Now more than ever, when the world’s governments should pull together to help their people after so many economies have been ravaged by the pandemic, GREED is the order of the day, at every level. Everyone’s out to raise prices, to induce shortages and to squeeze the working people out of whatever money they still have.
And just to be clear, I am NOT in favor of UBI.
This is what greed looks like: smug, shitty little demons thinking they’ve got it made, leading each other down a path of destruction. It cannot go on.
I’ve been using Photoshop since the late 1990s and Lightroom since its launch in 2007. I’ve been a user of Adobe software for some time, and have owned various software packages from them since that time. But in recent years, I’ve begun to be repulsed more and more by their greedy grip on their users. Their move to subscription-based software was the beginning of my discontent, which was only furthered by their constant attempts to constantly monitor what we do with their software and how we use our computers. I know of no other software company that does this so much, and I find it despicable. I think what they’re doing is a clear invasion of user privacy. Some might say it’s benign, that they’re only trying to keep track of their software licenses, but when you find out that they make most of their money with a suite of services they call Experience Cloud, where they offer “AI-driven solutions for marketing, analytics, advertising and e-commerce”, you get the sense that we’re the guinea pigs for their solutions, and their many “helper” applications that are supposed to only monitor software licenses are likely doing a lot more than that on our computers.
I am also a Mac owner, and in stark contrast to Apple’s constant marketing-speak about user privacy, they never mention Adobe’s many applications that are constantly talking back to the Adobe servers, and they never go into the details of what the many Adobe helper applications actually do on our computers.
At best, the many “helper” applications that get put onto your computer when you install Adobe software can be called sloppy programming, and at worst, you have to wonder exactly what they’re doing with each and every one of those pieces of software under the guise of “keeping Adobe applications up-to-date” and “verifying the status of your Adobe licenses”. Most people probably assume those apps are the various components of the Creative Cloud suite and even though they’re numerous and they can probably tell those apps are in constant communication with Adobe, they choose to tolerate them.
I know things may be different on Windows, where software gets installed in multiple places, but on Macs, applications are and have always been packaged into single files that contain all that a piece of software needs in order to work. Even Microsoft Office on the Mac functioned this way and only used one additional piece of auto-update software to make sure everything stayed that way, and after it moved to the App Store, even that went away. They let Apple handle all their updates now.
Not so with Adobe… They have to be “special”. They have to stick their tentacles everywhere on your computer, doing and monitoring who knows what. I absolutely hate the fact that their Creative Cloud software has to run all the time and talk to their servers all the time, just so I can use their software occasionally. I find it abusive and overreaching and questionable, but for some reason, we’ve chosen to go along with it because we want to use the software.
Have a look at what gets installed with their Photography Plan, where only two apps should be present.
You of course will get Creative Cloud, even if you don’t want it, with its many little apps that invade your computer. Then you get Adobe Lightroom CC, the app that hardcore Lightroom users never asked for and don’t want, because all we really want is Lightroom Classic. You then also get Photoshop, which I might use to create a logo once or twice a year, and I infrequently use to blend different frames together into a single photograph (for focus stacking). If that functionality were offered in Lightroom, I’d barely need to open Photoshop. It’s overkill for me.
Let’s see what we get with Creative Cloud, because that’s the crux of this post. Most people won’t realize that the little red folder called Creative Cloud in the Applications folder isn’t really the whole of it. No, Adobe also puts a lot of helper apps in your Utilities folder.
Whether you want them or not, you get Adobe Application Manager, a second Adobe Creative Cloud folder, Adobe Creative Cloud Experience, Adobe Installers and Adobe Sync. Let’s have a look at each of them.
Look at all the “goodies” you get in the Application Manager folder. Yuuuummmy… I didn’t effing ask for all this, Adobe!
Let’s see what else we get. We get more stuff we never asked for in the Creative Cloud folder.
We also get to be part of a Creative Cloud Experience that we never opted into.
We also get the uninstallers. Fine, okay… although on the Mac, we should simply be able to drag an app from the Applications folder into the Trash (sorry, the Bin) and “bin” done with it.
We also get Adobe Sync, which is another application/service I don’t want and didn’t ask for. Never mind that sometimes it’s stuck on syncing a few photos for weeks on end. I guess it’s thrown in as padding to justify the cost of the subscription plans. “Look, you’re getting the good software, and you’re also getting storage space and a website”… I didn’t ask for it. I just want Lightroom and nothing else!
By now you might think we’re done, but no, you also get a special plugin that monitors your online activity, um, “detects whether you have Adobe Application Manager installed. I bet you didn’t know about this little goody from Adobe, did you? It’s called the AdobeAAMDetect.plugin.
Ostensibly, it’s used to detect whether the Adobe Application Manager is installed onto your computer, but who knows what else it does without looking at its code? All I know is that when I go to my Safari plugins, it’s not openly and transparently listed there. No, it’s hiding in the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ folder, so you have to know where to look in order to find it. Why? And what else is it doing? Is it monitoring my online activity, just like the apps installed on my computer are monitoring my application usage and who knows what else?
I find all this deeply disgusting, and without opening up each of those apps that Adobe sticks on our computers and looking at the code, we won’t know what they really do. If I didn’t like Lightroom so much, I’d switch to another piece of software in an instant. But I have yet to find a single piece of software that:
Doesn’t have a subscription plan,
Lets me easily edit my photos and, this next one is really important to me,
Lets me easily edit the metadata across all of my photos and update it as needed, and finally,
Lets me import my catalog from Lightroom while keeping my collections, smart collections and collection sets intact, so I don’t have to sort through hundreds of thousands of photos manually.
After 13 years of using Lightroom, the interface is very familiar. I know exactly where to find what I need, but I sure find Adobe’s business practices despicable and would gladly switch to something else. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve stepped over the line long ago and have been invading the privacy of their users intentionally for years.
Douglas Rushkoff, an award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker and scholar, has written a book entitled “Life Inc”, where he delves into what he calls the “corporate mindset” of today’s society, and how to overcome it in order to make our lives and our world better.
I’ll let him tell you what the book is about in his own words:
“What I started to do was to look at the different ways we as modern Americans have become disconnected from one another, disconnected from the places we live, disconnected from the value we create, and even disconnected from our own sense of self-worth. I came to the conclusion that corporations, or what we call the corporate mindset, were really at the center of this phenomenon.”
“We’re living in a world where if you want to make money, you’ve got to work for a corporation.”
According to Rushkoff, it turns out this “corporate mindset” can be traced back to the Renaissance, which is when kings began to monopolize on the income created by people. Instead of letting them trade freely among themselves, they created charter corporations which had exclusive control over certain industries. The kings got shares of stock in those monopolies, thus income, and those companies got to make all the money there was to be made in those markets. This centralization of power continued right through to our own time.
“The society built through the Industrial Age was built to mythologize the mass-produced object, because we needed to create a society of consumers who thought buying all of this stuff would somehow make them happier.”
“Most of us spend so much time working and consuming that we have very little time left to do anything that has to do with other people.”
“The more we behave as individual actors in competition with one another, the harder it is to encounter one another in a friendly way.”
“People can start investing in one another and with one another, make their towns better, and earn returns that you’re not getting from your Smith Barney broker… and see the return of your investment in the place you actually live.”
“This [economic recession] isn’t just a crisis, it’s an opportunity. It’s the first moment in the last couple of hundred years that we’ve had to rebuild our society and our economy on principles that serve humanity instead of killing life.”
I agree with most of what he has to say, and it’s important to realize he’s not against corporations per se, but against the slow creep of the corporate mindset into everyday life. After all, it’s thanks to corporations that we have industrial design, which allows us to get products designed to exact specifications and high standards. And the concentration of capital and research at some corporations and organizations has resulted in amazing advances in technology that have benefited all of us. Yes, you can do a lot of things in your garage, and you can get a lot of stuff done with your neighbors and in your community, but you can’t build a highly sophisticated computer, digital camera or a modern car at home. (You might be able to assemble them from purchased parts, but those parts were made in factories, too.) There is plenty of value to what he has to say, and the book warrants a close read. We do need to become more human, more connected, more dependent on our communities.
There’s a 9-minute video summary of the book at his Vimeo account. He’s also posted video clips summarizing the main ideas of each book chapter there. I’ll post the main video summary and the first three clips below. There’s also more info on his website at rushkoff.com. You can get the book from Amazon.
Our medical insurance policy is with Cigna. We’re on the Open Access Plus plan. After I renewed my Cigna policy recently, I got our new insurance cards, and noticed that the premiums and copays increased as follows:
PCP Visit ($20 vs $15)
Specialist ($40 vs $30)
Hospital ER ($100 vs $50)
Urgent Care ($50 vs $25)
Rx ($10/25/50 vs $10/20/45)
Those are some pretty hefty increases, particular for items 2-4 above, so I thought I’d have a look at Cigna’s executive compensation packages, to see if they’re tightening the belt there as well.
Their CEO is H. Edward Hanway. Here’s what he makes [source]:
Current annual compensation: $30.16 million
5-year compensation: $120.51 million
His performance vs. pay rank is162/175, which means he’s the equivalent of a D/F student
In 2006, two years ago, here’s what he was making [source]:
Annual compensation: $28.82 million
5-year compensation: $78.31 million
Performance vs. pay rank: 166/189, which was slightly better than what he’s averaging now
So what we’ve got here is an overpaid CEO that isn’t pulling his weight, but still paying himself gobs of money off our backs. God knows how much the other executive officers are making, all while we, the customers, get charged more for our premiums and copays. Talk about a rotten deal.
Raoul Pop 