron, because it's because of the fact that using your phone basically knocks your IQ down like, I don't know, 30 points or something. So we are a nation of idiots now. We are just, idiocracy is becoming real. We're even wearing Crocs, and your phone is basically siphoning away your actual intelligence, and you're staring at puppies and at kitties, and bumbling through your life, but these companies and these apps are still trying to make money off of you and get your data while you're distracted and while you're stupider, and so they have to adapt. They have to adapt to the fact that you're dumb, and so what they do, you're dumb now. You're stupid. You're a stupid poopy head now, and so what they do is they just make, they dumb everything down for you, right? They meet you at your level, and not an iota higher, so that's what's happening. So according to Fast Company, watching TV no longer just means watching TV. After the rise of tablets and smartphones in the late aughts, a second-screen experience became the new standard for home viewing. Live blogging the latest season of Netflix's Stranger Things, or buying a new T-shirt during it is now just reflexive for millions of people because we're just drooling, lobotomized dumbasses, and so according to a 2023 YouGov study, 91% of Americans at least sometimes look at their phones while watching TV, true, and I love that they throw in a little statistic there because that's really good for propaganda. You always wanna throw in a little statistic to back up your claims that you get from YouGov.com or whatever the fuck, right? IamRight.org. For generations weaned on TikTok that sometimes might be a little closer to always. As Saturday Night Live's Michael Longfellow, they're quoting Saturday Night Live, recently joked about the app's brief ban, what do I even watch during a movie now? Yeah, hilarious. Although viewing habits, SNL is really funny by the way. Although viewing habits have long been headed in this direction, what's changed more recently is that Netflix now appears to have adapted to those habits by optimizing for second-screen viewing. That's what we're calling it, optimizing for second-screen viewing. That's what you're doing when you're checking your text messages in your car. You are engaging in second-screen viewing. You're not just being a narcissistic asshole negligent of the fact that they are in a moving canister of death on wheels and that they're supposed to actually be manning the thing and navigating through the streets with it. The streets where children just suddenly run across or a homeless person is tweaking out, trying to get help, is running across or something. Road rage people and all kinds of other people, you gotta look at your phone because you want to engage with second-screen viewing, which obviously, especially according to Netflix, is a new cultural norm and nothing to be outraged about. But, yes. A December deep dive into Netflix's approach from literary culture magazine, N Plus One, describes how the streaming service has subtly changed the way some of its movies and shows get made. As Will Tavlin writes, several screenwriters who've worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is to have this character announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program in the background can follow along. Is that right? True. Overly exposed to our dialogue, yada, yada, yada. Studios are asking for ideas that people will kind of ignore so they can be on their phone. Netflix seems especially receptive to such ideas. Yes, that's amazing. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. The question remains, let's see what the question is for this journalist, whether the company is only contorting some of its original content to be better background viewing or if that aesthetic is becoming its feature attraction. I mean, I would say all because if you've watched Netflix recently, I mean, it's all of them, it's all. I mean, let's say, Squid Game, right? Squid Game is a unique case because Squid Game, you'll probably definitely get into the first season and you'll watch all of it. And then what they do is with that kind of content, right? It's like now you're engaged with the story of Squid Game, with the plot because it was good, right? It was very exciting, very action-packed and dramatic. And so now you already get the arc. And so what they do is for the second season, rather than actually develop that plot or its characters, they'll do a clever thing, right? They just put the characters in a situation where they find themselves basically doing the exact same thing all over again with certain developments so that it's not a complete repeat of the last thing but really the same nonetheless. And so you've watched the first season. They don't expect you to be riveted for multiple seasons anymore. They don't care about that. They just repeat and repeat and repeat and rinse and repeat the plot in different skins but really the same structure until another show comes along. And so yeah, that's great. I think ultimately, culturally, everything that's happening is super good and cutting edge and it's great. And I hope to see more of it in the future. And that's my report for today. We got more news tomorrow. Until then, well, actually not Friday. And until then, keep touching grass or whatever the fuck it is you're doing and staring at your phone while you drive and keep downloading those apps. They'll save you. But this was the Melissa Diaz report. I was Melissa Diaz and now I'm out and I'll talk to you in a couple days. All right, peace. Bye-bye.