"Black Friday" is blackest for the low-paid workers in the stores.

"Cyber Monday" is a campaign to kill local retail stores and eliminate jobs. If you care about your town, buy from local stores. And pay cash, so no database knows what you bought.

I have never had anything to do with either of them. Decades ago I opted out of celebrating retail-promotion holidays which now include Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Halloween, and probably others coming in the next few years.

It makes me sad to read about the people who are so poor they can barely pay for their necessities, and yet load themselves down with buying gifts that they can't afford. >However, I don't respond with the intended reaction — "The worst thing is that he can't even afford to buy some toys for children in the family." Instead, I want to tell them, "Forget the toys! Buy the food and the medicine you need!"

Alexa presents itself to users as a servant, but it is a corrupt servant that takes kickbacks. Here is how Amazon controls which products it will offer to customers.

Amazon already has too much power over the marketplace. For the sake of preserving competition, systems like Alexa should be prohibited by law. Of course, that is not to mention all the other injustices of Amazon and of this product.

Note how the article starts with propaganda in favor of such products.

In the UK it is possible to pay your way through college by working full time in a supermarket at the same time.

It should not be necessary for people to do this. But I think it is not even possible to do this in the US — college is too expensive.

A satirical fake news site publishes incredible whoppers as a trap for credulous right-wingers. The idea is to tell them afterward that they should learn not to believe everything they read.

It would be a great hack, except for the fact that some credulous right-wingers continue to believe the stories even after the site says they were false.

Many successful progressive candidates this year refused campaign funds from business, but the businesses are not licked yet. They are scrambling to maintain their power in Washington, and they have plenty of money to do it with.